Sister Agnes; or, the Captive Nun
Thanks to its relatively catchy title, Sister Agnes; or, the Captive Nun (1854) has become one of the better-known anti-Catholic controversial novels, even though there's no record of it having more than one edition. (The author has apparently been identified, but I don't presently have access to the book wherein said identification can be found.) Released in England and America in the same year--something which has caused some confusion about the novel's country of origin--Sister Agnes is a topical novel, written as part of the convent inspection crusade now primarily associated with Charles Newdigate Newdegate.1 Although the drive to require that all convents be inspected by government officials had been afoot in the USA for some decades (as in the polemics of Theodore Dwight), it shot into prominence in the UK only after the so-called "papal aggression" of 1851. John Wolffe notes that convent inspection mobilized the anti-Catholic female base, pointing to the "Address to British Protestant Females" (1851) as the spark; in fact, our author claims to have written that address, and reprints it here as the novel's final appendix.2 If that's true, then this novel is not a one-off, but an ongoing salvo from a dedicated anti-Catholic crusader. Indeed, as the very existence of an appendix indicates, Sister Agnes represents itself as something more than a novel, complete with endnotes, the occasional footnote, and topical references--most importantly, to the case of Augusta Talbot, whose controversial case inspired considerable discussion at the time (and was incorporated into some editions of Maria Monk).3 Sister Agnes constitutes a brief not just against convents, but against the progress of "toleration" in contemporary Victorian culture.
Convent narratives such as this could be written in either the comic mode, in which the unwilling nun successfully escapes captivity and marries, or the tragic, in which the Church destroys the dissident in its midst. Sister Agnes is decidedly tragic. The adventures of our sacrificial lamb (as per her name) take her on a grand tour of nearly every anti-Catholic topos of the period, presided over by the theological "genius" of that most beloved of Protestant whipping-boys, St. Alphonsus Liguori.4 Mary, our heroine, is in danger from the moment she loses her mother. Her father enjoys the "sensuous worship" (55) offered by the local Tractarian clergyman, and thus fails to guard against Catholic influences--in particular, those influences right under his nose, in the form of the Jesuit masquerading as his daughter's governness. By "Jesuit," of course, I don't mean a cross-dressing priest, but rather that intriguing mythical being known as a "female Jesuit," who usually manifests in these narratives as a nurse or governness. (It's possible that the Victorian female Jesuit is a fractured descendant of Mary Ward's seventeenth-century attempt to develop such an order.) In anti-Catholic narratives, the female Jesuit most frequently casts herself as a devout Protestant who, during her association with her youthful victim, "converts" to the Catholic faith. Such stealth Catholics figure prominently in anti-Catholic narratives: their uncanny ability to penetrate Protestant homes and usurp parental authority reveals the fragility of Protestant households in a post-Emancipation culture. In this instance, the female Jesuit in question, Sister Agatha--a.k.a. Mademoiselle Dupin--is in cahoots with another "friend" of the family, Father Carlo--a.k.a. Monsieur Bouquet--to seduce Mary into a convent and thereby appropriate her considerable estate for the Church. This too, as Maureen Moran points out, is a popular anti-Catholic topos, in which Jesuits secretly circulate through society with "criminal designs on private property."5 Here, conversion and acquisition go hand in hand: Sister Agatha gloats that "'the work assigned me now by the Church is very much to my taste—to bring over this young heiress to the true faith, and to secure her fortune to the Church, while she is safe and happy in the peaceful cloister, far from the snares which surround her position in society'" (26). The very openness of Protestant domestic spaces not only renders them vulnerable to Catholic attack, but also inadvertently enables their erasure. As young heiresses convert, their money and land slowly accrue to the Church's account--a subtler version of the papal aggression.
Where Protestant spaces tend to be dangerously open, Catholic spaces are entirely shut. In an almost parodic accumulation of convent topoi, Sister Agnes offers, in no particular order, barren cells; virtually inedible food; high walls; subterranean dungeons (apparently an essential fashion accessory for any modern convent...); women sleeping in coffins; dirty nuns; "maniacs" of various stripes; torture; and murder. The only thing missing is Maria Monk-style hanky-panky between the priests and nuns, although we do see nuns with crushes (and vice-versa), and at the residence of one priest, Agnes innocently exclaims that "'Everything is arranged for a lady'" (286). Agnes herself falls chastely in love with a priest, in yet another anti-Catholic topos that, as here, usually signifies that heterosexual passions cannot be sucessfully tamed by ascetic discipline; human nature will out. The problematic spaces of the convent, which wall evil in instead of keeping it out, invert the power traditionally ascribed to the virtuous Protestant home, and "registe[r] the tensions of Protestant familial interiors while thwarting domesticity's hegemonic claims."6 In the convent, desire soon takes on twisted and unpredictable shapes, while "fathers," "brothers," and "sisters" keep suspicious watch on each other's heretical opinions. Domestic comfort gives way to self-inflicted agonies, in emulation of St. Rose of Lima (whose ascetic regime also makes a cameo appearance in Catherine Sinclair's Beatrice). Even Sister Agnes' prophetic revenge on the abbot who has her tortured to death--after hallucinating her spirit, he takes a drunken fall down a flight of stairs and cracks his skull open (388)--remains concealed within the convent, so that divine justice itself remains invisible to the outside gaze.
In this novel, the balked gaze in question is generally male. One of the paradoxes of this genre is that in arguing for the necessity of exposing convents to governmental oversight, it necessarily claims that we already know what happens in such fearsome spaces; government intervention will merely demonstrate those assertions already disseminated by anti-Catholic activists. Sister Agnes argues that such oversight is all the more crucial because convents actively work to conceal the evidence of their own depradations. Although Susan M. Griffin notes that "[e]ven when the story is narrated in the third person, the point of view is that of the protagonist, whose scarred and debilitated body bears witness to her first-hand experience of the horrors of Catholicism" (38), the problem of Sister Agnes is that that body undergoes almost total erasure, thanks to the rapid application of quicklime. In effect, the entire narrative dramatizes the inability of staunch Englishmen, undermined by their own government's policies, to gather the necessary evidence to liberate an innocent Englishwoman from the trammels of a foreign religion. Colonel Hayward, who repeatedly tries to liberate Agnes, finds that "no law" (293) in England will allow him to enter a convent without permission, and his son's more dramatic attempt in Italy to help Agnes escape merely perpetuates her death. Masculine energy finds itself cruelly thwarted by the Church's manipulation of the government, which itself abandons its responsibilities to British female subjects. The men seem suspiciously emasculated; poor Colonel Hayward usually winds up ranting and raving. Once a crime occurs, the author argues in the novel's preface, the arm of the law should penetrate domestic space--why not into convent space (4)? In other words, if the sacred space of the Protestant home should be opened to British law, if not to Catholic spies, then surely convents--which claim to substitute themselves for the home--ought to be subjected to similar inspection. The problem, of course, rests on the existence of a crime itself...and the proof of a crime turns out to be the convent's inaccessibility.
The government's problem is its own official policy of toleration. At one point, an irate Colonel Hayward declares that "'before I came to Tuscany, I was the advocate of Catholic emancipation; payment of Irish priests by government; the grant to Maynooth; and what not. Now I have learned something! you may call me a fool for ever, if I don't enter myself a member of a Protestant Association as soon as I reach England, and get up the "No Popery" cry at Grantishall, for the next election. You'll hear of me in parliament by and bye, making Protestant speeches without a doubt'" (394-95). The spirit of Protestant fair play turns out to be its own slow suicide; faced with Catholic intransigence, which reveals by concealment, Colonel Hayward undergoes a political "conversion" that also signals the appropriate evangelical response to the growing Catholic presence. Toleration turns out to be passive collaboration with the demonic, foreign forces of Popery; by contrast, Colonel Hayward's conversion from impotent rescuer to political activist is a program for a revitalized Protestant masculinity, one that will defend British women--and British property--from Catholic toils. By contrast, Agnes' father fails to protect her precisely because he believes that "'the horror of popery felt by our grandfathers is decidedly oldfashioned;—Roman Catholics are viewed in the light of the nineteenth century'" (64). This self-consciously "modern" attitude turns out to be the pose of the non-committal Protestant, willing to engage in religious relativism because his own religion turns out to mean so little. The nineteenth century's light turns out to be a dim one indeed.
1 For Newdegate's career, see Walter Arnstein, Protestant against Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1982).
2 John Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain 1829-1860 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991), 269.
3 All characteristic of what Susan M. Griffin calls the "escaped nun's tale": Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 35.
4 On Liguori in anti-Catholic polemic, see J. L. Altholz, "Truth and Equivocation: Liguori's Moral Theology and Newman's Apologia," Church History 44.1 (1975): 73-84.
5 Maureen Moran, Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 47.
6 Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 126.