Communion, Confession, and Conversion: The Intersection of Transcendentalism and Catholicism in Antebellum American Literature

This dissertation examines the xenophobic representation of Catholicism in the literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne and provides a revisionary account of the relationship between Transcendentalism and Catholicism by investigating the writings of three Catholic converts: Orestes Brownson, Sophia Ripley, and Isaac Hecker. Although nineteenth-century Protestants were hostile to Catholicism and Catholic converts, arguing that the conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism was a radical "break" from the American cultural ideals of liberty, individualism, and self-reliance, this dissertation argues that these converts resist this narrative of unincorporability by demonstrating a developmental theology in their major works, or a gradual, process-based conversion. Through their interests in corporateness, confession, and communion, all of which Transcendentalism and Catholicism jointly encourage, these three converts found threads of continuity between their Protestant past and their Catholic present, thereby contesting the dominant discourse of Otherness associated with Catholicism in antebellum America. By charting the disparity between the popular representation of Catholicism and the lived account of Catholic converts, this dissertation not only reconceives the nineteenth-century American Catholic experience but also revises current critical narratives of the Protestant conversion to Catholicism, which often recapitulate the alleged divide between the terms "American" and "Catholic." As a result, this dissertation demonstrates that both the nineteenth-century cultural debate and the twentieth-century critical debate about Catholicism elide and even ignore the manner in which American Catholic converts were able to reconcile their culture with their religion.