Awful Disclosures: Women's Evidence in the Escaped Nun's Tale

Abstract

Popular American tales of women's escapes from Roman Catholic convents were important manifestations of the virulent anti-Catholicism of the 1830s and 1850s. These stories also reveal how questions of evidence were imbricated with the woman question in nineteenth-century American culture. “Fictional” and “nonfictional” versions of these narratives attempt to prove their veracity, using a common standard of evidence and shared methods of authentication, documentation, and corroboration—including a reliance on their Protestant audience's reading history. Yet the multiple voices and forms and the visual, as well as verbal, rhetoric that the telling of the escaped nun's story entails work to destabilize feminine spiritual, religious, and moral authority. The escaped nun's intertextual story expresses and contains a cultural anxiety about young Protestant women and their influence in the remaking of American Protestant religious practices.

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