マリア・モンク『恐怖の暴露』序説 : 19世紀前半アメリカの反カトリック主義とジェンダー

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論文/ArticlesIn 1836, a book called "Awful Disclosures," written by Maria Monk, a self-claimed ex-Catholic nun, caused a sensation in New York City. The book was full of awful details about the life in a convent in Montreal, where Monk once lived in and escaped from, and came to know the deeply hidden secrets, such as sexual abuse and violence. Although it soon became clear that Monk made up the story with a help from her male Protestant producers, many people nonetheless believed in the book. It became one of the most important anti-Catholic works throughout the nineteenth century United States. This paper presents three important factors that made Monk's book plausible to the contemporary Protestant audience, in spite of its preposterous and unsavory contents. First, anti-Catholicism. A transatlantic anti-Catholic tradition among Protestants existed in the United States, which goes far back to the Protestant Reformation, even when there was no significant size of Catholic population in the country. In the early nineteenth century, Protestant Americans experienced a mass-scale immigration of foreign workers, many of whom were Catholics. Active expansion of the Catholic Church, mixed with ethnic and class conflicts, fueled the anti-Catholic feeling among American Protestants, which eventually led to organized political nativism in 1840s and 1850s. Second, a gender norm of middle-class white Protestants. In the nineteenth century, a new kind of gender norm emerged, which was characterized by the separate spheres between men and women. While men work away from home, women stay domestic to take care of her family. The norm put a huge importance on home as a sacred place and fundamental unit of society, where women preserve and pass down the necessary virtue for the maintenance of the republic. Catholic priests and nuns were antithesis to this norm, as they remain celibate and live with their same-gendered peers, instead of marrying and making home. This significant difference in gender ideal deepened Protestants'doubt about the Catholic Church, and especially about their convents. Third, contemporary anti-Catholic literature. In the early nineteenth century, not only Monk but many other authors published anti-Catholic books, tracts, magazines, and newspapers. Monk's book is located in the tradition of escaped-nun's story, which has a typical plot to bring an anti-Catholic message to the readers. These stories reflect not only Protestants'anxiety about the Catholic Church, but its irresistible fascination to them, which is expressed as dangerously enchanting and seducing power of the Church. Monk's work reveals a way anti-Catholicism, a kind of religious intolerance worked in the antebellum United States, where everybody was supposed to enjoy full religious liberty, but what it really means was still flexible and debatable.
2011-03-31

マリア・モンク『恐怖の暴露』序説 : 19世紀前半アメリカの反カトリック主義とジェンダー

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