While taking time out to work on a different article, I had occasion to return to Sheri S. Tepper’s fantasy novel Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore. A previously overlooked speech there is a very good counterweight to the offending passage. It puts what Antonia White tells us about her Catholic boarding school into context; it suggests that she was treated like a cult member.
Antonia White’s alarming school story
Antonia White said that while the nuns at the convent school she attended did not crush the spirits of the pupils - high spirits and general childish naughtiness were not discouraged - they cracked down hard on any attempts to show independence of mind and tried to stamp it out:
“Through years of training, the nuns had learned to recognise the faintest signs of such an attitude, and it was severely repressed. They could detect it the slightest thing...an inclination to answer back, and, most of all, in the faintest speculation in matters of faith. The world was waiting for us outside, with its Satan-set traps of heresy, free thought and easy morals, and the whole object of our education was to arm us against its snares...Mental pride... the most dangerous of all our temptations.”
Many people will be outraged by this, and for several reasons.
