1. On the sentimentalization of antebellum Christianity, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture ; Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs ; David Reynolds, Faith in Fiction , especially chap. 4. The best discussion of middle-class sentiment and its struggles with insincerity remains Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women .

2. For a nineteenth-century defense of affective religion, see Friedrich Schliermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers . See also William A. Clebsch, American Religious Thought .

3. Finney, "Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts" (1836), 8. The crucial point of Finney's "heart religion" is not (as it was for

revivalists of the Great Awakening a century earlier) to dispute rationalistic piety but rather to emphasize moral agency, the individual's voluntary powers and consequent spiritual obligation to (paradoxically enough) will the surrender of his or her will.

4. Charles Stearns, ed., Narrative of Henry "Box" Brown . An illustration of Brown and his box appears in Potter, The Impending Crisis . See also D. G. Mitchell's description of his implied reader of the 1850s best-seller Reveries of a Bachelor : "You sob over that poor dumb heart within you, which craves so madly a free and joyous utterance" (119).

5. On the early American novel's creation of sentimental communion with women readers, see Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word .

6. Scholars of the Indian captivity narrative have traditionally described its reorientation toward sentiment and sensationalism as a corruption of the genre and hence have tended to dismiss later examples. See, for example, Richard VanDerBeets, ed., Held Captive by Indians , introduction; James D. Hart, The Popular Book , 41.

7. On the antebellum literary marketplace, see R. Jackson Wilson, Figures of Speech ; Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace . For Hawthorne's struggles with commercial pressures, see especially Richard H. Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne , chaps. 1-4.

8. R. B. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls . Stratton's tale concludes by thanking God for the blessings of civilization that normally shield us from the sufferings of Indian captivity. Gone is the structure of merciful affliction.

9. Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled , notes a similar development in American drama: "What did happen in the nineteenth-century theater repeated the pattern Tocqueville constantly found in American manners generally: democracy freed drama from its literary conventions, but this liberty begot a conformity or voluntary compliance with other conventions that was at least as strict as anything imposed before" (171). For The Narrative of the Capture and Subsequent Sufferings of Mrs. Rachel Plummer, Written by Herself , see VanDerBeets (333-66). Parenthetical page references in the text are to this edition.

10. W. B. Carnochan, Confinement and Flight , notes a similar constellation of images in Crusoe's adventures: "The cave within a cave, the womb at the end of the tunnel, turns into a vaulted cathedral full of sparkle and opulence" (42).

11. David Meredith Reese, Humbugs of New-York , 238.

12. As quoted in Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 , 57.

13. Jules Michelet, Priests, Women, and Families , 268n.

14. John Claudius Pitrat, Paul and Julia . Pitrat's anti-Catholic tale of seduction by priests and eventual gravesite death offers an intriguing

masculine counterpart to Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple . Carol Z. Wiener, "The Beleaguered Isle," Past and Present 51 (1971), notes that "the abstract notion of man's corruptibility was confused inextricably with the concrete problem of his inability to resist the lures of the Catholic Church" (46). The phrase, "prisons of confiding girls" is from Nicholas Murray [pseud. Kirwan], Romanism at Home , 206. Murray's appeal to Chief Justice Taney's professional mastery over the problem of human corruptibility reflects a gradual nineteenth-century shift in cultural authority from the clergy to the law. Taney is Murray's object of professional appeal who, even if Roman Catholic, can be encouraged to uncover Catholic duplicity because his training has presumably overcome his religion: "Brought up to a profession which proverbially sharpens the intellect for just discrimination . . . you are as capable of separating the false from the true, the fiction from fact, the seeming from the real, as any other American citizen" (18).

15. The gender issues fueling antebellum convent agitation prefigure those at work in twentieth-century female Gothics. Tanya Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance , argues that the novelistic interiors that trap the twentieth-century Gothic heroine represent women's "most intimate fears, or, more precisely, their fears about intimacy—about the exceedingly private, even claustrophobic nature of their existence" (20). The Fourierist phalanstery, imagined by a nineteenth-century utopian like John Adolphus Etzler as offering "the greatest comforts . . . to the greatest sum of individuals in the smallest space," clearly rivaled the domestic project, as did Thoreau's ideal house, envisioned as a spartan and uncompartmentalized space that would reveal him as living life "sincerely." For a discussion of Etzler and Thoreau, see Steven Fink, "Thoreau and the American Home," Prospects 2 (1987): 330-31.

16. Samuel M. Hopkins, "John Knox and Mary, Queen of Scots," in The Christian Parlor Book , n.p.

17. Jules Michelet, Priests, Women, and Families , 164. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text. Michelet and Michel Foucault ( The History of Sexuality ) agree that confession played a prime role in the sexualization of the idle bourgeois woman. But Michelet, from his paranoid vision, interpreted the phenomenon as indicating the overweening ambition of priests to rule. Foucault, applying more diffuse conspiratorial notions of "power," argues that confession (particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) was a self-reflexive event by which the bourgeoisie distinguished and affirmed itself as a class by endowing itself with a verbose sexuality. Protestant conviction that confessional discourse seduced female penitents anticipated Foucault's analysis of the "science" of confession and its influence on the developing discourse of sexuality. In Foucault's words, the rite of confession developed after the Council of Trent into "the nearly infinite task of telling—telling oneself and another, as often as possible, every-

thing that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex" (20).

18. The Escaped Nun and Other Narratives , 19.

19. For an illuminating discussion of the precariousness of the middle-class family in nineteenth-century America, see Richard H. Brodhead, "Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America," Representations 21 (1988): 67-96.

20. Orestes A. Brownson, "Madness of Antichristians," in The Works of Orestes A. Brownson , 14:415.

21. Josephine M. Bunkley, The Testimony of an Escaped Novice , 25-26.

22. Murray, Romanism at Home , 167.

23. As quoted in Oliver W. Larkin, Art and Life in America , rev. ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 180. See also T. Walter Herbert, "The Erotics of Purity," Representations 36 (1991).

24. The Escaped Nun and Other Narratives , 77.

25. Rosamond Culbertson, Rosamond; or, a Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of an American Female under the Popish Priests . . ., 261. Ewens, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth Century America , states that there is no evidence that Culbertson actually existed; hence my use of quotation marks around her name.

26. Henry M. Field, The Good and the Bad in the Roman Catholic Church , 25.

27. Joseph F. Berg, The Great Apostacy , 88.

28. Father Chiniquy, The Priest, the Woman, and the Confessional , 119, 125.

29. Charles W. Frothingham, The Haunted Convent , 23.

30. "Female Convents," Christian Examiner 19 (1836): 55.

31. Bunkley, The Testimony of an Escaped Novice , 34.

32. "Sulla Morale Cattolica Osservazioni di Alessandro Manzoni," Christian Examiner 25 (1839): 289.

33. Bunkley, The Testimony of an Escaped Novice , 35.

34. Field, The Good and the Bad in the Roman Catholic Church , 10. Rising nativist sentiment in the 1830s and 1840s submerged even these tentatively positive images of monastic life. Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition , notes that "in 1839, S. Goodrich offers a pleasant picture of life in a convent, and a story of a monk heroically offering his own great artistic talent to God. In 1853 the same author presents a violently biassed picture of the Catholic Church in which he accuses it of approaching idolatry" (52). See also Philip Gleason, "Mass and Maypole Revisited," Catholic Historical Review 57 (1971): 265.

35. My thinking on the constrictions of Protestant selfhood is indebted to Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capital-

ism ; John Owen King III, The Iron of Melancholy ; Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages ; Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament .

36. Auguste Carlier, Marriage in the United States , 32. Carlier convincingly disputes Tocqueville's appeal to democracy as the principal explanation for the independence and virtue of American women, citing instead the influence of Anglo-Saxon culture and Protestantism. My analysis of the convent's deviation from the mobile and self-reliant ways of American women is indebted to Ewens, The Role of the Nun .

37. Foxe's Book of Martyrs , ed. G. A. Williamson. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text.

38. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims .

39. As quoted in Ewens, The Role of the Nun , 97.

40. Michelet, Priests, Women, and Families , 204.

41. For discussions of this maternal power, see Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood ; Katherine Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher . Gillian Brown, "The Empire of Agoraphobia," Representations 20 (1987), is a fine study of the psychic (and spatial) constraints of such affectional domesticity.

42. Edward Beecher, The Papal Conspiracy Exposed , 150. The literature of antebellum no-popery had no conception of the priest's possible parenting skills, such as those of the missionary priest Charles Nerinckx, remembered by Archbishop Martin Spalding; in church, Spalding recalled, Nerinckx, "surrounded by the little children, who so dearly loved him, . . . knelt down, and, with his arms extended in the form of a cross,—the children raising also their little arms in the same manner—he recited prayers in honor of the five blessed wounds of our Divine Saviour" (as quoted in Ann Taves, The Household of Faith , 15).

43. In discussing the surprising popularity of Warner's novel, one reviewer explained that "papas were not very difficult to convert, for papas like to feel their eyes moisten, sometimes, with emotions more generous than those usually excited at the stock-exchange or in the counting-room" ( North American Review , n.s. 67 (1853): 113. On the "quiet" of domestic novels, see Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers , 204. For two good discussions of the novel, see Susan S. Williams, "Widening the World," American Quarterly 42 (1990); and Isabelle White, "Anti-Individualism, Authority, and Identity," American Studies 31 (1990).

44. Donald Grant Mitchell, Reveries of a Bachelor , 79. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text.

45. My argument about Ik Marvel's fantasies of destruction is indebted to the following works on the idolatrous or iconoclastic imagination: John Phillips, The Reformation of Images ; Margaret R. Miles, Image as Insight ; Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane ; Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism , especially chap. 3.

46. "Social Influence of Catholic Theology," Metropolitan 1 (1853): 79.

47. James Jackson Jarves, Italian Sights and Papal Principles , 334.

48. "The Artistic and Romantic View of the Church of the Middle Ages," Christian Examiner 45 (1849): 362.

49. "The Ladies of the Sacred Heart," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 17 (1858): 205-6. Subsequent page references to this article are given parenthetically in the text.

50. "Margaret—the Lay Sister," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 17 (1858): 806-13. Page references to this article are given parenthetically in the text.

51. "Discourse at the Habiting of an Ursuline Nun," in The Works of the Right Reverend John England , 4:203.