Rosamond
Rosamond, which I excerpted in my previous post, has long played second fiddle to contemporary anti-Catholic texts like The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk and Rebecca Reed's Six Months in a Convent. However, like its North American fellows, it did hop the Atlantic (and was even translated into German!), and was reprinted in 1837 by multiple English publishers. (The publishers J. Johnson and John Heywood, apparently feeling the text needed a little something extra, retitled it the Awful Disclosures of Rosamond Culbertson--a bit of opportunism which I've seen at least once before.) However, its general popularity seems relatively constrained by time; unlike the endless issues of Maria Monk and Six Months, Rosamond seems to have almost entirely disappeared after the 1830s, with the exception of a reprint in 1848. Moreover, whereas Maria Monk, Rebecca Reed, Josephine Bunkley, and other prominent propaganda figures were real women (even if their texts were fictional), Rosamond Culbertson appears to be a fiction herself [1], invented (or at least disseminated) by the book's nominal "editor," a self-advertised ex-Catholic priest named Samuel B. Smith. Smith ran a popular anti-Catholic newspaper, The Downfall of Babylon, and had already produced at least one competitor for Maria Monk's crown, Sister Saint Frances Patrick; presumably, conjuring up a woman out of whole cloth was the next logical step [2]. (Despite Rosamond's regular appearance in discussions of "escaped nun" narratives, Rosamond never actually takes vows, although her priest-lover asks her to do so.)
Although Rosamond clearly owes its existence to Maria Monk, its actual picaresque plot--to the extent that there is a plot--seems more reminiscent of a polite(r) Roxana than anything else. (As Jenny Franchot points out, these texts emerge from the captivity narrative, with their "pleasures of a serendipitous, instantaneous flight" [105].) Rosamond herself describes her life as a "wicked pilgrimage" (191; 193; 227), which suggests a kind of inverted or demonic Pilgrim's Progress. The wilful Rosamond runs away from her family, becomes one (rather nice) man's mistress, then another (not nice) man's wife, then winds up in Cuba, where she becomes a priest's mistress, until she finally makes it back to the USA. At the time of the narrative's production, though, Rosamond's sexual agency has been conveniently circumscribed: the frontispiece represents her as a respectable matron, and the narrative repeatedly informs us that she has undergone an authentic conversion (this time!). Even better, "[h]er health is now so delicate and weak, that death seems already to have marked her as its own" (11)--which, while certainly convenient for Smith, also strips her of any remaining erotic threat. The woman who wields the frontispiece's pen can write about wayward sexuality under cover of both conversion (and, thus, conviction of sin) and impending disembodiment. Part of the narrative's guarantee of its own authority, in a sense, is the post-eroticism of its supposed female author, whose sexuality is on display and yet now entirely inaccessible.
Authority, however, forms part of the narrative's basic problem. Susan M. Griffin points out that escaped nun narratives "insistently present themselves as evidence," multiplying authorities and relying on proto-anthropological descriptions of "everyday" Catholic existence [3]. Such obsessions with footnoting and prooftexting remain integral to twenty-first century religious controversy. But Rosamond's hyperreferentiality practically explodes (or implodes?) the narrative. The introduction occasionally devolves into Biblical prooftext after prooftext. Two chapters consist of nothing but excerpts from the Encyclopedia Britannica (!) and the anti-Catholic polemicist Samuel Edgar. Footnotes, often incorporating lengthy quotations from such regular foci of anti-Catholic outrage as Peter Dens and St. Alphonsus Liguori (it's probably time to update J. L. Altholz's article on the Victorian obsession with the latter), sometimes swamp the page. The book ends with multiple appendices. And then there are the fragmentary letters with which the narrative proper opens, which stand in for yet other letters that were mysteriously "lost" in transit. (Unlike Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Rosamond neglects to sew such important texts into her dress.) Apropos of the letters, which turn the raunchiest stuff into Spanish and Latin, Griffin argues that "[s]o confident is Smith that his readership can supply images and narratives of priestly profligacy that he provides blank spaces for their inclusion" (43). I'd add that the purported material existence of the letters, whether lost at sea or available uncensored at the publishing office, winds up turning the narrative into a fantastic fiction of historical verification. Not only does Smith appeal to the appearance of the letters, which signify the priest's age, but also he offers such "proofs" as this: "Rosamond tells us, that there are many rogues in Havanna:— "There are many rogues here," (in Havanna,) says the Rev. Father. (Letter II.)" (23). For such self-authorization to work, of course, the reader must be firmly committed to the good (or not so good) Father's absolute reliability as a correspondent; even as Rosamond's narrative paints the Catholic Church as a haven for deceit, the fictional letters that authorize the narrative turn out to engage in a wholly unself-conscious form of "confession." The confessional, as it were, turns inside out, with the priest revealing clerical sins to his lay female lover.
The sins in question range from the pecuniary (there's a whole lot of gambling going on) to the sexual (the rape of an adolescent female penitent [4]). An itemized list would probably turn up every deadly sin. However, the narrative's most shocking "revelation" turns out to be cannibalism: the local Catholic priests win pardons for men who have been turning the slaves into "French sausages" (189). Although here the priests stand convicted of conniving at evil, rather than committing the evil themselves, the crime in question carries anti-Catholic implications. Specifically, this apparently lucrative trade mocks transubstantiation--these Catholics will eat all bodies, apparently, once transformed into something that looks like food. In turn, the priests transform murder into cash, thanks to the "immense sums of money" the pardoned men give them (189). Instead of the miracle of the Eucharist, we have cannibalism; instead of penance for sin, we have clerical profiteering. This echoes one of the footnotes on the Mass, which describes it as a "monstrous rite" for which one must "pay the Priests well" (142). Cuban Catholics slide down the slippery slope from monstrous transubstantiation to monstrous cannibalism; after all, the text implies, the one is the same as the other.
What the narrative keeps deferring, as it happens, is Rosamond's successful conversion to Protestantism. The hurried conclusion informs us that "I was assisted to get away by one. whom it might injure to mention his name, who felt very much for my forlorn and lost condition; and through the mercies of the Lord, and the love he had for my poor immortal soul, I am brought to this Christian country, and am placed among Christian friends: and I hope and trust, that I am not only reclaimed in this world, but am in the arms of my dear Saviour" (230). Rosamond's utterly anti-climactic escape from the arms of her various lovers to the arms of Christ may be the event on which her authority rests, but the narrative has virtually nothing to say about it--although her lover, among other people, keeps accusing her of being a Protestant (200). Instead, Rosamond invokes her Christianity in order to coach her reader in the right reading of her otherwise melodramatic and occasionally ambivalent tale (which includes, after all, the information that "pouring out my grief" to the Virgin Mary actually provided "relief" [216]). The narrative's "most horrid and awful scenes," some of which clearly pale before what she has chosen to suppress, are not grounds for any sort of readerly pleasure; rather, "[t]he remembrance of them brings me to loathe myself, and my past life, and brings me to feel what obligations I am under to God, for sparing my life, and forbearing with me, when I also was living in rebellion against him" (190). These moments of thanksgiving, scattered through the text, turns the narrative's Gothic excesses into moments of salutary spiritual discipline. Sandra Frink suggests that "[b]y framing many of these texts as confessions, readers were able to experience these pleasures vicariously without actually becoming implicated in the acts themselves," but Rosamond's pious ejaculations, with their ritual expressions of self-disgust, warn the reader that such salacious reading can only be rescued by inserting it in the right providential framework [5]. Perhaps Samuel B. Smith feared that there were no narrative pleasures, exotic or otherwise, in conversion.
[1] Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 396n25.
[2] On Smith and Sister Saint Frances Patrick, see Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (1938; Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 104-5.
[3] Susan M. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 39.
[4] As Marie Anne Pagliarini points out, this event is supposed to illustrate the (un)natural outcome of celibacy: "The Pure American Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America," Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 9.1 (Winter 1999): 104-5.
[5] Sandra Frink, "Women, the Family, and the Fate of the Nation in American Anti-Catholic Narratives, 1830-1860," Journal of the History of Sexuality 18.2 (May 2009): 249. Frink notes the "apologetic" rhetoric in Culbertson and other texts on 249-51, arguing that it "confirmed their [the reader's] own identity by distancing themselves from what they read" (250). I'd suggest that Rosamond's reader is pushed and pulled between the narrative's obvious appeal to sensationalism (its primary selling point), which asks the reader to revel in the sheer corporeality of the various sins, and its equally obvious appeal to Protestant spirituality, thanks to the "scholarly" material that somehow purifies the horrors.