The Girls of Belvedere, the first novel by playwright and filmmaker Michelle Clements, makes it clear in the Author's Note and in the publisher's press releases, that, although the story is fiction, it is based closely on experiences endured by the author's mother. She was institutionalized in the century-old Belvedere Orphanage in St. John's, Newfoundland in the nineteen-forties and fifties. Hardly a person in Canada has not heard of the horrendous sexual abuse perpetrated against young boys at the infamous Mont Cashel Orphanage. Other than a brief notoriety regarding Belvedere, little is known of the experiences of girls who grew up in the sister institution at that time.
“Books have been written about the sexual and physical abuse doled out to the boys of the Mount Cashel, but little attention has been paid to the treatment suffered by girls at their sister institution.”
The Girls of Belvedere is not a history of the orphanage, nor of the experiences of the girls who lived there, but, as the author writes, it is “a glimpse into the lives of some girls and women while they lived in an institution where its goals were often in conflict with the natural principles of family, compassion, connection, and protection.”
The focus of the fiction is on the lives of three young outport sisters whose mother has died and whose father makes his living on the sea. They are not strictly speaking orphans but, like many motherless children at that time, there was no-one suitable or willing to raise them in his absence, and consequently they were put into the trust of the Sisters of Mercy in a long-established girls' home in the capital city.
Kitty Murphy, the central character in the book, is a bright, feisty, opinionated little girl who is highly protective of her two younger siblings, Hannah and Ruth. Ruth, the youngest, is calm, helpful, and compliant towards adults, Hannah less so but essentially anxious to get along with others. Kitty is the one who challenges those around her when she feels her sisters are being bullied.
Although Belvedere is depicted as a large community of female children and adults, only a handful of characters other than the Murphy girls are relevant to the progress of the story. There is a good nun and a wicked nun, a good young friend and a wicked prefect, and a shadowy family who are for the most part absent from the girls' lives. These peripheral characters tend to be stereotypes, all good or all bad, but the central children are beautifully depicted. Like many real siblings, the girls are sometimes devoted to one another, at other times at odds, but ultimately bound by family ties that carry them through the ups and downs of an unpredictable and dangerous world.
Kitty catches the negative attention of the head of the orphanage, Sister Mary, and responds to her domineering presence and overly strict discipline by displaying a challenging attitude and demeanour. Sister Mary responds by coming down hard on the child, meeting out both disciplinary and physical punishment, which hardens Kitty resolve not to let the nun intimidate her. Eventually, Sister Mary reacts by attacking Kitty's one weakness--the happiness of her younger sisters. Ruth and Harriett become the target of the nun's spite, and there is little Kitty can do to stop it.
Unlike sexual abuse, physical punishment was an accepted part of child-rearing in the fifties, but Sister Mary and many of the other nuns take this to an extreme. Almost all the children are regularly beaten both in public and in private, their few privileges are often revoked, and humiliation and worse is a regular way of maintaining discipline. However, Sister Mary takes it a step too far when, in a fit of rage, she slams Kitty into a metal locker, breaking bones in her face that leave her permanently disfigured, and subject to the aftereffects of concussion. The violent treatment of the Murphy girls creeps up on the reader quietly, so that when it explodes in this attack, it is shocking in its impact. Their father's inability to intervene during an unexpected visit to the children is a realistic depiction of the class structure that rendered a common fisherman helpless when up against the might of the Catholic church.
In case all of this physical abuse seems unlikely, it is interesting to note that in the late 1990s, a group of 38 women went to court alleging they had been brutally abused by the Sisters of Mercy while resident in Belvedere Orphanage. Books have been written about the sexual and physical abuse doled out to the boys of the Mount Cashel, but little attention has been paid to the treatment suffered by girls at their sister institution.
Apparently, brutal physical abuse did not capture the attention of the public the way sexual abuse did. Girls were thrown down stairways, beaten with everything from tennis rackets and coat hangers to leathers straps and skipping ropes. One common punishment, which is not mentioned in the novel but which was widely known throughout the town, was that under the guise of treating lice, troublesome or rebellious girls had their heads forcibly shaved to humiliate them and bring them into line. This is at odds with the photograph of a young girl with beautiful long hair and a pretty, frilly dress depicted on the cover.
While the treatment of the three sisters is the primary focus of the novel, there is little depiction of the larger picture. Up to 200 girls were in the institution in the 1950s, yet there is little interaction with their peers or other nuns. The orphanage itself, a historic building dating back to 1845, gets some attention, but there is no mention of the fact that it was situated on an enormous property in the town, surrounded on one side by a very large Catholic cemetery, and the fields of the orphanage farm on the others.
The orphanage property today is the site of two very large high schools, blocks of condominiums, a shopping centre and sports fields. The orphanage in the 1950s was tucked away in this huge property, with only a single narrow lane leading to it from the rest of the town. There were no houses on the west of Bonaventure Avenue, nor to the east of Newtown Road, and the southern boundary was controlled by an Irish Christian Brothers' school and monastery.
There was really nowhere but the farm fields for most of these girls to escape to, even for a few hours, although it was a well-kept secret that if occasionally one of them made their way to the back doors of a few nearby homes, Catholic housewives allowed them to use the phones to call their families. The extreme physical and social isolation of these children within the boundaries of a large, busy seaport shaped a social situation that was completely out of control for decades.
The author's command of the interaction between the three children is convincing, although there is an occasional slip in the vocabulary used by the girls. “Ain't” was a term introduced by the American military to the island and even today is not commonly employed by outport children. The interaction between the three sisters is touching, but there is hardly a sentence devoted to the classrooms of the orphanage, and there is no mention of the barbed-wire bounded play-ground that occasionally lured other children from the town into the isolated grounds of the property. A 1998 report on institutional child abuse in Canada by Ronda Bessners cites statements of claim filed in the Newfoundland Supreme Court “that some girls were stripped and beaten in the presence of peers who were compelled to hold down the students during the beatings. Some residents were placed in isolation in dark rooms with little food and water, and no washroom facilities.”
The abuse of the three sisters is vividly and believably depicted, but it was not just three sisters who suffered at the hands of those supposedly devoted to cherishing these children They were raised in a social setting where everyone they interacted with was either a perpetrator or a victim. The Girls of Belvedere is a good start, but there is still plenty of room between the pages of a book for both a factual and a fictional exploration of the bigger picture.
About the Author
Michelle T. Clemens is a writer, producer, director, and actor born in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. She won two Arts and Letters Awards: Showdown won the 2023 Dramatic Script and Ready, Aim won in 2022 for Poetry. Showdown also had a dramatic reading at Persistence Theatre’s Year of the Arts Women’s play festival in 2024, and it was part of the Playwrights Guild of Canada’s International Craft Bites Program. Michelle’s three-act plays Mummering, Mischief and Murder: A Tibbs Eve Farce sold out in December 2023, and Boomerang debuted at the Barbara Barrett Theatre to near-capacity houses.
About the Reviewer
Robin McGrath was born in Newfoundland. She earned a doctorate from the University of Western Ontario, taught at the University of Alberta, and for 25 years did research in the Canadian Arctic on Inuit Literature and culture before returning home to Newfoundland and Labrador. She now lives in Harbour Main and is a full-time writer. Robin has published 26 books and over 700 articles, reviews, introductions, prefaces, teaching aids, essays, conference proceedings and chapbooks. Her most recent book is Labrador, A Reader's Guide (2023). She is a columnist for the Northeast Avalon Times and does freelance editing.
Book Details
Publisher : Flanker Press Ltd.
Publication date : May 9 2025
Language : English
Print length : 234 pages
ISBN-10 : 1774572478
ISBN-13 : 978-1774572474