2
AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM AND ITS CAPTIVITIES

Four
Rome and Her Indians

America's long and absorbed engagement with the threat and thematics of captivity—with real or imagined bondage to Indians, witches, slave-holders—shadowed the country's official vision of itself as the land of liberty. While political rhetoric enumerated the blessings of freedom, imaginative discourse was preoccupied with the often exoticized threat of confinement. By the mid-nineteenth century, middle-class audiences had become veritable connoisseurs of captivity, eager and practiced readers of its agonies, its mysteries, and its lessons. Hungry for the vicarious experience of confinement as an imaginative control of their turbulent democracy, antebellum Americans avidly read several versions of the captivity genre: anthologies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian captivity tales, a steady stream of slave and convent-escape narratives, and numerous popular novels including such best-sellers as George Lippard's Monks of Monk Hall (1844) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), that righteously exposed the horrors of economic and racial captivity.

Two hundred years of literary treatment had produced an elaborate rhetorical edifice of confinement and escape initially founded upon a scriptural model, structured according to religious, racial, and sexual fears and mysteriously illuminated by the pleasures of torment and deliverance. In many respects, this American captivity tradition represented a domestication of the European and English Gothic. But conditions specific to America—the imperial conquest of indigenous peoples and the establishment of chattel slavery—uniquely shaped the genre of

the American Gothic. The essentially psychological focus of such Old World novels as The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe and The Monk by M. G. Lewis was invested with imperial and racial conflicts specific to nineteenth-century America. Thus the "savage" and the "dark" were at once actual peoples stigmatized as impediments to Anglo-American settlement and forms of psychological being suppressed by the advent of modernization. American Gothic narratives functioned more directly in antebellum politics, capable not only of legitimating ongoing social oppressions but also, in particular instances, of inciting violence against them.^[1]

Roman Catholicism figured crucially in this American captivity tradition as a principal and historically resilient captor of the New World Protestant settler. Changing its guise in response to the psychosocial anxieties of successive generations of Protestants, the specter of Roman-ism played captor to each in turn, looming as menacing figure in the New England forests, the Southwest, and the Mississippi Valley region. The tradition of Protestant bondage to Roman evils originated with Luther's claim in 1520 that "the church has been taken prisoner" by a greedy and theologically misguided papacy.^[2] Lutherans and Calvinists thereafter characterized their reformation as not only a purification but also an escape from an outraged and sometimes pursuing Rome.

As the genre of Indian captivity narratives shows, the experience of "Roman" captivity was a highly self-conscious one in colonial America, a trauma of ethnic confrontation that attracted intense religious and aesthetic responses, which in turn produced highly popular narratives advertising the conflicted formation of national identity. Detailing the drama of white captivity in an Indian New World, many such narratives phrase the trauma of cultural and racial estrangement as a spiritual tribulation essential to the formation of an American selfhood. Such development involved an often protracted separation from forms of European worldliness that were at the same time claimed as critical to the success of white Christian civilization in the New World. Roman Catholicism played a crucial historical and symbolic role in this simultaneous extraction of the pure from the corruptions of Europe and assertion of European purity against the seductions of Indian America; profoundly familiar yet rendered foreign by the Reformation, Romanism was a force that threatened to disrupt the forming of the American self.

In writing the earliest New World Indian captivity narratives, Spanish and French Catholic authors had themselves suggested an essential, if violent, kinship between their Catholicism and that of their captors. Puritan and later Protestant captivity narratives agreed that such a kin-

ship did indeed exist between the Catholic European and the American Indian, only that kinship was a demonic, not a potentially sacramental, one. Endowed with a treacherous autonomy in Puritan narratives, Catholicism enjoyed a shifting power of personification, a wilderness enemy who conspired with the Indian to master the Protestant settler and, with the later Jacksonian "removal" of Indians, intrigued by itself for dominion over the Protestant body and soul.

In the century prior to English colonization, when Spanish explorers and priests knew America, a time that nineteenth-century Protestant historians and filiopietistic celebrants of America's pilgrim beginnings dissociated from the nation's official origin, the first recorded captivity occurred. In compensation for returning "naked" from the New World, a Spanish adventurer humbly offered his king a narrative of his experience. The Journey of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and His Companions from Florida to the Pacific, 1528-1536 , published in 1555, recounts the Spaniards' eight-year captivity among North American Indians.^[3] Its stunning depiction of both the ambiguous interchange of authority between Spanish captive and Indian captor and the subtle, resilient sacerdotal power of Catholicism prefigures later Anglo-American ruminations upon a vagrant Spanish Catholicism circulating invisibly through antebellum America—a power whose apparent charisma attracted vehement nativist criticism for its "foreign" forms of authority and submission.

Núñez's narrative implicitly articulated a formative irony that characterized many Indian and, later, religious captivity tales—namely, that captivity, for all its coercion, deprivation, and suffering, covertly registered the benefits of imprisonment. The subversive note of voluntarism, if not complicity, so noticeable in antebellum fictions about Rome accompanied the captivity genre from its American beginnings. In a reportorial style noticeably alien to the later, melodramatic language of New England's Scripture-bound Puritans, Núñez described for his king an imprisonment fraught with skewed intentions and accidental exchanges of power; his documentary style only enhances the account of his evident awe before the marvels of ethnic estrangement and provisional assimilation. When his Florida exploration dwindled to baffled wandering, he finally and desperately gave himself over to the Indians, captivity his only way to survive. Half captives, half tagalongs, Núñez and his small group followed the famished tribes as they roamed in search

of roots—the only El Dorado in this New World landscape being rumored fields of prickly pears two days' march away.

In a remarkable interaction between the numinous influence of Núñez's white skin, his political acumen, and the famine and religious expectations of his tribal captors, the captive explorer soon claimed a charismatic authority born of his marginal ethnic status. Over the course of eight years, he walked from Florida to Mexico, accompanied by thousands of Indians who looked to their white god for healing, blessing, and guidance. That his divine status produced a new, more problematic, captivity was not lost on him; he confided to his king that "frequently we were accompanied by three or four thousand persons, and as we had to breathe upon and sanctify the food and drink for each, and give them permission to do the many things they would come to ask, it may be seen how great to us were the trouble and annoyance" (95).

If the assumption of the priestly role felt burdensome to the layman Núñez, his familiarity with its rituals proved immensely valuable. Curing and blessing as he proceeded, he negotiated his way from tribe to tribe, the worshiping horde increasing as the caravan moved west. Throughout this captivity-turned-journey he claimed that Spaniards and Indians communicated perfectly by gesture, the two cultures spontaneously sympathizing by means of the hybrid religious rituals created in their meeting—an achievement later Protestant captives neither desired nor could attain. By the time Núñez reached the Spanish settlements around the Gulf of California, his captivity had become a virtual anticaptivity; in a final reversal, he stepped forward as the protector of his Indian prisoners, warning them against the traitorous schemes of the Christians before embarking for Spain. As anticaptivity, the narrative signals the colonial moment only to deny it, offering a suspended pastoral before the work of colonization begins in earnest.

The captivity narrative of the famed Jesuit missionary Father Isaac Jogues, written a century after that of Alvar Núñez, is a second crucial antecedent to colonial English narratives, for as a document of missionary zeal rather than exploration, it displays the workings of a professional Catholicism in competitive conflict with Iroquois shamanism. Núñez became, as it were, a priest with little reference to his private piety, whereas Jogues the priest was stripped of all ritual until in his martyrdom he attained a radically autonomous piety perfectly independent of priestly accoutrements. Acutely sensitive to the potential spiritual benefit of captivity (specifically, martyrdom), Father Jogues wrote one of America's most powerful early narratives of Christian imprisonment in the "heathen" New World: The Captivity of Father Isaac Jogues, of the

Society of Jesus, among the Mohawks (1655). His narration of captivity, torture, eventual escape from, and final sacrificial return to the Iroquois records a martyrology at work in the New World that ardently transcends the polemics of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. If Jogues's physical heroism and eventual martyrdom figure importantly in Parkman's discreetly polemical Jesuits in North America as a compelling instance of an exemplary, even charismatic, masculinity, Jogues's account is uninterested either in such translations of religious force or in the apostolic management of the Canadian tribes. Rather his narration unfolds a contest between spiritual powers in which Catholicism triumphantly transcends all aspects of the material world—a sacral force that within fifty years would be inversely portrayed by New England Puritan captives as the primary power of deceit, corruption, and bondage in the New World.^[4]

In 1642, the Iroquois captured Father Jogues and his lay assistant, René Goupil, near Albany, New York. As Núñez had done more than a century before, Jogues, a man later characterized by Parkman as "indomitable and irrepressible," transformed his captivity into an anti-captivity through a language of ardent subjection in which power and liberty accrue in direct proportion to bodily helplessness.^[5] Jogues's white skin draws upon him all the ritual violence the Iroquois can bestow—a violence that lingered below the surface of the adulation Núñez engineered, one kept at bay by his passive mimicry of priestly functions and careful avoidance of any missionizing. In one of the most torture-ridden of American captivity narratives, Jogues wrote to his superior in 1643 of his agonies and, more important, of his repeated refusal to flee them, his missionary zeal aggressively transforming Iroquois rage into proof of sacred love. Enduring a year of captivity before being ransomed by the Dutch at Albany, Jogues, less ambivalently than later Puritan captives like Mary Rowlandson, embraced the European divinity he perceived at work in the New World. His Ignatian spirituality was entirely separate from its New World "theater," for he was intent upon martyrdom more than colonization; thus Jogues, as missionary, is always in motion even while bound to the stake, moving through the New World as fallen temporality rather than settling within it as colonist of the New Zion. Nonetheless Jogues, like the Puritan Rowlandson, anxiously pondered the possibility that Indian captivity spelled divine wrath or, worse, abandonment.^[6] When a savage mysteriously desists from cutting off his nose, a mutilation that by Iroquois custom would have necessitated his death, Jogues writes to his superior that that one restraint showed that "God watched over us, and was trying us rather than casting us off" (11).

Supported by the passionately inclusive discourse of martyrdom that swiftly positions any potentially deviant carnal detail in a proliferating series of indications of divine presence, Jogues compares his torture to the pains of childbirth, quoting the apostle John in explaining to his superior that "we were like to 'a woman in travail' [John 16:21]," the agony of torture preceding the joys of eternity as surely as labor precedes those of maternity. Vitalized by this procreative vision, the celibate Jogues denies that the Indians are agents of their own violence, insisting that their attack on him is actually his own ethnically and spiritually inviolate self-birthing. Powerfully engaging monastic traditions of asceticism and self-mortification, Jogues conceives of his torture as a masculine ascesis necessary to a feminine new birth, the sexually transgressive metaphor testifying to his creative powers of endurance and authorship. In asserting their connection, however, the metaphor promptly discloses the excruciated distance between tortured priest and laboring mother—a disclosure that recalls the distance between religious experience "then" and "now," a gap always apparent in the carnal deadness of language used to convey the living spirit.

Within a wilderness occult, Jogues improvises his own indigenous piety, carving the name of Jesus on the forest trees, seizing every opportunity to convert and to baptize, aggressively countering Mohawk violence with his sacred, the meaninglessness of pain with the inexorable significance of martyrdom. The teleology of martyrdom reveals that even his own seemingly anomalous behavior is part of a pilgrimage home that converts New World tortures into reenactments of the Jerusalem crucifixion. Thus Jogues, explaining to his superior why he did not flee his Iroquois torturers when the opportunity arose, voices a classic formulation of New World captivity as a voluntary exile necessary to regain one's spiritual home: "Although I could, in all probability, escape either through the Europeans or the savage nations around us, did I wish to fly, yet on this cross, to which our Lord has nailed me beside himself, am I resolved by his grace to live and die" (38).^[7]

Alternating between accounts of his torture and of his contemplative retreats from the "Babylon" of Indian villages into the forest, Jogues's narrative contrasts the apparently aimless wanderings of the Iroquois to the transcendent orderings of his Ignatian piety. Unless captured and reorganized by conversion and baptism, the Indians, from Jogues's perspective, are wandering, in soul as well as body, the violence they inflict on the missionary a sign not of cultural agency but of a randomness that signifies the confusion of the damned. But in the contrast lodges a spiritually revelatory identification, an exegesis made visible only

through the Indians' ostensibly random violence. For Jogues records a certain gruesome intimacy between torturer and victim (precisely the intimacy that Parkman so powerfully misappropriated), one that dimly but perceptibly reflects the transcendent bond between martyr and God: at one point, abruptly spared death, Jogues comments that the event has taught him that "I should not fear the face of a man when the Almighty was the protector of my life, without whose permission not a hair could fall from my head" (25). Not only does the excess of pain, in its uncontrollability, resemble the sublime powers of divinity, but its unspeak-ableness also urges the victim to rephrase it as divine speech. These two captivities, then, incite and sustain one another, the torture necessitating the descent of grace, the grace welcoming the further intrusions of torture: "But God justly ordained that the more I pleaded, the more tightly they drew my chains" (18).

This reciprocal dynamic effectively transforms the captivity from a demonic imitation of heavenly intimacies to their numinous enactment. Tied to a stake, Jogues experiences his bodily fixity as mobilized spiritual combat in which the terrors of cultural estrangement are contained within the theologically (and ethnically) familiar precinct of the satanic. The primitive, the savage, the demonic never attain to the status of the unknown, a rank Jogues carefully reserves for his God. Thus in Jogues's continuance of his crucifixional experience, sin and holiness, abandonment and grace reciprocally construct one another, creating a narrative (and theological) interdependence that skirts the heretical perception that God and Satan are one. That he is no longer on the cross at the time of writing his narrative emerges in his rhetorical efforts to continue upon it. While his narrative insists upon his continued nailed closeness to the cross, the writing of the narrative depends upon his escape from it.

In their production of grace, Jogues's afflictions yield as well astonishing narrative power. Markedly contrasting to the silences of Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener , to the unspoken recesses where agnostic sensibilities retreat when in pain, Jogues's torture generates an eloquent and disciplined articulateness precisely because his pain unleashes a specificity of meaning.^[8] The more he is tortured, the more invincible the author becomes, asserting an ever stronger verbal reprise of his agony. When his thumb is hacked off, he raises it up in thanks to the Lord that his writing hand has been preserved from mutilation. Paradoxically, Jogues uses the torture that is designed to enforce recognition of his captive status to empty that captivity of any political reality. No longer torture but crucifixion, Jogues's experience mirrors, but finally cannot

be, the desired captivity to Christ, a captivity that can be perfected only in death. Reduced to a simulacrum of an inaccessible communion, the torture, by destroying the body it works upon creates the conditions of its own temporal thwarting as well. De-realized into sacred metaphor, bodily experience functions as a necessarily partial conduit to the numinous; Indian unreality becomes a sign of Christ's living but still invisible presence. Yet Jogues's narrative reconstruction of this dynamic must retemporalize this crucifixional epiphany in order to publicize to Europeans the creative logic of New World captivity.

Forced in his wilderness exile to practice a Protestantized piety, Jogues explains to his superior how "passages which my memory had retained taught me how I should think of God in goodness, even though not upheld by sensible devotion" (30). Later Puritan captives showed little such flexibility, however, when confronted with the "sensible" accoutrements of Catholic piety. As pawns in the extended North American conflict between France and England, many New England colonists were kidnapped by Indians allied to Catholic France. Schooled in Reformation polemics, these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England prisoners to Catholicized tribes interpreted rosary beads and crucifix, whether handled by missionary priest or "savage," as the insignia of a devilish Rome vengefully pursuing them in the New World.

The ambiguous relationship to captivity unfolded in the narratives of Núñez and Jogues also characterized the accounts of Puritan captives, for whom attack and kidnap heralded the presence of the divine. Impelled by Christian zeal, many cultivated, if they had not actively pursued, their captivities as instances of "merciful affliction" and hence divine attention. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New Englanders were especially adept at articulating the processes by which the trauma of abduction and often violent acculturation into Amerindian societies revitalized their European piety. The narration of kidnap into the wilderness could generate a radical spiritual excitement, for it made palpable the elusive paradox of New Testament Christianity: that life itself is a bondage and that liberty can be found only in entire dependence upon an unpredictable God. More precisely, the experience of captivity that apparently testified to God's potentially traumatic changeableness was revised to read as a primary index of his loving concern. Evangelical Christian subjectivity had long understood the unconverted state as one of radical captivity to the powers of Original Sin; in the words of one

seventeenth-century English Quaker, "Man is a captive, his understanding captive, his will captive, all his affections and nature in captivity."^[9] For American Puritans, an actual captivity to "savages" theatrically enacted this truth, confirming their Calvinist theology and controlling it by depositing it, at least temporarily, in the precincts of the foreign; Indian captivity, by externalizing their internal phenomenology of subjugation, afforded psychological, if not bodily, release from its pressures. In the abjection of forced surrender to heathens more depraved than themselves, Puritan captives partially escaped their own depravity; the burden of Indian violence additionally urged them to depend entirely on Christ, the real, yet merciful, captor.

This psychological and rhetorical understanding of Indian captivity as a New World stage for an Old World Christian pilgrimage was critical as well to the development of the Anglo-American national self, which sprang free of Europe by strenuously applying European Christianity to the American environment. The problem became how to preserve this new liberty once ransomed from captivity. If the providential reading of abduction and ransom depended on the victim's survival, his or her return to some psychological and literal place from which to formulate that reading also signaled a new distance between self and God's chastening afflictions—a distance in which the control over the past required to narrate it might issue in spiritual torpor, the loss of an ecstatic living in the Word.

Colonial Puritan acculturation to New Zion propelled New England saints against the twinned trials of "savagery" and "popery."^[10] Unlike Jesuit missionary perceptions of Protestant heretics as themselves in need of conversion and as ideologically adjacent to rather than commingled with the Indian, Puritan captives located French Catholicism, when they encountered it, at the heart of heathen America, inextricably fused with the savage. Thus positioned inside the often violent enterprise to establish Anglo-America, the Romanism emanating from France and its Indians demanded a concerted military and spiritual response to ward off the danger of spiritual backsliding or foreign imperial conquest.

But like the Indian and the wilderness itself, popery covertly served to incite piety, an integral (if more problematic) part of Puritan efforts to achieve a stark and ever-watchful gratitude toward God. When acting in concert, all three agents of the "demonic" verged upon the "gracious," for they produced in Puritan captives that vigilant dependence on God that was perhaps their most coveted subjective state. Like later antebellum nativists, Puritans exploited popery as catalyst and justification for their own spiritual and political vitality.

Because of its ideological utility in the mythology of Puritan captivity, popery developed a powerful literary presence: allied with the threatening but ultimately impotent forces of primitivism, Catholicism itself became a virtual character, one "who" dwelled within the charged but politically marginal domain of melodrama. Such a theatrical and instrumental personification would influence later antebellum attitudes toward Catholicism as a foreign, even "uncanny," agent, one both powerful and impotent, threatening yet farcical. Unlike Indian cultures, popery was ineradicable kin to the Puritan reformed consciousness, and hence helped translate the North American wilderness into a familiar psychological terrain of merciful, if not penitential, afflictions boldly designed for the spiritual betterment of Reformed Christians. Puritan astonishment at encountering the anomaly of Catholic Indians was rapidly grafted onto already conventionalized emotions of fascination and contempt toward the Mother Church, who, as cast-off parent, haunted her errant children. Guilty ambivalence over having broken the unity of the Christian family translated into suspicious avoidance of an angry Roman parent, unleashed in the wilderness and intent on recovering her flock—her vigilance matching that of the New England saints. Not surprisingly, then, the Roman church constructed by this theological family romance emanated a puzzling villainy in which forcible estrangements disguised profound recognitions. Catholicism's strangeness differed crucially from that of the Indian: it was "uncanny" rather than wholly new, tempting the Anglo-American Puritan with reacculturation to Europe rather than abandonment into wilderness ways. When Puritan captives confronted the convergence of these temptations in the figure of the Catholic Indian, they were forced to the disturbed acknowledgment that "home" had come with them into the wilderness.^[11]

With the onset of King Philip's War (1675-78), the violence of the Iroquois combined with the calculated efforts of missionary priests to form an enduring Protestant suspicion of popery's rival sacramental power as at once punitive and unpredictably seductive. The most influential Puritan account of subjection to this "Catholic" wilderness was John Williams's 1707 best-seller, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion .^[12] Williams's narrative focuses recurrently on the strange anachronisms of his experience. Captured with most of his family and parishioners in 1704, Pastor Williams survived a forced winter march from Deerfield, Massachusetts, to Montreal. En route, he endured what seemed to him the bizarre tyranny of his Catholicized Indian master, who, like a New World inquisitor, forced his Congregational prisoner

to cross himself and to attend the "great confusion instead of gospel order" (185) of an Indian mass.

Captivity was at once a forced march into an anarchic wilderness and a weird regression into coercive Old World spiritual ritual. The combination of violence and mysterious ornamental behavior strangely recalled the ceremonialism and persecutions of Catholic monarchies. But Williams's narrative of "myself and so many of my children and friends in a popish captivity" finally focuses less on Indian and Roman violence than on missionary seduction. The true threat to this Deerfield minister emanated from the priests who split up Puritan families, luring or coercing the children into the worst captivity of all: conversion to Catholicism. Included in his captivity narrative is a lengthy epistle to his son Samuel on the follies of transubstantiation and purgatory that presumably persuaded the boy away from the foreign doctrine.

Williams's epistle to Samuel tellingly reveals how captivity already provided a compelling explanatory construct for Christian subjectivity, especially for Anglo-American Puritans, who anxiously insisted that their purified New England culture represented and further enabled the workings of a rigorously disembodied spirit. As Pastor Williams explained to his son, their Indian captivity logically derived from a generative captivity lodged at the heart of Catholic theology: the doctrine of transubstantiation, which profanely embodied and hence incarcerated God. "[It is] a blasphemy to pretend to a power of making God at their pleasure," Williams writes, "and then eat Him and give Him to others to be eaten or shut Him up in their altars, that they can utter the same words and make a God or not make a God according to their intention" (216). Thus Williams pictures the Eucharist as capture and cannibalism: a closeting of the Deity that, in permitting consumption, provokes a terrifying specter of God's instability and vulnerability: If God can be eaten, he can disappear. From this original act of confinement issue a proliferating series of enclosures by which Catholics, already expert cannibals of God, seek to trap (and, by implication, devour) their fellow humans. Purgatory is, Williams reminds Samuel, one such device, "a fatal snare to many souls who sin with hopes of easy getting priestly absolutions at death and buying off torments with their money" (217). The analogy between Catholicism's theology of captivity and the wilderness experience of the Williams family was conclusive: Catholicism and Indian captivity were not only synchronic representations of Original Sin, manifesting the universal phenomenon of bondage in a fallen world, but in diachronic relation as well, for Indian captivity emerged

from Roman Catholicism, its tyrannies and rituals those of popery. Such arguments convinced Samuel, for he returned to New England and the professed liberty of Congregationalism.

Ironically, Pastor Williams became famous not so much for this victory over popery as for his defeat. Struggling to retrieve two of his children from the dread fate of conversion, he recovered Samuel, but not Eunice; to the scandal of her Mather uncles and the grief of her father, Eunice chose to remain in captivity. Rebaptized a Catholic, she took the name Marguerite and, at age sixteen, married a Caughnawaga brave named François Xavier Arosen. From this traumatic childhood of abduction and coerced assimilation, Eunice later emerged as a steadfast Indian wife, mother, and Catholic, one of the earliest in a long and interesting line of American converts to Rome. Although her brother Stephen eventually persuaded her to visit Deerfield, she refused to move back, for fear, she said, of losing her soul.^[13]

Thus, as John Williams had learned too well, the freezing Canadian wilderness contained a seductive magic by which Indians cannibalized their slain enemies to ingest their strength and priests transubstantiated God to ingest his conversionary powers. Against such heretical incorporations of matter, Puritan captives shielded themselves as ascetically as they could. Another young captive, John Gyles, who suffered the (to him) dire fate of being purchased from the Indians by a Frenchman, responded in revealing fashion to a Jesuit priest's efforts to ransom him. "He gave me a biscuit," Gyles reports, "which I put into my pocket, and not daring to eat it, buried it under a log, fearing he had put something into it to make me love him."^[14] Gyles's fear of Catholic wizardry points to residual superstitions in Puritanism that erupted in the Salem witchcraft crisis. But his unease points as well to emergent anxieties in American Protestantism. If his hurried burial of the Jesuit menace shows his youth and historical era, his fear of contact with seductive Catholic matter would be shared by many later Americans. Indeed, many nine-teenth-century narratives of Protestant captivity to Catholicism would focus precisely on such dynamics of involuntary love.

Five
Nativism and Its Enslavements

As the Indian was forcibly removed from America, Catholicism occupied an enlarged cultural arena for the identity-confirming drama of piety and violence, of ritual resistance to the torments and seductions of the profane initially fashioned in Indian captivity and conversion narratives. Having made its American literary debut in Jesuit and Puritan narratives of captivity, Catholicism thereafter figured crucially in the construction of antebellum Protestant subjectivity.

The powerful link between piety and sadism seen in a narrative like Jogues's resurfaced in the nineteenth century in the immensely popular tales of captivity to a punitive Catholicism. In imagining Americans trapped in convents, confessionals, and the dungeons of the Inquisition, militant Protestant nativists battled against Roman intrigue and persecution. Anti-Catholic narratives, while developing the conventional but still compelling association of the violent, the exotic, and the hidden that had structured the Indian captivity genre, moved the site for these psychic challenges from the forest to the parochial school, the nunnery, and the confessional. In the words of one "escaped" nun: "Where do you place the abode of cruelty and of curiosity? Where, but in the mysterious seclusion of the convent?"^[1]

Many antebellum Protestants imagined that a resurgent, disturbingly immigrant Catholicism aimed for their land, their children, their very souls. Embattled by this Protestant nativism that peaked in the 1830s and then again in the 1850s, Catholic leaders sometimes took the reckless offensive. In 1850, Archbishop Hughes, for example, brashly declared: "Everybody should know that we have for our mission to convert the world—including the inhabitants of the United States—the people of the cities, and the people of the country, the officers of the navy and the

marines, commanders of the army, the legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President, and all!"^[2]

Such statements threw conservative Protestants into angry panic. Lyman Beecher, whose evangelical rhetoric drew much power from artfully terrifying depictions of an imperial power that dared compete with the Anglo-Saxon, imaged the papacy as the archcaptor, holding "in darkness and bondage nearly half the civilized world" and threatening to swallow America whole. As Beecher went on to explain in his Plea for the West (1835), papal machinations were already at work to overtake the American West since Catholic policies had always sought to "compensate for losses at home by new efforts to extend their influence abroad."^[3] Only if New England funneled funds westward to establish Protestant schools could Americans hope to compete ideologically against popery, whose successful and rising number of parochial schools and dangerously populous settlement of the Mississippi River Valley promised a Roman Catholic frontier.

Fears of educational takeover paralleled visions of political usurpation, for the mind of the child and that of the voter were figured as similarly impressible. The confessional—as a mysterious architectural interior closed off from public surveillance, a place where secret dialogue transpired beyond the alleged democratizing influences of print—attracted enormous political and sexual anxiety. In the confessional, according to the nativist Protestant imagination, women were seduced and men suborned by priests who as confessors could discover the workings of home, marketplace, and polling booth and manipulate all invisibly. To nativist sections of the Whig and, later, Republican parties, the Irish immigrant was particularly susceptible to both the priest and the Democratic party machine, leagued to overthrow republican America.

Fears of political conspiracy were greatly enhanced by Anglo-American prejudice against the Irish that flared up when the Great Famine (1845-52) sent 1.25 million impoverished Irish to America in the space of a decade. Could America's still nascent democracy, one that in the 1830s actively battled the tyrannies of "King Jackson" on the one hand and the "Money Power" on the other, withstand the massive foreign influence of these spiritually "docile" Irish? Or would American politics regress to the despotism and cabalistic intrigues that typified Old World political culture?^[4] Nativists typically described the pope's impending political dominion in terms that indirectly implied their own powerlessness in an electoral system increasingly afflicted by fraud and graft. If the will of the people was divided by sectional quarrels and economic conflict, the Vatican's will was reassuringly united by its malevolent inten-

tion. Thus the author of Pope or President? Startling Disclosures of Romanism as Revealed by Its Own Writers (1859), for example, sought to convince American voters that the "hand of popery, secretly moving, misdirecting or holding in check the rights of the people," was about to grip America by the throat.^[5] This "hand of popery" operated as demonic counterpart not only to Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market but to evangelical Protestantism's hand of the Lord, a hand whose providential management of New Zion was increasingly impeded by denominational schism and the spiritual paucity of American civil religion.^[6] The Vatican hand invisibly guiding schoolchild and confessional visitant meant that any Roman Catholic with public power would be psychologically incapable of observing the constitutional separation of church and state. One popular anti-Catholic novel incited readers with "the extraordinary spectacle of the entire Postal Department—which controls the transmission of the public and private intelligence of the country—confided to the hands of a Roman Catholic, with upwards of fifty thousand offices in his gift."^[7]

Political phobias in particular were shaped by the centuries-long tradition of suspicion toward the Jesuits, confessors to generations of European royalty and hence the supposed masterminds behind domestic and international politics. As missionaries in New France, as an educated elite, and as highly placed confessors, Jesuits, as one nativist explained, "have cords drawn all around the world."^[8] Even more than Napoleon, Loyola (as we have seen for the theologically liberal Parkman) epitomized an absolute power based on the fusion of political, intellectual, and spiritual energies. According to one antebellum Protestant biographer, a single idea inspired Loyola: "that of an absolute domination over the spirits of men, and of a centralization of all powers on earth, in the bosom of one master of souls."^[9] With the revival of the Jesuit order in 1814, the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829, and the sharp rise in immigration from Catholic Europe between 1845 and 1855, a renewal of papal despotism, engineered by the Jesuits, seemed near, and "Jesuitical" intrigue became the target of Protestant missionary reprimand.

Writing for the Home Missionary Society, the liberal Congregational minister Horace Bushnell spoke in tones of Gothic alarmism, condemning Pope Gregory XVI for his politics, in which, "with few exceptions, every centre of power is the seat of some cabal; and creatures, male and female, glide about the precincts, who are able, by the base and criminal secrets in their keeping, or perhaps, by terms of partnership well understood, to open or shut at will, the gates of favour."^[10] Behind this

Gothic image of spectral figures gliding through conspiracy-ridden interiors stood American party politics (and for Bushnell in particular, Hartford church politics), whose invisible workings and all too visible corruptions propelled many citizens to abandon traditional party affiliations and subscribe to the anticonspiratorial platform of the American, or Know-Nothing, party.^[11]

It was finally difficult, however, for Americans to act decisively against the papal threat of electoral captivity. For all its ominousness, the precise nature of the popery overwhelming America remained vague: "Few have any exact knowledge of the doctrines of that Church which, through her servants, whispers seductively into the ear of a monarch, or mingles in a popular election, in order to compass her end of universal mental despotism."^[12] One writer even confessed his bewilderment in the face of his own conspiratorial suspicions; if the Jesuits achieved global dominion, "the question still comes up, what did they intend to do with the world and in it?"^[13] This elusiveness at the heart of Catholic agency was crucial to its continued vitality as a conspiratorial menace, always beckoning nativist fears toward social spaces where the figure of Romanism invisibly mingled. If to those unconvinced by the charges of Protestant alarmists such elusiveness simply signaled the absence of malign papal intentions, lack of evidence only worked to heighten nativists' certainty of intrigue. They turned for evidence of their unsubstantiated fantasies of global domination to the local mysteries of language deceitfully shared between unsupervised individuals. Captivity was to occur not through military invasion or overt political gesture but through the seemingly casual minglings of an increasingly heterogeneous and urbanized social space.

While alarmed Protestants had trouble arriving at very precise notions about their Catholic enemy, they also had correspondingly few ideas about how to ward off impending captivity; notwithstanding their meteoric rise to political power in 1854, Know-Nothing legislators failed to issue any new laws. Know-Nothing demands for a twenty-one-year naturalization period, restriction of officeholding to native-born citizens, and legislation requiring periodic inspection of convents succumbed to the greater appeal of the new Republican party platform calling for "free labor"—an appeal in which the South and slavery were cast as the nation's principal menace. Nativists' efforts to stigmatize the Catholic immigrant were thwarted both by economic realities and by the manifestly vague conception of the foreign threat, which enabled its appropriation by abolitionists in their campaign against the southern "Lords of the Lash." But if abolitionists borrowed the terms of anti-Catholic in-

vective to bolster their righteous attack on the tyranny and sensual excess of plantation life, their rhetoric hardly accorded black slaves the purity of the Protestant martyr. Rather, that status was reserved for the New Englander, intent on asserting his or her section's vision of America against the Romanish iniquities of the South.^[14]

New England hostility to immigrant Catholicism in the three decades prior to the Civil War facilitated the mounting regional attack on slavery by popularizing a usefully improbable and clearly regional rhetoric of purity and contamination, a discourse legitimized by appeal to a religious supremacism that left racial loyalties intact. One could attack the South for the Romanism of its slaveholding practices rather than the white supremacism of such customs. Thus Harriet Beecher Stowe's evangelical critique of the Catholic household of the St. Clare family in Uncle Tom's Cabin indicts slavery for its spiritual tyranny over the soul more than for its racial tyranny over the body. That little Catholic Eva attends Methodist meetings with her spiritual colleague Uncle Tom discreetly registers her escape from Romanism's toils—toils that entwine her neurasthenic punitive mother and her indolent father.

It is difficult, finally, to position anti-Catholic discourse in the sectional crisis of the 1850s; if Stowe and more radical abolitionists "Romanized" southern slaveholders, the Louisville Bloody Monday riots of 1855 found Know-Nothing agitators on the side of the South, preventing immigrant (often radical and antislavery) German Catholics from voting, thus "converting the election into a perfect farce."^[15] The increasing tensions that followed the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act splintered nativism into competing sectional alliances; for example, New England nativists allied themselves with antislavery forces against Irish Catholic immigrants while siding with southern planters who attacked German Catholic immigrants in Kentucky. Such contradictory uses of anti-Catholicism illustrate its strategic flexibility to antebellum politics and render problematic any one formulation of its position in the slavery crisis. Indeed, alarmist southerners themselves borrowed the terms of anti-Catholic discourse to depict the threat of a slave conspiracy that was seemingly confirmed by Bishop England's opening of a school for slaves in Charleston, finally closed by protests.^[16] The elusiveness of anti-Catholicism in antebellum politics enabled sectionally divided Americans to express their regional animosities while imagining their united opposition to the pope. If popular and elite fictions of Protestant captivity to Rome functioned in the 1830s and 1840s to contain the threat of the Catholic immigrant, by the 1850s they permitted North and South alike to imaginatively resist white America's impending fratricidal vio-

lence. To fight the machinations of Rome was to displace the specter of civil war; more generally, to imagine Rome as protean conspiratorial agent, confusingly allied with both pro- and antislavery forces, was to imagine an America still joined by common religious concerns.

Alarmed anticipations of an impending national captivity to popery form a revealingly distorted commentary on troubling issues of immigration, urbanization, and democracy. If the nativist efforts of the American party to purge the nation of heterogeneous "Catholic" elements represent one aspect of a recurrent American xenophobia, the literary-historical importance of antebellum nativist discourse resides in its use of an increasingly anachronistic vocabulary of theological conflict to describe and obfuscate the crises of America's transition from a "union" to a "nation."^[17] Nativist "religious" purity powerfully supplemented appeals to ethnic supremacism and racial purity, projecting contaminations of the Republic, like the capitalist regimentation of the Lowell textile mills or the miscegenation of the races, onto the foreign and tyrannous papal father. The widening controversy over the validity or permissible extent of slavery clarified this focus on Catholicism, the "foreign" religion a powerful surrogate for the "foreign race" enclosed in white America. The image of captivity to Rome, then, not only expressed the slave's captivity for the Protestant abolitionist and the slave conspirator's for the planter class but also revised the estrangements of a modernizing economy and social space into the righteous simplicities of filial revolt against Rome.

Thus in its obsessive fantasies of an impending Protestant surrender to papal mastery, much anti-Catholic writing resituated the divisive and pluralistic public sphere—whose tensions infiltrated the strenuously asserted privacies of the "domestic sphere"—in the manageable confines of an enclosed and melodramatized privacy of religious sentiment. Perplexed by the strain of conveying the "indelicacies" of slavery "delicately," even the fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs appealed to the ritual theatrics of anti-Catholicism in her pseudonymous Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Referring to her master's hidden fathering of eleven slaves, Jacobs's persona, Linda Brent, reminds readers that "the secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition."^[18] Jacobs's invocation of the Inquisition signals her owner Timothy Flint's licentious exploitation of women slaves and her own righteous expose: she will reveal the illicit excesses of his private and at times frustratingly invisible dominion. Her Inquisitional metaphor also dramatizes the intensity of her victimization and the justice of her revolt in terms profoundly familiar to her white northern readership. Such metaphorizing of herself

as Protestant victim to the subtle and largely hidden tortures of the Inquisition perilously borders on the salacious associations of anti-Catholic rhetoric widely popularized by the dime novelist Ned Buntline, who wrote, for example, of the titillating tortures of the Inquisition: "For, oh! upon that rack lay stretched the fair and half-naked form of Genita, its symmetry convulsing in matchless tortures, the bosom palpitating awfully with the pangs of that earthly hall and the exquisitely modelled limbs enduring all the pains of dislocation."^[19]

Intent finally on disclosing the intricacies of Linda Brent's psychological as well as bodily enslavement, Jacobs's narrative renders the sexual theatrics of Inquisition literature ironically: rather than eroticized torture in basement cells, she images for her northern evangelical readership a far more subversive interiority, as she tells of hiding herself first beneath kitchen floorboards and then for seven years in her grandmother's garret, from where she looks down on the master who still pursues his fugitive slave. In artfully removing herself from captivity within the sexually contaminated domesticity of Flint's household and his threatening interrogations, Linda Brent simultaneously sidesteps the nativist melodrama of anti-Catholic discourse—not only its prurient focus on female violation but also its consoling promise that ideological complexities are nothing more than Romish mysteries to be indignantly deciphered. Linda Brent's garret interior—in its solitude, its aerial superiority to masculine persecution, its surveillance of the white world—resolutely forbids the reader's "religious" arousal.

In contrast to Jacobs's suspended, calculating, and painfully protracted escape from slavery, nativist literature of the convent, the confessional, and the Inquisition recurrently imagined the pleasures of a serendipitous, instantaneous flight. The intensity of fantasied emancipation was fueled by a sentimental logic of vicarious identification with the imagined prisoners of antebellum culture. George Lippard's best-selling Monks of Monk Hall (1844) lavishly multiplied the forces of imprisonment and their (usually) female captives; Lippard's Philadelphians, though sometimes villainous, are at bottom helpless captives of capitalism, libertinism, and religious (Protestant, Catholic, and visionary) opportunism—forces not so much woven into a coherent plot by Lippard as melodramatically dismembered into the various spaces of the long-ago Catholic interior of Monk Hall.^[20]

Many contemporary observers, reluctant to acknowledge the relationship of righteous anti-Catholicism to racial and ethnic conflict, claimed that the religious paranoia and violence were incited by the flood of anti-Catholic sermons, pamphlets, and novels that saturated the an-

tebellum literary marketplace. Some of this literature, such as the reformist priest Scipio de Ricci's Female Convents, Secrets of Nunneries Disclosed (1829), was directly imported from England, where agitation over the promulgation of the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) produced a spate of anti-Catholic works. Other works made their way to America from more distant times, such as Anthony Gavin's Great Red Dragon; or, The Master-Key to Popery (London, 1725). Gavin's work was reissued three times in America (Philadelphia, 1816; Boston, 1854; Philadelphia, 1855), its popularity indicating the contemporary efficacy of such an anachronistic text. From 1800 to 1860, a partial count of anti-Catholic publications shows some 25 newspapers, 13 magazines, 210 books, 40 fictional pieces, 41 histories, and scores of giftbooks, almanacs, and pamphlets dedicated to the anti-Catholic cause.^[21]

As a strategic displacement for actual and ongoing captivities in antebellum America, anti-Catholic narratives exhibited a characteristically farcical tone. A sense of theatricality and insincerity pervades not only the frankly commercial dime-novel literature but more elite literary productions as well. Many Americans detected the imposture, sham, and simple profiteering that accompanied the often violent ideological tensions of this period. By 1835 anti-Catholicism had become a moneymaking venture that many entered into with entrepreneurial gusto. "The abuse of the Catholics," noted one magazine, "is a regular trade, and the compilation of anti-Catholic books . . . has become a part of the regular industry of the country, as much as the making of nutmegs, or the construction of clocks."^[22] The observation points to a paradoxical dynamic in American anti-Catholicism—namely, the indigenous production and consumption of an ostensibly foreign, Catholic commodity. Indeed this Old World religion, as conceived by nativist propaganda, became one of the basic ingredients in the developing American identity. Catholic perceptions corroborated the pervasive anti-Catholic slant of contemporary writing. Declared the leading Catholic journal: "There is not a single work of fiction, emanating from Protestants, which does not directly or indirectly assail the faith or morals of the Catholic Church."^[23]

The inauthentic strain at the base of the hysteria troubled some observers because it revealed a disturbing resemblance to hated popery. If the domestic manufacture of popery was aimed at bolstering the Protestant Way, it quickly assumed an ironic function as well. Much anti-Catholic writing unwittingly revealed that Protestant Americans could be as scheming and exploitative as the papists they despised. The vocabulary of Protestant disdain was fast turning in on itself as self-

critical Americans applied it to their society. Thus one review of an anti-Catholic text defined Jesuitism as

referring to all those of every religious denomination who are more zealous for their church than for Christianity, more particular about ends than means, who resist the teachings of their instincts as solicitations from the devil, who estimate their virtue by what they suffer rather than by what they enjoy; who take pride in concealing an appetite which they intend to mortify; and who, in time, form a habit of deception which spreads over the whole surface of their character, perhaps without their ever suspecting its existence.^[24]

Thus while Jesuits, as the menacing other, continued in symbolic counterpart to the developing entrepreneurial masculine identity, they were also beginning to appear as an indigenous feature of that identity. Nativist discourse was escaping from its confines and attaching itself to the interior of Protestant subjectivity. To the minister Calvin Colton, anti-Catholic writers were themselves "Jesuitical," for they used religious zeal to disguise their own greed and pornographic inclinations. The phenomenon so disturbed him that he wrote a book, significantly entitled Protestant Jesuitism (1836), which detailed how Protestantism and Catholicism ironically converged in a salacious nativist literature: "The taste for these publications and the excitement produced by them, are the natural product of that false alarm which the Jesuitism of our own country has attempted to raise against the Jesuitism of Rome. Here is rogue chasing rogue—Jesuit in pursuit of Jesuit—but the older rogue is the wiser, because he has been longer in practice: he will not be over-taken, for the sufficient reason that his pursuer is on the wrong scent."^[25]

As Colton's statement suggests, the antebellum struggle to fend off the Catholic enemy manifested a curious doubling effect that disrupted the traditional captivity model in which Protestants righteously fled from Catholic persecution. Protestants, increasingly corrupt in the same ways as their enemy, were now pursuing Rome. It was not only that Americans, by indulging in their taste for the pornographic, the inquisitional, and the violent, were practicing the very vices they ascribed to their enemy but that their conspiratorial fears also came to function as a surrogate religion, which inevitably resembled its Catholic nemesis because its shape and meaning developed through enumerating the myriad evil tenets of popery. The high ritualism and secrecy of the nativist Order of the Star-Spangled Banner is one prominent example of this surrogate effect. As a doubled representation of Protestant selfhood, the image of

Romanism attracted obsessive scrutiny precisely because it covertly promised access to the self modeled upon it. This strangely solipsistic pursuit produced a voluminous literature denying its self-bound origins. As David Reese declared in his Humbugs of New-York: Being a Remonstrance against Popular Delusion; Whether in Science, Philosophy, or Religion (1838): "Indeed the class of Anti-Popery literature, including volumes, pamphlets, tracts, and newspapers, have become so numerous, that it is impossible to read them all, unless indeed all other reading be postponed to the all-absorbing inquiry into the abominations of Romanism."^[26]

Such an "all-absorbing" fascination with Catholic iniquity indirectly confirmed the purity and unity of Protestantism.^[27] Because the Roman church had been traditionally associated with the complexity and corruption of culture, it served as an ideal antagonist in the fervent, if not entirely sincere, struggle against materialism. The threat of captivity to Catholicism's dread interiors, to its alluring and perilous worldliness, gave shape and limit to American democracy; the menace also functioned, however subliminally, as a desirable alternative to the pressures disguised beneath the optimistic rhetoric of democracy. Here as elsewhere, the Jesuits figured importantly as symbols of an alternatively constructed masculine power. Isaac Taylor's eccentric but revealing biography Loyola and Jesuitism in Its Rudiments (1857) diagnosed Protestantism's antagonistic fascination with Catholicism as symptomatic of the loss of human agency in the antebellum age, an insight unusual for the period. For all his hatred of the Jesuits, Taylor, like Francis Parkman, betrayed a self-critical curiosity about them. But unlike the famous historian, Taylor carried his analysis one step further in claiming that the fascination was not in fact with the Jesuits but with the early modern culture that produced them. At its zenith, the Jesuit order represented an era when individual agency clearly counted. By contrast, in the modern era individual power had been eroded by a vast, impersonal, and uncontrollable system:

The cessation—or the apparent cessation—of human agency, as related to the movements and progress of the moral system, seems to invite attention to the times when its power was at the height; and when the individual peculiarities and the personal history of illustrious men gave a well-defined direction to the mind of nations, and left a strongly marked image upon their forms of belief, and upon their permanent institutions.^[28]

Like many others, Taylor sought refuge from his newly "systematic" age in studying (and creating) a historical past that validated individualism

and nourished convictions strong enough to resemble the "marked image." Paradoxically, the Jesuits, representing an absolute obedience to absolute authority, enjoyed freedom from cultural enervation. They epitomized at once the captive mind and the power of individual will.

The nostalgia for a zealous but disciplined agency evinced by Taylor and others figured at the center of evangelical opposition to Catholicism and explains some of the conflicted and self-reflexive nature of Protestant fears of captivity to Rome. To many contemporary observers, their democratic age, in suppressing the rule of charismatic authority, enfeebled convictions of all sorts, religious ones included. Antebellum criticism of Rome, especially in the recurrent portraits of the malign but attentive Jesuit, aim at the recovery of agency and, for ministers in particular, the recovery of audience as well. Many of the most vocal anti-Catholic agitators, such as George Bourne and the Reverends Brownlee and Beecher, were ministers on the defensive, struggling to maintain prestige in a heterogeneous religious marketplace. From their alarmist perspective (which registered in heightened tones a queasy unrest at their decline in status) America could more easily brave a Catholic plot than the rapid proliferation of Protestant sects that apparently mocked any notion of theological design to the Christian universe. Lyman Beecher, who owed much of his fame to his crusade against Catholicism, suggested as much in outlining the Austrian-papal plot to gain dominion of the American West: "If such complicated indications of design may exist without design, as well may the broader mechanism of the world be regarded as the offspring of chance."^[29] For many antebellum Protestants, the supposed Catholic conspiracy to capture them proved not only that their faith was still vital but that their ministers were too.

Captivity structured nativist perceptions not only of papal machinations but also of Catholic dogma itself. Bondage characterized popery in all its aspects, thus presenting a satisfyingly coherent text for observers to decipher. To Nicholas Murray, the development of Catholic dogma and practice since the early Middle Ages revealed, as they did for Pastor Williams in his Canadian captivity, Catholicism's innate relationship to captivity. "These tenets," Murray explained, "artfully linked together into a great chain, forged for the purpose of binding the soul at the feet of the priest, were quietly received in those days of darkness; and the darkness was cherished by the locking up of the Scriptures from the people, and by the inculcation of an implicit faith."^[30] Murray's identification of Catholic piety with confinement, with the locking in of Scripture and of the soul, characterized liberal as well as nativist attitudes.

Illustrating this distribution of nativist discourse across theological "class lines," liberal New England Protestants even borrowed images of Catholic captivity to depict their own fear of entrapment by any orthodoxy, the specter of confinement figuring prominently in Unitarian and agnostic thinking about the spiritual life in general. Orthodoxy, whether Catholic or Calvinist, threatened to imprison the soul. From the perspective of one Unitarian writer, acceptable spirituality was closely associated with images of space and escape. In his article entitled "Sacrifice" he describes the spiritual life as poised between the alternatives of interiority and exteriority, confinement and release.^[31] Significantly, no explicit reference is made to Protestantism's quarrel with Rome, for by avoiding any hint of polemics he effectively dismisses the possible validity of their separate claims. Nonetheless, a clear ideological division remains. Liberal Protestantism implicitly figures as the way of release, Calvinism and Catholicism as the way of confinement. Presenting an amiable version of the labyrinthine interiors of Gothic fiction, the author depicts the self as a maze through which the divine spirit seeks to pass, God's chief desire being to flow through us and on into the world. The divine spirit "waits with sublime imperturbable serenity at every closed avenue, and enters at every open one" (320); our religious duty is to remain open to this spirit by emptying ourselves through a constant self-expenditure, or "sacrifice." Having let the divine enter us, we must let it exit into the world. We must not "make our bosom a terminus, rather than conduit, for the river of life" (332). Ideally, the individual should behave like a fountain, then, circulating the divine spirit through society; any attempt to confine the Deity, to horde it or hold it captive, will deform the person, for to constrain or repress this divine spirit generates the vices of "bigotry, self-mutilation, and every species of conscientious suicide" (316)—vices commonly ascribed to a monastic and penitential Rome.

Captivity to Romanism, be it on the national or individual level, was complicated by the threat of complicity. Many accused the Catholic church of luring people into its grasp, of charming their senses with the magnificence of its art or befuddling their reason with Jesuit casuistry. The widespread conviction of Catholicism's spellbinding properties suggests the discomfort yet usefulness of the felt attraction; the passivity of enchantment was psychologically safer than the activity of desire. Nativists were expert politicians of this theology of mesmerism; in effect, they created and controlled this enchanting menace in their self-appointed efforts to alert the American public to its presence. To Samuel F.B. Morse, artist, inventor, and Protestant propagandist, Catholics

lurked hypnotically and evilly like serpents in the "cradle of the embryo giant [America]." Moving quickly from pagan fantasies of America's Herculean infancy to Genesis imagery of sexual temptation, Morse hopes that the infant America, having grasped these serpents, will "neither be tempted from his hold by admiration of their painted and gilded covering, nor by fear of the fatal embrace of their treacherous folds."^[32]

Morse's use of Edenic imagery to describe Catholicism's serpentine sexual and moral temptations was typical of his time; earlier Americans had also understood the foreign religion as an extension through time of the devil's seduction of Eve. John Adams, for example, wrote to his wife, Abigail, of Catholicism's deceptive allure: "Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear, and imagination. Everything which can charm, and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell."^[33] By Morse's time, many Americans were convinced that Luther had not successfully broken the spell. Catholics hardly needed to conspire against America, for the nation's citizens were already spellbound, dangerously ready to sample Rome's delusions further. Morse's role in this prelapsarian drama was to alert Americans "who, with a facility most marvellous, fall into every snare and pleasant baited trap that Popery spreads for them."^[34] Anti-Catholic activity like Morse's could reenact the Fall in order to repair it, resurrecting Satan in order to triumph over him.

The continued reimagining of the horrors of captivity to Catholicism's labyrinthine, despotic interiors, past and present, provided an acceptable access to racial and economic worlds of subordination and dispossession disturbingly enclosed in, and forced beneath, middle-class existence. Unlike Lippard's eccentrically lurid fiction, anti-Catholic fiction more typically confined its treatment of such dispossession to the racially and economically "pure" precincts of the domestic where powerlessness could be safely figured as maidenhood trapped in the architectural complexities of the convent rather than the mazes of politics or economics. Narratives of imprisoned Protestant virgins offered a tantalizing confluence of theological and sexual preoccupations—a discursive convergence that was itself as provocative as the contents of convent life that it disclosed.

Six
Sentimental Capture
The Cruel Convent and Family Love

As nineteenth-century Americans shifted their focus from the transcendent to the social, they reconceived captivity in psychological rather than religious terms. Captivity to "savages" accordingly yielded less information about the divine, for in a middle-class (and increasingly anti-Calvinist) America that newly insisted on the benevolence, even domesticity, of the Deity and the agency of the believer, such exotic and tortured bondage only faintly recalled the desired Christian relationship with God. Torment—whether physical or spiritual—became increasingly detached from holy authorship, and bodily suffering like that exemplified in Parkman's historiography provided more information about the psyche in society than about Jehovah's mysterious ways. As antebellum Indian captivity tales, slave narratives, and convent escape stories illustrated, captives no longer typically responded to their plight by abandoning themselves to God, for their captivities signified new but potentially surmountable horrors of imprisonment to humanity and its corruptions. One no longer sought through captivity to obtain a cleansed and grateful awareness of God's power, of the reality and glory of one's existential dependence, but simply, if no less desperately, to escape. Captivity became a drama, not of being kidnapped into the American wilderness, boundless and frightening, but of being en-trapped by built spaces—athedral, confessional, and convent—with Romanism providing an antidomestic cultural architecture for Protestant habitation.

In this new preoccupation with issues of flight rather than submission, of sentimental release rather than orthodoxy, piety was often subtly transfigured into the afflictions of burdensome emotion.^[1] Faith operated less successfully as counterpart and rigorous antidote to torment; sep-

arated by the forces of middle-class domesticity and market capitalism, the sacred and the violent parted ways in middle-class fiction, meeting again in the marginal, subversive terrain of the convent exposé or the elite artistry of Melville and Emily Dickinson. Middle-class fictions like Uncle Tom's Cabin , even when arguing for the transcendent and evangelical potential of captivity, connected such spiritual power with the lavish cultivation and expression of sentiment. In nineteenth-century Indian captivity narratives, although vestiges of faith remain in formulaic acknowledgments of Providence for escape or rescue, the kinesis and mystery of piety have shifted their domain to the heart. As the dogma of redemptive suffering that structured earlier captivity narratives gradually eroded, and as Christian apologists staved off post-Enlightenment attacks by arguing that religion was finally a question not of disputable dogma but of autonomous emotion, feelings assumed many of the attributes of the sacred.^[2] One no longer suffered at the hands of God so much as by the demands of one's privatized subjectivity; antebellum middle-class fictions and sermons, in dethroning an unjustly severe Calvinist God, installed new and conspicuously feminine powers of sentiment whose grip was sometimes experienced as equally harrowing and unmanageable. The "heart" came to represent an internal domain as sacred (if not as forbidding) as that wherein had dwelled the "soul," and like Jehovah, the heart now became both captor and redeemer. America's greatest Protestant revivalist of the 1820s and 1830s, Charles Grandison Finney, described this new evangelical phenomenology in his 1836 sermon "Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts":

The term heart , as applied to mind, is figurative, and recognizes an analogy between the heart of the body, and the heart of the soul. The fleshly organ of the body called the heart , is the seat and fountain of animal life, and by its constant action, diffuses life through the animal system. The spiritual heart, is the fountain of spiritual life, is that deep seated but voluntary preference of the mind, which lies back of all its other voluntary affections and emotions, and from which they take their character . In this sense I understand the term heart. . . . It is evidently something over which we have control; something voluntary; something for which we are to blame, and which we are bound to alter.^[3]

Participating in this larger cultural trend toward sentimentality and domesticity, many nineteenth-century captivity narratives focused on the trials of this white "heart," at once ambiguously fleshly and spiritual, as it underwent a drama of emotional burden and release. Objective ex-

periences of Indian captivity, for example, were interpreted less as an encompassing metaphysical bondage to the Lord than as a subjective confinement to emotion. The crucifixional ironies that had structured earlier Christian tales of captivity subsided before a simpler but no less powerful melodramatic strain, while a fierce drive toward authorial expressiveness and readerly intimacy replaced the ambiguities and symbolic inventiveness perfected by spiritually zealous captives like Isaac Jogues or John Williams. Accounts of captivity and release aimed to produce an emotional catharsis, a freeing of the socially constrained, implicitly urban, eastern self as it vicariously tasted the excessive tribulations of southern slave or western Indian captive. In this sentimental identification with such captives, exposé came to replace revelation as the horrors of captivity, rather than its providential lessons, gained narrative priority.

The Narrative of Henry "Box" Brown (1849) brilliantly illustrates antebellum America's newly sentimental perspective on captivity. As Brown's name suggests, the fugitive slave reached freedom after a twenty-seven-hour journey through the U.S. mail, nailed up in a three-by-two-foot box. The narrative focuses less on the captive's spiritual development within his box than on the reader's emotional release in imagining another's incarceration and escape. In the preface to this mythic story of a literal living letter, forced to travel to freedom upside down in the fetal position, Brown's editor urges his readers to let their feelings "burst forth from their enclosure."^[4] The editorial passage connects Brown's live internment to a vaguer unbounded captivity at work in the reading audience—that within the "enclosure" of selfhood. Like the black fugitive bursting open his box in Philadelphia, readers of Brown's tale are encouraged to use his story to break free from the inhibitions of middle-class existence by a vicarious indulgence in another's plight. As Stowe argued in Uncle Tom's Cabin , it was precisely the refusal "to feel" that maintained the system of slavery; in her conservative abolitionist logic, to develop sympathy for the captive was the necessary precedent to urging southerners to release their slaves.

As Henry "Box" Brown's story indicates, sentimentalism permitted many nineteenth-century captivity narratives to locate transcendence in the release of emotion. Just as captivity was redescribed in terms of an emotionality broader (and less subversive) than the earlier sense of "enthusiasm," so the interior world of the captive self was increasingly depicted in an affectional vocabulary of imprisonment and escape. The attack on emotional repression and the invitation to sentimental release allied protagonist and reader in a newly intimate reading space where the

burdens of the social became those of an exaggerated expressivity that could be at least partially dispelled through the act of reading. ^[5] The increasing pursuit of grace by both conservative and liberal evangelical Christians through the cultivation and release of feeling meant that such Christians continually wrestled to keep emotional excess from vitiating pious sentiment. Thus the Christian heroine of Susan Warner's 1850 best-seller The Wide, Wide World , to purify and unleash her refined powers of sentiment, must painfully repress the grief and rage that are deemed excessive. If Ellen Montgomery's spiritual pilgrimage becomes, as a result, a painful conflation of asceticism with repression and of charity with an upper-middle-class consumerism that disdains British aristocrats and America's urban underclass alike, antebellum Indian captivity narratives detailed an even more precipitous decline into insincerity. ^[6]

Ironically, this inauthenticity appeared precisely when the captivity genre no longer advocated theological tenets but aimed to elicit the inner truth of feelings. Problematically theatrical, nineteenth-century accounts of captivity to slaveholders, Catholics, or Indians displayed an intense, explicit concern with audience, the apparent displacement of God as primary interlocutor initiating an aggressive search for the suitably responsive human reader. The challenge of establishing connection (and making sales) to a mass reading public that was increasingly female and ethnically diverse urged authors even more toward the sentimental voice. While members of a declining eastern elite, like Hawthorne, quietly (if no less commercially) cast about in a sea of faces for that "ideal reader," middle-brow writers of popular captivity narratives hounded readers to win their involvement, reiterating the horrors of bondage as if to ward off the twin phenomena of religious indifference and reader insensibility. ^[7] In this transformation of the genre, a palpable anxiety about readers' indifference (their turning away from the text before them) supplants previous fears of divine wrath or abandonment.

R. B. Stratton's Captivity of the Oatman Girls (1859), for example, recounts the Indian captivity and torture of two frontier sisters in order to stimulate readers with Indian atrocity rather than awe them with the workings of divinity. ^[8] Like other sentimentally indignant nineteenth-century narrators, Stratton interrupts and repeats one sister's descriptions of torture, heedless of narrative awkwardness in his obsessive pursuit of the reader. If nativist paranoia toward Jesuits and the pope reflected an intense need for audience, that same dynamic figured in Stratton's melodramatization of Indian torture. Other authors of nineteenth-century captivities practiced a similarly stylized and self-conscious courting of excess, approaching captivity's dark regions of sadism, mourning, and

possible redemption through a formulaic incitement of emotion, a patterned excess as orderly in its way as the prior use of Scripture to generate and structure the recollections of kidnap and escape.

The Narrative of the Capture and Subsequent Sufferings of Mrs. Rachel Plummer, Written by Herself (1839) suggests, finally, that the real bondage to be endured is not to God or Indian but to the heart and its affectional ties. ^[9] Plummer's story of abduction and enslavement by the Apaches—a two-year saga that begins with the witness of her child's murder—is perhaps the finest example of the sentimentalization of the captivity genre and its new concern with the developing "tortures" of family love. Plummer's implied readers are not Christians dulled by life in the settlements but rather parents who exist not in a state either of sin or of grace (each condition representing a reasonably intact, if not invincible, selfhood) but instead in a theologically emptied zone of vulnerability to irremediable loss: the death of children. The focus of the narrative is not pain on its way to heaven but pain that remains in a critical stasis, unable to go anywhere. The narrator's burden is the secular, finite, but eventually incommunicable one of extreme maternal anguish; the comparatively unwounded parental sensibilities of her readers function as the only shared text available for interpreting this captivity. Not the soul but the heart must suffer and endure this newly domesticated frontier anguish; Plummer concludes her description of the torture-death of her infant with this warning: "Parents, you little know what you can bear. Surely, surely, my poor heart must break" (342). Plummer's pathetic address is hardly less ominous (and certainly less manageable because more isolated) than conservative evangelical portraits of the Lord's impending afflictions. There is finally little escape from the condition of suspended catastrophe created by her poignant warning; hence enormous pressure is brought to bear upon the therapeutic action of sentimental narrative to avoid what Plummer implies is the age's new experience of damnation: the broken parental heart.

Plummer's treatment of Indian captivity in terms of family love and insurmountable woe finds partial symbolic resolution in a remarkable episode where she descends into a cave—an adventure that follows the death of her infant and occupies the bulk of her narrative. In a burst of seemingly arbitrary psychic need and heroic rebelliousness, the prisoner inexplicably beats up her Apache mistress, not to gain freedom but to explore a cave. Leaving her mistress behind, Plummer, like tourists in the Italian catacombs, pursues her journey "in the bowels of the earth" (350), imagining the candlelit chambers as grand church interiors. ^[10] Writing with the trenchant imagery and orchestrated movement of an

original mythographer, Plummer then shifts her account from cathedral to psyche. Following an underground stream for over a mile, she finally falls into a deep sleep by an underground waterfall, and "in the confused roar of the waters," she reports, "I fancied I could hear the dying screams of my infant" (350). Her literalized submergence in maternal grief, far beneath the ego and an earth's surface afflicted by race wars over possession of the land, yields a therapeutic dream vision; a "stranger" (who functions as Christ but who remains significantly anonymous) appears before the sleeping woman and bathes her wounds. After two days Plummer emerges from the cave, still a prisoner (and still prisoner to her maternal grief) but newly heroic to her Indian captors. Ransomed, she concludes her narrative with no sense of theological or psychological resolution but with a poignant plea for the return of her other child, abducted and separated from her.

Thus where Indian captivity tales had formerly functioned as a symbolic discourse that confirmed one's significance to a punitive but merciful deity, they now addressed America's increasingly sacralized entity: the family. As Plummer's narrative memorably demonstrates, captivity had become increasingly involved with the burden of affectional ties—how to endure their loss or, more disturbingly, how to escape their confines.

In this newly sentimentalized association between the bonds of captivity and family, Roman Catholicism emerged not only as devious captor of the individual Protestant soul but also as sentimental competitor to the Protestant family. With the near eradication of Indian cultures, the discourse of anti-Catholicism was released into the domestic sphere of middle-class culture, where it voiced anxieties about that domesticity, its gender dissymmetries, its isolation from the public sphere, its polarized adulation of sentimental womanhood and entrepreneurial manhood. Anti-Catholic attacks on the alternative family structures represented by the convent, the celibate priesthood, and devotion to both the Virgin and the intercessory community of the sainted dead exposed Catholic familial structures as intriguing and dangerously collectivist—elaborate institutional structures that suppressed the autonomous individual, that confusingly both elevated and oppressed women, and that finally evaded distinctions between public and private central to liberal democracy and middle-class heterosexuality. A dangerous irony of Protestantism's antagonistic and sentimental response to this Romanism was that in inciting readers to identify with victims of its affective powers, Protestantism sometimes urged them to an unsentimental violence against it.

Perplexed about the just extent of their pluralistic, individualist ways and attracted to, yet suspicious of, the notion of contemplative retreat,

convent captivity narratives like George Bourne's Lorette, The History of Louise, Daughter of a Canadian Nun: Exhibiting the Interior of Female Convents (1833) and the later best-sellers Rebecca Reed's Six Months in a Convent (1835) and Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery (1836) domesticated the metaphysical concerns of their American literary prototype, the Indian captivity narrative. As frenzied re-presentations of issues initially formulated in Indian captivity narratives, they recounted forced flights from home into an exotic, marginal culture and the cultivation of captivity's afflictions. Like the colonial model, where kidnapping frequently disguised a subversive longing to escape the settlements and the dulled pieties of civilization, convent narratives depicted escapes not so much from convents as from the tyranny (or the absence) of a parental roof. To enter the Catholic prison was to achieve a vitalizing sense of contested selfhood, but one that was conspicuously independent of God.

Nonetheless, these feminine (but often male-authored) revelations of affliction and eventual escape confirmed the "providential" lessons of those colonial predecessors who discovered the satanic within the popish denizens of the wilderness; so these nineteenth-century "maidens" claimed to have met savagery behind the religious guise of priest and nun. But the manifest concern with spiritual enlightenment in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian captivity narratives that powerfully linked captivity to biblical revelation, imprisonment to spiritual freedom, was now submerged by murkier connections between captivity and exposé, imprisonment and disillusion. By the mid-nineteenth century, the captivity genre, whether exposing frontier savagery or urban convents, dedicated itself to revealing the corrupt and cunning ways of man in his relations to the defenseless, rather than the mysterious ways of Jehovah. Indicative of a profound shift in America's understanding of the relationship between suffering and knowledge (and of the relation between the sexes), the discovery of the sinner inside the confessor, of the void inside the prison, figured at the center of both popular and American Renaissance fictions.

If often explicit in the fiction of major nineteenth-century authors, the breakdown of metaphysical certainty remained largely implicit in popular anti-Catholic fiction, which absorbed the loss of religious faith and the attendant problems of identity and vocation into the drama of Protestant male interest in female incarceration, a middle-class fiction at once self-righteous and erotic. Any analysis of Rome's intentionally deceptive surfaces was bound to fail, reduced to the status of perennial suspicion. Worse yet, so powerful and subtle was Romanism's duplicity that to read

it was to risk believing it. "This semblance of the true faith," wrote one observer, "which her 'articles of religion' exhibit, while united to other articles which are utterly at variance with the former, is the secret of her power and influence, since it serves to clothe error in the habiliments of truth." ^[11] Like Catholic theology and ceremonies themselves, the Catholic clergy disguised their true nature behind an alluring holiness. The distinctive robes of the priesthood summoned up images of post-Edenic secrecy and malice; one alarmist description from Priestcraft Exposed , a semimonthly journal published in 1834, portrayed priests as "covering their hypocrisy with the cloak of religion , and with more than the serpent's guile, worming themselves into the confidence and affections of their unsuspecting victims." ^[12] Indeed, the celibate priest circulating through civilian spaces of the marketplace and the home enjoyed a perplexing masculine mobility that made him both captive and exiled. "The situation of the priest alone , yet not alone," mused one author, "free and not free, in the midst of a world in discord with him, reminds us of that of a man condemned to the cellular treatment, who should carry his cell about with him. Nothing would be more likely to make him mad." ^[13]

The suspicions aroused by this variously deceptive Catholic surface register the social anxieties provoked by the new mobility, heterogeneity, and competitiveness of the antebellum decades. How was one to determine another's origins, motivations, and objectives? Melville's portrait of a confidence man at work in the turbulent steamboat world of the Fidèle delights in exposing the middle-class American as virtually predestined to imposture, made vulnerable by his obtuse faith in the supposedly purified commercial transactions of the New World. Similarly, the Jesuit, prowling everywhere, is not only the figure of the foreign conspirator working to convert America's "heart" but also the mobile American male himself, suspicious of neighbors whom he no longer knows and calculating in his social interraction. Persistent evangelical conviction of the depravity of the soul enhanced this dread of the Catholic imposter and his "prisons of confiding girls"; even the discerning self-control developed in the protective privacy of the family could fall victim. John Claudius Pitrat's Paul and Julia; or, The Political Mysteries, Hypocrisy, and Cruelty of the Leaders of the Church of Rome (1855) was one among scores of novels opposing familial ties and romantic affection to the seductions of the church; when the young monk finally discovers the corruption of his father confessor, he returns home to find his beloved dead and himself dies on her grave. ^[14]

Concern over the potential duplicity of strangers increased suspicions that priests intrigued for control of the Protestant family. proffering the

inviting interiors of convent and confessional, priests lured young women from their sheltered domesticity to even more privatized spaces, where their spiritual and sexual purity could be violated—a violation that resulted either in the pitiable death of the Protestant victim or her conversion to Catholic licentiousness, responses conventional to novels of seduction, religious or not. As M. G. Lewis's famous novel The Monk (1796) explained, the priests' abuse of women emanated from their vows of celibacy, for these vows repressed their sexual energies to the point of madness. Formerly Madrid's holiest monk, Lewis's sexually wild protagonist, Ambrosio, typifies the perils of a masculine sanctity itself conceived of as an instance of excessively willful control. Understood as an illicit suppression of the natural self (and specifically its reproductive obligations), continence is the original violent action that needs but a slight catalyst to erupt into its opposite. Protestant or Deist masculine outsiders figure in Lewis's (and other Gothic) narratives as curious bystanders, whose inability to interrupt this sexual traffic from the daylight world to the dark monastic interior both aggrandizes monastic power and, as important, suppresses the power of the father in civil society. Thus the evasion of secular patriarchy dramatized in the monastic landscape of male rampage and female violation images a catastrophic and childish heterosexuality whose safe containment in castle or monastery permits its narrative publication.

For Jacksonian Americans fashioning the new middle-class domesticity, the monastery, like the communitarian ideals of such reform movements as Brook Farm, rivaled the domestic project. The capture of virgins and their rape inside convent walls, their psychological subjection to tyrannical abbess and lecherous father confessor, and the titillating exposure of these indignities for middle-class readers refashioned the seclusion of women inside the domestic sphere of civil society as liberty, their subordination to patriarchial authority as voluntary, their sexual repression as "purity." ^[15] The attack on convents in Jacksonian and antebellum America intricately voiced Protestant perplexities over the ongoing construction of the "cult of domesticity." Whether because of its ardent female mystics, its veneration of Mary, its convents, or its traditional negative image as the Whore of Babylon, Roman Catholicism advertised a constellation of alternative femininities conspicuously excluded by antebellum theoreticians of the family who constructed, instead, a region of sentiment that, though run by women, was overseen by husbandly authority. Catholic sentimentality was inferior to the rationality of this Protestant sentiment—more bodily, ardent, and regressive. An article in The Christian Parlor Book , "John Knox and Mary,

Queen of Scots," sets an unreasoning Catholic womanhood against the masculine logic of Protestantism as the narrator imagines a weepy Queen Mary coolly surveyed by the emotionally contained church reformer. In case the political dimensions of this sexual and religious hierarchy remain unclear, the author reminds readers "that the interests of freedom and Protestant Christianity are on one side reaching through ages and extending to nations, and on the other, [is] one frail heart stained with crime, and one fair face bathed in tears." ^[16]

Such regret over the vanquishing of one frail woman in the name of Protestant imperialism enabled parallel processes of masculine mystification of the bodily interiors of Catholicism and women, mirrored structures of exterior allure and recessed corruption. Cathedrals architecturally represented this masculine Protestant configuration, for their architectural splendors held the dark confessional and its sexual secrets. The historian Jules Michelet's Le Prêtre, La Femme, La Famille (1845), a book quickly translated and distributed in America, provides a remarkable tour of this eroticized architecture whose salacious moments reside in the historian's anticlerical imaginings of intimacy:

Delightful hour of tumultuous, but tender sensations! (Why does the heart palpitate so strongly here?) How dark the church becomes! Yet it is not late. The great rose-window over the portal glitters with the setting sun. But it is quite another thing in the choir; dark shadows envelope it, and beyond is obscurity. One thing astounds and almost frightens us, however far we may be, which is the mysterious old painted glass, at the farthest end of the church, on which the design is no longer distinguishable, twinkling in the shade, like an illegible magic scroll of unknown characters. The chapel is not less dark on that account; you can no longer discern the ornaments and delicate moulding entwined in the vaulted roof; the shadow deepening blends and confounds the outlines. But, as if this chapel were not yet dark enough, it contains, in a retired corner, a narrow recess of dark oak, where that man, all emotion, and that trembling woman, so close to each other, are whispering together about the love of God. ^[17]

Michelet's architectonics of a verbal intimacy that simulates, even transcends, the pleasures of sex is a memorable example of anticlerical eroticism that reveals how well known Catholicism, the supposed "un-

known," is. There is nothing unpredictable about Michelet's tour through an interior made dim by the "illegible magic" of stained glass; as he proceeds, not down the nave to the altar but, purposeful in his deviance, over to a "retired corner," Michelet guides the reader to the inner scandal of Catholicism: intimate conversation between the sexes about God. The disgrace is not only that such conversation occurs, and that it does so privately, but also that it avoids sexual intercourse as the grounds for its exchange: the insistence of anti-Catholic discourse on the "seduction" of confessional and convent always includes, in addition to a theatrics of sexual violation (or intimacy), this peril of unsupervised conversation between the sexes. Anti-Catholic writings move the implicitly Protestant tourist-reader from the church and confessional to the convent, often figured as covertly attached by hidden corridors to the church—a geography of subversive intimacy in which Catholic masculinity commandeers Protestant femininity in a recurrent drama of illicit sexuality and religious conversion. As one "escaped" American nun confessed of her vertiginous experience with this priestly power: "As the fluttering and terrified, but irresistibly attracted bird, flies in gradually lessening circles, around the venomous snake, as it lies coiled in its serpentine folds, so did I fly from, yet return to, the witchery of Romanism." ^{[ 18]}

Notions about the female heart further structure the anticlericalism of Michelet's Le Prêtre, La Femme, La Famille . The heart resides in the family, itself a precarious sanctuary from the stress of the capitalist world; Catholicism threatens to invade both. "The question is about our family," Michelet declares in his opening sentence, "that sacred asylum in which we all desire to seek the repose of the heart, when our endeavors have proved fruitless, and our illusions are no more" (xli). ^[19] If Orestes Brownson was accurate in labeling Michelet's volume "a compound of ignorance, infidel malice, prurient fancy, and maudlin sentiment," ^[20] that volume nonetheless throws revealing light on Protestant fears of captivity by suggesting that their real animus was the affective separation demanded by the new bourgeois economic order, not any incarceration threatened by the Catholic church. Michelet's anticlerical tirade disguises a convoluted critique of the bourgeois world, whose pressures leave one open to priestly intrigue and seduction. This world isolates a woman from her husband (the preoccupied businessman) and separates her from her child (sent away for early schooling); she soon falls victim to ennui and then, inevitably, becomes the prey of the priest, who is the wife's counterpart in the modernizing order, a creature with no discernible work to perform yet free from economic pressure.

In the suffering and envy of his own perverse celibacy, the priest intrigues to rob the husband of control over his wife by gaining complete spiritual dominion over her. Failing this (as he will since, according to Michelet, a part of the soul always eludes capture), he consoles himself with the seduction of her body. Michelet's text culminates in a melodramatic analysis of the attraction between women and Catholicism, a bond derived from the passional domain of female biology that renders the need for seduction obsolete. Michelet's own heartfelt narrative establishes an interlocking exchange of influences between the church's cult of the Sacred Heart, the sentimental-erotic bond between a woman and her confessor, and the female body itself.

The heart!—that word has always been powerful; the heart, being the organ of the affections, expresses them in its own manner, swollen and heaving with sighs. The life of the heart, strong and confused, comprehends and mingles every kind of love. Such a sentence is wonderfully adapted to language which is meant to have a double meaning.

And who will understand it best?—Women:—with them the life of the heart is everything. This organ, being the passage of the blood, and strongly influenced by the revolutions of the blood, is not less predominant in woman than her very sex. (138)

Like Donald Grant Mitchell's Ik Marvel of Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart (1850) or Hawthorne's Coverdale of The Blithedale Romance (1852), Michelet tracks the minute details of this "life of the heart," of sexual surrender—a simultaneous unveiling of Catholicism and of women in their bourgeois households. In his conspiratorial erotics, the woman's bloody "sacred" heart lies subversively inside the sentimental heart. Although American Catholics subscribed to much contemporary sentimentalism, writing many novels of marriage and conversion expressly linked to the sentimental heart, hostile Protestants nevertheless persisted in excluding them: Catholics belonged in Gothic dungeons, not domestic parlors, their hearts bloody, not pure. As isolate voyeur of woman's confused interior (which can yet decipher language of "double meaning"), Michelet fashions his own authorial intimacy with his readers. American women could speak in these sexualized intimacies as well, artfully blending the perspectives of victim and voyeur as they unfolded their captivity in the confessional for Protestant readers. In a passage even more redolent of Aztec sacrifice than of the French bourgeois bloody heart, one American former nun describes "confes-

sion" as a sacrificial machine that grips its victim in a desired fixity while animating Catholicism into a galvanized "figure":

Superficial observers ascribe the influence she [the church] exerts to the charm of her ostentatious ceremonies and her imposing ritual; to the theatrical display and sensual appeal of her worship. These are indeed the agencies that at first attract , but it is the revealments of the confessional that retain . These are the bands of flowers thrown around the youthful victim to draw her to the altar; but the ordinance of confession is the sharp hook of steel that grapples her till the sacrifice be accomplished. The robes, the crucifix, the pictures, the incense, the mass, the invocation of saints, the thousand and one enchanting and gorgeous rites, make up, indeed, an attractive image, apparently possessed of vitality and vigor; but confession, as it were, completes the galvanic circle that keeps the form erect and active. Detach this, and the figure falls, a pale, corrupting corpse, to the ground. ^[21]

If confession could grapple someone with a hook, it was because the spirit was increasingly identified with the body, in part because of liberal Protestant efforts to dispel the Calvinist heritage of depravity (which exaggerated the distance between spirit and flesh), in part because of the middle-class cult of domesticity that endowed the persons and objects of the home with an affectional aura that bordered on the sacred. These efforts to familiarize and feminize the Deity were prevented from becoming eroticized by the expulsion of such bodily excesses onto Catholic spirituality. If, as the nativist Nicholas Murray explained to the Roman Catholic chief justice Roger Taney in one of his famous letters, "like sin and death, confession and seduction follow each other in Rome," ^[22] it was because Catholic spirituality was becoming powerfully eroticized by the "feminization" of Victorian Protestantism.

The insistent identification of spirit and body is prominent in much of this sentimental writing, whether in more didactic examples, like Susanna Rowson's best-selling Charlotte Temple (1791), or in a riotous version like George Lippard's Monks of Monk Hall (1844). In countless novels of sentiment, be they feminized or masculinized, genteel or titillating, heightened emotion assumes the dominance of a corporealized, finally eroticized, character in its own right. Like the body they have replaced, the feelings of sentimental characters exist in a state of excited vulnerability, are roused and soothed, violated and sometimes redeemed. Conversely, the female body is etherealized until, like Hilda of Hawthorne's Marble Faun (1860), it offers itself as sentimental surrogate for

the Crucifixion and ascension of Christ. There are few better icons of this capacity of the nineteenth-century sentimental body to deny itself by appeal to its affective religious power than Hiram Powers's Greek Slave (1843); as Powers explained of his famous sculpture of the nude, bound girl, "It is not her person but her spirit that stands exposed." ^[23] Powers's Swedenborgian faith in the consubstantiality of the divine and the natural enabled him to confidently deny any suggestion of prurience; in addition, his visionary piety accorded well with the sentimentalism of more theologically mainstream middle-class Protestants intent on affiliating the female body to the soul by means of sentiment. If an intended conclusion to this domestic affective logic was the sexualization of Catholic piety, an unintended one was the antebellum Protestant "heart's" usurpation of its own soul as that heart became the site not only for romantic but also for spiritual union, for metaphysical aspiration as well as erotic desire. Because confession, according to anti-Catholic fictions, involved disclosing the repressed contents of the heart of bewitched Protestant maidens, Protestants saw it as tantamount to illicit sexual intercourse. "How terrible, my dear sister," explained a convent escapee to women still outside the celibate enclosure of the convent, "is the power of these men, who pry into the most secret recesses of our hearts." ^{[ 24]}

Thus the encounter between celibate priest and young woman in the hidden interior of the confessional was attacked as an unavoidable occasion for seduction and sexual captivity because unsupervised talking, as suggested in Michelet's depiction, was itself seen as a surrogate sexual act. As "Rosamond" declared in her widely read captivity narrative of priestly rape and concubinage in Cuba: "Filthy communication is inseparable from the Confessional." ^[25] The inquiries of the confessor signaled the sacrilegious invasion of language into the unspeakable region of sex. Masculine and feminine hearts were alike vulnerable to these sexual depredations of verbal intimacy: "There is a Holy of Holies in every man's heart which no stranger has a right to penetrate," declared an Episcopalian minister. "They are things secret and sacred—which the heart reserves to itself and to God." ^{[ 26]} Joseph Berg's Great Apostacy, Identical with Papal Rome; or, An Exposition of the Mystery of Iniquity, and the Marks and Doom of Antichrist (1842) focused even more directly on the connection between speech and sexuality. "God is a God of decency and order," Berg intoned, "and he never would authorize a sinful man to catechise his fellow creature on subjects concerning which nature and conscience declare that it is a shame even to speak." ^[27] Nativist criticism of the salacious capacity of discourse to beguile and inflame an otherwise modest woman virtually identified confessional booth and

female body and played an important part in the developing cross-denominational socialization of woman into the "pure." To one writer, the confessional was the "key-hole" into the bedroom, the female penitent figuring as a capacious house within the home, both maternally vast and consolatory. The excluded husband "is allowed to rest his head on the cold marble of the outdoor steps; but the confessor triumphantly walks into the mysterious starry rooms, examines at leisure their numberless and unspeakable wonders; and, alone, he is allowed to rest his head on the soft pillows of the unbounded confidence, respect, and love of the wife." ^[28]

This Protestant drama of confessional intrusion into the sacred enclosures of the heart provided the sentimental structure for antebellum convent captivity narratives. Even the most ephemeral nativist fiction betrayed a self-conscious control of these issues, playing off one interior against the other, the convent against the home, the Catholic bloody heart against the Protestant purified one. In Charles Frothingham's Haunted Convent (1854), for example, a politician consents to send his daughter, Agnes, to a Montreal convent in exchange for the Catholic vote. For his part, the priest demonstrates the conventional willingness to capture each and every Protestant maiden, the prize apparently well worth the rigging of a state election. Bidding farewell to her lover, Justin Peoples (a hardy young democrat who will later rescue her), Agnes describes her impending convent incarceration with revealing coyness. "The Bleeding Heart! What a funny name. It is emblematic of yours after my departure, I suppose." ^[29]

Vehement objections to these "prisons of confiding girls" (all nineteenth-century American nuns adhered to the rule of enclosure) derived from twinned anxieties of middle-class masculinity: an envious hostility toward the unbridled sexuality allegedly enjoyed by the priest, who, free from the burden of economic competition and family responsibility, circulated like a vagrant pleasure principle through the minds of Protestant clergy, workers, and professionals and a competitive attack on a rival form of masculine authority, which, in its theological and often ethnic difference, formed part of a dangerous public space that encroached on the privacy of the family. Convent interiors, then, registered the tensions of Protestant familial interiors while thwarting domesticity's hegemonic claims. As a subversive re-formation of the self's relation to family and the family's position in society, convents also challenged middle-class Protestant boundaries between public and private. Too intimate, too collective, too formalized, convent communities departed from republican ideals of neighborly individualism. Or, as one Unitarian

essayist explained, they were simply antibiblical, for the New Testament was "saturated" with the "social feeling." ^[30] Seclusion, celibacy, and collective living all violated this carefully poised sociality. To join a convent was to escape into an indolent space, unregulated by the demands of reproduction or labor, "to fly from the scene of trial," declared a former nun, "and to abandon the relations of our providential position, and to waste, in a condition of passivity and mental vacuity, the precious moments of probation." ^[31] Such images of female wastage were paralleled by the masculine surplus of monasticism, because of whose evils, according to an antebellum essayist, "the deserts of the mountains, the bowels of the earth resounded with the groans of a thousand victims, who thought they were pleasing God by abjuring his gifts." ^[32]

This rhetoric of wastage and live entombment, the cloistral existence nothing less than a "burying [of] the heart in a living sepulchre," ^[33] far outweighed romanticized images of monastic life. During the antebellum period, the medieval revival (a movement that was Protestant in origin and aimed at Protestants), was still largely confined to England, where such figures as William Cobbett and Thomas Carlyle fashioned from medievalism a sentimental, aristocratic counter to the dislocations of industrialism. If Carlyle's portrait of Abbot Samson argued for the utopian potential of medievalism, it had little such impact in antebellum America, which had yet to experience the profound class dislocations of industrialization and which had little affection for the frank elitism of the British medieval revival. The Episcopalian Reverend Field's subdued approval of the monastery typified that of the few Americans who saw anything to favor in the cloister. "Another winning feature of the Catholic Church," muses Field, "is the repose which its numerous institutions offer to the weary—the broken heart." ^[34] If repose was a scarce commodity in the entrepreneurial Northeast—where it was associated with the potentially subversive artistic productivity of such creative "loungers" as Walt Whitman—it also bordered on the problematic specter of exhaustion and defeat. The convent's supposed invitation to leisure was typically represented in contradictory images of sexual license and mindless obedience, of a self both rampaging and passive that in both guises rejected republican and Protestant ideologies of self-government and industriousness. ^[35] Cloistered nuns dramatically contrasted to other American middle-class women, who, as European travelers frequently observed, enjoyed a notable physical freedom and masculine deference, prerogatives dependent on their exclusion from remunerative labor. "This deference [to women] does great honor to the intelligence of the Americans," wrote one European tourist, "who have realized in the midst of the

pêle-mêle of democratic life, that woman ought to be placed above the general level; and yet nothing in this affects the idea of equality, since she remains a stranger to the struggles of active life." ^[36] Inverting this structure, the cloister physically curtailed women while hiding them from the observation of Protestant men.

The Roman (and the Anglican) church had legendarily schemed against the Protestant family as the locus of an autonomous, potentially heretical, piety. Roman Catholics, having betrayed their own domestic allegiances by pledging filial obedience to their father in Rome and to their priest in the confessional while urging their daughters to lives of cloistered chastity rather than marriage and motherhood, then sought to disrupt the naturalized structures of Protestant family life and replace them with the mazelike structures of priestly hierarchy, confessional, and conventual living. Antebellum domesticity's sacralization of the family understood itself as carrying forward the traditions of early reform. John Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1563) glorified the sanctity of lay piety, upholding the family as central to the creation of the "priesthood of all believers," by depicting the martyrs in the context of their families. ^[37]

The Actes and Monuments of Martyrs , while celebrating the religious heroism of the Marian martyrs, presented powerful portraits of the martyr family that influenced generations of dissenters and lay behind the domestic preoccupations of antebellum nativist fiction. Foxe's Protestant martyrology situated religious heroism within a newly articulated domestic piety, one practiced at the heart, not the altar, and organized along new lines of unmediated obedience to Christ, the natural family, and the national government. Throughout, Foxe struggles against the disturbing implication that Henry VIII's own antidomesticity has triggered the horrible persecutions; as Protestant ideologue, Foxe could only choose to assert a precarious distinction between the false family and the genuine. Henry's first wife and the pope belong to the first category. Foxe strained to formulate Henry's first divorce: "Thus the king being divorced from his brother's wife, married this gracious lady, making a happy change for us, being divorced from the princess and also from the Pope, both at one time" (113).

To curtail the troublesome implications of Henry VIII's divorces, Foxe mythologized Catholicism into a virtual demon of antidomesticity, accusing the pope's evil family of subverting the civil precincts of lay piety. This religious melodrama is central to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels of seduction that decried the intriguing seducer as well as to novels of sentiment that celebrated Protestant domesticity. Thus Foxe portrays a murderous Catholic husband carrying his heretic wife to the

Fig. 5.
Martyred Women, from the 1583 edition of John Foxe's  Actes and
Monuments  (1563). Courtesy, The Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley.

"bloody bishop" (400) and certain death while a Catholic mother spurns her heretic son in a callous identification with the state: "Faggots I have to burn thee: more thou gettest not at my hands" (373). The Protestant victim family achieves its apotheosis in Foxe's description of the martyrdom of the pregnant Perrotine, whose child bursts from her burning womb only to be thrown back into the flames (Fig. 5). To Foxe, the episode epitomized the "Herodian cruelty of this graceless generation of Catholic tormentors" (380). Catholic iniquity could reach no further than the sacred interior of the womb.

In contrast to Rome's sadistic attacks on the family, Foxe repeatedly linked Protestant domesticity to the divine—the natural and heavenly fathers leagued against the false political and spiritual fatherhood of the Catholic priesthood. The family unit must be celebrated as autonomous (from Rome) but dependent (on Christ), a precarious status that informs the story of the nineteen-year-old martyr William Hunter, whose death provides a "singular spectacle, not only of marvelous fortitude in the party so young, but also in his parents, to behold nature in them striving with religion" (244). William's parents voluntarily participate in the

transfiguration of domestic into saintly anguish, the mother's gracious suppression of her maternal emotion implicating parents in the deaths of their children; together, the stake of martyrdom and the affectional bonds of the earthly family bind the martyr against the temptations of Rome's false family. Just prior to his execution, young William revealingly dreams that he "met his father as he went to the stake, and that there was a priest at the stake who went about to have him recant, to whom he cried 'Away, false prophet!' " (248). True to his dream, William meets the opposing figures of father and priest en route to the stake and performs his rehearsed repudiation of the corporate for the nuclear family, confirming his allegiance to his natural and heavenly fathers by offering himself as a burnt sacrifice from the one to the other.

The new conceptions of the proper exercise of parental authority that influenced the American colonial rejection of English royal authority strengthened this opposition between the affectional intimacies of Protestant domesticity and the coercive familial structures of monarchy and papacy. American revolutionary rhetoric, in attacking the parental injustices of George III, struggled to reassert the legitimacy of a properly benevolent patriarchal authority in the new nation, a reassertion that benefited from the continued stigmatizing of monarchism and popery. ^[38] One American immigrant nun wrote to her French superior of American hostility to nuns: "Nothing is more odious in America than the office of superior, for from it flow dependence and submission, virtues which the Americans do not recognize. To bear the name of superior in the United States of America is to acquire the inalienable right to the public hatred, contempt, and so forth." ^[39] She might also have added that the specter of female authority particularly disturbed many antebellum Protestants, influenced by such phobic portraits of powerful females as Jules Michelet's of the mother superior, "who, more absolute than the most absolute tyrant, uses the rage of her badly-cured passions to torment her unfortunate, defenceless sisters." ^{[ 40]} Nativist fiction assured Americans that the benign constraints of patriarchy would prevent the outbreak of such womanly Old World absolutism.

Against these images of an aristocratic (and in the convent, administrative) womanly power, the antebellum family claimed an informal metaphysical structure, free, like liberal Protestantism's anti-Calvinism, of undue dogmatism or coercion, organized instead by expanding practices of affectional tutelage. Maternal authority, credited by Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe with redemptive spiritual and (indirectly) political power, operated through promptings, not commands, its authority indicated precisely by its invisibility. Protestant maternal

power was discreet, not in being hidden from the eye of the community, like the power of the mother superior, but in being hidden from the mother herself. ^{[ 41]}

Affectional family religion established itself not only in the advice literature and novels of the domestic movement but also in the related discourse of antipopery. At the base of Edward Beecher's Papal Conspiracy Exposed, and Protestantism Defended in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture (1855) lies an evangelical, sentimental theology of marriage and domesticity in which Protestant familial love appears in its historical posture of provocative vulnerability to the antidomestic evils of Catholicism, calamities generated by the original sin of celibacy. The family, Beecher explains, is "a little model of the universal system under God and the church; and the love on which it is based is an emblem of the highest love of the universe—even that which exists between God and the redeemed." ^{[ 42]} Bitterly lampooned in Melville's Pierre (1852), this domestic metaphysic nonetheless displayed enormous commercial power, generating a best-selling women's fiction that shaped the antebellum literary marketplace—a fiction of domestic interiors whose psychic and bodily asceticisms balanced the lavish expansion and mobilization of female sentiment with women's physical circumscription.

The description of Protestant domesticity in the 1850 best-seller Susan Warner's Wide, Wide World voices this unremitting but affectionate coercion of emotion into sentiment, a transaction whose psychic violence, perhaps because of its adherence to the mandates of Protestant invisibility, remained largely unapparent to its readers. Contemporary reviewers praised novels like Warner's for the "quiet" they afforded, such stories of the hearth providing a surrogate contemplative retreat for a culture strenuously opposed to monasticism. ^[43]

Many writers besides Edward Beecher seemed oblivious to Christ's warning about excessive family attachment in their celebration of domesticity. Mitchell's best-selling Reveries of a Bachelor , for example, offered readers sequential fantasies of wife worship that do not guide family members to the "highest love" so much as inspire their spiritual hunger in order to satiate it with domestic "reveries." Mitchell's lonely bachelor Ik Marvel peers (like the voyeur priest of nativist fiction) from his hearth into "all the phases of married life" (viii), imagining home and the "presence" of a wife with a prayerful ardor that coyly transgresses into idolatry: "The Lares of your worship are there; the altar of your confidence is there; the end of your worldly faith is there; and adorning it all, and sending your blood in passionate flow, is the ecstasy of the conviction that there at least you are beloved." ^[44] Mitchell's masculine

surrender to the sacred middle-class woman and his picture of the male recovery of an unconditional love, offer escape from the challenges of the marketplace that are just as frankly embraced by the commercial appeal of such reclusive sentiment. That the text's worshipful fantasies are conjured by a bachelor, a dreamer who typically concludes his individual reveries by mourning the often violent destruction of his imagined women, children, and domestic interiors—a venting of iconoclastic wrath on these household gods that disguises male rage as sentimental grief—reveals the fury locked within the idolatrous imaginings of Protestant domesticity. ^[45] When Mitchell's readers objected to the obvious fictionality (but not the violence) of Ik Marvel's reveries, the author appealed to the higher justification of sentiment. "What matters it, pray, if literally there was no wife, and no dead child, and no coffin in the house? Is not feeling, feeling, and heart, heart?" (43). Mitchell's juxtaposition of coffin, house, and heart points not only to the claustrophobic violence of domesticity but also to its generative enclosures of sentiment. Stories of convent captivity are deeply engaged with the emancipation of such a closed selfhood, a release paradoxically imaged as the seduction, violation, and ruin of the Protestant heart.

Against these rival forms of piety created by the Protestant defense of sacred domesticity, antebellum Catholics ventured to defend the monastic system as completing, rather than conspiring against, the family. Explained one writer for a Catholic journal, the Metropolitan , the cloister did not usurp the heart so much as perfect it, at least in places other than antebellum America: "In Catholic times, the tendency of the family was towards perfection: from a natural it passed to a spiritual condition, and from the fireside it extended to the cloister." ^[46] Protestants persisted, however, in contesting precisely this terrain between fireside and convent.

James Jackson Jarves, a prominent art collector of the 1850s, was typical in responding to the sight of Italian nuns by asserting the superior (uncostumed) sanctity of Protestant motherhood: "Nor do our sisters of charity wear other garb than that in which they so faithfully perform their duties as Christian mothers," he declared in his aptly entitled travel book, Italian Sights and Papal Principles Seen through American Spectacles (1856). ^[47] That such defenses of the family borrowed from Catholic terminology only underscores the perplexing nature of a rivalry in which the Protestant annexation of the rival discourse served to register distance from it. Thus a reviewer of the British medievalist Kenelm Digby's Mores Catholici (1844) speaks in the language of canonization to chastise the church's apparent indifference to matrimony and motherhood: "A faithful mother is most truly sainted by revering children, and

next to her claim to canonization comes that of . . . a wise teacher, or an humble village priest. Rome has forgotten her truest saints." ^[48] Such discursive borrowings enhanced the competition between two ideologies of the family while folding into it Protestant anxieties about exclusion from the "flock." Thus the ceremony of taking the veil compared unfavorably to the saintly practices of the unmarried Protestant woman, according to an 1858 article in Harper's , "The Ladies of the Sacred Heart." ^[49] Like the bachelor dreamer of Mitchell's Reveries , the author of this article enjoys his position on the threshold of imagined feminine interiors; voyeuristically poised between cathedral and home, he elaborates the differences between these forms of female enclosure. From the dark chapel where he witnesses the taking of the veil, he moves with relief to the sunlit world of connubial bliss enjoyed by his friends.

As a bachelor, he is notably preoccupied, not with his own, but with female celibacy, for once inside the sunny home, he focuses on the husband's older unmarried sister, whom he dubs the "Protestant lay Sister of Mercy" (206). While the nun proper has just "sacrificed" herself to a false familial vision, her Protestant counterpart enjoys the fruits of both earthly and heavenly households, "the one a life of gloom and sterility, in fancied subservience to a stern Diety to be propitiated by penances and mortifications; the other, a cheerful, loving, filial service, rendered to a benign Father" (206). This critique of convent life establishes parallel oppositions between slavery and service on the one hand, sterility and fertility on the other, the image of Catholic enslavement heightened by corresponding notions of a sexual dysfunction that avoids not only procreation but its possibility. In a tellingly biological application of the parable of the vineyard, he pities the young woman, who in assuming the veil has strayed from the "appointed vineyard" and gone "into a desert where there is neither spring nor summer, seed-time nor harvest" (205). Such vagrancy from the womanly potential of her vineyard collapses the biblical parable's injunction to labor for the Lord into the injunction to do so for the family, a labor opposed by the spiritual and reproductive errancy of the nun.

While consistently stigmatized, the figure of the nun still whispered the attraction of emancipation. Another Harper's essay, "Margaret—the Lay Sister" inverts the terms of the debate to offer a penetrating (if finally undermined) critique of marriage. ^[50] Twice refusing the narrator's marriage proposal, the heroine Margaret offers the following indictment of domesticity: "The thousand harsh words, reproving looks, recriminations and petty irritations, that form the staple of much domestic society, would either kill or craze me" (810). Ironically, this self-described Prot-

estant "nun" depicts herself to her baffled but admiring suitor in the heroic terms of Emersonian self-reliance. Disdainfully saluting her transcendentalist, quasi-Catholic, feminine insurrection, the rejected suitor concludes that "the nun yet lives outside the cloister to

"Show us how divine a thing
        A woman may be made"
—even a single woman!
                         (813)

The figure of Margaret dodging the tyrannies of "woman's sphere" under the rhetorical guise of the self-reliant nun offers covert, if ambivalent, validation of female separation from domesticity; the attraction of such imagery for Protestant men and women was that it suggested a flight from privacy that studiously avoided disturbing the boundary between household and marketplace. American Catholics were naturally less reluctant to criticize the confinement of Protestant womanhood in her separate domestic sphere. In 1835, Bishop John England favorably compared the voluntary cloistered life to the settled coercion of marriage. Before an audience of more than seven hundred curious onlookers, the bishop addressed a young woman about to join the Ursuline order. To those who saw the monastic life simply as incarceration, England rhetorically inquired: "Have they no compassion for those who, forced by a variety of authorities or powers, are compelled, in contracting marriage, to sacrifice their own long-cherished and reasonable preferences to the caprice or to the calculations of another?"^[51]

Seven
Two "Escaped Nuns"
Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk

Rebecca Reed's Six Months in a Convent (1835) and Maria Monk's notorious best-seller Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery (1836) provide the two most significant examples of nineteenth-century American anticonvent literature. Both texts offer fascinating examples of a popular historiography that contrasts intriguingly to the elite historiography of William Prescott and Francis Parkman. As we have seen, both Brahmin historians made plausible their working assumption of America's Protestant origins by insisting on the analogy and finally identity of Indian "idolatry" and Catholic "papadolatry," inscribing the corruptions of Old World (principally Italian) Catholicism on little understood Amerindian cultures. Thus Prescott viewed the Aztecs and Parkman the Hurons and Jesuit missionaries through a lens of racial and religious difference that, at least within the discursive terrain of their histories, functioned to construct and reveal the American "past." That "savages" were not (except in French and Spanish territories) really Catholics and Catholic conquistadores or missionaries not really "savages" only permitted a more successful functioning of the ideological resemblance between them.

A similar dynamic, simultaneously privileging European origin and repudiating its Old World impurities, characterized antebellum Protestant clerical discourse about America. That process of purification depended, as we have seen, on importing and depositing the "sediment of misrepresentation" onto New World terrain and tribal cultures. Only thus could Protestant America define itself as a "pure fountain" and maintain its alleged ethnic superiority to Europe. A key means for doing so, as Prescott's and Parkman's histories show, was through the rhetorical appropriation of "Catholicism"—for as the primary index of

European corruption, the "foreign faith" could be transplanted to native cultures, thus permitting white American Protestants to declare themselves the authentic "natives" by divorcing themselves one more time from popery. In the process, these white American Protestants could legitimate their subordination of Indian cultures and renew their racial connection to English and Continental culture, now conceived of as "white" rather than as "Catholic."

Such elite historiographical and clerical struggles with the issues of racial and theological difference, encoded in the strategic antinomy of "past" and "present," can illuminate our understanding of popular historiography's account of Protestantism's American struggles. Specifically, the preoccupation with purity enables us to decipher history that was written as "event," enacted by working- and middle-class people who were by no means historians but who were very much concerned with the historiographic issue of how to correct America's potentially or actually impure development from its vaunted pure origin.

The event I focus on and interpret as a popular historical text dedicated to reasserting an origin that promises the achievement, rather than the loss, of an artisanal Protestant republicanism is the notorious mob attack and burning of the Ursuline convent outside Boston in 1834. Arguably the most important political event in Massachusetts prior to the agitation surrounding the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, the Ursuline convent riot signaled the renewal of anti-Catholicism and provided a model for escalating popular demonstrations against hated popery and what were called its priests' prisons. One rioter claimed of the convent, according to a witness at the ensuing trial, "that the institution was a bad one; that the nuns were kept there for a bad purpose; for a certain purpose. He said bishops and priests pretended to live without wives, but that the nuns were kept to supply the deficiency in this particular. He said this in vulgar language."^[1] The riot (and the trials that followed) received indignant national attention because of the violence of the working-class mob, composed largely of Scots-Presbyterian bricklayers. For a culture occupied with the supposed perils of Roman Catholicism, the convent burning, occurring at the time of an increasingly profitable Protestant evangelism spurred by a New England religious revival in the winter of 1833, enacted Protestant hostility toward the "foreign faith," exposing working-class Protestant prejudice and its persecutorial energies.^[2] The riot and trials enabled Protestants of various social classes to vent their anger against Romanism and also to distance themselves from the "mob." The violence led many observers to fear that Jacksonian democracy could not contain working-class uprisings, much

less enjoin necessary discipline on the American male. "It will be inscribed in our history," declared the attorney general at the trial of one of the ringleaders, "that here, at least the age of chivalry is gone. The mob put down everything and every body."^[3]

When a Protestant Bostonian later sought an audience with Pope Gregory XVI, the pope asked him, much to his humiliation, "Was it you who burned my convent?"^[4] The question—undeniably parental in its reproachful tone—disturbed not only that New England tourist but many other educated observers as well. What motivated the mob violence, and who was responsible? To the English diarist Frederick Marryat, the convent burning presented Americans another opportunity for self-mystification, not self-examination—a mystification born from narrativizing the event as an allegorical, even Edenic, confrontation between secrecy and curiosity:

The Americans are excessively curious, especially the mob: they cannot bear anything like a secret—that's unconstitutional . It may be remembered, that the Catholic convent near Boston, which had existed for many years, was attacked by the mob and pulled down. I was enquiring into the cause of this outrage in a country where all forms of religion are tolerated; and an American gentlemen told me, that although other reasons had been adduced for it, he fully believed, in his own mind, that the majority of the mob were influenced more by curiosity than any other feeling. The Convent was sealed to them, and they were determined to know what was in it. "Why, sir," continued he, "I will lay a wager that if the authorities were to nail together a dozen planks, and fix them up on the Common, with a caution to the public that they were not to go near or touch them, in twenty-four hours a mob would be raised to pull them down and ascertain what the planks contained." I mention this conversation, to show in what a dexterous manner this American gentleman attempted to palliate one of the grossest outrages ever committed by his countrymen.^[5]

On July 28, 1834, Elizabeth Harrison (Sister Mary John), suffering from "delirium," left the Ursuline convent in Charlestown and sought shelter with a neighboring farm family. Shortly thereafter she returned to the convent, escorted by her superior—an episode that (aided by the Boston papers) sparked rumors of the incarceration of helpless females in the convent, females who included not only nuns but boarding school stu-

dents. At the time, the Ursuline convent was providing an aristocratic French education for some forty-seven girls—two-thirds of whom were, ironically enough, the daughters of Boston's Protestant, largely Unitarian, elite, irritated by the conservative Congregationalism of the public schools. Only one-eighth of the students at the Ursuline Academy were Catholic. To the working-class mob of Scots-Presbyterians, Catholics and Unitarians had formed an upper-class combination against Congregationalism.^[6] This seemingly paradoxical alliance of Unitarians and Roman Catholics signaled that new rifts in Protestant orthodoxy itself were beginning to displace the traditional antagonism between Protestantism and Catholicism. As many educated Americans already knew, the simplified religious antipathy to Catholicism demonstrated by the mob was fast becoming an anachronism as well as a dangerous diversionary tactic, a false simplication of divisions within Protestant orthodoxy and within the national economy.

Shortly after Elizabeth Harrison's ambiguous flight, one concerned neighbor was given a full tour of the convent and boarding quarters, but his report, scheduled for publication in the Charlestown newspaper, came too late to prevent the riot, which occurred two weeks later. On the Sunday night before the riot, Lyman Beecher delivered three anti-Catholic sermons to huge congregations in three different Boston churches. On the following night, August 11, 1834, a mob of some sixty men, watched by an estimated two thousand spectators, burned the convent to the ground and returned the next night to rip up and burn all the plantings. Early in the attack the twelve nuns, three women servants, and forty-seven students fled the main building and hid in the garden. From their hiding place, they watched the rioters light bonfires in the dormitories, hurl cherished pianofortes out the windows, don the girls' clothing, and then proceed to the convent cemetery to pry open the coffin of a recently deceased nun. Protestant rioters pursued Protestant girls into a peculiar captivity: recalled one schoolgirl fifty years later, "We were shut up in that garden as closely as if we were in a prison, with no place even a temporary refuge from the rioters but the tomb, and the poor girls held the tomb in as much horror as they did the rioters."^[7] According to this same student memoir, the rioting did not conclude for over seven hours. A later committee report speculated that the two thousand spectators did not interfere because "from the omission of magisterial influence, doubt and mistrust existed, whether the work were not so sanctioned by popular opinion, or the connivance of those in authority, that resistance would be hopeless."^[8]

The exhausted students made their way into Boston the following morning, after a night of walking and hiding in various farmhouses. Sandwiched between Sister Mary John's delirious weekend flight and Reed's soon-to-be-published memoirs of her own imprisonment and escape from the Ursuline convent, this hurried walk of nuns and children emerges as the only genuine escape in a complicated cultural movement of staged invasions and exits. Like antebellum convent fiction itself, historical accounts of the event betray a curious sense of commingled calculation and frenzy. At the trial of the riot leaders, the attorney general sought to convey an image of the crowd violence as precipitate and savage, comparing it to colonial Indian attacks on white settlers, the women and children suddenly "awakened by frightful yells, like those which startled our ancestors, when the warhoop of the native savage burst upon their midnight slumbers."^[9] But nearly all accounts suggest that, contrary to the notion of an Indian attack, most inhabitants of the convent knew of the riot in advance; one memoirist of the event even concluded that "there was a strange fatuity in all the proceedings."^[10] Louisa Whitney, one of the Protestant scholars, remembers that the day of the riot was a long one of anticipation that turned Monday into "an unexpected holiday."^[11] Indeed, the slowed tempo of the experience—the daylong anticipation, the night hours of waiting, the hiding in the garden and then in two consecutive homes, and finally the children's long wandering walk into Charlestown—remained perhaps its most distinctive feature to Whitney, one that led her to suggest its strangely fictive status: "All this has taken nearly as long to tell as it did to happen."^[12] Indian captivity served Louisa Whitney, however, to convey not so much the surprise attack of savages as the girls' peculiar experience of rescue. When the exhausted children were finally loaded onto stagecoaches for Boston in the early morning, they met the returning crowd of rioters, who turned around and became their escort, offering an ambiguous protection that to Whitney seemed like Indian captivity made real: "We slowly rode the gantlet between a double file of amiable ruffians."^[13]

The intense awkwardness of this processional, in which upper-class Boston adolescent girls consented to forced rescue by working-class men, can be sensed more fully in the realization that the girls were evidently already practiced, even disdainful, readers of Gothic accounts of convent captivity. A fascinating glimpse of their reading habits emerges in an account of the selectmen's tour of the convent on the day of the riot—an inspection that was marked by a "large number of pupils coming to the windows, and addressing us in a very rude and improper manner, in-

quiring, 'have you found her? Did you find her in the tomb? Was she buried alive?'"^[14] Embedded in such antagonism, however, was a covert sympathy between these "rude" schoolgirls and the ominous emancipatory crowd that soon arrived. Schoolgirl fantasies about the spaces forbidden the boarders in the convent formed a secret anti-Catholic catalyst for the riots that arose from within, not from outside, the convent. "I do believe these ridiculous fancies, held by Protestant children to account for a novel discipline which they could not comprehend," wrote Louisa Whitney later in life, "obtained circulation among certain classes outside the Convent, and assisted in bringing on the catastrophe which destroyed the school."^[15] Such an account intriguingly suggests that the schoolgirls themselves had a hand in the writing of this riot.

The riot and the ensuing trials of eight men (all of whom were eventually exonerated) for the capital offenses of arson, burglary, and murder were presided over by Melville's father-in-law, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw. They attracted national publicity as a sensational exposé not only of convents but also, as mentioned earlier, of the dangers of "mobocracy." The dual nature of the sensation significantly links the nun and the American worker as joint figures of unrest. The rioters were not so much mobocratic, they declared in their defense, as chivalric, for they were bent on the rescue of imprisoned maidens and refrained from setting fire to the convent, according to trial testimony, "till they were satisfied there was no woman in the house." Trial testimony by one bystander confirmed that he "heard them say that no females should be hurt, but the cross must come down."^[16]

A frankly misogynist dislike of the mother superior accompanied such chivalry, however; she was described in trial documents as the "unconscious cause of all this loss, trouble, sensation, and disgrace."^[17] Virtually all the trial documents imply that violently contested proprietary rights over the female were at the base of the rioters' chivalric nativism. This contestation was further complicated by the implicit class antagonisms between the working-class male rioters and the upper-class females they "rescued." Thus one of the riot leaders, James Logan, vocalized the volatile proximity between the "feminine" (figured alternately as a foreign haughtiness and a native-born helplessness) and the inequities of private property. Of the rioters' pursuit of the mother superior, Logan testified: "They searched, and gave up endeavoring to find her, and then began breaking up the furniture."^[18] Described in other testimony as a "figurehead made of brass," the superior attracted an invective conventionally reserved for the pope (as Antichrist) and one that categorized her as property, and fraudulent property at that.

But for all the hostile focus on the mother superior, human beings finally emerge in the riot writings as curiously passive agents—secondary to the more compelling activity of property, specifically the illicit investigation, theft, and destruction of Catholic church possessions by the Protestant worker. An 1870 anonymous compilation of newspaper accounts and trial materials surrounding the convent episode suggests the charismatic aura that clung to this plunder:

On the Wednesday after the conflagration, Henry Creasy of Newburyport, a man about thirty-five years of age, committed suicide at the Bite Tavern by cutting his throat. Many rumors were circulated about the deceased,—that he had the communion chalice of the Convent in his possession, etc.; but it was only discovered that he had stated, just before he killed himself, that he had some of the sacramental wafer in his possession; and afterwards two pieces of the consecrated bread, which came from the chalice, were found in his pocket.^[19]

As the crowd oscillated between the rescue and destruction of the Catholic female (ambiguously figured as captive nun and indoctrinated boarder), the propertied figure of the Protestant daughter remained untouched by the mob—islanded as the representation of inaccessible wealth. One of those Protestant daughters herself spoke these architectonics of provocative property, reminiscing that the convent's "handsome building . . . invited the curiosity that it repelled."^[20]

In the advertisement of its curriculum, the convent frankly identified its educational services as designed to inculcate an aristocratic and highly self-controlled femininity in its students. The school's disciplinary agenda (the curriculum required students to maintain silence for nine hours daily) subjected boarders to a regimen excluded from but similar to that of the convent nuns.

From our historical distance it is possible to read in the anticonvent literature's depiction of the Ursulines' collectivized, regimented curriculum and ownership of luxury goods a veiled attack on the perplexing transformation of the workplace in New England's economy from traditional to incipiently rationalized—a change that manifested itself early on in the routinized factory labor of the new mill towns of eastern Massachusetts. The market's encroachment on the domain of the "native" New England agrarian economy and the added threat of immigrant

labor to overturn the ideology and prerogatives of artisanal republicanism lie encoded in this conspicuously gendered convent discourse. The Scots-Presbyterian bricklayers who formed the core of the mob and who understood themselves as chivalric agents vented their anger over their own decline in status and decreasing wages on a convent community of leisured women, hidden from public view, supported by foreign capital—and, to the extent that the Ursulines garnered the allegiance of Protestant women, a community that disrupted masculine control of the family. Paradoxically, then, the convent emblematized not just reactionary Old World power but also fearsome economic inequities of American industrialization. In this translation of the economic into the religious, convents were frequently called factories of the spirit that subjected their inhabitants to unnaturally long hours of repetitive tasks for the antiscriptural sake of instilling obedience to a superior, conventionally accused for her own repudiation of the maternal. As an anti-reproductive, authoritarian system, the convent held up linked images of mechanization and aristocratic wealth, both of which excluded a "native" artisanal class.

For a nation growing uncomfortably aware that its own revolution had confirmed rather than reformed unequal property and gender relations, the link between Boston's propertied class and the "Whore of Babylon" articulated a conspiratorial duplicity at the heart of American republicanism. Built, inconveniently enough, within sight of Bunker Hill, the Ursuline convent desecrated the terrain of revolutionary struggle. The wave of anticonvent propaganda that followed the convent burning often resorted to the twin appeal of seduction and revolution, violated woman and nation, as if to perfect a still incomplete American Revolution. Pamphlets and ephemeral tales reiterated that it was imprisoned femininity on revolutionary soil that justified the mob violence. Thus Charles Frothingham's Convent's Doom: A Tale of Charlestown in 1834 —a brief work that sold forty thousand copies in its first week of publication—claimed that the need to rescue stolen daughters, sisters, or fiancées was the legitimate reason behind the burning. Patriarchal and patriotic duties called for the convent's destruction since, as one virtuous arsonist explained, the Founding Fathers "thought not that within site of Bunker Hill, where the blood of heroes flowed, a Convent would be established, and their granddaughters become its inmates."^[21] The convent exposé genre, as developed with Ursuline riot materials, applies the conventional features of Catholic imprisonment, indoctrination, and persecution inherited from the English and European Gothic traditions to address the failures of the American Revolution; feminine violation and Catholic

secrecy obliquely critique the limitations of democratic republicanism and even the suspicious new powers of the court. One handbill circulated at the trial's opening even extended the promise of revolutionary heroism for those who resisted the nunlike deceptions of a sacerdotal Superior Court: "Liberty or death! Suppressed evidence, Sons of Freedom! Can we live in a free country, and bear the yoke of priesthood, veiled in the habit of a profligate Court?"^[22] The prosecution countered that the riot offered the sad spectacle of generational decline from the heroic Founding Fathers and that the glory of Bunker Hill was offensively disfigured by the "black embattlements" on Mount Benedict.^[23]

Imagining every conceivable iniquity behind the impassive exterior of convent walls, American Protestant authors formulated a conspiratorial rhetoric that identified Catholicism's deviant metaphysic not only with the reduced promise of democracy but also with the burdens imposed by the new privacy of the middle-class family. The cloistered celibate women of the Ursuline convent attracted hostile scrutiny from passersby; what sort of family life was practiced behind convent walls? Even more disturbing, what sort of power was given to women in the relative absence of men? Responding to the suspicion that Catholics practiced what Protestants termed Mariolatry and, in so doing, gave earthly women aside from Mary too much power, the mother superior was called on at the trial to explain the political and familial hierarchies that ordered the Ursuline community. Chief Justice Shaw, who had dismissed the anti-Catholic prejudices of the jury as irrelevant, ruled that such inquiries had bearing on the trial proceedings. Yet when Rebecca Reed later took the stand, he intervened in her cross-examination to rule that "neither party could go into the internal character of the institution," a decision that reportedly "greatly disappointed many present, who wished to have all the inside arrangements of the Convent revealed to them."^[24] While Reed was protected by Shaw's intervention, the mother superior was forced to reveal the internal familial relations that supported her authority. The superior's attempt to normalize her position against Reed's specific charges of having been coerced into worshiping the mother superior speaks to the collision of two family structures, Protestant patriarchy and Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy. On the second day of her testimony, the superior thus attempted to explicate the convent's communal structure and to stabilize her position within it.

The community sometimes call me mother ; sometimes President , but usually "ma mère." The words divine mother are never applied to me. Confessions are never made to me, but to the Rt. Rev. Bishop, or in his absence to some other clergyman.

I confess to the bishop. The confessions are made once a week. We apply the word divine only to the divinity. I do not represent the Virgin Mary, but am considered in the light of the mother of a family.^[25]

Convent life inverted and subverted acceptable patterns of female mobility: women were physically constrained but, from the perspective of the Protestant patriarchy, ideologically unavailable. The rule of enclosure symbolized an imprisonment that ambiguously contained female escape. Cloistered women, then, were captives in need of rescue but also, as the interrogation of the mother superior makes clear, cultural deviants in need of control.

In addition to the superior's masculine, aristocratic hauteur, further instances of female pathology circulated in the riot documents. According to the Charlestown citizens' committee, when the attack began the convent harbored "one . . . in the last stages of pulmonary consumption, another suffering under convulsion fits, and the unhappy female, who had been the immediate cause of the excitement, [and] was by the agitations of the night in raving delirium."^[26] Virtually all the documents imaginatively oppose the "delirium" of Elizabeth Harrison and the masculine control of the mother superior. "Of the Lady Superior, to whose stern and unyielding course during the excitement and difficulties which preceded the riot, the disaster has been often attributed, there have been strange and contradictory rumors, both before and since the time of the trials. She was a woman of masculine appearance and character, high-tempered, resolute, defiant, with stubborn, imperious will."^[27] Indeed the riot and ensuing trials continually reverted to the issue of female impropriety, for during the riot the superior allegedly provoked the mob by an ill-timed assertiveness that contravened customary female deference. The defense counsel for four of the rioters, in his opening remarks, argued that notions of conspiracy were groundless; rather the superior had brought on the attack herself. His key proof "was the language of the Lady Superior to the rioters; in relation to which the counsel said that had she addressed them in different terms, it was his firm belief that the Convent would be now standing on Mount Benedict."^[28]

Unfortunately, Attorney General Austin's main example of violated female American virtue—this same mother superior—continued her un-American bearing in court, appearing heavily veiled when called to testify and admitting under cross-examination that two days prior to the riot she had responded to a neighbor's warning of impending trouble by threatening that "the Right Reverend Bishop's influence over ten thousand brave Irishmen might lead to the destruction of his [the neighbor's]

property, and that of others also."^[29] At the later trial of three rioters, a witness to the riot testified that the superior even more pointedly refused the protection of Protestant chivalry for one of her companions:

This witness, it will be remembered, stated that when he went up with the mob at the earlier part of the evening, they were addressed by a lady from a window, whose observations almost induced them to disperse; that he and others then offered the lady their protection, upon which the Superior appeared at another window and told them she did not require to be protected.^[30]

In the vocabulary of this chivalric anti-Catholicism, convent walls held not only kidnapped maidens but women whose tyrannous faith mysteriously enabled a troublesome autonomy.

I was troubled in various ways by Romans .
Rebecca Reed,
Supplement to "Six
Months in a Convent"

Rebecca Reed's Six Months in a Convent (1835) was complexly implicated not only in the riot and its aftermath but in the larger American project to assert a native Protestant cultural origin. The text, written by Rebecca Theresa Reed, a self-described "escapee" from the Ursuline convent who had lived there for six months as a "charity scholar" three years prior to the riot, sold ten thousand copies in Boston in its first week of publication.^[31] Reed's editor argued that it was absurd "to trace the origin of a formidable conspiracy to a mere girl!" (Introduction, 17). Nonetheless, Reed's narrative of captivity and abuse in the Ursuline convent was a significant incitement to the mob violence, the trial verdicts, and the Ursuline community's eventual failure to receive any reparation from the Massachusetts legislature for the total loss of their property. Reed later claimed that her book was not an incendiary exposé but rather a spiritual autobiography and, even more, a confession of theological errancy written to argue for her readmission to the Episcopal church.

Although not published until 1835, Reed's story circulated locally prior to the riot, for at school one student remembered having "assisted at various disputes held among the girls about that notorious book, 'Six Months in a Convent,' and the character of its author.^[32] Following the riot, Reed's text served as the event's chief product and legitimation, both

parent to the event and its most dazzling offspring. A key witness at the ensuing trials of the rioters, Reed testified with "modest deportment" to the truth of her narrative, one that details her naive desire to retire from the world, subsequent realization of her imprisonment as a "novice," and final escape to a neighboring house through the convent gate, which, she rather charmingly confesses, she found "unfastened" (174). Her narrative and her testimony provoked in their turn an indignant rejoinder from the mother superior titled An Answer to Six Months in a Convent Exposing Its Falsehoods and Manifold Absurdities . . . (1835)—a document that incited Reed and her editor to collaborate in writing the document called Supplement to "Six Months in a Convent" Confirming the Narrative of Rebecca Reed . . . by the Testimony of More Than One Hundred Witnesses " (1835). The mother superior declared ludicrous Reed's captivity to "Roman bondage," priestly mind reading, and austere regimentation and especially her escape, since Reed might have just as easily "used the front door."^[33]

This swirl of documents and their characteristic alternation between terror and violence on the one hand and ridiculous farce on the other testify to a volatile confusion—between fiction and historical event, between exposé and legal testimony— characteristic of anti-Catholic discourse in this period. Emerging from and in turn inciting the "mob," Reed's "insider" fiction of female captivity, disillusion, and escape is marked as well by developing processes of mass literary production. Designed for quick consumption, her narrative speaks an abbreviated, hasty language of scandalous exposure. And as a collaborative project between an "escaped nun" and her "editor," the convent exposé marks the anomalous, incendiary, and highly profitable appropriation of the amateur and sentimental female voice by the male nativist. As such, Reed's Six Months stands as an intriguing example of popular female authorship, a text ambiguously dictated, edited, and eagerly publicized by market-conscious anti-Catholic clergy who enjoyed exclusive profits to the best-seller.

Simultaneously slipshod and compelling, Reed's narrative denies any interest in formal composition, offering instead a fractured structure whose very defects oddly mimic the authentic voice of victimized childhood. Thus she recounts her early ascetic preparations for joining the Ursulines: "I knew of no greater sacrifice I could at that time make, than to give up all the treasures my dear mother left me. I also gave my globe and goldfish" (65-66). Reed's story develops a further plausibility of sorts through breezy disavowals of any need for detail. "For some days," she informs us, "I was not well, and my mind, as may naturally be

supposed, sympathized with my body, and many things occurred that were to me unpleasant, which I shall pass unnoticed" (166). Like America's first best-seller, Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791), Reed's convent exposé ignores the etiquette of the belles lettres tradition to create a newly intimate voice of exploitation that produced legions of true believers. If generations of Charlotte Temple readers visited the Trinity Church graveyard where Charlotte supposedly lay interred, leaving tearful mementos on her unmarked grave, readers of Rebecca Reed responded by insisting that convents in their vicinity be inspected, their captives liberated, their buildings burned. And like Rowson before her, Reed shows a skillful ability to convert the language of female victimization into aggressive indictment. Thus in a public letter defending herself against having caused the riot, Reed suavely directs the rioters' own vernacular against her accusers: "That it should be publicly said of me, by one who holds a seat upon the judge's bench, that I have been the cause of the 'popular feeling' . . . is an invasion of defenceless female innocence, if possible, more barbarous than that invasion of private rights, which has called forth so much public discussion" (Introduction, 30). Reed's rhetorical stance shows the precariousness of her position, for she violates the sentimental literary conventions of female victimization (chief among which, if we are to believe Charlotte Temple , is that one should die rather than speak), by writing an exposé that, while claiming her own continuing need for "retirement" from the world, promptly invades and manipulates the public arena of the courtroom.

If the Unitarian upper class disdained the bigotry of Calvinist Lyman Beecher's antipopery sermons and coveted the European refinement offered their daughters by the French-educated Ursulines, their daughters still read fiction such as Reed's. One Ursuline boarder, for example, remembers reading a similar narrative, Mrs. Sherwood's Nun , shortly before the riot occurred. Orthodox Congregationalist (or Presbyterian) working-class readers read anticonvent literature like Reed's with a scriptural conviction one imagines lacking in the Unitarian schoolgirl reader. Orphan girl and "charity scholar" (neither nun nor affluent boarder), female author, and, as she later described herself, "Catholic Episcopalian," Reed locates herself in no interpretive camp. Rather, she functions as connecting link, permitting an explosive confrontation between the propertied and the dispossessed. If the riot circulated through Reed's text, the contradictions of New England culture circulate through her voice, the seduced and violated voice of the "orphan girl."^[34] The motif of the abandoned child emerges fully in the mother superior's response to Reed's literary production. "I had discovered her to be a foolish, romantic

girl, and felt no interest in her" (An Answer to Six Months , 30). Reed's complaint against the superior was precisely that she refused to play the nurturing maternal role central to sentimental Protestantism. In Reed's indignant words: "I had then permission to go to the choir, where I immediately fainted, at which the Superior was angry, and said in a whisper she had told me I ought not to have any feelings " (98-99). Sensitive to the manipulation but not the motives behind it, the superior pictures Reed as a swindling trickster who "could always find ready listeners, by whom the supposed secrets of a cloister or a nunnery must have been greedily listened to" (An Answer , 2). Convent life, in the superior's estimation, did not incarcerate this Protestant girl, as nativists believed, but rather gave Reed "an opportunity of indulging her idle habits, her wanderings from house to house, her talents for mimicry, her desire of display without the labor of preparation, and her enthusiasm in the cause of a new religion,—all at our expense" (An Answer , 2).

The story Reed records of the Catholic seduction of the Protestant girl finally serves to seduce American readers into submerging their class and gender antagonisms for the sake of acquiring a "native" American identity. In evident contrast to the multivolume histories produced by Prescott and Parkman, the welter of material surrounding the Ursuline convent riot is marked by divided and divisive political agendas and philosophical affiliations—conflicts that problematize the status of the writings precisely because the protracted and often vehement debates over what or who caused the riot, over who should be punished and how, and finally over the "meaning" of the event prevented any single text from claiming a coherent generic identity. Thus fictional accounts like Frothingham's Convent's Doom and Reed's autobiography and spiritual confession both represent themselves as factually responsible history, whereas much of the trial testimony, as oral history, is frankly saturated with references to various anti-Catholic fictions like Reed's Six Months , Mrs. Sherwood's Nun , and Beecher's Plea for the West —all variously pointed to as evidence explaining, if not justifying, the behavior of the rioters.

This confusion over evidential boundaries extended from the various quarrels, before and after the riot, about the Ursuline convent's "trespass" on the holy ground of America's revolutionary struggle to the stories of alleged trespass on convent grounds by neighboring (Presbyterian) laborers. Coincident to the riot, Charlestown selectmen were also prosecutors in a trespass lawsuit against Bishop Fenwick; having purchased land on Bunker Hill for a Catholic cemetery, the bishop was then forbidden to bury two Catholic children there. He did so anyway and was sued by the city of Charlestown for violating city health regula-

tions.^[35] The bishop's "pollution" of a Protestant terrain made sacred by the civil religion of the Revolution was soon countered with a Protestant invasion of the convent's sacred precincts. In the days before the riot, three women trespassed on convent grounds to get to the turnpike road; ordered by the superior to turn the women back, her Irish servant Peter Rossiter directed them off convent grounds. For this, Rossiter was severely whipped by John Buzzell, a ringleader of the riot.

One of the most revealing characteristics of the convent captivity fiction of the 1830s is its determined imaginative trespass into Romanism's illicit and alluring interiors. Directly after the riot, a citizens' committee established to investigate its causes declared the Ursulines reputable only because their public function as teachers excused the otherwise debatable features of monastic life; as teachers, the nuns "devote themselves to those services and the cause of humanity which render them at all times subjects of public observation; and expose their personal deportment, as well as the character of their institution, to the strictest scrutiny."^[36] The "trespassings" point us back to the confusion over the nature of convent family life and the contested boundary between private behavior and "public observation." As in the mother superior's struggles to define and not define herself as "mother," the riot material everywhere betrays a preoccupation with boundary; the consequent fluidity of textual genre attaches to Reed herself, the convent victim who still advocates retirement from the world after her escape back into it, and to Reed's editor, who expresses discomfort at the convent's institutional ambiguity. "The Convent," he declares in his introduction to Reed's narrative, "was either a religious establishment, for the worship of Roman Catholics, or it was a seminary of learning for the education of Protestant young ladies. If it were the former, it was no place for Protestant children. If it were the latter, then it is entitled to no sanctity" (Introduction, 43).

Such fluid boundaries characterize elite antebellum historiography as well. One thinks not only of Prescott's Cortés as an imperial creator of boundary, forging the outline of New Spain as he progresses into Mexico's interior (an activity accompanied by Prescott's shifting meditations on the proper boundaries between civilized, "barbarian," and "savage" groups), but also of elite history's generic preoccupation with the assertion of boundary. The tableaux that dramatize Prescott's account of Cortés's invasion and Parkman's "forest history," the elaboration of the "characters" of the principal historical actors, the pictorial displays of

landscape, and even the ambivalent appeal to providential design, destinarianism, and Anglo-Saxon superiority—all constitute fictive narratives designed not only to vivify romantic historiography but also to supply essential explanatory systems that can give data the ontological status of "facts." Romantic narrative history adroitly mixed novelistic and archival materials to serve an evolutionary progression toward a racially and spiritually monistic world. Reviewing Prescott's Catholicized account of Aztec sacrifice, for example, one sympathetic Unitarian approvingly noted that sacrifice had progressed from the corruption of material offerings to the superior purity of spiritual ones because the "mode of historical development is that of a separation of things mixed, allowing individual representations to both of the contending principles."^[37] To find historical texts where that separatist dynamic is contested, we must turn away from elite histories, for the processes creating their narrative coherence, if not their complexity and elegance, are the same ones creating their persuasive, potentially punitive ideological coherence. There is an unmediated connection, in other words, between Prescott's melodramatic felicities of style and characterization and his overarching "point": that Mesoamerican culture, vitiated by its cult of human sacrifice and tyranny, very properly gave way to the moral and racial superiority of Cortés.

The Ursuline convent riot, occurring some nine years before the publication of Prescott's Conquest of Mexico , provides us with just such a vernacular historiography that voices rather than controls ethnic, gender, and economic difference and that betrays not just antagonism but an equally volatile confusion. The discursive freedom that manifests itself in the characteristic volatility of Reed's speaking "I"—whose outrage backs onto a poignant sense of abandonment—promptly infects the stability of the event reported on by that "I." Thus Reed, describing the burial of a nun, appends this footnote to her description of the funeral: "My feelings were much hurt to witness the manner in which the lid of the coffin was forced down to its place. The corpse had swollen much, and become too large for the coffin" (138). Such generically inappropriate detail infantilizes Reed's historical voice but, in so doing, ironically authenticates the voice of the "escapee"; it marks the narrative as ineluctably "female," amateur, and outside classic historiography, where the management of point of view makes visible the point of access to foreign cultures and registers the epistemological control of genteel New England over the dispersed, subordinate groups that have neither points of view nor a viewing point onto the superordinate culture.

Reed's intriguing, sensational, and sense-bound exposé of iniquities behind convent walls seemingly advertises a blatant point of view—that

of Protestant working-class animus against Irish Catholic immigrant labor and Protestant clerical animus against its major ecclesiastical rival—an ideological stance whose simplification and vehemence contrast to the almost luxuriant ambivalence of writers like Prescott and Parkman, whose rhetorical "mixture" of nostalgia and Protestant supremacism accompanies the strenuous work of separation and cleansing of "things mixed" in their histories. But their continual questioning of source materials and their self-conscious musings on the historian's tenuous perspectival position—precisely the constituent features of their point of view—enable their historiography to achieve representational dimensionality and a relative philosophical coherence. Reed's convent history works precisely otherwise: its refusal to entertain ambiguity, its all-out attack on the villainy of popery, and its "pure" reading of the riot as necessary American return to a cleansed Protestant origin signal a paradoxical inability to maintain difference. Even the operative identification between the "savage" and the "Catholic"—inherited by Prescott and Parkman from seventeenth-century New England captivity narratives and put to such effective rhetorical use in their representations of the "frontier" as a terrain disabled by its primitivism and tainted affiliation with Catholic Europe—is disrupted in the Ursuline riot discourse.

As we have seen, Massachusetts Attorney General Austin, in his closing argument for the prosecution, labeled the white "American" laborers, not the Catholics whom they attacked, as the "savages" attacking defenseless women and children in the middle of the night. But this wholesale attack on the "foreign," while arguably serving the same rhetorical and ideological enterprise as elite historiography's Anglo-Saxonism, accomplishes something else entirely: a calling into question of the very practice of reading, a breaking through the distances that organize textual interpretation into an intimate rhetorical terrain of lawless proximity, of trespass and even touching. These problematics of touching surface in Reed's indictment of convent life when she claims that "never to touch anything without permission" was one of the community's chief rules, a taboo meant to symbolize the excesses of Catholic totalitarianism and exclusivity. Her divulgence of this prohibition makes her exposé itself a bold and excessive touching, one that breaks out of not only Protestant boundaries but also the generic boundaries that enforce literary proprieties. If the mother superior constantly bans the gratification of curiosity, Reed's book will solicit and satisfy it.

Reed's Six Months in a Convent dwells in a stasis of unresolvable conflict that characterizes itself not as ambiguity (as it does for elite male writers like Prescott and Parkman) but as rhetorical disjointedness. A collision between religious and class antagonisms makes it impossible to

decide which was worst: the foreign religion, the anarchist threat of the native-born working class, or the emancipated woman. This confusion suggests a disordered symbolic landscape beneath (or alongside) American master narratives of revolutionary origin and purified separation from the contaminants of the Old World and the racially "inferior" cultures of the American hemisphere. This terrain, along with Catholic iniquity, is what this vernacular history written by an "orphan girl" exposes. A lengthy "supplement" to Reed's novella, published to defend Reed's allegations and to respond to the mother superior's own devastating "answer" to Reed's story, suggests what we might call the reproductive confusion between "foreign" and "native" at work in Reed's narrative. The supplement's author writes of the convent:

It was wholly foreign ; having been founded, in 1820, by two foreigners , who imported four Ursuline foreigners into this country for that purpose, and in 1826 and 1827 [established] the Nunnery of foreign money , collected by a Mr. John Thayer in Rome and Ireland, (an American, we blush to add,) who rejoiced in the American Revolution only as the means of accomplishing a "much more happy revolution," in the supremacy of the Pope in America!^[38]

In contrast to the separation of "things mixed" that characterizes the canonical romantic historians, Reed's novella, the mother superior's "answer," and Reed's editor's "supplement"—whether individually anti- or pro-Catholic, anti- or pro-working class—demonstrate a frenetic involvement in the foreign, even an attachment to it, that presents itself alternately in the guise of vehement denunciation and desiring curiosity. Thus Rebecca Reed characterizes the mother superior as someone fantastically interested in her. "Presently the Superior joined me, wishing to know how I liked the garden, the flowers, etc. Observing a pocket album in my hand, she asked what I had hoarded up there. . . . She took it, and examining it, desired to know if I wished to keep some money I had in it. . .. She also requested me to sing" (71-72). Even this. brief excerpt of Reed's prose shows how little her ephemeral style appeals to the organizing and suppressive powers of genre.

Reed's convent story and the mother superior's "answer" advertise only one generic affiliation—that of the exposé, whose indiscriminate conclusions, yoking the demonic, the sentimental, and the trivial in episodic historical account, are meant to authenticate the discriminating power of what Reed's editor calls the "Protestant eye." Reed and her mother superior, as two amateur historians of an event in which both

serve variously as author, perpetrator, and victim, construct unmethodized, unpredictable accounts that are undisciplined by any circumventing generic requisites. Exposé quite simply problematizes explanation just as narrative history enables it. What are we to make, for example, of Reed's diagnosis of her quasi-tubercular condition, which, like her portrait of the consumptive nuns coerced into an exhausting regime of austerities, is meant to endow her with the charismatic status of victim to Catholic iniquity?

My lungs were also very sore in consequence of repeating the offices; so much so, that when present at recreation, when I had permission to speak, it gave me pain rather than pleasure. I have, since leaving the Convent, consulted several physicians, who have expressed it as their opinion, that the cause of my bleeding at the lungs, which frequently occurs, was originally the repeating the office and other services, in one long, drawling tone , which any one can know by trying to be very difficult. (108n.)

This improbable diagnosis, which targets Catholic liturgical practices as probable pathogen for lung conditions still beyond the therapeutic control of American medical practice, betrays its own instability in the narrative's conclusion. There, such diagnoses evaporate in the face of Reed's startling return to Protestantism's strenously advertised dependence upon "private judgment"—a dependence that, as Orestes Brown-son famously charged, backed precariously onto indeterminacy and a self-imprisoning subjectivism.^[39] Reed closes her exposé of Ursuline authoritarianism and corruption with a Protestant challenge to the reader's autonomous interpretation that finally subverts the claims of her own history. "And I leave it with the reader to judge of my motives for becoming a member of the Ursuline Community, and for renouncing it" (186). This sudden, almost cavalier retreat from her claim to provide a true history is presumably meant to advertise her invulnerability to such inspection. But as the conclusion to her lengthy indictment, this very Protestant invitation unsettles the historical project.

Reed's history of life in the convent, then, as it lurches from one inappropriate juxtaposition to the next, alerts us to the coercive smoothness of classic romantic historiography. Ironically instituting itself through a nativist discourse adamantly claiming to read the Catholic other, to decipher its deceptive ways, and, in so doing, to regulate the relation between a purified past and present, Reed's history disrupts that agenda, unwittingly supplanting the protective and stratified structures of class, religious, and ethnic antagonisms with a rhetoric of undiffer-

entiated anxiety—indiscriminate in diagnosis, negligent of boundary, resistant to closure.

After several unsuccessful attempts to gain reparation from the state of Massachusetts for an estimated property loss of one hundred thousand dollars, the impoverished Ursuline community was finally forced to leave for Canada in 1838.

In January 1836 the most widely read convent captivity narrative, Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery , was published, selling three hundred thousand copies before the Civil War—to be out-sold only by Stowe's great exposé of slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin . An intriguing instance of collaborative writing, Monk's story was originally fabricated with the help of a little-known former priest named Hoyt and taken from Monk's dictation by a group of nativist and abolitionist men, adept at creating and projecting the sentimental voice of the captive Protestant heroine. Among these men was Jonathan Edwards's probable great-grandson Theodore Dwight, who tried, unpersuasively, to claim that Monk's work was a historical romance: "The story, short as it is, for simplicity and pathos is not unworthy the genius and talents of a Scott."^[40] But as recognized then and since, Monk's story was hardly directed to a genteel audience, for her salacious revelations of life in a Montreal convent, while intended to bolster the claims of middle-class domesticity (and benefit from the success of Rebecca Reed's convent narrative), were meant to be read somewhere ambiguously outside but near the sacred precinct of the home.^[41] If the composition of Monk's actual readership remains difficult to trace, her story of female victimization, partially written by and for men, is a "masculine" tale that registers middle-class "feminine" concerns with domesticity. At once quasi-pornographic and sentimental, the Awful Disclosures defends its own violations of readerly etiquette as necessary to warn parents, "even if delicacy must be in some degree wounded by revealing the fact."^[42] Thus, like Harriet Jacobs, who later struggled with the delicate exposure of her indelicate sexual enslavement, Monk reaches for her "virtuous reader" by detailing the depth and breadth of her most unvirtuous captivity, enough so that the lower-class licentiousness of her narrative comes to function as an index of her middle-class propriety. Unable to gain the dignity of a court appearance like Rebecca Reed, forced therefore to "make my accusations through the press" (5), Monk works all the harder to write a middle-class best-seller of womanly trials and fortitude.

Unlike Rebecca Reed, Maria Monk had never been a charity scholar or even a novice but was in fact the nun's alter-image, a prostitute, who in 1834 had been taken into the Magdalen Asylum and was dismissed when she became pregnant (raped, she claimed, by a priest; Fig. 6). From there she made her way to New York and literary notoriety. Picking up where Reed left off, Maria Monk lavished on her readers fantastic descriptions of convent lechery and murder, a fantasia of captivity and escape from popish perils that encloses the largely unspoken drama of her "fallen womanhood" and its appropriation by a righteous male nativism to attack the "Whore of Babylon." As Maria "Monk" she is also a curious double of the licentious priests whom she exposes as the cause of her own prostituted status—the sexual chaos and shame of her prostitution explained and contained by its resituation in the convent. Its vague clipped style reminiscent of Reed's, Monk's Awful Disclosures portrays the frailty of Protestant girlhood, a vulnerability ultimately traceable, as for Charlotte Temple and Rebecca Reed, to the perils of "private judgment," which fails to decipher the calculations of the seducer. The abbreviated quality of Monk's narrative indicates more particularly the shared familiarity of her readers with this anticonvent discursive terrain of a Protestant feminine judgment bewildered by the labyrinthine structures of priestly power and desire.

Accusing her mother superior of an aggressive (hence depraved) female sexuality, Maria Monk claims that the superior played the role of brothel director, assigning sexual duties to her nuns and regulating the procedures for the murder of their infants. Of the priests, Maria confessed, somewhat disarmingly, to her readers that "often they were in our beds before us" (128). Monk depicts the Hotel Dieu Nunnery as the New World counterpart to Rome's "corrupt" topography, on which Protestant tourists ruminated; the priests soon inform her that "the chambers of pollution are above, and that the dungeons of torture and death are below; and that they dread the exposure of the theatre on which their horrific tragedies are performed" (344). This architectural hierarchy of vice provided by the priestly guide renders iniquity reassuringly organized and tangible—a demimonde version of Fourier's phalansteries of pleasureful living but also, perhaps more significant, a materialized architectonics of suffering that enables the representation of an otherwise unspeakable dimension of the profane: that inhabited by "fallen" women.

At the core of Monk's Gothic narrative of sex and infanticide is a troubled revelation of the perils of family estrangement. Like Rebecca Reed and the young heroine of Susan Warner's Wide, Wide World (1850),

Fig. 6.
Maria Monk holding her infant and demanding of her reading public: "Bring
me before a court." 
From  Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery  (NewYork, 1836).

Monk is a virtual (if not actual) orphan, distanced from her mother and beset by her arbitrary maternal power, confessing at one point:

I shall not attempt to justify or explain my own feelings with respect to my mother, whom I still regard at least in some degree as I ought. I will merely say, that I thought she indulged in partialities and antipathies in her family during my childhood; and that I attribute my entrance into the nunnery, and the misfortunes I have suffered, to my early estrangement from home, and my separation from family. (269)

Monk's criticism of her mother's violation of the maternal ideals of Protestant domesticity underlies her attack on the convent's antifamilial project. Her fragmented narrative voice (one further primitivized by the compositional processes of dictation and editorial interpolation) speaks in the tones of the outraged child, forced into an adulthood of prostitution that "cloisters" her from middle-class existence. As a translation of orphanhood into the parallel thematics of sexual violation, Monk's Disclosures travels adjacent corridors of abandonment and rape, her prostituted voice moving confusedly between isolation and violation, a condition that follows her even in escape when she confesses, "Sometimes I think I can hear the shrieks of helpless females in the hands of atrocious men" (325).

Monk's histrionic divulgence of sexual caresses and punishments illuminates a civilian world of emotional absence and physical exploitation, supplying a fawning priest in place of the lost father, a dominating mother superior in place of the indifferent mother who fails to provide any religious instruction, thus leaving her daughter entirely without traditional Protestant theological equipment. "I had no standard of duty to refer to," explains Maria Monk of her malleability, "and no judgment of my own which I knew how to use, or thought of using" (50). Leaving her convent schooling, Maria returns home but "soon became dissatisfied, having many and severe trials to endure at home, which my feelings will not allow me to describe" (22). These unspeakable tribulations of home propel her to a novitiate, a training from which she soon "escapes" for another brief and troubled expedition through civil society that includes a marriage (and separation) and her theft of her mother's military pension, funds she uses to regain admittance to the convent. Among her many gestures of bewildered complicity once she is back in the convent is her gathering of the mother superior's hair combings, which she wears as an amulet around her neck. This gesture of abject daughterly dependence, however, is roughly thwarted when the superior "told me I was not worthy to possess things so sacred" (30).

Fig. 7a.
Exterior view of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, the site of Maria Monk's
"captivity." The inset (above, upper right ) shows the "track of
Maria Monk in making her escape," a route that intersects twice
with the alleged subterranean passages between seminary and
convent that enabled licentious contact. 
From Awful Disclosures (New York, 1836).

After taking the veil, a ceremony that called for her to lie down fully draped in ceremonial garb in a coffin ("My thoughts were not the most pleasing during the time I lay in that situation" [46]), Maria Monk is fully informed of the convent's true life. The first night she suffers "brutal" (53) treatment from three priests; she is also forced to kneel on dried peas and, perhaps most damaging of all, to surrender her most interior thoughts in the confessional: "While at confession, I was urged to hide nothing from the priest, and have been told by them, that they already knew what was in my heart, but would not tell, because it was necessary for me to confess it" (78).

If Maria has trouble revealing her interior thoughts to the priest or, worse yet, gaining access to the emotional interior of her mother superior, she nonetheless develops a bold and precise knowledge of the convent's secret recesses, traveling the subterranean corridors, expert in her later narrative reconstruction of its architectural intricacies for her readers (Fig. 7). During one of her explorations of the convent cellar, she

Fig. 7b.
Interior of the nunnery. The segments marked "unknown" serve
to authenticate Maria Monk's otherwise precise architectural recall.

finds herself on the edge of an enormous pit, "in a spacious place, so dark, that I could not at once distinguish its form" (81). Here in this pit Maria discovers the lime that has been thrown to disintegrate the bodies of murdered infants, and at its edge she ponders the familial atrocities of Rome. Outraged American readers of her narrative sought to make their way to this pit and demanded the right to investigate the Hotel Dieu convent to discover where indeed those sites of sexual intercourse and infanticide were located.

Incredibly, thousands of Americans believed Monk's narrative. Soon, however, her exposure of the infamy of convent life degenerated into an exposure of her own imposture, her mother somewhat improbably claiming that her daughter had been damaged by a slate pencil driven through her head when a child; Monk's mother further claimed that a Protestant minister had approached her to see if she would agree to the fabrication that her daughter had been seduced by a Catholic priest when in fact Maria had been impregnated by the minister himself, a story that was offered as profitable solution to an unwanted pregnancy. To her credit, Monk's mother turned down the bribe, declaring in later interviews that she had spent her maternal energies trying to curb the vagrancy and unpredictable stories of her daughter. When a New York lawyer named William L. Stone found himself in Montreal, he determined to inspect the Hotel Dieu Nunnery for himself, later producing a document entitled Maria Monk and the Nunnery of the Hotel Dieu, Being an Account of a Visit to the Convents of Montreal and Refutation of the "Awful Disclosures " (1836). Admitting that he inclined toward believing Monk's account before his tour of the convent, lawyer Stone (with the Montreal bishop's permission) inched his way through it in search of evidence of Catholic iniquity. Like his fellow Americans exploring the Roman catacombs, Stone evidently relished his role as detective assigned to pierce the veil of Catholic deception. What he discovered, however, helped him to see why Montreal's citizens, in his words, "seemed to look upon the intelligent denizens of the United States, as laboring under a widely extended monomania!"^[43] For Stone discovered nothing beyond a group of nuns who were living in apparently tranquil accord. In fact, the nuns—to Stone's still slightly baffled perspective—appeared to beat Protestant families at their own game, leading him to admit, "I have never witnessed in any community or family more unaffected cheerfulness and good humor, nor more satisfactory evidence of entire confidence, esteem and harmony among each other" (26).

Failing to find any mysteries of iniquity in the Hotel Dieu, Stone investigated the mysteries of Maria Monk. As he soon recognized, the

secrets dwelled less in Catholicism than in the strange impostures and seductions of a newly anonymous and commercialized public space. Monk's evident helplessness before her clerical exploiters and her seeming belief in her religious victimization signaled the troublesome powers of publicity available in the nascent mass-print culture. Therein lay true perplexity. Discovering what he could of Maria Monk's true history, Stone was quick to detect the pathos of the young unwed mother, not yet the "prostitute" of later legend. Unlike her collaborators, she made hardly anything from her best-seller, and Stone could see why: "Indeed she is a fitful credulous creature—a child of freak and impulse—who has probably been as much of a dupe herself, as the public have been dupes of her" (48). Catholicism had become curiously implicated in the swirling deceptions of capitalist culture, the exposure of Roman iniquities a way to profit from the public. Stone's Protestant mission now swerved from the exposure of Romanism to the "emancipation of my own countrymen from the bondage of prejudice, superinduced by the most flagrant imposture" (56). The great theme of captivity to Roman Catholicism was threatening to give way to a more troubling bondage—to the impostures of one's fellow (clerical) Americans and the impulsions of one's own need to believe.

Not suprisingly, Stone's mission of liberation failed to take effect on Monk's patrons, the Reverends Brownlee, Bourne, and Slocum and Mr. Theodore Dwight. After discussing his findings with them, Stone could only marvel at their curious submissiveness to the girlish pretender. Their continued support of Maria Monk indicated to him an unnatural regression to an infantile dependence on the mother. "How melancholy, methought, while wending my steps homeward, to see grave theologians, and intelligent laymen thus pinning themselves to the aprons of such women!" (46).

On August 15, 1837, Maria Monk fled from New York to Philadelphia; once there, she refused to be escorted back by her alleged guardian, the Reverend Slocum. Instead, she had him arrested and said "that she had fled the Hotel Dieu and Catholic Jesuits only to fall into the clutches of Protestant Jesuits, who 'all made well by my books.' "^[44] What Maria (whom a Philadelphia doctor declared incapable of caring for herself) did for the next twelve years is unknown. But as the Philadelphia Times noted on July 28, 1849: "Since the publication of her book of 'discourses,' she has plunged into every excess of female iniquity."^[45] Reportedly, she died in 1849 like a female Bartleby—silenced and impoverished on Welfare Island.

Eight
The Inquisitional Enclosures of Poe and Melville

The closely imagined relationship between popery and captivity initially established in the Indian captivity narrative developed, in nineteenth-century convent exposes, a crucial thematics of artifice. As we have seen in the narratives of Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk, convent terrors strategically deployed sham fears of Rome to voice the pressures of an emergent middle-class Protestant domesticity. As productions of a deviant female and popular voice, convent narratives imagined perverse domesticities in which an errant female voice, ambiguously positioned between working-class melodrama and middle-class sentiment, gained entry to Protestant parlors by cleansing itself of the impure attraction to Rome. The artifice at the heart of convent narratives—of persecuting figures dispatched from Rome—firmly situated the Protestant language of Romanism in the precariously privatized domain of family romance as well as the public terrain of political contestation. Rome was not only imaged polemically as the ethnic interloper in nativist conspiracy tracts but also figured sentimentally as a haunting memory, itself characterized by uncanny metaphor and fragmented, even implausible, narration, marks of fictional contrivance that point to submerged authenticities.

Antebellum Protestants experienced and contributed to this "dream logic" of Rome in varied ways.^[1] But critical to our understanding of Romanism as a shaping force in the antebellum literary marketplace are the collective aspirations of this cultural logic that infiltrated from popular into elite fictions. In the "ascent" into higher canonical regions, this dream of Rome—nightmarish, comical, and baffling—found powerful vocalizations in writers of the American Renaissance, themselves imaginatively preoccupied with the terrors and representational challenges of alienation. In particular, Edgar Allan Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum," and

Herman Melville's Benito Cereno translate the "womanly" dream logic of convent captivity into a "manly" logic of inquisitional or shipboard imprisonment.^[2] Both texts displace overtly female preoccupations with the familial perversion of convents with images of the masculine psyche closed within Catholic powers or ambiguously excluded by them. Voices of maidenhood and prostitution are supplanted by the voice of an ambiguously celibate masculinity whose largely unspoken patriarchal dominion in the familial enclosure of middle-class domesticity enables its exploration of extrafamilial spaces. Such expeditions finally deposit these celibate explorers in Romanized interiors that speak, not a dispossessed female language of hyperbolic conflict and sexualized violence, but an elite language of densely symbolic ambiguity. Thus Poe and Melville draw upon the language of Protestant captivity, Poe to dramatize the enigmatic pains of consciousness and Melville to construct the "knot" of slavery and racism embedded in the New England conscience.

Like convent captivity narratives, "The Pit and the Pendulum" and Benito Cereno picture the sufferings of an exaggeratedly privatized subjectivity, one rendered critically alone by virtue of its fascinated dread of Catholic power. If Puritan Indian captivity narratives figured the afflictions of papal bondage as genuine instances of the clash of imperial powers (both temporal and supernatural), these antebellum captivity narratives enjoy no such clarified relation between private and public. In these eminently self-conscious fictions, Roman Catholicism is no longer a rival imperial power but, to the contrary, a conspicuous anachronism, peripheral to the narratives' contemporary urgencies. Positioned off center, the Romanism of these captivity tales, particularly in its elusive religious malignity and the uncertainty of either capture or escape, distracts protagonists and readers alike from the true meanings of their victimization. Amasa Delano's "dreamy inquietude" aboard the San Dominick and Poe's narration of sickly fear inside the dungeon of the Spanish Inquisition are registered in the accents of a Protestant paranoia subjected to an ironic metanarrative gaze. If entrapment by Catholic powers exploits the nativist passions of Poe's and Melville's readers, Poe's narrator and Melville's Amasa Delano quickly transcend such crude simplicities of audience manipulation. Both tales consistently undermine the anti-Catholicism they invoke—not only to mock the nativist susceptibilities of the reading public but, in so doing, to question the very pretensions of narrative.

The unsettling combination of suffering and parody, of imprisonment as a sly, if not a playful, event, owes its peculiar tenor to the artificiality, even theatricality, of nativist captivity literature, with its characteristic

blend of opportunism and genuine dread, of safe distance and dire involvement. The virtuosity of both narratives stems from their sustained and ambiguous mingling of sham and terror, their translation of nativism's exploitative melodramas into the aggressions of art. If the fraudulence of much nativist fiction reflected not only commercial opportunism but underlying doubts about the Catholic menace, Poe and Melville forged new authenticities, born of narrative elusiveness, from the inauthenticities of nativism.

In their religious manifestation, captivity narratives exerted a fascination born of the drama of suspended forgiveness. While the surface action of a narrative like Isaac Jogues's unfolded structures of merciful affliction, of the Lord forgiving and drawing his creature to him again, the interior drama threatened the reverse. Any number of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century narratives implicitly portrayed the suffering creature's forgiveness of God, the transition from anger to love, from insufferable fury to the prized condition of gratitude. As the popularity of the genre testifies, it was an absorbing dynamic, this adamant revision of resentment into bliss. With their developing capacity to reduce suffering, nineteenth-century Americans located in domesticity the pleasure of converting resentment and found it ever more difficult to perform an authentic submission. Increasingly, where suffering was concerned, the only bliss available was its cessation or, more realistically, its sentimental regulation.

Notwithstanding their release, such captives as Isaac Jogues or Mary Rowlandson sought to prolong their captivity, to dwell permanently inside the region of affliction. In the concluding lines to her captivity narrative, for example, Rowlandson jealously guards her battered consciousness from the soothing effects of the settlements and confesses to a new condition of sustained vigilance: "When others are sleeping, mine eyes are weeping!" Ironically, her greatest hope and necessity is to extend her captivity indefinitely, to maximize the moment of redemption by avoiding the closure of her experience. Thus she concludes in the atemporal, transcendental posture of the contemplative, bidding her readers, as Moses did the fleeing Israelites, to "stand still and see the salvation of the Lord."^[3] In stark contrast to Rowlandson's newfound vigilance, Poe's narrator inches his way through an obsessively wakeful discourse in pursuit of the swoon, angling not for immortality but for oblivion. All he achieves is the horror of exposure, enduring the ceaseless recognition not of God but of his own consciousness: the eyes of punishment have replaced the gaze of faith: "Demon eyes, of a wild and ghastly vivacity, glared upon me in a thousand directions, where none had been visible

before, and gleamed with the lurid lustre of a fire that I could not force my imagination to regard as unreal" (695).

I pondered upon all this frivolity until my teeth were on edge .

"The Pit and the Pendulum "

Having tripped and landed with his chin on the edge of the pit, the agonized hero of "The Pit and the Pendulum" congratulates himself for the second in a series of accidental deliverances. His lips suspended over the clammy vacancy of the pit, he enjoys to the full, like Maria Monk before him, the pleasures of the threshold; as another observer of popery's evil interiors, the narrator scrutinizes its gloomy recesses, eager simultaneously to pursue and escape its secrets. Grateful that live burial, the "most hideous of fates" (685), does not await him, he ventures into the perils of undifferentiated space, his curiosity enticed by the "blackness and vacancy" (685) through which he gropes. As prisoner of the Inquisition, Poe's narrator is lodged at the foundation of the edifice of Romanism—a visually duplicitous location where mechanical ingenuity endows his presumptively Napoleonic Age inquisitors with the technological powers of an industrializing America. The technical precision with which these inquisitors dominate the interior of the prison, invisibly engineering the movement of walls, floors, and swinging pendulum, registers envious antebellum suspicions of Rome's efficient technologies of the spirit. One contemporary observer of Catholicism commented on "the resources of that marvellous ecclesiastical system"—that is "so ingeniously contrived, so adroitly defended, so cunningly accommodated to human pride and weakness both."^[4] Demoniac Catholic techniques to control both spirit and body marginalize Protestantism to an ever dwindling space of evasion. Progressively displaying its insidious creativity, the narrator's dungeon seemingly manipulates its own interior, from pit to pendulum to mechanized inferno, treating its victim to a series of spectacular disclosures whose unspeakability is cited in an ever more loquacious prose.

Unlike Maria Monk, who must be hit before she falls to the floor, Poe's narrator performs his own prostration, swooning before his own religious terrors. Enthralled by the pleasures of infantilization before the monkish power, this self-identified "recusant" (690) gazes up at the gleaming pendulum "as a child at some rare bauble" (691). Like other Protestant explorers of convents, catacombs, and confessionals, the narrator struggles for mastery by acting the detective, out to deduce not only

the extent of Catholic iniquity but the intentions behind it. If Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk partially negotiate the challenges of this detective imperative by at least escaping, though in a state of continued bafflement, Poe's narrator frankly, luxuriously fails. His rationalist investigation cannot compete against the technical ingenuity of his captors, and in the face of their spectacular and disciplined violence he trails off into "vain, unconnected conjecture" (695). His attempts to decipher his plight are entirely secondary to the ardent predatory power of the wrathful church, which in pendulum form descends to the bound and childlike narrator, who can look up , but not at his persecutors.

The tale's pleasuring in the Inquisition recalls that of the New York showman who in 1842 exhibited a building of the Inquisition replete with common instruments of torture.^[5] By the time of Poe's tale, the Inquisition and its ingenious tortures had become a form of popular entertainment. If the confessional offered the attractions of illicit intercourse, the Inquisition offered its own erotic intimacies. Bound in his oily bandage, Poe's narrator submits to the embrace of dungeon rats: "They pressed—they swarmed upon me in ever accumulating heaps. They writhed upon my throat; their cold lips sought my own" (694). The feminized posture of his plight disguises an aggressive, distinctly masculine desire to enter the persecutorial intimacies of Romanism. Juan Antonio Llorente's History of the Inquisition of Spain (London, 1826) describes how, on the opening of the Madrid Inquisition in 1820, a prisoner was discovered who was to die the following day by the pendulum method.^[6] Whereas Llorente reports with objective restraint on the Inquisition as a thing of the past (albeit recent past), Poe invests his source material with the radical intimacy of his anonymous and confessional "I." This voice of suffering resurrects and appropriates the Inquisition as immediate antebellum context and symbol of its own indeterminate anguish.

The private taxonomy of captivity that forms the gruesome and comic focus of Poe's narrative neatly organizes the range of Protestant confinements in the ideological enclosure of Romanism; the spatial removes into Indian country of Puritan and Jesuit narrative become vertiginous descent into unconsciousness. Of the many horrors that surround us, which is the worst? Poe, given to insistent scrutiny of the possible incarcerations available in this life, asks, in this tale above all, which captivity is the worst? Live entombment or the loathesome abyss?^[7] The pit or the pendulum, the indifference of the void or the exquisite intimacy of the blade? Enamored of classification, the narrator must repeatedly submit to the Inquisition's sublime dismissal of his categories. The hero's

hierarchy of punishments is subject to constant revision, as one torment leads into another, issuing finally into a competition of sufferings that renders distinction futile. "To the victims of its tyranny," explains this student of the Inquisition, "there was the choice of death with its direst physical agonies, or death with its most hideous moral horrors" (687). As his clinically precise discourse proceeds in its effort to survey the features of inquisitional captivity, the confinement becomes more boundless and uniform, the narrator's proliferating physiological detail finally pushing his captivity narrative to the edge of the ludicrous, where it is left to hover.

Thus the perceptual bondage suffered by Poe's bewildered "I" is both tortured and funny, a combination that forces the reader to dwell in a space as narrow as the narrator's—an uncomfortably shifting surrender to the tale's mimetic power where trust continually incites suspicion. Captivity as authorial joke is also authorial menace. Objective tortures are endowed with a technological excess that incites reader engagement only to mock it, just as the original authenticities of the Protestant captivity tradition are rendered artificial to convey the emergent authenticities of a surrealist art in which the text's frank confession of its artifice testifies to its author's engagement with the finally unspecifiable urgencies of his idiosyncratic consciousness. Or in the authorial tones of Poe's captive to the Inquisition: "I saw the lips of the black-robed judges. They appeared to me white—whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words—and thin even to grotesqueness" (681).

A virtuoso of studied authenticity, of a deflected sincerity like that of his artfully descending pendulum, Poe mimics the ambivalent blending of farce and dread that characterized conspiracy-minded nativists, for whom the foreign religion was sufficiently present yet unknown to make their accusations plausible. As the ultimate stylist of Protestant captivity, Poe uncovers the self-preoccupation at the heart of a tradition of practiced tremblings before the specter of the Inquisition.

As the primary vehicle of his religious burlesque, Poe's relentlessly physiological language supplants the "recusant" soul with a Protestant body as primary target of Catholic captivity, intrigue, and torture. While the narrator invokes the classical captivity narrative tradition by citing Scripture, confessing, like Hezekiah, to being "sick unto death" (Isaiah 38:1), his objective is hardly the education of the soul's ascetic powers by incarceration within the torments of the fallen world. His enclosed self immediately abandons the consolatory achronicity of biblical citation for a narrative of obsessive temporal precision, his rationalist language focusing on the flesh, a gaze that converts the pleasures of exegesis

into those of "nausea" and "thrill." Intercessional wisdom fades into impotent spectral images as the "angel forms" of candle flames shift into "meaningless spectres" (682). This dissolution of scriptural context discloses a region of bodily obsession in which even the political menaces of Romanism, its proverbial systematized ingenuities, revert to a meaningless mechanization; thus the "inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum" that simply suggests circularity, not revolt, the mere "idea of revolution —perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel" (681). In this sensationalized, and hence depoliticized, incarceration, religious captivity metaphorizes the impingements of consciousness, whose pressures urge one not toward God but toward the "sweet rest" (682) of the grave. Catholic persecutors become identified with the masochist energies of the modern subject—an "I" whose nationality, religion, and individual history are suppressed beneath a newly sensational language of disorientation and dispossession.

This deposit of the Inquisition at the heart of the narrator's dehistoricized subjectivity participates in the logic of convent captivity narrative, where maiden subjectivity can experience its purity only through identifying the mother superior as fallen mother. So Poe's narrative pictures the abjectly filial autobiographical subject as one pursuing contact with, and knowledge of, his inquisitional fathers. That he awakens already confined in a space that proceeds to dwindle makes of his every evasion an inevitable drawing closer. Poe's narrative, then, affords us a choreography of antebellum Protestant movement upon the shifting stage of Romanism. A benevolent version of this mobility appears in Hawthorne's admiring efforts to describe an Italian church: "Perhaps the best way to form some dim conception of it, is to imagine a little casket, all inlaid, in its inside, with precious stones, so that there shall not a hair's breadth be left un-precious-stoned; and then imagine this little bit of a casket increased to the magnitude of a great church, without losing anything of the intense glory that was compressed into its original small compass."^[8] While Hawthorne can imaginatively shrink and then magnify the cathedral interior that so dazzled him, Poe's narrator is the hapless victim of such aesthetic play as his colorful dungeon looms large or shrinks at another's will.

Hope whispers falsely to the bound narrator, writhing before the pendulum's descent; so too his narrative, in its garrulous unspeakabilities, degrades the incarcerated logic at the heart of Jesuit or Puritan capture—a logic in which the bound body, imitating Christ's sacrificial immobility, gains access to a fluid, mobile subjectivity, one that not only can move

into but also can move meanings. Here the body's fixity registers an exegetical fixity: the "heart's unnatural stillness" registers the "sudden motionlessness throughout all things" (683). Nor can the hero measure the site of his captivity, its beginnings and ends rendered identical by the "perfectly uniform" (685) wall. The hero's inability to decipher the meaning or measurements of a captivity transpiring within the "shadows of memory" (683) gains its cultural authenticity by reference to the "thousand vague rumors of the horrors of Toledo" (685)—imagined by antebellum Protestants as countless, incapable of final measurement.

Taunting the very religious fears he elicits, the narrator describes with studied artifice his fumbling along the slimy wall: "I followed it up; stepping with all the careful distrust with which certain antique narratives had inspired me" (685). Coyly alluding to the contemporary context of "no-popery" literature, Poe's captive urges his readers to understand his experience as authenticating their unease; glimpsing the pit, he assures us that the "death just avoided was of that very character which I had regarded as fabulous and frivolous in the tales respecting the Inquisition" (687). His horrors of consciousness are consistently subject to the satirical effect of this intertextuality. "Of the dungeons there had been strange things narrated—fables I had always deemed them—but yet strange, and too ghastly to repeat, save in a whisper" (685). With a teasing regularity that mimics the methodical enumeration of his sensations and gestures the narrator hints at the conventionality of his predicament, finally suggesting that his (and the reader's) real captivity is to no-popery literature. Thus his first trembling retreat from the pit's edge occurs within a sly reference to his past career as a reader of anti-Catholic fiction: "Neither could I forget what I had read of these pits—that the sudden extinction of life formed no part of their most horrible plan" (687).

Abruptly enabled by a "sulphurous lustre" (688) to see the true nature of his enclosure, the narrator confirms that the psychic void is reassuringly peopled with Catholic images, the walls everywhere "daubed in all the hideous and repulsive devices to which the charnel superstition of the monks has given rise" (689). These culturally self-reflexive motions of consciousness are doubly recontained by this invocation of monkish aesthetics, the skeletal forms displayed, as they were for American tourists in underground Rome, for his gruesome enjoyment. While the masochism of black vacancy yields to the sadism of monks who finally depict themselves as separate from the narrator so that the monologue of live entombment can at least become the dialogue of "inquisition," Poe's eccentric narrator is himself recontained as a character in no-popery

literature. Like any reader of familiar texts, he appreciates his tormentor's deviation from the pit to the pendulum as an admirable instance of authorial ingenuity, aimed at preserving readerly interest: "The plunge into this pit I had avoided by the merest of accidents, and I knew that surprise, or entrapment into torment, formed an important portion of all the grotesquerie of these dungeon deaths. Having failed to fall, it was no part of the demon plan to hurl me into the abyss" (690). The captive's anticipatory knowledge of course is inverted by his narrative to cast him as a figure whose private reasonings are fully anticipated by his invisible persecutors. They have carefully kept his bound body from the descending path of the pendulum, their deep monkish intimacy with his most spontaneous unvoiced speculations rendering his every revelation already known, as happened to Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk before him. As past reader, current captive, and future author of anti-Catholic fictions, the narrator finds that his most frantic work is to disguise his entire knowledge of his inquisitors as their entire knowledge of him.

As one who knows all there is to know, he finally turns his rhetoric of teasing disclosure toward his readers, enticing and thwarting their engagement, refusing, unlike Maria Monk, to divulge what he sees in the pit's "inmost recesses" (696). Inquisitorial dalliance with his agonies models his own flirtation with the reader, enough so that the ingenuities of Catholic torture come to articulate how a burlesque of authorship simultaneously conveys the perils of its reading. Enticing the victim to cooperate in his own extinction, the inquisitors delight in surprise and protraction to enforce his acknowledgment of their punning, intertextual imaginations. As heretic pushed toward a mechanized auto-da-fé, in doubled bondage within a dungeon that itself flattens into a red hot lozenge, the narrator confesses to his captors' ingenious identification of deliverance and perdition. Springing away from the pendulum, he merely leaps toward their next narrative episode on the edge of the pit. "Free!—and in the grasp of the Inquisition!" (695) he cries as the walls begin to move. His best efforts to decipher and elude the "doom prepared . . . by monkish ingenuity in torture" (690) have failed, for the pendulum has sliced him free precisely that the walls might shove him into the pit.

In drawing the parallel between his narrator's frantic efforts to decipher the intentions of his inquisitional captors, his equally perplexed attempts to construct a sequential narrative from his memory fragments, and finally the reader's struggle to believe and disbelieve the manifest artifice of the narrative, "The Pit and the Pendulum" translates the legendary unspeakable filth within the recesses of Romanism—its impostures and secrecies—into the recalcitrant processes of a psychological

realism struggling to represent a "memory which busies itself among forbidden things" (683). If captivity to Rome's agents in the New World formerly implicated Catholicism in the pleasures of regained spiritual vigilance and a revivified gratitude, it now belonged to the circuitous expeditions of the swoon into the unconscious and ambiguously beyond it. Captivity to Catholic mysteries has yielded to imprisonment in the menacing and maddeningly trivial confines of the writing psyche. The "seared and writhing body" (697) of Poe's narrator, a body whose "soul took a wild interest in trifles" (688), is the self-bound sequel to the heroic incandescence of Foxe's burning martyrs.

The Spaniard behind —his creature before: to rush from darkness to light was the involuntary choice .
Benito Cereno

In 1841, the nativist Joseph Berg uttered a revealing diatribe against the confessional:

We hear a great deal said about slavery in our day; and I abhor oppression in every shape; but I count the poor slave, who hoes his master's corn under the lash of a heartless overseer, a freeman, when compared with the man who breathes the atmosphere of liberty, and yet voluntarily fetters his soul, and surrenders himself, bound hand and foot, to the sovereign will and pleasure of a popish priest.^[9]

Berg was not alone is his astonishing opinion that the slave was better off than the Roman Catholic. His statement reveals a depressing capacity to rationalize chattel slavery as one (and not the worst) among a series of enslavements, a reasoning that suggests how images of bondage to papal captivity could minimalize objections to race slavery. The priest is more fearsome than the slaveholder because Berg, racially and regionally, cannot identify with African Americans beyond the abolitionist stereotype of "the poor slave." The priest, unlike the planter, also enjoys the voluntary surrender of his victims. Berg's focus on this voluntarism at the heart of Catholic bondage reveals the uneasy masculinity of the Protestant temperament, which had long struggled with the theological imperative to enact a willing surrender to Christ.^[10] If the seduction of females by priests registered the pressure of Protestant domesticity on the errant desires of women, the alleged psychological seduction of the male by priests violated cultural expectations of masculine autonomy—expectations that arose in order to legitimate the proliferating demands

of the developing capitalist economy. Male victims of masculine power risked effeminization. As the fugitive slave Frederick Douglass well knew, the oratorical display of his own victimization at the hands of his former white masters encroached dangerously on the virility he also proudly claimed.^[11]

Put simply, male victims always had to contend with the implication of complicity, a specter indeed more threatening than that faced by the slave, who, if "poor," at least did not volunteer for his or her fate. Perversely applying traditional Christian distinctions between spirit and flesh to condemn Romanism's spiritual tyranny or the bodily tyranny of slavery, northern nativists voiced their dread of such potentially all-male confessional intimacies. Like the fearsome image of miscegenation that haunted both pro- and antislavery white Americans, the threat of spiritual miscegenation as figured in anti-Catholic writing argued that mingling inevitably led to mixture—and in such mixtures all claims to purity were dangerously forsaken.

Melville's Benito Cereno (1855) probes these sexual, racial, and religious comminglings at work in the Protestant masculine imagination and brilliantly extends the logic of embattled purity to the challenges of narrative itself. Does purity afford one its vaunted insight into the workings of the contaminated enemy, casting light on its darkness? Or is purity a self-blinding force, repressing America's all too evident disturbances beneath a surface rhetoric of bemusement that genially minimizes what little remains to be seen? In the perceptions of Amasa Delano as he boards the San Dominick , Melville images slavery in the New World as the secret text layered within the Protestant text of Rome. Delano's repeated deflection of a murderous racial reality into a fading world of ecclesiastical conflict was a familiar feature of nativist and abolitionist thought. Benito Cereno forcefully identifies the papal threat with the slaves and to that extent folds a southern voice of conspiratorial anxiety into Delano's northern ruminations that eventually lead him to conclude that Spaniard and African are piratically leagued against him. Delano was hardly unique in his misreading. Like Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum," Melville's Protestant captivity tale dramatizes the captive's plight as a protracted series of interpretive quandaries. But if Poe internalizes Catholicism to register the panic at the heart of his marginalized southern subjectivity, Melville insists on endowing it with the representational density and plausibility of conspiratorial narrative.

In 1853 the great diarist George Templeton Strong observed of a no-popery riot in New York: "If Roman Catholicism as transplanted here shall retain all its aggressive and exclusive features, in other words,

its identity, I don't see but that a great religious war is a probable event in the history of the next hundred years; notwithstanding all our national indifference to religious forms."^[12] Strong was right about the war but wrong about the issue; his false prediction only too clearly recalls Amasa Delano's notorious naïveté aboard the San Dominick —a naïveté ideologically and aesthetically enabled by the suggestive convergence of black habit and black skin. Delano, the polite racist from Nantucket, is, we might argue, a representative northeasterner in his identification of slave ships and monasteries and a representative southerner in his perplexed musings on the black masks everywhere around him.^[13]

When Benito Cereno was published in Putnam's in 1855, readers were well familiar with the ambiguous and ominous associations between Catholicism and slavery that Melville developed in his story, and with the narrative stance of confused and confusing perceptions of spiritual and bodily oppressions. In no-popery literature, the Catholic church itself moved treacherously across the boundary between profane and sacred—a division that powerfully informed domesticity's doctrine of "separate spheres," of prohibitions against interracial marriage, and of mounting northern hostilities to the South. Delano's voluntary captivity in what he initially views as a structure "like a white-washed monastery" (48), his alternately smug and frightened musings before its Old World secrets once aboard the San Dominick (nautical metonym of the Dominican-led Inquisition), reembody the hystericized interior of Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum" with the contemporary specifics of religious, racial, and regional conflict. If Poe's Seville dungeon is located at the geographic heart of the Spanish Inquisition, Melville's Benito Cereno sets that interior afloat; on the margins of European imperial power the self-described "little Jack of the Beach," Amasa Delano, meets up with the monasticized mysteries of the San Dominick "at the ends of the earth" (77). The San Dominick's travels down the South American coast and its eventual forced passage back to Lima under the escort of the New England Bachelor's Delight free that Catholic interior from both its Old World touristic context and its domestic American context of Indian or convent captivity.

Only, like any traveler, Delano carries those domestic captivity narratives within him; he steps between the hatchet polishers "like one running the gauntlet" (59), compares a sailor peering at him to "an Indian [peering] from behind a hemlock" (74), a collapse of African and native American finally voiced by the narrator outside Delano's consciousness, when Africans are described fighting "Indian-like" as they "hurtled their hatchets" (101). Delano speaks as well a language of

American travel abroad, transplanting the tourist rhetoric of European Catholicism onto the floating monastery. Like American tourists in Italy, baffled by their simultaneous exclusion from convents and confessionals and inclusion in the dazzling interiors of cathedrals and picture galleries, Delano is intrigued by the ship's visual self-presentation but mystified by the inhabitants. Indeed, just as the interest of antebellum tourist writings about Catholic Europe resides largely in the alternating collusion and confrontation between anti-Catholic ideology and the heterogeneous sights of Italy (in particular), so Melville fashions his narrative's intrigue from similar slippages among the conflicting forces of conventionalized anticipation, troubled perception, and disturbing memory. If those slip-pages occasionally enjoy the familiarity of the organic, his "old trepidations" recurring "like the ague" (78), they more frequently contradict one another forcefully enough to seem estranged, even uncanny. The circuitous inquiries and odd atmosphere of Delano's New World captivity, then, exhibit the suspended, rapt Protestant pace of exploration through convent, cathedral, and catacomb. As tourists pondered America in Rome (and convents back home), so Delano moves ideologically (and hence perceptually) through Europe to understand the Catholicism floating strangely before him. Whether readers shared in or disdained the nativist campaign against pope and immigrant, they would certainly recognize the narrative's peculiar tone of genial condescension flecked with abject dread, for it characterized discussions of the interlocking menaces of the 1850s: Romanism and slavery.

But if Delano, off the coast of Chile, must encounter the baffling metamorphoses of inquisitional power aboard the San Dominick , Melville carefully denies him the assurances of the Protestant captivity tradition. Its accoutrements are there and not there, vital yet absent, like the metaphors that enclose them. The ship appears "like" a monastery; its appearance "almost" leads Delano to imagine a "ship-load of monks" (48). That Delano first sees the Spanish slaver as crowded cloister registers the cultural error of nativism, in which racial blindness is enabled by religious illumination, a purifying light that mistakenly transforms slaves into monks. The ship, qua ship, enjoys a peculiarly intensified interiority by virtue of the sea's surrounding blankness; it is a particular kind of Catholic interior, for the malevolent fatherly power of Jesuit, of pope, and of the Dominican inquisitor in particular has been usurped—not conquered by Protestants but subversively appropriated by Africans. Many antebellum Protestants would agree with Delano's groping effort to situate 'Spaniards in the familiarites of Protestant English history by claiming that "the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-

Fawkish twang to it" (79). The blurred grammatical focus and casual tone of Delano's musings genially recognize the familiarity of the anti-Catholic code and the gentility of his partial refusal to believe in timeworn conspiracy. If to be a Spaniard still resonates with a "Guy-Fawkish twang," Delano subdues his conspiratorial gullibility, for he and his Putnam's readership know just what a "Guy-Fawkish twang" is—a threat rendered sufficiently absurd by Protestant imperial power that it now sounds like a "twang."

While directing their suspicions toward immigrant Irish and (to a lesser extent) German Catholics, Protestant Americans accorded an aristocratic superiority to Spanish Catholicism. As home to the Jesuits and the Dominican Inquisition, Spanish Catholicism represented an ultimate (and in both senses of the word, a refined) fanaticism, one far superior in class terms to the impoverished and spiritually "docile," if politically threatening, Catholicism of the Irish. Indeed, the Catholic Cereno's symptoms are aristocratic ones, according to Delano's diagnosis: "Shut up in these oaken walls, chained to one dull round of command, whose unconditionality cloyed him, like some hypochondriac abbot he moved slowly about" (52). The Nantucket captain's sympathy with Cereno's burdens of command also suggests the shared commercial and class interests of northern "merchant princes" and southern "cotton kings"—alignments that only reluctantly succumbed to sectional animosity in the late 1850s. Indeed the "fraternal unreserve" (114) enjoyed between the two on the voyage back to Lima, while silent Babo lies imprisoned beneath, transiently recovers the solidarity of such alliances before the Negro's "shadow" (116) again interrupts the southerner's ability to communicate with his northern friend.

Melville's Catholic imagery invokes the Roman church's role in spurring the development of African slavery—a role that began, ironically, with the efforts of Las Casas to protect New World Indians from enslavement by suggesting the greater suitability of Africans.^[14] Slavery in its later manifestation in Melville's narrative (set in 1799) is resolutely an affair of New Spain, not New England. Delano's suspicions of the apparently neurasthentic and morbidly reserved Cereno are traced to the pathology of Cereno's national type, his behavior "not unlike that which might be supposed to have been his imperial countryman's, Charles V., just previous to the anchoritish retirement of that monarch from the throne" (53). Delano's sentimental and sociable racism, which allows him to imaginatively berate Cereno as a bitter master and hence to locate him in English Protestant legends of Spanish cruelty in the New World, also allows him to chastise Cereno for his excessive familiarity with Africans.

Reminding himself that "Spaniards in the main are as good folks as any in Duxbury, Massachusetts" (79), Delano minimizes national difference to ponder the internal mysteries of spirituality and temperament.

Thwarted by Don Benito's enigmatic reserve, Delano, in a series of unspoken ruminations, attempts to penetrate Don Benito's psychological interior. Indeed, until the long-delayed illumination of the racial meaning of the events surrounding him, Delano recurs to a religious, and at times medical, interpretation of the lassitude, disorder, and morbidity of life aboard the San Dominick . His Protestant exegesis of the "hypochondriac abbot" Don Benito, tended by Babo, his "friar" (57) on this "shipboard of monks," however, remains on the level of metaphor as Delano compares this baffling New World community to Old World Catholic morbidities. Anomalous and, as it turns out, finally unspeakable relations between Africans, English, and Spaniards in the New World gain a partial expressibility through their uncanny resemblance to the religious schism at the heart of Christianity. The cleansed and orderly procedures of Anglo-American subjectivity thus appraise with dismay the mingled items of Don Benito's cuddy, whose indiscriminate Catholic clutter contains both an actual and a metaphoric Catholicism. Delano notices a "thumbed missal" and a "meager crucifix" and then proceeds to metaphorize other items in the cuddy into his own ideological edifice of Romanism: thus the rigging lies "like a heap of poor friar's girdles"; the malacca cane settees are "uncomfortable to look at as inquisitors' racks" (82); and the barber chair "seemed some grotesque, middle-age engine of torment" and the sink "like a font" (83). This rush of remembered artifacts dismembers Catholicism into an assemblage of books, clothing, and furniture that chaotically invokes the Franciscan order, the Inquisition, the sacrament of baptism, the Catholic liturgy. Delano's construction of this popish interior develops its grotesquerie from this jumbled collection of reminiscences and Roman artifacts. "This seems a sort of dormitory, sitting-room, sail-loft, chapel, armory, and private closet all together" (83), he remarks, troubled by the mixture of functions. As this paraphernalia prophesies the collapse of an antiquated Spanish imperial power before a modern Anglo-American one (whose interiors are well organized in their domestic rather than ecclesiastical piety), so the genre of Catholic captivity slips into Delano's subconscious, inhabiting the subordinated regions of fleeting intuition, suspended revelation, and haunting resemblance. Part of the tale's ideological subtlety is its simultaneous use of Delano's anti-Catholicism to voice his provincial views of New World politics and race and the rise and subsidence of the narrative's truth.^[15]

In documenting the passage of a Protestant mind from naive confidence to vague suspicion, then to revelation and hard-hearted revenge, and finally to denial and forgetfulness, Benito Cereno forces apart and temporally orders the entangled skeins of ideology. Delano must forgo the religious for the racial narrative, must realize that the ship is no floating monastery of Old World tyrannies and impurities but a slave ship in which the Spaniard is not the powerful agent of Catholic imperial power but a feeble white man swooning before the ingenious tyrannies of the African.

In imagining the enslaved African as New World monk, Delano implicitly compares the masculine autonomy enjoyed on his ship, the Bachelor's Delight , to the suspicious collectivism of the slave ship's Catholic celibates. If New England bachelors advertise (without participating in) an unthreatening familial version of middle-class marriage, Catholic monks menace by their very numbers and anonymity. "Peering over the bulwarks were what really seemed, in the hazy distance, throngs of dark cowls; while, fitfully revealed through the open port-holes, other dark moving figures were dimly descried, as of Black Friars pacing the cloisters" (48). As an intermittently revelatory Catholic enclosure that entices Protestant exploration in order to punish it, the San Dominick enjoys the cover of Delano's religious blindness. Unable to see into monasticism, he is doubly distant from the truths of race slavery it disguises. Indeed, because his religious narrative imagines a superstitious, sickly Catholicism, Delano can exaggerate the difference between himself and Cereno; contemplating the Spaniard's seeming fear of the deceased, Delano muses, "How unlike are we made!" (61). The New England captain recurrently imagines Cereno's captivity in a morbid Catholicism that radically excludes the very idea of race slavery. Thus Cereno is strangely attended by Babo, who is "something like a begging friar of St. Francis" (57); Babo indeed is more a metaphor than a character, for his self is only partially revealed in the later trial depositions as the former "captain" of the slaves. That Delano understands Cereno as a religious rather than a political captive preserves both the racial hierarchy and Babo's unknowability. To recognize that Babo is a subversive African rather than a "deprecatory" (57) friar is to forgo the supremacies of Protestantism for the crisis of race war.

Ironically enough, the safety of this Protestant Gothic vision that enables Delano to imagine an impenetrable "subterranean vault" (96) rather than, as Cereno later describes it, a fully intentional inhabited community whose "every inch of ground [was] mined into honey-combs under you" (115) also provides him the hint. In his famous misreading

of the shaving scene, Delano's focus on its inquisitional aspect truthfully communicates Babo's murderous power. The barber's seat does indeed work like "some grotesque, middle-age engine of torment"; musings on Babo's unwitting mimicry of the Inquisition do generate "the vagary, that in the black he saw a headsman, and in the white, a man at the block" (85). Babo's shaving of Don Benito, in its ceremonial, even ritual, precision, resonates with the legendary (and historical) calculations of a religiously motivated violence. At the same time, it possesses the vitality of historical anachronism; as countless Gothic narratives testify, psychic meaning accrues in proportion to a setting's historical displacement. Thus the Catholic imagery through which Delano haltingly approaches his enlightenment operates both sardonically and prophetically, simultaneously illuminating the limitations of his Massachusetts sensibility and pointing toward the presence of a novel malevolent power in the New World that jointly inhabits the story's exterior deceptions and its interior truth.

Like the blacks' staged reenactment of their former enslavement, Delano's interpretive recurrence to the enclosures of monastery and Inquisition (a recurrence in which the two are equated) appeals as well to anterior narratives of oppression. Each retrospection enables the other; Delano's monastic ruminations, in their focus on Cereno as the authoritarian "abbot" and Babo as faithful victim to the Spaniard's gloomy rule, make possible Babo's deception. Similarly, the slaves' staged reenactment of their former status—a collective theater that is always on the verge of disruption—fuels Delano's religious interpretation. The moments of near disruption—when Delano witnesses violence from black boy to white, when the knot is thrown to him, when he bids the "slaves" stand back—urge him to speculate on Cereno's improper use of authority as an instance of religious excess, one that resembles Charles V's "anchoritish retirement" from power. In constructing a New England subjectivity that persistently pathologizes the religious other in order to organize an otherwise baffling scenario, Melville satirizes its interpretive pretensions. Indeed, while Delano, precisely because he has categorized Cereno as the Catholic other, consigns himself to "again and again turning over in his mind the mysterious demeanor of Don Benito Cereno" (67), unable to decipher the catacomb environment, his own interior is seemingly transparent to the mutineers, who strike their hatchets "as in ominous comment on the white stranger's thoughts" (67).

Thus if Melville exploits antebellum preoccupations with the conventional monastic secrecies of Catholicism to introduce the radically unconventional duplicities of the African American, he endows the black

man with monkish powers of collective organization and devious spiritual insight. Delano's uncertainties about his Catholic double—is he an invalid, an incompetent youth, an imposter?—finally urge him to embrace his own bewilderment as he concludes that "to the Spaniard's black-letter text, it was best, for awhile, to leave open margin" (65). The moment is an important one, for it signals the supersession of his conspiratorial religious vision, in which the sentimental vagaries of his anti-Catholicism falsely schematized black and white as abbot and monk to obscure the murderous racial schism between them.

If neither Cereno nor Babo has access to Delano's Romanism, the narrative's concluding extracts from Cereno's deposition and the remarks upon that deposition invite the reader to marvel at Romanism's serendipitous contribution to Babo's conspiracy. Providing access to the interlocking processes of religious and racial conspiracy, Delano's language of mysterious interiors disguised by black cowls, black skins, and "black vapors" (69) is finally the language Melville uses to describe the elusive interior meanings of his fiction. If the deposition serves "as the key to fit into the lock of the complications which precede it, then, as a vault whose door has been flung back, the San Dominick's hull lies open to-day" (114). The force of this passage is not only to connect 1799 to the "today" of 1855 but also to register the ingenuity of authorial constructions over that of religious or racial conspiracy. The story finally wrenches Delano from his charitable musings on the twinned excesses of Catholics and slaveholders and violently repositions him within a vengeful vision of racial pollution. Delano's insidious transition is registered when "he smote Babo's hand down, but his own heart smote him harder. With infinite pity he withdrew his hold from Don Benito" (99). Delano's Gothic dread of Cereno is thus replaced by racial hatred, as the shadow of the Negro now covers that of the pope.

Cereno's leap toward Delano and the white man's conquest of the black rebel that ensues force the punitive logic of this polluted interiority onto the African. The blacks' bodies are open to white transgression while the sailors of the Bachelor's Delight are sealed off from penetration. The blacks' "red tongues lolled, wolf-like, from their black mouths. But the pale sailors' teeth were set" (102). Such racial thematics abruptly scissor Delano's musings and replace the recesses of papal iniquity with those of black bodies whose dark interiors are not uncanny so much as radically different—a difference that provokes the violent suppressions of the imperialist instead of the gingerly probings of the tourist.

Both the deposition extracts and the postdeposition narrative reintroduce the Catholicism that has been so abruptly jettisoned by the

revelation of racial conspiracy. As a mark of the new sympathy between Spaniard and New Englander, Cereno, "courteous even to the point of religion" (115), acknowledges Delano's fraternal religious status; both men agree that they are protected by the "Prince of Heaven" (115); and Cereno even forgives Delano's misjudgment of the "recesses" (115) of his character. But this (racially homogeneous) ecumenical spirit, by which narrative sequence and white supremacy are restored, lapses again into the uncanny fragmented world of monasticism and narrative uncertainty. Prostrated and largely silenced by the "shadow" of "the negro" (116), Cereno retires once more, this time not to his cuddy but to a monastery, "where both physician and priest were his nurses, and a member of the order volunteered to be his one special guardian and consoler, by night and by day" (103). Thus the silenced, soon-to-be decapitated Babo is replaced by the monk Infelez; the illicit proximity practiced by the subversive African Babo, whose plotted narrative had forced whites to become his characters and no longer his author, reorganizes back into the European proximity of monk and spiritual patient. In larger narrative terms, Melville finally extracts the reader from the metaphoric to the deictic, from Delano's interior musings on the San Dominick's resemblance to a monastery to an omniscient narrative that points, first, to the truths of slave conspiracy and, second, to those of monasticism. Cereno leaves Delano's "shipload of monks" for an omnisciently narrated pilgrimage to the monastery on Mount Agonia.

From these last exits of Babo and Benito Cereno, Delano is excluded. With his last words, which include his injunction to "forget it" (116), his world of New England Romanism vanishes from the text, replaced by the hidden monastic intimacies of Infelez and Cereno. That the text ejects Delano after he has urged us to forget what has happened does not signal the forgetting of the Protestant captivity tradition. On the contrary, the narrator supplants Delano and appropriates his mystified Romanizing gaze, enticed and thwarted by a foreign Catholic interiority. If the ship's hull has disclosed that antebellum America's secrets are those of race, not religion, those aboard retreat back into the mute Catholic interior. Babo's and Cereno's passage into voicelessness recontextualizes race within religion as the conspirator's decapitated head gazes toward (and into) St. Bartholomew's Church and toward (and onto) the monastery on Mount Agonia. In positioning these concluding narrative moments as all emanating from Babo's gaze, one directed on the Catholic "vaults" (117), Melville forcibly identifies his antebellum reader with Babo. We look at Babo's head, which, "fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites" (116), only to be suddenly looking

with that head toward the church and monastery that enclose the vanishing Catholic slaveholders, Aranda and Cereno.

Babo's gaze recuperates and extends that of antebellum Protestantism, for it promises that one can gain access to the Catholic interior; not only does Babo stare into the vault that holds Aranda's bones, but his gaze, in following Cereno's funeral procession toward the monastery, is also there, narratively speaking, to greet him, for Babo's authorial inscription beneath Aranda's skeleton, "seguid vuestro jefe," is repeated in the narrator's final description of Cereno's end: "Benito Cereno, borne on the bier, did, indeed, follow his leader" (117). If Babo is victim finally to the allied Catholic and Protestant slaveholding powers of New Spain and New England, his displayed head, a "hive of subtlety" (116), suggests that he reclaims the cellular organization and ingenuities of the monastery for his own. Emerging as the conclusive monastic interior—collectively empowered and ingenious—that brain lodges itself in New Spain's literal Catholic edifices and in New England's metaphoric ones. As a final icon of religious difference, the monkish Babo subversively imitates New Spain to mock New England, master of both their guilty interiors.

Nine
Competing Interiors
The Church and Its Protestant Voyeurs

Catholic captivity literature unfolded in the context of Protestant orthodoxy's internal quarrels and its efforts to construct a new consensus by sacralizing the family. Like the narratives of Henry "Box" Brown and Rachel Plummer, convent escape tales were preoccupied with the strange new gods of modernization and modern capital and inconclusively involved with issues of psychic and familial confinement. Ironically, the ostensibly religious polemics of anti-Catholicism provided a major channel for this new focus on a profane privatized world of sentiment and its psychological confinements while increasingly secular conceptions of captivity in turn played a formative role in the generically diverse antebellum portraits of Catholicism as seducer of the heart and senses more than the soul.

The continued deployment of specifically Protestant tensions about captivity to Rome depended on endowing it, as we have seen with the fictions of Poe and Melville, with a punitive interior, one disguised by any number of duplicitous architectural or behavioral exteriors. Whether nativist or genteel critics of Rome, antebellum Protestants characteristically envisioned the foreign religion as a monolithic Gothic edifice containing intricately organized and perilous interiors, privacies deeper than those increasingly claimed for middle-class family life, and differently constructed. These Roman privacies resisted the eyes of the citizen and the open spaces of democratic life, inviting speculation about unjust incarceration and illegal conversations, bodily or otherwise. Protestants created in Romanism an imaginary container whose alluring multifaceted surface disguised a violent, even devouring, interior, images drawn from the sexually fearful and punitive rhetoric of the Book of Revelation. Rome, as the Scarlet Woman and the Whore of Babylon, had

"polluted" female recesses and an alluring female surface. Protestant womanhood, undergoing its own strenuous purification through the "cult of true womanhood," was thought especially vulnerable to Rome's unbridled female sensualism.

If American Protestant women were engineering a problematic escape from centuries of misogynist speculation about their tempting, corrupting interiors by denying themselves an interior, by struggling to become transparent vehicles of a domesticated Holy Spirit, these displaced thematics of erotic depth, both either misogynist or sensual in representation, menaced the newly delicate identity of the Protestant woman. In Hawthorne's Marble Faun , Kenyon shudders to think, when the delicate Hilda has disappeared, that she might have suddenly fallen through Rome's precarious surface into some "abyss" or "cavern" or "chasm"—terms that pervade the terrain of the novel and of Romanism as Kenyon imagines it. Figured as a corrupt feminine topography that could engulf the near transparent Protestant woman, Rome transported the Edwardsian image of hell back to Europe, from whence it had fled. Many antebellum tourists shared Kenyon's lingering Calvinist suspicions of the Roman surface and, whether at home or abroad, understood themselves as inheritors of the Enlightenment, out to disclose and enumerate the workings of superstition. The revolutions of 1848 seemed to promise the culmination of this Protestant exposé; as one self-styled historian of the Inquisition exulted at the opening of its chambers during the short-lived Roman Republic, "The inmost recesses of its interior have been explored, and all its abominations are now set before an astonished world."^[1] Invading this Catholic enclosure entailed, as we have seen, a range of literal and vicarious explorations—including cathedral visits, convent attacks, and the writing and reading of anti-Catholic narratives. Dispersing the gloom in the light of Protestant reason would subject Catholicism's regressive privacies to the democratic collective and, by so doing, make apparent the energy and purity of Protestants' antisensual subjectivity.

But the logic of this Protestant exploration dictated a continuing exposure of Catholicism as dangerous interior; the coherence of Protestant subjectivity, then, could be guaranteed only by positing interiors within interiors, an infinite regress designed to satisfy the theological tourist-investigator. Catholicism as global abstraction was itself theorized as imprisoning container so that no matter how many of its specific chambers were exposed, more remained because of its capacity to generate them. As one writer declared, Dante's inscription above the entrance to hell actually described the prison of religion from within which the poet wrote: "It was needed that the appropriate motto should be

engraved in unmistakable characters upon its portals: 'Ye who enter here, leave all hope behind.'"^[2]

Liberal and conservative antebellum Protestants prided themselves on having no such treacherous distinction between inner and outer, spirit and letter; their faith had no gilded covering, no outside and inside, but was instead an integrated, and hence largely invisible, spiritual process, one coincident with the "invisible" church of their Reformed piety. Protestants, in insisting on their piety as one relatively unmediated by human intervention and hence pure—a single substance ideally unmarred by divisions between flesh and spirit—implicitly struggled against the palpable divisions of the ostensibly sovereign self in democratic society. When that sovereign self experienced the numerous circumscriptions of property, gender, and ethnicity as curtailments on its autonomy, it transcended them by imagining a recurrent escape from Romanism, whose spaces, infinitely bounded by rules, costumes, and religious practices, were, furthermore, capable of exhibiting fascinating transformations from "inlaid casket" to "sublime cathedral." Protestant thinkers dwelled, like the hero of "The Pit and the Pendulum," on a slippery spiritual topography, one that descended into this protean Catholic materiality. The further one traveled from Reformed piety toward Roman Catholicism, the more embodied and potentially confining the landscape grew. Of course, those made uncomfortable by such material forms were not insensible to their benefits, even if the need for them suggested a certain spiritual weakness.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, wrote to his wife about their daughter Una's worrisome leanings toward Anglicanism: "Would it be well—(perhaps it would, I really don't know)—for religion to be intimately connected in her mind, with forms and ceremonials, and sanctified places of worship? Shall the whole sky be the dome of her cathedral?—or must she compress the Deity into a narrow space, for the purpose of getting at him more readily?"^[3] Hawthorne's image of Anglicanism as a compression and incarceration of God recalls the claustrophobic discomforts of Pastor Williams with the closeting and consumption made possible by transubstantiation. Only Hawthorne's unease with such enclosures is additionally inflected by a note of worrisome womanly aggression. Una, after all, is credited as agent, one who performs this compression to get "at him more readily." Hawthorne was not unusual in imagining High Church Anglicanism (and Catholicism) as an aggression against the Deity, an unleashing of humanity's imaginative and technical powers to create rival temples, built spaces of

splendid artifact and ceremony that registered the confines of psyche rather than its communions, its aesthetic ingenuity rather than its purity.

Melville's satire of American Episcopalianism in "The Two Temples" unfolds as allegorized exploration of twinned ceremonial enclosures: that of New York's Grace Church and that of a London theater.^[4] Dedicated to Sheridan Knowles, a well-known actor turned Baptist preacher whose antipopery sermons attracted wide attention in the 1850s, Melville's diptych was initially rejected by Putnam's magazine for its potential religious offensiveness. Knowles's career, which involved the theater, antipopery, and evangelical Protestantism, registered the principal concerns of Melville's story. Knowles's nativist sermons attacking the evil of Catholic theatricality inform Melville's ambiguous thematics of captivity in the ecclesiastical impostures of High Church Episcopalianism. But like so many Melvillean protagonists, the narrator only points to the folly, bitingly aware of the absence of charity in the modern world without himself being capable of any.^[5]

Melville's narrator, speaking confidentially with his magazine readership, presents himself as Protestant captive to Catholic materiality, except that the material enclosure is, importantly, not a Catholic one but one of the "new-fashioned Gothic Temples" (304) of the Protestant bourgeoisie. Similarly, he is not so much a captive Reformed Christian as a spokesman for the urban under- and working classes. The proud materiality of this seemingly Catholic edifice, "marble-buttressed [and] stained-glassed" (303), excludes the penniless pilgrim with his prayer book; in retaliation, the self-described "caitiff" (304) exposes the suspect neo-Catholicism of the propertied classes, whose money punishes with an impious authority like that of the pope. After the corpulent beadle has turned him away, the pilgrim impishly explains to his readers: "I suppose I'm excommunicated; excluded, anyway" (303). As the Gothic edifice displays the newly comprehensive powers of capital to destroy both the republican equality and austerities of American Protestantism, captivity is no longer a question of the forced exploration of a taboo interior but of exclusion among the dispossessed, who suffer the constriction of "invisible" market forces rather than of the Inquisition. The "Puseyitish" (308) interior marginalizes the narrator from worshiper to awed spectator. His captivity in a structure of "richly dyed glass . . . flaming fire-works and pyrotechnics" (304) yields, not providential wisdom, but

a new imperialism of aerial perspective, an ability to look down on members of the congregation and to see the structure of market relations and priestly theatrics that sustain them. Perched above the oblivious worshipers, the narrator claims his invisible "pew" is closer to Heaven, his righteous perspective converting the humanity below into "heads, gleaming in the many-colored window-stains . . . like beds of spangled pebbles flashing in a Cuban sun" (306). If the topography of Melville's captivity narrative sardonically inverts that of "The Pit and the Pendulum," placing the prisoner's gaze high above rather than desperately below and looking up at his inquisitional judges, the subjectivities of the two narratives nonetheless share a compressed, defensive space, anxiously monitoring and seeking to thwart the ecclesial authorities pressing upon them.

When the narrator's ascent brings him to a "gorgeous dungeon" (304) of stained glass, his first impulse is to pierce through these Romish mediations to an objective daylight view of the outdoors by "scratch[ing] a minute opening in a great purple star forming the center of the chief compartment of the middle window" (304). But when he does, his unmediated view fails to win him the promised Protestant objective of intimate communion with Christ—communion authenticated by the independent processes of private judgment. Instead, his peephole reveals the church beadle far below, driving off impoverished boys—a sordid inversion of Christ's rage at the money changers.

If Melville's theological critique of mediation frames his critique of the workingman's exclusion from the egalitarian promises of republicanism, concern with the divisive workings of capitalism nonetheless remains entangled with the delusions of the worker's gaze. Having ascended to his highest perch, the narrator is no longer subject to the visual confinement of stained glass, one that identifies his oppression as ecclesiastical; freed from that captivity, he must now contend with the oppression of mortality itself, for a wire screen obscures his view, "casting crape" (306) on the scene below, thwarting his visual mastery and revealing him to readers as but another marred point along the profane perspective. This authorial shading of the utopian narrative eye registers Melville's characteristic suspicion of reformism and also underscores the seclusion of the Protestant voyeur, whose spectatorial attachment to illicit material forms, be they the "dim-streaming light from the autumnal glasses" (307-8), the "enrapturing, overpowering organ" (307), or the "noble-looking" (306) priest, forbids participation in them. Indeed "Temple First" dramatizes the connection between economic dispossession and spiritual incarceration, implying that exclusion from bour-

geois consumption leaves one not only "outside" but confined "inside" one's deprivation: thus the narrator, fleeing the church, finds the beadle has unknowingly locked him in, an indifference to his existence that renders the workings of authority simply paradoxical: "He would not let me in at all at first, and now, with the greatest inconsistency, he will not let me out" (307).

Melville's translation of antebellum Protestant concern with the confinements and intrusive mediations of Romanism into his studies of urban alienation refuses, however, the nativist subtext of that concern: the hero of "Temple First," having been arrested and fined for his anti-Catholic trespass, flees to London, where his adventures in "Temple Second" pointedly expose America's inferiority. The doubled structure of the diptych enforces the resemblance of Victorian America to England—the narrator again "outside," destitute and isolate amid the crowds of "Babylonian London" (310) that surge aggressively against him in a kind of Malthusian apocalypse. As Babylon, "Leviathan" (310), and Tartarus, the city forms a vast and infernal container, whose object is not to compress and torture but to segregate and silence the self, a fate coyly resisted by the chatty, intently allusive, and punning narrator, who looks to "rest me in some inn-like chapel, upon some stranger's outside bench" (310-11). Looking again for ecclesial refuge from the crowded anonymity of urban spaces, the narrator stumbles on a street that ends "at its junction with a crosswise avenue" (311), a topography he imagines as crucifixional. This passional cityscape promises to convert his urban wandering into the pilgrimage that has been continually invoked and foreclosed by the narrative's sheer plethora of scriptural allusions. The crossed streets promise a therapeutic quieting of his chatty questing, a psychological and spiritual relief that he compares to "emerging upon the green enclosure surrounding some Cathedral church, where sanctity makes all things still" (311). The rural simile, however, signals not the attainment of the sacred but an encounter with its simulation—not as Episcopalianism but as theater.

The London experience henceforth functions as the double of the New York experience, imitating its autonomous structures only to thwart them. Entering the alluring theater through the proverbial low side door, the narrator begins another heavenly ascent to imperial spectatorship, with humanity far below; but this time, as he quickly admits, "I had company" (313). Ensconced in empyreal intimacy with a work-ing-class audience, the narrator rejoices in his position at the "very main-mast-head of all the interior edifice" (314), a position from which he can enjoy a "sovereign outlook, and imperial downlook" (314) and

yet not be alone. Ironically the theater's frank simulation—as opposed to the duplicitous artifice of Grace Church—allows the "enraptured thousands" (315) to feel the sacred sensation of fraternal inclusion. The moment signals the emergent importance of mass entertainment in Victorian culture, particularly its utility in quelling working-class dissent by charismatically miming the oppressive state. The narrator's companions rise to give the actor Macready a spontaneous, "unmistakably sincere" (315) ovation for his performance in Bulwer-Lytton's Richelieu; or, The Conspiracy (1839)—an embrace of aesthetic mimesis that exposes the New York priest as hollow actor while praising the charismatic impact of the professional Macready.^[6] Indeed, the imperial perspective of "Temple Second" on "Temple First," with the charity of working-class theater-goers exposing the churlishness of New York Episcopalians, depends on a pointed religious defense of Macready's theatrical incitement and skilled management of audience euphoria—his construction of a perfectly controlled space in which "nothing objectionable was admitted" (314). If the narrator's concluding praise for the charity found in the London theater disturbingly links such virtue to the self-forgetfulness of entertainment, the theater world still enjoys a sacred power. The American church of "Temple First" is disabled by the theatrical analogy while "Temple Second" is finally bolstered by the religious analogy, for the London theater demonstrates an enviable capacity to absorb what it resembles into the matter of its own self-representation.

Conceived of as something one "entered," Catholicism's palpable presence attracted those who felt the oncoming drafts of religious infidelity, or who, like the wanderer through Melville's two temples, longed for community. But that same physicality also indicated corruption and potential suffocation. The church's ornamental exterior was necessarily deceptive, a false visualization of what Protestants claimed must always remain invisible to avoid the taint of idolatry. Melville's conversion of the theater and church, actor and priest in "The Two Temples" extends the language of dissent beyond its traditional target—the vestiges of popery in Anglicanism—and inverts its conventional moral geography. Melville's New York now claims the ornament and corruption of Old World culture while the theater, a traditional target of reform animus, contains the sacred. While ironically locating the sacred in the theatrical, Melville continually invokes traditional suspicions that the Roman church staged magnificent theatricals to bedazzle and manipulate its flock. Its ceremonial revelation of the Godhead in the elevation of the Host was at once mesmerizing and blasphemous, for it restaged an

Incarnation that to Protestants had occurred once, and only once. Indeed, the priest's sacramental enactments, in making visible the invisible workings of spirit, violated the privacy of God's gaze, profaning his theatrical space with that of the human gaze. In the words of one concerned Unitarian:

The Church of Rome is dramatic in all its features. It seems to be its office, and its very essence to act Christianity, and to hold out in exterior exhibition that, which, in its true light, no eye but God's can see. No wonder the Church of Rome is fond of sacraments, when the definition of one so admirably suits herself;—she is "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual church."^[7]

If a dangerous exhibitionism hovered over Catholic ritual, converting its priests into performers and its theology into entertainment, Protestant critics of such spectacle defensively theorized their own intrusive gaze as different from the dazzled eye of the Catholic believer. While the Catholic "spectator" looked gullibly on the priest's theater, Protestants directed their "pure" gaze of detection and ethnographic curiosity on this figure. One journalist observed of Americans who included mass-watching among their activities as tourists abroad that "during the interesting part of the performance, they stand on tip-toe on the kneeling-board to obtain a good view; when the music pleases them they listen in silent admiration; when the interest of either Mass or music lags, conversation, not always confined to an under tone, beguiles the time."^[8] Even sympathetic Protestants persisted in identifying Catholic ritual as secular theater. Loyola's antebellum biographer Isaac Taylor muses on his subject's ostensibly theatrical behavior as the cause of his own uncertain religious views: "The things said and done are in themselves, perhaps, good and approvable; but they are so done and said as if a harlequin were doing and saying them. At every turn of the bedizened performer we are inwardly perplexed, not knowing whether we should admire or scorn what is passing before us."^[9]

Fascination and disdain, enchained attention and alienation coexisted in the Protestant observer who watched Catholicism constrained to perform theatrical spectacles before its critics. Thus did Protestant spectatorship bind together the displays of captivity and theatricality, enforcing a privileged exposure (and degradation) on those "perverted" to Rome. Even the age's most respected convert, Cardinal Newman, described himself as a captured wild beast on display.^[10] One could spy prayerfully, as it were, like the tourist Hawthorne, who recorded in his

Italian notebook that "yesterday I saw a young man standing before a shrine, writhing and wringing his hands in an agony of grief and contrition. If he had been a protestant, I think he would have shut all that up within his heart, and let it burn there till it seared him."^[11] In watching someone else in an "agony" and then recording what he sees for further narrative elaboration, Hawthorne memorably enacts the religious voyeurism at the heart of Protestant spectating.

Against charges of imposture and demonic counterfeiting of the divine, Roman Catholics defended the redemptive possibilities of spectacle, seeing in the unembarrassed exhibition of the crucified body the prime signifier of triumphant spirit. From its original instance—Christ displayed on the cross before the mocking crowds—on through the annals of the Jesuit missionaries (Father Jogues dragged as "spectacle" from one Indian village to another), the spectacular features of Christianity, particularly the image of the male body in extremity, became identified with foreign Catholic representational practices. For American Protestants constrained by the sexual sublimation of Victorian gender relations, a bare cross carried scandalous associations, and a crucifix stirred even greater unease. Thus did Elizabeth Seton's sister try to prevent her from attending mass at St. Peter's church (where José Maria Vallejo's Crucifixion hung over the main altar), by whispering, "They say, my sister, there is a great picture of Our Savior ALL NAKED —!"^[12] When Charles Eliot Norton confronted ubiquitous images of crucified Saviors on his Italian travels, he found their principal effect was "to substitute the coarsest fancies for the most solemn and pathetic truths, and to minister to a diseased craving for unnatural and detestable excitements."^[13] Norton's language of an illicit substitution that provokes a diseased and deviant desire resonates with antebellum medical and clerical attacks against masturbation, whose pleasures not only enervated the ideal entrepreneurial self but also distracted it from the duties of reproduction. The beauty of the male body, exposed on the crucifix, posed a peculiar challenge to male members of New England's Protestant elite (a group whom Emerson had described in his 1830 address "The American Scholar" as "lined with eyes"). American masculine unease before the Italian Catholic aesthetic found no greater expression than in a journal entry by Francis Parkman:

I saw an exhibition of wax figures, among which was one of a dead Christ, covered by a sheet which the showman lifted away with great respect. The spectators, who consisted of five or six young men, immediately took their hats off. Yet, in spite of their respect for the subject on which the artist had exercised

his skill, they did not refrain from making comments on the execution of the figure.^[14]

The responses of both Parkman and Norton must be considered in relation to the age's competing Protestant icon of sacred femininity: Hiram Powers's Greek Slave , a statue that, as we have seen, afforded a purified spectacle of the female body. While Powers's sculpture was repeatedly hailed for its spiritual power, its triumphant dematerialization of a naked girl in chains, images of the Crucifixion were customarily accused of dragging spirit into flesh. The sculptor Horatio Greenough wrote in 1846 that no "American has, until now, risked the placing before his countrymen a representation of Our Saviour. The strong prejudice, or rather conviction of the Protestant mind has, perhaps, deterred many."^[15] Catholic nakedness, its exposure of the male body a taboo representation of erotic arousal and moral degradation, thus differed from Protestant nakedness, in which the exposed female body functioned as fetishized image of the middle-class masculine and feminine discipline of lust.

Such issues of spectatorship, theatricality, and subversive nakedness informed cultural attitudes toward Catholicism-as-theater. In contrast to Peter Cartwright's famed Methodist revivalism techniques that organized conversion into a tripartite architecture of audience, "anxious pen," and space of conversion, three areas of reciprocal vigilance that could shift unpredictably into disorder, Roman Catholic practices unfolded a series of controlled spectacles, radically different from the revival, with its improvisational atmosphere, but no less astonishing in performative skills. The church's "visibility," its sanctified spaces and elaborate "meanings," presented themselves as rarefied aesthetic for many sympathetic Protestant viewers. "As the procession was gliding into the Sacristry, in their pure white albs, like spirits," wrote Sophia Ripley of priests during Easter service, "they fell on their knees like snowflakes, in front of the pavilion. We ignorant children supposed it was only a slight act of reverence and a silent prayer, when they burst forth in the Stabat Mater."^[16]

An antebellum painting by the American Episcopalian and West Point painting instructor Robert Weir beautifully portrays this spectatorial fascination with Catholic ritual. Entitled Taking the Veil , Weir's canvas depicts a young woman in bridal array kneeling before the officiating priest (Fig. 8). Himself reluctant to paint the figure of Christ although deeply interested in the neo-Gothic movement, Weir explained of an earlier work that "I painted the Two Marys at the Tomb , but left the

Fig. 8.
Robert W. Weir, Taking the Veil,  1863. 
Courtesy, Yale University Art Gallery.

figure of Christ to be imagined. I have often so left it. One feels a delicacy in even attempting the delineation."^[17] Troubled by the Catholicism he saw in visiting Italy, Weir was studiously modest in his solemnly theatrical composition of taking the veil. He developed the painting from an 1826 sketch of a consecration he had witnessed in Rome. To the viewer's left stand a crowd of entranced spectators, who fill the hazy background of the cathedral interior and approach the illumined precincts of the main sanctuary. While the eyes of the multitude are fixed

on the ceremonial transaction, the viewer's gaze alternates between the bridal figure and the crowd, witnessing its own spectatorhood on the faces of the witnesses. Weir, as American artist-onlooker, relocates himself from a main to a side gallery. The unreciprocated gaze between painter and crowd is transacted across the downcast eyes of the girl, who kneels in opulent self-effacement, head bowed, appropriately unconscious of her theatrical celebrity. On the verge of being veiled and eclipsed from public scrutiny, she affords one last backstage view of womanhood before retreating from the Protestant eye, her heavily clothed body a discreet substitute for the naked Christ whom Weir hesitated to paint.