ABSTRACT
“The Little Convent Girl” tells of a steamboat voyage down the Mississippi during which the eponymous character discovers the world on the other side of her convent walls. Upon reaching New Orleans, where she is picked up by her mother, she discovers that the latter is colored—and therefore that she, too, is colored. Since in this story nothing is what it seems to be, Zaugg proposes to “put up the veil to see better” and to examine through a close reading of the text what it conceals in its folds. Zaugg focuses first on King’s criticism of the Catholic Church through the little convent girl, then on the motif of the double running through the whole narrative, and ends with a study of the second section of the story.
