Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses: The Case of Charlotte Bronte

Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses The Case of Charlotte Brontë Diana Peschier Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catho...

Author: Diana Peschier

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Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses The Case of Charlotte Brontë

Diana Peschier

Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses

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Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses The Case of Charlotte Brontë Diana Peschier

© Diana Peschier 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 13: 978–1–4039–4302–6 hardback ISBN 10: 1–4039–4302–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peschier, Diana, 1950– Nineteenth-century anti-Catholic discourses : the case of Charlotte Brontë / Diana Peschier. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–4302–8 1. Brontè, Charlotte, 1816–1855 – Characters – Catholics. 2. Christianity and literature – England – History – 19th century. 3. Anti-Catholicism – England – History – 19th century. 4. Brontè, Charlotte, 1816–1855 – Religion. 5. Anti-Catholicism in literature. 6. Catholics in literature. I. Title. PR4169.P36 2005 823⬘.8––dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2005042519

For David and Francesca


Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

x

1

Introduction

1

2 The Construction of an Anti-Catholic Ideology in the Nineteenth Century: Sexuality, Gender, Patriarchy and the Discourse of Fear

10

3 Forgive Me Father: The Sacrament of Confession as a Means to Control and Debauch Young Girls and Women

25

4 The Danger of Gliding Jesuits and the Effects of a Catholic Education

43

5 Lifting the Veil: A Nineteenth-century Perception of Nuns and Convents

70

6 Nineteenth-century Anti-Catholic Discourse in the Brontë’s Local Newspapers

91

7 The Perceived Anti-Catholicism of Charlotte Brontë’s Novel: The Professor

98

8 Jane Eyre: Anti-Catholic or Anti-Christian? Shirley: A ‘Social’ Novel

109

9 The Priestcraft of the Book: Representations of Catholicism in Villette

138

10 Conclusion: A Discourse of Fear Engendered by the Rise of Roman Catholicism in Mid-nineteenth-century England

162

Notes

165

Bibliography and Sources

183

Index

193

vii


List of Illustrations 1. Frontispiece of Thomas Godfrey Jack, Beauty and the Beast: A Soul Trap of Satan. London: William Wileman, 1899. 2. (a and b) ‘Two satirical depictions of the danger of Roman Catholicism.’ Punch or the London Charivari, vol. 20. 1851. 3. Photograph of ‘Maria Monk’ and Child. Title page of Rev. J.J. Slocum, Conformation of Maria Monk’s Disclosures. London: James S. Hodson, 1837. 4. Frontispiece of The Appalling Records of Popish Convents and the Awful Disclosures of Tortured Nuns. London: F. Farrah, 1865. 5. Title page of ‘The Horrors of Roman Catholic Convents, Exposed in a True Heartrending Account of the Shocking Imprisonment and Sufferings of Sister Barbara, a Polish Carmelite Nun, who was Walled up Alive for Twenty-One Years in the Cold Dark Cell of an Infected Underground Dungeon’, in Lancelot Holland, Walled up Nuns and Nuns Walled in. Edinburgh: William Wileman, 1895. 6. Frontispiece of Brompton Revelations: An Exposure of the Mysteries and Iniquities as Daily Practised in Foreign and English Convent Prisons. London: Elliot, 1865. 7. ‘Articles of Piety alias Instruments of Torture’. An engraving from a photograph in A Plea for the Suppression of Convents. London: Protestant Evangelical Mission and Electoral Union, 1870. 8. ‘Receipt’ (copied from the original) from an ecclesiastical warehouse in London. A Plea for the Suppression of Convents. London: Protestant Evangelical Mission and Electoral Union, 1870. 9. ‘Abuses of Romanism’ Part of a Chart from, Romanism Versus Protestantism – or the Inevitable Result of the Present Crisis in the World’s History. Part 1. London: 1851.

ix

Acknowledgements My thanks are extended to all those who gave me support and encouragement in the writing of this book. Adam Roberts, whose critical suggestions, numerous readings of rewrites and above all, understanding and confidence in my ability gave me the motivation to complete this work. I want to thank my friends and former fellow-students on the Women’s History MA at Royal Holloway, Sara Bailey, Meg Irving, Linda Massie, Deirdre Palk, Julie Peakman and Stephanie Spencer whose nurture and wisdom helped me overcome the numerous obstacles I encountered during the often lonely task of writing. My special thanks are reserved for my husband David Peschier and my daughter Francesca for their sense of humour, interest in my studies and above all their patience, while this long project underwent completion. They have been my companions on trips to Haworth and Brussels, have tolerated my obsession with nuns and Jesuits and have laughed me through my difficulties.

x

1 Introduction

I am going to inquire why it is, that, in this intelligent nation and in this rational nineteenth century, we Catholics are so despised and hated by our own countrymen, with whom we have lived all our lives, that they are prompt to believe any story, however extravagant, that is told to our disadvantage; as if beyond a doubt, we were, every one of us, either brutishly deluded or preternaturally hypocritical, and they themselves, on the contrary, were in comparison of us absolute specimens of sagacity, wisdom, uprightness, manly virtue, and enlightened Christianity. I am not inquiring why they are not Catholics themselves, but why they are so angry with those who are. Newman, Lectures, p. 11 This is a book about nineteenth-century anti-Catholic discourses and how Charlotte Brontë portrayed Roman Catholicism in her novels. Research for this book involved the reading of a great many antiCatholic texts written during and around the middle of the nineteenth century in order to place Brontë’s depiction of Catholicism within the framework of Victorian social ideologies. It is not a book about religion and although such works as Marianne Thormahlen, The Brontës and Religion (1999) have been consulted they have not been engaged with as they are not relevant to my argument which revolves around the use of anti-Catholic imagery determined by the cultural context of the day. Anti-Catholicism, although part of the English cultural inheritance from the time of the Reformation, was especially prominent in the nineteenth century for historical reasons and much anti-Papist propaganda that was prevalent in the eighteenth century2 re-emerged in a 1

2


slightly different form at this time. In this book, publications are approached in terms of gender-relations, patriotism, strategies of power and control and how they emerge from the narratives of anti-Catholic, Victorian literature and the novels of Charlotte Brontë. Irish immigration influenced nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism and to the English Protestant the faith of the Irish was simply an extension of their nationality. During the first half of the century the Irish and the Roman Catholic populations in England were growing: the number of Irish born English citizens grew from 290,891 in 1841 to 519,959 in 1851.3 In 1823 Daniel O’Connell founded the Catholic Association to campaign for the removal of discrimination against Catholics. In 1828 he was elected as MP for County Clare but as a Catholic he was not allowed to take his seat in the House of Commons. In 1829, in response to widespread agitation throughout Ireland and the fear that it would lead to revolution, the British Parliament passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act, which granted Catholic emancipation and allowed O’Connell to take his seat. The Act marked a defeat for the Ultra Protestants. To supporters of Catholic Emancipation the Act meant that their Catholic compatriots should have the political right to sit in the British Parliament. To its opponents however, it marked a retreat from the principle of an established, official, state church and meant that Catholics could, by their vote in Parliament, have real influence over the Church of England. By 1850, fuelled by the influx of Irish immigrants fleeing the famine, the number of Roman Catholics in England and Wales had increased considerably and the so-called Papal Aggression achieved the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy.4 Partly to administer to the large number of Irish Catholics emigrating to England, the Catholic Church re-established its full hierarchy consistent with that of Catholic countries. Thirteen sees and the archdiocese of Westminster were established. Cardinal Wiseman was appointed as cardinal and Catholic Archbishop of Westminster and returned to England in November 1850 in the midst of a climate of widespread ‘No Popery’ prejudice. This was fed by fierce Protestant suspicions about the rise of Roman Catholicism and also the fact that Wiseman was considered to be militant and extremely outspoken. His ‘Pastoral Letter’ (1850) ‘Out of the Flaminian Gate’ reinforced the fears of those who believed that the re-establishment of the hierarchy would be the first stage in a Catholic takeover of England. In this letter Wiseman celebrates the new Catholic organisation in England in provocative language. He speaks of ‘governing’ the various counties of England. This statement was alleged to have elicited an imperious reaction from Queen Victoria in which she enquires whether she is Queen of England

Introduction 3

or not, and it evoked many outbursts of bigotry and extreme reaction from English Protestants. Catholicism was equated with moral and political depravity, corruption and superstition and Wiseman’s effigy was burnt. Several Catholic churches had their windows broken and ‘No Popery’ processions were held throughout England. Another factor that contributed to the anti-Catholic mood of midnineteenth-century England, was the emergence of the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement which had resulted in such prominent cases as the conversion of John Henry Newman to Catholicism in 1845. The term ‘Oxford Movement’ is used to describe the activities and ideas of an initially small group of people at the University of Oxford who argued against what they saw as the increasing secularisation of the Church of England and sought to return it to its apostolic heritage and to the catholic doctrines of the early Church Fathers. In the early 1830s a group of young men formed around John Keble at Oriel College. They became increasingly outspoken about the shortcomings of the contemporary Church of England. John Henry Newman, Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Richard Hurrell Froude a junior fellow of Oriel College and William Palmer, a fellow of Worcester, joined with Keble to launch a series of ‘Tracts for the Times’ (hence the name Tractarians). Ninety tracts were published over eight years with such subjects as: What does ‘consecration’ of the eucharistic elements signify? How were the ‘golden ages’ of the early Church fathers and seventeenth-century Anglican theology to be recovered? Perhaps the most controversial tract (Tract Ninety) was that written by Newman in 1841 which argued that there was nothing in the 39 articles contrary to the Council of Trent. In 1834 another young fellow of Oriel College, Edwards Bouverie Pusey, joined the Tractarians. After Keble’s retirement from Oxford in the early 1820s, the leadership of the Oxford Movement had been largely left to Newman. However, because of the public protest that followed the publishing of Tract Ninety Newman increasingly withdrew to his semimonastic establishment at Littlemore and Pusey emerged as the new figurehead of the movement in Oxford. After Newman was received into the Roman Communion, his followers turned to Pusey. The ‘Puseyites’ (as his followers were called) incited much controversy within the church. At the same time there were increasing vocations to the religious life. In 1841, Pusey heard the first profession of a nun in the Church of England for three centuries. Rituals that were seen by many Protestants as the aping of the papist church, became common practice in such parishes at St Saviours, Leeds, a parish that Pusey had endowed. Vestments were worn, thuribles were swung, genuflecting was encouraged

4


and the sign of the cross was made. Devotion to the blessed sacrament was taken for granted, confessions were heard and holy anointing was practised. The ritualists gave rise to a long and bitter battle and it is not surprising that in the mid-nineteenth century they were frequently ‘lumped together’ with Roman Catholics in the minds of the Evangelical Protestants. The ‘No Popery’ movement of 1850–51, though informed principally by religious tradition, in its widest application represented certain popular beliefs that were characterised by a strong Evangelical impulse.5 The extravagant imagery found in the literature accompanying the agitation against Catholicism reveals something like hysteria and an increasing belief in conspiracy theories that verge on paranoia. This anti-Catholic feeling was aroused in the Protestant public, by certain clergymen and anti-Catholic preachers who travelled extensively on both sides of the Atlantic,6 through the popular religious press and by a particular genre of fictional writing. A good example of the type of language used by Protestant writers to express anti-Catholic feeling can be found in a book written in 1851 by Rev. Dawson Massy, the title of which clearly reflects its contents: Dark Deeds of the Papacy Contrasted with Bright Lights of the Gospel, also the Jesuits Unmasked and Popery Unchangeable. The imagery of the darkness of Catholicism immediately evokes an atmosphere of fear and repression with the insinuation of underlying foul deeds. The idea that the Jesuits should be unmasked supports the fear that these priests worked in disguise, secretly infiltrating English society. The Jesuits were founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1522, suppressed by Pope Clement XIII in 1733 and re-established by Pope Pius VII in 1814. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they devoted themselves to their great mission of education. The Jesuits were seen as being very clever and slightly foreign with an aura of mystery about them, an image of the order that has been consistently reproduced in literature. In writing about the consequences of the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy Dawson makes his opinion explicit:7 As for ENGLAND we know not how to describe the extraordinary arrogance shown in the late Papal aggression, or the tremendous evils which may be the consequence, if prompt and sufficient measures not be instantly taken to crush this ‘serpent’s root, from which shall come forth a cockatrice, and whose fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent.’ (Massy, Dark Deeds, p. 155)

Introduction 5

By quoting Isaiah 14:29, Dawson uses a device which was common amongst the Evangelical Protestant writers who often employed direct quotations from the Bible, allusions to the text and a biblical idiom to reinforce the idea that they were the true interpreters of God’s word. This type of anti-Catholic writing was widespread during the nineteenth century and it illustrates both a long history of similar prejudices and their reinterpretation in the light of the religious atmosphere of the time. In the middle part of the century anti-Catholic feeling was prevalent amongst the English speaking nations of the world. Many of the works cited in this book were published in America and Canada as well as in England. This literature reflects a fear of Catholic institutions and sacerdotal practices, especially of the priesthood and female religious orders which went against strongly held Victorian Protestant beliefs. The vow of celibacy contradicted Protestant culture, the bedrock of which was the structured family life that was the embodiment of a patriarchal society. In England anti-Catholicism was not only a religious and gender issue but it also had a strong nationalistic component. In a work written to warn Englishmen of the threat of a French invasion, Henry Drummond MP expresses a fear of how Catholicism subverts the English way of life:8 We have many traitors who will obey an Italian priest rather than the Sovereign of Great Britain; so absurdly superstitious, that, finding their trade in imposture falling off in England, they recommend their followers to pray to a dead woman and to a bit of bread. The majority of us, however, have the desperation of men who are fighting for all that man can hold most dear, – country, property, wives, children … The above four concerns of English Protestant males: country, property, wives and children play an important role in different categories of antiCatholic literature. In particular, I will explore how these issues informed a nineteenth-century anti-Catholic discourse and gave it a distinct gendered dimension. By the middle of the nineteenth century, fiction that was overtly antiCatholic was being written for a religiously aware middle class. Some of this writing was presented as based on fact and some was produced in the form of a novel or short story. Much of the literature explored the themes of sex and/or death and whether the style was lurid or restrained it was evidently gendered. It has to be recognised that anti-Catholicism in literature is part of the Gothic tradition and that the eighteenth-century Gothic novel, particularly those that use the anti-Catholic motif, may well have had an influence on nineteenth-century anti-Catholic literature

6


and the novels of Charlotte Brontë.9 In the eighteenth century Gothic signified a writing of excess. Because political uncertainty and fears over the nature of society, sexuality and family are at the centre of Gothic fiction, it is natural that the Gothic novel was particularly popular during the time of the French Revolution. These novels often had an antiCatholic subtext which continued into the nineteenth century when fears around Irish Catholic immigration added more fuel to the belief that Roman Catholicism was a real threat to Protestant English society. Late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Gothic fiction contains a strong element of disguise. Many of the male characters are not who they appear to be.10 In nineteenth-century anti-Catholic literature, female Jesuits and nuns join their male counterparts in masquerading as members of secular society in order to infiltrate English homes. One particular narrative that recurs in this type of writing is that of the convent story. According to these tales, convents were gloomy, grave-like places of living death. Typically Gothic locations which were adapted to fit local conditions and themes. The inmates were usually portrayed as young, beautiful, innocent girls imprisoned against their will. Whilst in the convent, these poor girls faced the tyranny of bitter abbesses, sexual corruption, physical and mental abuse and even death at the hands of their superiors.11 Other popular motifs, such as confession, scheming Jesuits (both male and female), the danger of Catholic girls’ schools and the constant surveillance carried out by the Catholic Church had more to do with the protection of innocent, young Protestant girls than with theological debate. The contrast between the situation of girls and women in England and that of females on the continent is frequently alluded to. In pointing out such differences, the Rev. Hobart Seymour asks what purpose of religion could it serve to immure young girls of 16 years of age in ecclesiastical prisons?12 He makes the observation: There is a difference between the people of England and the nations of the continent, and that difference is, among other things, our free and Protestant Christianity. That Protestant Christianity has given to England a married clergy – men who can honestly take their wives to their bosoms and look at their daughters around their hearths, and who, therefore, can sympathise with the feelings of the women and in the interests of the daughters of the land. (Rev. Seymour, Convents or Nunneries, p. 24) The Roman Catholic practice of incarcerating young women in convents was believed to be one of the causes of female insanity and

Introduction 7

convents and lunatic asylums were seen as similar types of institutions by many anti-Catholic writers. In 1847, the writer Catherine Sinclair wished to warn the young against being ‘ensnared’ by Romanism. She mentions young women who were amongst her personal acquaintances who had been buried in foreign convents, shut up in lunatic asylums, and who had died in such a fever of Popish perplexity that the doctors declared, had they lived it would have been in a state of derangement.13 Because of this connection between asylum and nunnery, it is necessary to take a look at some nineteenth-century medical texts that refer to women’s mental health in order to compare the ‘religious’ and ‘medical’ attitudes towards women’s psychological and emotional disorders. The way that the anti-papal backlash triggered by the Papal Aggression is reflected in its various guises in the minor literature of the period, produced a gendered set of tropes that became established images in the novels of Charlotte Brontë. This meant that for many critics, her work is seen as being overtly anti-Catholic. However, I believe that Brontë is a novelist of such superiority that she cannot be limited by prejudice or literary genre. The various forms of writing she employs are fused and moulded into her distinctive style. Brontë recognised that to communicate with her audience she had to take advantage of the hold which ideas such as anti-Catholicism and styles like the Gothic had over the public imagination. The novel most cited as the best example of this is Villette. In her study, Lisa Wang makes the link between ‘Brontë’s novels and contemporary theological controversies.’14 More specifically, she makes the point that the religious issue which was most current during the writing of Villette was the intensifying Protestant/Catholic conflict in England and the role of the Oxford Movement. The reading of Villette as an anti-Catholic novel has assumed near-traditional status among its critics from Charlotte Brontë’s friend Harriet Martineau onwards.15 Whilst commentators such as Rosemary Clark Beattie16 acknowledge that Villette differs markedly from the ‘standard run of mid-century anti-Catholic literature’, the perception that Charlotte Brontë is clearly anti-Catholic in her writing is a recurring one, as is the belief that Villette is a very antiCatholic novel, possibly the most anti-Catholic in the canon.17 Gilbert and Gubar say that nothing is more irritating to some readers than the anti-papist prejudice of Villette,18 whilst Robert Bernard Martin accepts Brontë’s anti-Catholicism as axiomatic and uses it as the basis on which to build his critique of the exploration of rationalist thinking and emotionalism found in her novels.19 He says that Brontë uses her antiCatholic emotions thematically as she equates Roman Catholic doctrines and practices with emotionalism and the undisciplined aspect of human

8


nature: the submission of reason and will to the irrational. Although Martin does admit that there are certain elements of Catholicism that Brontë finds attractive there is nevertheless an underlying assumption that she was profoundly anti-Catholic.20 It is this fundamental belief that Brontë’s work is anti-Catholic that colours many critics’ analyses of her work. Tom Winnifrith says that in Villette, the attack on Roman Catholicism is ‘more definite and more vehement’ than in The Professor. He believes that a possible reason for Charlotte Brontë’s hostility to Catholicism is her dislike of elaborate ritual mingled with a secret hankering after it.21 Irene Taylor points out that Villette in particular among all of Brontë’s novels, is a deeply religious book.22 In fact, these critics all agree that Brontë’s religion pervades her novels23 and many see a perceived anti-Catholicism as germane to her writing. Patricia Duncker, whilst affirming that the ‘violent anti-Catholic propaganda’ expressed in Villette ‘equates Rome with a philosophy of discipline and control that is little short of Fascist’,24 also observes that ‘Lucy is saved from terminal hysteria by telling all in the Catholic confessional’. She might have added that she was also saved by her love for a jesuitical Catholic. It is important to place Charlotte Brontë’s writing within its historical context and to note her various expressions of sarcastic intolerance of the Roman church; an intolerance that, according to her biographer Lyndall Gordon, she reserved for Catholicism alone.25 However, it is also interesting to note that the literature of the sub-genre of anti-Catholicism that grew up in the first half of the nineteenth century created a particular climate – a climate within which Brontë would express herself through the popular images of this particularly Protestant writing, even when she did not intend her text to be directed against the Catholic Church.26 The heroine of Villette Lucy Snowe is possibly the most cited of Charlotte Brontë’s characters in the debate about the portrayal of Catholicism in her novels. Lucy fears Catholicism because it offers her, as an alternative to alienation, ‘the self-contained world of religious fanaticism’. For Lucy, there are in Catholicism elements to which she responds profoundly, feelings which represent both the spiritual and the erotic. Moglen particularly notes the significance of the figure of the nun for Lucy, which she describes as ‘the chill form of enforced virginity’.27 The tension between independent Protestantism and authoritarian Catholicism and between English stolidity and the Continental temperament is very important to the understanding of many of Brontë’s characters,28 as is the conflict between submission and domination, control and letting go that fuels much of the discord between Catholic and Protestant

Introduction 9

temperaments. Annette Schreiber says that Charlotte Brontë has done something ‘unique’ with the novel form:29 She has allowed it to capture and represent the multi-layers of a human consciousness, the rational and the irrational, the manifest and the latent, the conscious and the unconscious, simultaneously and immediately. (Schreiber, ‘The Myth in Charlotte Brontë’, p. 66) This leads her to develop a psychic allegory in Jane Eyre and Villette that enables her to ‘record the stream of unconsciousness contrapuntally with the consciousness of the alienated woman’. In addition to employing ‘psychic allegory’, Brontë also makes use of a religious allegory which evolves into the form of myth or parable. Whilst the division between Protestantism and Catholicism is crucial to the writing of Charlotte Brontë, it is of secondary importance to the underlying discourse of alienation, repression and desire which that writing articulates. It is necessary to keep in mind McGlamery’s belief that:30 Patently, when she wrote Villette Brontë had no idea that her portrait of Catholicism would create such a furore. It seems obvious that she felt it to be neither passionately or virulently anti-Catholic. When we compare the offending passages in Villette to the overtly anti-Catholic literature of the day, we can understand her perspective. (McGlamery, ‘This Unlicked Wolf Cub’, p. 67)

2 The Construction of an Anti-Catholic Ideology in the Nineteenth Century: Sexuality, Gender, Patriarchy and the Discourse of Fear

Mid-nineteenth-century anti-Catholic discourse was fuelled by stories of girls being inveigled into convents, terrible ‘goings on’ within the convent walls, and warnings of how Roman Catholicism could destroy even the bonds of matrimony. Two very well known and sensational cases of the time were The case of Maria Monk and Connelly v. Connelly. Maria Monk claimed that she had been lured from her home and served for five years as a novice and two years as a Black Nun. During her time at the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal, Canada, she was ‘debauched’ and gave birth to a baby which she saved from destruction by fleeing the convent. Her ‘Awful Disclosures’ (1837) give a picture of torture, dark underground cells, licentious priests and the murder of innocent babes. The Connelly case was far less sensational and related to two American Episcopalians who had converted to Catholicism in 1835 and had received a papal separation so that Pierce could become a priest and Cornelia a nun. They moved to England where Pierce quarrelled with Cardinal Wiseman, left the church and sued Cornelia in the Arches Court (1849–51) for the restitution of conjugal rights. Newspaper reports focussed on the Pope’s claim to dispense with the vows of matrimony.1 The danger to the Protestant family posed by the escalation of Roman Catholicism in England was illustrated by such ‘true’ accounts and led writers such as Catherine Sinclair to warn young girls about being tricked into convents and being approached whilst walking 10

Anti-Catholic Ideology 11

in public gardens:2 Those girls who expiate in joyous freedom along the daisied meadows of England, the sun shining over their heads, and the flowers blooming around their path, would not be easily persuaded to make their permanent abode at the bottom of a coal pit. (Sinclair, Modern Superstitions, p. 6) This chapter will examine some of the incidents which were used to illustrate the dangers of Roman Catholicism and explore how they kindled the anti-Catholic feelings of English Protestants. On Friday 15 November 1844, a report in the Times informed its readers that earlier that year popular accounts of the terrible doings of the Roman Catholic clergy with designs on young, innocent, Protestant girls had left the realms of fiction to become historical reality:3 A popular French writer has recently asserted, in a work of fiction, in which he virulently, though not always unjustly, assails the policy of the Romish clergy, that the pretensions of the more unscrupulous members of that church openly defy all the most sacred relations of mankind, that they dare to set at nought the ties of filial duty, and that no artifices are too base for them to resort to in furtherance of their ends. But we have met with nothing in the pages of fiction which illustrates these serious and almost incredible charges more forcibly than an occurrence which has actually taken place in the course of the present year in one of the capitals of the South of Europe. We feel impelled to give to these painful events and most sinister machinations a greater publicity than they have hitherto received, not only because it is well that the actors in such transactions should learn that they cannot escape the animadversion of Europe, but because the case we are about to relate affords a warning not to be overlooked by our own Protestant fellow countrymen whose families may chance to fall within the reach of the same dangerous influences. (The Times, 19 November 1844) The Times documented how the daughter of the Dutch minister at the court of Turin was abducted by clerical conspirators of the Church of Rome and ‘entombed’ in a convent. Stories about innocent girls led astray by designing clerics who relieve them of their fortunes and their chastity are common in much anti-Catholic material published in the

12 Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses

mid-nineteenth century. The press reported alleged cases in real life and these helped foster sentiments against Rome.4 In the case of the Dutch ambassador’s daughter there is minute attention paid to names, places and times, in an obvious attempt to verify the authenticity of the account. This particular genre of reporting excites the reader’s imagination, stimulating a prurient interest in nuns and nunneries. During May 1844, the Dutch minister at the court of Turin, Monsieur Heldivier, received his letters of recall. At the same time some domestic anxiety had been occasioned to his family by one of the daughters, ‘a young lady of ardent and independent temperament’.5 She was supposed to have formed an attachment to a young lawyer of the town, whose character and position did not make him a suitable match for her. The Heldivier family decided that in the circumstances they would hasten their departure, and the Dutch minister presented his letters of recall to the King of Sardinia. However, due to the illness of another of the children, the Heldivier family was delayed in a hotel in Turin for a few days. On 8 June, a fireworks display was held in honour of the birth of an heir for the Duke of Savoy, and the ex-minister and his wife were obliged to attend the festivities. It was reported that the Heldiviers were reluctant to leave their daughter, who had made a feeble excuse in order to be allowed to stay at home alone. The parents were away a short time, but when they returned, their daughter had disappeared forever. She had left the hotel at night, with no change of dress. When the police were informed, they went straight to the young lawyer who knew nothing about the missing girl. No trace of her could be found. ‘This absence of all evidence raised a strong presumption that she would only be found in the precincts of some convent, more inaccessible than a prison or a tomb.’6 The use of the narrative form to relate a scandalous and ‘true’ event that embodies a primeval fear, that of the loss of a child, enables the reporter to exaggerate the importance of the innocent Protestant girl to the ‘master plan’ of the evil Romish Empire. This form involves the reader in a story which they can relate to and also touches the subconscious and even conscious, deeply embedded fears. The very fact that this story appears in the Times newspaper, a respectable publication, gives immediate credence and coherence to the more salacious and chaotic narratives that were emerging from the anti-Catholic wing of the Protestant church. As the story progresses, one can trace certain cultural meanings in the thrust of the narrative. The role and importance of the paterfamilias is challenged by foreign priests from an alien religion. The honour and inheritance of an upper middle-class, Protestant girl are taken from her by cunning and she is incarcerated behind convent walls which are impenetrable by both those outside and those imprisoned within them.


The story continues with M. Heldivier applying to the Archbishop of Turin for help in tracing the girl. The Archbishop thought it fit to reply to this application, that he had reason to believe that Mademoiselle Heldivier had indeed sought refuge in a convent, but that he was unable to state where she was at present. A few days later however, it came to light that for two years he had been carrying on a system of secret communication with the young lady. Thwarted by her parents in her attachment for the young advocate, she had sought to avenge herself on them by transferring her confidence from her father to this prelate, ‘From her natural protectors, to the jealous arms of Rome.’7 The Archbishop, unwilling to commit himself by a written order, had furnished his convert with one half of a sheet of paper cut in a particular manner; the other half was given to the abbess of the convent of Santa Croce in Turin with orders to receive the bearer of the corresponding fragment at any hour of day or night. Provided with those credentials, the fugitive found shelter within the convent walls. Following the advice of the Archbishop, her flight was deferred until her father, by the delivery of his letters of recall, had surrendered those diplomatic rights and privileges which would have allowed him the free access to his daughter, which would have been fatal to the scheme of the clerical conspirators. The exposure of this religious, and implicitly sexual, scandal in the form of a social drama facilitates his manipulation of the emotions and opinions of the reader who was informed that a concentrated effort was made to bring the authors of the plot to account for their action and to yield up the young girl whom they had in their possession:8 Setting aside the odious secret acts by which this alleged conversion had been effected, and the irreparable damage done to an honourable family, the case was one which demanded the strongest remonstrances as an unparalleled invasion of the law of nations and the rights of diplomatic persons. (The Times, 15 November 1844) A Dutch subject, a minor, a child of a Dutch minister, is encouraged to quit her father’s house, received into a convent, and there detained not only by moral, but by actual force since every attempt to search these convents was resisted by the clergy. To make matters worse, there is an inference of sexual impropriety in the above passage. ‘Odious secret acts’ is a phrase frequently used in this type of literature to mean sexual misconduct. A personal appeal was made to the King by the distracted father, who was granted an audience, but in answer to M. Heldivier’s request for the return of his daughter, the only reply that the ‘absolute monarch’ dared make was that whatever might be his own opinion on


the subject, he dared not interfere with the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the convents for fear of excommunication. The reporter comments:9 Such an answer on such an occasion might have been expected by Philip 2nd of Spain: and such powers that are thus recognised and established fall little short of those of the Inquisition. The principle contended with on behalf of the Church of Rome is this – that any child having completed the age of twelve years may, for any cause, motive or pretext, throw off the parental authority and fling itself under the protection of the Church. If the child be a Protestant, so much the better, since once it abjures its filial duties, it abandons its religious faith; but whether Catholic or Protestant, the protection of the Church thus sought and thus given is absolute and inviolable. (The Times, 15 November 1844) Help in releasing Mlle Heldivier was sought from Mr Abercromby the British minister in the Court of Turin, and Baron Mortier the representative of France. Both men protested strongly against so monstrous a principle, especially when applied to the children of foreigners, accidentally or officially residing in Piedmont. They argued in vain that M. Heldivier, as a diplomat, had an incontestable right to quit the country in peace, taking with him all of his family, ‘The inexorable grasp of the infallible church prevailed.’ The King of Holland is reported to have taken this outrage on the family of his minister with indifference, the outcome being, ‘Mlle. Heldivier remains in the convent of Santa Croce where she has formally abjured the Protestant heresies, and will probably take the veil on the completion of her noviciate.’10 The conclusion of this remarkable article gives context to the polemic embodied in the preceding narrative.11 The author shows his bias in the following statement: We have no wish to draw any excessive or unjust inferences from this strange occurrence, which seems to belong not only to another country but to another age; but it exhibits an awful picture of what the uncontrolled power of the Romish clergy may still dare to effect, and a humiliating example of a Government which has allowed the ties of private right and public law to be broken asunder, because it is itself a victim to the worst sort of bigotry, and the most servile subjection of spiritual oppression. (The Times, 15 November 1844)


On one level this could be seen as rather a crude piece of anti-Catholic propaganda, but the underlying theme points to a deeper layer of cultural significance. In this type of story where the wicked, male priest leads the daughters of middle-class Protestant men astray, it is the father who is most concerned at the loss of his innocent child. This throws an interesting light on the gender and status of the reader to whom the story is addressed who would appear to be the male head of the Protestant household. Reported cases of Roman Catholic priests luring boys into monasteries display a slightly different view of the corruption of innocent minors. In these reports one finds obvious homosexual overtones, as well as a narrative where sexual interest is only obliquely implied. What is of interest to the reader is that these cases concern young boys who are perceived as effeminate for various reasons. The threat to the authority of the father of the beleaguered son and the possibility of the usurpation of his role by the church of Rome reinforces the effectiveness of this genre of anti-Catholic propaganda and points again to an intended male readership. In 1852 a collection of letters from a ‘Romish Priest’ to a Protestant youth was printed by Hall and Co. of London. It was claimed that these letters had been written by the priest who was in secret communication with the boy, and that they had been intercepted despite all the precautions taken.12 It should be at once stated, that this was not one of the too many instances, where young persons have been entrapped by advances on the part of emissaries of Rome, who are continually plying their trade under various forms and by various devices … (Anon., Intercepted Letters, p. 3) The author makes the point that the youth in question was made more vulnerable by his own vanity and stupidity; he admits that the boy’s own limitations made him to a certain extent culpable and goes so far as to list his weaknesses. Nevertheless the reader is made aware that immaturity of youth means that he needs the protection of Protestant friends and families:13 This circumstance, however, in no way abates the importance of the Letters themselves, as an instance of stealthy intrusion upon parental and domestic rights, which is one of the most fearful and hateful of


Romish practices, and as a self-furnished, and, therefore unimpeachable testimony to that system of fair-spoken guile which is among the most dangerous of Romish implements. They are also important by way of warning, as a tendency to shew, that no amount of protective caution on behalf of the young can be too great, where on the one side, there may be simplicity, ignorance, vanity or folly, and on the other, there will certainly be found practised, unscrupulous and wakeful cunning. (Anon., Intercepted Letters, p. 3) The editor of the collection of letters claims that his reason for making them public is to warn fathers of the danger that the Roman Church poses towards their children.14 In a footnote, he writes: The accounts of various forms of religious entrapment practised on the young, which are ever and anon reaching the public ear and eye, appear to carry one common badge upon their front, in the words ‘without knowledge of friends’. It is as if the treacherous attempts were deemed hopeless within the sound of the true counsels of home. The nightly plunderer’s first care is to make riddance of the watch dog. (Anon., Intercepted Letters, p. 5) The vulnerability of a young person, male or female, who is devoid of friends, is a common theme in nineteenth-century literature. This discourse is an appeal to the powerful Protestant male, to protect the unprotected from the clutches of the Roman Catholic clergy, the antithesis of Protestant puritanism. The idea is emphasised in the narrative of the letters from a Romish priest, for example, when the youth is given an introductory note and told to present himself at the ‘house of a neighbouring country gentleman, a member of a class where manly and highminded dealings are especially looked for and ordinarily found …’15 The inescapable implication is that being Catholic is not manly. The ‘country gentleman’ gives the boy ‘a friendly token, in the shape of a Manual of Devotion to the Virgin’. No comment is deemed necessary by the editor. In a letter dated 15 March 1851 a priest advises the youth as to the course he should take in becoming a Roman Catholic. It is obvious that he had previously told the boy not to say anything to his friends or family about his conversion, but now he believes that it is against his own interests to keep it a secret:16 By thus acting, you would afford your Father a strong pretext for saying that you were led astray by haste and folly; perhaps that your


simplicity was imposed upon by crafty malicious priests. And God knows but that in his deep regret he might consider himself entitled to take some not very pleasant steps. (Anon., Intercepted Letters, p. 6) The priest continues his letter with the advice that the boy should be open with his father. The editor, however, disputes the sincerity of this part of the letter, and makes the following comment in his footnotes:17 This self condemnatory passage is probably due not to the priest’s own second thoughts, but to a lay accomplice, who well understood the position of a minor, and had moreover the experience of certain practices of his own youth to guide him in advising others. (Anon., Intercepted Letters, p. 6) His opinion of the craftiness of the clergy seems to be vindicated at the end of the letter when the priest changes his mind, and adds, ‘Until you have come to your full decision it is my opinion that you had better keep your thoughts on religion to yourself: giving no occasion for foolish gossip to your companions.’ As the youth’s conversion progresses, the tone of the priest’s letters becomes more insistent in advocating secrecy. In ‘Letter 3’ (1 December 1851), defiance against paternal authority is encouraged, and theological arguments are proffered in support of this course of action:18 The act of a parent prohibiting his offspring to embrace that religion, far from possessing any legal authority, is simply contrary to the supreme authority of God, and violates the order of things established by God forever. – Seeing therefore that your father is determined to stand (intentionally or not, that is not the question) between you and God, you are fully justified in conscience to act independent of or contrary to his will – to do otherwise, instead of being acceptable to God, would make one guilty of a very grievous sin. – Wherefore did Jesus Christ say: ‘He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me’? (Anon., Intercepted Letters, p. 11) This can be read as a direct challenge to patriarchal authority and the Biblical quotations used in this context must have struck fear and fury into the hearts of all middle-class English, Protestant fathers reading these letters. This was precisely the aim of the editor, who finishes the collection with a dire warning of his own against ‘the prowlings of a


watchful and treacherous foe’, who wish to ‘inveigle’ the Protestant young into religious houses. A famous instance concerning a young girl and the machinations of the Roman Church that was reported in the Times, was known as the ‘Talbot Case’. It was heard at The Court of The Chancery Lincoln’s Inn in March 1851. The actual case was Doyle v. Wright and concerned the guardianship of a certain Miss Augusta Talbot. However, it would seem that there were hidden agenda to this case and particularly the reporting of it. Rev. Seymour states in his book about the Talbot Case and its implications, that nunneries on the continent19 are the result of feudalism, they are all to do with money … The object of the nunneries in England takes a wider range than this. They are established with a view to the propagation of the religion of Rome … (Rev. Seymour, The Talbot Case, pp. xvi–xvii) These nunneries, according to Seymour, lay themselves out to allure and attract every young person who may be possessed of wealth, or the expectation of wealth. He says that every wile, every art that subtlety can suggest is employed to lure such persons into a convent life. Romance, religion, love, disappointment and affliction are20 all alike made in their turn a means to minister to the object to be attained. The promises of seclusion, tranquillity and peace in scenes of rural retirement, and in the sweet converse of a holy sisterhood, loving and loved, amidst the dream-like stillness of the cloister, and the sweet music of the vespers – these promises, however unlikely of fulfilment, become powerful arguments in the hands of subtle, experienced and intriguing priests she becomes a nun, and they take possession of her wealth. (Rev. Seymour, The Talbot Case, pp. xvi–xvii) Augusta Talbot, the young woman in question is described as an orphan, without a father to shield her or a mother to cherish her. Because she had been made the victim of priestly intrigue it was expected that her case would awaken every high and chivalrous feeling in every manly Protestant. Augusta Talbot was one of the two children of the late Hon. George Henry Talbot, half-brother to the Earl of Shrewsbury. Her mother, the daughter of Sir Horace St Paul Bart, was a Protestant whilst her father was a Roman Catholic. After the death of her parents, Augusta was placed by her guardian Dr Doyle in a convent called ‘The Lodge’ at


Taunton.21 A few years later Augusta’s brother John died and she became presumptively entitled to £60,000 and accumulations. On 6 June 1850 Augusta attained her nineteenth year and her stepfather Mr Berkeley put up a petition because he believed that she was being forced to become a nun and break off all communication with her past life. Bishop Hendren was the ecclesiastical superior of the convent ‘The Lodge’, and visited there almost daily. Mr Berkeley, made the following formal statement about the Bishop22: I verily believe that the said JW Hendren, together with the superior of the said convent, exercised absolute and unconditional control over every feeling of the heart of the said infant Augusta Talbot, and over every motive and action of her life. (The Times, 31 March 1851) By this point in the court report a pattern of the wicked Catholic clergy and lay helpers ‘seducing’ a gullible young ‘infant’ into a convent so that the Church could get their hands on her very substantial inheritance, is beginning to emerge. It is interesting to note that Augusta Talbot is still being referred to as an infant even though she is, at the time of the above report, nearly 20 years old. This shows an underlying assumption that even when adult in years, women are essentially childlike. Augusta had lost her traditional male protectors, her father and her brother, but the role was assumed by her stepfather, a Protestant. What had begun as a rather turgid court report develops into a scandalous drama. At the centre of this drama was a Miss Jerningham,23 the Mother Superior of ‘The Lodge’, who represented the unacceptable face of the female and the antithesis of the innocent, young and naive Augusta. In the eyes of the Protestant reader, she would have been seen as being on ‘the wrong side’ and in league with the Catholic clergy in their plans to entice wealthy young girls into the isolation of the convent. The susceptibility and malleability of Augusta, in the eyes of Mr Berkeley, would seem to have a great deal more to do with her gender than her youth. A girl in her vulnerable position would be perfect prey for the unscrupulous, scheming agents of the Pope especially if she were an heiress. Despite denials by the Convent Superior, Mr Berkeley claimed that Augusta had become a postulant and had ‘taken the first steps in this fearful course from which probably there was no retreat’. Because of this initiation there was the danger that she might lose her inheritance to the convent, so it was petitioned that some proper person should have the custody of Miss Talbot during her minority and that Mr Berkeley


might have access to her at reasonable times.24 The next day the court heard the charge that A priestly influence had been exercised over the mind of Miss Talbot from her earliest infancy, with a view of inducing her to embrace a conventual life, and therefore secure her large fortune for the Roman Catholic Church. (The Times, 1 April 1851) This is a bold summing up of the long-winded narrative, but an important message for Protestant, male readers to keep close watch on their female dependants. Actual cases of the dangers posed to the young and defenceless by Roman Catholics became the basis for pamphlets and lectures warning the Protestant public of the menace lurking within English society. A typical lecture of this genre was one given by the Rev. M. Hobart Seymour in 1852, at the invitation of ‘The Ladies of Bath’. He may have been invited by the ladies, but attendance of Mr Seymour’s lecture was limited to men and admission was by ticket. The audience was 15,000 strong, an indication of the male interest in nunneries at this time. In the printed version of the lecture there followed a letter to the Queen from the ‘Ladies of Bath’ about wicked convents. Seymour’s diatribe dealt mainly with the constraint of nuns and it was taken seriously enough by the Catholic Church to be formally denied by Cardinal Wiseman. Rev. Seymour began the subject of his lecture by mocking the reasoning of the Catholic Church for ‘fortifying’ their convents:25 But the Cardinal has replied by stating that though there be indeed the lofty walls and ponderous gates and barred windows and grated openings, yet they are all designed, not to keep the nuns within, but to keep the men without. (Rev. Seymour, Convents or Nunneries, p. 10) Seymour finds it difficult to believe that these fortifications exist for protection against the violence of men. He makes the point that there is, in his opinion, no danger to Protestant ladies devoted to religion in England.26 The idea that the cloister could give a woman the kind of personal freedom that she could not find in the outside world where she would be expected to follow her ‘natural destiny’ of wife and mother, does not even occur to the Rev. Seymour. The rise of the number of women entering the religious life at this time is attributed by him and like-minded men, to the conniving priests of the Catholic Church


entrapping poor unsuspecting girls in a fortress from which they could not escape.27 He says I know not a greater cruelty, I know not a more unmanly outrage, than to take a young girl – a young, tender, innocent, generous, confiding, loving, warm-hearted girl – of fifteen or sixteen years of age, and ask her to sign away all the flower and blossom of her future life, to leave her to mourn in bitterness and brokenheartedness all her after years, and to learn that her maturer judgement and her woman’s feelings, and all her after life, have been sacrificed to the law of the Church of Rome – a law that I feel is an offence against God, as well as an outrage against nature. (Rev. Seymour, Convents or Nunneries, p. 17) The sexual nature of the language of the earlier extract is in tune with the main body of Seymour’s lecture. He is a man talking to men and because of this he appeals to their masculinity in combating the unmanly behaviour of the Roman priests. Seymour states that according to Canon Law a nun was of age when she was 16 not 21, so she could be removed to a convent abroad if she agreed. The movement of nuns out of England, usually to the continent, was another common theme in the catalogue of the dangers of convents and an appeal to the patriotism of English Protestants. It was generally believed that the girls were moved from Protestant England to a Catholic country without their consent, if they became difficult or wanted to leave the order. Seymour appeals to his fellow men in this assertion:28 As to it being with the consent of the girl of that age, I need scarcely say, speaking to men of the world, that we never find it difficult to persuade a girl of sixteen to go to the continent, there requires no greater power of persuasion to induce her, on some plea or other, to visit continental scenes. And thus we learn from the admission of the cardinal that painful and distressing fact, which seems to me one of the most objectionable and painful features of the whole system, that these young creatures may at any time be removed from the free institutions of England to some nunnery in Mexico or Syria, Spain or Italy. (Rev. Seymour, Convents or Nunneries, p. 22) By the use of a specific phrase, ‘men of the world’, Seymour manages to give sexual overtones to something that on one level reads as a straightforward if particularly masculine opinion. One is led to ask in what context these men of the world would use their powers of persuasion on


16-year-old girls? When he talks about what actually goes on in these convents, Seymour allows his language to become openly sexual.29 What other fate could befall these innocent girls? His answer is that they are placed in one of those monasteries where every vice of earth and every crime of hell is perpetrated, and where the shriek of outraged innocence, and the death sighs of a broken heart, are suppressed and stifled within the walls, and never can be heard in the outer world. (Rev. Seymour, Convents or Nunneries, p. 22) As the lecture progresses the imagery used becomes almost more appropriate to Victorian pornographic writing than to a religious lecture given by a Reverend gentleman. The language employed to describe the scenes in the convent is reminiscent of descriptions of Victorian brothels in which a man (usually upper class) could buy a young virgin, and deflower her in an environment where he would be able to enjoy her screams of pain.30 There is a sadomasochistic element that runs through a great deal of this anti-Catholic literature, whether written in a realist or a more sensational idiom. Seymour’s attention next turns to the continent and the supposed depravity of its people. He gives as an example of Catholic degeneracy, what he calls ‘the demoralisation of the nunneries of Tuscany’.31 He begins, I beseech every man in this assembly, by every high and holy motive, to ask of God to enable him to hallow and chasten his feelings. I am now obliged to read to you that which is filthy, revolting and disgusting; and you have to hear that which is hideous, horrible and unnatural. I am to lead you through the interior of the nunneries of Tuscany – to lay before you scenes of vice, profligacy and debauchery which continued throughout many – many years. (Rev. Seymour, Convents or Nunneries, p. 35) He excuses himself for reading depositions from the eighteenth century by saying that it is his duty to his God and himself to expose the real nature of the whole system of these nunneries. ‘I feel intense difficulty in reading these, and I am sure every good man present will feel for me in the painful and loathsome task of reading these depositions.’32 The depositions are not printed in the lecture, presumably because they were too lurid. This form of male voyeurism under the guise of a moral and nationalistic crusade is presented as a challenge to the patriarchal,


Protestant order. Whether it was trapped nuns or fallen women, the stories held a fascination for a male audience who could then manipulate their outraged masculinity to bring about social or religious reform. This reform generally involved the curtailing of women’s freedoms in order to protect them, rather than limiting the power of the men who sought to exploit them. Whilst it is true that the Evangelical wing of the Protestant Church aimed to check the power of the Catholic Church and its clergy, there existed the feeling that young and impressionable women needed to be kept under the control and care of a paternalistic male.33 The type of reporting and comment examined earlier prompted Cardinal Newman to make the following observation on the position of Catholics in England in 1851:34 A Protestant is at liberty to bring a charge against us, and challenge us to refute, not any proof he brings, for he brings none, – but his simple assumption or assertion. And perhaps we accept his challenge, and then we find we have to deal with matters so vague or so minute, so general or so particular, that we are at our wit’s end to know how to grapple with them. (Newman, Lectures, p. 88) For example, accusations were made against the building of an oratory in Edgbaston which Newman said were founded on fable and became a sensation in its own right. Instead of looking at the land and the architect’s plans in order to understand why the oratory was being built in a particular way, Protestant locals preferred to understand the building in the light of the ‘incarcerations, the torturings, the starvings, the immurings, the murderings proper to a monastic establishment’. Newman is particularly concerned because the people making the accusations against Roman Catholics and the oratory were all educated men with high standing.35 The narratives concerning the dangers to young women and vulnerable boys presented by the Roman Catholic Clergy and their satellites around the middle of the nineteenth century demonstrate an underlying discourse of fear, fear of the foreigner infiltrating the homes and the families of Protestant Englishmen. Newman recognised that antiCatholicism was ingrained in the English national psyche and was therefore very difficult to refute:36 I am treating of the unpopularity of Catholicism now and here, as it exists in 1851, … in the inns of court, and in the schools and colleges of the land; and I say, this tradition does not flow from the mouth of


the half-dozen wise, or philosophic, or learned men who can be summoned in its support, but is a tradition of nursery stories, school stories, public house stories, pulpit stories; a tradition of newspapers, magazines, reviews, pamphlets, romances, novels, poems, and light literature of all kind, literature of the day; … a tradition floating on the air; which we found in being when we first came to years of reason; which has been borne in upon us by all we saw, heard, or read, in high life, in Parliament, in law courts, in general society; which our fathers told us had ever been in their day; a tradition, therefore, truly universal and immemorial, and good as far as tradition can be good, but after all, not more than a tradition is worth. (Newman, Lectures, pp. 83–4) I am not attempting here to represent the actual historical circumstances behind these stories, having little, if any documentation from ‘the other side’; but rather to present evidence that these sorts of anti-Catholic texts were contributing to a particular ideological bias in British Protestant culture.

3 Forgive Me Father: The Sacrament of Confession as a Means to Control and Debauch Young Girls and Women

The confessors convey to the female mind the first foul breath which dims its virgin purity. White, The Indelicacy of Auricular Confession, 18361 The perpetrators of anti-Catholic ideology in the nineteenth century were prompted by a particular set of anxieties concerning the wives and daughters of English, Protestant men, who allowed themselves to be deceived and seduced by effeminate, reptilian, Catholic priests. Reptilian because the Catholic priest was often compared with snakes and other reptiles. This is an extended image of the priest as the Devil in the guise of the serpent in the Garden of Eden which is employed to illustrate his deadly cunning. Danger was perceived to be lurking in the dark recesses of the Catholic confessional and the key to the hearts and minds of innocent English women was to be found in specific beliefs surrounding the female psyche. Jules Michelet, writing in 1846, makes the unequivocal observation that women, in particular wives, confess not to wood, ‘the black oak of the old confessional’, but to a man of flesh and blood: ‘and this man now knows of this woman more than even her husband in their long intercourse by day and by night.2 The priest is viewed as dangerous because he ‘has her secret’ and he will never forget it. Michelet believes that women, because of their modesty, are originally unwilling to speak to the priest and yet they speak inspite of themselves because they are ‘fascinated like the bird by the serpent’.3 He writes about the 25


confessing woman having two husbands, one who has her soul and the other her body. He believes that the whole business of the confessor consists in isolating the woman and making sure that she confides everything to him. It follows that the husband not only loses control over his wife, but is also humiliated by another man who is a virtual stranger to him and yet knows him intimately:4 How degrading for a husband to obtain nothing of what was his own, except by the consent and indulgence of another! To be seen, watched, in his most secret privacy, by an invisible witness, who governs him, and doles out to him his pitiful share! To meet in the streets a man who knows better than himself his most secret witnesses, who humbly bows to him, then turns around and laughs! … Happy is the father of a family who has so virtuous a wife, and servants so very gentle, humble and honest and pious! The glass house which the ancient sage sighed for, so that he might be seen by all, is enjoyed by him without his wishing for it. None of his words is lost. He speaks in a whisper, but every secret word is caught up. If he writes his most secret thoughts, they are read – by whom? Nobody knows. What he dreams of when he lays on his pillow, he is much astonished to hear next day, cried about in the public thoroughfares. (Michelet, Priests Women and Families, p. 47) The idea that the ‘virtuous wife’ should be beguiled to reveal all her innermost thoughts and secrets to a priest required a satisfactory explanation that to a certain extent exonerated the woman and implicated the confessor. A crucial nineteenth-century social and educational assumption was that when a woman read, identification with the text occurred.5 It was thought, therefore, that reading could instil and confirm desirable moral and social qualities.6 If this were true, then undesirable qualities could be instilled by the wrong sort of text, and so by suggesting previously unheard of sins to a vulnerable female, a priest could excite her passions to the point that she identified so strongly with what he was asking her that she actually felt the desire to commit those very acts. The preface of a pamphlet which contains correspondence between the Hon. George Spencer MP and Rev. William Riland Bedford makes the widespread charge against the Roman Catholic Priesthood that they are ‘breaking through every barrier of respect and delicacy which Heaven has given for the protection of the female character.’7 Priests are doing this by preparing Protestant females for confession by reading The Garden of

Forgive Me Father 27

The Soul,8 which he says is full of indecent questions. Bedford calls on all Protestant Englishmen to protest against confession,9 because: There is nothing more abhorrent, nothing more revolting to their feelings, than that the mind of a sister or daughter should be contaminated with impure conversation with any man, however sacred a character with which he may be invested. (Bedford, The Indelicacy of Auricular Confession, p. 6) The material examined in this chapter consists of examples of Evangelical Protestant religious writing concerning the danger of the confessional. This literature observes the necessity for a positive male reaction to the debauching of female dependants through the practice of confession and the secrecy of the confessional. The type of fiction, in which the relationship between a priest and his female penitent was a central theme, is also examined. Representations of Roman Catholicism were effective vehicles for the discussion of sex, and the effect that stories containing lurid pictures of Roman Catholic doctrine, discipline and worship had on their readers, particularly religiously minded middle-class Protestant readers, should not be underestimated. The concentrated emphasis on the sexual dangers of the confessional and the explicit nature of the material may explain the attraction for the large numbers who attended the men-only meetings about the problems of auricular confession. The nature of the arguments put forward and the violence of the language used both at the meetings and in the pamphlets indicate a deeper fear than the professed one of the consequences of Catholic Emancipation. A man’s dread of the loss of patriarchal control over his wife and his daughters and the possibility of their seduction and corruption by another man becomes a powerful weapon in the hands of the propagandist, as does the idea that the corrupting priest is likely to be a foreigner. The Rev. Andrew Thomson, lecturing on popery in 1851, appealed to the patriotism of his audience by warning them of the effect of auricular confession on a nation such as Italy:10 Look at the great middle class of our country, those who range in rank from the cottage upward to the mansion, and see the generally untainted and unsuspected purity that adorns and dignifies the character of woman … Then pass to Italy with Hobart Seymour; hear him mourn over the state of society so ill-arranged, – and regard for female purity so little cherished, that women often sink into


that state in which character is an incumbrance and modesty is an inconvenience … Let the religion of Italy become the religion of Scotland and England and we shall soon have its debased morality and its social disorganisation. The confessional itself would be sufficient, in less than a hundred years, to infect the land with a universal moral leprosy. (Rev. Thomson, A Course of Lectures, pp. 265–6) In The History of Sexuality Foucault draws attention to the cultural construction of women in their bodily and sexual beings and he asserts that patriarchal culture has an obsession with female corporeality. He observes that bodies were disciplined by many techniques of power and specific instances of the exercise of power produce specific resistances and resistance produces new discourses and so new power.11 If one applies this theory to the power relations between a female penitent, a Catholic priest and a Protestant male who sees himself as the female’s protector, then one can see the priest exercising power over the woman which triggers a power struggle between the Protestant male and the priest, followed by the more intensive exercise of power of the Protestant patriarch over his wife or daughter. It is in the initial relationship between the priest and his penitent that one can see the early manifestation of the patient/analyst relationship which Foucault likened to the inquisitorial procedures of religious confession. In the nineteenth century it was not uncommon for doctors concerned with such matters to link mental health problems in women with physical, sexual problems and the weakness of the female nature. This led to some extreme forms of surgery designed to control the sexual urges of the mentally disturbed female. One of the signs of a woman’s ill health was seen as a longing for freedom from the home and a desire to escape through work or even by becoming a sister of charity or a nurse.12 One sexually assertive girl was said to have spent ‘much time in serious reading’,13 which in turn was seen as inflaming her mind and making her go astray. After her treatment she was married, became pregnant, and lived as a happy and devoted mother. It is against such a background of ideas about women’s minds and their susceptibility that the debate about the dangers of the confessional flourished. In a similar manner, the writers of the genre of literature discussed in this chapter could achieve two objectives by using the defenceless woman as a tool in their anti-Catholic propaganda. The first goal was the excitation of the passions of the masculine, Protestant father and husband to protect what he deemed his own from the debauching Catholic priest; the second may be seen as the cultivation of an even greater constriction of women in their physical, spiritual and intellectual lives.


The writers of the anti-confessional material asserted that the ‘managing’ of a woman’s mind by a Catholic agent invariably led to the managing of her body, and once her body had been ‘conquered’ she became a useful weapon in the armoury of her seducer. This was all part of a grand plan perpetrated by the Pope in Rome. As the author of The Roman Catholic Confessional Exposed: in Three Letters to a Cabinet Minister14 records: Auricular Confession is the key-stone of Romish morality and Romish power. It is the foundation on which the whole Papal system rests. It is in the confessional that the wily priest learns the inmost secrets of his penitent, and makes himself master of the hidden movements of his heart. It is there that he extorts the reluctant answer from the bashful virgin and suggests to her spotless mind sins of impurity and lust, her ignorance of which had hitherto been her best defence. (Anon., Roman Catholic Confessional, pp. 35–6) One of the most important places in which sex could be discussed freely and without impunity was in the Catholic confessional. Moreover, whilst the Evangelical Protestants deemed this extremely dangerous for innocent females, the discussion and exposure of exactly what went on in the confessional provided them with their own locus for explicit sexual discourse which in turn provided a type of voyeuristic titillation for their readers and listeners. The literature in this chapter certainly bears witness to this observation. In 1839 the Rev. Charles Brigham gave a lecture at Kings Lynne on the ‘enormities of the confessional’ because he was worried about claims against the Catholic Church being made by Eugene F. O’Beirne, an expelled student from the seminary of Maynooth in Ireland. Maynooth College was the subject of a great deal of controversy because it was subsidised by the British government and the anti-Catholic lobby thought it a disgrace that the English taxpayer should be paying for Catholic priests who were plotting to take power in England, and learning how to debauch innocent girls in the confessional in order to gain influence in British society. Brigham chose to comment, in his refutation of ‘calumnious charges bought against Maynooth College and the Catholic priesthood in general’15 that: In their mad wish to outrage the feelings of Catholics, and to hold up to scorn and contempt the religion which they profess, they have enlisted to their falling fortunes, degraded apostates filled to the very


gorge, aye reeking and running over with foulness, with filth, and with obscenity. These they have sent forth in their unhallowed cause, openly and publicly to outrage modesty, to insult decency, to place at open and shameful defiance that common and necessary decorum, which even the wild savage would not dare to violate. (Brigham, The Enormities of the Confessional) Brigham believed that O’Beirne had spoken all over Norfolk and Suffolk against the practice of confession because he is ‘a caterer for lustful appetites’ and that because of the content of his talks and his method of delivery he has been believed by his audiences:16 Horrid as these charges are, impossible as they must appear on the very face of them, they have been widely believed in these counties; and Protestant husbands and fathers have left the foul exhibition of the expelled student, so convinced that the filthy scene with which he glutted them, was real, as to prohibit their Catholic wives and daughters from again approaching the confessional. (Brigham, The Enormities of the Confessional) In the context of this book it is interesting to note that the locus for sexual discussion has moved from the confessional into the halls and lecture rooms of English provincial towns, and that Rev. Brigham understood (subconsciously or otherwise) the use of sexually explicit propaganda to be effective because it attracts and holds the attention of voyeuristic males. Seventeen years later, in 1856, the attraction of hearing what went on in the secrecy of the confessional was still demonstrable. Rev. John Armstrong gave a lecture on ‘The Confessional and its Wickedness’ at the Town Hall in Brighton.17 The lecture was given exclusively to men: the Reverend Lecturer justly considering that, however delicately the subject might be treated, it is, by its very nature, unfit for public discussion in the presence of a mixed audience. (Rev. Armstrong, Preface of The Confessional ) The underlying discourse of fear, engendered through the exercise of sexual and spiritual control, that emerges from the large amount of nineteenth-century anti-confessional literature produces a ‘truth’ for the men of that particular moment in history which was to give them power over women more generally. It is this exercise of Catholic power


over women as understood by the Protestant male to which this book will now turn. Superficially, the material could be taken at face value as rather crude propaganda aimed at exciting the male readers to take action against the creeping political threat of Roman Catholicism. However, I would argue that this discourse also contains a fundamental concern with the creation of a climate of fear that employs gendered motifs to fuel its religious and political arguments. In 1847, J.G. Millingen18 wrote that: Woman, with her exalted spiritualism, is more forcibly under the control of matter; her sensations are more vivid and acute, her sympathies more irresistible. She is less under the influence of the brain than the uterine-system, the plexi of abdominal nerves, and irritation of the spinal chord. (Millingen, Mind and Matter, p. 157) This combination of factors, he believes, means that a woman is predisposed to hysteria, the ‘womb’ pathology, from the time she reaches puberty and is therefore particularly liable to look for her emotional satisfaction either in love, or later, in religion. In the case of the confessing woman, she is able to find both in the same place. In fact, according to Rev. William Bedford, ‘had I a daughter, I would rather see her right hand cut off than she should attend the Confessional of a Roman Catholic Priest.’19 William Hogan, a much referred-to advocate of the abolition of the use of the confessional, states his belief that Roman Catholicism is causing dissent in families, or as he puts it, in ‘the bosom of society, the family circle’. Hogan sees the family split as occurring along gender lines. He employs the image of a father on one side of a family dining table whilst the mother and daughter are on the other.20 The father is seen as being alone, making the point that the intervention of the priest into the lives of his women is a direct challenge to his patriarchal position: ‘It would seem that as if in the midst of them, opposite you, sat an invisible man to contradict what you say.’21 The invisible enemy spoken of is the priest. The woman is seen as a mere puppet who is manipulated by whichever man manages to gain control over her feelings. The conflict here is between the Catholic priest and the paterfamilias; the female is merely the catalyst, the tangible evidence of their disagreement. Hogan goes on to explain the particular power that a priest is able to exercise over a woman:22 The priest as a confessor, possesses the secret of a woman’s soul; he knows every half-formed hope, every dim desire, every thwarted


feeling. The priest as spiritual director, animates that woman with his own ideas, moves her with his own will, fashions her according to his own fancy. And this priest is doomed to celibacy. He is a man, but he is bound to pluck from his heart the feelings of a man. If he is without faith, he makes desperate use of his power over those confiding in him. If he is sincerely devout, he has to struggle with his passions, and there is a perilous chance of his being defeated in that struggle. And even should he come off victorious, still the mischief done is incalculable and irreparable. The woman’s virtue has been preserved by an accident, by a power extraneous to herself. She was wax in her spiritual director’s hands; she has ceased to be a person, and is become a thing. (Hogan, Auricular Confession, pp. 34–5) Such power is said to be wielded by unscrupulous priests, but even the good ones compromise women. To back up his argument Hogan quotes the work of Paul Louis Courrier whom he believes is read too little:23 What a life, what a condition is that of our priests? Love is forbidden them, marriage especially; women are given up to them. They may not have one of their own, and yet live familiarly with all, nay, in the confidential, intimate privity of their hidden actions, of all their thoughts. An innocent girl first hears the priest under her mother’s wing; then he calls her to him, speaks alone with her, and is the first to talk of sin with her before she can have known it. When instructed, she marries; when married, he still confesses and governs her. He has preceded her husband in her affections, and will always maintain himself in them. What she would not venture to confide to her mother, or confess to her husband, he, a priest, must know it, asks it, hears it, and yet shall not be her lover. How could he indeed? Is he not tonsured? He hears whispered in his ear, by a young woman, her faults, passions, desires, weaknesses, receives her sighs without feeling agitated, and he is five and twenty! (Hogan, Auricular Confession, pp. 35–6) This reported intimacy with the priest is designed to make the father and husband jealous and therefore insecure. The priest has to be seen as a libertine out to seduce the women in his care. After all it is only natural: he is young, male and celibate and in close physical contact with a woman. Courrier asks his reader to imagine the scene in the confessional, the priest waiting for the woman, his agitation, their heads together whispering, the mingling of their breath. He says that ‘parler l’amour c’est fait l’amour’ is a ‘profound truth’. Hogan plays further on male


insecurities by suggesting that husbands are being made into cuckolds in the confessional and even suggesting that some of their children might not be theirs but the priest’s. This is a real threat to a husband’s masculinity; it goes without saying that to cast doubt on the paternity of his children touches a very basic male fear. Hogan appeals to his audience of American husbands24 as a ‘friend’, one who has seen the dangers and is warning them man to man: Be not startled American husbands, I make not these statements to hurt or outrage your feelings. I make it in compassion for you, and to prevent you, if possible, from permitting your wives or your daughters to go in future to these dens of vice called confessionals … I have seen husbands unsuspiciously and hospitably entertaining the very priest who seduced their wives in the confessional and was the parent of some of the children who sat at the same table with them, each of the wives unconscious of the other’s guilt, and the husbands of both, not even suspecting them. (Hogan, Auricular Confession, pp. 62–3) Another much quoted writer and speaker against the Catholic confessional is the ex-priest Father Chiniquy. Although the book I have quoted from, The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional, was printed in England in 1878, Father Chiniquy was in fact, causing a stir against Roman Catholicism in Canada during the 1850s and his ideas were being reported in England through various Protestant institutions such as the Colonial Church and School Society that had its headquarters in Fleet Street, London.25 Chiniquy supported the belief that women have more acute and vivid sensations than men. He says that it is a torture for women to confess their sins and describes the confessing priest in strong language as the ‘vilest seducer’. He talks of women actually fainting in the confessional box, speaking so intimately to an unmarried man having nearly killed them. The picture he paints is very dramatic and his admission that he was involved in the whole process when he was a priest tends to authenticate the narrative.26 He says that he had to ask girls polluting and damning questions: My infallible church was mercilessly forcing me to oblige those poor trembling, weeping, desolated girls and women to swim with me and all her priests in those waters of Sodom and Gomorrah … (Chiniquy, The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional, p. 8)


Once Chiniquy has established the initial relationship of the crafty priest and the innocent girl, he describes how corruption takes place and the girl is transformed from pure to degraded by the implantation of knowledge followed by physical seduction. In fact, Chiniquy claimed that he had heard the confessions of over 200 priests and all but 21 confessed sins committed because of auricular confession. The basis of this story is, of course, a variant of the Biblical Eden creation myth with the priest in his usual role as the serpent. Once the woman has succumbed to the cunning priest, she must either become his henchman and part of the popish plot, his whore or choose death. These themes made the tales of the confessional salaciously popular reading.27 The dangers of the confessional were discussed openly in the newspapers and parodied in periodicals which suggests that this controversy formed an area of general awareness in the nineteenth century. On 11 March 1825, Daniel O’Connell28 was examined before the House of Lords about Roman Catholicism and auricular confession. In his testimony he maintained that the Irish priests who were practising their religion in England were almost ‘universally lowly born.’29 This comment prompted a warning given in a letter to a ‘late Cabinet Minister’ in which the author says what tremendous power the practice of confession gives to 3,000 low-class Irish priests. This reference to birth is presumably a device to enhance the horror of such men indelicately questioning women about their intimate lives. The same letter writer talks of the questions posed to young married women. They are asked exactly what goes on in their sex lives, naming certain acts. The author describes these acts as ‘detestable, obscene, disgusting and filthy’,30 though why they should be and how he knows what is said is questionable. He wants, however, to point out the perils of such close questioning. The secrets of the man’s own preferences and techniques are being opened to scrutiny by a third party, thus lessening the husband’s authority and power over his partner. The woman may give a general description of what goes on in the privacy of her own bedroom,31 but: Even this does not satisfy the prurient imaginations of these Aphrodisian priests, but they are further instructed (in a chapter on the carnal sins which a man and wife commit with one another) to examine their penitents with a minuteness truly execrable. (Dens, Circa Actum Conjugalem) For this purpose they are supplied with a Memoria Technica in two Latin verses, followed by a mass of instructions compiled with more than anatomical precision. (Anon., Roman Catholic Confessional, p. 39)


Robert Steele, in his ‘Warning with Evidence Against the Immorality and Blasphemy of Priests in Absolution’, published some of the ‘headings’ of the actual questions put to women in the confessional, which they were obliged to answer truthfully, putting aside all modesty.32 These headings he set out as: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Quis? Who is the sinner? Quid? What is the nature of the sin? Ubi? Where was the sin committed? Quibus autilis? With what assistance or accomplices? Cur? With what motive? Quomodo? How? In what position? Quando? How often? (Steele, The Priest in the Confessional, p. 15)

In stating what is actually asked during confession, Steele is following in the tradition of The Confessional Unmasked33 which was seized and banned in 1867 on the grounds of obscenity. Steele notes that Murphy, who was deemed to be the author of this profoundly anti-Catholic book, had a great following and that his talks were well attended by men. Murphy gave such a talk at St James’ Hall Piccadilly where the seats cost two shillings reserved and one shilling unreserved. He writes that the book The Confessional Unmasked had done more to open the eyes of the people than anything else, and because of this, Murphy had been murdered by an organised band of 300 Papists:34 Who were allowed to march a distance of five miles into Whitehaven to murder him, and then allowed to return to Cleator moor without an attempt to make a single arrest though the murder was witnessed by the superintendent of police who had forty men at his service for the peace of the town. (Anon., The Confessional Unmasked, p. 31) Steele adds that it is much to be regretted that The Confessional Unmasked should be a banned book, as it was compiled from evidence taken from Roman Catholic theologians. It is to this work that I will now turn, as it is a particularly good example of a contemporarily famous distillation of nineteenth-century anxiety about Roman Catholicism and in particular the practice of confession. A note in The Bookseller 3 June 1875 announces the death of Mr David Bryce on 1 May of that year. Mr Bryce had been a publisher in Paternoster Row and was the reputed translator of The Confessional Unmasked (1851) in which was collected ‘all the filth which could be extracted from the eight volumes of Peter Dens’.35 This to serve its own


purposes was widely circulated by the Protestant Association, but, ‘so abominable was its contents that the police interfered and stopped its sale.’36 Following the publication of this book and its subsequent banning, Bryce, a former secretary of Benjamin Disraeli, died in very reduced circumstances. He gives his reason for translating Catholic theologians from the Latin as the desire to give general readers, who did not have the ability or the time to consult the original works for themselves, important information. Another reason Bryce gives for his translation, is his belief that many men had a vague and indefinite notion that some ‘queer questions’ were asked in the Confessional, but very few had any idea of the reality which he was to disclose. Bryce feels it necessary to state that:37 In the latter part of the pamphlet I have given a few extracts without abridgement, to show into what minute and disgusting details these holy men have entered. This alone has been my object and not the filling of the work with obscenity. (Anon., The Confessional Unmasked, p. 4) Like as Peter Dens, Bryce translated and quoted from the works of St Alphonso Liguori,38 Bailly, Delahogue and Cabussutius, writers of teaching texts for the Roman Catholic seminary of Maynooth. He sets the Latin out on one side of the page with the corresponding English translation on the other. Bryce quotes Peter Dens on the just causes for permitting motions of sensuality which are, according to the theologian:39 Sharp tingling sensations of sensual delight shooting through the body, and exciting corporeal pleasures. Now if a lady appears modest, the Confessor is instructed that modesty must be overcome or else he is authorised to deny her absolution! … Attendance upon invalids!!! is also a just cause for sensual motions. (Anon., The Confessional Unmasked, p. 38) The author’s comment is that it thus appears a matter of course that the hearing of confessions is justification for the entertainment of sensual motions, as is attendance on an invalid. This causes him to ask the following question of his readers:40 After reading this, who would marry a frequenter of the confessional. Only think of allowing a wife or daughter to go alone to confession to such beastly sensualists, or of permitting such hideous monsters


to enter their sick chamber, especially when they are recovering. (Anon., The Confessional Unmasked, p. 38) According to Bryce it is hardly surprising that the unmarried priest should experience sensual motions in the confessional. He invites the reader to look at some of the questions asked of the penitent female. The Roman Catholic theologian Bailly instructs priests to ask specific questions to a young girl and they are set out in his manual of instruction:41 If the penitent be a girl, let her be asked – Has she ornamented herself in dress so as to please the male sex? Or, for the same end has she painted herself; or bared her arms, her shoulders or her bosom? … Whether she is not attached to someone? Whether she has not allowed him to take liberties with her? Whether she has not allowed him to kiss her? [The questions may probe further]. (Anon., The Confessional Unmasked, p. 39) In an interpretation of Dens, vol. 7, p. 150, it is written that:42 If a married woman confessed that in sulk, whim, or for any other reason, she has not rendered due benevolence, she is compelled to give the Confessor a full, true and particular account of the way in which her husband insisted on his right, viz., whether in anger and with threats, or with entreaties and coaxing endearments. In this manner the Confessor not only ferrets out the most secret acts of the married, but also ascertains, whenever he chooses, what is the particular mettle of the husband, and the disposition of the wife! (Anon., The Confessional Unmasked, p. 43) The reader is given an example of how the priest can infiltrate a Protestant family with his questions. A ‘generous and unsuspecting English Protestant Baronet and an MP’ found a book called Examination of Conscience, intended for both unmarried girls and married women, lying on the table in his drawing room between a Romish priest and his daughter with whom the priest was piously moralising, when her father entered rather abruptly. The Baronet read the book and was particularly disgusted with what he found:43 Have you been guilty of fornication, or adultery, or incest, or any sin against nature, either with a person of the same sex or with any other


creature? How often? Have you abused the marriage bed by any actions contrary to the order of nature? Or by any pollutions? Or have you been guilty of any irregularity in order to hinder your having any children? How often? (Anon., The Confessional Unmasked, p. 51) The Confessional Unmasked also asserts that married couples are minutely questioned about carnal sin, specifically that of ‘Onan’ which they might commit with one another. The confession of such sins would, in the mind of the Protestant male, give the priest intimate knowledge of and therefore power over him.44 Our bachelor saint now expatiates upon the various possible postures and other delicate matters. We think that very few of our married friends could compose such a masterpiece of matrimonial mysteries. (Anon., The Confessional Unmasked, p. 57) Liguori is also mentioned as giving very detailed description of variations of the sexual acts which the author describes as ‘filthy and polluting’, but which undoubtedly gave the publication the success it enjoyed. In fact, according to The Weekly Register, The Confessional Unmasked had sold 50,000 copies:45 Let anyone who is tolerably well known in London walk up the Strand from Charing Cross and the probabilities are that before he reaches Coutts Bank he will be offered a copy of The Confessional Unmasked. (The Weekly Register, 20 July 1867) In banning the book, the authorities had ensured a wider readership than it might otherwise have expected. Discussion of The Confessional Unmasked carried on well into the late nineteenth century in such publications as the Monthly Record of the Protestant Evangelical Mission.46 The premise of the debate is that the doctrine and practices of the Romish Confessional are now openly adopted and carried out with complete impunity. Under these circumstances it has become a question of no slight importance to every father of a family whose wife or daughters may be brought into communication with confessing priests to have some knowledge of the doctrine and practices of the confessional. The argument is based around the questioning of the ‘real’ aim of the confessional. The Monthly Record has a definite answer:47 the end and the object of this system of ‘Confession’ … is to debauch to the very lowest depths of sensuality the minds of ‘penitents’, and


to bring them by this means under such subjection to their priest, as to render it all but impossible that they can ever free themselves from his control; or even meet his look without a sickening sense of their absolute and debasing subjection to his will. (Anon., History of the Confessional, p. 15) The importance placed on the perceptions of subjection and control in the relationship between priest and female penitent leads to the following description of a confessing priest. The language is unusually vehement and a great many people took offence:48 A Romish priest is a victim of social and moral contradiction – born of woman, yet not a son; a most complaisant wooer, yet insensible to love; having children but not a father; a proprietor of houses, but without a home; the most degraded of subjects, and the most exalted of potentates; pure as an angel, yet more corrupt than a Sodomite; the usurper of the throne of God, and the slave of the most debasing sensuality; at once the most austere devotee to the Gods of his own creation, and the most arrogant blasphemer of God his maker – a deity-creating, god-devouring assassin. He is a moral skunk, whose offensive properties and destructive habits make the creature at once an object of dread, loathsomeness and aversion. He is an embodiment of brute and demon combined in one character, the Cobra that defiles and destroys. He is an unscrupulous mesmerist, exposing the nakedness and perverting the faculties of those who put themselves under his influence. He is the most venomous nondescript, an agent of Satan for transforming men and women into useless or malignant beings. (Anon., History of the Confessional, p. 12) In this depiction, the Roman Catholic priest is not seen as a man; rather he is a skunk, a cobra and an agent of Satan. According to William Hogan, an ex-Irish priest himself, the Catholic priest is like an anaconda. Hogan declares that he knows ‘not another reptile in all animal nature, so filthy, so much to be shunned and loathed and dreaded by females, both married and single.’49 Such language configures the Catholic priest as the diametrical opposite of the manly, straightforward, morally correct Protestant male. One genre of nineteenth-century writing which frequently employed anti-Catholic rhetoric, is the cautionary tale. Such accounts purport to be true narratives, sometimes composed by the victims themselves. One such tale written in 1852 by Catherine Sinclair tells the story of Beatrice who is lured into a convent by priestly suggestions made largely in the


confessional. In the preface, the author states clearly what her intentions are in writing this narrative. Sinclair warns the young girls of the methods used to entice them into Romanism and warns of the dangers of Continental Europe, a hotbed of Romanism:50 British fathers abroad, placing their children in foreign convents for the benefit of accomplishments, do so on a mere vague understanding that their religion shall not be tampered with! They might as judiciously dip a white dress into the dyer’s vat of black on the positive assurance that it shall come out white again. (Sinclair, Beatrice, pp. xiii–xiv) This warning appears to employ the double image of the postulant’s white veil becoming the professed nun’s black and the loss of purity which is inevitable once the young girl enters the dark unknown of the convent. This symbolism communicates a powerful message to the reader. Sinclair upholds the idea that imaginative reading or the ingestion of words aurally can work upon a young woman’s mind to such a degree that her behaviour is altered. It is not only priestly suggestions that can bring about the downfall of a Protestant female, but also Popish literature. If girls are starved of ‘good’ imaginative literature, they will, in their craving for something supernatural, turn to Catholic books that tell of wonderful miracles and rapturous visions, pretty books with illustrations that work upon the senses and are written for a purpose, and that purpose ‘is anything but Protestant!’51 Another cautionary tale and one that combines the sensational elements of seduction and murder is Frederick Edward’s Inez, A Spanish Story Founded on Facts, Illustrating One of the Many Evils of Auricular Confession, written in 1829. The plot of the story concerns a priest, Pedro, who seduces a young woman, Inez. Fearing that their intercourse might be discovered, he induces her to accept the marriage proposal of a young man, Alphonso. After the wedding Alphonso goes away to work in India, but returns to his village unexpectedly. He suspects Pedro and his wife of infidelity and is murdered by the priest who then stabs Inez. He is caught disposing of her body. Pedro is imprisoned in Rome, but will soon be freed. Unusually, the author uses the form of a rhyming poem for his main text. Pedro is guilty yet one can see from the following lines that the Eve-like qualities in Inez make her the temptress who causes his downfall when he has to be close to her in the confessional:52 Oh! beauty what a snare art thou, How fatal is the trance That breaks the holiest thoughts and vow,


Enkindled by thy glance; What fatal poison oft will fly, From out a Beauty’s sparkling eye; And drown the holiest thoughts that be In sin, – and shame, and misery. … And Pedro from that hour to this Had revel’d in imagin’d bliss; With eagerness beyond expression – He forward look’d to her confession; For that had serv’d him oft before For deeds of which we say no more; And much he hop’d t’would serve again, To crown his hopes – and ease the pain, The anguish – thrilling – throbbing smart, That lust had shot across his heart. Edwards, Inez, a Spanish Story, Canto, pp. 31 and 34 Eventually Inez ‘sacrific’d her maiden charms.’ “As with other women seduced in the confessional, Inez is initially distressed once she has sinned, but then continues sinning as her virginity is no longer a barrier to or protection from her lust. The poem, because of its form and subject matter, reads as almost comical. However, it was presumably written by a sober Protestant male in order to excite anti-Catholic feeling and possibly to cater for prurient male interest in sexual behaviour. One final story worth mentioning, is a personal narrative written by Eliza Smith in 1850: The Progress of Beguilement to Romanism. Smith gives a long and sentimental preamble to her story, describing her state of mind before she fell in with Roman Catholicism. Her nature conforms to the type of female who was in particular danger from that religion. She describes herself as ‘a child with too much imagination.’53 This, as we have seen earlier, was recognised as a weakness in a woman, leaving her vulnerable to be ‘worked upon by wily priests, pomp and glitter’. Smith recognises that she was attracted by the trappings of Catholicism:54 There was so much to gratify the senses, so much to appeal to the imagination and to awaken the enthusiasm; so much to minister to sentimentalism and fill the energies of an ardent mind … (Smith, The Progress, p. 10) She goes to confession where, ‘things, the meaning of which I did not understand were then brought before me, and my tears of contrition


supplanted by the burning blush of wounded delicacy’.55 Having confessed, Smith decides to become a nun and applies to join a foreign convent. The remainder of the story is taken up with her negative feelings about convent life. How much of this narrative is actually true is less important here: it is the message it conveys to other women that is salient. Modest behaviour and submissive conduct towards the male members of her family is of paramount importance to a Victorian woman if she hopes to command any respect or have any value in the eyes of (male) society. Roman Catholicism is to be avoided at all costs, because to embrace it would mean loss of virtue and entail subjection to priestly authority, resulting in the woman’s loss of male protection from husband and father. Anti-confessional literature in the nineteenth century followed several different agenda. It worked as patriotic, anti-Catholic propaganda during a period when the Roman Catholic Church was establishing a foothold in Protestant England. It reinforced the prevalent ideas on women, that they were psychologically and spiritually open to suggestion to the point of their moral ruination. It reinforced the need for protective masculine, Protestant husbands, fathers and male friends. The confessional, as a closed box, represented a hidden, private location which excluded Protestant male control. At the same time, anti-confessional literature provided a respectable forum for the discussion and contemplation of sexual behaviour, particularly transgressive behaviour. Men could speculate and talk as much as they wanted under the pretence of rescuing their women from the clutches of rapacious, popish priests.

4 The Danger of Gliding Jesuits and the Effects of a Catholic Education

The church of Rome stands guilty, and glories in the crime of binding down young and inexperienced girls by a vow which can never be shaken off to a life which they may find, when their woman’s nature develops itself, they are unfit for. Tonna, Nuns and Nunneries, p. 3061 S.J. Abbott secretary of the Convent Enquiry Society, writing at the end of the nineteenth century about the danger of the rise in popularity of convents warned the British public of the terrible goings-on in these establishments. He relates tales of depravity, cruelty, corruption and suffering which he presents as true accounts from behind the closed doors and high walls of Catholic nunneries. Abbott stresses the idea that a convent life is ‘unnatural’ for women and therefore leads to terrible consequences. Not only will they suffer from being immured and secretly disciplined, but they may be changed forever by the experience:2 In the secrecy of a convent many tenderly reared girls, accustomed to be waited on by willing servants, find themselves painfully out of place when, for discipline’s sake, they are imperiously ordered by some ‘Reverend Mother’ fiend in petticoats to do disgusting menial work for the mere purpose of showing that they are slaves at her command. (Abbott, Revelations, p. 157) Because of their particularly sensitive natures, girls were believed to be greatly affected, both physically and mentally, by the rigours of convent life. So much so that their fate would involve loss of health and looks even to the point of death, or else entail corruption so that they become 43


part of the great conspiracy perpetrated by the Catholic Church in its quest for power. Abbott’s ideas reflect those of the Rev. Hobart Seymour who was writing in 1852:3 the nuns seem to me to be confined like birds within a cage, that might flutter their wings and hurt their feathers, but could not escape, being prisoners, victims, and recluses of life. (Seymour, Convents or Nunneries, p. 10) He asks his readers what purpose of religion could it serve to immure young girls of 16 years of age in these ecclesiastical prisons. This type of anti-Catholic writing was generally produced by the Evangelical wing of the Protestant Church, by both men and women. It was frequently published by Seeleys, a private, anti-Catholic publisher. As Catherine Hall has pointed out, Evangelicals expected women to sustain and even improve the moral qualities of the male sex.4 It was in this area of life that women could find a sense of importance. By immersing herself in religion, the Protestant female could experience some kind of empowerment that could not be disputed on account of her gender. In Practical Christianity (1797) William Wilberforce had argued that women were especially disposed to religion, and therefore had the responsibility of encouraging their husbands in religious observance:5 When the husband should return to his family, worn and harassed by worldly cares or professional labours, the wife, habitually preserving a warmer and more unimpaired spirit of devotion, than is perhaps consistent with being immersed in the bustle of life, might revive his languid piety. (Wilberforce, A Practical View, p. 86) This concept of the female as the more naturally religious gender runs through mid-nineteenth-century literature. The ideal Evangelical woman needed to possess certain characteristics. She was supposed to be modest, natural and not too sentimental nor subject to violent feeling. It was the role of the Evangelical male to educate the women in theology and to guide them in their spiritual lives, but it was for the females to demonstrate their piety by example and to exercise a proper moral influence on those around them. The type of girl who was seen to be particularly in danger from the corrupting influences of the Catholic Church is the ultra-sensitive, irrational female stereotype, who was religiose and fascinated by the external and aesthetic trappings of religion such as music, iconography and ritualistic services. This type of female was frequently

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understood to have tendencies towards hysteria, and should such a girl come under the influence of a Roman Catholic priest intent on her conversion, not only would she be susceptible to his persuasions, but she would pose a threat to the Evangelical, patriarchal system which was already being challenged by a changing society and new scientific discoveries in Victorian Britain. Faced with the renewed strength of the Roman Catholic Church in England, the Evangelical Protestant movement needed persuasive arguments and a strong emotional response against the ever-increasing influence of Rome on the ‘weakest’ of their society. By what would appear to have been a well-orchestrated campaign against those in authority in the Catholic Church, Protestants, Evangelicals in particular, managed to create a wave of intense feeling against the Society of Jesus6 and all those who followed a similar rule. Although the propaganda of nineteenth-century anti-Catholic literature was viewed as somewhat ludicrous by the Roman Catholic laity, some of them were uneasy about the Jesuits and their methods. As the Society of Jesus regained its authority during the first half of the nineteenth century, Evangelical Protestants found it easy to spread rumours, suspicion and fear, postulating a grand conspiracy by the Church of Rome to gain dominion over the British people by the infiltration of their homes and their schools by Jesuits. One manifestation of this hostility was that of Anglican clergymen in London urging their congregations not to employ Roman Catholics as domestic servants and to dismiss any they already had in service. Another was the production of anti-Catholic fiction. Various novels were written at this time. Some made use of sentimentalised pious language and opinions littered with biblical quotations which were often taken out of context and lacked any real theological integrity. In others the imagery and plot was influenced by the type of Gothic novel made popular by Ann Radcliffe. Roman despotism was identified with the Catholic Church and the Gothic novels that emerged from nineteenth-century Protestant societies often had an anti-Catholic subtext and were intended to create moral panic in their readers. A modern day parallel may be instructive here. In her recent book, Hystories, Elaine Showalter interrogates the ways in which, during the past decade, the ‘hysterical narrative’ has become one of the most popular formulations in literary criticism.7 She gives good examples of how the hysteria, in many cases fuelled by Evangelical Christians, has resulted in the reporting of cases of alleged satanic abuse. The style of these particular narratives has a striking resemblance to the anti-Jesuit narratives of the mid-nineteenth century. Both draw on the deeply seated fear of a


secret infiltration of society and the ever-present conspiracy of dark unrecognisable forces that plot against normal people and their families. Leaders of satanic cults are believed to be living in disguise as ordinary members of the community which they infiltrate and gain control over the weaker members. The alleged victims of these cults maintain that they are controlled by huge secretive organisations that maintain dominion over members and victims alike. The No-Popery climate of 1850–51 was characterised by a strong Evangelical impulse and the extravagant imagery employed in the agitation revealed something like hysteria. There are also numerous invasion scares, Catholic Europe invading Protestant England. The Protestant Magazine (March 1851) published a diagram showing the perceived differences between Protestant and Catholic cultures. It emphasises the patriotism that fuelled much of the underlying discourse of this particular hysteria. Protestant England is portrayed in the diagram as free, prosperous, peaceful and a happy national state, whereas Popish Rome is seen as oppressed, declining, disturbed and tyrannised. This alien culture was, for the Evangelical Protestant, embodied in the congregation of the Society of Jesus. According to ‘Helen DHU’8 writing in 1855, Jesuits are masters of disguise and thereby avoid detection. It is because of the attention they pay to the minutiae of everyday life that they are able to exercise so much power. Nothing escapes their notice, no one can escape their manipulation, they are dangerous and to be feared for their religious fanaticism:9 He is literally all things to all men … He [the Jesuit] will accompany the gay women of the world to the theatre, and will share in the excesses of the debauchee. With solemn countenance he will take his place by the side of the religious man at church; and he will revel in the tavern with the glutton and the sot. He dresses in all garbs; speaks all languages; knows all customs; is present everywhere – though nowhere recognised – and all this should seem (oh, monstrous blasphemy!) for the greater glory of God. (Helen DHU, Stanhope Burleigh, pp. vii, viii) This picture of the deceitful Jesuit was powerful in the Evangelical Protestant campaign against Catholics and helped to fuel the fear of the covert alien in their midst. In The Jesuit in the Family (1847), a short novel by Andrew Steinmetz, the object of Catholic interest is a young man, Leonard. The Jesuit in this story is masquerading as Leonard’s tutor but he is recognised for his

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true self by an elderly aunt Mrs Malcolm, who has lost her own son to the Jesuits. Mr Bainbridge (the tutor) is believed to be a Jesuit in disguise for the following reasons: he has a very favourable appearance; he is too ‘perfect’; he is naturally captivating and he has too much self-possession. It is noted that the tone of his voice changes according to whom he is talking; specifically, he uses a soft voice when talking to women and a firmer voice when conversing with men. Mrs Malcolm says of Mr Bainbridge that she knows enough of Romish arts to recognise and fear a wolf in sheep’s clothing. She uses images of predatory animals in describing Jesuits and employs biblical language, to make her antiCatholic observations:10 Alas! you will let him (Leonard) stray without a guide into the land of prowlers – into the very den of the prey beast, whose food is such as my poor nephew: the hungry tiger of corruption that lurks in darkness to spring upon the weak in mind, the unwary, the undefended. (Steinmetz, The Jesuit in the Family, p. 6) The idea that Romanism was a religion for women, children, the weak in mind and the effeminate man was circulating during this period. For example in 1872, Philip Schaff wrote in the Evangelical Magazine that Roman Catholicism was a religion for children and lower grades of civilisation because it addressed itself to the senses and imagination, dealing largely in forms and symbols.11 In The Jesuit in the Family, the tutor/Jesuit Bainbridge manages to spirit Leonard, away to the Continent where he joins The Society of Jesus. His father becomes a Catholic and dies bankrupt, his family in ruins. On Mrs Malcolm’s grave are inscribed the words ‘The Last of a Protestant Family’. This novel has a complicated and rambling plot and is not well written, but it serves as an example of didactically anti-Catholic literature. The language used to describe the Jesuits in all their reptilian repulsiveness is both Old Testament and sexual in its style. Interestingly the following passage is put into the mouth of the Jesuit Bainbridge as an example of the lengths to which he is willing to go to persuade the Malcolm family not only that he is not a Jesuit but that he understands and despises Catholicism:12 Popery displays her seducing arts, enticing from the bosom of the church the guidless, the unstable, the infirm of our Protestant homes … ‘Yes; the emissaries of Rome are abroad – the terrible Jesuits creep and crawl, meditating destruction. And mark here the last trick


of the serpents! They scatter abroad the pestilence of calumny against the true defenders of our Protestant faith’. (Steinmetz, The Jesuit in the Family, p. 23) As Frank Wallis points out in his work on anti-Catholicism in midVictorian Britain, Ultra Protestants were assiduous in spotting the spies and agents of the Pope. The Jesuits were a particular target for them and became one of the main stereotypes associated with Romanism. Their standard line was that, ‘Jesuits never altered their diabolical course of permeating all the institutions of society to spy upon and seduce nonCatholics into the enemy camp.’13 The image of the Jesuit and his agents perpetrated by Evangelical Protestants in mid-Victorian England was of a spy, interested in every detail of everyday Protestant life. He used this meticulous observation of detail in his efforts to control and use his ‘victims’. There were many stories of household servants, governesses and tutors, who were found to be closet Catholics placed in English families in order to carry out strict surveillance and report back to their papist masters in Rome. Selfconfessed escaped nuns who threw themselves on the mercy of kind Protestant families were treated with suspicion lest they should be ‘female Jesuits’ in disguise. Handsome and urbane men turned out to be wily priests who picked out weak and innocent girls and lured them into convents. Each of these examples represent an iconic ideological version of the perceived Catholic threat, realised specifically in terms of a dangerous and universal surveillance. One book that articulates the fear of the Catholic incognito is The Female Jesuit, a novel by Jemima Luke published in 1853 which she claims as a record of actual experience. It was followed later in 1853 by The Female Jesuit Abroad, by Charles Seager who claimed to have met Marie the female Jesuit in Belgium and continues her story. There is also a Review of The Female Jesuit, and the Sequel to The Female Jesuit: Female Jesuits and Jesuit Agents. These works are anonymous but in the British Library collection they are bound in the same volume as Seager’s work and he may well be the author. In the Review the author makes an interesting point about the title of Jemima Luke’s book, and refers to the fact that books about Jesuit conspiracies are fashionable in the 1850s. He ridicules the idea that any ‘Jesuit agent’ should wish to know the intimacies of Mrs Luke’s quiet household:14 The title of the ‘Female Jesuit’ was chosen says Mrs. Luke, ‘In accordance with Marie’s description of the order to which she said she had belonged,

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and also as indicative of the character of her proceedings.’ In the last clause our friend is, of course, quite in the fashion; and, except for her own sake, no friend of the Jesuits would wish her to be otherwise. (Anon., Review Jemima Luke, p. 427) To the modern reader, the term ‘female Jesuit’ would appear to be an anomaly. The mid-Victorian Protestant writer appears to have used the term to cover two different types of Catholic women. One meaning, as employed by Mrs Luke, is fairly technical, involving the orders of nuns who followed a rule similar to the one propounded by St Ignatius Loyola and whose sisters were ‘governed’ by Jesuits who were their confessors and spiritual directors:15 Michelet’s ‘Jesuits and Jesuitism’ communicates the fact, that Loyola’s law, forbidding the employment of female agency, has been expressly repealed, and that some orders of nuns are available for Jesuit purposes. The ladies of the order of the ‘Sacré Coeur’ in particular are said to be, ‘not only directed and governed by the Jesuits, but since 1823 to have had the same rules’. (Luke, The Female Jesuit, p. x) The other, looser meaning, seems to refer to any female who was seen to apply the spying and manipulative ways of the Jesuit in her everyday life. For example, Madame Beck in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette is likened by the author to a Jesuit. The use of the term Jesuitical, meaning someone acting in a manner associated with the methods of the Jesuits is fairly common in Victorian literature, but it is usually attached to a male. The Oxford English Dictionary shows how ancient this use of ‘Jesuitical’ was in English Protestant usage. It is noted that the opprobrious sense attached to ‘Jesuit’ and ‘Jesuitical’, that of a dissembling person, a prevaricator, originates in the Jesuit’s philosophy that: ‘the end justifies the means’, first made known in 1540. The female Jesuit in literature denotes a darker side of feminine nature which could be awoken and activated by Roman Catholicism. Like her male counterparts, the female Jesuit is at work in the Protestant world making converts and luring young girls into convents. Mrs Luke makes the following comment about the new order of female Jesuits:16 And, like the Jesuits, the chief though unavowed object appears to be the increase and prosperity of the Order, and the accession of new converts by means of the education of the young. (Luke, The Female Jesuit, p. 5)


The novel The Female Jesuit is a complicated tale of petty intrigue, the autobiography of ‘Marie’, and a good smattering of anti-Catholic diatribe. Much of the story deals with tales of convent life that were so popular in the Evangelical press at the time. Marie, who is supposed to be disillusioned with ‘popery’, decides it is not for her and throws herself on the mercy of her Protestant friends. She is taken in by Mrs Luke, but then things begin to go wrong. The reader is subjected to a litany of complaints about Marie’s erratic and deceitful behaviour. She forges letters to herself, steals charity money, and even sets fire to the bedroom of Mrs Luke’s daughter Lily so that she can ostensibly save her life. She then becomes jealous of Lily and gets her into trouble with her parents. She is physically spiteful to Lily’s little brother Arnold and is generally very difficult to live with. Finally Marie fakes illness. By executing a complicated plan involving leeches in the mouth and the selfadministration of digitalis to lower the pulse rate, she makes the family believe that she is seriously ill with consumption and that her unhappiness is compounded by letters from her Jesuit Uncle stating that he is delayed in Rome and cannot visit her. Mrs Luke discovers that Marie has been lying about her illness and that she has been writing the uncle’s letters to herself. When she confronts the girl, the reader is told that Marie’s face changed and took on a ‘plotting look’. To a reader of the twenty-first century, conversant with psychoanalysis and the predominantly female problems of anorexia and related conditions, the story of Marie appears to be one of a severely disturbed young woman who, perhaps because of her family background and strange upbringing, is making coded cries for help. However, she is presented to the 1850s reader as a cunning Jesuit. Mrs Luke and her family were, ‘convinced that such ability in intrigue could proceed from none but a Jesuit source.’17 The question ‘Was She Not a Jesuit?’ is the title for chapter xxv of the book, wherein Marie’s motives are discussed and the following conclusion is arrived at:18 It has been surmised by many that she may have been a lay sister of some religious order, and employed by the Jesuits for some purpose of their own. (Luke, The Female Jesuit, p. 431) This offers a recognised explanation for Marie’s lying, trickery, prying curiosity and wonderful self-possession consistent with British Protestant assumptions about Catholicism. The precise nature of the Jesuits’ plan is clearly unimportant. The point of the book is to warn Protestant families about cunning

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female agents:19 It must be obvious to all, that women introduced into families for Jesuit objects would be far more efficient than any out-agents could be; and that feminine tact, combined with Jesuit cunning could scarcely miss the attainment of any desired object. (Luke, The Female Jesuit, p. 432) Luke ends her book with the following question, which would have been entirely in tune with the collective fear of Jesuit agents actively being fostered by Evangelical Protestants. It would have had the added effect of providing yet another blow to the weak and vulnerable in society namely, female servants and governesses:20 How many other governesses or household servants, or even other ‘escaped nuns’, whose story has been concealed from regard to their safety, may now be aiding the purposes of the Jesuits in this country? It is well worthy of inquiry. (Luke, The Female Jesuit, pp. 432–3) It would seem from her observations that Mrs Luke believes the female figure of the Jesuit is more effective and culpable than the male. Frances Trollope, a popular mid-Victorian author, was particularly scathing in her attacks on men who held a post of responsibility in the church and who used their influence in a negative way to lure women into both temporal and religious traps. In her novel The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837), she makes a vitriolic attack on the misuse of Evangelical power and the vulnerability of an unworldly widow who, lacking the protection of her husband, was particularly susceptible to the predatory vicar. Trollope, a member of the established Church of England, was alert to the dangers of excessive Evangelicalism and her portrayal of the Ultra Protestant vicar of Wrexhill horrified her critics. Her physical description of this clergyman, Mr Cartwright resembles that of a stereotypical Jesuit, as The Athenaeum described him in Autumn 1837:21 Handsome, silkily spoken … with his black eyes and caressing hands, which make such sad havoc amongst a bevy of admiring village ladies, he glides on his way, like a serpent – glossy, silent and poisonous – throwing out hints here, innuendoes there; blighting with the language of brotherly love, and under the mask of Scriptural sanctity, creeping steadily upward towards wealth and power. He is a fearful character; and some of his later doings are too dark and terrible to


have been written down by a woman, – aye, or a man either; but Mrs. Trollope loves debatable ground. (Trollope, The Vicar of Wrexhill, Introduction) Mrs Trollope clearly did love debatable ground, something illustrated in a later novel, Father Eustace: A Tale of The Jesuits (1847).22 This is a three volume work which employs all the anti-Catholic rhetoric of the Evangelicals to tell the story of priestly intrigue and deception. It is, however, interesting to note that the conclusion of Father Eustace offers redemption to the young Jesuit of that name, whereas the Vicar of Wrexhill is horsewhipped, disgraced and banished. It is not clear why one clergyman should receive a greater punishment than the other. Critics have asserted that The Vicar of Wrexhill was based on the Trollope’s Harrow neighbour, the Rev. John Cunningham,23 so this may be an example of Fanny Trollope ‘admonishing’ behaviour that she disapproved of. However, she could have believed that, as a Protestant, the Vicar of Wrexhill should have known better than Father Eustace, who is portrayed as being more deluded than corrupt. Father Eustace is a good example of the way in which religion, particularly Roman Catholicism, was perceived to offer females an outlet for their imagination and aesthetic pleasure. One of the most distinguishing features of nineteenth century, English anti-Catholicism was the fear of Catholic institutions and sacerdotal activity. The Catholic priesthood and female religious orders violated two canons of Protestant practice. Celibacy in particular was viewed with suspicion by a culture that venerated family life. Mrs Trollope’s Father Eustace is representative of a Protestant concept of Catholic priests who were renowned for being talented, attractive, rather feminised men, soft spoken and gently persuasive. The Jesuit rarely walks, he glides. The novel begins with the death of Richard Randolfe DeMorley, a land-owning Roman Catholic who leaves his widow Lady Sarah and his daughter Juliana, both of whom are Protestants. It was the custom in a mixed marriage of this type for all the females, including the servants in the household, to be Protestant and the males to be Catholic. The reader is introduced to Father Ambrose, Sir Richard’s confessor, who establishes his character as a grasping Jesuit immediately by trying to make Juliana give all the non-entailed property to the Catholic Church. Much against the wishes of Lady Sarah, Juliana allows Ambrose to take a casket of jewels despite the fact that this is against the law. Lady Sarah treats Ambrose with scorn and he realises how little she values the honour of a man, ‘who could thus take advantage of the agitated feelings of a young orphan girl

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to get possession of her property’.24 Trollope insists that it is not for personal greed that Ambrose acts as he does, but for the good of his church. This acting from blind obedience rather than for personal greed, makes him a very dangerous character:25 Yet if anyone who had watched the old man at that moment, had supposed that the grasp with which he clasped that precious casket and the glance with which his eye seemed to devour it, proceeded from any wish to appropriate the contents to himself, they would have been entirely mistaken. (Trollope, Father Eustace, p. 46) Father Ambrose lingers on at the DeMorley’s house, Castle Cuthbert. He is caught in earnest conversation with the bailiff of an empty neighbouring property which is strange as this man is ‘no Romanist’. His presence begins to annoy Lady Sarah so that she says in reply to an invitation to Henley, ‘it would be much pleasanter, Julia, for us to watch the silent glidings of Father Thames, than of Father Ambrose’.26 The image of the gliding Jesuit is further extended when it is explained that DeMorley himself had been a ‘Jesuit’ as he had been educated by them in Belgium and this ensured that they would never let go of him. Ambrose had been placed in the house in order to create a rift between husband and wife. It was his ‘Smooth gliding policy’ to divide the couple by making DeMorley feel guilty for marrying a heretic. By explaining the history of the DeMorley family Trollope sets the scene for a Catholic plot which contains several warnings to her Protestant readers. The text effectively asserts three things: do not send your children to be educated in foreign Catholic schools; mixed marriages do not work; once the Jesuits have hold of you they will never let go. Her diatribe against the Jesuits is powerful. The image of the all-seeing spider weaving its web around the world is extremely effective. It evokes the picture of a far-reaching, complicated and sticky trap, woven to ensnare the unsuspecting Protestant, whilst the Jesuit sits in the centre of his creation waiting for his prey. Trollope adopts a straightforward and neutral idiom for this novel, avoiding the over-flamboyant and falsely biblical style of so much nineteenth-century anti-Catholic rhetoric. According to the author, the Society of Jesus has:27 more eyes than are fabled in the head of a spider, and who weave webs of more delicate and wide-spreading texture and of threads more nicely vibrative, than all the spiders in the World … No race, or rather no society, congregated on the surface of the Earth understand


their own concerns better than do the inheritors of the power of Ignatius Loyola; and those who, under any circumstances, presume or suspect them of doing less for the advancement of their power than they can do, are altogether blunderers and ignorami!! (Trollope, Father Eustace, pp. 71–2) Because Ambrose realises that he can never use his powers on Lady Sarah, he is said to hate her with ‘that resolute, concentrated, unexpansive species of hatred which perhaps no one but a foiled Jesuit can feel’. He realises that he will never be able to make her a ‘Catholic or a Jesuit’ and in the presence of firm, committed Protestantism, albeit in the shape of a woman, he turns his attentions to her more wavering, innocent and passionate daughter. Ambrose eventually returns to Rome to see his Superior. The hierarchical system of the Catholic clergy is stressed. The training of a Jesuit over a period of many years ensures his complete and unwavering obedience to his superiors, he is subject to strict discipline and his total and unquestioning loyalty to his society is the source of its power. To many mid-Victorian Protestants the Jesuits seemed almost like a different species, cold calculating and cunning; this perception of the order formed the basis of a discourse of fear that developed around a community of highly intelligent and motivated men:28 Neither the bodies nor the minds of Jesuits appear to be affected like other men; or rather, the mind of a Jesuit is schooled into having such ‘sovereign sway and masterdom’ over itself and the body it belongs to, that none may guess from any outward sign what either mind or body feels. (Trollope, Father Eustace, pp. 152–3) To create an atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue Fanny Trollope gives a very detailed description of Ambrose’s meeting in Rome with the General of the Jesuits, Scaviatoli. There are secret passwords, hidden locations and a labyrinth of rooms. Trollope gives the reader a clear summary of the priests’ intentions by dramatising the figure of Scaviatoli who confirms that nothing is too low or too high for the attention of the Jesuits as their intention is no less than holding a universal, superintending rule, both spiritual and intellectual, over the nations of the earth. To further underline the way in which they work, Scaviatoli states:29 The secret of the power so visibly vested in us by the favour of Heaven, rests in the watchfulness with which we mark all things,

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whether seemingly little or seemingly great, and then make each thing serve as a link in the stupendous chain by which we are permitted to hold the perverse minds of men in subjection to the only code that can protect them from eternal destruction. (Trollope, Father Eustace, p. 168) Having set the scene for the popish plot, Trollope introduces the reader to Father Eustace the hero or possibly anti-hero of her novel. Father Eustace constitutes the perfect stereotype of the ‘gliding Jesuit’. Trollope gives an extremely detailed picture of the priest which helps to explain the impact he has on all who come into contact with him, particularly Juliana DeMorley. The reader is told that Eustace can move silently and imperceptibly. This is a useful attribute for a man whose intention it is to rob a mother of her daughter and a church of its devotee. The vocabulary used to depict him is more usually associated with women which underpins the idea of the Roman Catholic priest as being unmanly and effeminate. Eustace is described as slight, of middle height, gentlemanly, easy and graceful in his carriage:30 His countenance was one of very remarkable beauty; the features exquisitely formed and the large, long, dark blue eye, with its rich black eye-lashes and delicately formed eye-brow, might have vied with any in the world either in shape, colour, or expression. (Trollope, Father Eustace, pp. 236–7) He also has dark brown curls and a small, classically outlined head. To make the feminised picture of Eustace complete Mrs Trollope notices the size and shape of the priest’s hands:31 Nor was it possible, when his glove was withdrawn, to avoid remarking the singularly symmetrical form of his hand, and the almost feminine delicacy of its colour. (Trollope, Father Eustace, p. 237) When Eustace, masquerading as Edward Stormont a young Irish gentleman, is introduced into the society frequented by the DeMorleys, he is reported as being ‘in the form of a Belvedere Apollo with an intellectual face’, and looking a vast deal more like an angel than a man.32 This ‘demigod’, as he is described by one young lady, has a very favourable effect on the impressionable Juliana. Eustace has done his homework well and knows his target’s predilection for music. Singing is one of his particular talents and when he performs:33 she ( Juliana) was conscious of that strangely delicious frissonnement which runs through the frame when listening to music, that seems to


use the ears as a conductor to the heart, and which teaches us more distinctly than any abstract philosophy can do, how mysteriously intimate is the union between soul and body. (Trollope, Father Eustace, p. 50) Juliana is said to be so emotionally stirred by Eustace’s singing that she is moved to tears. He is very aware of the effect he is having on her. Clearly this is a form of sexual awakening for Juliana as well as being a gratifying aesthetic experience. It is yet another example of the Catholic understanding of the influence of liturgy, in the widest sense of the word, on a sensitive soul and a sexually inexperienced young girl. The idea put forward in the novel that Father Eustace’s main purpose was to make Juliana DeMorely a nun would surely have touched a deepseated dread in the minds of both the male and the female readers. For, as Eustace himself writes in his diary:34 Juliana DeMorley, once a professed nun, the disposal of her property rests in the hands of her director. Beautiful creature! I would I had not found her so beautiful, so full of feeling … It is difficult not to regret that such a woman can never be the mother of a lovely race, as lovely as herself. (Trollope, Father Eustace, p. 83) The thought that a beautiful, sensitive, Protestant girl should lose her opportunity for married life and motherhood as well as her worldly goods, to become a ‘bride of Christ’, barren, penniless and under the authority of a Catholic priest, brings together in one narrative most of the threads of a gendered, anti-Catholic discourse of fear. Frances Trollope does, however, give Eustace some redeeming features. He is genuinely falling in love with Juliana and as the novel progresses he is more and more conscience-stricken. For the sake of the plot though, he has to be seen to put aside all personal considerations and blindly obey the will of his superiors. During his training as a Jesuit, Eustace had been carefully instructed in the science of reading the human heart. Whilst at school and college he had been specifically selected for his good looks and talents so that they might be used for the greater good of the church. The reader is informed that this is the way the Jesuits work and how they are able to gain so much influence:35 Wise indeed, in their generation, are the children of Loyola! We have but to study their code and read with common attention their declarations and their history, in order to perceive the admirable skill they

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have acquired in the art of reigning, not over the bodies but over the souls of men … Had Fr. Eustace been less deeply in earnest in his piety, he never could have yielded himself to the pernicious state of abject obedience which was demanded of him; and had not this slavery of the soul been represented to him from his earliest childhood as the one thing needful to salvation, he would not have learned to tremble, as he did now, at feeling his nature recoil from the acts which a diseased idea of duty compelled him to perform. (Trollope, Father Eustace, pp. 98, 101) The author comments, ‘it was sad to see a man like Edward Stormont [Father Eustace] so brainwashed’. She expresses pity for the man, believing him to be brought to a ‘state of abject obedience’ by his own piety and offers excuses for his actions:36 I conceive a truly believing Jesuit to be one of the most pitiable, as well as one of the most admirably self-devoted of created beings … Power is their (the Jesuits) object. Power is their earthly deity … There is no talent, no single gift of Heaven unmutilated by the agency of man, that brings not power with it. Is not beauty power? And grace, and cheerfulness, and wit, and wisdom, and the ear that teaches us to study and analyze harmony and the voice that gives us power to produce it, and the eye that leads the hand to imitate the beauty that it sees – all this gives power, and the Jesuit knows it; and never do they find among their ranks an individual gifted beyond his fellows with ANY source of power but they mark it, and cherish it, and turn it to account. (Trollope, Father Eustace, pp. 220, 222) Trollope compares the prayer for sustenance offered by the Jesuit on the command from the Society of Jesus, with the cure for mental suffering found in the ‘poison’ of laudanum and brandy. Laudanum was widely used in mid-Victorian society, particularly by women, despite being highly addictive. The analogy of the reliance of the young Jesuit on his superiors with that of the possibly hysterical or otherwise mentally disturbed woman on laudanum would therefore have had a particular and recognisable significance during this era. Mrs Trollope sees the Jesuit as oppressed by the hierarchical machinations of Rome. He turns to his superiors for mind-numbing direction and the bliss of promised salvation. In making Eustace and Juliana both victims of their backgrounds and their desires, Trollope almost mischievously undermines the image of the snakelike, corrupting Jesuit.


Juliana DeMorley, the heroine of the tale and the target of the Romish conspiracy, is intelligent and kind, but also naive and impressionable. She discovers that Edward Stormont (as she knows him) is a Roman Catholic, but since her father was also Catholic this does not worry her. In fact, the memory of her sad father arouses mixed feelings of guilt and compassion in her and when Eustace plays a requiem for the dead in her father’s memory, she is deeply moved. The couple fall in love with each other and Eustace, in his despair, resolves to use his influence over Juliana.37 In one scene Eustace makes Juliana kneel at the altar of her father’s private Catholic chapel whilst he sings, accompanying himself on the organ. When he returns, he finds her unconscious, prostrate on the steps and believes her to be dead. The juxtaposition of these two powerful emotions of sex and religion resulting in Juliana’s death-like swoon is reminiscent of the state of religious ecstasy experienced by holy women and nuns such as St Catherine of Siena. This type of extreme emotion is, to Victorian sensibilities, recognisably female; the male, Eustace, is able to master his feelings whilst Juliana completely gives way to hers. This particular scene not only dramatises the peril this defenceless female is facing with no father or brother to protect her, but also allows the plot to develop. Whilst Juliana is apparently comatose she nevertheless is aware of everything that is going on around her, so she hears Eustace talking to her about his impossible love and feels his kiss. The episode is concluded in a symbolic manner designed to emphasise the idea that the Jesuit is a mysterious, unattainable figure whose intention is to subjugate the young woman to Roman Catholicism; Father Eustace glides away from the library, and Juliana is left alone at the altar. At the end of the second volume of Father Eustace Frances Trollope introduces two more stereotypical Jesuits who masquerade as ordinary gentlefolk and help Father Eustace in his wavering moments. It had been agreed that should Eustace find himself falling in love with Juliana he should send a letter, prewritten by Scaviatoli, to a Father Edgar, otherwise known as William Mills, and this would bring a ‘friend’ to help him. The reader begins to understand the nature of the relationship between the two men:38 The elder Jesuit looked down upon his younger victim with a sinister smile. He saw that he was still a slave; and knew that, let him think of him and his judgement as he might, there would be no danger of his breaking his chains, although they should drag him to the lowest depths of misery and sin, so long as his spirit remained thralled by the belief that his vow of absolute unquestioning obedience was a

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more sacred and a more binding law than any other which either God or man could teach him. (Trollope, Father Eustace, pp. 189–90) Another ‘Jesuit’, Sister Agatha is to pretend to be Mr Mills’ cousin, Mrs Vavasor. She has a close relationship with Father Edgar and more than just friendship between them is hinted at by the author. Until the introduction of Sister Agatha, the only Catholic female in the novel had been Mrs Harwood, the housekeeper, a clandestine Catholic but a simple, obedient soul who is cruelly mocked by Sister Agatha when she expresses shock at Juliana falling in love with a priest. This ‘female Jesuit’ represents the dark side of woman which is identified as ‘the wicked nun’. In their book The Madwoman in the Attic Gilbert and Gubar, with reference to Madame Walravens in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, argue that the witch behind the nun, is in reality the nun herself. This powerful image is used to express the two sides of the religious woman.39 As Madame Walravens forces Justine Marie to enter a convent to get her away from M. Paul, Sister Agatha believes that when Juliana finds that she has been in love with a priest, her only course of action will be to take the veil. In aiding the male-dominated Catholic hierarchy, Sister Agatha hopes to attain power for herself. She does this in the only way she knows how, using her female cunning to further enslave women. The ‘malicious’ woman is often portrayed in this type of Victorian literature as being even more unpleasant than her male counterpart. Having suffered a similar fate to that of her victim, she uses that suffering to become part of the male establishment where she is well placed to ensnare more young girls. Trollope’s description of Sister Agatha clearly depicts Gilbert and Gubar’s notion of the religious woman seeking earthly power. She is caricatured as worldly and ambitious:40 There was an expression of fixed determination about the mouth and chin, and a look of keen intelligence in the eye, that would have suggested to such an one (it. a physiognomist) [sic] a long list of latent possibilities, amidst which, both power and will would have seemed greatly to predominate over all softer qualities … Lady Macbeth was not a more ambitious woman than this proud nun. (Trollope, Father Eustace, pp. 256, 330) Edgar has promised to have Agatha made the abbess of a rich convent if she helps him. Her reply to this offer is hardly that of a good woman: ‘my scruples William, shall be as faint as my trust in you is firm’.41 Edgar and Agatha work together as perfect stereotypical Jesuits. They infiltrate


the local genteel society with ease, forming firm and even flirtatious friendships. Edgar knows and therefore becomes master of all the petty interests of the drawing room, and this puts him in a very strong position. Agatha becomes the confidante of a young lady of substance and is made privy to the romantic intrigues that abound. As in Mrs Luke’s book The Female Jesuit, the text of Father Eustace raises certain questions. In particular we might ask: what is the reason for this social involvement when the task of these three formidable Catholics is to make Juliana a nun and to procure her fortune for the church? The answer to this question is given in volume three of the novel where Mrs Trollope, as a warning to all unsuspecting Protestants, enlightens her readers as to how the Jesuits work:42 Like a party of gypsies dispersing themselves through the neighbourhood for the purpose of telling fortunes, they all gather something in the way of information, and then make common stock of it. (Trollope, Father Eustace, p. 50) Father Edgar himself states:43 I wonder how many more centuries will be permitted to elapse before men find out that the Jesuit scheme of instituting a regular course of study of the human heart, and all the most hidden secrets thereof, for the improvement of these young disciples, is not only the best, but the only mode of obtaining real power over the Universe. (Trollope, Father Eustace, pp. 316–17) Sister Agatha speaks of Puck as being jesuitical when he says, ‘Good Lord, what fools these mortals be’, and Edgar’s particular interest in the petty gossip of the locality is described as one of the most effectual means by which the human race is brought under subjection to the divinely organised institution of the Holy Company of Jesus.44 These Jesuit spies are so good at the art of disguise says Mrs Trollope that when speaking of Mr Curtis, a good, local, Protestant and a friend of Lady Sarah, she observes:45 He was no more likely to suspect that a gentlemanlike, well- informed English gentleman, who was come into the neighbourhood to pay a visit of a few weeks to a nephew, was a Jesuit monk in disguise, than he was to fancy that the President of the United States was come over incognito, in order to take measure of his estate, that he might decide

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what portion should be allotted to the Union. (Trollope, Father Eustace, p. 210) Even though Mrs Trollope depicts Father Edgar and Sister Agatha in a very negative light, at the end of the story, she has Father Edgar living to a ripe old age and Sister Agatha suffering a rather comic death due to indulging herself in too many walnuts. Eustace however, commits a very non-jesuitical act: he writes Juliana a letter in which he confesses that he is a Catholic priest, leaves it on her paint box and runs, not glides, away. He realises that he is lost as a Jesuit but nevertheless some vestige of his training remains and he returns to Rome for Scaviatoli’s inevitable punishment. He is not murdered as predicted by Sister Agatha, but by means of a sensational trap he is imprisoned by his order:46 suddenly [Eustace] felt the floor under his feet sinking beneath him, and in another moment the faint light which had before surrounded him, was changed to total darkness. He uttered no cry; no word, no groan escaped him; but a sensation, probably not much unlike that caused by death itself, came upon his spirit; he felt that he was doomed and that the light of day was passed from him forever! (Trollope, Father Eustace, pp. 295–6) The author comments that Eustace was: ‘the living image of a helpless bigot in whom his blind submission had stifled all the energy of moral freedom, and all the responsibility of manly honour.’47 Like other Protestant writers,48 Mrs Trollope could not let the Catholic Church win in her fiction. Many years after his flight, Father Eustace returns to Cuthbert Castle, ill and destitute but capable of asking Juliana for forgiveness. He collapses at her feet and dies, but not before he has heard her give her pardon.49 On his body is found a letter addressed to Juliana in which he recognises his faults, and the Protestant Church as the only true church. He is buried in the family grave and much later when Juliana dies she is laid beside him with a black velvet pall laid over the two coffins like a bed blanket. The author does not specifically state this, but it would fit in with the thinking of the time that through his conversion and his suffering, Eustace had joined the ranks of manly Protestant men and was therefore fit to be associated with a Protestant girl. Whilst Eustace is being dealt with in a predictably medieval way by his order, Juliana is acting in a predictably hysterical and feminine manner: she becomes very ill and in a few months she is reduced to a


mere skeleton. The doctor’s diagnosis is that she has had such a huge shock to her nervous system that it has caused incipient insanity. She avoids becoming a nun, but she incurs the mental suffering that was often attributed to nuns.50 Like one who has chosen a celibate life, Juliana never marries or has children, even though she is said to have retained her beauty. She makes her half-brother heir to her estate, making it clear that she is resigned to never founding her own dynasty. Although the novel has a superficially happy ending, both the hero and the heroine meet tragic fates, the warning about gliding Jesuits is all too explicit. During the middle and the latter half of the nineteenth century a considerable amount of literature was published in which parents of young girls were warned against the danger of giving their children a Catholic education:51 As the machinations of Popish emissaries to effect a division of faith and of feeling between families, have been hitherto chiefly directed and chiefly successful, among ladies, generally very juvenile ones, it is hoped that the author may not be condemned presumptuous in attempting thus to warn the young against being ensnared, who have not had all the same sad opportunities as herself, to observe the rise, progress, and most calamitous termination of a taste for the excitements of Romanism. (Sinclair, Modern Superstition, p. 3) It had become fashionable for girls to be sent abroad for their schooling, mainly to France and Belgium, and convent schools were the preferred destination for these middle-class, Protestant young ladies. In England, many non-Catholic parents sent their girls to convent schools believing that they would receive a superior education, particularly in languages. During Queen Victoria’s reign, upwards of 800 conventual institutions had been established in England and this fact was seen by some as a threat to the Protestant institutions and the well-being of the nation. In Father Eustace, Frances Trollope makes the point that one of the main methods used by the Catholic Church for making converts is through education. The fashion for sending young girls to the Continent to be educated in convent schools was considered dangerous by the Evangelical Protestants because it exposed malleable girls to all the dangers of popery and left them without the protection of their fathers, brothers and clergymen. During this period, warnings against convent schools appear in many different types of literature. In her novel Beatrice Catherine Sinclair under the heading ‘Methods Used to Entice Young

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Girls into Romanism’, criticises the laxity of Protestant fathers who place their daughters in potentially ruinous situations. The worse scenario to a certain Protestant imagination is that when a girl is persuaded to take the veil: not only will she be lost to her family for ever, but, according to Sinclair:52 The nature of a nun is from the hour of her profession to be like no other human nature, after the priest has convinced her that religion is his accomplice in commanding a life of solitary heartlessness, of voluntary austerities, of grovelling heathenisms, and of self-inflicted misfortunes. (Sinclair, Modern Superstition, p. xxv) The trend for placing daughters in foreign convents was seen not only as hazardous for the girls involved but also for the whole fabric of Protestant society. In Stanhope Burleigh: The Jesuits in Our Home, Helen DHU makes the following observation about Protestant families of wealth:53 How often their daughters are sent to Convents of the Sacred Heart, at home and abroad, where they are gradually won over to the Catholic faith, and end in becoming enemies of the religion of their forefathers. (Helen DHU, Stanhope Burleigh, p. x) In one of the ‘personal narratives’ that proliferated during this period, Eliza Smith tells of how she was converted to Catholicism before seeing the error of her ways. She says that she accidentally fell in with some works on the doctrines of the Catholic Church, and being a very imaginative child she was very attracted to them. Smith excuses herself for having been beguiled by Rome whose rules work ‘through fear, and subjugate the human mind by the invincible leagues of spiritual terrors’. After all, she says, even the greatest of men tremble before the power of the Church. ‘What wonder if a woman’s weaker heart and lowlier intellect is schooled by such means to the pliancy required.’54 Girls were the mothers of the future, the guardians of religion and morality in the home and above all the weaker sex, it is not surprising therefore to see them being used as a very persuasive instrument in the call to Protestant men to rid England of the Roman menace. One of the most interesting novels written in order to warn Protestant parents of the dangers of sending their daughters to foreign convents to be educated is The Schoolgirl in France written in 1842 by Rachel McCrindell. Apparently this was a widely read book.55 In the preface to


the story the author clearly states her agenda in publishing, and asks the reader to note that it is not a work of fiction but based on true experience with the names of the characters and places altered in order to preserve their anonymity. Speaking of herself in the third person, Miss McCrindell writes:56 It has fallen to her lot, to witness many of the evils attendant on the too-common practice of sending young persons to the continent, at that very period of life when the mind is most unguarded, the feelings most susceptible, and the principles most uncertain. She has seen the snares spread for the inexperienced, the spells thrown over the warm imagination, the fascinations entwined round the youthful heart, by that most dangerous system of false religion, which appealing with almost irresistible power to the senses, through them prostrates reasoning faculties, and thus silently but surely weaves its fatal net around the unsuspecting victim. (McCrindell, The Schoolgirl in France, Introduction) When this happens, the deluded parents are left to mourn their alienated child who has fallen prey to the seductions of popery. Accordingly, McCrindell sees it as her duty to warn parents of the minute, everyday dangers connected with a Roman Catholic seminary, in order that they will not send their daughters out ‘as sheep in the midst of wolves’. The story has two central characters, Caroline Howard and Emily Mortimer, cousins who are to go to school in France for two years. They represent completely different types of Protestant females. Emily is anxious about the trip and about being ‘polluted’ by French ways and popery. Caroline is looking forward to the novelty and challenge, she feels strong in her faith. Before their departure, their Rector, Mr Somerville, sends them a letter of warnings and admonition to read their Bibles and to pray regularly. The first chapter of the novel is configured formulaic religious writing interspersed with frequent Biblical references. One of the main reasons the girls are being sent to France is because their families thought that they were becoming too serious and ought to have some fun and frivolity in their lives and be removed from their serious friends. As in most novels of this genre, the lack of friends or family plays a very important role in establishing the vulnerability of young women. McCrindell holds such lax parenting in very low esteem:57 Little did these short-sighted parents consider, or reflect on the dangers to which they were thus exposing their children; they never once

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thought either of the religion or the irreligion of the place to which they were about to send them. (McCrindell, The Schoolgirl in France, p. 9) Some of the girls’ serious friends are described to the reader in deliberately sentimental language which idealises the people and their situation. This works as a contrast to the environment in which they will find themselves in France. On a farewell visit to their friends the Rev. Morton and his wife, the parsonage is depicted as a flawless model of Protestant domesticity. The house is neat and has a garden full of sweet smelling flowers, beautiful pigeons are feeding from Mrs Morton’s hand, there is a large well-fed cat basking in the sun and a little lap dog energetically welcomes the girls. From the security of this natural Eden, Mr Morton warns the girls about the false trumpery of Rome:58 ‘Remember my dear young friends’, said this venerable man, ‘that Popery is a religion which appeals most powerfully to the senses, which possesses every facility, from the seductive nature of its tenets, and the imposing splendour of its ceremonies, for dazzling the imagination, perverting the judgement, and ensnaring the heart.’ (McCrindell, The Schoolgirl in France, p. 11) It is clear from the context of the narrative that the girls, especially Caroline, are very susceptible to aesthetic influences. Their friends recognise this even if their families are blind to it, and it is obvious to the reader that the French Catholics will be quick to appreciate this aspect of Caroline’s nature and put their knowledge to good use. From the moment the two cousins arrive at their school in France it is evident that Caroline is in danger of falling under the spell of Catholicism. Not surprisingly, the school is run very much according to the strict regime of convent life. There is a large contingent of English girls in the school and Emily makes it her business to act the good Evangelical Protestant in trying to stop her fellow countrywomen from falling into Romish ways. She lays great emphasis on the keeping of the Sabbath and attempts to stop the Protestant girls from buying themselves treats of fruit and cream on a Sunday. Her schoolmates however, are already on the slippery slope to Catholicism and resent her bossiness:59 they loudly declared that they had never seen such a strangely scrupulous and gloomy creature, and that they would not suffer


themselves to be ruled by so new and disagreeable an intruder. (McCrindell, The Schoolgirl in France, p. 31) Emily begins to despair about the seriousness of her companions, and speaks of searching for ‘that fragrant bud of youthful piety’, an expression that has distinct sexual overtones with its reference to the fragrant bud of female youth that is presumably about to flower. She finds that the French system of education deems it necessary to keep young girls under constant surveillance. This method of control is seen as being peculiarly continental and peculiarly Catholic.60 It gives Lydia, Caroline’s serious, consumptive sister, good reason for exploding into a patriotic diatribe on the benefits of living in Protestant England:61 O’ happy, happy England … blessed land of freedom and peace! Where girls of fifteen or sixteen are looked upon as rational beings and capable of distinguishing between right and wrong; – where they are taught to respect themselves, instead of being constantly suspected! – Where they are gently led into the paths of virtue, without being subjected to the degrading coercion, which is more likely to disgust than to benefit their minds. England! dear England for ever … I would not exchange the privilege of being an English girl for all the wealth of the Indes, or all the boasted advantage which France is so proud of possessing. (McCrindell, The Schoolgirl in France, p. 52) The mixture of patriotism, patriarchy and Evangelicalism is extremely revealing. On pages 106–8 we find a patriotic poem England, which reads as strangely out of context to the present-day reader but would have been in accordance with the nineteenth-century perception that Protestantism was patriotism. The Protestant girls feel isolated and vulnerable without their fathers, brothers and vicars to guide and protect them and one by one Emily’s English companions become tainted by Romanism. There are detailed descriptions of Catholic rites and rituals that greatly affect the girls’ emotions. Emily witnesses a grand funeral procession which she says was, ‘well calculated to strike the mind with awe, and operate powerfully on the feelings’62 McCrindell gives a detailed description of the colours, sounds and smells which so affect even the pragmatic Emily, that she nearly faints with emotion. Caroline is even more overawed by the spectacle, she becomes pale and agitated, and then composed, but from that moment she withdraws her close affection from Emily and becomes more immersed in Catholicism. Throughout the novel Caroline becomes increasingly emotionally unstable. She faints at the slightest thing concerned with Catholicism,

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even at the mention of a visit to a convent. The fainting girl is used almost as a trope in much anti-Catholic literature as part of the larger central pattern of surrender. It represents loss of control. Emily feels the danger of this Catholic domination of the senses, and blames the parents who have sent them to this heretical place:63 [Emily] could not but deeply deplore that cruel ambition of worldly accomplishments, or that reckless indifference to their eternal interests which so generally induced Protestant parents to expose their children to the baneful influence of French society and a French education. (McCrindell, The Schoolgirl in France, pp. 94–5) In Father Eustace Juliana DeMorley is exposed to the pernicious influence of Catholic ritual which makes her lose her self-control. In The Schoolgirl in France the reader is able to observe similar loss of control experienced by Caroline at both the Christmas and the Easter services. She is so overcome by emotion that she faints. In nineteenth-century fiction, this swooning is characteristic of young inexperienced girls who are swamped by feelings that they cannot understand or control. A more experienced woman can and does understand what is happening to Caroline. Madame Dorville is presented as being pleasant and kind, but her sole aim is to convert the girls to Catholicism. Acting in the mode of a ‘female Jesuit’, she:64 resolved to set all the fascinations connected with her religion before their eyes in the light which she thought would be most likely to produce a powerful impression on their minds. (McCrindell, The Schoolgirl in France, p. 122) Caroline and her sister Lydia are invited to stay at the Dorville’s house in the country where they are introduced to a young and prepossessing priest. The whole visit turns out to be a conspiracy to convert them. The pattern of the intrigue is stereotypical of this type of anti-Catholic narrative. The beguiling agent is a trusted female who leads her prey into the clutches of the male hierarchy. The execution of popish plots is certainly a part of McCrindell’s repertoire of anti-Catholic propaganda, but she is more concerned with the influence of the artistic and intuitive perspectives of the religion on the psyche of young women. The dangers of being away from England are stressed repeatedly, underlining the ‘foreignness’ of the Catholic religion. Emily longs to take her friend Caroline away from the school to ‘the shores of Protestant England, where the spells of popery would, she trusted, be broken’.65 There are several descriptive passages in the book which are vivid enough


to suggest that the author had experienced them herself. Their only function seems to be to show the type of ceremony that would affect an emotional girl. In one description the reader is told about a feast day in the town during which the host is paraded. The girls go to the cathedral to hear the ladies of the congregation make their general confession:66 There was something exceedingly interesting and picturesque, in the appearance of these young ladies, as they knelt before the altar, in their uniform white dresses, and long flowing veils: and the effect was heightened to enchantment, when, at the conclusion they sang a hymn in which the touching sweetness of their voices blended in richest melody, with the majestic peals of the organ. Emily could not wonder at the tears of emotion which she saw trembling in the eyes of several of her companions, nor at the pale cheek and averted eye of Caroline, her own feelings were strongly excited and she could not help fearing the influence which these fascinating appeals to the senses must exercise over the ardent imagination of youth. (McCrindell, The Schoolgirl in France, p. 205) Another episode that is described by the author but appears to have no functional relevance to is the story of the funeral of a priest whose corpse is laid out in full sacerdotal costume, and placed in a sitting position. This somewhat bizarre occurrence is described in such detail as to suggest the author is writing it from memory. So too is the incident of the girls coming across a country cottage where the corpse of a dead baby is on display outside and the mother curses Emily for not crossing herself with holy water since by doing so she would be wishing the soul of her infant well. The purpose of these stories would seem to be to show the superstition and strangeness of this Catholic country, and there are other reported incidents which symbolically represent the demoralising effects of popery and the decadence of French society.67 After the death of Caroline and Lydia’s mother in England, their father goes to France to collect them. However, they do not return home directly and instead have to enter another French school. Caroline wishes to return to the original one, but Emily and Lydia try to put Mr Howard right on the perils of convent schools:68 ‘as a Protestant’ [says Emily] ‘I cannot wish to be again a resident in a Roman Catholic seminary, and I am convinced that it is highly dangerous to entrust any young people to such tuition’. ‘Oh! yes, dear Papa’, added Lydia, ‘it is indeed very, very dangerous!I can speak of my own

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experience of the fascinating influence of Popery, and I am not the only one who has felt its ensnaring power.’ (McCrindell, The Schoolgirl in France, p. 273) The girls’ plea is initially heeded but as the story unfolds they find themselves once more amongst the papists, this time in a convent. The last chapters of the book are written in a completely different manner and are designed to expose what goes on behind the closed doors of Catholic convents. Caroline and Lydia’s father dies and leaves word that his girls are to return to England. Even though by this time Caroline has become converted to Catholicism, she follows her father’s wishes. She is slowly weaned off the Catholic faith and reaffirms her Protestant beliefs once she has returned home to the protection of her Protestant friends and clergy. Much mid-nineteenth century anti-Catholic literature made use of historical tales of the antagonism between Protestants and Catholics which included eighteenth-century attempts to stop children being sent abroad for their education. There is a long history of English anti-Catholic writing and each era takes stories from the previous one and reworks them to fit in with present history. According to Julie Peakman, who has dealt with anti-Catholic erotica in her book Mighty Lewd Books,69 ‘The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a surge of English denunciations of the Catholic clergy which employed venomous or satirical attacks in order to expose the sexual misdemeanours of priests, its primary function being as propaganda against the Catholics.’70 Nineteenth-century anti-Catholic writers produced literature that built on existing perceptions of Catholicism and reworked them into narratives more fitting to the political and social climate of midVictorian Britain. By creating a discourse of fear around the religious and moral safety of vulnerable females, these writers fuelled the belief that a secret and dangerous force that emanated from Rome was active in England and in Catholic schools on the Continent.

5 Lifting the Veil: A Nineteenth-century Perception of Nuns and Convents

In England the friends of the most abject criminal, or the most delirious maniac may gain uncontrolled access to certify that she is treated with kindness and propriety, besides which indispensable protection, the inmates of a prison, or a lunatic asylum, have the inestimable privilege of being occasionally visited by the authorised crown officers, to take legal proof that they are either justly or willingly incarcerated; but a convent is the only spot in her majesty’s wide dominions to which the law of British Liberty does not extend. Sinclair, Modern Superstition, p. 101 One distinguishing feature of anti-Catholic feeling during the nineteenth century was a widespread fear of Catholic religious institutions, and in particular female religious institutions. Many single women regarded the convent as a plausible alternative lifestyle. Such an alternative necessarily challenged the Victorian patriarchal emphasis on the family as the core of society. This meant that convent-living tended to become ideologically constructed as ‘unnatural’. To deny a woman her ‘natural’ destiny of wife and mother was deemed a terrible offence. In her analysis of a nineteenth-century women’s religious congregation, Gloria McAdam makes the point that whilst the nun represented an alternative to the established understanding of female gender and sexuality, she was consistently subjected, by men, to a gendered interpretation.2 It is this ‘gendered interpretation’ of the nun in nineteenth-century literature

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that will be explored in this chapter, through the examination of various different approaches to the subject, both fictional and non-fictional, published during the mid-nineteenth century. The rise of convents in England coincided with the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy and missionary priests were widely seen to be attempting to affect the conversion of the British people to ‘popery’. Anti-Catholic propaganda, generating a morbid interest in nuns and convents, led to a demand for government regulation and supervision of Catholic convents.3 A measure was proposed to prevent the forcible detention of females in religious houses and provide for a semi-annual inspection of convents by government inspectors. The so-called Convent Bill (1851) which tried to enforce anti-convent legislation was proposed by Drummond, Spooner and Lord Stanley and was defeated. However the debate that it inspired enabled the anti-Catholics to employ all their powers of oration and their literary skills to spread the popular myths embodying cruelty, and sexual perversion associated with communities of reclusive, unmarried women and men.4 As mentioned in Chapter 3, Victorian men might experience vicarious sexual stimulation from their scrutiny of the various supposed practices of nuns and priests. The anti-convent literature of this period displays, to a greater or lesser extent, a close interest in the sexual lives of the inmates of and the visitors to nunneries, and the use of corporal punishment in these establishments. In a more general discussion about the ‘No Popery’ cause, it has been observed that the obvious sexual implications of the movement’s literature were related to the period’s peculiar attitude towards the body. They were part of the restricting code of respectability which was closely associated with the social structure upheld by the upper and middle classes. Robert Klaus concludes that No Popery, because it involved the dominant precept of the privileged classes, was perhaps more illustrative of Victorian sexual neuroses than were the more measurable discourses of prostitution, pornography and homosexuality.5 I agree with Klaus, but would argue that these ‘neuroses’ were more specifically gendered than he allows and had more to do with a Protestant, male need to reconfirm authority and power over women rather than a general concern for sexual morality. One recurring argument against nunneries found in lectures, pamphlets and even speeches to the House of Commons during the mid-nineteenth century is that they are intrinsically ‘unnatural’. More than this, by rejecting marriage but nonetheless consorting with unmarried men, women place themselves in a morally dangerous situation.


The following passage from 1856 is a typical example of the prevailing arguments put forth:6 The monastic life, in itself, is peculiarly adapted to promote unhallowed thoughts and desires. Occupation is the natural condition of man … the priesthood, who are encouraged to sin by the facility of absolution from their fellow priests, cannot enjoy abstinence from the occasion of sin. Brought by their very profession into close contact with females in the confessional, they converse with them on the grossest subjects that are unfit for human ears. Bound by an unnatural law of celibacy – placed in circumstances in which their animal passions naturally become ascendant – with females in the confessional, nuns in the cloister at their disposal – is it not likely that immorality will ensue? (Blakeney, Popery in its Social Aspect, p. 245) In this sort of text, monks and nuns are considered idle and for this reason in danger of being overcome by their animal passions and lapsing into immoral behaviour. In much of the literature convents are seen essentially as priest’s brothels. The female inmates are either lascivious and wicked, or poor defenceless victims of sexual and physical abuse. These narratives, which purport to expose the dangers that Roman Catholicism poses for the young, innocent, middle-class girl, can be read as a rather crude attempt to control female sexuality. Within the ‘revelations’ of what goes on behind convent walls, a subtext can be detected. It reveals a tension within the patriarchal, Protestant family that is focussed on the Protestant girl. The problem here concerns the need to define women’s religion, with the underlying assumption that females are not capable of making their own religious choices. The dominant narrative in these texts is of women who are inevitably overcome by their emotions and are easy prey for those who wish spiritually or sexually to seduce them. Young women are portrayed as weak, but once they have been sucked into the Catholic Church, they experience a metamorphosis that turns them into strong, heartless creatures of indefinite gender. In his book on Victorian sexuality, The Dark Angel, Fraser Harrison gives an indication as to how the writers of anti-convent literature managed to depict two such different representations of the female character in a single narrative. He argues that in a patriarchal society male sexuality was credited with impressive powers and no woman could be thought entirely indifferent to a man’s sexual attention or unaltered by it. Traditional medical thinking maintained that whilst in men sexual

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desire was inherent and spontaneous, in women it lay dormant until aroused. Once aroused, however, female ardour could not be cooled; such was the magic of the male touch. Victorian women were highly protected from predatory men in order that they might retain their value as an intact possession.7 Once the girl was removed from the protection of her male relatives and placed in isolation in a convent she became assailable. For this reason it was believed that young, wealthy, Protestant girls were ‘stolen’ from their homes, and incarcerated in convents where they were relieved of their property and their virtue:8 Another means to which the priests resort to is to steal girls who are known to possess any property, and induce them to enter convents unknown to their parents. (Drummond, A Plea for the Rights, p. 7) Imprisonment, secrecy and constant surveillance were the measures used against the nuns to keep them in the power of the Catholic Church. It was these very methods that were often understood to push the sisters too far, so that they lapsed into cruelty or even insanity. During the nineteenth century there was a marked change in the discursive regimes which confined and controlled women. A close association between pathology and femininity became established within scientific, literary and popular discourse. It was at this time that womanhood and madness became effectively synonymous.9 Women were categorised, sexualised and confined in the home or the asylum when they did not follow the path that ‘nature’ had laid down for them. The 1850s saw an unprecedented increase in the number of women admitted to asylums:10 with the rise of the female hysteric, madness was becoming increasingly associated with femininity, moving out from the confines of the home and into the public institution. The convent, a confining institution itself, was described in anti-Catholic literature as a prison and an asylum: How are we to distinguish between our modern convents, our houses of correction, and our madhouses? Some convents seem to combine the characteristics of all three.11 A secure house where women could be controlled and in some cases became insane. The type of female that could be inveigled into a nunnery was the same as the one who, according to nineteenth-century psychiatric thinking, was most likely to become an hysteric:12 Nervous, susceptible women between puberty and thirty years of age, and clearly the single more so than the married, are most frequently


visited by hysteria; and such constitutions have always a greater aptitude to strong mental emotions, which on repetition, will super induce mental derangement. (Burrows, Commentaries, p. 74) The association of the idea of the convent with that of the asylum at this time has more to do with a nineteenth-century male view of women than with their professed anti-Catholicism. It appears however, that this association uses one idea to reinforce the other, drawing on current perceptions of Catholicism to sustain the position of the patriarchal, Protestant male and his duty to protect his womenfolk. Foucault makes the assertion that the asylum is a religious domain without religion. He also says that Catholicism frequently provokes madness because it excites a fear of the ‘Beyond’ which is conjured up through the employment of fearful images and strong emotions which lead men to despair and melancholia.13 The power of an oppressive religious system working within the isolated atmosphere of an asylum or prison presents a picture of terrible gloom and potential tyranny. That young girls should be taken to such places and subjected to unknown terrors directly challenged conventional ideas of family life and female protection. It is not surprising therefore to find books with titles such as Walled Up Nuns14 later in the century in which Englishmen are called upon to rid their country of Catholic convents. The convent, in many cases, was an example of what Irving Goffman refers to as ‘Total Institution’.15 One definition of this term is an establishment that is designed as a retreat, often a training centre for the religious. These institutions are characterised by their barriers against the outside world, locked doors, enclosing walls and even such natural phenomena as moors, rivers and forests. What is distinctive about total institutions is that they exhibit the common characteristics of close surveillance of the inmate, lack of privacy and often corruption by another inmate. Characteristics that are almost universal in the literature concerning nuns and nunneries. It is frequently this loss of liberty and the pointless existence of the institutionalised that is seen as the cause of nuns’ melancholia or insanity. In The Convent by Rachel McCrindell, the reader is given a description of an old nun, Sister Giovanna, who becomes mad after witnessing an immuring in her convent. She is persuaded by the Mother Superior that self-inflicted tortures are agreeable to God. Her penances include taking hardly any rest, spending entire nights in the chapel on her knees in front of a crucifix or a statue of the Virgin Mary with her arms extended in the form of a cross for so long that her muscles seize up. She starves

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herself until she is a mere skeleton, and ‘frequently mangled herself with the scourge, till exhausted nature could scarcely enable her to crawl back to her cell.’16 On her chest, Sister Giovanna wears an iron cross ‘garnished’ with small painted spikes which she often drives into her flesh. Sister Giovanna’s self-inflicted pain and finally her death is described in great detail, a common feature in this type of literature and one that possibly provided titillation for the reader. Even in her last moments, dying in agony, ‘the infatuated creature … fastens around her waist a broad, rough, prickly band of horsehair.’17 This demented woman, a spy for her superior, was insane according to McCrindell who tells her story: Sister Giovanna had a male cousin who had secretly married a 19-yearold girl called Costanza. Her family considered her too young to be married and put her in the convent. The Pope annulled the marriage and the convent received an endowment. However Costanza would not give up her husband and tried to escape with the help of Sister Giovanna. The Mother Superior found Giovanna burning the escape note, made her confess the plan and forced her to help catch the pair. The husband was sent to the court of the Inquisition and tried for attempting to abduct a nun, and Costanza was bricked up alive and is last seen staring at Giovanna. This was the origin of Sister Giovanna’s madness. At the beginning of the nineteenth century William Tuke, followed by his grandson Samuel, began a movement in Victorian psychiatry that shunned the use of violence and mechanical restraint in the treatment of the insane, and advocated work and self-discipline. The catalogue and illustration of the instruments used by earlier asylum keepers for the control of their patients are very similar and in some cases the same as those that were supposed to have been used in the control of recalcitrant nuns.18 By associating the convent with the asylum of an earlier, more brutal age the Evangelical Protestants place the women within it beyond masculine care, out of control and in grave moral danger. In the following extract taken from Michelet’s Priests, Women and Families (1846), the author relates his personal opinion and experience of convent life.19 He tells how he used to live near a convent and could hear the voices of the nuns singing very sadly: Their singing was a sorrowful, harsh, grating drawl, out of all tune as of voices broken by long suffering. I first imagined it was the prayers for the dead, but on listening more attentively, I distinguished the words ‘Te rogamus, audi nos,’ that song which invokes the benediction of the God of all living things on the fertility of the soil. This


May-song chanted by such lifeless beings, presented a grievous contrast to my mind, as I watched these pale women condemned to eternal sterility, drag their weary limbs over the flowery grass-plot. … The gloomy scene I had witnessed, unrelieved or exalted by any poetical sentiment, had painfully affected me; recalling as I did, less the notion of virginity than that of sterile widowhood – that fruitless, enervating state, of both moral and intellectual privation, to which these unfortunate creatures are subjected by their tyrannical masters. (Michelet, Priests, Women and Families, p. 51) The simple imagery of sterility, of an unfulfilled longing for marriage and maternity is obvious in this writing. The author continues by describing the solitude of convent life, speaking of the ‘unconquerable maternal instinct’, and a ‘woman’s heart’, which form the basis of her character. In the convent the true nature of woman tries to deceive itself, but it cannot, at least not without risking dire consequences. Michelet sees the nun as being constantly watched, night and day.20 Even her dreams are recorded: A woman’s heart, a mother’s heart – that invincible maternal instinct which forms the basis of a woman’s character. … How can we wonder that this woman is sad, and that she becomes sadder and sadder every day, or that she wanders solitary and silent in the most dreary avenues? But even her solitude is considered a crime; she is suspected; all observe and watch her – not only during the day! that would be insufficient; this spy system lasts all night; during her sleep they listen by her side, and when she dreams, every word she utters is taken down. The horrible conviction of being thus watched day and night, must strangely disturb all the faculties of the soul and awaken fearful day-dreams, the hallucinations of her shattered reason … . (Michelet, Priests, Women and Families, p. 53) The reference to the ‘hallucinations’ and the ‘fearful day-dreams’ of the unfulfilled nun and the description of her convent prison function equally as an illustration of her confused mind. This would be taken as the natural result of such an unnatural life to one conversant with Victorian psychiatric thinking about women.21 That is, that women were more vulnerable to insanity because the instability of their reproductive systems interfered with their sexual, emotional and rational control. Unmarried middle-class women were believed to be more prone to mental disorders than women from the working classes. In Victorian

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novels, the madwoman became the vehicle for the manifestation of a suppressed life or frustrated sexual desire.22 Convents, then, were depicted as prisons, brothels and madhouses by mid-nineteenth-century anti-Catholic writers. It would seem no accident therefore that they were also regarded as the locus for all kinds of perversions, and sexual perversions in particular. In his book The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs published in 1857, William Acton wrote:23 I should say that the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally. It is too true, I admit, as the divorce courts show, that there are some few women who have sexual desires so strong that they surpass those of men. … I admit, of course, the existence of sexual excitement terminating even in nymphomania, a form of insanity which those accustomed to visit lunatic asylums must be fully conversant with; (Acton, Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, p. 31) If incarceration in a convent is believed to cause madness, ennui and melancholy, it is surely not too great a leap of the imagination to see it as eventually causing sexual promiscuity which in itself is perceived as a form of insanity in women. In 1852 ‘A Protestant’, writing about the evils of nunneries, recounted the sad story of a young girl who was beguiled into a convent:24 In the city of Bath, a young lady, daughter of a Protestant clergyman, has been led into secret correspondence with a Romish priest, whose notes were put under the cushion of her pew, – induced to enter an English Nunnery – and on inquiry being set on foot [sic] by her family, was found to have been then removed to a Nunnery abroad; where she is said to be at this time in a state of insanity – the condition of a great proportion of nuns to which they are reduced, as is well known on the Continent, to a fearful extent, by the effect of nine or ten years incarceration within the walls of a Nunnery … And while the system of perverting the daughters of Protestant parents exists, are not the Protestants of this land immediately and directly concerned in putting an end to the nunnery system among us. (A Protestant, Nunneries, pp. 6–7) The secret correspondence with the Romish priest suggests that sexual impropriety was an instrument in the beguilement of this young girl.


To prevent her family attempting to exert some sort of influence, she was removed to another convent on the Continent where she went insane. This ‘daughter of a Protestant clergyman’ passes from the control of one man, her father, to another, the Catholic priest who brings about her downfall. An influential speaker against Catholic practices and institutions was Father Gavazzi, an ex-Catholic priest who came over from Italy in the 1850s and travelled England giving public lectures warning people of the dangers of Romanism. Records of his ‘orations’ were printed, as was the reaction of the crowd which, in all cases was effusive and welcoming. For example, when he gave a lecture on the subject of ‘auricular confession, nuns and nunneries’ in Sheffield in 1852, we are told that the Hall was crowded with ladies and gentlemen of the middle and higher classes who greeted him most heartily.25 Applause is frequently mentioned throughout the lecture: The subject of nuns and nunneries was dwelt upon by Father Gavazzi at great length. He showed, first, that nuns were made by the confession; for when a father confessor once gets within his meshes a rich young lady, he never permits her to escape … The nuns, on the day of their admission to the Nunneries, were made to swear to forget all their relatives and friends. How, then, could the nunneries be a fit place for instructing the daughters of England? (Gavazzi’s Orations, 1852, pp. 26–7) In other well-attended lectures in Brighton and London, Father Gavazzi made the observation that the ‘capital’ of nunneries was, ‘young, beautiful maidens of large fortune. These are the new material after which the priesthood of Rome yearns’.26 In his eighth Oration in 1851, which was entitled Convents and Nunneries, the Social Effect of Monastic Establishments, Gavazzi calls convents ‘living sepulchres’, where nuns are buried alive. He says that they are also ‘clerical seraglios or abodes of childish imbecility’ where ‘our maidens lead an existence of uselessness’. He calls the nuns ‘brides of despair’, and to the emphatic applause of the crowded auditorium informs his audience that in these convents, ‘household virtues, filial, spousal or maternal are unknown’.27 Despite being Italian, Gavazzi was able to speak directly to the fears of patriarchal, English Protestants using the discourse of gendered anti-Catholicism to whip up support in demagogic style.28 In his oration in London in 1854 he says: the question is, how shall your daughters best fulfil their English duties as wives and mothers, in English families? The question is not

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to speak beautifully the French language; no the question is, to read beautifully the English Bible in your British families. (Gavazzi’s Orations, 1854, pp. 12–13) Gavazzi unambiguously portrayed the convent as a threat to nineteenthcentury English society by employing the type of patriotism found in the earlier quotation. He also saw it as undermining the power of the father, husband and brother insofar as it isolated women from their influence. It is only a small step from this, to the assumption that if women were removed from their friends and family to a ‘foreign’ environment where they were made to go against that which their society deemed natural for their sex, they would become in some way, mentally unstable or even deranged. Many writers of this period participated in the general discourse of the infantilisation of women, with their concomitant emotional and sexual instability. One such writer was the Rev. John Jessopp who wrote in his book, Woman in 1851,29 Moreover, the humbler sphere we assign to woman is precisely that for which her whole constitution is predisposed, and as it were, instinctively adapted. Her more slender and fragile build, her more rapid beating of the pulses, her more lively sensibility of nerve, her greater delicacy of organisation and of feature, all contribute to constitute her ‘the weaker vessel’. (Jessopp, Woman, p. 27) Jessopp, of course, blurs the medical facts to ideological ends. A woman’s pulse rate is not determined by her gender but by her physical fitness, as is a man’s; a child, however, does have a more rapid pulse than an adult, so in this instance the woman is yet again being imbued with childlike qualities. He has definite views about those he calls ‘Christian maidens’. According to Jessopp, these young girls are willing in spirit but, ‘in no one but her is the flesh more weak’. For this reason he concludes that it is very important for girls to be prepared ‘for the special mission of the wife … since it is in the ordinary course of things to marry’.30 The belief that life in a convent was one of isolation and the suppression of sexual desire conspired to create the idea of the evil nun. Women, particularly frustrated women, were thought to be capable of greater cruelty than men and this perception was exploited by the nineteenthcentury writers of anti-Catholic literature. The Evangelical Christian writers also believed that women were fatally flawed because of their gender. They were the descendants of Eve who first introduced sexual awareness and therefore evil into the world. Drawing on their main


resource, the Bible, and reinterpreting it in the light of nineteenth-century psychiatric discourse, the anti-Catholics justified their opinion of nuns without compromising the stature of women who followed the correct path of the obedient daughter and faithful wife and mother. Gavazzi’s oration at Kennington Park in 1854 addressed what he called the danger of women. How through their moral weakness, they could be used by the Devil as his agents in the world.31 He asked his audience to remember that proselytising is a hard task, even for Jesuits: But I hear in England, from Protestants sometimes, that the Jesuits are not so bad as people think them: that they are quiet, peaceful, learned, pious gentlemanly-looking people. Yes; but they are Jesuits, and therefore always and everywhere bad. (Gavazzi’s Orations, 1854, p. 7) He reiterated a traditional view that when the Devil was introducing evil into the world, he did not choose to use Adam because he knew that with that man he would have failed, therefore he took another way and tempted Eve. The rewriting of Genesis 3 that follows this Biblically incorrect introduction is a good example of how Evangelical writers selected Bible passages and used them out of context in order to give their ideas pseudo-religious authority. Gavazzi employs the widespread idiom of Protestant anti-Catholicism. By making the equation between nuns and the fallen Eve archetype, he necessarily sexualises them:32 Eve, as a good lady, was pleased with the serpentine fashion, and, as a good lady, she was easily persuaded by the serpent, and accordingly, as a good lady, she took and she ate the fatal apple; and as a good wife, Eve brought the apple to her husband; and poor Adam, poor Adam, fascinated by the gentleness of his wife – poor Adam! Like all English husbands he wished to please his wife, took the apple and ate it: and misery and death were introduced into the world by means of Eve. So now, in order to tempt the British Protestant Adams, the devil – that is to say the Pope in our case – is not tempting, by means of the Jesuits, the British people, but he makes use of some foreign and native Eves called Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Clemency, Ladies of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Nuns are used to tempt the British people … Therefore, nuns are more fatal and dangerous than even Jesuits and monks. (Gavazzi’s Orations, 1854, pp. 9–10) In the anti-convent literature of the mid-nineteenth century, two kinds of nuns are clearly depicted. The young, vulnerable victim who has been

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lured into the convent for her money and beauty who either meets an unpleasant end, or survives to become the second type, the older, cruel nun, often the Mother Superior. This second type of sister, having been corrupted when young, has become an instrument of the Catholic clergy. Her mission is to pervert and debauch the younger, innocent nun and enmesh her in the web of depravity. As Gavazzi asserts,33 My own experience is, that where the nuns are without heart, they live to be sixty or seventy years of age; but where they are gentle, warm-hearted, they die between thirty and forty, despairing and repenting of their sacrifice. (Gavazzi’s Orations, 1852, p. 27) Michelet states that there was a wide difference between the harshness of man and the cruelty of women. The underlying discourse of this theory asserts that men may be harsh to both men and women and in fact it is often their duty to be so: but cruelty to women is the woman’s preserve. It is interesting to note that female cruelty is seen to be born from her own ‘ill-heated passions’,34 passions that cannot be assuaged by the natural course of things (which is to say, marriage and motherhood), but which must be satisfied by unlawful sexual liaisons or fester beneath the surface until they burst forth as acts of vindictiveness. Within the dictates of patriarchy, behaviour which is at odds with its thinking is considered mad or even bad. Women who reject or do not follow their designated role are considered deranged. Following this argument, the convent as asylum or a prison would seem a fitting place to find these females. Whatever interpretation one wishes to place on the idea of the nun as ‘other’, one thing is clear: the presence of convents instilled unease, even fear, into the Evangelical Protestant and a lot of novels and invented documentary material concerning nuns and nunneries was published in the mid-nineteenth century. Some of this anti-convent literature was presented as fiction, often in novel form and frequently with an introduction that affirmed that the author had taken his or her material from true fact or even experience. There is also a body of writing that purports to be ‘true experiences’ or reported fact. Much of this material is so stylised that it is almost formulaic and it is often overtly erotic. I have chosen to class this writing as fiction, with the reservation that it purports to a truth content. It claims to be part of a discourse of documentary verisimilitude however ideological and invented it might be. A typical example of this kind of text can be found in Priests and their Victims (1850) which is presented as the experience of an escaped nun as related to G.Viner. The ‘author’, who is


referred to as Maria Nun, tells how she was orphaned in 1745 and left a small fortune by her father on the condition that she enter a convent. The name Maria Nun is an obvious reference to Maria Monk whose scandalous revelations of her convent in Canada, was a best-seller and widely read at this time.35 Maria goes to live in the convent of St Michael which was ‘in connection with the order of Jesuits’. The time comes when she has to choose between the world without money, or the convent. The world has been presented to her as full of sin and temptation and so she chooses convent life. The day arrives for her to accept the white veil and she is moved to a separate part of the convent where she sees, written on the walls: ‘REMEMBER DEATH’.36 This makes a great impression on her as does the fact that ‘these words were repeated by every sister as they passed one another’. Maria Nun passes through some unhappy times but eventually takes the black veil and is a great favourite with the abbess; then things begin to go wrong. Maria wakes one night to find someone in her bed embracing her. The nightly visits continue and she hears of another nun, Sister Agnes who has also been bothered, so she goes to visit her in her cold, damp cell which is, in reality a prison. Agnes tells her story. At this point the features familiar from other anti-Catholic stories emerge and the narrative encompasses entombed nuns, lascivious confessors, and corruption by older nuns. Agnes refuses to give in to the sexual demands of her confessor, even though she is ordered to do so by the abbess. She is tortured in every conceivable way to make her yield. She says ‘I have been compelled to submit, with my hands held firmly, to their disgusting toyings, and yet in spite of it all, I have refused to submit freely to their desires.’37 Maria Nun remembers Matilda, the nun who had a terrible accident when she fell and was impaled on a spike such that her unborn child was torn from her womb. Agnes still refuses to submit and so a large feather bed is brought by some elderly nuns and placed over her: the elderly sisters then climb on top of it and jump and stamp until ‘death released her of her sufferings’. Having been suppressed, literally, Agnes’ body is thrown into a vault under the choir without any prayers being said. Later, when friends come to enquire after Agnes, they are told that she was ill with a dangerous fever and eventually that she has died. The abbess realising that Maria knows about Agnes and her fate, cautions Maria, ‘Let me warn you to take example by the fate of the poor sisters.’ The death of Agnes finally persuades Maria to submit to the priest, after which she is trusted and admitted to the midnight revelries in the convent. These take place in the abbess’ room. The first time Maria attends one of these orgies she eats well and drinks too much. ‘The wine

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of which I was made to partake, drowned the voice of conscience and aroused the desire of passions. I cannot recollect anything of that evening revelry. I can only remember that when I awakened the next morning, I found myself by the side of the young priest.’ As is often the outcome of such tales, Maria becomes pregnant and is moved to another part of the convent where there are other pregnant nuns. As soon as the babies are born they are thrown into a pit and covered with lime. When her own baby is killed, Maria reaches a crisis point and decides to escape. She takes with her The Secret Instructions of the Jesuits, which are printed in Viner’s book. This account by Maria Nun is very poorly written, reading rather like an unpolished translation; but it is interesting as it uses the formula worked by most anti-convent material, the basis of which is the choice between death or corruption for young innocent nuns. In 1836 Mrs Sherwood wrote a novel called The Nun which she said was, ‘a story to instruct the Protestants of England, liberated by God from the slavery of the great apostacy whose name is MYSTERY’.38 In her introduction she informs her reader that, ‘there is no form of religion on Earth which has supplied so many scenes for romance as that of the great Roman Catholic apostacy’. The setting of the novel is Italy and the nun in question, a native of Turin, is young and beautiful. The novel is of particular interest because of its portrayal of convent life for a Protestant readership. The rituals are shown as bizarre and extremely suspect and the inmates of the convent as young, innocent and ingenuous, very beautiful but cunning and cruel. The ceremony of taking the white veil is described. The idea of the nun becoming the bride of Christ and being treated as if it were a secular wedding for the whole day is dwelt upon in great detail, as is the feeling of melancholy experienced by the new nun after the rituals have been completed. One of the main victims of the story is an exquisitely lovely young girl called Clarice. Her father is English and the Mother Superior frequently refers to him as ‘that English Heretic’, by which the reader is to presume that he is a Protestant. One of Clarice’s main tormentors is Annunciata, a regal, beautiful nun the cruel right hand of the equally cruel Mother Superior. Clarice is said to be possessed by demons; she is exorcised and shut away. The story develops with all the intrigue and ingredients necessary to this type of anti-convent text or a Gothic novel. There are dark chambers, subterranean passages, bricked-up nuns and references to ‘The Inquisition’. Clarice is put into solitary confinement and fed a meagre diet. She is pronounced a heretic for reading and following ‘The Bible’. The Plague is brought into the convent by a little niece of one of the nuns. Clarice catches it and dies. This is presented as a happy event


for the wicked nuns as it saves them from having to kill her themselves. The abbess becomes ill, and Annunciata takes over and decides to reform the convent. Her rule is very harsh: she orders that there is to be very little contact between the sisters, and she advocates mortification of the flesh. The narrator’s comment on Annunciata shows her power and determination that seems to be born of a redirected passion that needed to find an outlet:39 God forgive me, if I wrong this young woman! but I certainly believe that ambition, was so predominant a passion in her mind, that there was no crime at which she would have hesitated to remove a hindrance to the gratification of this passion. (Sherwood, The Nun, p. 177) Annunciata is a strong influence over a strong superior, but she dies of the plague and Clarice is seen to be avenged. After her death the abbess cannot really cope.40 The convent slips out of her control, and the truth about the goings on inside its walls leak out to the surrounding town. There is a mob uprising and rioters storm the convent. The leader of the mob addresses the Mother Superior: ‘do you flatter yourself, you vile and hypocritical instrument of tyranny and hypocrisy, that your abominable doings are hidden from the world?’41 The convent is then set on fire. Having thus purified the location of evil doings, Mrs Sherwood proceeds to bring about the redemption of the deluded nuns. At the end of The Nun it is revealed that Clarice is still alive, the body of another incarcerated nun having been substituted for hers in a faked burial. The sufferings she has undergone are dwelt on in very close detail. The escaped nuns are all given Bibles and they become Protestants. Mrs Sherwood adds a postscript that all the nuns were eventually married and stresses the importance to women of motherhood and marriage. The novel can be seen as a warning of what can occur when a woman is forbidden to follow her God-given natural instincts, hidden away from the world with only the company of other unmarried women and is deprived of the Protestant manual for living, the Bible. The assault on the convent in The Nun takes place in Italy, yet a common call to Protestant Englishmen was to ‘storm’ the convents in their country either literally, to release the poor creatures trapped within, or as a legal move by requiring all convents to be regularly inspected. One nineteenth-century anti-convent story related by the MP Henry Drummond illustrates the concept of the dual personality of the nun. Drummond tells of a visit to Rome during which he accompanied a middle-class woman, mother of a large family, to see her 16-year-old

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daughter take the veil. The girl is described as being exceedingly beautiful. She had been persuaded to go into the convent by the artifices of a monk, her confessor. By the rule of the convent she is allowed to see her mother again exactly a year later, but when she appears at the grating she is altered so much that her mother does not know her until she speaks. On realising that this emaciated old woman is, in reality, her beautiful young daughter, her mother cries out ‘who are you?’ The girl answers, ‘O madre mia, la crudelta dell’Abbadessa mi ha fatto cosi.’ (Oh my mother, the cruelty of the abbess has reduced me to this!) Drummond concludes that the abbess is probably jealous of the girl’s beauty and so (under the pretext of mortifying her pride) makes her do all kinds of laborious and disgusting work, makes her sleep in a damp cell under the ground, below the level of the Tiber, starves her and flogs her. Within two years she is dead.42 In 1848, Rachel McCrindell produced The Convent. A Narrative Founded on Fact. She states she wrote this novel in order to ‘benefit the rising race, and to set before them, in all their soul-destroying power, the doctrines of Popery’.43 McCrindell had spent several years in Catholic countries and, according to her, had witnessed much of Catholicism’s persecuting spirit, making her well prepared to show how the system practised to deceive the simple minded. The author makes it clear that the outline of the narrative is based on fact; but adds, ‘the substance is true, but woven together by such circumstances as her imagination suggested as likely to occur to persons situated as were the novices’.44 The story centres on two young novices, Rosina and Isabel who at first are happy in their convent,45 because They had not yet learnt the true spirit of the Inquisition which pervades the convent system, often adopts the tiger-like policy of the cat, and allows its victims apparent liberty, only to sport with their torments, and render them eventually an easier prey. (McCrindell, The Convent, p. 54) The first thing that the two girls learn is that they are constantly watched. Isabel even finds a hole in the wall of her cell through which she is observed by an elderly nun, Sister Giovanna, who is very austere and takes a lot of penances. This nun is a great favourite with the Mother Superior and the priests who urge her on to even greater selfimposed ‘life-destroying’ efforts in her desire to achieve sainthood. Isabel and Rosina begin to realise what convent life is really like. Isabel decides not to take the black veil but realises how isolated she is, how


they are cut off from communication with the outside world. She is caught with a Bible and put into solitary confinement. Rosina fares little better: she decides to tell her mother how she feels, but her plan is foiled, she had not bargained with the cunning of the Mother Superior. ‘Little was she aware how completely she was understood, and how skilfully the serpent-craft of monastic vigilance was already working to circumvent her!’46 Their fate appears to be sealed. The awful destiny that had ruined the lives of many young girls who had been convent educated was awaiting them:47 it was no uncommon thing to see, as in this instance, a deluded young creature, in the very bloom and ardour of inexperienced youth, devoting herself, not only without reluctance, but cheerfully and joyfully, to a living tomb, a life of hopeless, loveless, heart-withering, solitary imprisonment; lonely, without the freedom of solitude, and deathlike, without the peace and repose of the grave! (McCrindell, The Convent, p. 192) However, they have had their eyes opened and refuse to embrace the sisterhood joyfully. At their profession they escape, and flee to England, a free land. It is interesting to note that the worst aspect of convent life for this female author was not the terrible treatment from the Mother Superior, bad as that was, but the idea of living in a loveless and lonely environment. The expression ‘heart-withering’ sums up the isolation of the nun’s confinement which was seen to affect their psychological state. This is in essence different from the idea formulated by male writers, that sexual frustration and the impossibility of motherhood and marriage could transform young girls placed in a convent into cruel and bitter spinsters. In an article on fundamentalism and the control of women, Karen McCarthy Brown argues that religious fundamentalism is very difficult to define, but that for those who are attuned to gender as a category of analysis ‘a stab of recognition is often occasioned by the presence of high degrees of religiously sanctioned control of women’.48 She writes about the ‘Victorian Cult of True Womanhood’ which maintains that ‘women can be idolised only when their sphere of activity is carefully contained and their power scrupulously monitored’. In the reading of anti-convent literature this is a salient point. Nuns are seen as women out of their natural and proper womanly sphere, they are therefore marked as potentially threatening, and undesirable. The more power they exercise within their particular domain, the more dangerous they

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are to society. McCarthy’s point about religiously sanctioned control of women may be seen clearly in Jessopp’s book Woman (1851), which is a useful example of Ultra-Fundamentalist Protestantism.49 Writing on the place of ‘woman’ Jessopp says: We gradually perceive that such as she is presented in the Book of God, she ought to be in daily life, – indispensable, but unobserved … Woman is the companion whom the Almighty gave to man at once to charm his existence, and to double his delights in sharing them. ‘The vocation of her being is a vocation of love’. ( Jessopp, Woman, pp. 140–1, 10) When a woman transfers her vocation of love for husband and family to love of the Roman Catholic Church and becomes a bride of Christ she becomes both victim and demon. Samuel Day Phillips, formerly a monk of the Order of the Presentation, wrote about incarceration in a convent causing madness in his book Life in a Convent (1848):50 Very few minds indeed are sufficiently impregnable to bear up against an evil so formidable as this [solitude]. And hence the adoption of solitary confinement by our civic rulers as a mode of punishment to which the most hardened culprit must become sensitive. (Phillips, Life in a Convent, p. 34) During the 1840s, solitary confinement had been used widely as a punishment in English prisons and was proclaimed to be an effective and humane method of control. It was also used in lunatic asylums as a method of calming overexcited patients. It was asserted that a few months of solitude could make even the most difficult convict or patient malleable and docile. By the 1850s, it had become clear that solitary confinement had unforeseen effects on the sanity of the punished. In the prisons where it was practised the incidence of mental illness was much higher than in the institutions where it was not used as a method of punishment.51 In 1853, Charlotte Brontë is reported to have visited Pentonville prison and Bethlem, where she saw the fearful effects of solitary confinement on a human mind for herself, having already written of their consequences in Villette:52 The world can understand well enough the process of perishing for want of food: perhaps few persons can enter into or follow out that of going mad from solitary confinement. They see the long-buried


prisoner disinterred, a maniac or an idiot! – how his senses left him – how his nerves first inflamed, underwent nameless agony, and then sunk to palsy – is a subject too intricate for examination, too abstract for popular comprehension. (Brontë, Villette, p. 273) Given that the effects of shutting people away from the world and isolating them from their family and friends were being discussed and reassessed during the second half of the nineteenth century, it is to be expected that the writers of anti-convent literature should access this psychological discourse of anxiety and use it to their own ends. The image of high convent walls and the horrors hidden within was a powerful and common literary device used in this genre of writing. They held the same type of fascination for those outside the walls as did prisons and lunatic asylums and were therefore subject to similar speculations. The fact that these edifices were peopled by celibate women who lived together beyond the reach of ‘society’ added interest and spice to these conjectures. Foucault, referring to Pinel’s work, Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale (Paris, 1801) mentions the statistics used by Pinel in his argument for his treatment of mental patients.53 These showed that The number of girls fallen into idiocy is seven time greater than the number of married women for the Year XI and the Year XIII; for dementia, the proportion is two to four times greater; we can thus deduce that marriage constitutes for women a kind of preservative against the two sorts of insanity which are most inveterate and most often incurable; debauchery, misconduct, and ‘extreme perversity of habits … can gradually degrade the reason and end in outright insanity’; (Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, p. 258) Pinel’s views on the mental health of single women could be used to good effect in the argument for keeping young girls out of convents. His views on the effects of solitude on mental health were certainly employed. Samuel Day Phillips quotes Dr Andrew Combe on the evils of solitude and uses the work of Pinel to back up his argument. By using the theories of medical men, Phillips gives objective, scientific authenticity to his opinions. Combe asserts that if we neglect our faculties or deprive them of their object, we weaken the organisation, give rise to distressing diseases, and at the same time experience ‘the bitterest feelings that can afflict human nature, ennui and melancholy’.54 Pinel’s Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale argues that ‘solitude

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predisposes to mental disquietude and is the procuring cause of mental disease’.55 These references bring Phillips to the conclusion that it would be better for a father had he ‘found his daughter’s spirit flown to its maker, … than to burn with the thought that her mind and body, by a lingering process should be mouldering within the convent walls’.56 He underlines his point by further appealing to the male’s protective instinct with a pathetic little verse inserted into his prose text.57 It expresses, in romantic language, the fate of the young innocent girl left to rot in a convent: Oh ’tis a deeply fearful thing, To watch the young heart withering. To see the eye that once was bright, Close ’mid the shades of sorrow’s night; To see the form, in beauty’s bloom, Sink to its cold but living tomb, A life of death, in which is felt – The darkness which no sun may melt! Phillips, Life in a Convent, p. 35 The amount of anti-convent literature written in the nineteenth century is vast. It includes mainstream works as well as the more peripheral texts examined in this chapter. Much of the literature contains the message that convents should be inspected by qualified officers as were lunatic asylums and prisons. What is clear from looking at this material is that a clear set of perceptions and prejudices had grown up around the figure of the nun. To add weight to the discourse of fear surrounding the single woman and her potential power to upset the ‘natural’ order of life for women, marriage and motherhood, the enclosed nun was portrayed as one of two kinds of female, neither desirable nor admirable. The first type, the innocent victim, needs protection from her male friends or family if she is not to die or become insane. The second type is much more complicated. She is both corrupted and corruptor, evil and dangerous. This nun is often ‘disguised’ by her beauty which heightens the horror inspired in the reader by her wicked treatment of her sisters and her total lack of Christian morality. There are very close connections observable in the texts between convents, prisons and lunatic asylums, and between amoral nuns and deranged Victorian madwomen. The perception of the enclosed nun being kept in conditions close to solitary confinement, is used to explain her unreasonable behaviour or extreme melancholy. ‘Lifting the veil’ from the nun meant that she could be


brought back under Protestant control and Protestant male ‘protection’. L.H. Tonna states that the church of Rome uses ‘bolts and bars and lofty walls, and all the arrangements of a prison’58 in its exercise of power over vulnerable females. This idea and the belief that girls in convents were under constant supervision emphasises that anti-Catholicism in the nineteenth century had much to do with a fear of Catholic institutions, particularly the female ones.

6 Nineteenth-century Anti-Catholic Discourse in the Brontë’s Local Newspapers

Papa and Branwell are gone for the newspaper, the Leeds Intelligencer, a most excellent Tory newspaper, edited by Mr. Wood, and the proprietor, Mr. Henneman. We take two and see three newspapers a week. We take the Leeds Intelligencer, Tory, and the Leeds Mercury, Whig … . Charlotte Brontë, The Shakespeare Head Brontë, p. 1 The reading of Charlotte Brontë’s novels, particularly Villette, as being essentially anti-Catholic has become almost routine among her critics.1 Lisa Wang refers to the fact that the use of Catholic religious discourse in the Brontës’ writings is isolated to Charlotte Brontë’s novels where it is undertaken from a Protestant perspective.2 It is widely accepted that Charlotte Brontë’s perception of Catholicism was nourished by the cultural climate of the time and in particular the response to ‘papal aggression’ during the early 1850s. In her early works, the Juvenilia, there is mention of Catholicism. For example, in The Tales of the Islanders there is reference to Catholic Emancipation. Brontë has a traveller recounting how he found Roman Catholicism in Southern Ireland to be wicked and associated with necromancy. Given the Brontë’s Protestant, Irish background it is not surprising that the young Charlotte should hold certain views about Catholicism but as Christine Alexander has noted in her book on Charlotte Brontë’s early writing, it would be wrong to exaggerate the importance of the Juvenilia to her later work. ‘As Charlotte grew older and saw more of life, especially during her years in Brussels, her new fund of experience would replace the Angrian plot.’3 Alongside the stories in the national press and the type of fiction examined in this book, the Brontë’s local newspapers, the Leeds Intelligencer and the Leeds Mercury, were full of reports of Romish influence and 91


St Saviours in Leeds was highlighted as a centre for the shift towards Catholicism in the Protestant church.4 It is the aim of this book to explore how cultural meanings around anti-Catholicism were formed and disseminated in the nineteenth century and how they were reproduced in the novels of Charlotte Brontë. By focusing on specific narratives from both fictional and nonfictional publications it is possible to explore the representations of Catholicism that were current around the period that Charlotte Brontë was writing her novels. As it is known that the Brontës took the Leeds Intelligencer and the Leeds Mercury,5 I have scrutinised copies for the years 1848–52 for their reporting on matters relating to Roman Catholicism. During 1848 the Leeds Intelligencer and Mercury contained a certain amount of reporting on Catholicism. Much of this concerns reports about Ireland and news from Continental Europe but anti-Catholic rhetoric is absent from the stories. It is evident however, that the papers believed Romanism to be making inroads into Protestant Yorkshire. The opening of a new Roman Catholic chapel near Tadcaster by Cardinal Wiseman is recorded6 as is the imminent arrival of a party of Jesuits, expelled from Italy, who will take up residence in Ugborough House, a ‘splendid mansion’ which is the property of Lord Clifford.7 It is mentioned that Lord Clifford is a ‘zealous Roman Catholic’, a reminder to the reader that the old Catholic aristocracy is still a presence in the area. Later on in the year, a rather strange little story is reported in both the Intelligencer and the Mercury, concerning a Roman Catholic priest who followed a married lady home and loitered outside her house. The next day he turned up again, walked into her house and tried to molest her. The priest was fined for breach of the peace.8 In the Mercury, the story is titled: Alleged outrage by a Catholic priest in Halifax9 underlining the sexual danger posed by this lurking Roman cleric. By 1849, there is a noticeable shift in emphasis against the Catholic Church in both papers. Comments derogatory to the civilisation of Catholic countries and even anti-Catholic poems appear.10 There is a story concerning a Catholic man who had died from Asiatic flu but had been refused a Christian burial by his priest, Father Walsh. The consequence of Father Walsh’s action resulted in the priest’s effigy, fantastically dressed, being burned in the streets by the dead man’s workmates.11 Although the article is not directly anti-Catholic, criticism of the priest and his doctrines is implied and the reaction of the crowd sustains this impression. By August 1849, there is notice of a British Reform Society Lecture on auricular confession by the Rev. R.P. Blakeny, to be

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held in Albion Street, Leeds. The lecture contains the usual rhetoric of how confession corrupts by putting ideas into people’s (especially young and vulnerable) heads.12 In 1850, the year of the so-called papal aggression, interest in Catholic matters greatly increases in the Intelligencer and the Mercury. There are reports on papal aggression13 and in the Mercury, there is a particular interest in the release of Dr Achilli ‘from the dungeons of the Inquisition’, his subsequent arrival in England and his popular talks against the Catholic Church.14 Public meetings such as ‘the crowded anti-papal meeting at Pontefract’15 and sermons on such subjects as ‘The Popish Aggression’16 become more usual and are reported as being very well attended. In an article on papal encroachments, the Queen is envisaged as having ‘kissed the toe’ of the Pope in token of submission,17 an image that would have been repugnant to the patriotic Englishman. In another article on popish treason, the kind of anti-Catholic language typical in much of the literature previously examined is used in a call for an uprising against popery: Conciliation and compromise have been tried too long already, with what effects we now see. The frozen viper which we have incautiously cherished in our bosom now threatens to repay our kindness by exerting its reviving energies in accomplishing our destruction. (Leeds Intelligencer, 2 November 1850) In the midst of this anti-Catholic rhetoric of cherished vipers out to destroy their Protestant hosts, an account is given of a talk given at the Leeds Mechanics’ Institute by Mr W.A. Bedford. The title of the lecture is ‘Female Education: Aspect of England’ [sic] and although it is not antiCatholic it emphasises the true vocation of women according to Protestant male society. Since women are born to be daughters, wives and mothers it follows that the vocation of nun must necessarily be outside the natural order of things: The question of the equality of female intellect was briefly glanced at, and we think a more satisfactory conclusion was arrived at than has ever been the result of a mere logical discussion, inasmuch as Mr. Bedford considered that each sex was gifted in the manner most appropriate to its destined avocations, and without ‘minishing aught’ from women’s intellectual culture, would have her regularly and systematically trained for the performance of what he called her


professional duties as daughter, wife and mother. (Leeds Mercury, 26 January 1850) It follows therefore that Protestant fathers, brothers and husbands need to keep their women closely guarded against the Catholic threat. Both the Intelligencer and the Mercury see Romanism as something foreign and very ‘un-English’. In their diatribes against the expansion of Catholicism in England the language becomes very nationalistic, with Englishmen urged to oust this alien religion. The greatest number of articles concerning Catholicism occur in the Leeds Intelligencer during 1851. Although, as the editor says, the agitation excited by papal aggression had subsided for the moment,18 controversy about the practice of confession at St Saviour’s Church in the city raged over several weeks. In February 1851 readers are informed that confession at St Saviour’s Anglican Church is akin to that used in Roman Catholic churches: with the privilege on the part of the confessor including the most searching and delicate questions which he, in his discretion or indiscretion, may think the case of his penitent requires. There is, according to the newspaper, a lot of confessing of young girls. The vicar of St Saviour’s, the Rev. Becket, makes the following statement: That Protestantism is as prurient as it is prudish we are well aware; but scarcely did we expect to find among its votaries, two [clergymen] so incautious so to avow that, without any view whatever of ministeringto the penitent’s soul, they wished to hear what had been said by her confessor, for the simple reason that they had expected it to be indelicate in the extreme. (Leeds Intelligencer, 4 February 1851) The writers of the Leeds Intelligencer make it clear that it is their belief that Catholicism poses a threat for young women, not only in the confessional but in the convent school as well. In a report on the Talbot case19 22 March 1851, the commentator sees the treatment of Augusta Talbot by the nuns of Taunton as being in compliance with the Directorum of the Jesuits, namely: When the mind is moulded and the soul subdued, a little respite is to be given, and a choice coldly offered to the self-abandoned pupil; the door for a return to the world is to be opened, that the exhausted heart may recover just enough liberty to cast itself into perpetual subjection. (Leeds Intelligencer, 22 March 1851)


Even more pertinent is the editorial comment made on explaining how Augusta Talbot had been damaged mentally by her experiences in a convent: Whether a year and a half spent in society may be sufficient to counteract the pernicious effects of nine years’ residence in the torpifying atmosphere of a nunnery, at a time of life when the mind and character are most impressible, is unhappily very doubtful. (Leeds Intelligencer, 5 April 1851) In the same article, a convent life is referred to as being worse than ‘Egyptian bondage’, and a convent education as being a cheap alternative education for girls, certainly not fitting for an heiress like Augusta Talbot who was not even allowed home during the school holidays. In the light of the Talbot case, the writer calls for all convent schools to be put under inspection. In April 1851, Newman visited Leeds. The Intelligencer is not at all complimentary about his visit. It describes ceremonies held in the city, where Father Newman is present, that aim to convert the locals to Catholicism. In August, there are reports that Dr Cahill had been giving lectures on Roman Catholic doctrine around Yorkshire under the guise of lecturing on astronomy and natural philosophy. These are printed as a warning to the reader. The tone of this article is in the same vein as the other pieces concerning Catholics and Catholicism, vitriolic and cautionary. In 1852 it is interesting to note that the Leeds Mercury contains several stories that deal with perceptions of certain aspects of Catholicism rather than with actual events that had previously been reported and commented upon. In a story titled: Horrible Murder in Lambeth. Woman’s Head Cut off by her Son, the murderer, Thomas Wheeler, is said to have been in Wandsworth Lunatic Asylum since his return from Bahia where he was sent as a clerk. What is relevant here is Wheeler’s defence. He states that he was tricked by papists to go to Bahia where he was persecuted, poisoned and sent mad. ‘In other documents the unfortunate man attributes insanity solely to poisoning, and evinces the greatest possible horror of popery.’20 Although Wheeler is found guilty of murdering his mother, it is significant that he uses myths of Catholic abduction and wickedness as mitigating circumstances. The Newman v. Achilli libel case is reported in the Mercury on 26 June 1852. In this case the role of seducer is given by the Catholic Newman to the ex-Catholic priest turned anti-Catholic propagandist, Giacinto


Achilli. In a reversal of the usual motif, Newman accuses Achilli of various acts of debauchery with young women including an offence with a young girl of 15 years. In what appears to be an act of retaliation, Father Gavazzi,21 another ex-Catholic priest, turns on Newman during a lecture in Leeds stating that when Newman was a Protestant minister he was a learned man beyond all doubt, however, What I can vouch for is, that when Father Newman, after wearing a mask for years, declared himself openly a Roman Catholic, and became a Popish priest … and a Jesuit in soul and for life, he is become so small, so degenerated in mind, and preaches such ridiculous follies that his stupid conduct proves that the Church of Rome does not like people of mind and spirit, wishing to dominate over her sisters like slaves. (Leeds Mercury, 18 August 1852) In this diatribe against Newman, Gavazzi employs the fear of the ‘hidden Jesuit’, the priest behind a mask, to heighten his criticism of Catholicism. In reducing Newman to a mere puppet of the church, a small-minded man who has lost his individuality and independent thinking, Gavazzi reinforces the idea, held by many Protestants, of the controlling power that the Catholic Church is believed to exercise over its communicants. Whilst introducing the idea of adherents to Rome as slaves, Gavazzi feminises them as sisters, underlining the importance of gender in the perceived struggle for dominance between the Catholic and Protestant Churches. When Gavazzi resumes his ‘Orations on Popery’ in October 1852, he specifically warns the people of Leeds about how the Church of Rome is working secretly in England, how the Puseyites represent the slippery slope to Rome and how Jesuits are disguising themselves and are not recognised for what they really are. The report in the Leeds Mercury on Gavazzi’s comments on nuns is of particular interest. Speaking to Protestant fathers, he says that as nuns have vowed to give up the world and therefore know nothing of it, they are not fit to teach their daughters. Nuns, Gavazzi repeats, are under perpetual vows of celibacy and therefore know nothing about the duties of good wives and good mothers in society. He appeals to ‘Englishmen’, informing them that in his country (Italy) young girls become nuns at 18 years of age. In many instances the young ladies have been educated in convents where they remain to take up the monastic life, having been entered there for education at perhaps six or seven years of age. Not only do they know nothing of the wider world, but they are trapped by their vows. Gavazzi goes on to illustrate the two types of nun, by ‘supposing’


two cases for his audience: this young girl is a stony, stupid, cold woman, or she is a woman of feeling. If she is a woman of stone with a heart of stone and of ice, then she may live until sixty, seventy, eighty or ninety years in a nunnery without noise, without disturbance, without anything of this world, but all for God and Christ her spiritual husband. But if the women who take these oaths be truly women; if these victims have hearts, warm hearts, affectionate hearts, when they come to twenty or twenty-two years old, then they come to know and experience the great sacrifice they have made; but this comes too late for repentance. Then come the horrors of despair. This is the bad effect of this bad system, in which the victims cry out in despair; there is a noise and a disturbance in all the nunneries. (Leeds Mercury, 9 October 1852) Gavazzi clarifies further by referring to convents as prisons and living tombs and claiming that women actually go mad in nunneries where they often die when they are around 20 to 35 years old.22 He appeals to Protestant men Oh Englishmen, arise against the nunneries and against the system of nunneries, because they are living tombs, living sepulchres, in which your young country women are buried in overwhelming despair … the priesthood of Rome will never publish what is concealed within monastic walls. You will never know of what takes place. I will not state what I know, because my lips are sealed by the moral precepts imposed on me by the Apostle Paul; but believe me, under this mystery much more immorality than you think of is concealed, for the benefit of the clergy of the priesthood of Rome. (Leeds Mercury, 9 October 1852) This is another example of Protestant Englishmen being urged to take action against convents, but Gavazzi takes it one stage further. If the men will not ‘rise up’ then he appeals to the ‘Ladies of England’ to make a stand. The reportage of anti-Catholic rhetoric in such detail in a local newspaper and the repetition of the tropes common to the literature examined in previous chapters, suggests that certain images and a distinct mythology concerning certain aspects of the working of the Catholic Church had become part of a specifically nineteenth-century religious and social discourse. This provides an illuminating perspective on Charlotte Brontë’s writing about Catholic issues.

7 The Perceived Anti-Catholicism of Charlotte Brontë’s Novel: The Professor

My eye rested on the green door of a rather large house opposite, where, on a large brass plate, was inscribed ‘Pensionnat de demoiselles’. Pensionnat! The word excited an uneasy sensation in my mind – it seemed to speak of restraint. Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, p. 54 In a forward to the first edition of The Professor Arthur Bell Nicholls, Charlotte Brontë’s husband, wrote, ‘the authoress made some use of the materials in a subsequent work – Villette’.1 He also pointed out that the two stories ‘are in most respects unlike’.2 It is true that there are striking differences in the actual texts, not least that The Professor is narrated by a man, its central character,3whereas Villette is narrated by Lucy Snowe. Nonetheless in both novels, Brontë used similar tropes of anti-Catholic writing to articulate a sense of female melancholia and isolation and the use of surveillance as an instrument of control.4 It is the expression of anti-Catholicism in The Professor that this section will particularly concentrate upon; specifically how certain stereotypes are employed by Brontë and how they can be interpreted in the light of nineteenthcentury cultural perceptions. These are also reflected in Chapter 9 in relation to Brontë’s Villette. Although The Professor contains fewer overtly anti-Catholic references than Villette, there is, nevertheless, a feeling of general disapproval of Rome running through the book. Through the vehicle of William Crimsworth, who is portrayed as both staunchly English and Protestant, Brontë is able to express many current nineteenth-century, masculine ideas about Catholicism. Through Frances Henri she explores her own concerns about the place of the unprotected, lonely spinster in society. Because the narrator of the 98

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novel is a man, The Professor reflects a slightly different form of antiCatholic sentiment from Villette. The relationship between Protestant Crimsworth and his Protestant pupil takes on a different significance from the Catholic master/Protestant pupil relationships of Charlotte Brontë and her Belgian teacher M. Heger, and her later creations M. Paul Emmanuel and Lucy Snowe. At no point does Crimsworth feel the attraction of the Catholic religion itself and his observations on its followers are slanted differently from Lucy Snowe’s as they can be seen as more gender specific. However, the ‘Jesuitical’ figure of Hunsden, his only friend, plays a significant and interesting part in the story. Crimsworth’s reaction to the Catholic girls and women he meets in Brussels reflects the nineteenth-century English Protestant male’s idea of convents, Catholic girls’ schools and nuns. It is interesting to note what he expected to see when he first met Zoraïde Reuter, the directress of the Pensionnat de Demoiselles where he was to take up the post of the Professor of English: I had thought to see a tall, meagre, yellow, conventual image in black, with a close white cap, bandaged under the chin like a nun’s head-gear … . (Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, p. 71) The woman he actually meets proves to be quite the opposite: young, attractive and flirtatious as well as devious and sexually dangerous. She represents the ‘other face’ of the nun, emphasising the duality of this imaginative perception. In similar manner, the girls in the pensionnat are described as ‘youthful beings … with their nun-like robes and softly braided hair … a kind of half-angels’ (The Professor, p. 76). Crimsworth soon discovers their ‘true natures’. He finds his pupils to be liars, tale bearers, and backbiters, but worst of all they are sexually precocious. Gilbert and Gubar find an explanation for Brontë’s vilification of her own sex in her own English anti-Catholicism’. They argue that She [Brontë] herself allows Crimsworth to offer this as a reason for his feelings, and certainly Brontë’s attacks on the Catholic church in Villette and elsewhere in The Professor suggest that he may be criticising the students at the pensionnat not for being girls but for being Catholic girls. (Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 322) This argument has similarities to other critical positions cited later, but it may just as well be the case that Brontë uses a generally accepted stereotypical view of Catholicism to make a more profound, gender-specific


observation. In Villette it is Lucy Snowe who observes the other young women in the Pensionnat Beck, criticises them from a woman’s point of view and sees them in relation to herself. In The Professor, it is a visiting male, English teacher who becomes disillusioned with his female pupils and attributes their faults to their Catholic education. His disillusionment however, serves to make him appreciate the qualities of the half-English Protestant Frances Henri and he delights in the ‘wakening to life’ of his pupil. Of course, as an author, Brontë’s personal experiences of Catholic girls must have informed her writing, but as Shuttleworth makes clear, in The Professor ‘cultural difference is used as a model through which to explore gender division and interaction’.5 In Villette Lucy Snowe recognises the differences between the more liberal approach to the expression of feelings found in Roman Catholicism in contrast with the more English, Protestant restraint and repression. As a seemingly self-sufficient and reserved woman this aspect of the Catholic faith holds certain attractions for her, as does the submission to a ‘higher authority’ in the shape of the church. Crimsworth on the other hand thinks that the Catholic practice of laying down strict rules for salvation to be a dangerous one, as they seem to him to have no connection with morality. He comments I know nothing of the arcana of the Roman-Catholic Religion and I am not a bigot in matters of theology, but I suspect the root of this precocious impurity, so obvious, so general in popish Countries, is to be found in the discipline, if not the doctrines of the Church of Rome. (Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, p. 89) This short observation by Crimsworth embraces much of the gendered, anti-Catholic images found in the more poplar literature examined earlier. The Catholic girl is portrayed as being dominated by her religious superiors and this control manifests itself in either her sexually immoral behaviour, or in the repressed demeanour of the nun. The use of the word ‘arcana’ conjures up a sense of mystery, secrecy and even magic, which emphasises the concept of Roman Catholicism as an alien phenomenon, something foreign, dark, sinister and very un-English. The imagery of magic is repeated in Crimsworth’s description of Sylvie, one of his pupils who was completely different from the others, destined as she was for the cloister. He describes her as gentle and intelligent, even sincere, as far as Catholicism would allow her to be. However, he reads in the ‘tame, trained subjection of her manner’, that she has given up her independence of thought and action as preparation

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for her future life as a nun. This dependence on men would not be alien to nineteenth-century Protestant ideology. The problem with Sylvie is that she is subjected to a priest and priests were perceived as being both ‘foreign’ and feminised, which made them gender dubious. In some strange, contradictory way however, these effeminate men were believed to use their attractiveness as a lure for unsuspecting girls and women who they hoped to seduce, debauch or control. Sylvie’s independence, according to Crimsworth, had been surrendered to ‘some despotic confessor’ whom he likens to a magician, who has reduced poor Sylvie to a ‘pale, passive automaton’. Having never known the advantages of an honest Protestant education the poor little future religieuse had been early taught to make the dictates of her own reason and conscience quite subordinate to the will of her spiritual Director. She was the model pupil of Mdlle. Reuter’s establishment; pale, blighted image where life lingered feebly but whence the soul had been conjured by Romish wizardcraft! (Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, p. 93) Crimsworth wants to be kind to his pupil Sylvie but he feels he cannot as he knows that every kindly word and action would be reported by her to her confessor, who would deliberately misinterpret what he heard and poison Sylvie against her teacher.6 Once Sylvie had shrunk from Crimsworth when he had put his hand on her head, because I was a man and a heretic; she – poor child! – a destined nun and devoted Catholic – thus a fourfold wall of separation divided her mind from mine. (Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, p. 111) The symbolism of a wall literally separating the nun from the outside world suggests the Gothic trope of the walled-up nun. Crimsworth’s image of the wall is used as an analogy to depict the insurmountable differences between Catholics and Protestants.7 This concept of ‘imprisonment’ in a religion, whether literal or metaphorical, clearly fascinated Brontë. In her novels she uses the recognised figure of the poor governess as a depiction of vulnerability and of the outcast, but it is in her portrayal of the nun that her most compelling image of female loneliness is to be found. As mentioned previously, The Professor differs from Brontë’s other novels in the fact that the hero is a man. Crimsworth finds himself in the position of an unempowered female, orphaned, alienated from his


brother and his uncles, living in a foreign, Catholic country. Like Lucy Snowe in Villette, he finds employment in a school where he becomes a teacher of English. Unlike Lucy who is considered little higher than a servant in the Pensionnat Beck, Crimsworth evolves through his position of superiority over his pupils to establish his masculine identity as a Professor, a ‘master’. As Lucy has her inner tormenters, so Crimsworth has his own demon, hypochondria, which he perceives as taking female form and coming to him when he is in a state of heightened sexual awareness.8 In the nineteenth century the term hypochondria encompassed a particular semantic field: it was regarded as a chronic illness with both physical and mental symptoms. Brontë herself suffered from what she termed as ‘hypochondria’ when she was teaching. Writing about her condition to her friend and old employer Miss Wooler, she says that when she was ill at Dewsbury Moor, her morbid nerves could know neither peace nor enjoyment and that her suffering was so great that she could have been ‘no better company for you than a stalking ghost’.9 A medical manual owned by the Brontës,10 describes hypochondria as follows: Sometimes the hypochondriac is tormented with a visionary or exaggerated sense of pain, or some concealed disease; a whimsical dislike of particular persons, places or things; groundless apprehensions of personal danger or poverty; a general listlessness and disgust; or an irksomeness or weariness of life; in other instances; the disease is strikingly accompanied with peevishness and general malevolence; they are soon tired with all things; discontented; disquieted … often tempted to make away with themselves; they cannot die, they will not live; they complain, weep, lament, and think they lead a miserable life: never was any one so bad. (Dr Thomas John Graham, Domestic Medicine, pp. 311–12) Crimsworth admits that before he experienced the few hours of ‘sweet delirium’ with Frances, he had known no rest of either body or mind for a fortnight. The psychopathology of rejection and alienation appears to build up within Crimsworth, and finding no catharsis for his loneliness or immediate relief for his sexual tension, generates his dormant hypochondria. As Lucy’s terrible oppression that lies in wait for her at sundown ‘like a tiger crouched in ambush’, Crimsworth’s female hypochondria invades his chamber at night and whispers in his ear that ‘in the midst of life we are in death’ (The Professor, p. 210). These words are taken from the service of the burial of the dead in The Book of

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Common Prayer and would have been well known in the nineteenth century. Indeed, they crop up frequently in anti-convent literature. Hypochondria is described as a kind of ghostly, morbid nun who drops ‘her drear veil’ over Crimsworth in order to hide sky, sun, grass and green tree, whilst she tries to entice him into an act of suicide. However her ‘victim’ is a man, and as a man he is able to break free from his sense of repression and suffocation. Brontë gives her hero a certain amount of psychological insight into his condition which he displays in his explanation that he became prey to hypochondria in his youth because of his lonely, parentless boyhood which was uncheered by brother or sister. What Crimsworth cannot understand however, is why he should be attracted to her ‘vaulted home of horrors’ just as his life is taking a turn for the better both professionally and emotionally. He offers no explanation except to say that he repulsed hypochondria as one would repulse a ghastly concubine coming to embitter a husband’s heart against his young bride. Hypochondria, portrayed previously as a ghostly nun, changes her image here to one that clearly reflects the dark aspect of woman frequently portrayed in the figure of the corrupted, sexually aware nun. Crimsworth, unlike Lucy, is able to banish his demon because he finds love and companionship in Frances. As a male he has a choice, he is able to be active, to seek his spouse and make his own way in the world, rather than take the passive woman’s position and remain ‘buried alive’ until extricated from her position by a man. In The Professor it is Frances Henri who embodies the motif of the outcast, lonely female, alienated from her environment by her religion and status. In this aspect she is similar to Lucy Snowe: they both describe themselves as lacking in skills and are financially poor. In Brussels Frances is seen as a heretic and this deprives her of influence. In England she would be perceived as a foreigner, and that too would diminish her status. Frances has an idealised view of Protestant England where she believes people to be more honest and less devious than in Catholic Belgium. The description she gives to Crimsworth of life in her Catholic school could have been lifted straight from the pages of one of the anti-convent school stories of the time: Besides, Monsieur, I long to live once more among Protestants, they are more honest than Catholics; a Romish school is a building with porous walls, a hollow floor, a false ceiling; every room in this house, Monsieur, has eye-holes and ear-holes, and what the house is, the inhabitants are, very treacherous; they all think it lawful to tell lies,


they all call it politeness to profess friendship where they feel hatred. (Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, pp. 133–4) The discourse of surveillance is essentially the same as that underlying the text of Villette, and it too is linked with the practices of Roman Catholicism. Mdlle. Reuter the directress or ‘mother superior’ figure of the Pensionnat de Demoiselles, performs the same jealous and controlling function as Madame Beck of the Pensionnat Beck. The theme of surveillance as instrumental in the control of nuns in a convent is a constant one in anti-Catholic rhetoric. Some of the surveillance is described as being ‘open’ but much of it is seen as more akin to spying, a form of secret observation. Knowledge of another person gives the observer power over the observed. The organisation of the Catholic Church is portrayed as being governed by a strict adherence to power and knowledge as the means to an end, with the Pope as the supreme power from whom the network of clergy emanates. At the base of this pyramid are single women and young girls, who are at the same time both powerless and potentially dangerous. Stealth and secrecy are accepted as being of paramount importance in pursuit of knowledge and control. In Catholicism, the most obvious and available representation of this type of institution is the convent. In The Professor Sylvie the destined nun is rendered mindless by the control of the church which is represented by her confessor to whom she has to tell everything and who, through the work of his spies, constantly observes her behaviour. Mdlle. Reuter is both the surveyor and the surveyed. Discussing Crimsworth’s youth and trustworthiness with the pupils of her pensionnat she says: ‘Du reste, … the surveillance will be strictly attended to’ (The Professor, pp. 71–2). Like Madame Beck in Villette, Zoraïde Reuter exercises her authority over her pupils and teachers by monitoring their behaviour through a network of spies and tale bearers. Crimsworth, although a Protestant, becomes involved in surveillance himself. When he first moves into the boys’ academy next to the girls’ school he feels disappointed because the window overlooking the garden of the pensionnat had been boarded up. Later when he had been admitted to the girls’ school as a teacher, Crimsworth manages to persuade old Madame Pelet to have the boards removed so that he is able to observe his pupils at their sports. It is whilst he is sitting at this window observing Mdlle. Reuter’s garden at night and thinking about her, that he overhears her conversation with M. Pelet and discovers her deceit. This should have come as no surprise to Crimsworth as he already deemed Zoraïde Reuter as deficient in sound principle because

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she had been brought up a Catholic not a Protestant. Just before he hears the conversation in the garden, Crimsworth muses: had she been born an Englishwoman and reared a Protestant – might she not have added straight integrity to all her other excellencies? Supposing she were to marry an English and Protestant husband, would she not, rational, sensible as she is, quickly acknowledge the superiority of right over expediency, honesty over policy? (Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, p. 99) In Crimsworth’s surmising about what Zoraïde Reuter might have been under different circumstances, Brontë gender-codes Protestantism as male and Catholicism as female, imitating contemporary anti-Catholic discourse. She also emphasises the foreignness of Catholicism and gives Crimsworth’s musings a patriotic slant. The Protestant male is perceived as right and honest, the Catholic female as expedient and political. Crimsworth is aware that he, the observer of Catholic femininity, is in turn scrutinised by Mdlle. Reuter in order to ascertain his true character. In true ‘female Jesuit’ style she was searching for salient points and weak points and eccentric points; she was applying now this test, now that, hoping in the end to find some chink, some niche where she could put her little firm foot and stand up on my neck – Mistress of my nature. (Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, p. 80) Crimsworth admits that ‘I watched her as keenly as she watched me’, and this simultaneous subjection to the other’s gaze becomes a kind of game that Mdlle Reuter enjoys: I will renew my observations. She knows that I watch her; how calm she is under scrutiny! it seems rather to gratify than annoy her. (Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, p. 99) Crimsworth is not the only Protestant observer who studied others closely in order to understand them. In Villette Lucy Snowe watches those around her. She watches the young Paulina reveal her character in the Brettons’ house. This knowledge of her ‘rival’ would prove useful to Lucy later on in life. Brontë employs the concept of surveillance as vehicle for power in both Villette and The Professor. She uses current ideas of Catholicism to express


her ideas in a recognisable form. The school, the convent and the confessional are closely connected to the prison and the mental asylum by the way they function and in particular the way in which the students, nuns, inmates and patients are observed and controlled. However, it is too easy to see this use of imagery as merely anti-Catholic. Both Protestant narrators of the novels are silent observers and this gives them knowledge of their often alien surroundings and the power to recount their stories. In The Professor, Brontë puts forward the same argument as in Villette, that love is a great liberator for women, along with useful work. Brontë puts nineteenth-century images of the old maid into Crimsworth’s thoughts when he articulates Frances’s situation and how, had she been as desolate as Zoraïde Reuter deemed, she would not have been worse off than thousands of her sex: Look at the rigid and formal race of old maids – the race whom all despise – they have fed themselves, from youth upwards, on maxims of resignation and endurance; many of them get ossified with the dry diet; Self-Control is so continually their thought, so perpetually their object that at last it absorbs the softer and more agreeable qualities of their nature, and they die mere models of austerity, fashioned out of a little parchment and much bone. Anatomists will tell you that there is a heart in the withered old maid’s carcass – the same as in that of any cherished wife or proud mother in the land – can this be so? I really don’t know – but feel inclined to doubt it. (Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, p. 201) If, as Brontë appears to be suggesting, the state of celibacy must necessarily be dry and loveless, the nun, the absolute personification of female celibacy is the ideal representation of the lonely female. In The Professor, when Crimsworth asks his wife Frances how she would have liked celibacy, she answers: Not much certainly – an old maid’s life must doubtless be void and vapid, her heart strained and empty; had I been an old maid I should have spent existence in efforts to fill the void and ease the aching – I should have probably failed and died weary and disappointed, despised and of no account, like other single women. (Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, p. 236) It is in this last phrase that Brontë sums up the fear of her heroine, it is a fear that is constantly repeated in various forms in her novels and her

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poetry and reflects her own particular circumstance: Affection’s joy I ne’er shall know; Lonely will be my life’s decline Even as my youth is lonely now. Charlotte Brontë, The Brontë Sisters, p. 52 The pain of the lonely, single woman which begins the same for the Catholic and Protestant alike is resolved by completely different means. By setting The Professor in Belgium, a Catholic country, Brontë is able to explore the predicament of the single, unconnected female through the medium of Catholicism and the convent in particular. Frances Henri, who according to her directress is scanty in resources, has obscure connections and uncertain health and is therefore doomed to celibacy (The Professor, p. 139), is discovered by Crimsworth in a Pensionnat de Demoiselles which is portrayed as a type of convent where even close relationships between the pupils were forbidden. Even the somewhat enigmatic figure of Hundsen has much of the Jesuit about him. He has small, even feminine lineaments, long dark locks and is foreign-looking (The Professor, p. 29). Although Crimsworth describes him as English in form and features he comments that nevertheless he has ‘a dash of something Gallic’ (The Professor, p. 24). When advising Crimsworth to travel in search of money, it becomes obvious to the reader that Hunsden, like Rochester,12 is well acquainted with the Continent. He suggests Brussels as a suitable place to find employment and comments that he knows Brussels as well as he knows his home town (The Professor, p. 46). This ‘knowledge’ of Continental Europe, its languages and literature (The Professor, p. 28) adds to the air of enigma that surrounds Hunsden and makes him a somewhat exotic character. However, like Rochester, Hunsden is from an old Northern family, once rich and still independent and he is said to appreciate ‘the distinction of this ancient, if not high lineage’ (The Professor, p. 23). Hunsden appears and disappears without warning and although in the background, he is influential in Crimsworth’s life almost like a father confessor. The reader is never completely at ease with Hunsden’s character which is deliberately ambiguous. Like Rochester with Jane, and M. Paul with Lucy, he is able to pierce the carapace of caution, tact and observation that Crimsworth has deliberately fabricated for his own protection and which was impenetrable by his own brother Edward (The Professor, p. 26). Early in their relationship, when Hunsden has been


instrumental in Crimsworth leaving his brother’s employment, the reader is made aware of a recognition of their essential similarity which allows Hunsden to penetrate Crimsworth’s psyche. ‘Oh I see!’ said he, looking into my eyes, and it was evident he did see right down into my heart; having sat a minute or two with his chin resting on his hand, diligently occupied in the continued perusal of my countenance, he went on … . (Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, p. 45) The unusual friendship between the two men continues throughout the novel with Hunsden turning up at crucial moments in Crimsworth’s life. When Brontë transports the mature Frances to England along with her husband and child, she removes her from the cultural and religious differences of ‘abroad’ and settles her firmly in a patriarchal Protestant haven. However, the presence of Hunsden, always a slightly menacing figure, means that the door to a different culture is never completely closed and this somewhat exotic outsider remains as an influence over her husband and her son. Crimsworth and Frances are anxious about the influence Hunsden exerts over Victor, and as Crimsworth reflects that his son will soon be sent away from the influence of his home and Hunsden, one is reminded of the Jesuit teaching that it is important to indoctrinate a child from an early age: I see him now – he stands by Hunsden – who is seated on the lawn under the beech – Hunsden’s hand rests on the boy’s collar and he is instilling God knows what principles into his ear. Victor looks well just now – for he listens with a sort of smiling interest … Victor has a preference for Hunsden … . (Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, pp. 245–6) There is no suggestion that Hunsden is instilling religion into Victor, far from it, he is seen by critics as the voice of rebellion. It is his demeanour and behaviour that is ‘Jesuitical’. In The Professor, Brontë explores the effects of Catholicism mainly through the female characters and how they are understood by the male Protestant hero. In this way her conclusions are clearly gendered and less subtle than their later working in Villette.

8 Jane Eyre: Anti-Catholic or Anti-Christian? Shirley: A ‘Social’ Novel

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee is not to lift an impious hand to the Cross of Thorns … appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, pp. 3–41 As in the previous critique of The Professor and the later analysis of Villette, this examination of Jane Eyre intends to look at Brontë’s knowledge of religion and the way she uses it metaphorically and in its cultural setting to illuminate the specific concerns of this work. One of the most notable of these concerns is the necessity of human love. Charlotte Brontë’s relationship with Catholicism cannot be seen as reductively pro or anti; it is far more complicated than this. As Margaret Smith notes in her introduction to the Clarendon edition of Jane Eyre, when the novel was first published in October 1847 it was recommended by the Roman Catholic publication The Tablet, as a ‘form of vigourous mental workout’ despite Brontë’s ‘vehement Protestantism’.2 In this chapter I take into account various aspects of Brontë’s life, particularly her childhood, in the analysis of the novel, as it is relevant to her thinking about religion. I will, however, resist the temptation to read this fictional work exclusively in the light of biography. Ellen Nussey wrote the following memory of her friend Charlotte Brontë as a schoolgirl:3 I must not forget to state that no girl in the school was equal to Charlotte in Sunday lessons. Her acquaintance with Holy Writ 109


surpassed others in this as in everything else. She was very familiar with all the sublimist passages, especially those in Isaiah, in which she took great delight. (Ellen Nussey, The Brontës, p. 37) It is important to remember that in the nineteenth century, intimate knowledge of the Bible was widespread amongst educated people particularly those brought up in the Evangelical Protestant tradition. Matters of religious significance were discussed in newspapers and magazines and the Sunday church sermon was listened to with attention. Clergymen were known for their preaching and many travelled the country attracting crowds of listeners wherever they went. According to Tom Winnifrith, the influence of religion on the Brontës is simultaneously obvious and obscure. Most of the books known to have been owned by the Brontë family were of a theological nature.4 It is clear therefore, that much of what the Brontës read and experienced was concerned with religion, however as Winnifrith points out, it is not clear how such an original intellect as Charlotte Brontë’s would have reacted to the variety of religious beliefs she would have encountered.5 With this in mind, it is not the sole object of this chapter to interpret the religious content of Jane Eyre through the experiences of the author, but rather to scrutinise her allusions to religion and her Biblical references against her awareness of the practice and the literature of Christianity with the cultural significance that it held for the nineteenth-century woman:6 Influenced by her reading, her friends and the mood of the time, she (Charlotte Brontë) absorbed some of the ubiquitous anti-Catholic sentiment and passed it on, but with less heat and rancour than many of her contemporaries. (Marianne Thormalen, The Brontës and Religion, p. 37) It is impossible to embark on a study of Jane Eyre without recognising that Charlotte Brontë used her knowledge of religion as a vehicle through which she criticised the type of Evangelical teaching personified in the person of Mr Brocklehurst the director of Lowood School. Mr Brocklehurst was modelled on the Rev. William Carus Wilson who ran The Clergy Daughter’s School at Cowan Bridge where Charlotte and her sisters were pupils. When Mrs Gaskell published her Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857, she observed:7 Mr. Wilson seems to have had the unlucky gift of irritating even those to whom he meant kindly, and for whom he was making perpetual

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sacrifices of time and money, by never showing any respect for their independence of opinion and action. He had, too, so little knowledge of human nature as to imagine that, by constantly reminding the girls of their dependent position, and the fact that they were receiving their education from the charity of others, he could make them lowly and humble. (Mrs Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, p. 58) Criticism of the Rev. Carus Wilson provoked by the publishing of Jane Eyre caused a furore of protest from his friends, and books such as The Vindication of Carus Wilson, written by his son-in-law, appeared in 1857.8 However, the works that Carus Wilson both wrote and edited9 reflect a pessimistic view of children, and of girls in particular which led him to advocate the breaking of their will and the repression of their individual spirits in order to save their immortal souls. Through her novels, and in Jane Eyre in particular, Charlotte Brontë rebelled against the type of teaching propounded by Carus Wilson, especially his manipulation of passages from the Bible in order to create a doctrine of salvation which required the behaviour of its recipients to be controlled socially.10 When the young Jane Eyre has her first meeting with Mr Brocklehurst and they discuss Hell and the Bible, the reader can detect the child’s suspicion of the real intent behind the use of the clergyman’s religious jargon and his interpretation of scripture. When asked how she hopes to avoid dying and going to Hell, Jane replies that she must keep in good health and not die. When Brocklehurst upbraids her for not liking the Psalms because she does not find them interesting he tells Jane she has a wicked heart. Jane is commanded to pray to God to have her heart of stone changed into one of flesh and she is on the point of asking Mr Brocklehurst how this operation was to be performed when she is interrupted by Mrs Reed. When Jane meets Mr Brocklehurst again at Lowood, Brontë uses the occasion to illustrate the blind illogicality behind many Evangelical prejudices which were elevated by the misapplication of theological vocabulary and certain references to the Bible, into moral condemnations ( Jane Eyre, pp. 61–7). When dealing with Evangelical Christianity, the religion of her childhood, Brontë was aware that a lot of the teaching had more to do with control, particularly the control of girls and women, than with Christian love. ‘Girls’ were in danger of ‘losing their souls’ for different reasons from boys. They were urged to follow a prescribed pattern of behaviour in order to attain eternal life. The prescription for boys’ social behaviour was given a more flexible moral structure, within which they had a certain amount of freedom to interpret what it meant to be


‘good’.11 The warnings to girls were always justified by references to the Bible. Vain girls were likened to Jezebel,12 and Eve was frequently cited as the first example of woman’s sin. It is this manipulation of religion and its social consequences that is of importance in Jane Eyre; Brontë expresses this particularly well in the incident at Lowood when Mr Brocklehurst visits the school and admonishes the girls for the way they wear their hair, as their hairstyles are an important indication to the state of their souls: ‘Madam’, he pursued, ‘I have a Master to serve whose kingdom is not of this world: my mission is to mortify in these girls the lusts of the flesh; to teach them to clothe themselves with shame-facedness and sobriety, not with braided hair and costly apparel’; (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 64) Brontë uses this incident to illustrate hypocrisy, as just at that moment Brocklehurst’s wife and daughters enter the schoolroom, they have beautifully curled hair and fashionable clothes. On one level this illustration of Brocklehurst’s hypocrisy works because he is a married man and his own wife and daughters are deemed by him to be exempt from his religious views. To take it a step further, for the purpose of my argument, this scene could just as well be set in a Roman Catholic convent with the father confessor admonishing the girls. In this particular setting of Lowood school Brontë uses tropes that were common in antiCatholic literature in an Ultra-Protestant environment. I believe that this transference or interchangeable use of rhetoric challenges Brontë’s perceived anti-Catholicism and raises questions about the function of organised religion. What is at issue here is the control of women; the poor schoolgirl, spinster or nun should be attending to her female duties, her God, her prayers, always in her place and it is religion’s duty to keep her there. It is critical to this argument that Mr Brocklehurst failed to convince the young Jane Eyre of his doctrines. His obvious hypocrisy coupled with the tragic death of Helen Burns, makes Jane ponder what she had been taught: And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell: and for the first time it recoiled, baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all around an unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood – the present; all the rest was formless


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cloud and vacant depth; and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 79) Whilst it is true that Charlotte Brontë wrote these words over 20 years after she had felt the initial rebellion against the regime of the Rev. Carus Wilson, it would appear that the Evangelical influence she underwent as a child left a deep and lasting impression on her. The language of the devotional books given to children in the nineteenth century is highly emotional as is the religious language found in Jane Eyre, particularly the vocabulary of Helen Burns. Elizabeth Imlay says that a constant factor in Charlotte Brontë’s religious development was unavoidably the idea of Hell, which first took hold at the Clergy Daughter’s school.13 She also maintains Brontë’s attitude towards traditional Christian belief was in fact unorthodox. From the reading of her novels, it is not at all clear what Charlotte Brontë’s religious beliefs were exactly; however it is obvious that she used her extensive knowledge of the Bible and religion in her writing. As previously mentioned, this is not a book about religion. However, it is the intent of this chapter to demonstrate how nineteenthcentury religious discourse contextualised and shaped the text of Jane Eyre: accordingly, it is necessary to recognise Brontë’s interest in religion and theological argument. I have noted that Roman Catholicism was recognised by some nineteenth-century Protestant writers to pose a particular threat to women and that this danger mainly took the shape of convents and the priests who had access to them. Discourses proceed from society but also shape that society, and Charlotte Brontë was aware of the gendered discourse of fear underlying anti-Catholicism. Commenting on her investigations of Charlotte Brontë’s known reading before 1847 Imlay says that she found no references to the idea that a woman might have had a vocation for the cloister. In fact, in the writers she looked at, general prejudice against female religious vocation of this sort ran so high that it would be unfair to see Brontë as any narrower or more intolerant than the rest of the Protestant intelligentsia of her day.14 However, Imlay’s book is dealing with myth and allegory in Jane Eyre; and it would, for our purposes, be more relevant to look at how Brontë deploys the mythology of her day in the religious motifs in her novel, rather than to comment on her personal prejudices. When she likens the convent cell to ‘the drab, narrow form presented at that time to poor, plain women with indifferent health’,15 Imlay does begin to address the symbolism of Brontë’s Roman Catholic representations. As she indicates, the Protestant reformation which forced nuns to leave their convents and


marry, might have liberated the women sexually but it often imprisoned them in a different way:16 A Puritan home, or a Puritan institution such as Lowood, could turn full circle towards a form of imprisonment as dreary, as fear-ridden, as absolute and eventually unsexing as any monastery or convent could have been. (Elizabeth Imlay, Charlotte Brontë and the Mysteries of Love, p. 97) Imlay’s point is clearly demonstrated in the novel, when the young Jane Eyre is sent to Lowood, totally alone. Brontë describes the school as being like the popular idea of a convent; the girls are all dressed the same: poor, demure and unattractive. Lowood is an institution, the girls are all orphans or only have one parent living, they are separated from family and friends in a similar way to girls embarking on the religious life. The garden of the school is described as ‘convent like’, it is a completely enclosed and private area, designed, like the garden of the Pensionnat Beck in Villette, to shield the girls within from the gaze of the outside world, and to prevent them from having any contact with society beyond the school gates: The garden was a wide enclosure, surrounded with walls so high as to exclude every glimpse of prospect; a covered verandah ran down one side, and broad walks bordered a middle space divided into scores of little beds: these beds were assigned as gardens for the pupils to cultivate, and each bed had an owner. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 48) Jane’s isolation is emphasised when Mr Brocklehurst tells her fellow pupils to shun her, to totally exclude her, ‘to shut her out from your converse’. Like a novice in a convent who is, for some reason, believed to have transgressed the rules, Jane is to be closely observed by the teachers who perform a similar role to mature nuns of the anti-convent literature. Brocklehurst orders these older women to watch Jane, keep their eyes on her movements, weigh all her words and scrutinise her actions. Because Jane is said to be a liar, her body is to be punished in order to save her soul ( Jane Eyre, p. 66). Mrs Brocklehurst, in her turn inspects the running of the school in a similar way to Madame Beck in Villette: It seems that they [Mrs and the Misses Brocklehurst] had come in the carriage with their reverend relative, and had been conducting a


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rummaging scrutiny of the rooms up stairs, while he transacted business with the housekeeper, questioned the laundress and lectured the superintendent. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 65) Brontë uses the trope of surveillance in her depiction of the method of control exercised over the girls of Protestant Lowood in a very similar way to the way she describes the control of the girls at the Roman Catholic Pensionnat Beck in Villette which once more demonstrates her interchangeable use of rhetoric. Jane describes Lowood, which is guarded by high and spiked walls, as a seminary ( Jane Eyre, p. 75). However, after Brocklehurst’s cruel regime is somewhat modified following a typhus outbreak, she settles down to life there and because she has useful work to perform is not unhappy even though her life is ‘uniform’. By recognising that women needed to be active in order to be content,17 Brontë appears to be recognising that an all-female institution which offers women the opportunity to play an active role might not be altogether a bad thing. For a while, Jane herself believes that she is happy: ‘I was quiet; I believed I was content: to the eyes of others, usually even to my own, I appeared a disciplined and subdued character’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 84). It is only when her friend Miss Temple leaves Lowood to be married that she realises that she is becoming institutionalised and that Lowood has become her whole life, almost like her prison. It is at this point that Jane understands that she needs freedom, that she craves liberty and the wider world. Throughout Jane Eyre, Brontë employs the figure of the ‘buried woman’, a concept that was unavoidably connected with Roman Catholicism. At the various crisis points of her life, Jane Eyre ‘withdraws’ as if she is cloistering herself. Her first experience of being locked away is when, as a very young girl, she is imprisoned in The Red Room as a punishment for biting her cruel cousin John Reed. Jane passes out and when she comes round she is aware of the glow of the nursery fire from behind its black bars which conjures up a horrific image of prison bars or even the grille of an enclosed order of nuns: ‘The next thing I remember is, waking up with a feeling as if I had had a frightful night-mare, and seeing before me a terrible red glare, crossed with thick black bars’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 18). When Jane is reprimanded for crying, the reader is given inside knowledge of her mental anguish: ‘But how could she divine the morbid suffering to which I was a prey?’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 22). Following this incident, Jane has isolation from society forced upon her and she withdraws into her own mind and imagination. Jane retreats from the world when she is living at Lowood in a totally enclosed


society, then ironically, when she tries to break free and takes up a teaching post at Thornfield Hall, she finds herself once more shut away from the world. At Thornfield, Jane meets Mr Rochester, who although English, has much of the foreigner about him. He is dark and passionate, and has lived both in the West Indies and on the Continent. Rochester even admits to keeping his ward Adèle ‘on the Roman Catholic principle of expiating numerous sins, great or small, by one good work’ ( Jane Eyre, pp. 139–40). Rochester’s wife Bertha, as a Creole, may well have been Roman Catholic; she certainly embodies the features of a certain type of foreign, Catholic female so disliked by Crimsworth in The Professor. Whereas Jane is little, neat, poor and plain, Bertha has been a beauty but has become a large, messy, sensual, florid woman. Rochester tells Jane that at the beginning of Bertha’s madness, her conversation became coarse and her ‘vices sprang up fast and rank’. He describes her as being both intemperate and unchaste, using foul language, worse than a harlot; her lust was a shame to all of the Rochesters ( Jane Eyre, p. 306). This is a much more exaggerated picture of a sensual woman than the one of the sexually aware schoolgirls in The Professor, but the ‘foreignness’ of these women is stressed by Brontë when she makes the comparison between them and the less worldly, demure, innocent, Protestant Frances and Jane.18 Rochester may be seen as a jesuitical figure, using that representation in its widest sense.19 Jane’s description of her master presents him as ‘unEnglish’, he is dark and brooding, has black hair, thick black eyebrows and a shortish athletic physique. He is enigmatic and uses disguise in order to penetrate the minds of others, as when he disguises himself as a gypsy in order to ‘tell the fortunes’ of the ladies at his house party. Rochester presents himself to society as a romantically available, single man, which he is not, and allows himself to fall in love.20 The object of his affection pays the terrible price of betrayal. In Rochester’s case he is not free because he is still married, albeit to a lunatic wife, whereas Mrs Trollope’s Father Eustace is married to the Church and is equally not free to take a second bride. As Paul Emmanuel, the Jesuitical figure of Villette, is able to penetrate Lucy Snowe’s carapace and discover her fiery inner self, so too does Rochester with Jane. He is able to interpret her paintings and her loneliness, because he sees in her a kindred spirit. As M. Paul recognises that Lucy is ‘dangerous’ so Rochester says of Jane: I see, at intervals, the glance, of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were


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it but free, it would soar cloud-high. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 138) This level of perception, particularly into the psyche of a woman, is not found in any of Charlotte Brontë’s other male characters in Jane Eyre. Rochester is sensitive to the free thinking, turbulent spirit that hides behind the disguise of the plain, withdrawn governess, in a way that the Evangelical Mr Brocklehurst could not begin to understand the disturbed and unhappy young Jane, nor the pious St John Rivers respect the desire for real, passionate love in his cousin. In popular anti-Catholic literature, the Catholic priest, in particular the Jesuit, was frequently seen as being a feminised figure. In Romanism Versus Protestantism. Or the Inevitable Result of the Present Crisis in the World’s History (London: 1851), there is a chart in the back of the book illustrating the differences between Evangelical Protestantism, Church of England and Roman Catholicism. The Chart shows the ‘feminising affect’ of Catholicism on men. Under the column Abuses of Romanism and sub-heading, Stone Deadness of the Spiritual Life is the following quote: ‘Love without Faith, – softness and effeminacy the result. Imagination indulged at the expense of Reason, producing sentimentalism and Affectation.’21 Because of, rather than in spite of, this aspect of his looks and personality, the Catholic priest is also recognised as being sexually dangerous to young girls. Rochester is certainly not effeminate, but it is perhaps his ‘feminine side’ (which need not be physical) that enables him to understand women better than Brontë’s other ‘masculine’ creations who are fiercely Protestant and whose belief in their own power and sexual superiority blinkers them and prevents them from seeing beyond the surface of an enigmatic female like Jane Eyre. In Jane Eyre, as in The Professor and Villette, Charlotte Brontë uses the motif of the nun as a depiction of female loneliness and celibacy, and in some instances as a representation of female incarceration. From a letter to Mrs Gaskell written by Mary Taylor, we learn of Brontë’s impressions of her fellow teachers in Brussels, in particular one colleague who was very keen to get married. This teacher, according to Brontë, felt that she was getting old and so used to send letters via her father or brother to eligible men whom she thought might be persuaded to marry her. She was apparently worried that should she lose her position at the Heger’s school her only resource would be to join the Sisters of Charity which she was disinclined to do. According to Mary Taylor, Charlotte Brontë was always interested in people in a similar condition to herself and the reporting of this particular incident reflected her own fear of


loneliness.22 Mary Taylor comments This woman almost frightened her. ‘She declares that there is nothing she can turn to, and laughs at the idea of delicacy – and she is only ten years older than I am!’ I did not see the connection till she said, ‘Well Polly, I should hate being a Sister of Charity; I suppose that would shock some people, but I should’. (Clement Shorter, The Brontës, p. 145) If, as Imlay suggests, Brontë sees nuns as symbolising woman’s enforced passivity, her frustrated and denigrated desires and the human psyche deprived and oppressed in various ways,23 then the suggestion that Jane Eyre had ‘something of the nun about her’ was more an observation on her social position than a religious statement. When Mr Rochester hears that Jane has come from Lowood where she has lived for eight years, he exclaims: ‘Eight years! you must be tenacious of life. I thought half the time in such a place would have done up any constitution! No wonder you have rather the look of another world … you have lived the life of a nun: no doubt you are well drilled in religious forms’; ( Jane Eyre, pp. 121, 123) Elaine Showalter refers to Lowood as a pseudo convent where Jane undergoes a prolonged sensual discipline, is systematically starved and deprived of all sensory gratification.24 The school, like the convent, represents sexual diminishment and repression. The girls are dressed in a manner that deprives them of any of their feminine attributes whilst attempting to destroy their individuality and are instructed in chastity and obedience. However, echoing the type of convent story where nuns and priests are engaged in various kinds of close relationships and the confessor holds the ultimate power and influence over his penitent, Rochester quizzes Jane about her attitude towards Mr Brocklehurst: ‘Brocklehurst, who I understand directs Lowood, is a parson, is he not?’ ‘Yes sir.’ ‘And you girls probably worshipped him, as a convent full of religieuses would worship their director.’ ‘Oh no.’ ‘You are very cool! No! What! a novice not worship her priest! That sounds blasphemous.’ (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 123)


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Not only does Rochester tease Jane about her former life in a way that would be immediately recognisable to the nineteenth-century reader of anti-Catholic novels, but he even uses the French word religieuses to denote nuns.25 The use of the term ‘worship’ and the idea of something being ‘blasphemous’, is pertinent in this context as Rochester, in his role as master and dark outsider, uses the allusion to the enclosed life of a convent and the position of the male director to lead Jane on to admit that she certainly did not hold the director of Lowood in high esteem, any more than he could hope to command her free spirit which longed to ‘soar cloud high’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 138). As an unmarried, working woman, Jane is out of her proper womanly sphere. She shares a similar predicament in her relationship to society in general and men in particular as the nun to whom she is compared by Rochester. Charlotte Brontë was no stranger to having her feelings of social identity undermined and being vulnerable to masculine authority. When she was at the Pension Heger in Belgium she was an anomaly. A young woman removed from her usual environment, lonely, withdrawn and unprotected, she was susceptible to any kindness offered to her or notice taken of her by the director of the school with whom she fell in love. Jane Eyre feels her strange, solitary existence at several stages throughout the novel. On her arrival at Millcote, she tells the reader plainly how vulnerable and alone she truly is: It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world: cut adrift from every connection; (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 93) Jane, like a nun entering a closed order, has deliberately cut herself off from all those connected with her previous life. Had this remained the case, had she not written to her uncle in Madeira to inform him of her impending marriage to Rochester, her story would have had a very different outcome. Following a recognisable pattern of the deliverance of a vulnerable female, it is a member of her family, albeit fairly remote, who saves Jane from Rochester and Thornfield. It is interesting to note however, that the unscrupulous Rochester is somewhat redeemed by the end of the novel without it becoming necessary to the plot for Jane to lose any of her virtue. In the text of Jane Eyre, Jane’s withdrawal is a social matter rather than a religious one. Thornfield is like a convent or a prison where women are sequestered through different variations of incarceration. The reasons for their being there however, have more to do with the situation and status of women in the nineteenth century than with religion.


Whilst critics have frequently dwelt on Jane Eyre’s nun-like qualities, in the novel it is Eliza Reed who actually takes the veil. Brontë describes Eliza as head-strong, selfish and yet respected. It is her sister Georgiana, spoiled, insolent and spiteful who is everybody’s favourite because of her beauty: Her beauty, her pink cheeks and golden curls, seemed to give delight to all who looked at her, and to purchase indemnity for every fault. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 15) In contrast, Eliza is a hard-headed ‘business woman’ who would have sold the hair off her head if it would have made a profit.26 Whilst Eliza goes out in the early morning to check on her chickens and garden from which she sells produce to the gardeners and cook, Georgiana sits in front of the mirror dressing her hair with artificial flowers and faded feathers. Yet it is not the frivolous, empty-headed Georgiana who ends up in a convent, but her serious, mean, spinster-like sister. As Brontë is specifically writing about a young woman entering a Catholic convent by her own free will when she writes about Eliza Reed, it might be pertinent to look briefly at a nineteenth-century idea of what sort of female chose this style of living voluntarily. In the previously mentioned chart listing ‘The Abuses of Romanism’ (1851), one abuse listed is ‘uncommanded asceticism, and a running from the world, instead of shining as lights in the world’.27 Eliza, in joining a French Catholic convent, is turning her back on her former world where she does not ‘shine’ like her much prettier sister and is entering a world where her particular ‘qualities’ would be put to good use. The picture that Brontë paints of Eliza is not that of a young vulnerable girl, but an older, devious woman who is already embittered. She does not conform to an anti-Catholic perception that Romanism encouraged the taking of vows by young females ‘to the subversion of the happiness and usefulness of thousands’. When these ‘rash promises’ are taken by young women, the Protestant viewpoint is that society is robbed of its best and dearest ornaments.28 In the case of Eliza Reed this certainly was not true. The cousin that Jane Eyre meets on her return to Gateshead to see the dying Mrs Reed is very tall and thin, with a sallow face and severe mien. There was something ascetic in her look, which was augmented by the extreme plainness of a straight-skirted, black, stuff dress, a starched linen collar, hair combed away from the temples, and the nun-like ornament of a string of ebony beads and a crucifix. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 228)


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The two Reed sisters have nothing in common with each other. Georgiana denounces her sister as a selfish, heartless creature who feels spiteful hatred towards her. She accuses Eliza of ruining her prospects of making a noble marriage for ever by her acting the spy and the informer, an accusation that Eliza ignores ‘sitting cold and impassible, and assiduously industrious’. The image of Eliza acting the spy and the informer against her more attractive, popular sister is reminiscent of the spiteful mother superiors of anti-convent literature. It is surely no coincidence that Jane tells the reader that her cousin did in fact become a nun and indeed a mother superior. Why Eliza should embrace Rome and join a foreign convent is germane to the question of the contrast between the secular and religious conceptions of the nun. Eliza seems to have a peculiar vocation, born out of her obsessive need for order and security. According to Jane, her cousin had decided that when her mother died She would execute a long-cherished project: seek a retirement where punctual habits would be permanently secured from disturbance, and place safe barriers between herself and a frivolous world. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 235) Jane says of Eliza, ‘in matters of religion she was a rigid formalist’, and as Roman Catholicism was understood to be the epitome of formal, ritualistic worship, it would follow that Eliza would feel quite at home within its regime. By placing Eliza Reed in this context, Brontë employs an extended image that would illustrate her character in a much more effective way than more meticulous explanation and description could hope to do. A typical example of the attitude of nineteenth-century Protestants towards the Catholic monastic system can be found in the following extract taken from a lecture delivered before the Protestant Alliance in 1853. The Protestant Alliance was a society that tried to detect the plots and encroachments of the papal enemy. The perceived threat of Roman Catholicism led this group of Ultra Protestants to search its history and the present for Catholic attributes:29 Monasticism began with the pretence to spiritual superiority and the need of withdrawal from worldly care for the high object of heavenly meditation. It rapidly passes into the stage of spiritual pride, and selfrighteous contempt of all ordinary Christianity … the spiritual pride of superior holiness in self-invented worship, has led, practically, to the foulest abominations. (Rev. T.R. Birks, Popery in the Bud and in the Flower, p. 6)


It is clear from Brontë’s description of her cousin Eliza that it is her spiritual pride and her wish to withdraw from worldly care along with her neurotically ritualistic personality that leads her to join a convent. It is Georgiana to whom Jane shows the most indulgence, listening to her stories of London and her conquests there and after her mother’s death helping her to sew and pack. Eliza sees a similarity between herself and her cousin Jane that does not exist between the two siblings. In one breath she states that there is a great difference between living with the discreet self-contained Jane and her emotional, thoughtless sister, and then suddenly declares: ‘To-morrow, … I set out for the continent. I shall take up my abode in a religious house, near Lisle – a nunnery you would call it: there I shall be quiet and unmolested. I shall devote myself for a time to the examination of the Roman Catholic dogmas, and to a careful study of the workings of their systems: if I find it to be, as I half expect it is, the one best calculated to ensure the doing of all things decently and in order, I shall embrace the tenets of Rome, and probably take the veil.’ (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, pp. 241–2) Jane’s reaction to this statement is appropriate to her state of mind and her distancing herself from her cold unemotional cousin. It also reinforces the idea of a convent as a prison where vulnerable females are ‘walled up alive’ and mental health problems threaten their hoped-for tranquil existence: I neither expressed surprise at this resolution nor attempted to dissuade her from it. ‘The vocation will fit you to a hair,’ I thought: ‘much good may it do you!’ When we parted, she said: ‘Good-bye, cousin Jane Eyre; I wish you well: you have some sense.’ I then returned: ‘You are not without sense, cousin Eliza; but what you have, I suppose in another year will be walled up alive in a French convent. However, it is not my business, and so it suits you – I don’t much care.’ (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 242) The last the reader hears of the Reed cousins is that Georgiana made an advantageous marriage with a wealthy, worn-out man of fashion and so fulfilled the expectations of conventional nineteenth-century society, whereas Eliza took the veil and actually became Mother Superior of the convent which she endowed with her fortune. The fate of Eliza is


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significant. The church received all her money and rewarded her for it with advancement within the order, manifesting the fear that Rome was predatory upon women in a financial as well as a pseudo-sexual manner. However, the perception that Eliza was fitted, by her cold, heartless character, for the position cancels any compassion the reader might have felt for her. By the time Jane Eyre returns to Thornfield, she has completely cut herself off from her childhood and dispatched her unpleasant cousins to the fates that befit their characters. John is dead, Georgiana destined to be trapped in a loveless marriage, and Eliza incarcerated in a French convent. It would appear from the text that Brontë has punished Eliza and chosen a fate for her that is fitting to her character. Her negative comments about nuns and convents therefore are included at this point in the novel to illustrate this ‘punishment’ and not as overt religious criticism. At the end of her chapter entitled ‘Hypochondria’, Valerie Grosvenor Myers says that the majority of Charlotte Brontë critics identify a sense of female protest, pain and anger in her work and many attempt to ‘plumb Charlotte’s psyche for hidden complexes’.30 It is true that there has been much interest in Charlotte Brontë’s depression which was brought about variously by ill health, bereavement and isolation. In her letters to her friend Ellen Nussey, she frequently complains of headaches and stomach problems. She is very low when alone in Brussels, when staying with the Taylor family in 1845, immediately after her brother Branwell’s death, during the time that her sisters Emily and Anne are dying, and whilst she is editing their work, to cite but a few examples among many. Charlotte knew when she was depressed and appears to have had a certain amount of insight into the cause of her crippling headaches. In November 1850 she wrote to Ellen Nussey: ‘I trust and hope my headaches are going to give me respite; they have been very annoying, not from their violence but frequency.’ In a subsequent letter dated December 1850,31 which was written from Harriet Martineau’s house, Brontë tells her friend: I am away from home and relieved temporarily at least, by change of air and scene from the heavy burden of depression which I confess has for nearly 3 months been sinking me to the earth. I shall never forget last Autumn. Some days and nights have been cruel … My loathing of solitude grew extreme. (Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2) Like many other writers who suffered from depression, Charlotte Brontë uses metaphor to best describe her condition. One analogy she uses


frequently is that of being incarcerated in solitary confinement. Brontë likens hypochondria (the Victorian term for clinical depression) to being buried in a dungeon:32 I pity Mr. Thomas from my heart … for ten years he has felt the tyranny of Hypochondria – a most dreadful doom – far worse than that of a man with healthy nerves buried for the same length of time in a subterranean dungeon. (Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Brontë: Truculent Spirit, p. 84) Throughout the novel Jane Eyre tries to escape the trap of incarceration that lies in wait for the unprotected female. The threat of imprisonment takes several different forms throughout the book: the Red Room, Lowood, Mr Rochester and St John Rivers all pose a threat to her independence. Jane recognises her own loneliness and says, ‘alas this isolation – this banishment from my kind!’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 335). Jane is young, female and friendless and therefore very vulnerable, as she says of herself, ‘Not a tie links me to any living thing’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 346). According to certain strands of nineteenth-century literature, it was lack of human contact that contributed to the nuns going mad. Also perceived as dangerous to mental health was solitary confinement. During the nineteenth century the Quaker philosophy of criminal rehabilitation was adopted by many prisons:33 The rehabilitation of the criminal is expected … of the relation of the individual to his own conscience and to what may enlighten him from within. (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 238) The walls of the cell were meant to confront the prisoner with himself. Foucault observes that Catholicism soon absorbed this Quaker idea into its discourses:34 I see your cell is no more than a frightful sepulchre where, instead of worms, remorse and despair come to gnaw at you and to turn your existence into a hell in anticipation. But … what is for an irreligious prisoner merely a tomb, a repulsive ossuary, becomes for the sincerely Christian convict, the very cradle of blessed immortality. (Abbé Petigny, Allocution adressée aux prisoners, p. 239) For Charlotte Brontë, being isolated, having to live exclusively with one’s self, was the recipe for deep depression possibly leading to madness. This


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condition in itself would lead to further isolation and incarceration in a mental asylum or like Bertha Rochester, in a secure and secret prison. Whoever is in authority over Jane Eyre attempts to tame and punish her by cutting her off from society but they cannot transform this independent spirit into the nun-like figure she so fears. From the first chapter of Jane Eyre, the reader is introduced to Jane as a solitary character, one who is an outsider in her world as any friendless single woman was destined to be an outsider in Victorian society. In the Reed household, Jane is referred to as a dependent, less than a servant, as underhand and scheming. She refers to herself as a discord in Gateshead Hall, ‘like nobody there’ having nothing in common with her aunt or her cousins. When she is locked in the Red Room Jane sinks into what she refers to as her ‘habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, [and] forlorn depression’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 16). She is so afraid of being left alone in the place she believes is haunted by her uncle’s ghost that she has what she calls ‘a species of fit’. Following this dramatic episode Jane is removed from the society of the rest of the household by her aunt. She has a small closet to sleep in by herself. She takes all her meals alone. She has to pass all her time in the nursery, not in the drawing room with her cousins, who, acting on orders speak to her as little as possible. Even her tormenter John is forbidden to chastise her his mother tells him: ‘Don’t talk to me about her, John: I told you not to go near her; she is not worthy of notice; I do not choose that either you or your sisters should associate with her.’ (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 27) The pattern of Jane’s life is therefore set: she is to be excluded, a misfit in a society into which she has been born, but cannot become a member of because of her situation. Whilst still at Gateshead, Jane is not permitted to join in the Christmas festivities with her cousins. Brontë gives the reader a picture of the lonely little girl, an illustration that has echoes of convent imagery and the disturbed mental state of the future adult. Left alone in the unlit nursery, sitting by the fire with a doll on her knees, Jane observes that she was: glancing round occasionally to make sure that nothing worse than myself haunted the shadowy room; (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 28) Is this ‘self’ who haunts the young Jane an immature version of the ghostly nun who appears to the older female, Brontë heroines? Certainly the way


Jane’s favourite doll is described has overtones of the ritualistic observances of Catholicism. This doll is the only thing Jane loves, and Brontë describes it as ‘a faded graven image’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 28) the term used in the Ten Commandments for the carved idols worshipped by pagans.35 In Isaiah an angry God is depicted as wreaking vengeance on the unfaithful:36 They shall be turned back and utterly put to shame, who trust in graven images, who say to molten images, ‘you are our Gods.’ Isaiah 42:17 It is almost as if Jane is coded as ‘Catholic’ in the text, not in a doctrinal sense but because of her nun-like qualities and her love for an inanimate object. During the height of the anti-Catholic fervour of the nineteenth century a great deal of the writing focussed on Roman Catholics worshipping ‘idols’ – by which was meant statues, holy pictures and saints.37 It is significant in this context that in a moment of extreme loneliness and possible depression, Jane Eyre finds comfort in what Brontë calls a ‘graven image’: and in Villette, at a time when she could not bear her solitude, Lucy Snowe turns to the Catholic confessional. Critics have observed that Charlotte Brontë’s perceived anti-Catholic views may well have stemmed from the tension caused by her education as an Evangelical Protestant and her attraction to the ritualistic ‘theatre’ of the Catholic mass. The lure of the convent was understood as being particularly strong for single, nineteenth-century women. However, Brontë in no way commends or elevates the position of the nun, nor does she denigrate or mock it: rather she uses the motif as a symbol of intense loneliness and hypochondria. As Jane matures she begins to understand her own feelings better. She needs other people, as she explains to Helen Burns: I know I should think well of myself; but that is not enough: if others don’t love me, I would rather die than live – I cannot bear to be solitary and hated, Helen. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 69) She understands her position is unique to her gender. A position that can only be made worse by lack of involvement in the world: Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed


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to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 109) For Jane, joining a convent is not the answer for women, since for her it represents burial from the world. The horror of the convent cell is greater than the dislike of the lonely little governess’s room at Thornfield ( Jane Eyre, p. 116). The mental suffering of the walled-in nun is greater than the ‘unconscious lassitude that weighs on the [ Jane’s] lid: that signifies melancholy resulting from loneliness’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 201). Jane knows that ‘there is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow-creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 246), yet her vulnerability as a woman without connections may be seen as putting her in religious as well as moral danger. Jane’s ‘hypochondria’ is noted by Rochester on the night before their wedding. When Jane tells him that she feels uneasy about her fate, Rochester answers, ‘This is hypochondria, Jane. You have been over excited, or over fatigued’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 279). The reader however can read the signs of impending doom. Like the child with her doll, the adult Jane has made a graven image of her future husband. He has replaced God. Jane has let her previously clear vision become clouded and is dependent on Rochester as a cure for her loneliness. When Jane’s ‘hypochondria’ turns out to be a true presentiment, she becomes a cold, solitary girl again: her life was pale; her prospects were desolate. A Christmas frost had come at midsummer: a white December storm had whirled over June; (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 295) When Jane leaves Thornfield and Rochester the reader recognises that she is leaving her ‘hypochondria’ as well, as she glides silently away.38 It is as if she has recognised her solitary condition and no longer fears it: I care for myself. the more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself … I will hold to the


principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad – as I am now. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 317) The madness Jane is experiencing at this crisis point, is not the debilitating melancholy of her previous life, but a real madness born out of desperation and loss. In Jane Eyre Brontë offers her heroine the protection, if not the love, of a good looking, intelligent, Calvinistic clergyman and she has the temerity to refuse it. Jane realises that marriage to St John Rivers would be an emotional death for her, that if she became his wife he would soon kill her. This is a reference to his gloomy outlook on nature, his Calvinistic doctrines and his destructive form of Christianity. To enter into a union with St John would be to cut herself off from the delights of the world and would be little better than any other form of incarceration. In response to St John’s proposal, Jane instinctively recoils and tells her reader: ‘My iron shroud contracted around me’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 404). By using such an evocative image, that of a slowly contracting cell of smooth iron,39 Brontë shifts the location of loneliness from the isolation of the solitary spinster to the loveless marriage, and then to the prison cell. It is important to Jane that St John, although physically attractive himself, cannot appreciate the beauty of the world about him because he has had his senses dulled by his religion: Nature was not to him that treasury of delight it was to his sisters. He expressed once … an inborn affection for the dark and hoary walls he called his home: but there was more of gloom than pleasure in the tone and words in which the sentiment was manifested; (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 351) Whilst she is with the Rivers Jane begins to understand her true nature, ‘I began once more to know myself’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 337). The reader becomes aware that it is through the company of other people, particularly like-minded people, that she becomes a real person. Jane is able to break out of her cycle of loneliness because she discovers herself and realises that marriage to St John, far from making her happy, would push her further into depression. In her new life as a school teacher Jane enjoys a certain amount of popularity and a useful existence. Jane’s true name is hidden whilst she is with the Rivers, but not her true character. This contrasts with her earlier life when she had frequently hidden her real feelings by turning her face into a mask of female respectability. For


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example, when returning to Thornfield from her visit to the dying Mrs Reed, Jane comes upon Rochester sitting on a stile, writing. She decides to take another route, but he sees her and calls to her. She is in a nervous state and is afraid of betraying her thoughts in her face. Then she remembers the strategy she has learnt out of necessity: ‘But I have a veil – it is down: I may make shift yet to behave with decent composure’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 244). Jane knows that when ‘veiled’ she is not true to herself, whether a nun-like figure or a conventional bride, she is not comfortable with a self-image which she cannot recognise. When looking at herself in the mirror in her bridal wear Jane tells the reader: ‘I saw a robed and veiled figure, so unlike my usual self that it seemed almost the image of a stranger’ ( Jane Eyre, p. 286). She cannot accept either of these models of submissive femininity any more than she can accept St John’s proposal to be his helpmate, the wife of a Christian missionary. St John wishes to dominate Jane. Like Brocklehurst’s regime, he uses surveillance as a means to exercise his authority over her. Whilst retaining his own impenetrable mask, he observes Jane in an effort to understand her, not like Rochester (who wanted to know the real Jane better) but in order that he might use this information as a method of control. Jane is troubled by St John’s inner turbulence and the difficulty she has in understanding him: St John’s eyes, though clear enough in a literal sense, in a figurative one were difficult to fathom. He seemed to use them rather as instruments to search other people’s thoughts, than as agents to reveal his own; (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 346) This close observation of his cousin begins to make Jane feel very uncomfortable: I found myself under the influence of the ever-watchful blue eye … so keen was it, and yet so cold, I felt for the moment superstitious – as if I were sitting in the room with something uncanny. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 397) This vocabulary of the ever-watchful eye is reminiscent of the ‘sleepless eye’ of the Catholic Church that keeps watch over Lucy Snowe in Villette. St John is far from being a Catholic but he does represent the Evangelical Protestant male who, in similar manner, wishes to dominate and ‘protect’ the women in his care. As previously noted in the case of Mr Brocklehurst, anti-Catholic tropes are transferred to the Calvinist


St John, making them expressions of gender and power rather than restricting them to a particular religion. Slowly, St John begins to exercise his influence over Jane and she feels that she is losing her autonomy: By degrees, he acquired a certain influence over me that took away my liberty of mind: his praise and notice were more restraining than his indifference … I fell under a freezing spell … as for me, I daily wished more to please him: but to do so, I felt daily more and more that I must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties, … (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, pp. 397–8) Under the guise of wishing to save Jane from a useless life, St John asks her to be his wife; but he does so without any of the love and sexual passion of Rochester’s proposal. He says that he wants someone he can ‘influence efficiently in life, and retain absolutely till death’. He adds that if she refuses him she will limit herself for ever to ‘a track of selfish ease and barren obscurity’. Jane recognises his despotic nature and feels the need for freedom; nonetheless she is tempted to give into him, to put herself under his protection. St John’s religious rhetoric is convincing; he persuades Jane that he is a good man. Brontë uses her knowledge of Calvinism to make St John’s arguments believable and to a certain proportion of her readers, acceptable. However, she will not let Jane do ‘the right thing’ and allows the phantom voice of Rochester, the dark ‘foreigner’, to wrench her heroine away from the safekeeping of a good Protestant, English male and casts her once more into the unknown. By the time Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre, she had realised that ‘these ghastly Calvinistic doctrines are death’,40 and so Jane realises that marriage with St John Rivers would be a spiritual death for her. Throughout the novel Jane has informed the reader that she will not be buried alive: I felt how – if I were his wife – this good man, pure as the deep sunless source, could soon kill me; without drawing from my veins a single drop of blood, or receiving on his own crystal conscience the faintest stain of crime. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 411) When Jane eventually finds true happiness with the mutilated Rochester it is because she is with him on her own terms as equals, if anything, he needs her and leans on her rather than the other way round. Presumably Rochester’s ‘blindness’ renders him acceptable as a husband insofar as it symbolically disables his capacity to engage in the practice of pseudo-Catholic surveillance. Jane’s contentment is founded


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on the fact that she has escaped a life of impotence and dependence. On hearing of St John’s imminent death, Jane acknowledges his goodness and sincerity: it is not the fault of the man that he wished to posses her, it is the fault of flawed religion. One criticism of Jane Eyre, that appeared in The Quarterly Review, the influential, right-wing nineteenth-century journal, stated that the novel was ‘anti-Christian’. There has been considerable discussion as to what was meant by this, but surely it is a criticism of Brontë for using her novel to question the doctrine of justification by faith alone and to rail against what has been predestined by God.41 In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë is particularly aware of the fact that nineteenth-century, single women were fated to play the role of the ‘other’ in religious and social contexts that were defined by men and therefore they were perceived as being both dangerous and vulnerable. As in her other novels, Brontë demonstrates a particular interest in the borderlines of sanity. Jane Eyre, has the passionate child, the depressed woman and the insane woman, all of whom are rebelling against their isolation and incarceration which are a consequence of their gender as much as anything else. By employing the imagery of stereotypical and therefore recognisable religious motifs, Charlotte Brontë is able to utilise a technique that enables her to express her sentiments about the struggle of a single, friendless young woman against the masculine power that surrounds her.

Shirley: a ‘social’ novel ‘Your place is to do good to others, to be helpful whenever help is wanted.’ … Is this enough? Is it to live? Is there not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, in that existence which is given away to others, for want of something of your own to bestow it on? I suspect there is. Does virtue lie in abnegation of self? I do not believe it. Undue humility makes tyranny; weak concession creates selfishness. The Romish religion especially teaches renunciation of self, submission to others, and nowhere are found so many grasping tyrants as in the ranks of the Romish priesthood.42 Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 174 Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley does not follow the pattern of her other novels which are grounded in the personal experience of the author. Shirley’s historical setting during the period of the Napoleonic Wars 1811–12 and its concern with the British government’s Orders in Council and the


Luddite riots place any anti-Catholic rhetoric in a different environment from that of The Professor, Jane Eyre and Villette. In order not to invalidate the analysis of the above texts, I have selected certain passages from Shirley where Charlotte Brontë uses certain imagery and ideas to express her ideas on women and girls and in particular old maids. Most of the allusions to the loneliness and powerlessness of the single woman in a man’s world are made by or about Caroline Helstone who is in love with Robert Moore who, like Rochester and M. Paul is the ‘dark foreigner’ of the book: When depressed, the very hue of his face seemed more dusk than when he smiled, and to-day cheek and forehead wore their most tintless and sober olive. (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 171) Caroline is forbidden to see Moore by her uncle because he considers Robert to be ‘Jacobinical’. She is wandering near his home one evening when she sees him out with Mr Yorke, however she fails to speak to him and goes home in ‘the utter sickness of longing and disappointment’ (Shirley, p. 189). Caroline then asks her uncle if she can look for a position as a governess, but he dismisses this idea out of hand. Because of her unrequited love for Robert Moore and her loneliness Caroline’s health begins to fail: A week or two passed; her bodily and mental health neither grew worse nor better. She was now precisely in that state, when, if her constitution had contained the seeds of consumption, decline or slow fever, those diseases would have been rapidly developed, and would soon have carried her quietly from the world. People never die of love or grief alone; though some die of inherent maladies, which the tortures of those passions prematurely force into destructive action. The sound by nature undergo these tortures, and are racked, shaken, shattered: their beauty and bloom perish, but life remains untouched. They are brought to a certain point of dilapidation; they are reduced to pallor, debility, and emaciation. People think, as they see them gliding languidly about, that they will soon withdraw to sickbeds, perish there, and cease from among the healthy and happy. This does not happen: they live on; and though they cannot regain youth and gaiety, they may regain strength and serenity. The blossom which the March wind nips, but fails to sweep away, may survive to hang a withered apple on the tree late into autumn: having braved the last frosts of spring, it may also brave the first of winter. Every one


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noticed the change in Miss Helstone’s appearance, and most people said she was going to die. (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 191) Caroline’s ill health appears to be similar to Brontë’s own hypochondria. Later in the novel Caroline goes into a decline with a serious fever after she has spent an evening with the Moores and is led to believe that Robert is favoured by Shirley. As in Villette, Brontë uses the image of a tiger to express fear and depression. She felt a pulse beat fast in her temples: she felt too her brain in strange activity: her spirits were raised: hundreds of busy and broken, but brilliant thoughts engaged her mind: a glow rested on them, such as tinged her complexion. Now followed a hot, parched, thirsty, restless night. Towards morning one terrible dream seized her like a tiger: when she woke, she felt and knew she was ill. (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, pp. 421–2) Articulating her dread of loneliness, Caroline Helstone, uses the figure of the nun to depict an extreme image of isolation. In her portrayal of Miss Ainley, a saint-like spinster, who is not oppressed by her solitude because of her hope of heaven, she rejects the over simplified tenets of religion that lead to acceptance of injustice in this world: ‘I never find Miss Ainley oppressed with despondency, or lost in grief,’ she thought; ‘yet her cottage is a still, dim little place, and she is without a bright hope or near friend in the world. I remember, though, she told me once, she had tutored her thoughts to tend upwards to Heaven. She allowed there was, and ever had been, little enjoyment in this world for her; and she looks, I suppose, to the bliss of the world to come. So do nuns – with their close cell, their iron lamp, their robe strait as a shroud, their bed narrow as a coffin … God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me, among the rest.’ (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 390) In similar vein. Brontë links women’s mental health with their lack of self determination and ability to accept their God-given role in life. Caroline’s mother, Mrs Pryor recounts her life as a governess with the


Hardman family and warns her daughter against taking such a post: My life in this house was sedentary, solitary, constrained, joyless, toilsome. the dreadful crushing of the animal spirits, the ever prevailing sense of friendlessness and homelessness consequent on this state of things, began ere long to produce mortal effects on my constitution, – I sickened. The lady of the house told me coolly I was the victim of ‘wounded vanity’. She hinted, that if I did not make an effort to quell my ‘ungodly discontent’, to cease ‘murmuring against God’s appointment’, and to cultivate the profound humility befitting my station, my mind would very likely ‘go to pieces’ on the rock that wrecked most of my sisterhood – morbid self-esteem; and that I should die an inmate of a lunatic asylum. (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 376) Far from agreeing with Mrs Hardman that it is ‘morbid self-esteem’ that sends women mad, Caroline, appeals to fathers and brothers in similar form to the entreaties of the anti-convent literature. However in this instance she is not warning them against the dangers of convent life for their daughters and sisters, but the dangers of stifling their intelligence and creativity: Men of England! Look at your poor girls, many of them fading around you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating to sour old maids, – envious, backbiting, wretched, because life is a desert to them; … Keep your girls’ minds narrow and fettered – they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace to you: cultivate them – give them scope and work – they will be your gayest companions in health; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your most faithful prop in age. (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 393) Shirley Keeldar is incisive in her observation on the way men understand women. As in the gendered opinion of the anti-Catholic literature I have examined, women are either pure and malleable or corrupt and malign: If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman, almost always a fiend. (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 352)


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Employing the image of the ‘idolatry’ ascribed to Roman Catholicism, Robert Moore finally expresses his love for the ‘good’ Caroline Helstone: ‘I have twice this evening had some thoughts of falling on the floor at your feet.’ … ‘And worshipping you downright. My mother was a Roman Catholic; you look like the loveliest of her pictures of the Virgin: I think I will embrace her faith, and kneel and adore.’ (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 606) Brontë employs the figure of the nun in Shirley, but in a more enigmatic way than in her other novels. In connection with Louis Moore the nun is seen as something to be be feared and there appears to be a link with solitude, a condition he has come to loathe. Brontë says that Louis Moore would rather be in the ghostly Nunnely Forest than at the house of his rival Sir Philip Nunnely: Yes, he would rather have appointed tryste with a phantom abbess, or mist-pale nun, among the wet and weedy relics of that ruined sanctuary of theirs, mouldering in the core of the wood. (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 519) She adds a little later that he used to rather like Solitude, who he envisaged as a quiet and serious, yet fair nymph. However, since he has known Shirley he has a different opinion: I abhor Solitude. Cold abstraction – fleshless skeleton – daughter – mother – and mate of death! (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 521) When Caroline and Shirley plan an excursion to Nunnwood, the site of the ruined nunnery becomes a place where women can be at peace. They decide to go alone to Nunnwood as with gentlemen ‘an excursion becomes quite a different thing’ and their presence dispels the last charm. With the wrong sort of gentlemen, like the curates, irritation takes the place of serenity. Caroline describes the wood to Shirley: That break is a dell; a deep, hollow cup, lined with turf as green and short as the sod of this Common; the very oldest of the trees, gnarled, mighty oaks, crowd about the brink of this dell: in the bottom lie the ruins of a nunnery. We will go – you and I alone, Caroline – to that wood, early some fine summer morning, and spend a long day there. (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 213)


Caroline escapes the fate of the nun that is so feared by Lucy Snowe and is described by Rose Yorke as a slow death in Briarfield Rectory. Through lack of love she ‘wasted like any snow-wreath in thaw; she faded like any flower in drought’ but recovers, as Lucy recovers when she is loved by M. Paul, after she finds out that Robert Moore really cares for her: It was true: there was an obvious change in Miss Helstone: all about her seemed elastic; depression, fear, forlornness, were withdrawn: no longer crushed, and saddened, and slow, and drooping, she looked like one who had tasted the cordial of heart’s ease, and been lifted on the wing of hope. (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 598) Caroline is not destined to be a mist-pale nun any more than Lucy Snowe or Jane Eyre. Whilst it is true that Brontë makes a few sarcastic asides about Roman Catholicism in Shirley they would appear to be somewhat ‘tongue in cheek’ comments such as her mention of the infallibility of the Pope when Caroline, Shirley and Margaret Hall gather around their favourite pastor Mr Hall at the school feast: Cyril Hall was their pope, infallible to them as Dr Thomas Boultby to his admirers. (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 300) and observations comparing England with her Catholic counterparts which she uses to patriotic ends: the churchyard is full of children and teachers, all in their very best holiday attire: and – distressed as is the district, bad as are the times – it is wonderful to see how respectably – how handsomely even – they have contrived to clothe themselves. That British love of decency will work miracles: the poverty which reduces an Irish girl to rags is impotent to rob the English girl of the neat wardrobe that she knows necessary to her self-respect. (Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 296) Caroline Helstone suffers loneliness and a sense of impotence because of her gender and status. Like Lucy Snowe she experiences physical illness which is caused by her hysteria and which can only be cured by true love and the feeling that she is useful. Like Lucy and Jane Eyre the man who eventually ‘saves’ her from a nun-like existence is what I have referred to as a ‘Jesuitical’ character. Dark, slightly or completely foreign with roots in a Catholic country. In Jane Eyre, Rochester’s Catholic


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connections are fairly tenuous, in Villette, M. Paul is a Roman Catholic, one who has been educated by the Jesuits and in Shirley, Robert Moore is half French with a Catholic mother. As in her other novels, the antiCatholic references in Shirley are employed metaphorically rather than as an indication of deeply felt religious prejudice.

9 The Priestcraft of the Book: Representations of Catholicism in Villette

My Life is what I expected it to be – sometimes when I wake in the morning – and know that Solitude, Remembrance and Longing are to be almost my sole companions all day through – that at night I shall go to bed with them, that they will long keep me sleepless – that next morning I shall wake to them again – sometimes Nell, I have a heavy heart of it. Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, p. 2301 Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette has been identified by critics as a vehemently anti-Catholic work. It cannot be denied that the novel contains many detrimental references to the institutional practices of Roman Catholicism, but by situating it within the wider field of anti-Catholic writing in the nineteenth century I would argue that negative aspects of certain characters and situations which are linked by their association with Catholicism are more stylistic and thematic than rhetorical – the result of a cultural perception of that particular religion, not an overt criticism of it. Rosemary Clark-Beattie writes: ‘Villette is perhaps the most moving and terrifying account of deprivation, of powerlessness, ever written.’2 This statement provides a more fertile approach to the novel than that of the simple ‘anti-Catholic discourse’. It is useful in interpreting Brontë’s portrayal of Catholicism, in particular her representation of the nun. This chapter will aim to show that Brontë deployed current perceptions of Roman Catholicism to represent concepts such as isolation and surveillance which in Villette are more developed than in The Professor, Shirley and Jane Eyre. When Villette was first published in 1853 it was generally well received by the critics, but its so-called anti-Catholic passages were offensive to 138

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some of its readers.3 As Charlotte Brontë wrote to her friend Miss Wooler Currer Bell’s remarks on Romanism have drawn down on him the condign [sic] displeasure of the High Church party. … I can well understand that some of the charges launched against me by these publications will tell heavily to my prejudice in the minds of most readers; but this must be borne, and for my part, I can suffer no accusation to oppress me much which is not supported by the inward evidence of conscience and reason. (Charlotte Brontë, ‘Letter to Miss Wooler’, 13 April 1853) Brontë effectively dismisses the criticism that she is anti-Catholic as understandable but not true and therefore it does not trouble her conscience. In her review in the Daily News 3 February 1853, Harriet Martineau, a friend of Brontë, observed that ‘Currer Bell goes out of her way to express a passionate hatred of Romanism.’ She saw this as something to be deplored at a time when ‘Catholics and Protestants hate each other quite sufficiently.’ Brontë was upset by her friend’s criticism of her obsession with love and the fact that she saw Villette as a novel full of pain4 rather than by her surprised observation of the anti-Romanism from one who was normally so ‘large and liberal’ in her thinking. This suggests that her depictions of Catholicism in Villette were a part of her literary, cultural and religious upbringing and that she employed them in the novel in a stylistic manner not as anti-Catholic rhetoric. It is generally accepted that Brontë based Villette on her time in Belgium at the Pensionnat Heger. From her letters to Ellen Nussey it is clear that whilst in Brussels she suffered from extreme loneliness and isolation which she mainly attributed to her ‘difference’ from the other inmates of the school:5 There are privations & humiliations to submit to – there is a monotony and uniformity of life – and above all there is a constant sense of solitude in the midst of members – the Protestant, the Foreigner is a solitary being whether as teacher or pupil. (Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, p. 315) This trope of the ‘otherness’; of the Protestant in Catholic society runs through the whole of Villette and is a useful device for expressing the suffocating atmosphere of a society whose religion views women in specifically designated roles and seeks to limit their activities by means of constant surveillance and control. Brontë understands the difference that exemplified the ‘freedom’ of the Protestant woman to bring about her own salvation by a response of faith rather than by ‘good works’. But


she goes further than other so-called anti-Catholic writers; she sees that the Protestant view of women is in its own way just as patriarchal and limiting as that of the Catholic in the way that women are expected to live under the protection of their male relatives. One of the principal differences between the Protestant and Catholic view of the single woman which is explored in Villette is that in England, the loneliness and self-sufficiency of a single woman is accepted as normal even though pitiable, whereas in Catholic Belgium the single woman is seen as dangerous, a person to be tamed, converted, even placed in a convent. Commenting on the morbid and weak aspects of her heroine, Lucy Snowe, she says that it was no impetus of healthy feeling which urged her into the confessional, ‘it was the semi-delirium of solitary grief and sickness’.6 The idea of the vulnerable girl being at risk in the confessional was not a strange one at this time and the danger of the unctuous priest constantly on the look out for Protestants, particularly young women, to convert, was certainly appreciated by Brontë who had witnessed Cardinal Wiseman himself in action. In a letter to her father in June 1851, Brontë tells him how she attended a meeting of the St Vincent de Paul society in London where she saw Cardinal Wiseman and heard him speak. She tells of the Cardinal having ‘a long oily mouth’ and looking as if he would relish a good dinner and a bottle of wine. She describes him almost as a caricature of the cunning, smoothly spoken, beautifully adorned priest of the sort portrayed in the Punch cartoons and Fanny Trollope novels:7 He came swimming into the room smiling, simpering and bowing like a fat old lady, and sat down very demure in his chair, and looked the picture of a sleek hypocrite … (he) wore scarlet gloves and a brilliant scarlet waistcoat. A bevy of inferior priests surrounded him, many of them very dark-looking and sinister men. The Cardinal spoke in a smooth whining manner just like a canting Methodist preacher. The audience seemed to look up to him as to a god. (Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, p. 236) The purpose of the meeting was to stress the need for Catholics to strain every nerve to make converts to popery. Brontë comments: ‘most persevering and enthusiastic are they in their work, let Protestants look to it’.8 Through Brontë’s letter of 6 August 1851 to Mrs Gaskell, we learn that she had read The Saint’s Tragedy by Charles Kingsley9 and believed that it touched on deep truths. She says that the story is ‘no poet’s dream’ because ‘we know such things have been done, that lives have been

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subjugated and lives laid waste in this manner’. In The Saint’s Tragedy Elizabeth is separated from her husband and children by the influence of her spiritual director, the priest Conrad. Because of what he has done and his fellow-priests set out to do, Conrad is warned that: ‘The day will come when every husband and father will hunt you down like vermin.’10 It is interesting to note that Kingsley hints that Elizabeth is unstable and liable to emotional extremes. Commenting on this, Brontë adds that she thinks that Elizabeth never did have a perfectly sane mind, for ‘a sound mind – a healthy intellect would have dashed her natural affections from his grasp as a Lioness defends her young’ and that she observes that a ‘slight craze’ runs through the whole of Elizabeth’s existence. The portrayal of the mentally unstable woman would have held particular significance for the mid-nineteenth-century reader, and in isolating his heroine from her family and friends Kingsley places her in a particularly dangerous position.11 The fascination at this time for nuns and convents would have been sustained by the idea, found in Kingsley’s work, that the Catholic church put celibacy above married life. The power of the priest to sway women from obedience to their husbands or fathers echoed certain nineteenth-century Protestant anxieties which Charlotte Brontë draws on in her novel. Through the motif of the nun found in the depiction of: Justine Marie, Count de Hamal, Madame Walravens, Lucy Snowe herself and the convent turned school, the Pensionnat Beck, Brontë is able to explore various aspects of femininity and the constitution of neurosis.12 Brontë makes the familiar association of the mental asylum with the convent, the hysterical or manic woman with the repressed nun. In this way she is able to use the confining walls of the convent/pensionnat and the presence of the nun, whether dead, walled-in, spectral or even the product of an overheated imagination, as a medium for her ideas on neurosis and the management of women’s minds.13 Edmund Wilson says that in Lucy Snowe, Charlotte Brontë moved towards a style of writing that could ‘lay hold the terrors that lie deep in the human soul and that cause man to fear himself’.14 In mid-Victorian England the climate of fear surrounding Catholicism, seen as a foreign and threatening culture, would create a useful medium for exploring the depths of alienation experienced by many single, friendless women. Whilst the nineteenth-century reader might not have been familiar with psychological theories, she would however be quite at home with the biblical and religious images used in Villette. The link between the convent and women’s mental health will be examined next, through the text of Villette. It is important to note,


however, that this is not undertaken in order to show the gendered nature of early psychology. This has been exhaustively covered by such authors as Sally Shuttleworth. Nor is it merely to show Brontë’s evocation of images that link the convent and the asylum even though these are important to my argument. By looking at some contemporary portrayals of mental disturbances in females I aim to expand Elaine Showalter’s observation that in Villette Brontë made use of current ideas about insanity to explore the psychological contradictions in nineteenthcentury women’s lives,15 to include the assertion that she also made use of current ideas about Roman Catholicism. This section, will look at some of the works on women and mental health published in the nineteenth century with the aim of comparing the text of Villette with the ideas of contemporary medicine. In Sketches in Bedlam (1823) a book which deals with the ‘characteristic or traits of insanity’ found in the cases of 140 patients confined in the New Bethlehem Hospital, the author concludes that among the women patients the main reasons for admission were: melancholy (depression), delusions of grandeur, being in love, pregnant or being a religious fanatic. For men they were: theft, violence, murder and delusion.16 The writer, who is described as ‘a Constant Observer’, gives an example of the case of Mary Smart. Aged 30, Smart was admitted to Bethlehem in November 1821. She is referred to as ‘a poor soul’, a married woman with four children whose source of derangement seems to have been religious despondency. She imagined that she had taken the sacrament unworthily and sacrilegiously and that her body was full of serpents.17 This self-doubt and the taking on of guilt by women is a powerful idea. Religion is used as a vehicle or a temptation for women to embrace in order to empower themselves, but because of a deeply ingrained idea of the masculinity of God and dominance of male power in religion it was also often the source of madness. In Villette, Lucy Snowe asks her readers to think of her in her early days as a well-adjusted and sane female should be: as a bark slumbering through halcyon weather, in a harbour still as glass – the steersman stretched on the little deck, his face up to heaven, his eyes closed: buried, if you will, in a long prayer. A great many women and girls are supposed to pass their lives something in that fashion; why not I with the rest? (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 35) The nun, the Catholic schoolgirl and the inmate in the mental asylum needed to be regimented and constantly watched to ensure that they

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did not break the bonds of their confinement. The Bethlehem Hospital regime was like a convent’s: early to bed, early rise, stark but clean living conditions, one room to each person. The inmates had a very plain but wholesome diet, attended divine service twice a week and were under continual surveillance.18 In his commentaries on insanity, George Burrows makes particular reference to hysteria. He describes this as a disease that occurs mainly in young, single women under the age of 30. He maintains that the nervous systems of immature, susceptible females are always ‘highly irritable’,19 the implication being that the reason for hysteria is often sexual repression. The fulfilled married woman is not so prone to such disorders. This diagnosis, typical of nineteenth-century medical opinion, necessarily implies that all unmarried women (be they spinsters or nuns), are particularly vulnerable to mental instability. In Villette Dr John is convinced, having observed the solitary life that Lucy leads in the Pensionnat Beck, that the apparition of the nun in the garret is a symptom of Lucy’s ‘hysteria’: ‘You think then,’ I said, with secret horror, ‘she came out of my brain, and is now gone in there, and may glide out again at an hour and a day when I look not for her?’ ‘I think it is a case of spectral illusion: I fear, following on and resulting from long-continued mental conflict.’ (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 249) Reflecting the situation of the isolated, single woman, Lucy remains worried as to whether she is in fact prey to mental illness.20 Thomas Laycock also argues that married females rarely suffered from distinct nervous affections.21 Women were disproportionately burdened by incurring expectations of moral and sexual rectitude. Being far more isolated than men, they had more time to reflect and had very few outlets for the expression of their talents; because of this, isolation may be interpreted as a system of subjugation perpetrated by a patriarchal society. In attempting to communicate this state of existence for many women whilst indicating the depth of feeling experienced by the suffering female, what better figure for Brontë to employ than that of the nun in the convent? Jean Etienne Esquirol, whose work influenced nineteenth-century English psychiatry,22 said that Every house for the insane has its Gods, its priests, its faithful, its fanatics … in these establishments, the social bonds are broken,


habits are changed; friendships cease; confidence is destroyed. ( Jean Etienne Esquirol, Mental Maladies, pp. 19–20) A recurring theme in anti-Catholic convent literature is the idea that the Catholic Church, in order to isolate their ‘victim’, change her whole way of life and keep her under supervision. A young woman who is friendless and alone, particularly if she is in a foreign, Catholic country is seen as an ideal target. In a Catholic convent, the priests and the Mother Superior wield the power; in an asylum, the doctors and the supervisor perform a similar job. Within the convent or the asylum, the woman should be safe, constantly guarded against herself and others. However, nuns were believed to be vulnerable to their confessors and even the female inmates of lunatic asylums could be prey to violation. In the case of Susannah Rogison, the young woman was admitted to the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum at the age of 23 in 1836. She died in 1838 having first given birth to a child which was found dead in her bed. As Susannah was violent and easily excited, she was confined by day to a chair in which she was fastened by straps and at night she was tied in bed by her hands and feet. She never left the ward, and was locked in her cell at night whilst two nurses slept near her. Nevertheless, this woman who was probably, according to the description given of her ailments, both bulimic and anorexic, was raped by someone within the asylum.23 This case is noted in particular as it mirrors the fears that surrounded the incarceration of women in Catholic convents, it also stresses the detachment from the outside world which made incarcerated women vulnerable. In Villette Brontë uses the symbol of the convent to provide a physical place of enforced isolation for Lucy Snowe. The power exercised within the Pensionnat Beck is in the hands of the proprietress, Madame Beck, who plays the part of a Mother Superior or female Jesuit; but the ultimate power is held by the Church in the shape of the male priest, the Jesuit Père Silas. Lucy’s first night at the pensionnat reads both like a novice entering her convent for the first time and a patient being admitted to an asylum: After the ‘Prière du Soir’, madame herself came to have another look at me. She desired me to follow her up-stairs. Through a series of the queerest little dormitories – which, I heard afterwards, had once been nuns’ cells: for the premises were in part of ancient date – and through the oratory – a long, low, gloomy room, where a crucifix hung, pale, against the wall, and two tapers kept dim vigils. (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 68)

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Whilst Lucy is asleep that first night at the school, Madame Beck closely examines all her things and makes imprints of her keys. Lucy notes, ‘Her name was Modeste Maria Beck née Kint: it ought to have been Ignacia.’24 The use of spying, isolating and ‘instructing’ are the mechanisms by which the custodians of the nineteenth-century mental asylum controlled and subdued their female patients. They are also perceived to be the main methods used by the Catholic Church to convert the Protestant and exercise power over its female flock. Perhaps the most powerful feeling represented by the figure of the nun in Villette is the sense of loneliness, so strong that it is near to desolation. We can interpret her presence as a clue to the feelings of the author about Catholicism. The convent and the asylum were both places to be feared, as is clearly reflected in Lucy Snowe’s thoughts: Those who live in retirement, those whose lives have fallen amid the seclusion of schools or of other walled-in and guarded dwellings, are liable to be suddenly and for a long while dropped out of the memory of their friends, the denizens of a freer world. (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 266) Lucy uses the imagery of convent life to describe her own situation. She speaks of the maid Rosine visiting her cell and when talking about her own state of mental health, she reflects the belief that nuns suffered mental illness because of their separation from society. Lucy says that ‘The world can understand well enough the process of perishing for want of food’ (Villette, p. 273) but the idea of ‘going mad from solitary confinement … is a subject too intricate for examination, too abstract for popular comprehension’ (Villette, p. 273). Even though it is not easy to understand why solitary confinement induces madness it is clearly the case as, they [the World] ‘see the long-buried prisoner disinterred, a maniac or an idiot!’ (Villette, p. 273). In 1855, two years after the publication of Villette, Mrs Gaskell,25 a friend of Charlotte Brontë, published a short story entitled The Poor Clare, in Household Words. In this tale, the main character is a young girl called Lucy who eventually joins the order of the Poor Clares. She has been placed under a curse so that although she is outwardly gentle, feminine and kind, within, she is a horror, a devil. This inner self can be physically perceived by Lucy, and at times by those around her: In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind, another wicked, fearful self, so like me that my soul seemed to quiver within


me, as though not knowing to which similitude of body it belonged. (Mrs Gaskell, The Manchester Marriage, p. 163) At this vision she swooned, and whilst in bed, her double could be seen ‘flitting about the house and gardens always about some mischievous or detestable work’.26 Mrs Gaskell poses the question: Yet this sounded like the tale of one bewitched; or was it merely the effect of a life of extreme seclusion telling on the nerves of a sensitive girl? (Mrs Gaskell, The Manchester Marriage, p. 163) This rather enigmatic statement begs the question as to what Mrs Gaskell is really trying to say. Is Lucy merely a sensitive girl or does this phrase actually portray a lonely, economically powerless girl with repressed sexual urges? Gaskell’s Unitarian religious beliefs27 may hold the clue to her understanding of the problems that Lucy experienced, especially the idea that the ‘demon of sexuality’ exists in every woman and needs to be repressed for the salvation of her soul. An idea that is clearly expressed through thinly masked comment on the unnatural isolation of convent life. In Villette, Lucy Snowe experiences an apparition of her nun immediately after she has buried Dr John’s letters in the garden of her ‘convent’. The moon becomes brighter and she is aware of the nun, although she can only see her eyes as her face is masked. She asks the nun who she is and why she comes to her, but the nun retreats and disappears. Lucy calls out to the nun, ‘If you have any errand to me, come back and deliver it’ (Villette, p. 297). But there is no reply and no reappearance. In the case of Mrs Gaskell’s Lucy, the ‘apparition’ is recognised by the narrator as Lucy’s buried self, a physical manifestation of what Dr John had told Lucy Snowe was the product of a fevered mind,28 or, as in the example of Mrs Gaskell’s Lucy, emanated from repressed sexuality: I saw behind her, another figure – a ghastly resemblance, complete in likeness so far as form and feature and minute touch of dress could go, but with a loathsome demon soul looking out of the gray eyes, that were in turns both mocking and voluptuous … my flesh crept with horror … I could not see the grave and tender Lucy – my eyes were fascinated by the creature beyond. (Mrs Gaskell, The Manchester Marriage, p. 164) The only remedy that Mrs Gaskell can find for her Lucy is that her former self must be ‘buried’. Lucy becomes a Poor Clare in order that by

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perpetual penance and constant service to others, she may at length achieve final absolution and rest for her soul. After her confession to Père Silas, whilst she was suffering what has been recognised as a mental breakdown during the long vacation at the Pensionnat Beck, Lucy Snowe was afraid that she would have to perform a similar penance to that of Mrs Gaskell’s Lucy to atone for her ‘sins’ of loneliness and sexual feelings. In Villette, the priest claims that for some, there is only ‘bread of affliction and waters of affliction’ (Villette, p. 162).29 For Lucy Snowe to become a nun, like Lucy in The Poor Clare, would be an answer to some of her problems. However, the idea of entering a convent fills Lucy Snowe with even greater dread than the realisation of her actual position in the world. Whether she accepts the Roman Catholic option or the Evangelical one, a life of service, self-abnegation and chastity appear to be her lot in life; a punishment for being poor, plain, friendless, homeless and above all, female. Critics have pointed out that Villette greatly anticipates the insights of the more systematic psychological and sexual research of the twentieth century. John Maynard believes that fundamental to Charlotte Brontë’s conception of character is the discovery of what Freud called the ‘id’. She uses dreams to reveal certain psychological states; she understands works of art, poems, paintings and music as outlets for the deeper self.30 She finds in myth and fairy tale motifs, ways to express the deeper workings of the psyche, and she develops a symbolic language that allows the deeper consciousness to speak through a series of sexual images.31 Whilst accepting the fact that twentieth-century literary critics might interpret Brontë’s writing in this way, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that she was a nineteenth-century religious woman who was mindful of theological issues all her life. Naturally she would have been conversant with the use of myth and symbolism in the Bible to express profound truths.32 The nun in Villette has been interpreted as a manifestation of Lucy’s repression coming back to torment her:33 For Charlotte Brontë, the Roman Catholic Church always seems to represent imprisonment, literal or figurative, the extreme of the solipsistic enclosure for which the nun buried alive is the symbol. ( Judith Williams, Perception and Expression, p. 107) This may be a perfectly valid interpretation of what Brontë is trying to convey in Villette, but the reading of the personal convictions that are presumed to have informed her use of imagery are not particularly


convincing. In Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic the text of Villette is interpreted in the light of Brontë’s own experiences in Belgium.34 Whilst agreeing that the novel is written from experience, especially feelings of agonising loneliness, the premise of my argument is that the perceived anti-Catholicism in Villette is the result of Brontë using familiar religious and literary tropes as a medium through which she can express certain ‘truths’ of her ordeals. Gilbert and Gubar speak of, ‘Brontë’s virulent anti-Catholicism’35 and say that: Lucy will become increasingly certain as she proceeds to tell her story, that nuns do fret at their convent walls, and that the church is a patriarchal structure with the power to imprison her. (Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 415) For Brontë’s Lucy the convent cannot be the solution to her own inner ‘demon’, rather than finding peace within its walls she would be exchanging one form of imprisonment and isolation for another. As is clearly demonstrated in Jane Eyre, it is not at all clear whether Brontë herself saw this Catholic system of female subjugation as any more forbidding than the Protestant patriarchal method. Whilst Brontë was in Belgium she clearly felt herself to be an outsider in an alien culture. However although she admits she was often alone, she nevertheless says that she managed to keep her spirits up and enjoyed the lessons she gives to M. Heger, the husband of Madame Heger the directress of the school, and his brother-in-law, M. Chappelle. By August 1843 she tells Ellen Nussey how she is dreading the long summer vacation when she will be left all alone in the school, and by October 1843 she is plunged into the depths of despair and tells her friend that Brussels is desolate to her,36 she has no friends and feels completely alone: Madame Heger is a politic, plausible and interested person – I no longer trust her. It is a curious position to be so utterly solitary in the midst of numbers – Sometimes this solitude oppresses me to an excess. (Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, p. 334) A little later on another letter to Ellen reflects that Brontë is in a state of depression:37 Today the weather is gloomy, and I am stupefied with a bad cold and headache. I have nothing to tell you. One day is like another in this

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place! … I wander around from room to room, but the silence and the loneliness of all the house weighs down one’s spirits like lead. (Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, p. 334) In expressing this sense of isolation through the medium of Lucy Snowe in Villette, Brontë is able to capture the readers’ understanding and sympathy precisely by couching it in religious terms. She uses the discourse of anti-Catholicism to engage the reader’s emotions without having to be too explicit. It has already been noted how Brontë uses the motifs of myth and fairy tale to express the deeper workings of the psyche, her depiction of Lucy Snowe’s feelings of desolation show that she is also extremely adept at using religious imagery to embody her feelings. In Villette, Brontë appears to have drawn on the literature born from an underlying fear of the resurgence of Roman Catholicism to write a novel that expresses the reality of being a single, poor, woman without relatives or friends. The text of Villette contains too many internal contradictions to be read as purely anti-Catholic. For example, Lucy Snowe’s attitude towards the Roman Church is by no means consistently hostile, and more importantly her ‘saviour’ is a Jesuitical Catholic. From the moment Lucy Snowe arrives in Brussels she is surrounded by Jesuits, both male and female. They appear in different guises, but they glide, they pry, they seek to control, and above all, they watch her. In Villette M. Paul exercises the power of the penetrating gaze on Lucy. Although he is not actually a Jesuit, he has been educated by them, has the intelligence of one, lives like one and in the text he is frequently referred to as ‘Jesuitical’. When Lucy arrives at the Pensionnat Beck at night and asks to be employed, Madame Beck asks her kinsman M. Paul to read Lucy’s face. He says that he sees both good and evil in her, and Lucy refers to him as, ‘this vague arbiter of my destiny’ (Villette, p. 67) – a very prophetic phrase. The description of how M. Paul gazes at Lucy is particularly relevant because it speaks of Lucy wearing a metaphorical veil, the symbol of the nun and the symbol of secrecy. M. Paul is said to be capable of seeing through her ‘mask’ to the real person within: A resolute compression of the lips, and gathering of the brow, seemed to say that he meant to see through me, and that a veil would be no veil for him. (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 66) Whilst Lucy remains at Madame Beck’s school she is not to be free from M. Paul’s constant observation. He watches her in the garden from a vantage point in the boys’ college next door, he appears suddenly all


over Villette, from the art gallery to the concert hall, he observes her teaching, regulates her study and even places a shawl about her shoulders when she falls asleep at her desk. M. Paul’s surveillance is not as subtle as Madame Beck’s: it is less invasive of Lucy’s personal space and he cannot resist telling her what he has observed and how she can improve herself. Bucknill and Tuke’s Manual of Modern Medicine states that moral power lies in an intimate knowledge of others,38 a knowledge that can be obtained through the employment of constant observation: A faculty of seeing that which is passing in the minds of men is the first requisite of moral power and discipline, whether in asylums, schools, parishes, or elsewhere. ( J.C. Bucknill and D.H. Tuke, A Manual of Psychological Medicine, pp. 671–2) Spying and surveillance similar to that described in Villette can be observed in much Victorian fiction, particularly the anti-Catholic novels. It was also recognised to be important in Evangelical thinking as a method of control, particularly of young women. In Jane Eyre, as we have seen, Brontë has the Ultra Protestant Mr Brocklehurst saying that discipline is achieved by mortification of the flesh and constant inspection and surveillance. A theory which he puts into practice at Lowood school. Lucy Snowe experienced this exercise of power in the figures of Madame Beck and M. Paul but she never knew exactly when she was being looked at. She was constantly aware that she might be under observation at any time. The practice of constant surveillance is believed to be particularly efficient and effective in the control of behaviour for this very reason. In Villette, Lucy Snowe is well aware of Madame Beck’s spying and she, not being completely passive, in turn spies on Madame Beck. She finds her employer’s efforts to monitor her private life and examine her possessions vaguely amusing, rather than constituting some awful threat. Lucy has a certain amount of admiration for Madame Beck as she believes her to be a sensible woman: It is especially true that she possessed a genuine good sense which is not given to all women or to all men; and by dint of these combined advantages she behaved wisely, she behaved well. Brava! (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 105) However, Madame Beck is ‘the enemy’ even if a worthy one. Her behaviour is akin to that of the supervisor or jailer. Her kinsman M. Paul, who

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is arguably even more of a Jesuit than she, conducts a different type of surveillance the aim of which is to help him understand Lucy and to use his knowledge of her to improve and benefit her. M. Paul’s behaviour conforms to stereotypical Jesuit behaviour in many ways. He feels the need to ‘keep Lucy down’, to have her behave almost like a nun. He keeps watch over his prey, ready to pounce at any moment. M. Paul admits to Lucy that he has been spying on her and others in the pensionnat, he has hired a room at the college overlooking the garden, nominally as a study, but really as a lookout post. He says that he sits and reads there for hours, that his book is the garden, its content is female, human nature. When Lucy tells him that his conduct is not right, he answers explosively: Comment – it is not right? By whose creed? Does some dogma of Calvin or Luther condemn it? What is that to me? I am no Protestant. My rich father … was a good Catholic; and he gave me a priest and a Jesuit for a tutor. I retain his lessons; and to what discoveries, grand Dieu! have they not aided me! (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, pp. 363–4) M. Paul justifies his actions by pointing out to Lucy that his Jesuit system works. She wishes he were a Protestant and although she does not approve of his prying, she will not attribute to him the other fault common to the priests of the more prurient anti-Catholic literature. In fact she specifically points out his sexual purity,39 likening his character to ‘a knight of old’: Innocent childhood, beautiful youth were safe at his side. He had vivid passions, keen feelings, but his pure honour and his artless piety were the strong charm that kept the lions couchant. (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, pp. 382–3) Shuttleworth says that in Villette Lucy’s own worst fears can be projected outwards onto an alien culture against which she can assert her own fierce Protestantism. She speaks of ‘Lucy’s violent antagonism to Roman Catholicism’, often treated by critics as an intrusion of Brontë’s personal prejudice and not germane to the narrative.40 Lucy certainly does hang on to her Protestantism, but it is associated very strongly with her Englishness rather than any extreme Fundamentalist creed. In other words it functions more as a national than a religious identifier. In fact by the end of the novel one can detect echoes of the type of Universalist thinking articulated by Helen Burns in Brontë’s


earlier novel, Jane Eyre. M. Paul and Lucy Snowe argue fiercely about their beliefs but concentrate mainly on the practices and rituals of their religions. When M. Paul takes the girls for breakfast in the countryside, Lucy observes him closely as he prays before the meal and notices that he crosses himself ‘as devoutly as a woman’: I had never seen him pray before, or make that pious sign; he did it so simply, with such childlike faith, I could not help smiling pleasurably as I watched; his eyes met my smile; he just stretched out his kind hand, saying, ‘Donnez-moi la main! I see we worship the same God, in the same spirit, though by different rites.’ (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 382) As the novel progresses, Lucy is able to appreciate better the temptations and the pitfalls of Roman Catholicism and how the institution of the church and its hierarchy operates. She is able to admit that ‘whatever Romanism may be, there are good Romanists’ (Villette, p. 396). M. Paul is one of these, but he too is victim of the ‘Sleepless Eye’ that is the Catholic Church, represented by the confessional: this man, Emanuel, seemed of the best; touched with superstition, influenced by priest-craft, yet wondrous for fond faith, for pious devotion, for sacrifice of self, for charity unbounded. It remained to see how Rome, by her agents, handled such qualities; whether she cherished them for their own sake and for God’s, or put them out to usury and made booty of the interest. (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 396) Brontë employs the image of the Jesuit in her depiction of M. Paul and yet, as observed in other nineteenth-century female authors, she forgives him because of his other qualities and he becomes both victim and hero. In Villette, this capricious male spy becomes Lucy’s liberator, her ‘Christian hero’ who frees her from her convent, literally and metaphorically. He keeps to his religion and she, with his approval, to hers. Perhaps the clue to this outcome can be found in observations Lucy makes of M. Paul: People said M. Emanuel had been brought up amongst Jesuits. I should more readily have accredited this report had his manoeuvres been better masked. As it was I doubted it. Never was a more

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undisguised schemer, a franker, looser intriguer. (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 302) Brontë recognises the Jesuit of anti-Catholic fiction but her hero does not quite fit the mould, for as she says that ‘all Rome could not put him into bigotry, nor the propaganda itself make him a real Jesuit’. Propaganda is an interesting word to use in this context: Brontë appears to use it in its technical sense41 as a congregation responsible for directing the work of the foreign missions and the training of priests for these, whilst for the reader it could also signify the current anti-Jesuit literature. If the echoes of Protestant, anti-Catholic literature are to be found in Villette, they are most clearly illustrated by the jesuitical figure of Madame Beck. As noted earlier, nuns associated with the Society of Jesus were often referred to as female Jesuits in the nineteenth century; so too were the female spies of the Catholic Church who wormed their way into the houses of well to do Protestant families in the guise of a nanny, a governess, a maid or even a good friend. Once within the family, they were believed to set about their task of secret surveillance and would pass on all the personal confidences of their target to the Catholic hierarchy, often represented by a male Jesuit, in order that he might exercise power over the wife, daughter, or sometimes young son of a Protestant Englishman. The female Jesuit often had to prepare the ground for the conversion of a young girl. In Villette, Madame Beck manages to control the young women in her school by a system of relentless spying; like her male counterpart, she is ‘shod with the shoes of silence’ (Villette, p. 65) and has the ability to glide noiselessly around her pensionnat as a snake glides secretly through its domain.42 Madame Beck’s school is referred to as a ‘demi-convent’ (Villette, p. 98) secluded in the built up cover of the capital. The directress is the archetypal Mother Superior even though she is a married woman with children. Brontë speaks of Madame Beck, plotting, counter-plotting, spying and receiving reports of spies all day (Villette, p. 73). She tells Lucy that she is sick of the means she has to use to keep the pupils in check, but if any other method were used, continental girls (which in this context automatically means Catholic girls) are so accustomed to restraint that relaxation would be misunderstood and fatally presumed on. Lucy remarks that after speaking with her, Madame Beck would move away on her ‘souliers de silence’, and glide ghost-like through the house, watching and spying everywhere, peering through


every key-hole, listening behind every door. (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 73) It is interesting to note Lucy’s reaction to Madame Beck’s spying even when it is directed against herself. At times she appears to regard her antagonist with an air of grudging admiration. Lucy deems Madame Beck to be a capable woman and thinks that her abilities are wasted on the limiting confines of a school.43 She says that Madame Beck is Wise, firm, faithless; secret, crafty, passionless; watchful and inscrutable; acute and insensate – withal perfectly decorous – what more could be desired? (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 74) Lucy also notes that she is an accomplished liar, an essential characteristic of a female Jesuit. Brontë extends the image of the Pensionnat Beck as a convent by informing the reader that the school had indeed been a convent in the past. It conforms to the popular nineteenth-century idea of convents. It has a ghost, the unquiet soul of a nun who in the middle ages had been buried alive for ‘some sin against her vow’ (Villette, p. 106). It is this nun who seems to be haunting Lucy. However it is significant that one December evening when Lucy is walking in the dark carré, lit only by the red glow of the stove, she is intuitively aware of a gliding presence which turns out not to be the nun but Madame Beck on duty. The whole atmosphere of the scene: the darkness, illuminated only by a burning, red glow, the rustling of Madame Beck’s gown, the soft breathing, is all suggestive of the fear engendered by the creeping, gliding, serpentine Jesuit. It has been noted by many critics that Lucy Snowe is, in a sense, buried alive in this convent-like school. Indeed, not only is she isolated by her foreignness and her religion, she is also seen to be deliberately punished by Madame Beck, who restricts her to a walled-in life similar to the physical solitary confinement used in prisons and mental asylums. When Lucy is rescued by Dr John after she has collapsed in front of a church belonging to a community of Beguines, a female holy order, she tells him about her state of mind that forced her to make a confession. She explains that it was her extreme loneliness and her need for counsel that made her seek help, even the help of the Catholic Church. Dr John immediately blames Madame Beck for Lucy’s distress: Confound Madame Beck! Has the little buxom widow no bowels, to condemn her best teacher to solitary confinement? (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 185)

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In her Catholic environment Lucy is not to be trusted, she is Protestant, English and intelligent. Madame Beck is jealous of her friendship with Dr John and later in the novel of her love for M. Paul. As part of her surveillance of Lucy, she steals her letters from Dr John, which she reads and replaces in perfect order. Lucy surmises correctly that Madame Beck would discuss her letters with M. Paul who would misconstrue their meaning: Madame Beck herself was the soul of discretion, besides having as strong a brain and sound a judgement as ever furnished a human head; that she should know the contents of my casket, was not pleasant, but might be borne. Little Jesuit inquisitress as she was, she could see things in a true light, and understand them in an unperverted sense; but the idea that she had ventured to communicate information, thus gained, to others; that she had, perhaps, amused herself with a companion over documents, in my eyes most sacred, shocked me cruelly. (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 294) In evoking images of the Inquisition and the Jesuits, Brontë is drawing on anti-Catholic discourse in order to illustrate the true character of Madame Beck. She depicts her as being unable to behave in a straightforward manner, always having to play the spy and report back to her ‘superior’, the Catholic, male figure of M. Paul or Père Silas. Brontë gives further evidence of Madame Beck’s devious character: she is a member of what Lucy refers to as ‘the Secret Junta’ that is to send M. Paul to the West Indies to oversee Madame Walravens’ estates. Her motives are more complicated than the others: on one level she hopes to benefit financially from the estates as a distant relative of Madame Walravens, but she also desires to be rid of M. Paul who she knows to be forming a close relationship with Lucy Snowe. The others of the ‘Junta’ fear that M. Paul will fall into apostacy if he is allowed to remain in Villette and continue his attachment to a Protestant. Madame Beck is more motivated by jealousy, as she wants M. Paul for herself. Jealousy is a typical characteristic of a wicked Mother Superior or a female Jesuit, particularly jealousy of other women who are younger or prettier than themselves. It is Madame Beck’s envy that finally awakens Lucy to her true character. As the final drama of Villette unfolds and Lucy is intent on seeing M. Paul one more time, Madame Beck finds that she has become ungovernable and has to attempt to sedate her in order to keep her under control, imprisoned in the school.44 Lucy becomes frightened of Madame Beck and believes that she might attempt to poison her. In much anti-convent literature this was a preferred method of punishment


or ultimate power used by the wicked Mother Superior who was believed to be expert in the administration of Digitalis. One of the main functions of the Mother Superior of anti-convent literature is to induct young novices into the system. Madame Beck plays this role when she gives Lucy sole care of the unwanted crétin during the long vacation. Lucy is physically tied to the school whilst she is looking after her charge and she has to take on the role of one who watches rather than is being watched. As Madame Beck oversees the young females who have no self-control over their baser passions, so Lucy has to maintain constant vigilance over the crétin for the same reason: for her poor mind, like her body, was warped: its propensity was to evil. A vague bent to mischief, an aimless malevolence made constant vigilance indispensable. (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 157) This constant supervision of the crétin makes Lucy ill; she feels that ‘it was more like being prisoned with some strange tameless animal, than associating with a human being’ (Villette, p. 157). The ‘personal attentions’ Lucy has to perform for the crétin ‘required the nerve of a hospital nurse’ and should not have been the responsibility of a teacher, puts the reader in mind of the various disgusting punishments meted out to transgressing nuns in order to humiliate them and make them submissive to their superiors. Lucy finds the physical care of the crétin debilitating and it makes her sick, but it is the psychological anguish caused by solitude that affects her most: ‘my mental pain was far more wasting and wearing’ (Villette, p. 158). Lucy is sent by Madame Beck to visit Madame Walravens, a witch-like Catholic who had made her granddaughter enter a convent where she died at a young age, rather than let her marry the impoverished M. Paul. Whilst at the house in the symbolically named Rue des Mages, it is made clear to Lucy that she cannot hope to marry M. Paul as he has given himself to God and to the memory of the dead nun, his first love. It is implied that he has vowed to remain celibate like a priest.45 Lucy realises that she is at the centre of some Jesuitical intrigue. She resists the pressure to become a Roman Catholic and a nun herself because in the novel, she represents the English Protestant heroine who is tempted by Rome but does not succumb as she sees through the plot: a handful of loose beads; but threaded through by that quick-shot and crafty glance of a Jesuit-eye, they dropped pendant in a long

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string, like that rosary on the prie-dieu. Where lay the link of junction, where the little clasp of this monastic necklace? (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, pp. 393–4) Lucy Snowe’s portraits of Madame Beck and Père Silas are studies of the uses to which ‘Catholic cunning’ can be put.46 It is pertinent to my argument however, that like other female, Protestant authors writing about similar subjects,47 Brontë judges her ‘female Jesuits’ much more harshly than her male Jesuits. Lucy Snowe, like other young English women living abroad in the nineteenth century felt the allure of Roman Catholicism. Jan Jedrzejewski’s article on Charlotte Brontë and Roman Catholicism speaks of the confession of Lucy Snowe in Villette as reflecting the author’s own state of mind when she was in Belgium. With reference to her letter to her Sister Emily, written from Brussels in 1843 he concludes that Charlotte Brontë had a growing interest ‘or indeed fascination with, the direct, personal, emotional aspect of the experience of Roman Catholicism’. He deduces that her interest in Romanism went beyond the rational, cognitive level and that she had some kind of subconscious, impulsive sense of curiosity and attraction.48 Jedrzejewski indicates that the motif of confession occupies the central space in the overall structure of Villette. Labassecour, the setting of the novel, referred to by Brontë as a land of convents and confessionals, is the locus for Lucy’s confession to Père Silas. Jedrzejewski asserts that this confession is one of the turning points in the plot that triggers an entire sequence of events concerning Père Silas,49 his attempts to convert Lucy to Catholicism and his part in the conspiracy of the ‘secret junta’ bent on separating her from M. Paul. The danger of the confessional to the Protestant imagination is also its attraction for Lucy Snowe; its secrecy and the fact that it puts the penitent out of view, makes it a hidden space where she can admit what is really troubling her. The nineteenthcentury confessional boxes in the cathedral of St Gudule in Brussels, which were Brontë’s model for Lucy’s confessional in Villette, are solidly built and heavily curtained: the penitent is under the scrutiny of the priest alone, affording him both secrecy and power. Although Brontë employs the trope of the jesuitical character throughout the novel, Père Silas is the only Jesuit in Villette who is truly a member of the Society of Jesus. Lucy first meets him in the confessional whilst she is in the grips of some form of mental breakdown. The reader is told that she is attracted by the sound of the church bells as her religious beliefs led her to expect spiritual relief from any sincere act of


Christian worship. In the church Lucy watches the penitents going to confession and her perception is that they are all women receiving consolation, something that she needed. Brontë herself understood the perils of confessing one’s weaknesses, especially to a Catholic priest as this would put him in a position of power.50 In a letter to Ellen Nussey she wrote: ‘if I made you my father confessor, I could reveal weaknesses that you do not dream of’.51 Lucy Snowe understands that confession, along with surveillance, takes the place of conscience in Catholicism. However, when she goes to make her own confession she is using the confessional more as a psychiatrist’s couch than as a channel for the forgiveness of her sins. It was during the nineteenth century that psychiatry began to take the place of confession, enabling the patient to unburden herself and to reveal her true character. Lucy Snowe, desperate for human solace, turns to the priest as a physician and then realises the danger she is courting. In unveiling her inner secrets to Père Silas she is giving him power over her and succumbing to the control of what she terms ‘the Sleepless Eye’, the Roman Catholic confessional. When Lucy meets Père Silas again at Madame Walraven’s house he tells her that from the moment of her confession he has not lost sight of her nor failed to take an interest in her, because she had shown him the inner secrets of her heart and mind (Villette, p. 394). This is another example of the confessional being used to gain total control over the mind of the convert. The knowledge that Père Silas has gleaned about Lucy through her confession, threatens her with the exposure of her sexuality which will then be swiftly suppressed. Jedrzejewski says that the priest is associated in Lucy’s mind with her own vulnerability to Catholic influence.52 Maybe he is associated with kindness and she is more influenced by his methods of conversion. Père Silas is compared to Fenelon, the spiritual advisor and visitor to the convent school in Paris known as ‘Nouvelles Catholiques’ where young female converts were offered a safe retreat away from hostile parents and friends. Fenelon, like Père Silas, relied on persuasion and kindness to make converts.53 He favoured the use of the distribution of Catholic literature as a vehicle for conversion like M. Paul who leaves Catholic literature for Lucy to read and she realises that he does this in obedience to Père Silas. Père Silas does not conform to the physical stereotype of the dark, oily, often handsome though effeminate Jesuit. Brontë paints a picture of a kindly, grey-haired old priest, with what Lucy terms ‘a compassionate eye’. Although he does try to turn Lucy towards Catholicism having recognised her ‘true’ nature and that Protestantism could not satisfy her

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inner fire, she does not blame him, but perceiving the danger she is in she ‘glides’ away. Lucy tells her reader that in her disturbed state she could well have been converted to Catholicism and have ended her days in a convent, thus reaffirming the fear that vulnerable young girls were prey to Catholic priests, especially in the confessional. However, she stops short at this point, recognising that unburdening herself in this way had done her good and that whatever she might think of the Catholic Church this priest had helped her: He was kind when I needed kindness; he did me good. May heaven bless him! (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 163) It is significant that when Lucy leaves the church she becomes lost in a labyrinth. In religious terms this is an image of losing one’s way in life, usually in the intricacies of sin, like the image of man being lost in a dark wood at the beginning of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In Victorian times the literary construct of the metropolis as a dark, powerful and seductive labyrinth was well known to educated readers.54 Brontë draws on popular imagery to create a powerful picture of the confusion, sense of isolation and loss of direction being experienced by Lucy Snowe. As Dr John observes of her condition: Medicine can give nobody good spirits. My art halts at the threshold of Hypochondria: she just looks in and sees a chamber of torture, but can neither say nor do much. (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 183) Neither the priest nor the doctor can help Lucy; it is her condition of being a woman is the real problem. The physician and the Jesuit are contradictory in their prescriptions for Lucy’s good health.55 One suggests that she immure herself in a convent, the other that she seek out more cheerful society. In this novel, which is frequently identified as anti-Catholic, Brontë makes the English Protestant manly doctor fundamentally respectful of the foreign celibate Catholic priest, a respect which is reciprocated. It is this type of digression from the more overt propaganda of midnineteenth-century anti-Catholic texts, that highlight Brontë’s use of anti-Catholic tropes as complex and ambivalent and her use of antiCatholic discourse as being more literary than religious.56 The Protestant doctor and the Catholic priest work together to save Lucy from dying. Both keep her under observation, one for her medical condition, the other for her spiritual health. There is a light, almost teasing attitude in


Lucy and Dr John’s concern that Père Silas might want to convert Lucy. They refer, in conversation, to sly Jesuits but this is done with a good humour and the acknowledgement that even though he is a Catholic priest, Père Silas is a good man, especially in his treatment of the poor, the sick and the dying (Villette, p. 184). What is important about Lucy’s confession and its aftermath, is the reason why she made it in the first place: I wanted companionship, I wanted friendship, I wanted counsel. I could find none of these in closet, or chamber, so I went and sought them in church and confessional. (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 185) Brontë extends the image of the confessional as presenting danger for Lucy Snowe who is vulnerable because of her loneliness and her repressed sexual feelings. It plays a part in allowing Père Silas to understand M. Paul’s affection for this Protestant girl, and gives him the knowledge that will enable him to separate them. Brontë’s readers would be well acquainted with the idea of the confessional being utilised to discover the penitent’s secrets so enabling the confessor to cause dissension between family and friends. M. Paul even admits to Lucy that his friends have warned him away from her because of her Protestantism. He says that Père Silas likes, even loves her for her goodness but she is dangerous, too self-reliant. Lucy’s reply is interesting: she tells M. Paul that she is far from dangerous and has no desire to trouble his faith because he believes, as she does, in Christ and the Bible. However, M. Paul cannot understand her. He has, as Lucy points out, been prey to ‘crafty Jesuit slanders’. She believes that his director had insinuated to him that Protestants were irreverent pagans, so she tries to put him right. This is an intriguing mirror image of anti-Catholic prejudice which shows that Brontë understands the working and effectiveness of stereotypical motifs. Although Lucy must know that she will stand a better chance with M. Paul if she will give in to Père Silas and become a Catholic, she sticks firmly to her religion even at the risk of remaining a lonely, unmarried woman.57 It has been suggested that Villette is a deeply religious book and that the heroine, Lucy Snowe, who is widely believed to be modelled on the author herself, rejects carnal hope in the shape of Dr John in order to embrace divine love in the shape of M. Paul. The nun is seen to be the ‘wraith of Lucy’s desire for sexual love’, a manifestation of her desire to sin against the ‘vow’ that Charlotte was making for herself in writing Villette.58 In a letter to W.S. Williams in November 185259 Brontë

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observes the following about Lucy Snowe: She has about her an external coldness. You say she may be thought morbid and weak, unless the history of her life be more fully given. I consider that she is both morbid and weak at times; her character sets up no pretensions to unmixed strength, and anybody living her life would necessarily become morbid. It was no impetus of healthy feeling which urged her to the confessional, for instance, it was the semi-delirium of solitary grief and sickness. (Charlotte Brontë, The Shakespeare Head Brontë, p. 18) Although at times it is difficult to differentiate between the two in Brontë’s aesthetic, it is the nature of Lucy’s depression that most concerns the author, rather than any preoccupation with criticising the Catholic Church. Brontë clearly did not foresee any problems in this direction as she writes to Ellen Nussey in October 1852: ‘The book, I think, will not be considered pretentious, nor is it of a character to excite hostility.’60 In her article on anti-Catholicism in Villette Gayla McGlamery says that Brontë’s reaction to the anger that her depictions of Catholicism stirred up suggests how casually she created them. She proposes that Brontë was apparently in full confidence that her views were widely shared by right-thinking English men and women.61 In the light of the reading of the mass of anti-Catholic literature of the period, I believe that Brontë employed the current, emotive, anti-Catholic issues and perceptions not as facts and opinions, but thematically, as a metaphor through which to convey the plight of the lonely spinster, disempowered by genteel poverty.

10 Conclusion: A Discourse of Fear Engendered by the Rise of Roman Catholicism in Mid-nineteenth-century England

Priest: I trust the day is not far distant where there shall be no homes in England, but the men living in monasteries and the women in convents, and only priests at liberty. We shall then have all the broad lands of Britain for church property, and unbounded incomes to the priesthood, with power that no one shall question. As confessors to all the ladies, we shall visit them constantly, teaching them the necessity of never opening a Bible, the evils of marriage, and the whole code of Liguori [an influential Catholic theologian] who shows that the entire moral law may be set aside at the bidding of any priest and that with his sanction, theft, lying and all other crimes are commendable. Catherine Sinclair, The Priest and the Curate, p. 411 The above passage taken from a nineteenth-century novel indicates the various arenas of a discourse of fear of Roman Catholicism that underpinned much of the anti-Catholic writing of the time: the incarceration of men and women in religious houses, the ‘theft’ of property and money by Catholic priests and the power of the Roman clergy over English women and girls. Much anti-Catholic writing of the time was specifically gendered and the authors of this particular genre of nineteenth-century literature not only employed current historical concerns in their work but also made use of contemporary interest in women’s mental health and masculine insecurity concerning their women. In seeking to locate fresh ways of thinking about the perceived anti-Catholic elements of The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette, four 162

Conclusion 163

novels by Charlotte Brontë, I have selected examples of nineteenthcentury anti-Catholic writing, from a reading of over 100 such texts. In order to isolate the five distinctive themes of confession, the figures of the Jesuit and the nun, education and isolation, newspaper reports, popular novels, sermons, lectures and pamphlets have been scrutinised for the bipartite composite of gender and power in the context of anti-Catholicism. I have sought to identify the religious, social and cultural meanings behind the various depictions of Roman Catholicism as portrayed by Evangelical Protestant writers. Taking an overview of the historical and political significance of the texts, this book has explored the gender and power relationships contained in the narratives and related them to the contemporary discourse of fear that engendered a need to control women both bodily and spiritually. Works on women’s mental health written around the mid-nineteenth century provide an important source for the examination of perceptions of the hysterical and melancholic female as a result of or resulting in, her incarceration or cloistering. They help to focus on the way in which Charlotte Brontë uses the trope of the buried nun in her novels as an expression of this type of imprisonment. It is known that from the eighteenth century onwards the majority of patients confined in mental asylums were women. Their hysteria and depression far from liberating them, provided yet another excuse to control and repress them. Bearing this in mind it is useful to remember that Brontë was clearly not afraid to plunder medical and scientific theory for what she wanted, leaving behind what she did not like – particularly when it came to theology. (Helen Small, Love’s madness, p. 172) Marie, ‘the female Jesuit’, Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe and Miss Marchmont may all be seen, in the light of nineteenth-century medical texts concerning hysteria, to be typically hysterical females.2 According to Robert Brudenell Carter, hysterical symptoms follow an initial fit or paroxysm which can be brought about by some exciting cause such as fright, disappointment or anger.3 The incidents of Jane in the Red Room, Lucy’s fit during the long vacation and the shocking death of Miss Marchmont’s fiancé are brought to mind. Marie, the female Jesuit, displays symptoms of hysteria when she is found to have applied leeches to her mouth in an attempt to feign illness. Carter cites the following as symptoms of ‘common hysterical ailments in hysterical women’: haemoptycis and haematemisis, which may be imitated by applying leeches to the inside


of the mouth or by swallowing and vomiting animal blood.4 Marie also had recourse to the use of digitalis which Carter mentions as being used to ‘counterfeit the constitutional effects of the loss of blood’. The scrutiny of nineteenth-century medical commentaries is useful in locating the perceived origins of female mental health problems and their association with religion. For example, George Burrows MD attributes certain forms of female insanity to the young and immature brain being taught too much theology at a tender age. He concludes that it addles the female brain and disturbs women so that they become overzealous.5 As Roy Porter notes, Victorian asylum records show that many patients were diagnosed as suffering from hysteria. At this time various retreats started to cater for private patients suffering from hysteriform conditions.6 During the nineteenth century, the convent was closely associated with the asylum and actual mental hospitals in continental Europe were frequently identified as being managed by nuns. Evangelical Protestants believed that the Catholic Church was aiming at total dominion over the mind and, as observed, its methods of surveillance and management imitated the control of the incarcerated patient. This system of surveillance has been identified in the novels of Charlotte Brontë and is most developed Villette where it is closely identified with the Catholic Church. By examining the evidence of nineteenth-century anti-Catholic literature and its relationship to mainstream fiction, it has been possible to probe behind the ‘mask’ of intolerant religious rhetoric in order to reveal these systems of the subjugation of women as exploited by both Catholic and Evangelical Protestant men who are represented in Brontë’s fiction by characters like Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre and Père Silas in Villette. In a similar manner it has been feasible to unravel the cultural, linguistic and gender specific meanings behind the religious representations in Charlotte Brontë’s novels. Whilst drawing on the personal, religious and life experience of the author as an aid to establishing the meaning of the texts, I have been able to look towards the cultural, social and historical foundation of certain Catholic images; thus presenting an alternative reading of Brontë’s writing.

Notes 1

Introduction

1. John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Recent Position of Catholics in England Addressed to the Brothers of the Oratory (London: Burns and Lambert, 1851), p. 1. 2. See her chapter on ‘Anti-Catholic Erotica’, in Julie Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books. The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 126–58. 3. D.G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (California: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 51. 4. Statistics taken from: Derek Holmes More Roman than Rome and Gloria McAdam, My Dear Sister: An Analysis of Nineteenth-century Documents Concerning the Founding of a Women’s Religious Congregation (Bradford: University of Bradford, PhD Thesis, 1994). 5. Robert Klaus, The Pope the Protestants and the Irish (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), p. 281. 6. One prolific preacher and writer referred to in this study was Father Achilli, a defrocked Catholic priest who capitalised on the No-Popery movement and published various ‘revelations’ about Catholic convents that helped to confirm popular prejudices. Achilli won a libel suit against Newman in 1851 for accusing him of sacrilege and sexual misconduct. 7. Dawson Massy, Dark Deeds of the Papacy Contrasted with the Bright Lights of the Gospel, also the Jesuits Unmasked and Popery Unchangeable (London: Seeleys, 1851), p. 155. 8. Henry Drummond MP, To the People of England on The Invasion (London: Bosworth and Harrison, 1859). 9. See Shirley, p. 398 where Caroline Helstone observes Rose Yorke reading Mrs Radcliffe’s The Italian. There is evidence that Charlotte Brontë was well aquainted with this genre of literature. 10. For example, Ambrosio in M.G. Lewis, The Monk, 1786. 11. D.G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (California: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 61. 12. Rev. M. Hobart Seymour, Convents or Nunneries. A Lecture in Reply to Cardinal Wiseman (London: Seeleys, 1852), pp. 14, 24. 13. Catherine Sinclair, Modern Superstition (London: Simpkin and Marshall & Co., 1847), pp. 4–5. 14. Lisa Wang, Uses of Theological Discourse in the Novels of the Brontë Sisters (London: Birkbeck College, PhD Thesis, 1998), pp. 17,146. 15. Harriet Martineau, an agnostic with a Unitarian background, found the anti-Catholic sentiments of Villette offensive. She voices her disapproval of them in an article in the Daily News, 3 February 1853. 16. Rosemary Clark Beattie, ‘Fables of Rebellion: Anti-Catholicism and the Structure of Villette’, ELH 5 (1986): p. 821. 17. Paz, Popular Anti Catholicism in Mid Victorian England, p. 63. 165

166 Notes 18. S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 414. 19. Robert Bernard Martin, The Accents of Persuasion: Charlotte Brontë’s Novels (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 148. 20. In speaking about the kindness of Père Silas to Lucy Snowe at her confession, Martin comments: ‘It is the first indication in the novel, or for that matter any of Miss Brontë’s novels, that Roman Catholicism may have virtues in spite of being unattractive to her.’ The Accents of Persuasion, p. 162. 21. Tom Winnifrith, The Brontës and their Background, Romance and Reality (Basingstoke Hants: Macmillan Press, 1988), pp. 49–55. 22. Irene Taylor, Holy Ghosts the Male Muses of Emily and Charlotte Brontë (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 246–7. 23. According to Lisa Wang, there are over 450 direct allusions to the Bible in Charlotte Brontë’s novels. Uses of Theological Discourse in the Novels of the Brontë Sisters, p. 31. 24. Patricia Duncker, Writing on the Wall (London: Pandora Press, 2002), p. 34. 25. Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë. A Passionate Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), p. 226. 26. Charlotte Brontë was surprised and hurt by criticisms of her depiction of Catholicism in Villette. She was particularly ‘upset’ by her friend Harriet Martineau’s review of the book which accused her of attacking Catholicism with vehemence. 27. Helene Moglen, Charlotte Brontë, the Self Conceived (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1976), p. 218. 28. For fuller comment on the love between Lucy Snowe and Paul Emmanuel, see Robert Colby, ‘Villette and the Life of the Mind’, in Fiction With a Purpose (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1960), p. 417. 29. Annette Schreiber, ‘The Myth in Charlotte Brontë’ [sic] Literature and Psychology xvii (1968): p. 66. 30. Gayla McGlamery, ‘This Unlicked Wolf Cub,’ p. 67.

2 The Construction of an Anti-Catholic Ideology in the Nineteenth Century: Sexuality, Gender, Patriarchy and the Discourse of Fear 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Leeds Mercury, 30 March 1850. Catherine Sinclair, Modern Superstitions, p. 6. The Times, 19 November 1844. See Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York: John Murray, 1977), p. 30. The Times, 15 November 1844. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

Notes 167 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

Ibid. Anon., Intercepted Letters of a Romish Priest (London: Hall and Co., 1852), p. 3. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 6, footnote 2. Ibid., p. 11. Rev. Michael Hobart Seymour, The Talbot Case (London: Seeleys, 1851), pp. xvi–xvii. Ibid. The Times, 31 March 1851. This was taken from the court report in the Times, 31 March 1851. The Jerningham family was one of the ‘old’ aristocratic English Catholic families. The Times, 1 April 1851. Law report, Court of Chancery Lincoln’s Inn, 31 March. Rev. M. Hobart Seymour, Convents or Nunneries a Lecture in Reply to Cardinal Wiseman (London: Seeleys, 1852), p. 10. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid. For an example of how this idea developed see Stead, ‘Maiden Tribute’ ‘The Brothel Keeper’, in Pall Mall Gazette (London: 1885). Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in The Bud (London: Pimlico, 1969), p. 350 states: ‘The exploitation of young girls is the most repellent aspect of Victorian sex’. In Ivan Bloch’s Sexual Life in England (1938 edition) a woman in the West End is reported as saying that ‘In my house you can gloat over the cries of the girls with the certainty that no one will hear them besides yourself – a statement confirmed by other sources.’ Seymour, Convents or Nunneries, p. 35. Ibid., p. 39. This is particularly evident in the Heldivier and Talbot cases cited earlier. John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England: Addressed to the Brothers of the Oratory (London: Burns and Lambert, 1851), p. 88. Ibid., pp. 112–17. Later in the century, during the 1860s, Newman again came under fire from the Evangelical wing of the Protestant Church for his close association with the Brompton Oratory. This oratory was at the centre of certain reported ‘scandals’ including the case of a young girl called Eliza McDermott whose mother claimed she was lured into a convent against her family’s wishes. This was reported fully in the Daily Telegraph in 1865. The Brompton Oratory was also put under suspicion by Alfred Smee, writing to Sir George Grey through the medium of the Evening Standard, who cast serious doubts over the private burial grounds at the oratory. Ibid., pp. 83–4.

168 Notes

3 Forgive Me Father: The Sacrament of Confession as a Means to Control and Debauch Young Girls and Women 1. Quotation by ex-Roman Catholic priest Blanco White printed on the cover of The Indelicacy of Auricular Confession as Practised by the Roman Catholic Church: Correspondence between Hon. George Spencer and Rev. W. Riland Bedford (Birmingham: William Hodgetts, 1836). 2. Jules Michelet, Priests Women and Families (London: Charles Edmonds, 1846), p. 47. 3. Ibid., p. 47. 4. Ibid., pp. 47 and 49. 5. See Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 36. 6. For this reason, many biographies of worthy women were circulated in the nineteenth century, along with numerous tracts and pamphlets. 7. Letter from Bedford to Spencer 1 July 1836. The Indelicacy of Auricular Confession, p. 6. 8. A Catholic devotional book particularly used by penitents preparing for confession. 9. Letter from Bedford to Spencer 1 July 1836. 10. Rev. Andrew Thomson, A Course of Lectures on Popery, Delivered in Edinburgh 1851 (Edinburgh and London: Johnstone and Hunter, 1851), pp. 265–6. 11. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, pp. 138–45. For a more detailed discussion of this, see Kate Soper’s essay ‘Positive Contradictions’, in Caroline Ramazanoglu, ed., Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism (London: Routledge, 1993), chapter 2, pp. 29–50. 12. See Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987), chapter 3. Managing Women’s Minds. 13. Ibid., p. 77. 14. The Roman Catholic Confessional Exposed: in Three Letters to a Cabinet Minister (Dublin: Philip Dixon Hardy, 1837), letter 2, pp. 35–6. 15. Rev. Charles Brigham, The Enormities of the Confessional (London: Richards, 1839), especially pp. 3–4. 16. Ibid., p. 5. 17. Rev. John Armstrong, Preface to The Confessional, its Wickedness. A lecture given at the town hall Brighton, 5 September 1856 (Brighton: Edward Verall, 1856). 18. J.G. Millingen, Mind and Matter, Illustrated by Considerations on Hereditary Insanity and the Influence of Temperament in the Development of the Passions (1847), p. 157. Quoted in Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914, p. 57. 19. George Spencer and William Riland Bedford, The Indelicacy of Auricular Confession as Practised by the Roman Catholic Church (Birmingham: William Hoggets, 1837), p. 26. 20. William Hogan, Auricular Confession and Popish Nunneries (London and Liverpool: G.B. Dyer and Edward Howell, 1846), pp. 34–7. 21. Ibid., p. 34. 22. Ibid., pp. 34–5. 23. Ibid., pp. 35–6.

Notes 169 24. Although Hogan originally wrote for American Protestants, his work was published in London and Liverpool and was widely read in England, especially pp. 62, 63. 25. This information is taken from a pamphlet, Father Chiniquy, the Reformer of the Far West (reprinted from The Record) (London: Macintosh, 1859). 26. Chiniquy, The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional (London: W.T. Gibson, 1878), p. 8. 27. A good example of this type of tale is Chiniquy’s story of a young girl called Mary who was educated in a convent school where she was seduced and corrupted by two confessors. Mary dies from her guilt. The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional, pp. 20–32. 28. Daniel O’Connell was a democrat and a Dublin lawyer whose ultimate aim was Home Rule and Catholic Emancipation was the first step because it already had support in the House of Commons. O’Connell thought that once there were Catholic MPs in the Commons they could use their influence for Home Rule. In 1823 the Catholic Association was set up by O’Connell. It was so active that by 1825, the year O’Connell appeared before the House of Lords, that it was declared illegal. O’Connell simply changed its name and continued as before. Also in 1825 Sir Francis Burdett proposed another Emancipation Bill. It was passed by the Commons but rejected by the Lords. 29. O’Connell quoted in The Roman Catholic Confessional Exposed in Three Letters to a Late Cabinet Minister, p. 36. 30. Ibid., p. 39. 31. He is referring to the priest’s manual written by the the Catholic theologian Peter Dens, Circa Actum Conjugalem. The Roman Catholic Confessional Exposed in Three Letters to a Late Cabinet Minister, letter 2, p. 39. 32. Robert Steele, The Priest in the Confessional (London: The Author, 1887), p. 15. 33. The Confessional Unmasked: Showing the Depravity of the Priesthood and the Immorality of the Confessional being the Questions put to Females in Confession (London: Thomas Johnstone, 1851). Page 3 of The History of the Confessional Unmasked states that the compilers of the work preferred to remain unknown. 34. Ibid., p. 31. 35. Peter Dens was a Roman Catholic theologian who wrote manuals for priests which were used by ordinands studying at the Catholic college of Maynooth. In 1786 he wrote Theologia ad Usum Seminariorum Leodic, which was still being used in Catholic seminaries in the nineteenth century. 36. Author unknown. The History of the Confessional Unmasked. The Liberty of England Imperilled by the Confessing Priest (London: The Protestant Evangelical Mission & Electoral Union, 1865), preface. 37. The Confessional Unmasked (London: Thomas Johnston, 1851), preface p. 4. 38. Liguori was canonised at Rome in 1839. He was a favourite of Cardinal Wiseman. 39. Dens, vol. vi, pp. 299–300. Quoted in The Confessional Unmasked, p. 38; the exclamation marks are Bryce’s insertions. 40. Ibid., p. 38. 41. Bailly, vol. 7, p. 366. Quoted in The Confessional Unmasked, p. 39; the final sentence in square brackets is Bryce’s addition.

170 Notes 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

The Confessional Unmasked, p. 43. Quoted in Bailly, p. 51. Ibid., p. 57. Quote from The Weekly Register 20 July 1867. Cited in The History of the Confessional Unmasked. January 1866 edition. Ibid., quoted in The History of the Confessional Unmasked, p. 15. Ibid., quoted in The History of the Confessional Unmasked, p. 12. William Hogan, Auricular Confession and Popish Nunneries (1846), p. 37. Catherine Sinclair, Beatrice or the Unknown Relatives (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), preface, pp. xiii–xiv. Ibid., p. xv. Frederick Edwards, Inez, a Spanish Story Founded on Facts, Illustrating One of the Many Evils of Auricular Confession (Lyme: W. Landray, 1829), p. 18. Canto 1 xvii and Canto 1 xvi, pp. 31 and 34. Eliza Smith, The Progress of Beguilement to Romanism: A Personal Narrative [sic] (London: Seeleys, 1850), p. 10. Ibid. Ibid., p. 41.

4 The Danger of Gliding Jesuits and the Effects of a Catholic Education 1. L.H. Tonna, Nuns and Nunneries: Sketches Compiled Entirely from Romish Authorities (London: Seeleys, 1852), p. 306. 2. S.J. Abbott, Revelations of Modern Convents or Life in Convents on British Soil in the Closing Years of the Nineteenth-Century. Intended as an Earnest Appeal to the British Public (London: W. Wileman and John Kensit, 1899), p. 157. 3. Rev. M. Hobart Seymour, Convents or Nunneries. A Lecture in Reply to Cardinal Wiseman (London: Seeleys, 1852), p. 10. 4. Catherine Hall, White Male and Middle Class, Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), especially chapter 3, ‘Victorian Domestic Ideology’. 5. Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of this Country contrasted with Real Christianity (1797), p. 453. Quoted in Hall, White Male and Middle Class, p. 86. 6. The political importance and the history of the Jesuits makes the society an excellent example of the dangers of Roman Catholicism for the Evangelical Protestant writers who are able to exploit this knowledge in their antiCatholic writing. Interesting books to refer to on the history of the Jesuits are: Francis Edwards S.J., The Jesuits in England: From 1580 to the Present Day (London: Burnes and Oates, 1985) and Peter Rawlinson, The Jesuit Factor: A Personal Investigation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990). 7. For a comprehensive explanation of these terms see Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (London: Picador, 1997), chapter 6, ‘Hysterical Narratives’. 8. An alias for either Helen Black or Charles Edwards Lester (according to the British Library catalogue).

Notes 171 9. Helen DHU, Stanhope Burleigh: The Jesuits in our Homes (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1855), pp. vii and viii. 10. Andrew Steinmetz, The Jesuit in the Family. A Tale (London: Smith and Elder, 1847), p. 6. 11. Cited in: Frank Wallis, Popular Anti Catholicism in Mid-Victorian Britain (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellon Press, 1993), p. 38. 12. Steinmetz, The Jesuit in the Family, p. 23. 13. Frank Wallis, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian Britain, p. 30. 14. Anon., Review of Jemima Luke, The Female Jesuit, and the Sequel to The Female Jesuit: Female Jesuits and Jesuit Agents (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1853), p. 427. Bound together with Charles Seager, The Female Jesuit Abroad. British Library class mark 4905.b.34. 15. Jemima Luke, The Female Jesuit, or, a Spy in the Family (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1851), p. x. 16. Jemima Luke, The Female Jesuit, p. 5. 17. Ibid., p. 327. 18. Ibid., p. 431. 19. Ibid., p. 432. 20. Ibid., pp. 432–3. 21. Quoted in the introduction to, Frances Trollope, The Vicar of Wrexhill (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1996). 22. In his recent article, ‘Charlotte Brontë and Roman Catholicism’, Jan Jedrzejewski states that Father Eustace is representative of ‘often less-than-subtle religious propaganda.’ Although on the surface this is a fair comment, I would contend that the novel contains more intuitive representations of gender and power than he gives credit for. See Jedrzejewski, ‘Charlotte Brontë and Roman Catholicism’. Brontë Society Transactions 25, 2 (October 2000). 23. See Pamela Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope, the Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman (London: Viking, 1997), p. 358. 24. Frances Trollope, Father Eustace: A Tale of The Jesuits, vol. 1, pp. 45–6. 25. Ibid., p. 46. 26. Ibid., p. 51. 27. Ibid., pp. 71–2. Trollope emphasises her point by the use of double exclamation marks. 28. Frances Trollope, Father Eustace, vol. 1, pp. 152–3. 29. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 168. 30. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 236–7. 31. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 237. The description of Eustace’s hands would have been of particular significance to the Victorians. During this period small, delicate, white hands were a fashionable sign of femininity. Very tight gloves were worn to show off the shape of the hand, hence the use of glove stretchers which were only in use for about 100 years. Arthur Munby, famous for his diary and photographs of Victorian working women had what could be termed as almost a fetish about women’s hands. His writings give a good insight into the social implications and the importance in determining class and gender in the nineteenth century, of the size and shape of a person’s hands and gloves. See Munby, ‘Our Mary’ in Poems, Chiefly Lyric and Elegiac (London: Truber and Co. Ltd., 1901). Ann Morgan’s Love: A Pedestrian Poem (London: Reeves and Turner, 1896). ‘Discipline’ in Verses New and Old

172 Notes

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

(London: Bell and Daldy, 1865). Other references may be found in Derek Hudson, Munby Man of Two Worlds (London: Abacus, 1974). Frances Trollope, Father Eustace, vol. 2, pp. 9–10. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 50. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 83. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 98 and 101. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 220 and 222. ‘But not only are the principles in which the unearthly disciples of Loyola are reared of so stringent a quality as to impede, and finally destroy, every natural movement of the soul, but they are also made to be, habitually, of such ready application, that no emotion can arise without bringing its antidote with it.’ Frances Trollope. Father Eustace , vol. 2, pp. 182–3. Even though Eustace is a priest, he is still a man and therefore able to control his emotion and channel it into another use. In contrast, Juliana, a female, is completely swamped by her emotions to the point of physically swooning. Frances Trollope, Father Eustace, vol. 2, pp. 189–90. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 432. Frances Trollope, Father Eustace, vol. 2, pp. 256 and 330. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 331. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 50. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 316–17. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 135. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 210. Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 295–6. Ibid., p. 189. n.b. Charlotte Brontë, writing Villette, could not allow Madame Walravens to punish M. Paul forever. He had to return, and in his return and ultimate death lay his redemption in the heart and memory of Lucy Snowe. For elaboration of this idea see chapter on Villette. It is interesting that even at his death, Father Eustace employs a ritual of Roman Catholicism, confession and absolution, to make his peace with a Protestant woman. However, as he is asking another person, not God, for forgiveness he is perhaps behaving in a more Protestant manner in accepting responsibility for his own misdemeanours. See Catherine Sinclair, Beatrice or The Unknown Relatives (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), p. 297, which mentions Catholicism exciting girls to insanity, so much so that some are necessarily placed in asylums. ‘When I hear as of late, that the intellects of many young ladies have been excited to actual insanity by the awful view of eternity forced clandestinely upon their thoughts by these Popish Priests; when I know that several are now necessarily placed in asylums …’ Catherine Sinclair, Modern Superstition (London: Simpkin Marshall & Co., 1847), p. 3. Ibid., p. xxv. Helen DHU, Stanhope Burleigh: The Jesuits in our Home, p. x. Eliza Smith, The Progress of Beguilement to Romanism (London: Seeleys, 1850), p. 91.

Notes 173 55. See the introduction to Rachel McCrindell, The Schoolgirl in France (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1842). Here the author states that owing to the unhoped for success of her former novel, she has been emboldened to come before the public again. In fact, there were at least seven editions of the novel between 1840 and 1859, printed in both England and America. 56. Rachel McCrindell, The Schoolgirl in France, introduction. 57. Ibid., p. 9. 58. Ibid., p. 11. 59. Ibid., p. 31. 60. This practice of the constant surveillance of pupils in Catholic girls’ schools is dealt with more fully in the chapter on Villette. 61. Rachel McCrindell, The Schoolgirl in France, p. 52. 62. Ibid., p. 54. 63. Ibid., pp. 94–5. 64. Ibid., p. 122. 65. Ibid., p. 206. 66. Ibid., p. 205. 67. See the story of the horrendous and frightening trip to the countryside reported in The Schoolgirl in France, chapter 24. 68. Rachel McCrindell, The Schoolgirl in France, p. 273. 69. Julie Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books: the Development of Pornography in EighteenthCentury England (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 70. Ibid., pp. 126–7.

5 Lifting the Veil: A Nineteenth-century Perception of Nuns and Convents 1. Catherine Sinclair, Modern Superstition (London: Simpkin Marshall & Co., 1847), p. 10. 2. Gloria McAdam, My Dear Sister: An Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Documents Concerning the Founding of a Woman’s Religious Congregation (University of Bradford, PhD Thesis, 1994). 3. The Second Annual report of the Protestant Alliance (London 1853) claimed that the Protestant Alliance (a quasi-religious and patriotic organisation which was founded in 1851 as an offshoot of the Protestant Association to resist the territorial usurpation of the Pope) had collected over 2,500 signatures on a petition demanding convent regulation. 4. For example, during the debate on the Convent Bill, Henry Drummond accused Father Faber of going around the country seducing young women. 5. Robert Klaus, The Pope, The Protestants and the Irish (London: Garland Publishing, 1987), chapter iv. 6. Rev. R.P. Blakeney, Popery in its Social Aspect. Being a complete Exposure of the Immorality and Intolerance of Romanism (London: Hamilton Adams & Co., 1856), p. 245. 7. Fraser Harrison, The Dark Angel. Aspects of Victorian Sexuality (London: Sheldon Press, 1977), pp. 31–3. 8. Henry Drummond, A Plea for the Rights and Liberties of Religious Women Imprisoned for Life Under the Power of Priests (London: T. Bosworth, 1851), p. 7.

174 Notes 9. For a more detailed discussion see Jane Ussher, Women’s Madness. Misogyny or Mental Illness (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), chapter 4. 10. Ussher, p. 71. In the 1830s it was being recommended that ‘in the case of public asylum, a larger portion of the building should be allotted to females as their numbers always predominate’ (W. Browne, What Asylums Were and Ought to Be (1837) New York, Arno Press, Reprint 1976). 11. Jules Michelet, Priests, Women and Families (London: Charles Edmonds, 1846), p. 53. 12. G. Burrows, Commentaries on Insanity (London: Underwood, 1828). Quoted in Ussher, p. 74. 13. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 255–7. 14. Walter Lancelot Holland, Walled Up Nuns and Nuns Walled in (London: J. Kensit, C. Thynne, W. Wileman, 1895). Although this work is published later than most of the texts in the present study, it is very typical of the earlier anti-Catholic literature and demonstrates how persistent this particular discourse was. 15. Irving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (London: Penguin Books, 1968). 16. Rachel McCrindell, The Convent: A Narrative Founded on Fact (London: Aylott and Jones, 1848), p. 89. 17. Ibid., p. 116. See illustration ‘Articles of Piety’. 18. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady, chapter 1. 19. Jules Michelet, Priests, Women and Families, part 2, p. 51. 20. Ibid., p. 53. It is interesting to note that this description is reproduced in the anti-convent work: Hints to Romanizers. No.1. the Confessional and the Conventual System (London: Seeleys, 1850). 21. For a typical male comment on the unfulfilled sexuality of a nun, see Samuel Day Phillips, Life in a Convent (London: A. Hall and Co., 1848), p. 22. ‘Oh! my hand shudders, my mind recoils, my blood chills, my soul sickens, at the very thought of those convent prisons, wherein are incarcerated the blooming maiden …’ 22. For a fuller explanation see Showalter, The Female Malady, chapter 2. 23. William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age and Advanced Life, Considered in their Physiological, Social and Moral Relations. Quoted in Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966), p. 31. 24. A Protestant, Nunneries (London: Houlson and Storeman, 1852), pp. 6–7. 25. Gavazzi’s Orations: Delivered in the Music Hall Sheffield on the 9th. 10th. 13th. 14th. and 15th. November 1852 (Sheffield: Sheffield Free Press, 1852), pp. 26–7. 26. Gavazzi’s Orations: Delivered at the Town Hall Brighton 1855 (Brighton: Charles E. Verral, 1855), p. 6. 27. David Bogue, Orations of Father Gavazzi (London: A.M. Piggott, 1851), pp. 49–54. 28. Gavazzi’s Orations. April 5th. 1854. The Assembly Rooms, Kennington Park London (London: A.M. Pigott, 1854), pp. 12–13. 29. Rev. John Jessopp, Woman (London: A.M. Pigott, 1851), p. 27. 30. Ibid., pp. 22 and 90.

Notes 175 31. Gavazzi’s Orations. The Assembly Rooms Kennington Park, London (5 April 1854), p. 7. 32. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 33. Gavazzi’s Orations. Sheffield 1852, p. 27. 34. A term used by Michelet when talking about the tyranny of ‘female Jesuits’. 35. Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures (1836). 36. G. Viner, Priests and Their Victims: Scenes in a Convent (London: H. Eliot, 1850), p. 7. 37. Ibid., p. 6. 38. Mary Martha Sherwood, The Nun (London: Seeleys, 1836), p. 326. 39. Ibid., p. 177. 40. There is more than a suggestion of lesbianism in this passage with Annunciata portrayed as the dominant partner who has captivated a susceptible Superior by her beauty. 41. The Nun, p. 196. 42. Henry Drummond MP, A Plea for the Rights of Women Imprisoned for Life Under the Power of Priests (London: T. Bosworth, 1851), p. 9. 43. Rachel McCrindell, The Convent. A Narrative Founded on Fact (London: Aylott and Jones, 1848), p. iii. For McCrindell’s earlier anti-Catholic work The Schoolgirl in France (1844) see earlier pp. 114–22. 44. Rachel McCrindell, The Convent, p. iv. 45. Ibid., p. 54. 46. Ibid., pp. 187–8. 47. Ibid., p. 192. 48. Karen McCarthy Brown, ‘Fundamentalism and the Control of Women’, in John Stratton Hawley, ed. Fundamentalism and Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 175. 49. Rev. John Jessopp, Woman, pp. 140–1 and 10. 50. It is interesting to note that Day Phillips’ ideas on solitude concur with those of Foucault in his analysis of discipline and punishment more than a hundred years later. Samuel Day Phillips, Life in a Convent (London: A. Hall, 1848), p. 34. 51. See Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady, pp. 68–70 for a more detailed explanation of this method of punishment. 52. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 273. 53. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, p. 258. 54. Samuel Day Phillips, Life in a Convent, p. 35. 55. Ibid., p. 36. 56. Ibid., pp. 48–9. 57. Ibid., p. 49. 58. L.H. Tonna, Nuns and Nunneries, p. 306.

6 Nineteenth-century Anti-Catholic Discourse in the Brontë’s Local Newspapers 1. This will be discussed more fully in the chapters relating to the individual novels. 2. Lisa Wang, Uses of Theological Discourse in the Novels of the Brontë Sisters (London: Birkbeck College, PhD Thesis, 1998), p. 41.

176 Notes 3. Christine Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). 4. This is referred to in Sally Shuttleworth, ‘The Dynamics of Cross Culturalism in Charlotte Brontë’s Fiction’, in Michael Cotsell, ed., English Literature and the Wider World. Vol. 3. Creditable Warriors 1830–76 (London: Ashfield Press, 1990), p. 184. 5. The Shakespeare Head Brontë. Miscellaneous and Unpublished Writings of Charlotte and Patrick Branwell Brontë (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936), vol. 1, p. 1. Attributed to Charlotte Brontë, The History of the Year. 6. Leeds Intelligencer, 27 May 1848. 7. Ibid., 3 June 1848. 8. Ibid., 30 September 1848. 9. Leeds Mercury, 30 September 1848. 10. Leeds Intelligencer, 20 January 1849. 11. Ibid., 27 January 1849. 12. Ibid., 11 August 1849. 13. See Leeds Mercury, 26 October, 16 and 23 November, 7 and 28 December 1850. Leeds Intelligencer, 26 October, 2 November, 7 and 14 December 1850. 14. Leeds Mercury, 2 February and 9 March 1850. 15. Leeds Intelligencer, 7 December 1850. Sermons at Gisburn, Markington and Northallerton are also reported. 16. Leeds Mercury, 7 December 1850. This sermon was preached at Haworth (home of the Brontë family): ‘On Sunday last, a sermon was preached in the church of Haworth by the Rev. William Cortman, on the late popish aggression. The congregation was unusually large, and seemed deeply impressed by the solemn and important truths adduced on the occasion.’ 17. Leeds Intelligencer, 26 October 1850. 18. Leeds Intelligencer, 18 January 1851. 19. For a fuller explanation of this case see Chapter 2 of this book. 20. Leeds Mercury, 7 April 1852. 21. As mentioned in Chapter 5, Father Gavazzi preached several ‘Orations’ on the various evils of Catholicism in England in the 1850s. 22. See earlier p. 78.

7 The Perceived Anti-Catholicism of Charlotte Brontë’s Novel: The Professor 1. Arthur B. Nicholls, Preface to Charlotte Brontë, The Professor (London: Smith and Elder, 1857). 2. Ibid. 3. For further discussion of Brontë’s use of a male narrator see Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman In The Attic: The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination, pp. 315–17. 4. Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, ed. Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 54. For the rest of the chapter the above edition of the novel will be referenced as Professor followed by the page number.

Notes 177 5. Sally Shuttleworth, ‘The Dynamics of Cross Culturalism in Charlotte Brontë’s Fiction’, in Michael Cotsell, ed. English Literature and the Wider World. Vol. 3. 1830–1876 (London: Ashfield Press, 1990), p. 178. 6. cf. Lucy Snowe’s confession in Villette. The priest would ‘poison’ the Catholic M. Paul against the Protestant Lucy. In this case the pupil/teacher motif is reversed. 7. As recorded earlier p. 95, the Leeds Intelligencer (1851) gives a good example of nineteenth-century Protestant thinking about nuns and convents. In a report on the Talbot Case, convent life is referred to as ‘Egyptian Bondage’ and comments on how living in the ‘torpifying atmosphere’ of a nunnery would effect the life of a young, impressionable girl. 8. The Professor p. 207. Crimsworth, having kissed Frances, realises that his passion for her is physical as well as spiritual. 9. Letter from Charlotte Brontë to Miss Wooler, November 1846, in Juliet Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, pp. 156–7. 10. Symptoms of hypochondria, in Dr Thomas John Graham, Modern Domestic Medicine (1826). Quoted in the notes to The Professor, ed. Heather Glen (London: Penguin Books, 1989), pp. 311–12. 11. Charlotte Brontë, ‘Reason’, an undated poem in Stevie Davies, ed., The Brontë Sisters: Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1988), p. 52. 12. Like Rochester in Jane Eyre, Hunsden is heir to a Northern estate, HunsdenWood, and comes from a local, old family. Where Rochester was expected to make an advantageous marriage with Bertha to enhance his family’s prosperity, Hunsden has become a mill owner and manufacturer in order to restore the partially decayed fortunes of his house.

8 Jane Eyre: Anti-Catholic or Anti-Christian? Shirley: A ‘Social’ Novel 1. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 3–4. For the rest of the chapter the above edition of the novel will be referenced as Jane Eyre followed by the page number. 2. Ibid., introduction, p. vii. 3. Ellen Nussey’s, ‘Charlotte as a Schoolgirl’, Scribner’s Magazine, May 1871, cited in E.M Delafield, The Brontës: Their Lives Recorded by their Contemporaries (London: The Hogarth Press, 1935), p. 37. 4. Professor M. Christian and Miss A. Forster have prepared a card index file of these books. It is kept at the Haworth Parsonage Museum. 5. Tom Winnifrith, The Brontës and Their Background. Romance and Reality (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1988), pp. 28 and 31. 6. Marianne Thormalen, The Brontës and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 37. 7. Mrs Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 58. 8. H. Shepheard, A Vindication of the Clergy Daughter’s School, and of the Rev. Carus Wilson (Kirkby Lonsdale: Robert Morphet and London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1857). 9. In particular the Sunday school periodical edited by Rev. Carus Wilson, The Children’s Friend (Kirkby Lonsdale: 1800–50), and The Teacher’s Visitor.

178 Notes

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

(London: Seeley, Burnside and Seeley, 1844–49). He also wrote and edited other cautionary tales for children. For a fuller explanation of this see Diana Peschier, The Way to Heaven: Contrasting Responses to Early Nineteenth-Century Sunday School Literature, Thesis for MA Women’s History: Gender and Society in Britain and Europe 1500–1980 (London University: Royal Holloway College, 1994). There are many examples of such moral tales. Titles include: Hints to Girls on Dress Especially Intended for Scholars in Daily and Sunday School (London: Religious Tract Society, 1836); Mary. The Fruits of Instruction (London: Ogle, Dawson and Co., 1820). There are also many similar stories in the children’s magazine edited by Rev.W.Carus Wilson, The Children’s Friend, in particular the editions for 1825 and 1826. 2 Kings 9: 30. Elizabeth Imlay, Charlotte Brontë and the Mysteries of Love: Myth and Allegory in Jane Eyre (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), p. 93. Ibid., pp. 96–7. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 97. For a more detailed example of Charlotte Brontë’s ideas on women’s need for occupation, that just like their brothers they have the need to exercise their faculties, see Jane Eyre, p. 109. See The Professor, pp. 88–92 and Jane Eyre, p. 294. Rochester’s character can also be seen as being like that of the secret Catholic aristocrat, a figure such as Frances Trollope’s De Morley in Father Eustace. This figure called to mind eighteenth-century Catholic power in England, and was associated with secrecy, private hidden chapels, priest holes and also often with great wealth and influence. Like Father Eustace in Frances Trollope’s novel, Father Eustace. Of interest to this subject of the connection between Catholicism and effeminacy is David Hilliard’s article: ‘Un-English and Unmanly: Anglo Catholicism and Homosexuality’, Victorian Studies, 25 (1982). Clement Shorter, ‘The Brontës. One Aspect of Brussels 1842. Letter from Mary Taylor in New Zealand to Mrs Gaskell’, in Delafield, The Brontës: Their Lives Recorded by their Contemporaries (Stroud: Ian Hodgkins, 1979), p. 145. Elizabeth Imlay, Charlotte Brontë and the Mysteries of Love: Myth and Allegory in Jane Eyre, p. 99. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (London: Virago, 1991), p. 117. This was a very common usage in nineteenth-century anti-convent literature, tending to stress the ‘foreignness’ of Roman Catholicism. During the nineteenth century, convents were alleged to have sold the hair cut from the heads of postulants as hair pieces and wigs for more fashionable females. Romanism versus Protestantism. London 1851. Chart the Abuses of Romanism. These point are made in Romanism Versus Protestantism. Rev. T.R. Birks, Rector of Kelsall, Herts, Popery in the Bud and in the Flower. A Lecture Delivered before the Protestant Alliance. May 25 (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1853), p. 6. Valerie Grosvenor Myer, Charlotte Brontë: Truculent Spirit (London: Vision and Barnes and Noble), p. 89.

Notes 179 31. Charlotte Brontë, ‘Letter to Ellen Nussey Ambleside December 18. 1850’, in Margaret Smith, ed. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), vol. 2. 32. Letter 3 Fitzwilliam Museum. Attributed to 1852. Quoted in Valerie Grosvenor Myer, Charlotte Brontë: Truculent Spirit, p. 84. 33. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 238. 34. Abbé Petigny, Allocution adressée aux prisionners, à l’occasion de l’inauguration des bâtiments cellulaires de la prison de Versailles quoted in ibid., p. 239. 35. Exodus 20: 4; Leviticus 26:1; Deuteronomy 5: 8. 36. Isaiah 42:17. 37. One fairly extreme example, which is at the the same time typical of this, can be found in Rev. Birks’ lecture against Popery: Popery in the Bud and in the Flower. A Lecture. 38. In anti-Catholic literature nuns and Jesuits are described as gliding rather than walking to emphasise their stealth. 39. For a fuller explanation of this image and its origin, see the explanatory notes, Jane Eyre, p. 484. 40. See, Valerie Grosvenor Myer, Charlotte Brontë: Truculent Spirit, p. 66. 41. See Beth Newman ed., Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (Boston, New York: Bedford Books, 1996). ‘Two related but separable aspects of Jane Eyre, have shaped the way later critics have approached its political implications. One is the novel’s embrace of individualism, which it endorses through Jane’s self-assertive rise from social obscurity, her insistence on her rights to self creation and self fulfilment, and her desire for personal and economic independence. The other is its exploration of Jane’s plight particularly as a woman’ p. 454. 42. Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, ed. Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 174. For the rest of the chapter the above edition of the novel will be referenced as Shirley followed by the page number.

9 The Priestcraft of the Book: Representations of Catholicism in Villette 1. Charlotte Brontë, Letter to Ellen Nussey, Haworth: 14 July 1849. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 230. 2. Rosemary Clarke-Beattie, ‘Fables of Rebellion: Anti-Catholicism and The Structure of Villette’, ELH 53 (1986): p. 823. 3. Letter to Miss Wooler on the publication of Villette 13 April 1853. 4. For a fuller explanation see Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1997), pp. 718–19. 5. Letter to Ellen Nussey, Brussels April 1843. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, p. 315. 6. Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams, 6 November 1852. Quoted in The Shakespeare Head Brontë, vol. 4. 1852–1928, p. 18. 7. Letter to Rev. P. Brontë from Charlotte in London, 17 June 1851. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2. ed. Margaret Smith, p. 236. 8. Ibid.

180 Notes 9. Charles Kingsley, The Saint’s Tragedy; or, The True Story of Elizabeth of Hungary, Landgravine of Thuringia, Saint of the Romish Calendar (London: John W. Parker, 1848). 10. Ibid., p. 194. 11. During the time that Charlotte Brontë was writing Villette, her letters to Ellen Nussey show that she was very depressed and suffering a great deal from bad headaches. In August 1852 she tells Ellen how unhappy she is, not because she is a single woman and likely to remain so but because she is a lonely woman and likely to be lonely. In September 1852, when writing to Ellen about Villette she says; ‘I feel fettered, incapable, sometimes very low. However at present the subject must not be dwelt upon; it presses me too hardly, wearily, painfully.’ Charlotte Brontë, Letters to Ellen Nussey (Bradford: Horsefall Turner, 1885). 12. For further explanation of this idea see Sally Shuttleworth, ‘The Surveillance of the Sleepless Eye: The Constitution of Neurosis in Villette’, in Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 142–7. 13. In January 1853, Charlotte Brontë visited Bethlehem Hospital with Dr Forbes. She was particularly interested in patients kept in solitary confinement. 14. Quoted in Robert Heilman, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s new Gothic’, in The Brontës. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Gregor (London: Prentice Hall, 1970), p. 108. 15. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady; Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1991), p. 69. 16. A Constant Observer, Sketches in Bedlam: or Characteristic Traits of Insanity as Displayed in the Cases of One Hundred and Forty Patients of both Sexes Now or Recently Confined in New Bethlehem (London: Sherwood Jones & Co., 1823). 17. Ibid., p. 288. 18. See Sketches in Bedlam for a more comprehensive description and to note the illustrious visitors who visited the hospital and afterwards made very positive comments about it in the visitor’s book. 19. George Burrows, Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms and Treatment, Moral and Medical of Insanity (London: Thos. & George Underwood, 1828). 20. Ibid., p. 256. 21. Thomas Laycock, A Treatise on the Nervous Diseases of Women (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1840), p. 143. 22. Jean Etienne Esquirol, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity, trans. E.J. Hunt (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), pp. 19–20. Quoted in Embodied Selves, an Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 23. Caleb Crowther MD (formerly senior physician to the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum), Observations on the Management of Madhouses. Part 2 (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1841). 24. Villette, p. 72. Ignacia is the feminised form of Ignatius. Here Brontë is referring to Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. 25. Mrs Gaskell was married to the Rev. William Gaskell a Unitarian minister. In general, Dissenters and Anglicans presented a united front against the papal aggression of the 1850s. 26. Ibid., p. 163.

Notes 181 27. Unitarians believe that God is one person and reject the doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. They take reason, conscience and character as the criteria of belief and practice. Repressed sexuality would, therefore be a logical explanation for Lucy’s behaviour from a Unitarian perspective. 28. Ibid., p. 164. 29. A reference to imprisonment: ‘Put this fellow in the prison and feed him with bread of affliction and the water of affliction’ (1 Kings 22:27 and 2 Chronicles 18:26). 30. Lucy Snowe’s encounter with the paintings of the Cleopatra and La Vie d’une Femme, her insight into the emotion of Vashti’s performance and her absorption of the myth of the buried nun show this understanding. The dreamlike scene in which Lucy is drugged by Madame Beck and moves through the nocturnal festivities of Villette, illustrates the fairy tale motifs of nuns, goblins and scheming priests under the symbolically significant cloak of Catholicism. 31. See John Maynard, Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 32. For a detailed explanation of Brontë’s use of exegesis see the chapter on Villette in Christina Crosby, The Ends of History (London: Routledge, 1991). 33. Judith Williams, Perception and Expression in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë (London: U.M.I. Research Press, Ann Arbor, 1988). 34. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, p. 415. 35. Ibid., p. 415. Gilbert and Gubar allude to Wordsworth’s 1807 poem ‘Nuns Fret not at their Convent’s Narrow Room’. 36. Charlotte Brontë, Letter to Ellen Nussey Brussels, 13 October 1843, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, p. 334. 37. Ibid., Brussels. n.d. (next letter January, from England). 38. J.C. Bucknill and D.H. Tuke, A Manual of Psychological Medicine, 3rd edn (London: J.A. Churchill, 1874), pp. 671–2 (1st edn 1858). Cited in Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, pp. 44–5. 39. See also Villette, p. 143, where M. Paul is said to be the soul of honour who could be trusted with a regiment of the fairest and purest in perfect security that under his leadership they would come to no harm. 40. Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, pp. 226–7. 41. OED ref. (1) ‘Congregation or college of the Propaganda – A committee of cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church, having the care and over-sight of foreign missions, founded in 1622 by Pope Gregory xv.’ (2) ‘By association, systematic scheme or concerted movement for the propagation of a particular doctrine or practice.’ 42. See Villette, p. 69 for an example of this. 43. See Villette, p. 105 where Lucy praises Madame Beck’s good sense. 44. In the anti-Catholic literature of this time stories of young nuns being sedated and carried off to the Continent, where they are incarcerated in an attempt to keep them quiet when they became difficult, were fairly widespread. 45. See Villette, pp. 391–5 for a fuller explanation. 46. Kate Lawson, ‘Reading Desire: Villette as Heretic Narrative’, in English Studies in Canada 17 March 1991.

182 Notes 47. For a good example of this, see Fanny Trollope, Father Eustace. 48. Jan Jedrzejewski, ‘Charlotte Brontë and Roman Catholicism’, Brontë Society Transactions. The Journal of Brontë Studies (October 2000), p. 127. 49. Ibid., p. 131. 50. It was also thought, for reasons discussed earlier, to be sexually dangerous. 51. Charlotte Brontë, Letter to Ellen Nussey, 15 May 1840, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, p. 217. 52. Jan Jedrzejewski, ‘Charlotte Brontë and Roman Catholicism’, p. 133. 53. For further explanation about Fenelon see Terry Lovell, ‘Gender and Englishness in Villette’, in Sally Ledger, Josephine McDonagh and Jane Spencer, eds, Political Gender: Texts and Contexts (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994). 54. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 17. 55. Victorian views on women are almost parodied here. 56. Jedrzejewski makes this point in ‘Charlotte Brontë and Roman Catholicism’, p. 122, but he reduces Frances Trollope’s Father Eustace to an example of ‘less than subtle religious propaganda’ which ignores the sympathetic attitude the author portrays towards the Jesuit anti-hero. 57. Brontë likens Père Silas to the Devil tempting Jesus in the wilderness when he was fasting and vulnerable. Lucy is starving for love, and by embracing Catholicism would clearly have a much better chance of marrying M. Paul. 58. For a further explanation of this theory, see Irene Taylor, Holy Ghosts. The Male Muses and Charlotte Brontë (New York, Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1990). 59. Printed in The Shakespeare Head Brontë. The Brontës, Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence, vol. 4, 1852–1928, p. 18. 60. Charlotte Brontë, ‘Letter to Ellen Nussey October 1852’ in Letters to Ellen Nussey (Bradford: Horsefall, Turner, 1885). 61. Gayla McGlamery, ‘This Unlicked Wolf Cub’: Anti-Catholicism in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette’, in Cahiers Victoriens et Edourdiens, vol. 37, 1993, p. 67.

10 Conclusion: A Discourse of Fear Engendered by the Rise of Roman Catholicism in Mid-nineteenth-century England 1. Catherine Sinclair, The Priest and the Curate (London: Richard Bentley, 1853), p. 41. 2. Ibid., p. 172. 3. Robert B. Carter, On The Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria (London: John Churchill, 1853). 4. Ibid., p. 73. 5. George Burrows MD, Commentaries in the Causes, Forms Symptoms and Treatment, Moral and Medical, of Insanity (London: Thos. & George Underwood, 1828), Commentary 11. 6. Roy Porter, ‘The Body and the Mind, the Doctor and the Patient, Negotiating Hysteria’, in eds Gilman, Sander, King, Porter, Rousseau, Showalter, Hysteria Before Freud (London: University of California Press, 1993).

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Bibliography and Sources 191 Ussher, Jane. Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). Vance, Norman. The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Vargish, Thomas. The Providential Aesthetic in Victorian Fiction (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1985). Vicinus, Martha, ed. Suffer and Be Still, Women in the Victorian Age (London: Methuen, 1980). Vrettos, Athena. Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). Walkowitz, Judith. ‘Male Vice and Feminist Virtue: Feminism and the Politics of Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain’. History Workshop Journal 13 (Spring 1987). Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago Press, 1992). Wallis, Frank. Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian Britain (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993). Wang, Lisa. Uses of Theological Discourse in the Novels of the Brontë Sisters (London: Birkbeck College, PhD Thesis: 1998). Weeks, Jeffrey. ‘Foucault for Historians’. History Workshop Journal 14 (Autumn 1982). Williams, Judith. Perception and Expression in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë (London: UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, 1998). Winnifrith, Tom. The Brontës and their Background, Romance and Reality, 2nd edn (Basingstoke Hants: Macmillan Press, 1988). Wise, Thomas James and John Alexander Symington, eds. The Shakespeare Head Brontë. The Brontës, their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence vol.4. 1852–1928 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1932). Wolff, Robert Lee. Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York: John Murray, 1977).

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192 Bibliography and Sources Bell, Currer (Charlotte Brontë). Villette (New York: Harper Brothers, 1853). Bell, Currer (Charlotte Brontë). The Professor (London: Smith and Elder & Co., 1857). Jack, Thomas Godfrey. Anti Papa: The Invasion of England by Priests of Satan (London: T. Lipshytz, 1895). Jack, Thomas Godfrey. Beauty and the Beast: A Soul Trap of Satan (London: William Wileman, 1899). Myhill, Charlotte. How Perversions are Effected. Three Years as a Nun (London: M. Walbrook, 1874). Sauvestre, Charles M. On the Knee of the Church: Female Training in Romish Convents and Schools (London: William Macintosh, 1869). Steele, Robert. The Priest in the Confessional: Immorality and Blasphemy, Priests in Confession (London: The Author, 1887). Veritas, K. The Confessional: A Mother’s Tale (London: William Macintosh, 1873). Warboise, Emma Jane. Father Fabian (London: James Clarke, 1875). Weldon, George Warburton. The Priest in the Confessional (London: Protestant Institute, 1870).

Index Abbott, S.J. 43 Achilli, Giacinto 93, 95–6, 165 Adam (Bible) 80 Agatha, Sister (Father Eustace) 59–61 Agnes, Sister (Priests and Their Victims) 82 Ainley, Miss Mary Ann (Shirley) 133 Alexander, Christine 91 Ambrose, Father (Father Eustace) 52–3, 54 Annunciata (The Nun) 83, 84, 175 anti-Catholic fiction 7, 45 anti-Catholicism 1–2, 5, 23–4 causes for rise of 2–3, 162 anti-Catholic literature 4, 5–6, 10, 14–15, 42, 45, 162–3, 164 Armstrong, Rev. John 30 Awful Disclosures 10 Bainbridge, Mr. (The Jesuit in the Family) 46–7 Beatrice or, the Unknown Relatives 39–40, 62–3 Beattie, Rosemary Clark 7, 138 Becket, Rev. 94 Beck, Madame (Villette) 49, 104, 114, 144, 150, 153–6 Bedford, Rev. William Riland 26–7, 31 Bedford, W.A. 93 Bible 5, 84, 110, 111, 112 reinterpretation 80 Blakeny, Rev. R.P. 92 Brigham, Rev. Charles 29–30 Brocklehurst, Mr. (Jane Eyre) 110, 111, 112, 114, 117, 150 attitude of Jane Eyre towards 118–19 Brocklehurst, Mrs. (Jane Eyre) 114–15 Brontë, Charlotte as a schoolgirl 109–10 characters 98–9, 163–4: see also specific names

criticism and interpretation 7, 9, 131, 147, 164, 166 depression 123, 148–9, 180 gender-coding 105, 108 loneliness 117–18, 148 on Cardinal Wiseman 140 on Catholic girls 99–101 on control of girls and women 111–12 on female celibacy 106–7 on nuns 118–19, 121, 122–3 on Protestant women 139–40 on women’s mental health 133–4 portrayal of Catholicism 1, 7–8, 91, 105–6, 113, 126, 138–9, 157, 166 Brown, Karen McCarthy 86, 87 Bryce, David 35–6, 37 Bucknill, J.C. 150 Burdett, Sir Francis 169 Burns, Helen (Jane Eyre) 112, 113, 126, 151 Burrows, George 143, 164 Cahill, Dr. 95 Carter, Robert Brudenell 163, 164 Catholic Association 2, 169 Catholic clergy abduction of women 11–13, 39–40, 167 effeminacy 15, 55, 101, 117 power over women 31–2, 33–4 reptilian imagery 25, 34, 39, 47–8 Catholic Emancipation 2, 91, 169 Catholic hierarchy restoration 2–3, 4 Catholicism 2, 47 abuses 120 foreignness 23, 27, 67, 94, 100, 105, 116, 141 gender-coding 105, 108 in newspapers 92 cautionary tales 39–42 193

194 Index celibacy 5, 52, 72, 141 female 96 in literature 106–7 Chiniquy, Father Charles 33–4 Church of England 2, 3 Clarice (The Nun) 83, 84 Clark-Beattie, Rosemary 138 Clement XIII, Pope 4 Combe, Andrew 88 confessional 25–6, 92–3 and sexual morality 29–30, 33–5 cautionary tales 40–2 impact on Italy 27–8 in literature 157–8, 160 objectives 38–9 questions 35, 36–8 Confessional Unmasked, The 35–6, 38 Connelly v. Connelly case 10 Convent: A Narrative Founded on Fact 74–5, 85–6 Convent Bill (1851) 71 convent education 62–3 in literature 63–9, 95 Lowood School (Jane Eyre) 112, 114, 115, 118 Pensionnat Beck (Villette) 100, 114, 144, 145, 154 Pensionnat de Demoiselles (The Professor) 104, 107 convent life 43, 75–6, 83, 86, 95, 145, 177 convents and nunneries 6–7, 10, 178 as lunatic asylums 73–4, 164 dangers of 43–4 fortifications 20–1 in literature 75–8, 81–6, 154 rise of 71 sexual morality 22, 71–2, 73 threat to English society 78–9 Courrier, Paul Louis 32 Crimsworth, William (The Professor) 98, 99, 100–1 characterization 101–2 hypochondriac 102–3 relationship with Hunsden 107–8 Cunningham, Rev. John 52

Dark Angel, The 72 Dark Deeds of the Papacy Contrasted with Bright Lights of the Gospel, Also the Jesuits Unmasked and Popery Unchangeable 4 DeMorley, Juliana (Father Eustace) 52, 55–6, 58, 61–2, 67 Dens, Peter 36, 37, 169 DHU, Helen 46, 63 Doyle v. Wright case 18–20 Drummond, Henry 5, 71, 84, 85 Duncker, Patricia 8 Edgar, Father (Father Eustace) 58, 59–61 Edward, Frederick 40 Elizabeth (The Saint’s Tragedy) 141 Emmanuel, Paul (Villette) 99, 116, 137, 149–50, 150–1, 152–3, 155, 160, 172 Esquirol, Jean Etienne 143 Eustace, Father (Father Eustace) 55–7, 58, 61, 116, 171, 172 Eve (Bible) 80, 112 Examination of Conscience 37–8 Eyre, Jane (Jane Eyre) 111, 128–9, 136 attitude towards Brocklehurst 118–19 characterization 116, 179 loneliness 115–16, 119, 124, 125, 127–8 nun-like qualities 115–16, 118–19, 125–6 school life 114, 115 Father Eustace: A Tale of the Jesuits 52–62, 67, 171, 182 Female Jesuit Abroad, The 48 female Jesuits 49 in literature 6, 48–51, 59, 105, 153–4, 157 Female Jesuits and Jesuit Agents 48 Female Jesuit, The 48, 50–1 Fenelon (Villette) 158 Foucault, Michel 28, 74, 88, 124, 175 Garden of The Soul, The 26–7 Gaskell, Elizabeth 110, 117, 140, 145, 146, 180

Index 195 Gavazzi, Father Alessandro 78–9, 80, 81, 96 Gilbert, Sandra 59, 99, 148 Giovanna, Sister (The Convent) 74–5, 85 Goffman, Irving 74 Gordon, Lyndall 8 Gothic fiction 5–6, 45 Gubar, Susan 59, 99, 148 Hall, Catherine 44 Harrison, Fraser 72 Heldivier family 12, 13–15 Helstone, Caroline (Shirley) 132–3, 135–6 loneliness 133 Henri, Frances (The Professor) 98, 100, 103–4, 106, 107, 116 History of Sexuality, The 28 Hogan, William 31–3 Howard, Caroline (The Schoolgirl in France) 64, 65–7, 69 Hunsden (The Professor) 99, 107–8, 177 hypochondria in literature 102–3, 123–4, 127 hysteria 31, 44–5, 143, 163–4 Hystories 45 ‘id’ 147 idol worship 126, 134 Ignatius of Loyola, St. 4, 49 Imlay, Elizabeth 113–14, 118 Inez: A Spanish Story Founded on Facts, Illustrating One of the Many Evils of Auricular Confession 40–1 insanity 73–4 and solitary confinement 87–9, 124, 145 in literature 141–3, 163–4 treatment 75 Irish in England 2 Isabel (The Convent) 85–6 Jane Eyre 9, 109, 131, 136–7, 148, 150, 179 Jedrzejewski, Jan 157, 171 Jerningham, Miss. 19 Jessopp, Rev. John 79, 87

Jesuit in the Family, The 46–8, 46 Jesuits 4, 6, 46, 80, 170, 179 in literature 46–8, 52–61, 149, 151, 152–3, 156–7, 157–60 see also female Jesuits Jezebel 112 John, Dr. (Villette) 143, 146, 154, 155, 159–60 Keble, John 3 Keeldar, Shirley (Shirley) 134 Kingsley, Charles 140, 141 Klaus, Robert 71 laudanum 57 Laycock, Thomas 143 Leeds Intelligencer (newspaper) 91–2, 177 Cardinal Newman’s visit to Leeds 95 Catholicism 92–3 confessional 94 Dr. Cahill 95 papal aggression 93 Talbot case 94–5 Leeds Mercury (newspaper) 91–2, 176 Catholicism 92–3, 95 Dr. Achilli 93 Father Gavazzi’s comments on nuns 96–7 Newman v. Achilli case 95–6 ‘lifting the veil’ 89–90 Liguori, Saint Alphonso 69 Lucy (The Poor Clare) 145–7 Luke, Jemima 48, 49, 50, 51 lunatic asylums 7, 73–4, 144 surveillance 145 McAdam, Gloria 70 McCrindell, Rachel 63, 64, 74, 85 McDermott, Eliza 167 McGlamery, Gayla 9, 161 Madwoman in the Attic, The 59, 148 Malcolm, Mrs. (The Jesuit in the Family) 46–7 Manual of Modern Medicine 150 Maria Nun (Priests and their Victims) 82–3 Marie (The Female Jesuit) 48, 50

196 Index Martineau, Harriet 7, 139 Martin, Robert Bernard 7–8 Massy, Rev. Dawson 4, 5 Maynard, John 147 Maynooth College (Ireland) 29 Michelet, Jules 25–6, 75, 76, 81 Mighty Lewd Books 69 Millingen, J.G. 31 monasticism 121 Monk, Maria 10, 82 Monthly Record of the Protestant Evangelical Mission 38 Moore, Louis (Shirley) 135 Moore, Robert (Shirley) 132, 135, 137 Mortimer, Emily (The Schoolgirl in France) 64, 65–6, 68–9 Mother Superiors in literature 81, 121, 144, 155–6 Munby, Arthur 171 Murphy, William 35 Myers, Valerie Grosvenor 123 Newman, Cardinal John Henry 3, 23, 95, 165, 167 Newman v. Achilli case 95–6 Nicholls, Arthur Bell 98 No Popery movement (1850–51) 3, 4, 46, 71 novel 5–6, 9 nunneries see convents and nunneries nuns 44, 63, 179, 181 dual personality 84–5, 89 Father Gavazzi’s comments 96–7 gendered interpretation 70–1, 79–80 in literature 74–5, 80–7, 89, 117–19, 121, 122–3, 135 movement to Continent 21 surveillance 104, 144–5 Nun, The 83–4 Nussey, Ellen 109–10, 123, 139, 148, 161, 180 O’Beirne, Eugene F. 29, 30 O’Connell, Daniel 2, 34, 169 Oxford Movement 3, 7 papal aggression 2, 7, 91, 93 Pastoral Letter 2

patriarchal culture 15–16, 22–3, 27, 28, 42 Peakman, Julie 69 Philip II, King of Spain 13–14 Phillips, Samuel Day 87, 88, 175 Pinel, Philippe 88 Pius VII, Pope 4 Poor Clare, The 145–7 Porter, Roy 164 Practical Christianity 44 Priests and Their Victims 81 Professor, The 8, 98–9 Progress of Beguilement to Romanism, The 41–2 Protestant Alliance 121, 173 Protestantism 6, 94 gender-coding 105 Protestant Magazine, The 46 Pryor, Mrs. (Shirley) 133–4 psychic allegory 9 Pusey, Edwards Bouverie 3 Puseyites 3, 96 Quarterly Review, The 131 Radcliffe, Ann 45 Reed, Eliza ( Jane Eyre) 120–1, 122–3 Reed, Georgiana ( Jane Eyre) 120–1, 122, 123 religious allegory 9 Reuter, Zoraïde (The Professor) 99, 104–5 Rivers, St. John (Jane Eyre) 128, 129–30 Rochester, Bertha (Jane Eyre) 116 Rochester, Edward (Jane Eyre) 107, 127, 129, 130, 136–7, 177, 178 characterization 116–17 Rogison, Susannah 144 Roman Catholic Relief Act 2 Romanism Versus Protestantism, Or, the Inevitable Result of the Present Crisis in the World’s History 117 Rosina (The Convent) 85–6 St Saviour’s Church (Leeds) 94 Saint’s Tragedy, The 140–1 Sarah, Lady (Father Eustace) 52–3, 54 satanic cults 45–6

Index 197 Schaff, Philip 47 Schoolgirl in France, The 63 Schreiber, Annette 9 Seager, Charles 48 Secret Instructions of the Jesuits, The 83 Seeleys 44 sexual morality and confessional 29–30, 33–5; questions 35, 36–8 convents 22, 71–2, 73 Victorian 71, 72–3 Seymour, Rev. M. Hobart 6, 18, 20–2, 44 Sherwood, Mary Martha 83, 84 Shirley 131–2 Showalter, Elaine 45, 118, 142 Shuttleworth, Sally 100, 142, 151 Silas, Père (Villette) 144, 147, 157, 158–60, 166, 182 Sinclair, Catherine 7, 10, 39–40, 62 Sketches in Bedlam 142 Smart, Mary 142 Smith, Eliza 41–2, 63 Smith, Margaret 109 Snowe, Lucy (Villette) 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 116, 126, 136, 141, 146, 158–9, 160–1, 181 confessional 157–8, 160, 166 loneliness 145, 154 surveillance 149–50, 150–1, 154, 155, 156 Society of Jesus 45, 46, 53–4 solitary confinement 87–9, 124–5, 145 in literature 154 Spencer, George 26 Stanhope Burleigh: The Jesuits in Our Home 63 Steele, Robert 35 surveillance in literature 104–5, 114–15, 129, 144–5, 149–51, 153–4, 155, 156 Sylvie (The Professor) 100–1, 104 Talbot, Augusta 18–20, 94–5 Talbot case 18–20, 94–5 Tales of the Islanders, The 91 Taylor, Irene 8 Taylor, Mary 117–18

Thomson, Rev. Andrew 27 Times 11, 18 abduction of girls 11–13, 39–40 conversion of boys 15–18 total institutions 74 Tractarians 3 Tracts for the Times 3 Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale 88 Trollope, Frances 51–2, 53, 54, 55, 61 Tuke, D.H. 150 Tuke, Samuel 75 Tuke, William 75 Unitarians

181

Vicar of Wrexhill, The 51, 52 Victoria, Queen 2–3 Villette 7–8, 8, 9, 59, 138–9, 160–1 solitary confinement 87–8 Walled Up Nuns 74 Wallis, Frank 48 Walravens, Madame (Villette) 59, 155, 156 Wang, Lisa 7, 91 West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum 144 Wheeler, Thomas 95 Wilberforce, William 44 Williams, W.S. 160 Wilson, Edmund 141 Wilson, Rev. William Carus 110–11 Winnifrith, Tom 8, 110 Wiseman, Cardinal Nicholas Patrick 2–3, 10, 20, 92, 140, 169 Woman 87 women/girls abduction by Catholic clergy 11–13, 39–40, 167 confession 25–7, 31–2, 33–4, 39; questions 35, 36–7 control, religiously sanctioned 73–4, 86–7, 111–12, 129–30, 163 convent life 43–4 cruelty 81 cultural construction 28–9 ideal Evangelical woman 44

198 Index women/girls – continued incarceration 6–7, 144 infantilisation 79 in Gothic fiction 6 insanity 73–4, 76–7, 141–3, 163–4 single 70, 72–3, 88, 104, 107, 126, 131, 143, 149; Protestant and Catholic view 140

vocation, religious 20–1, 113 vocation, true 93–4 Wooler, Miss 102, 139 Yorke, Rose (Villette) 136 youth religious entrapment 16, 20

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