Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS Griffin, Susan M. Anti-CadioHcism and Nineteentii-Century Fiction. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004. 284 pp. Cloth: $75.00. Susan's Griffin's Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction not only excavates a rich and diverse transatlantic archive of anti-Catholic texts but charts the major themes of this often-overlooked genre, paying particular attention to the significant role that gender plays within anti-Catholic writing. Positing Catholicism as "the primitive that Protestantism leaves behind" (5) but with which it continues to be in dialogue, Griffin argues that novels of religious polemic ranging from Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures ofthe Hotel Dieu Nunnery ofMontreal to Charlotte Bronte's Villette shed important critical light on the formation and maintenance of national imaginarles in both the U.S. and Britain. Further, by charting how both nations' fascination with anti-Catholicism shapes such diverse political discourses as the escaped nun's tale, nativism, and the Oxford Movement, Griffin uncovers an anti-Catholic corpus that puts Maria Monk in conversation with Sarah Josepha Hale, Henry James and William Dean Howells in dialogue with Benjamin Disraeli. This elegantly written and original literary genealogy thus is an important resource for scholars of history, literature, cultural studies, and religious studies. Ofparticular note is Griffin's attention to the gender dynamics ofantiCatholic writing through the 1870s. Each chapter offers readings of the complex and intricate ways in which masculinity and femininity are at play within the various nationalist tensions that give rise to anti-Catholic narrative forms. Griffin's argument that the nun's story so popular in antebellum America depicts cultural uneasiness about the feminization of American Protestantism is excellent, as is her reading of nativist novels of the 1850s. Suggesting that such popular novels as TheArch Bishop (1855) and TheJesuit'sDaughter (1854) represent the specterofpaternity gone awry, Griffin makes a persuasive case for reading such texts as depicting a midcentury cultural perception that the true American father was missing. With their repeated narratives ofyoung Protestant native-born American men struggling to rescue young women from the clutches of"false" Catholic fathers, these stories reflect Americans' consciousness that the founding fathers had disappeared, with the deaths of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, and that the paternal legacy they left was difficult if not impossible to fulfill as it demanded, of necessity, a break with past paternity. Such accounts of the significance of gender to the transatlantic antiCatholic tradition generate important new readings offamiliar novels such as Villette and The American and of lesser known novels such as Augusta J. Evans' Inez: A Tale ofthe Alamo. Yet precisely because Griffin's antiCatholic canon features such novels as Evans's, one might wonder about 120Reviews the importance of race and ethnicity to the anti-Catholic literary tradition with which Griffin is interested. Written while the young Evans lived in San Antonio, Texas during the Mexican American War, Inezdepicts an earlier struggle for independence—the Republic of Texas' struggle for independence against Mexico and Santa Anna, whom Evans identifies as "the tyrant who had subverted the liberties of [their] country" (154). The arch villain, Father Mazzolin, thus comes to represent the despotism not only of Catholic, but of Mexican, rule. Because Griffin is interested in U.S./British anti-Catholic interactions, the ways in which U.S. anti-Catholicism might be in dialogue with French Canadian and South American catholic traditions are beyond the scope of her project. Yet such influences at times intrude into her project, raising questions that will no doubt generate further studies on anti-Catholicism. Griffin's closing reading of Disraeli, James, and Howells shows how anti-Catholic discourse, by late century, became widely dispersed throughout non-polemical Anglo-American writing. This ambitious and suggestive account of Disraeli's Lothair(1870), Howells' A Foregone Conclusion (1874), and James's The American (1877) shows the important part that anti-Catholicism plays in these writers' efforts to shape their professional writerly identities in the 1870s. Such a reading suggests that anti-Catholicism continued to exert a generative influence on prose that was not overtly engaged with religious debates, and thus that it infiltrated writing that seems at first reading to be entirely secular. We see one example...

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