The Truth Behind the Desiring Nun Archetype and the Stereotypical Use of the Convent As a Setting in the 18Th Century Literature Of

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun: The Truth behind the Desiring Nun Archetype and the Stereotypical use of the Convent as a Setting in the 18th Century Literature of Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood By Veronica Lauren Wilson, B.A. A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English California State University Bakersfield In Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of Masters of English Spring 2014 Copyright By Veronica Lauren Wilson 2014 Wilson 1 The literature and drama of the long eighteenth century is overpopulated with nuns, and they are all transgressors of patriarchal society in one way or another. These nuns are all vow-breakers, fornicators, and fallen women; whether they were ruined after taking their holy vows or took their vows as a way to escape a society who rejected them for being ruined, there is one thing that is certain: Catholic nuns of eighteenth century literature are clearly trouble. This theme is too pervasive to be a mere whim, so where does this negative view of Catholic women monastics come from? Some of the blame can certainly be placed on the anti-Catholic sentiment that saturated Protestant England’s society, but more of it can be place on the even more pervasive anti-woman sentiment in England at this time. What is even more surprising is that this anti-woman stance is seemingly taken up by even the female authors of the time. Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood both have a remarkable amount of novels and plays that reference nuns and convent life, and, if given only a cursory reading, they may seem to uphold the view of women monastics, and even women in general, as laughable. However, while their works may seem to argue against autonomous women, when examined within the historical context of not only nuns but also women of the time and viewed through the more contemporary lenses of popular culture and feminist theory, it becomes very clear that they were twisting this well-known archetype to their own purpose. Although they were following the usual pattern for these types of stories in many ways, there were very slight variations in the works that made them stand out from the others; however, these variations might not have been noticed because the works of women authors were not subjected to any critical treatment or given any real consideration at all as culturally important works until almost two centuries later. Wilson 2 Women and Convents in the Eighteenth-Century To understand the cultural context that Behn and Haywood were building on, it is first necessary to closely examine the English understanding of nuns in an eighteenth century context. In her essay “’For Virgin Buildings oft Brought Forth’: Fantasies of Convent Sexuality,” Kate Chedgzov points out that, to the people of England at this time Catholic monastics were, largely, unknown because “between the dissolution of the convents between 1536-39 and the foundation of the Bar Convent at York in 1686 there were no convents [there]”(61). For more than a century there were no Catholic nuns in England, so for English audiences and readers, the nun was a fantasy, and was used by authors as a sort of mythical character that most people had never actually encountered. Therefore, writers made generous use of artistic license to create a stock character that represented what Frances E. Dolan calls, in her article “Why Are Nuns Funny?,” the “ part of Catholicism that is to be dismissed rather than feared: the absurdity of female authority and separatism” (Dolan 509). Society at this time saw the idea of women living separately from men so laughable that these women became stock characters who were incapable of success in life. They were either horrible, sadistic Abbesses or fragile young women with no autonomy, desperately in need of men to save them by stealing them away from the confines of the convent and marrying them. In the literary works of this time the convents themselves were also a standard setting. In her article “Jane Barker and the Politics of Catholic Celibacy,” Tonya Moutry McArthur argues that authors often made use of convents “as a plot device: the possibility of cloistration is often a threat to young women who disobey their cruel parents, an escape from them if they wish to Wilson 3 avoid an unavoidable marriage, a barrier that prohibits amours and thus increases desire, a last resort for women who are ruined, or a temporary depository for women who are not needed currently in the narrative”(602). Convents as a plot device were often vilified, used as a threat for young women who failed to conform to societal norms, or both of these. To examine the question of why Protestants would have been so fascinated with the Catholics who had long ago left England, one must consider the history of nuns in England. Despite the fact that convents were banished from England along with all of the other Catholic organization, there were still “English nuns after the Reformation, [but] they did not live in England and they were not especially visible from there” (Dolan 510). Devout English Catholic women did not all give up their religion because their monarch said to; some of them simply fled the country. The fact that these women were forced to leave the country is one of the primary reasons why they were still so talked about in England. The women of these convents chose to deny the government mandated religion, leave their country, and flout tradition by deciding to live on their own, with no male relative in attendance to oversee their lives. In short, they ignored every culturally prescribed role deemed appropriate for a woman by defying their monarch, leaving their families, refusing to conform to the accepted religion, and refusing to marry and help their husbands continue their family names by bearing children. They did all of this during a time when women were taught that their most desirable quality was obedience. It is true that Catholic monks of the time were also banished from England, but the idea of men leaving home and being in charge of their own lives and decisions was not nearly so Wilson 4 strange. According to Ellen Pollack’s article, “The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope,” during this time, “the burden of productivity fell increasingly to men, women became the embodiment of moral value, exemplifying at her best a passive and contemplative (in some ways a curiously catholic) ideal” (Pollack 42). Therefore, men who chose to work and live on their own were still conforming to some gender expectations, even if they were Catholic. Women of any religion that chose to provide for themselves were an abnormality even if they did maintain the ideology of a passive, virtuous woman. Because of these particular circumstances, convents were not simply seen as places of devotion; instead, they were “centers of political and cultural resistance, allowing women an alternative to marriage and motherhood and serving as spaces within which single and married women found fellowship and retreat, education and spiritual direction” (McArthur 597). To a modern mind, this may not seem that exceptional, but to the patriarchal English mind, this was unnatural and deserving of mockery. Not only was the idea of women living self-sufficiently a matter of great humor for Protestant men, the idea that women did not wish to marry was also a matter for public concern. Celibacy was a particular matter on which the Catholic and Protestant Churches disagreed. Pollack reminds us that puritan preachers believed marriage “was a high spiritual calling for both sexes and the conjugal relation an image of Christ’s relation to the church. Where the Catholic Church had traditionally placed virginity and celibacy above marriage, which is regarded as unclean, the protestant sects of the German and English Reformation recognized matrimony as a natural state” (40). Not only were nuns ridiculous because they were women who disregarded the religion which was endorsed by the monarch, they were also women who Wilson 5 lived in an unnatural state because they refused to marry and procreate. The patriarchal structure was so firmly entrenched in Protestant society that women who refused to help perpetuate the system by aiding in the production of the next generation were seen as unnatural because virginity was “’virtuous’ only when its preservation actively served the ends of a system of patriarchal marriage that assigned it to the proprietorship and utility of men” (Pollack 55). Virginity was only seen as a positive attribute if the men in charge could benefit from it, and these men saw no benefit in women who locked themselves away from society and refused to participate in it in the culturally prescribed manner. Women living by themselves in a community were not just seen as a problem by the Protestants either; the leaders of the Catholic Church struggled with the problem of letting women live on their own as well. Within Catholicism, chastity was seen as a virtue in both men and women, and they saw marriage as merely “a necessary evil for the propagation of the race and the avoidance of sexual sin” (Pollack 40). Therefore, the Catholic Church was obligated to support the idea of women committing themselves to a chaste life; however, there was a great deal of debate and uncertainty surrounding how the nuns should be allowed to live. Even in the century before Aphra Behn began writing, there were documented cases of the men of the Catholic Church trying to curb what was seen as immoral behavior in convents.

Load more