"Daughter of the Puritans"? Rose Hawthorne Lathrop and American Identity

ABSTRACT: Both before and after becoming a Dominican at age 48, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1851–1926) was acutely conscious of her national identity. Her parents were vastly influential in this regard, as was her adolescent experience of an America whose capital seemed to be Concord, Massachusetts. Lathrop's mature vision is documented in her three major publications after her 1891 conversion to Catholicism. A Story of Courage: Annals of the Georgetown Convent of the Visitation (1894) showed the New England native stretching to view a broader America even as it told two competing stories. One highlighted partial continuities between the life of this convent and the development of the United States; the other stressed how Catholicism can and must provide essential foundations of community that are lacking in the nation generally. Memories of Hawthorne (1897) revealed how fondly she remembered Concord and wished to integrate her parents' Transcendentalist circle into her evolving understanding of America. Ultimately, Lathrop's serial publication Christ's Poor (1901–1904) demonstrated that she, as Mother Mary Alphonsa, retained these earlier views but increasingly placed them at the service of engaging a largely non-Catholic audience to aid her community in "curing a very terrible disease from which America suffers; its neglect of destitute persons most grievously sick."