The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing by Philip Gould

Author:Philip Gould
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-01-29T16:00:00+00:00

The alternating blushes and paleness, the suspicions and secret, the confessional mode, all point to what Wilson’s readership would have understood as the sexualized nature of Catholicism (later, Florence must make the same confession to her horrified and disgusted husband). However, in Wilson’s novel, we do not see the plot of priestly rape/seduction played out with the white Protestant heroine, but rather with the dark girl. The threat to Florence is articulated through the lascivious designs of Father Mazzolin, an Italian Jesuit, on Inez and her fortune.

Inez is certainly the most powerful character in the novel, a woman of physical courage, disregard for convention, and capacity for selfless love. All three of the novel’s female characters suffer silently in their love for a man. The most virtuous woman–Mary–actually dies because she is too “feminine” to speak her love for Dr. Bryant. Just as Inez enacts the dangerous sexual encounters with the priest that are only imagined for Florence, so too the unrequited love for Dr. Bryant that she shares with Mary drives the Catholic girl, not to languorous death, but to action. As a Pocahontas figure, she first attempts to save the white man she loves, then, when she cannot, Antigone-like, she risks her life and defies the powers that be in order to recover and bury his body. Inez dies of the infection that she contracts on the battlefield strewn with dead bodies. Unlike Mary, who succumbs to the beautiful death of the girl-too-good-to-live, standard to nineteenth-century Protestant fiction, Inez ends her life cursing the priest who has destroyed her religious beliefs and is interred during a tempest in unhallowed ground. Nonetheless, Wilson hints at the power of this “other” woman’s passion when, echoing the lovers’ end in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), she has Dr. Bryant’s body secretly reburied with that of Inez. This gothic moment of triumph for the Catholic woman of color glances at narrative possibilities that Wilson will explore–albeit in limited ways–with her white Protestant heroines in later novels.

Wilson’s Inez is not alone in American fiction at mid-century, as I have suggested. For example, an Inez appears importantly in Stanhope Burleigh: the Jesuits in Our Homes (1855) by Helen Dhu. “Helen Dhu” is a pseudonym used by Charles Edwards Lester, a prolific and well-known writer of history and biography, as well as a translator. All of his other works were written under his own name, suggesting that this sort of fiction would have been perceived as more palatable coming from a woman’s pen.

In “Dhu”’s novel Inez is an Italian Catholic who is, like Belisle’s Enna, the secret daughter of a powerful Catholic cleric. When the daughter discovers her father’s identity, she turns against him and plots to help the young American man whom she has come to love, but who, like Wilson’s Dr. Bryant, is reserved for the weak, feminine, white girl, Genevra. Passive and “feminine,” Genevra endures her persecution by Catholic fathers (lay and clerical), eventually dying of her trials. Genevra’s death scene is

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