Though Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk was intended to fool audiences into believing its story,
readers had not been fascinated by its Enlightened ideals but rather by its voyeuristic and pornographic nature.
Convent narratives had been designed to explore the forbidden, the taboo, and the aspects of women's sexuality over
which patriarchy desires to exert full control
(Schultz xxvii). While the cult of domesticity had emerged during the
nineteenth century, white women had been making plans to campaign for suffrage and to rewrite the Declaration of Independence
at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848
(Griffin 117). Women asserting their autonomy was frightening to many men at the time,
especially to those pastors who were the main authors of anticonvent literature and saw the end of society as it was with women
becoming more empowered. The escaped nun's tale attempts to define and control women's religion
by establishing a sexual and
gender ideology through the limitations of the True Man's continence and the True Woman's lack of desire, and describing in as
much detail that can be allowed at the time of the sexually illicit acts going on in the convents so women and men would not
disturb the already established middle-class Protestant ideals of domesticity and middle-class life.
