Hotbeds of Popery: Convents in the English Literary Imagination

Hotbeds of Popery: Convents in the English Literary Imagination Ana M. Acosta I never saw you in the gay apparel of the world; but surely, no dress could give a greater force to your charms than that which it is your lot to wear. The habit ofparade and fashion may add a more dazzling glare to the beauties offeature and complexion; but where personal charms are heightened by the graces of character, the simple garb in which Religion has clad your heavenly form gives to loveliness its full force, and fixes attention to its best object. The snowy robe, which hangs in ample folds around you, gives a simple, awful, yet winning dignity which all the luxury of the loom could not afford; and the black transparent veil, which, while it hides nothing, sets off every thing, and would make a homely countenance interesting,—alasi what is its office when it floats around your countenance!1 Anti-Catholicism and Eighteenth-Century Culture It seems consonant to reason, that the religion of every country should have a relation to, and coherence with, the civil constitution: the Romish religion is best adapted to a despotic government, the presbyterian to a republican, and that of the church of England to a limited monarchy like ours. As a political phenomenon, late eighteenth-century anti-Catholicism was primarily concerned with a perceived pro-Catholic lobby in government. In fiction, however, it figured more often in the topos of the nunnery. Nevertheless, The History of Emily Montague suggests that more than a coincidental connection existed between 1 According to the tide page, "Translated from the French ofJ.J. Rousseau," letters ofan Italian Nun andan EngUsh Gentleman, 2nd ed. (London, 1784). This is, however, a false attribution : Michael Wheeler attributes it to William Combe, "Transforming the Literary Landscape:Jane Austen and Her Sisters at Chawton House Library," Inaugural Lecture at the University of Southampton (28 February 2001): http://www.pemberley.com /mwheeler.html. I would like to thank the Mrs Giles Whiting Foundation for funding the leave during which I was able to prepare this article. 2 Frances Brooke, Vie History ofEmily Mmitague, 4 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1769), 2:207. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 3-4, April-July 2003 616 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYFICTION the two. Emily Montague is a travelogue and a political and cultural commentary thinly disguised as a sentimental novel. It is composed mainly out of the letters of Bella Fermor and Edward Rivers in Quebec to Lucy Rivers in England, and from Bella's father (audior of the letter quoted above) to the Earl of ___, also from Canada to England. The skeletal plot culminates with the reunion of putative orphan Emilywith her father, a merchant in the West Indies, who had placed her in a convent in France when she was a young child. This was apparendy common practice at die time, and in this article I will study a series ofnovels in which sending or abducting an English girl to a French convent was a central plot device; Emily Montague is unusual because it placed that fictional device within die broader discourse of mainstream eighteenth-century anti-Catholicism. The letters written from Quebec, ceded to Britain six years earlier by the Treaty ofParis, reflect Brooke's own travels there with her husband; at the same time, they used the opportunity to comment on possible combinations ofreligion and government, another way tojuxtapose the three choices offered by France, the American colonies, and England.3 Equating types of faitii with types of government, cited above, was not unusual; what was unusual was its appearance in a fictional framework that simultaneously broached questions of women's autonomy as a contrast between forced marriage and the convent on the one hand, and free choice and liberty on the other. This article presents a detailed anatomy of these and similar issues within a litde-studied series of convent novels published in England between 1765 and 1800. Following a summary ofthe main features of anti-Catholicism during the same period, diis study addresses some of the tensions diat came into play when religious differences were 3 Formoreon T/ií//u^^£i7u...