Pornography of the Puritan

Much of these past two months has been consumed by research into Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, its supposed author and the clergymen who perpetrated the hoax. Words are nearly always accompanied by images that are disturbing and, in some cases, unintentionally comical. The Disneyesque depiction of Maria above, taken from the cover of an undated 20th century English edition, ranks with the most tame. Time and again, I'm reminded of Richard Hofstadter's observation that 'anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan'.

Most 19th century editions feature the same 38 engravings, all depicting characters and scenes in the book. There is, for example, the 'inhuman priest' Bonin in action pose. According to the book, it is he who, with an undisclosed number of nuns, trampled Sister St. Frances to death. Many of the images feature tormented nuns, women who have endured rape and torture, such as the 'melancholy' Sister St. Martin and 'Mad Jane Ray'. In the illustration below we see Maria herself, recovering from 'the cap', an instrument of punishment described as 'small, made of a reddish looking leather, fitted closely to the head, and fastened under the chin with a kind of buckle.' The reader is told that it was 'common practice to tie the nun's hands behind, and gag her before the cap was put on, to prevent noise and resistance.'

While the reader is shown the convent's tools of torture, the closest we get to an actual depiction accompanies a detailed description of the punishment inflicted upon poor Jane Ray. Remarks our heroine, 'I could not help noticing how very similar this punishment was to that of the Inquisition.' And so, we're provided with an engraving.

Bondage, flogging, branding... it's no wonder that the 'awful disclosures' found readers amongst those attracted to the works of Sacher-Masoch, Sade and Mirbeau. Indeed, the book has at times been packaged to attract just such an audience. Here, for example, is a 1971 edition from London's Canova Press (publishers of The Order of the Rod and Harriet Marwood, Governess).

The most egregious illustration I've yet come across comes not from a copy of Awful Disclosures, but a tract promoting the book's claim that the Hôtel-Dieu convent contains a lime pit into which the infants of nuns and priests are thrown.

Perhaps a bit of comic relief is in order. I recognize and appreciate that there will be some who will not recognize this last example as such, but like the ranting of conspiracy theorist and crazy man Glenn Beck, I find it pretty amusing. In 1854, an earlier loon named H.M. Hatch self-published Popery Unmasked, a 76-page booklet intended to expose the 'debasing tendency of Roman Catholicism'... and, it seems, Pius IX as Satan. The author references Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk as one of five works that 'stand as high as any historical works now in use'. Not that the authority conferred by Hatch in any way prevents him from tampering with the text – he abridges here and adds a phrase or two there, pretty much making a mess of things. For Hatch, like Beck, there isn't a lie that can't be improved upon.

Related posts:

Maria Monk's Immortal Book

Maria Monk and the Kennedy Campaign

Beauty Neglected

From time to time, by which I mean every other day, I receive emails from various online book marketplaces pushing titles that they somehow think I'll be wanting to buy. Most are ignored, but I usually have time for the folks at AbeBooks, who seem alone in recognizing my interests. Their latest – subject line: '30 Beautiful Old Books We'd Buy For the Cover Alone' – points to a visual feast comprised of titles published from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th. Who would've thought that a volume titled The Book of Bugs could look so attractive?

Among the other beauties is A Japanese Blossom, the 1906 novel by Winnifred Eaton, published under her nom de plume Onoto Watanna. I've written a good deal on Eaton in print, and don't really want to repeat myself here, but I continue to be mystified by the lack of recognition she's received in this fair Dominion. Eaton's story is remarkable on so very many levels, beginning with her birth in 1875 Montreal to an English silk merchant turned landscape painter and his Chinese wife, herself the orphaned child of circus performers. One of fourteen children, Winnifred grew up near poverty, yet managed to become one of the wealthiest Canadian writers of her day. No doubt some inspiration was derived from her older sister Edith, who in recent years has been described repeatedly as the 'mother of Asian American literature'. Winnifred's own literary career began at the age of fourteen with the sale of a short story to Montreal's Metropolitan Magazine. By the fin de siècle she'd embraced Japonisme and, as Onoto Watanna, arrived in New York, where she presented herself as the daughter of an Englishman and a Nagasaki noblewoman. Her second novel, A Japanese Nightingale (1901), sold over 200,000 copies, was adapted to the Broadway stage and inspired a silent picture.

There is a great deal more to Eaton's story, including a career in Hollywood and her return to Canada as the wife of a wealthy Alberta rancher, but it's unlikely that you'll find any trace at your local public library. The Canadian Encyclopedia has no entry on Eaton, nor does she figure in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. However, she is the subject of a very fine biography, Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton (2001), written by her granddaughter. There's also a biography of her sister, Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton (1995). Both published by the University of Illinois Press, they're part of an a revival that has seen number of Watanna books reprinted in the United States. To these I recommend the University of Virginia Library's Winnifred Eaton Digital Archive, which features a growing number of her fiction and non-fiction writings. The biographical sketch provided by the site makes no mention of Canada. Perhaps we deserve nothing more.

A good many ugly-looking books have been featured in this blog; consider this small sampling of Watanna titles an attempt at redressing the balance.

A Japanese Nightingale

New York: Harper & Bros., 1901.

The Heart of the Hyacinth

New York: Harper & Bros., 1903.

Daughters of Nijo

New York: Macmillan, 1904.

Tama

New York: Harper & Bros., 1910.

Maria Monk's Immortal Book

Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk;

or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun's Life Exposed!

Manchester: Milner & Co., n.d.

192 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related posts:

Pornography of the Puritan

Maria Monk and the Kennedy Campaign

Words of Hate for Maria Monk

Drapeau, Destruction and a Blue Plaque Candidate

I do not like you Jean Drapeau,

And well I know the reason why;

Your concentration on the cash

(That peasant passion)

Shows always in the lipless grin

Under the little merciless moustache,

Revealing what ideas swim within

The circle of your skull

To make our city — in the modern fashion —

Not beautiful

But only big, and rich, and dull.

— John Glassco, Montreal, 1973

A sequel, of sorts, to yesterday's post. On my recent trip to Montreal I took several photos of things Glassco. The poet had a complicated relationship with the city of his birth. At eighteen, he saw it as a place of provincialism. Glassco famously fled for Paris, where he enjoyed and endured Montparnassian adventures and was very nearly felled by tuberculosis. Yet, this same Montreal – the Royal Victoria Hospital, to be precise – held the knowledge and ability that saved his life. After his recovery, Glassco again escaped the city, settled in the Eastern Townships, and lived for decades as a semi-recluse. It was only in his last two decades that he truly returned. Many of his final years were spent on an unpublished novel, Guilt and Mourning, set in a fantastic Montreal that has been spared the destruction of the 20th century.

Above is the westernmost entrance to the Guy-Concordia Metro, located at the northwest corner of St-Mathieu and de Maisonneuve. In 1909, it was the site of a grand house in which the poet was born. This stretch of de Maisonneuve was then known as St-Luc – hence, 'Jean de Saint-Luc', the pseudonym he claimed to have used for Contes en crinoline, his non-existent first book. St-Luc was made part of de Maisonneuve in the 1950s (following modifications to the intersection at Guy).

Simpson Street's Chelsea Place, looking towards Sherbrooke. A large gathering of Neo-Georgian homes with pleasant courtyard, it rests on the foundation and grounds of Edward Rawlings' mansion. Rawlings, the founder of the Guarantee Company of North America, was Glassco's grandfather. The poet often claimed the mansion as his birthplace – not true, though he did live there for several years as a boy. In 1925, it was sold and razed; the gardens were plowed over and its peach orchard was destroyed. All that remains is a lone chestnut tree (to the left of the passing PT Cruiser).

3663 Jeanne-Mance (right door, two uppermost floors), Glassco's final Montreal address. He shared this flat with his second wife, Marion McCormick, for nearly ten years. On 29 January 1981, the poet died in a small room on the top storey.

The Mysterious Question Mystery

The Canadian Century: English Canadian Writing Since Confederation

A. J. M. Smith, editor

Toronto: Gage, 1973

The Canadian Century is the tardy companion to The Colonial Century, a textbook that began life in 1965 as The Book of Canadian Prose: Volume 1. Worth the wait? I think so. Smith wastes more than a few of the 652 pages on things like Hugh Garner's 'One- Two- Three Little Indians', but this is more than offset by the inspired, accomplished and all too often overlooked. The reader is presented with writing by Edward Blake, Wilfrid Laurier, Northrop Frye, Leonard Cohen and Alice Munro. Louis Riel's eloquent, if confused, final statement in The Queen v Louis Riel is included; as is John Glassco's comic memoir 'A Season in Limbo', otherwise only available in an old number of The Tamarack Review. Preceding all is a piece titled 'The Mysterious Question', which Smith chose to include in his Preface.

'Perhaps I take a risk of including here a remarkable short story', the anthologist writes

Perhaps.

The short work of fiction, first published in a 1951 issue of Northern Review, is a hoax. Attributed to 'John Goodwin of West Vancouver, B.C.', age 12, it was actually the work of editor John Sutherland (plagiarized from a story by Washington Irving). The prank fooled a great many people, including Ethel Wilson, who had been so impressed by the story that, thirteen years later, she wondered about its author in her essay 'Series of Combination of Events and Where Is John Goodwin?'

Smith knew the true identity of the author; in 1969, he and Glassco had exchanged correspondence about Sutherland's prank. Yet, the anthologist appears to have had no qualms in furthering the ruse... for a while. The Canadian Century was reprinted at some point. Hard to tell when. The title and copyright pages are identical, the design is unchanged, yet 'The Mysterious Question' has disappeared.

Object: Well, it's a textbook: bland layout and paper of a shade that induces symptoms not dissimilar to snowblindness. Simultaneous cloth and paper editions.

Access: Not as common as one might expect. A handful of copies are currently listed, the most expensive coming in at US$15. Seems everyone thinks that they're offering the first printing. Maybe they are. The second printing is scarce — in his A. J. M. Smith, An Annotated Bibliography (Montreal: Véhicule, 1981) Michael Darling writes that he'd been unable to locate a copy.