Maria Monk

Maria Monk (27 June 1816 – summer of 1839) was a Canadian woman who claimed to have been a nun who had been sexually exploited in her convent. She, or ghost writers who used her as their puppet, wrote a sensationalistic book about these allegations.

Maria Monk's book Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun's Life in a Convent Exposed was published in January 1836. In it, Monk claimed that nuns of the Sisters of Charity of a Montreal convent of the Hôtel-Dieu were forced to have sex with the priests in the seminary next door. The priests supposedly entered the convent through a secret tunnel. If the sexual union produced a baby, it was baptized and then strangled and dumped into a lime pit in the basement. Uncooperative nuns disappeared.

There is some evidence that Maria Monk suffered a brain injury as a child. One result of this brain injury was that Monk became easily manipulated, and was not able to distinguish between fact and fantasy. It has been suggested that Monk was manipulated into playing a role for profit by her publisher or her ghost writers.

The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, excerpt

"The Superior now informed me that having taken the black veil, it only remained that I should swear the three oaths customary on becoming a nun; and that some explanation would be necessary from her. I was now, she told me, to have access to every part of the edifice, even the cellar, where two of the sisters were imprisoned for causes that she did not mention. I must be informed that one of my great duties was to obey the priests in all things; and this I soon learnt, to my utter astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them. I expressed some of the feelings which this announcement excited in me, which came upon me like a flash of lightning; but the only effect was to set her arguing with me, in favour of the crime, representing it as a virtue acceptable to God, and honourable to me. The priests, she said, were not situated like other men, being forbidden to marry; while they lived secluded, laborious, and self-denying lives for our salvation. They might be considered our saviours, as without their service we could not obtain pardon of sin, and must go to hell. Now it was our solemn duty, on withdrawing from the world, to consecrate our lives to religion, to practice every species of self-denial. We could not be too humble, nor mortify our feelings too far; this was to be done by opposing them and acting contrary to them; and what she proposed was, therefore, pleasing in the sight of God. I now felt how foolish I had been to place myself in the power of such persons as were around me."

The work is a curious one, since whoever wrote it was not entirely lacking in ability as a writer; it is in places a psychologically plausible description of the sort of thing that conceivably could go on in some ultra-authoritarian institutions, and it does not always adopt a sensationalist tone in spite of the very serious nature of its allegations.

An atmosphere of anti-Catholic sensationalism

Maria Monk's book came shortly after an earlier incident in Boston, Massachusetts prompted by an anti-Catholic book. In 1835 Rebecca Reed wrote a book called Six Months in a Convent, which contained an unsympathetic description of her alleged experiences in an Ursuline convent school in Charlestown, Massachusetts. This convent was burnt down by a mob in 1834, shortly before the Reed book appeared, after an incident in which one of the nuns attempted to escape and was persuaded to return, and a rumor circulated that she was being held against her will (August 11-12,1834. For more details, see Ursuline Convent Riots . Reed died shortly after the publication of her book, of tuberculosis that was widely believed to have been caused by the austerities she practised in the convent.

Literary antecedents

Reed's book became a best-seller, and Monk or her handlers hoped to cash in on the evident market for anti-Catholic horror fiction by their offering. The tale of Maria Monk was, in fact, clearly modelled on the gothic novels that were popular in the early 19th century, a literary genre that had already been used for anti-Catholic sentiments in works such as Matthew Lewis' The Monk. It contains the genre-defining elements of a young, innocent woman being trapped in a remote, old, and gloomily picturesque estate; she learns the dark secrets the place contains, and after harrowing adventures makes her escape.

Monk claimed that she had lived in the convent for seven years, got pregnant and fled because she did not want her baby destroyed. She had told her story to a Protestant minister in New York, who had encouraged her to tell her tale to a wider audience. According to Protestant newspaper American Protestant Vindicator, by July 1836 it had sold 26,000 copies. Later other publishers also published books that supported its claims or were close imitators - not to mention tracts that refuted the tale.

A public furor

The book caused a public outcry. Protestants in Montreal demanded an investigation and the local bishop organized one. Inquiry found no evidence to support the claims but many American Protestants refused to accept the result and accused the bishop of cover-up.

Colonel William Leet Stone, a Protestant New York City newspaper editor acquired a permission to set up his own investigation. In October 1836 his team entered the convent and found that the descriptions in the book did not even match the convent interior. During their first visit they were denied entry to the basement and the nuns' personal quarters. Stone returned to New York and interviewed Monk and came to a conclusion that she had never been in the convent. In the later visit he was given the total access to all quarters. Stone's team found no evidence that Maria Monk had even lived in the convent.

Maria Monk disappeared from the public view. It was later rumored that she was actually a Montreal prostitute and had spent the seven years in Magdalen Asylum for Wayward Girls. Many details of the story could have been from her legal guardian William K. Hoyte, an anti-Catholic activist and his associates. The writers later sued each other for the share of the profits.

Her later life; career of the tale

As for Maria Monk, she ran away to Philadelphia with a lover. She penned a sequel, Further Disclosures of Maria Monk, which added nothing to her tale. When she gave birth to another illegitimate child in 1838, most of her supporters abandoned her.

The Boston Pilot ran this obituary on September 8, 1839: "There is an end of Maria Monk; she died in the almshouse, Blackwell's Island, New York, on Tuesday". However, the book Awful Disclosures remained in print for years afterwards in various formats and was intermittently revived. There appear to have been two Australian editions (1920, 1940). The last recorded unsupplemented facsimile edition was published in 1977. For more subsequent edition information, see below.

Bibliography and Subsequent Editions

Posthumous editions of Maria Monk were published in 1837 (New York: Howe and Bates), 1920 (Melbourne: Wyatt and Watt), 1940? (Brisbane: Clarion Propaganda Series),1962 (Hamden: Archon), and were often reprints or facsimiles of the original. In 1975, a microform format was made available from New Haven, Connecticut. ISBN references are available for the following editions:

Maria Monk: Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk and the Hotel Dieu Monastery of Montreal: New York: Arno Press: 1977: ISBN 0405099622

Maria Monk: Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: Manchester: Milner: 1985 ISBN 0665383622.

Maria Monk: Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: London: Senate: 1997: ISBN 1859584993

The last two aforementioned editions are noted as facsimiles in online bibliographic records. Therefore, they are presumably intended primarily for those interested in the historical aspects of Maria Monk's claims and the related Ursuline Convent Riots in Charlestown, Masschuesetts in August 1834 that preceded it. Nancy Lusignan Schultz has edited and prefaced an investigation of both the Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk cases. It incorporates both Reed's Six Months in A Convent (1835) and the Awful Disclosures (1836):

Nancy Lusignan Schultz (ed) Veil of Fear: Nineteenth Century Convent Tales: West Lafayette: NotaBell Books: 1999: ISBN 155753134X

Nancy Lusignan Schultz (ed), Veil of Fear: Nineteenth Century Convent Tales, Purdue University (1999) ISBN 155753134X