Contextual Documents

A short Maria Monk bio

Appendix to Monk's text (skip to page 201-ish)
Includes reviews, refutations, Monk's personal defenses, etc.  The link sticks you onto the title page, but skip to page 201 or so for the beginning of the appendix.

Further Disclosures by Maria Monk
Warning...it's long.

Affidavit by Maria Monk's Mother
According to her mom:  she's never been in a convent but was in fact driven crazy by a pencil shoved into her ear at an early age--thus not the most credible of sources.  Nice.

Another review/refutation from 1871
35 years later people, people are still pissed off.

Some background about Maria Monk and Rebecca Reed

Proposal

“This singular woman”: Mad Jane Ray and the Unruly Female
Body in Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures

Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal has often been discussed in the context of the nineteenth-century Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda novel (Ray Billington, Jenny Franchot, and Nancy Schultz,). This genre is frequently examined not only in light of the nineteenth-century religious and political climate but also in relation to issues of female domesticity and agency. In addition, Joseph Mannard, Susan Griffin, and others consider the convent novel in relation to the American domestic novel also popular at the time, arguing that the convent tale questions nineteenth-century paradigms of female domesticity. My project will engage with this body of research by examining Monk’s portrayal of mad Jane Ray. This character provides a marginal voice that confronts both the ideal of the domestic woman and the disciplinary systems of control and silence apparent not only in the convent but in culture more generally. I argue that Jane Ray’s status as an unruly madwoman, as Other, provides a space outside these systems from which to question, subvert, and eventually break them down.

My argument engages previous research on Awful Disclosures, the convent novel, and the captivity narrative, focusing on studies of female otherness, including Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic and more current scholarship that addresses issues of transgressive and/or monstrous female bodies, carnival theory and the inversion of gender, transgression of place, and women’s subversive speech acts.

In today’s cultural climate, in which the problematic nature of the female body is still very much with us (as evidenced in the writings of Haraway, Halberstam, Butler, and countless other feminist and queer theorists), it will be useful to examine this older text through a more contemporary lens. Recent scholarly revisitation of this older text helps in the creation of a “usable past,” by which we can further understand historical representations of gender and thus come closer to understanding and rectifying those in our own time.

Abstract

Griffin, Susan. “Awful Disclosures: Women’s Evidence in the Escaped Nun’s Tale.”
PMLA 111.1 (1996): 93-107. JSTOR. Web. 14 Sept. 2010.

Griffin examines the proliferation of escaped nun’s tales from the 1830s to the 1850s, most notably those of Maria Monk and Rebecca Reed, in light of not only the tradition of anti-Catholic literature propagated by Protestants at the time but also the implications of the female religious renegade for women more broadly. By juxtaposing the escaped nun’s tale with the more popular genre of the nineteenth-century women’s domestic novel, Griffin illustrates how the problematic figure of the escaped nun, her status as both accuser and evidence of Catholic crimes, and the discourse surrounding her imprisonment and escape undermine the authoritative female ideal exemplified in the domestic novel. She outlines common tropes in escaped nuns’ tales, particularly those relating to supposed proof of the author’s veracity via strategies of both inclusion (maps and diagrams, interviews, depositions, corroborating articles from clergy, etc.) and exclusion (pointing to but suppressing certain supposed evidence because it is too shocking, too racy, lost, or inaccessible somehow), creating “blank spaces” (99) for the reader to construct the textual reality of the narratives. She places this common emphasis on authorial veracity in the context of nineteenth-century attitudes toward women’s evidence in the public sphere, arguing that, as female public speech and agency was at the time viewed as transgressive, women must gain the approval and backing of men before engaging in public discourse; this necessity reveals itself in the often male-dominated evidence of the nuns’ tales. However, these excessive corroborations also serve to undermine the veracity of the female speakers, as their adherence to generic tropes and conventions further fictionalizes the content of the narratives; women’s evidence, then, is both insisted upon and simultaneously discounted, further complicating the question of female agency.

In my paper, I plan to discuss issues of female transgressiveness and agency in terms of the body, speech, and writing. This article provides useful background information on the transgressive nature not only of the escaped nun’s tale genre itself but also of its authors, characters, and audiences. I plan to use this article and others like it to illustrate the complications inherent in the feminine struggle for bodily agency in Awful Disclosures, the places in which this struggle meets with resistance, and the ways in which it attempts, successfully or unsuccessfully, to overcome it.