The Construction of the Gothic Nun: Fantasies and the Religious Imaginary”

1 “The Construction of the Gothic Nun: Fantasies and the Religious Imaginary” Diane Long Hoeveler Marquette University I would like to begin my talk today by asking a few questions about the construction of the gothic nun. And by that I mean the nun as she was represented in the hundreds of gothic novels and chapbooks that appeared in France, England, Ireland, and Germany from around 1770-1870. What was it about nuns and convents that so entranced the imaginations of nineteenth-century readers of gothic novels and chapbooks? Why did this reading population recur to meditating on the enigma of women shut up in gloomy cloisters with only a few celibate men allowed access to them? What sort of ideological fantasy work did this representation accomplish for a population that was determined to believe that such an arrangement was not only unnatural, but dangerous and ultimately threatening to the body politic? As far as her origins are concerned, it would appear that the gothic nun owes a good deal of her pedigree to the Roman vestal virgins, a group of six to twelve women selected at a young age to tend the central hearth fire of Rome while living as celibates for thirty years in the heart of the Palatine. The life of a vestal virgin was privileged, with a high degree of social and political status, but should a vestal virgin fail in her duty to remain chaste, she was condemned to a live 2 burial within an underground chamber, left there with only enough food to survive for a few days at the most (Wildfang 1). This fate sounds remarkably similar to the one suffered by Agnes in Lewis’s The Monk (and the trope of live burial is repeated in dozens of lesser-known gothic novels and chapbooks). If we move then to the medieval period, Powers’s pioneering study of the British convent examines the realities of these women’s lives, while also providing archival vignettes and case histories of individuals. She observes that medieval women entered the convent for a “career, a vocation, a prison, a refuge; to its different inmates the medieval nunnery was all these things” (25). She concluded her study by noting that using convents as dumping grounds for unmarriageable women finally compromised the entire convent system, a concept that becomes central to how the anti-Catholic gothic ideology functioned in the novels. The gothic nun’s origins are a curious mixture, then, of the literary and the historic, of women found in legends as well as actual personages spanning ten centuries and a variety of texts that range from Spain and Italy to France, Germany, England, and finally Canada and America. From pornographic tales about lesbian nuns to shocking stories of reluctant women forced into convents only to find themselves giving birth to babies that were then hastily baptized and murdered by their priest fathers, the highly and ambivalently sexualized figure of the gothic nun haunted and intrigued the European imaginary for a variety of political, social, philosophical, and religious reasons. Hushed and secretive convents, as the abodes of these seductive creatures came to be figured in the gothic imaginary, were depicted as mysteriously tabooed locales that competed with the patriarchal bourgeois family for control over nubile female bodies. Even more ominously, gothic convents were presided over by perverse abbesses and lecherous monks 3 rather than the sexless mothers and benignly enlightened patriarchs who claimed to be in charge. These menacing convents became one of the locus classicus in the gothic canon, full of dark hallways, dank underground cells, and sexually repressed or perverse women, young and old, beautiful and homely, content or maddeningly frustrated by their lots in life. In many ways, the representation of the gothic nun in her gloomy convent functioned as a blank slate on which both Catholics and anti-Catholics could project any number of fears, anxieties, prejudices, and fantasies both positive and negative and see them come to life on her frail frame. One fact, however, is undeniable: the representation of the gothic nun is multivalent, full of horror and mockery; she can best be understood by reading a variety of texts that expose her full and contradictory complexity in the British Protestant imaginary. It has been recently argued that the construction and popular circulation of the British gothic nun began with the adaptation of a French sentimental tale by Joseph Addison, Theodosius and Constantia (Spectator 1711) and a few years later by Alexander Pope’s romanticized version of the doomed Eloise in his Eloisa to Abelard (1717), forced into a religious vocation against her wishes. One need look no further for examples than Stéphanie de Genlis’s depiction of Cecilia d’Aimeri in her epistolary novel of education, Adèle et Théodore, later published in England in a chapbook adaptation as The History of Cecilia, or the Beautiful Nun, or Matthew Lewis’s portrait of Agnes de Medina in The Monk to see how popular this particular sentimental representation of the nun was in gothic texts of the time. But by focusing only on these figures, we have a very partial and incomplete portrait of a figure that can be understood in a sympathetic light, as a victim romanticized by an Enlightenment culture that mourned her loss of love and marriage for the chilly climes of a convent. 4 There is much to be said for this one particular face of the gothic nun, and certainly it is true that unlucky aristocratic women were forced into convents by their families for financial and other reasons. With the dissolution of British monasteries in 1539, some British nuns initially went abroad to join convents there, but it was not until the late sixteenth century that British women founded expatriate English convents, three by 1610 and finally twenty-two in France, the southern Netherlands, and Portugal by 1710 (Dolan 510). As only one convent remained in operation in England after the Reformation, Bar Convent in York, nuns were not a visible presence in England until French nuns seeking refuge began appearing on British soil in 1792. If a British woman wanted to join a religious order, she went to a British Catholic convent in Lisbon or France, or possibly the Spanish Netherlands and her family would travel abroad to visit her (Watkinson 220-31). As Dolan notes, “visits to women’s religious houses in the Southern Netherlands became a standard feature on tourists’ itineraries by the late seventeenth century” (510). In particular, Protestant tourists like Walpole and Thomas Gray, for instance, regularly visited convents, and the nuns were something of an “attraction” behind their convent grates, viewed as exotics or living vestiges of an era that the British Protestant imaginary had rejected and yet still nostalgically wanted to view from a safe distance. This benign face of the nun, however, was by no means the whole story about the nun’s identity or role in the gothic. Indeed, the gothic ideology relies on a bifurcation of its imaginary so that it consistently presents all of its major stock characters in a duplicitous and split manner. The sentimental figures of Eloise or Constantia are mirrored by any number of sexually voracious, perverse, and manic nuns or prioresses, for instance, the mad and adulterous Sister Agnes/Laurentini in Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, the vicious Abbess of San Stephano in 5 The Italian, or the terrible Mother St. Agatha, “La Domina,” who presides over the sadistic and murderous Convent of St. Clare in Lewis’s The Monk. Or nuns are depicted in any number of gothic novels as petty gossips, shrews, sexual hypocrites, or gluttons. We certainly see this in De Sade’s Justine and Juliette (the source for so many evil abbesses, modeled on Sade’s portrait of the Abbess Delbène), as well as in Radcliffe’s novels or Elizabeth Helme’s Magdalen; or The Penitent of Godstow (1812). As I have attempted to argue so far, the gothic nun is a complex, multifaceted, and ambivalent representation: sometimes the innocent victim of her own wayward sexuality which causes her to be drawn into a doomed affair with a monk, perhaps based on the legend of the twelfth-century Yorkshire Nun of Watton (Constable). Or sometimes she is the victim of her family’s inability or unwillingness to provide a dowry (for example, as depicted in Aphra Behn’s The Rover [1677], Diderot’s fictitious Suzanne Simonin in The Nun, or the well-known story of Marianna de Leyva [1575-1650], better known as the Nun of Monza, fictionalized in Manzoni’s The Betrothed). At other points she is the lesbian victimizer of other nuns on whom she preys, perhaps based on the case of Sister Benedetta Carlini, a seventeenth-century lesbian abbess in Pescia (J. Brown) or the licentious lesbian nun Sister Angelique in the pornographic Venus in the Cloister, or the Nun in her Chemise by Jean Barrin (1680; publ 1719). As Valerie Traub has observed, lesbian nuns were a crucial component in pornographic attacks on Catholicism: “same- sex transgressions are fostered by the innate hypocrisy of Catholics and the deprivations of sex- segregation: celibate, and therefore burning in lust, the wily nun is imagined to satisfy her lust either with other hypocrites like herself or, particularly egregious, with unsuspecting novitiates” (63). 6 Nuns begin to function in anti-Catholic pornography during the sixteenth century. For instance, the French anti-clerical classic, Venus in the Cloister was clearly derived from Pietro Aretino’s dialogues in his Ragionamenti (1534-36), which had five dialogues between Sister Angelique, a lesbian nun of nineteen, and Sister Agnes, a novice who is an apt pupil for Angelique’s lessons in “Florentine kissing” and fondling (qtd.

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