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.