Hotbeds of Popery: Convents in the English Literary Imagination
Ana M. Acosta, City University of New York
Volume 15, no. 3-4, April-July 2003
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ABSTRACT
As a political phenomenon, late eighteenth-century anti-Catholicism was primarily concerned with a perceived pro-Catholic lobby in government. In fiction, however, it figured more often in the topos of the nunnery. Nevertheless, The History of Emily Montague suggests that more than a coincidental connection existed between the two. Emily Montague is a travelogue and a political and cultural commentary thinly disguised as a sentimental novel. It is composed mainly out of the letters of Bella Fermor and Edward Rivers in Quebec to Lucy Rivers in England, and from Bella’s father to the Earl of __, also from Canada to England. The skeletal plot culminates with the reunion of putative orphan Emily with her father, a merchant in the West Indies, who had placed her in a convent in France when she was a young child. This was apparently common practice at the time, and in this article I will study a series of novels in which sending or abducting an English girl to a French convent was a central plot device; Emily Montague is unusual because it placed that fictional device within the broader discourse of mainstream eighteenth-century anti-Catholicism. … This study addresses some of the tensions that came into play when religious differences were represented in works of popular fiction: nation-building, fertility as a resource, and the problem of celibacy; women’s self-determination; the dilemma posed by Continental education; marriage and the paucity of viable alternatives to it.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Convents and Nuns” include:
Having Text: Desire and Language in Haywood’s Love in Excess and The Distressed Orphan
by SHARON HARROW (ECF 22.2, Winter 2009-10)
Where the Bodies Are Hidden: Ann Radcliffe’s “Delicate” Gothic
by YAEL SHAPIRA (ECF 18.4, Summer 2006)
Muddy Allegiance and Shiny Booty: Aphra Behn’s Anglo-Dutch Politics
by REBECCA S. WOLSK (ECF 17.1, October 2004)
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