Cloistered Bodies: Convents in the Anglo-American Imagination in the British Conquest of Canada

Working within the new historiography of the body, this essay argues that convents served as a convenient metaphor for Canada in the mid-eighteenth century English and Anglo-American imagination: They were French, Catholic, feminized, and most disturbingly, closed to Protestant men. In describing French Canada and its convents, they used language that suggests their fascination with opening and penetrating this new addition to the empire, despite the fact that the Quebec Ursulines were in fact very open to visitors, even to Protestant men. Esther Wheelwright, the Ursulines' New England-born Mother Superior, played a large role in English-language fictional and historical representations of the convent in the 1750s and 1760s.