Maria Monk

Maria Monk (born June 1, 1816, probably in St. John’s, Lower Canada [now Quebec, Can.]—died Sept. 4, 1849, Blackwell’s Island [now Roosevelt Island], New York, N.Y., U.S.) was a Canadian-American narrator of a salacious and highly embroidered personal story that provided fodder for anti-Roman Catholic sentiment from the 1830s through the rest of the century.

Monk grew up in Montreal. Little is known for certain of her early life, but she reportedly suffered a childhood head injury that led to some sort of intermittent mental derangement throughout the rest of her life. She worked as a servant girl until her promiscuity brought her to a Roman Catholic asylum for prostitutes, from which she was subsequently discharged in 1834 when she was discovered to be pregnant. She then formed a liaison with the Reverend William K. Hoyt (or Hoyte), head of the nativist Canadian Benevolent Association and a fanatical anti-Catholic. He took her to New York City, where he and a group of nativist agitators drew upon and embroidered Monk’s experiences in the asylum. Helped along by her own fevered imagination, the tale ultimately took the shape of lurid fiction: Maria had converted to Catholicism and entered the Hotel Dieu Convent (nearby the asylum in which she had lived) as a nun. There she discovered that nuns and priests engaged regularly in sexual intercourse and that the babies born of these unholy unions were killed and buried in cellar graves. This tale was published serially in the American Protestant Vindicator in 1835 and in book form early in 1836 as Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings During a Residence of Five Years as a Novice, and Two Years as a Black Nun, in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery at Montreal.

Benefiting from the rising tide of anti-Catholic bigotry in the country, from the appetite whetted by such works as Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent, published a short time earlier, and from a latent taste for pornography in a reading audience otherwise deprived of it, Awful Disclosures became a sensational best-seller. A flood of denunciations and repudiations from respectable sources, Catholic and Protestant alike, was met by a greater flood of anti-Catholic replies, and sales mounted. More than 300,000 copies were sold by the time of the Civil War, and the book continued to be reprinted into the 20th century. In 1837 Monk left Hoyt for the Reverend John J.L. Slocum, another of her collaborators, and he produced Further Disclosures by Maria Monk (1837). She later lived in Philadelphia, where in 1838 she gave birth to another illegitimate child. In 1849 she was living in a bordello in New York City. Arrested for picking the pocket of a customer, Monk was sent to the almshouse on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island), where she died.