Abstract
In July 1869, an investigating judge in the city of Cracow, at that time part of the Austrian province of Galicia, made a shocking discovery that would lead to an international scandal. Having received an anonymous letter informing him that a Catholic nun was being held against her will in the city’s Carmelite convent, the judge had demanded the right to search within its walls. The international press provided breathless accounts of what apparently occurred next. Brushing aside the protests of the Mother Superior, confessor and other nuns, the judge, along with several other officers and, by some accounts, the local bishop, forced his way into the convent and rushed toward a row of cells. Opening the first door, the investigators recoiled in horror. A figure later described as half-beast, half-human lay before them, naked, shivering, and covered with mud and excrement. Cowering at the sight of her liberators, the “creature,” in the terms of the press, begged them for mercy.1 Shocked and angered by their discovery, the officers led away the nun, by now identified as Barbara Ubryk. When news of the scandal reached the town’s citizens, mobs gathered outside the convent and were only prevented from attacking the building by the presence of armed soldiers.2 It was later alleged that Ubryk had been held captive in her miserable cell for twenty-one years.
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Notes
Univers, August 8, 1869. A letter allegedly written by the Superior to Ubryk’s sister in which she describes Ubryk’s mental illness and complains of the cost of treating her was published in the New York Times on August 24, 1869, as well as the Charleston Courier of August 31. For a description of the contested versions of the Ubryk narrative, particularly in an English context, see Rene Kollar, “The Myth and Reality of Sr. Barbara Ubryk, the Imprisoned Nun of Cracow: English Interpretations of a Victorian Religious Controversy,” in Victorian Churches and Churchmen: Essays Presented to Vincent Alan McClelland, ed. Sheridan Gilley (London: Catholic Record Society, 2005).
Alfred Villeneuve, Les mystères du cloître, Vol. 2 (Paris: Alexandre Cadot, 1846), 503.
Soeur X, Le couvent: Mémoires d’une religieuse (Paris: Degorce-Cadot, 1868), 261.
Ubryk’s captivity appeared to hold a similar significance for German-speaking liberals. See Michael Gross, The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 157–170.
Cited in Larcher, Les femmes jugées par les hommes (Paris: Hertzel, 1859), 63.
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For French approaches to the feminine private sphere, see Laura S. Strumingher, “L’Ange de la Maison: Mothers and Daughters in Nineteenth Century France,” International Journal of Women’s Studies 2, no. 1 (1979): 51–61
Yvonne Knibiehler, La sexualité et l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002), 156–159.
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Revue des Deux Mondes, June 19, 1864. In his survey of stereotypes of Americans which appear in French drama and fiction, Simon Jeune has observed that the two stock figures were the grasping businessman and the forthright young girl. Simon Jeune, De F.T. Graindorge à A.O. Bamabooth: Les types américains dans le roman et le théâtre français (Paris: Didier, 1963).
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For a discussion of the parallels between the two, see James R. Lewis, “‘Mind-Forged Manacles’: Anti-Catholic Convent Narratives in the Context of the American Captivity Tradition,” Mid-America 72, no. 3 (1990): 149–167.
Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola and James Arthur Levernier, The Indian Captivity Narrative 1550–1900 (New York: Twain, 1993), 27–28.
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Scholars of feminism have argued about the role of Protestantism and Catholicism in fostering or discouraging organized women’s movements. In his The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia 1840–1920, Richard Evans argues strongly that Catholicism acted as a brake on feminist movements. Patrick Kay Bidelman also characterizes the Catholic Church as an obstacle to the development of feminism. See Pariahs Stand Up! The Founding of the Liberal Feminist Movement in France, 1858–1889 (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982), 6–9. Evans and Bidelman’s argument is disputed by James McMillan in “Clericals, Anticlericals and the Women’s Movement in France under the Third Republic,” The Historical Journal 24, no. 2 (1981): 361–376.
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Susan M. Griffin has suggested that the escaped nun’s tale reveals “the fundamental weakness of the female self on which the future of American Protestantism rests.” See Susan M. Griffin, “Awful Disclosures: Women’s Evidence in the Escaped Nun’s Tale,” PMLA 111, no. 1 (January 1996): 105.
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André Mater, La politique religieuse de la République Française (Paris: Emile Nourry, 1909), 109–110.
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© 2010 Timothy Verhoeven
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Verhoeven, T. (2010). The Captivity of Sister Barbara Ubryk. In: Transatlantic Anti-Catholicism. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109124_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109124_6
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