The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 89, July 1985 - April, 1986 Page: 37
610 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Remembering the Alamo
amination: "The Texians may be considered as leading a crusade in
behalf of modern civilization, against the antiquated prejudices and
narrow policy of the middle ages, which still govern the Mexican Re-
public." What Ganilh expresses indirectly, many other novelists named
outright as the scourge of Catholicism. As a somewhat disaffected
rnember of the Catholic priesthood, Ganilh offers many criticisms of
Catholic abuses in Mexico and Texas, but his criticism is mild compared
to that of later novels. In these novels the Texas cause is championed
chiefly on religious grounds, and the image of the Republic is that of a
new government founded to relieve its citizens of the dark designs of
priests and the hierarchical and undemocratic structure of the Catholic
church. Ganilh exempts from calumny those priests who practice char-
ity and endure hardships for the sake of their flock, but in many of the
novels the main villain is a priest. In Augusta Evans Wilson's Ilez (1855),
for example, Father Alphonso Mazzolin craftily converts the Anglo
heroine to Catholicism and tries to force the titular heroine, Inez de
Garcia, to marry a cousin for whom she has no love. Father Mazzolin,
typical of the evil priest type, possesses "cunning, malignity, and fierce-
ness."' His counterpart appears in Amelia Barr's Remember the Alamo
(1888) as Fray Ignatius, who has a "dark, cruel face" and is "immovably
stern."" Ignatius spends much of the novel trying to force the Mexican-
born wife of the hero to sign over their property to the Church. His
hatred for Americans is all consuming: "If these American heretics
were only in my power! ... I would cut a throat-just one throat-
every day of my life.""
In the struggle between the forces of light and the forces of dark, the
meaning of the Texas victory is the same in novel after novel. Perhaps
Remember the Alamo best summarizes the issues: "For the priesthood
foresaw that the triumph of the American element meant the triumph
of freedom of conscience, and the abolition of their own despotism."
Such anti-Catholicism sometimes finds innovative and sinister imagery
in these novels. In Remember the Alamo, for example, the Bowie knife
receives a kind of ironic religious sanction. A Mexican who is partisan
to the Texan cause calls it a "knife of extreme unction-the oil and wafer
4Gaston, Early Novel of the Southwest, 35 n.; Myrthe, Ambrosio de Letinez, iii; [Augusta Evans
Wilson], Inez: A Tale of the Alamo (New York, 1855). The description of Father Mazzolin is
quoted in Gaston, Early Novel of the Southwest, log.
6Quoted by Raymund A. Paredes in his introduction to Amelia Barr, Remember the Alamo
(1888; reprint, Boston, 1979), xi.
6 Ibid., 176.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 89, July 1985 - April, 1986, periodical, 1985/1986; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117151/m1/63/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.