There's no Place Like Rome: American Protestant Fascination with Catholicism

Jenny Franchot has produced a dazzling book about a topic that has been long overdue for a new synthetic treatment. In light of the number of recent books reevaluating cultural and intellectual life in antebellum America, her contribution to the historiography of Protestant nativist and anti-Catholic sentiment is as impressive as it is timely. Her central thesis is simple: that “anti-Catholicism operated as an imaginative category of discourse through which antebellum American writers of popular and elite fictional and historical texts indirectly voiced the tensions and limitations of mainstream Protestant culture” (p. xvii). The New Historicist method by which anti-Catholic discourse is examined, however, requires patience and continuous engagement from the reader.

There is abundant historical evidence that Catholicism functioned as the Other in nineteenth-century Protestant America. Following the removal of non-Protestant populations from the eastern settled areas — most of the eastern Indian tribes were forced to the western frontier in the 1830s — and even before the arrival of a first wave of “papists” from Ireland and Germany in the 1840s, Protestants constructed a new Catholic enemy. Their suspicions of a Catholic revival beginning in Europe were heightened by the revival of the Jesuit order in 1814, the British Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1829, and campaigns in England against increasing state funding for the Catholic seminary founded in 1795 at Maynooth, Ireland. This militant Anglo-Protestantism was in many ways a revival and extension of old Reformation polemics against Rome. Because Americans imported much of their anti-Catholic discourse, it seems there would be little novelty in North American anti-Catholic texts. Nonetheless, Franchot contends, by the 1840s American Protestants faced special anxieties about their own disunity despite their hegemony since the seventeenth century. Against these fears of fragmentation and declension a remarkably diverse anti-Roman rhetoric helped to negatively define a “Protestant Way” as a counterweight to religious heterogeneity.

Franchot’s exploration of Otherness was initially guided by Edward Said’s discussions of Orientalism’s function in the European mind. In the American context it is indebted to the literary criticism of Sacvan Bercovitch and Ann Douglas who reacted against the previously unchallenged dominance of Perry Miller in New England studies. Franchot’s book claims to be an antidote to what she believes has been the unintended impact on American fiction of the brilliant scholarship of Miller, and even that of Bercovitch and Douglas, namely to give us an “ever more Protestant America.” Franchot’s indisputably paranoid Protestants are willing to exploit the image of popery as the most threatening form of physical and psychological captivity, but they also used Catholicism as a mirror for themselves. Franchot’s extensive literary influences include T. Walter Herbert’s work on the familial tensions within the Hawthorne clan (a related volume in the New Historicism series), and the insights of Robert Levine, Jane Tompkins, Cathy Davidson, and Gillian Brown.

The historical roots to Franchot’s work can be traced to studies of anticonspiracy activities in the early Republic by Ray Billington and David Brion Davis, who painstakingly reconstructed the social context for nineteenth-century nativism. Not only Catholics, but Mormons and Freemasons were rendered as Others in antebellum America, as demonstrated thirty years ago in Davis’s seminal article, “Some Themes of Counter -Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic and Anti-Mormon Literature.” Davis’s historical consideration of American literature continues to bear fruit in numerous recent works, including Franchot’s interdisciplinary study and art historian William Vance’s study of American perceptions of Rome as an ancient, Catholic, and contemporary artifact for Protestant tourists and writers. Franchot eschews the term “paranoia” as understood by Davis and Richard Hofstadter, describing her focus as “uncovering the often idiosyncratic attractions, fears, and refusals that can hide beneath such social psychological terms.” But in the end, Franchot may have but further proved their point by amassing detailed proof that Protestant paranoia...