Clothing of Piety, Clothing of Poverty: Object Lessons in a Convent School

摘要

This paper focuses on the ways in which memories of the religious habits worn by Catholic teaching sisters prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) came to circulate in Atlantic Canada in the 1990s. At that time, people living in an impoverished rural settlement in northern New Brunswick recalled ominous dark and shrouded figures when discussing the religious past. However, the significance attached to the clothing of piety diverged considerably when the teaching sisters who once worked in that settlement recalled their past. They focused on the very materiality of their clothing as an object that had sensuous properties, constricting and enveloping, limiting and enabling their work. But they also recalled the clothing of others, the clothing of poverty in which their students came to school. One's deictic perspective, as either perceiver or wearer, altered the significance attached to the religious clothing of piety, or the threadbare clothing of poverty. This paper examines the ways in which the memories of objects from the past came to articulate broader grievances.