SOURCE: "The Inquisitional Enclosures of Poe and Melville," in Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism, University of California Press, 1994, pp. 162-81.

In this excerpt, Franchot examines Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" to demonstrate how elements of popular anti-Catholic tales of convent captivity became transformed in more literary tales of inquisitional and shipboard imprisonment.

The closely imagined relationship between popery and captivity initially established in the Indian captivity narrative developed, in nineteenth-century convent exposés, a crucial thematics of artifice. As we have seen in the narratives of Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk, convent terrors strategically deployed sham fears of Rome to voice the pressures of an emergent middle-class Protestant domesticity. As productions of a deviant female and popular voice, convent narratives imagined perverse domesticities in which an errant female voice, ambiguously positioned between working-class melodrama and middle-class...