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"Maria Monk's Bad Associations: Institutionalism, Anti-Catholicism, and Reform in Antebellum America"
Christopher Castiglia, Professor of English, Loyola University-Chicago
November 17, 2005

Beginning in the mid-1830s and up until the late 1850s, some of America's most eminent thinkers--Lyman Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Calvin Colton, William Lloyd Garrison, and Francis Lieber among them--argued that liberty and democracy depended on a newly conceived network of institutions. These men collectively evolved a theory of institutionalism, which placed liberty always on the receding horizon of the future and absorbed citizens' creative participation in democracy into abstract agency. Curiously, in each of these men's works, Institutionalism arises alongside moments of profound anti-Catholicism, in which the Pope and his Jesuitical agents are accused of undermining American values through the confessional and the pulpit. What the relationship was between institutionalism and anti-Catholicism, and how Maria Monk, a self-proclaimed "captive" of a Montreal convent in the early 1830s, used that relationship to express a larger critique of modern disciplinarity, are the subjects of this essay.

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This chapter is part of a project by Professor Castiglia entitled Interior States; several parts of the project have been previously published in the venues below:

"Pedagogical Discipline and the Creation of White Citizenship: John Witherspoon, Robert Finley, and the Colonization Society," Early American Literature 33, 2 (1998), 192-214.

"Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth," American Literary History 14, 1 (Spring 2002), 32-59.

"The Genealogy of a Democratic Crush," in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Duke UP, 2002), 195-217.

"The Marvelous Queer Interiors of The House of the Seven Gables," in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Richard H. Millington (Cambridge UP, 2004), 186-206.

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Professor Castiglia is also the co-editor of recent special themed issues of two journals, American Literature 76, 3 (Sept. 2004), on "Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies" and Early American Literature 37, 1 (2002), on "Interiority in Early American Literature."