Ex-

Ralph Luker links to Sam Leith's article in the Telegraph on a best-selling memoir that appears to have been partly plagiarized.  I was a little more interested in Leith's account of what could be called "poor-me memoirs":

The story raises more interesting issues than copyright. Memoirs of abuse, victimhood or hardship - all those white covers with pictures of tatty-looking infants on the front [I stole that phrase from Hilary Mantel] - involve big money in publishing: J T LeRoy, Augusten Burroughs, Frank McCourt, and so on. It got properly under way with Dave Pelzer's multi-volume whingeathon beginning with A Child Called "It" and, no doubt, destined to end with A Pensioner Called Whohe? Victimhood has acquired a moral authority of its own - one attractive to writers and publishers alike.

Far from being a modern genre, the victimhood memoir has deep roots in the Western literary tradition--in fact, you can probably trace some of its generic elements to medieval hagiography (albeit transposed to first-person recollections).  It might be better to suggest that "victimhood" has taken on "moral authority" apart from its earlier, religious claims on the public's attention.  That is, while victimhood memoirs still work in religious contexts, they also lay claim to an entirely this-worldly appeal; one can read a victimhood memoir and not think that there's a theological point to be made. 

Nineteenth-century religious versions of the victimhood memoir were just as market-oriented.  John Henry Newman put his finger on the issue:  "The popular demand is for the prodigious, the enormous, the abominable, the diabolical, the impossible.  It must be shown that all priests are monsters of hypocrisy, that all nunneries are dens of infamy, that all bishops are the embodied plenitude of savageness and perfidy."*  Anglo-American ex-priest, ex-nun, and, to a lesser extent, ex-Jewish** memoirs consistently employed the same tropes, emphasizing various forms of physical abuse, sexual deviancy, domestic pressure for conformity, and brainwashing tactics.  "Maria Monk"'s ultra-sadism is the most famous example; Josephine Bunkley and Edith O'Gorman also claim that they were physically assaulted during their respective convent stays, while Rebecca Reed points to her Superior's emotional manipulations.  All of them, of course, eventually "see the light" and escape to safe Protestant havens.  Father Chiniquy--whose Fifty Years in the Church of Rome was still being reprinted, as late as the 1960s, by Baker Book House--apparently spends his entire childhood rebelling against priestly attempts to sexualize children in the confessional, and his entire adulthood rebelling against an immoral church hierarchy.  (Other "highlights" of his memoir include a priest castrating himself.) In terms of narrative construction and thematic elements, almost nothing separates the purportedly non-fiction memoirs from fictional ones, like Mrs. Sherwood's The Nun or even Diderot's La Religieuse. 

To find a market, these memoirs had to reinforce, not challenge, popular opinions about what life in Catholic schools/convents/monasteries or Jewish households was like.  In all cases, the memoirist was victimized by the religious institution of choice, yet came out of the experience unscathed (largely, anyway) and, by virtue of religious conversion, ultimately triumphant.  (Never mind Escape from Alcatraz; more like Escape to Protestantism!) The market appeal of these texts usually outlasted their claims to truth; all of the "canonical" ex-priest or ex-nun memoirists were exposed as frauds, but (as Newman notes, with understandable asperity) Maria Monk continued selling well, long after the book was debunked.  A number of these memoirs remain in circulation, either in cheap paperback editions or on the 'net--suggesting that their polemical appeal continues to trump their "fictional" status.   

*--John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, ed. and intro. Andrew Nash (1851; Herefordshire: Gracewing; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 140-41.  There's an online edition at the Newman Reader. 

**--There don't seem to be many book-length nonfiction examples of 19th.-c. ex-Jewish memoirs; most of the ones I've seen are in missionary journals.  Joseph Samuel C. F. Frey's Memoirs are probably the best-known example. 

Comments

[Jonathan Dresner]

Karen Armstrong's Through a Narrow Gate would seem to fit your descriptions of ex-nun memoirs pretty well.

Though I wonder about the marketing and writing of these. (in fairness, my exposure to these texts is limited) It seems to me that they are not written, as you say, to reinforce public suspicions about institutions like nunneries, but as appeals to that segment of the public that does not have such suspicions.

Perhaps it's a case of the target and consumer being non-contiguous groups.

[Miriam Elizabeth Burstein]

I think you could make a case that things change in the twentieth century; the nineteenth-century memoirists were working in a well-established anti-Catholic tradition, with lots of Gothic antecedents, etc., whereas their twentieth-century relatives are working in a different theological and generic context. Old-fashioned anti-popery still exists on the fringes of Anglo-American culture, after all, but it's not really on the radar for most readers; aside from the ones who are actively studying it, my Catholic friends and students have often never run across this kind of material. (Obviously, the sex scandals have prompted a new outbreak of anti-clericalism, but, one or two instances aside, nuns don't seem to be a target.) And, of course, we're in an age where the number of vocations have drastically collapsed, whereas our Victorian friends were worried about the opposite trend.

[genevieve]

As a sad, factually based aside, the Irish misery childhood subgenre has its fair share of child abuse stories where nuns were involved. I have four on my bookshelf here awaiting return to someone writing a memoir of similar experiences.Nearly all involve some sexual abuse by Irish nuns of orphans or sick children, which is a chilling indictment of that particular brand of jingoistic, backward Catholicism.
( BTW I'm fourth generation Irish Australian, ex-Catholic and much happier than I was. Most of the time anyway!)