The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers: Critical Essays

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The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers

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The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers Critical Essays Edited by

Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke, and Ana Kothe

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND UNRULY WOMEN WRITERS

Copyright © Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke, and Ana Kothe, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60025–6 ISBN-10: 0–230–60025–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2007 10 9 8 7

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Printed in the United States of America.

For unruly women everywhere


CON T E N T S

Acknowledgments

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Introduction Unruly Catholic Women Writers through the Centuries Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke, and Ana Kothe Part 1

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Medieval through Seventeenth Century

Chapter One Female as Flesh in the Later Middle Ages and the “Bodily Knowing” of Angela of Foligno Jennifer Judge Chapter Two “I Grab the Microphone and Move My Body”—Volatile Speech, Volatile Bodies, and the Church’s Attempt to Measure Holiness M. C. Bodden Chapter Three Letters from the Convent: St. Teresa of Ávila’s Epistolary Mode Joan F. Cammarata Chapter Four Talking out of Church: Women Arguing Theology in Sor Juana’s loa to the Divino Narciso Jeanne Gillespie

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Contents

Chapter Five Angela Carranza, Would-Be Theologian Stacey Schlau

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Chapter Six Resituating Carvajal’s Vida in Protonovelistic Narratives Ana Kothe

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Part 2

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Chapter Seven Through the Grate; Or, English Convents and the Transmission and Preservation of Female Catholic Recusant History Tonya Moutray McArthur Chapter Eight “Must Her Own Words Do All?”: Domesticity, Catholicism, and Activism in Adelaide Anne Procter’s Poems Cheri Larsen Hoeckley Chapter Nine The Legacy of Laveau in the Practice of Helen Prejean: The Tradition and Territory of New Orleans’ Spiritual Advisors Barbara Eckstein Part 3

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Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Chapter Ten “Reluctant Catholics”: Contemporary Irish-American Women Writers Sally Barr Ebest Chapter Eleven Marie-Claire Blais Revises John Keats: Sadean Moments and Anti-Catholic Sentiment in Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel Ben P. Robertson

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Contents Chapter Twelve Catholicism’s Other(ed) Holy Trinity: Race, Class, and Gender in Black Catholic Girl School Narratives Jeana DelRosso Chapter Thirteen Challenging Catholicism: Hagar vs. the Virgin in Graciela Limón’s The Memories of Ana Calderón Mary Jane Suero-Elliott Chapter Fourteen Dis-robing the Priest: Gender and Spiritual Conversions in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Pamela J. Rader

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

The editors would like to thank everyone who made this book possible, including the following: our respective spouses, David Freeman, Paul Murphy, and Stéphane Pillet; our student assistant, Katie Flowers; the Indiana University Press, for permission to reprint one of the essays included here; and, of course, our unruly contributors.


I N T RODUC T ION

Unruly Catholic Women Writers through the Centuries Je a na D e l Ro s so, L e igh E ic k e , a n d A na Ko t h e

Who can forget the still stunning eyes of the Afghani girl Sharbat Gula as she made a comeback appearance in National Geographic’s April 2002 issue?1 Despite her obvious gaze upon those who read the journal at home or came across it at the supermarket checkout line, it was in fact the people of the Western world who gazed upon her. On television and in newspapers, we saw images and heard stories about the Taliban’s horrific religion-based oppression, particularly of women, and then of America’s glorified liberation of women like Sharbat.2 Yet one need not read about exotic locations to encounter the troubling representation of women oppressed by religion. In France, the enactment of a law in March 2004—popularly known as “la loi sur le voile” (the law of the veil)—was publicized regularly in Le Monde,3 heightening the problematic intersection of not only religion and gender, but also Christianity and Islam, further complicated by a perceived “east/west” divide. For at least the first five years of the new millennium, Western media have been focusing on current non-Western or west-meets-east conf licts between religion and women’s changing roles, while often assuming an a-historical and a-cultural position of invisibility regarding women’s relationships with traditional Western religions. It is therefore imperative to understand these struggles as they existed and continue to exist in the Western world.

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This collection of essays attends to Western women’s centuries-long struggles within Roman Catholicism—struggles that have recently received attention within the area of theology as it intersects with feminism.4 The essays contribute to this discussion by responding to the following questions: Under what circumstances have Catholic women across temporal, geographic, and racial boundaries been able to resist traditional gender restrictions, as represented through their literary production? How has Catholicism (stereo)typically restricted women’s roles, while simultaneously empowering women through their poetry, fiction, and autobiographical narratives? How have the tensions in the lives of women, as writers, activists, and Catholics, proved to be a source of fascinating maneuvers through fiction and personal history? This volume examines the role of Catholicism as “unruly” women write against various degrees of oppression before a Catholic and non- Catholic readership. The essays here present a wide geographic and temporal spectrum of Catholic women. They are divided into three main sections by chronology: part one encompasses the medieval period through the seventeenth centuries; part two addresses the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and part three takes on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The essays cover varied perspectives on both canonical and lesser-known Catholic women writers, all focusing on unruliness in what is commonly thought of as a restrictive site of writing for women: Catholicism. Already, Sally and Ron Ebest’s collection of essays entitled Reconciling Catholicism and Feminism? (2003) has approached this very subject from the perspective of personal narratives and testimonies. We are happy to include an essay by Sally Ebest in this anthology. And Allyson Jule and Bettina Tate Pedersen have recently provided a glimpse into the overlapping of feminist scholarship and Christianity in their book Being Feminist, Being Christian: Essays from Academia (2006), a collection affirming that “ideas thought to be ancient and outdated (like religion)” have emerged as highly significant in the twenty-first century (1). We seek to continue to explore this relatively new area through the lens of literary criticism, concentrating on literary works and including a variety of scholarly perspectives. From the medieval period, we have selected two essays that complement each other in their discussion of the relationship of the body to writing and unruliness. First, Jennifer Judge offers “Female as Flesh in the Later Middle Ages and the ‘Bodily Knowing’ of Angela of Foligno.” In the essay, she compels her readers to locate and extract the woman’s voice in mystical discourse, which is usually written down by a man.

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Deftly using the theories of Luce Irigaray, Judge argues that through abjection Angela reinscribes her female body as a sacred site of transgendered metamorphosis that resists patriarchal structures. Complementing Judge’s essay is one by M. C. Bodden on Margery Kempe, entitled “ ‘I Grab the Microphone and Move My Body’— Volatile Speech, Volatile Bodies, and the Church’s Attempt to Measure Holiness.” Bodden’s perspective on Kempe demonstrates an originality of approach as she affirms Kempe’s questionable mysticism while arguing that not considering her biography as hagiography is ethnocentric. She challenges both genre and feminist theory to reconsider Kempe’s dissolution of the division between the secular and the sacred. Moving from medieval into early modern women writers, Joan Cammarata’s essay on Teresa of Ávila’s letters, entitled “Letters from the Convent: St. Teresa of Ávila’s Epistolary Mode,” examines the less well-studied corpus of Saint Teresa’s correspondence by embarking on a rhetorical analysis of discursive practices related to religion. While Teresa confidently professes her obedience to the ecclesiastical hierarchy in her letters, she is unruly in her challenges to the prescribed norms of obedience in the Order. Her correspondence registers the unruly issue of education and religious life that is to mark the work of later women writing from the convent, such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Angela Carranza, both of whom are addressed in this volume. From the seventeenth century, three essays explore unruliness in terms of gender and theology. Jeanne Gillespie’s essay discusses unruly theology in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s loa. Gillespie focuses on Sor Juana’s outspoken character during a time and within a cultural space— the Catholic Church—that privileged women’s silence. Her essay, entitled “Talking Out of Church: Women Arguing Theology in Sor Juana’s loa to the Divino Narciso,” closely studies the tactics that align the indigenous practices of native Mexicans with a female criollo voice called “América”; it is not an unproblematic alignment. Also dealing with women in seventeenth-century colonial America is Stacey Schlau, whose essay on a relatively unknown writer from Peru is entitled “Angela Carranza, Would-Be Theologian.” As the title indicates, Schlau continues the previous essays’ connection among gender, theology, and unruliness. Carranza was tried by the Inquisition for her intrusion into the male-dominated arena of theology, but not before her persona and discourse touched a wide variety of Peruvians, regardless of social status. Schlau’s essay makes an excellent match for Ana Kothe’s contribution entitled, “Resituating Carvajal’s Vida in Protonovelistic Narratives.” Also a relatively unknown writer, Luisa de Carvajal wrote

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a substantial body of poetry as well as an intriguing autobiographical “Life,” or Vida, which discloses her unruliness from an orphaned childhood in Spain through her missionary work in England, where she was arrested twice and eventually died. But rather than look at her “Life” as mere hagiography, Kothe examines its presence during the rise of the novel and thus aligns her essay with those on Foligno and Kempe, which also look at questions of genre in addition to theology and gender. Essays treating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century figures address the ways in which practicing Catholicism itself became a heterodox and dangerous activity, as well as assess the intersections among Catholicism, domesticity, and regional folkways. Tonya Moutray McArthur continues the exploration of women leaving their birthplace for religious reasons in her “Through the Grate; Or, English Convents and the Transmission and Preservation of Female Catholic Recusant History.” She analyzes the writings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Catholic nuns exiled from their homes for religious and political reasons, arguing for a reconsideration of the permeable boundary between their cloistered writings and those of their lay contemporaries. Another English convert to Roman Catholicism and early feminist, the nineteenth-century activist and poet Adelaide Anne Procter comes under the scrutiny of Cheri Larsen Hoeckley. Her essay, “ ‘Must Her Own Words Do All?’: Domesticity, Catholicism, and Activism in Adelaide Anne Procter’s Poems,” argues that Procter ironically capitalizes on the language of domestic ideology to critique male political and economic oppression of women in courtship and marriage. Rounding out part two and drawing connections between two Louisiana spiritual advisors for condemned prisoners, nineteenth-century New Orleans “voodoo queen” Marie Laveau and Sister Helen Prejean, c.s.j., Barbara Eckstein argues for a reexamination of regional folkways and the importance of Laveau to the cause Prejean serves, as recorded in Dead Man Walking. In her essay, “The Legacy of Laveau in the Practice of Helen Prejean: The Tradition and Territory of New Orleans’ Spiritual Advisors,” Eckstein uses current postcolonial theories to examine these historical figures. Our selection of essays from the twentieth century has provided us with a wide range of diverse women’s voices and cross-cultural responses to Catholicism. Sally Ebest, in her essay “ ‘Reluctant Catholics’: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers,” examines the often overlooked genre of Irish and Irish American women’s literature to

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posit that such writings attempt to reconcile feminism and Catholicism while subverting the more sexist aspects of the Catholic church. Next, and taking an original approach to the topic of French Canadian Catholicism and female sexuality, Ben P. Robertson looks at the writings of Marie-Claire Blais, exploring her rejection of Catholic sexual mores in his essay “Marie-Claire Blais Revises John Keats: Sadean Moments and Anti-Catholic Sentiment in Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel.” Shifting to a focus on race and religion, Jeana DelRosso’s essay, “Catholicism’s Other(ed) Holy Trinity: Race, Class, and Gender in Black Catholic Girl School Narratives,” examines the convent school narratives of writers such as Audre Lorde and Merle Collins to argue that African American and African Caribbean women writers find both racism and redemption in Catholic tropes. Mary Jane Suero-Elliott also addresses gender and race in her essay entitled “Challenging Catholicism: Hagar vs. the Virgin in Graciela Limón’s The Memories of Ana Calderón.” Suero-Elliott reads Limón to demonstrate how this Latin American writer recuperates the Hagar story by redefining negative portrayals of poor brown womanhood. And Pamela Rader brings us into the twentyfirst century with her essay “Dis-robing the Priest: Gender and Spiritual Conversions in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.” Here Rader argues that Erdrich’s cross-dressing character of Father Damien not only provides the space for a syncretism of both religion and gender, but also creates the possibility for subversive hagiography. The questions raised and illuminated by this collection provide a vital corrective to our understanding of women’s relationships with Catholicism. Rather than simply oppressing or containing women, Catholicism drove or inspired many of these writers to challenge literary, social, political, or religious hierarchies. In a time when questions of gender and sexuality provoke intense debate within Catholicism and other Christian traditions, and when religion is more frequently invoked in political rhetoric, it is imperative to address women’s historical and contemporary debates and struggles with the church. Along with other Christian doctrines and Islam, Catholicism continues to exist as a powerful force in women’s lives; by examining how women throughout the centuries have attempted to reconcile their unruliness with their Catholic backgrounds or conversions, the editors and contributors to this volume hope to offer both an overlooked history of the past and an unlooked-for promise for the future.

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Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke, and Ana Kothe Notes

1. http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/afghangirl/index.html. The 2002 photo shows Sharbat Gula in the original 1985 photo as a girl on the left part of the page, and as a married woman on the right, marked by the traditional headdress of rural Afghani women. 2. While not originally represented as repressed by religion (she was a refugee from the 1984 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), her 2002 “cover girl” reappearance coincided with a new invasion of the area by the United States. The justification for occupying the region two years later still concerned the welfare of women. President George W. Bush dismissed growing concern over the lack of stability in Afghanistan in a March 19, 2004, press conference by emphasizing what he believes is a better way of life there: “The people of Afghanistan are a world away from the nightmare of the Taliban. Citizens of Afghanistan have adopted a new constitution, guaranteeing free elections and full participation by women” (http:// www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040319-3.html). Both George and Laura Bush have repeatedly stressed the role of “freeing” women as a positive result of the U.S. invasion. In literary terms, this sort of “rescuing the damsel(s)” can be found as far back as Homer’s Iliad, in which a Greek “coalition” waged a lengthy war on their eastern rival, Troy, in order to liberate Helen. 3. Almost 150 articles on this controversial law appeared in Le Monde between July 1, 2003, and April 30, 2004. 4. Recent works noticeably addressing this issue include the following: Sally Barr Ebest and Ron Ebest (eds.), Reconciling Catholicism and Feminism? Personal, Reflections on Tradition and Change (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003); Tina Beattie, New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory (London: Routledge, 2006); Allyson Jule and Bettina Tate Pedersen (eds.), Being Feminist, Being Christian: Essays from Academia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

PA RT

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Medieval through Seventeenth Century


CH A P T E R

ON E

Female as Flesh in the Later Middle Ages and the “Bodily Knowing” of Angela of Foligno Je n n i f e r Ju d ge

The female mystics of the later Middle Ages asserted a personal and physical relationship with Christ that countered their exclusion from ecclesiastical authority in the Catholic Church and their inferior symbolic position as body in a body/spirit dualism: “luxuriating in Christ’s physicality, they found the lifting up—the redemption—of their own” (Bynum, Holy Feast 246). The spirituality of the Italian mystic Angela of Foligno (ca. 1248–1309) is representative of this Christocentric and sensual form of religiosity, for she rejects an absolute body/spirit division and views her female body as a dignified locus of transcendent experience. Angela’s body, particularly during the reception of the Eucharist, functions as a somatic monitor of the condition of her soul. Appropriately, her narrative “draws on bold and realistic bodily vocabulary” to relay her spiritual quest (Mazzoni 248). Angela’s experience of the Eucharist affirms Caroline Walker Bynum’s thesis that the Eucharistic fervor of female mystics in this period signals the incarnational and subversive nature of their piety. Frequently, devotional women such as Angela bypassed the need for priestly intervention in accessing the body of Christ; thus, they gained “religious self-sufficiency” (Palumbo 38). However, accessing their rebellious spirituality is problematic for scholars, as often a male scribe/confessor’s words convey their teachings. Mechthild of Magdeburg is known

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through Henry of Halle, Margery Kempe through her anonymous amanuensis/priest, and Angela’s Liber de Vere Fidelium Experientia is saturated with the orchestrating presence of Brother A (or Arnaldo, as scholarly tradition names him; Mooney 34–36). However, as mystical experience is necessarily ineffable, it is communicated more effectively though the responses of the mystic’s body. Hence, Angela’s body, though inscribed by Arnaldo’s words, becomes her most authentic text. In “La Mystérique,” French psychoanalytic theorist Luce Irigaray explores the crucial physicality of mystical discourse and its uses of abjection— with subtextual reference to Angela. Her view of mysticism as a feminine discourse has, however, been criticized as re-essentializing woman (Beckwith 196; Finke 82; Moi 139). Yet from an alternative theoretical angle—Foucauldian and Bakhtinian historicism—both Karma Lochrie and Laurie Finke also identify abjection as a strategy that refashions a “fissured” or “grotesque” female body into one that is sacred and socially subversive. This essay observes that Angela of Foligno’s body becomes a form of text, regardless of whether it ref lects political ideology or inherent female nature. From Angela’s writings, I offer additional support for this overarching critical consensus. The female body is the central vehicle through which religious women such as Angela asserted a disruptive and unconventional authority that was enabled by the contradictions and gaps in official patriarchal ideology. Referring to the later Middle Ages, Alexandra Barratt proposes that, despite images of motherhood ascribed to the Christian God, He is indisputably figured as male. As only a paternal figure offers “plausible” authority in a patriarchal society (Daly 57), authority in all senses is masculine (Barratt 6). As the central symbol of a patriarchal religion, Christ is also necessarily male. The customary fact of Christ’s maleness has served throughout the centuries as an argument for the denial of female ordination. St. Bonaventure, for example, disqualified women from ecclesiastical authority based on the gender of Christ (Bynum, Holy Feast 317), and, in the twentieth century, episcopal bishop Kilmer Myers reiterated this argument for the exclusion of women from ecclesiastical power in 1972 (Daly 4). In 1995 Pope John Paul II issued the papal “Letter to the Women of the World,” which restated the Catholic Church’s rejection of women in the ministry (Hofmann 192). Jesus, the tract insists, has reserved the office of priest to men, as proven by the gospel (197–199). More recently, one year before he became Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World” (August 2004), an extensive document

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(approved and released by Pope John Paul II) denouncing the notion that gender difference is a social creation (and not an innate and eternal reality) as harmful “feminist rhetoric”; this feminist sophistry challenges the “importance and relevance” of a fundamental church teaching: the “fact that the Son of God assumed human nature in its male form.”1 The fixity and centrality of the Catholic Church’s concept of humanity’s innate gendered hierarchy could not be more plainly asserted for the twenty-first century. Because Christ’s maleness is an essential requirement of incarnate authority, it is sharply ironic that, as Bynum and other feminist scholars of mysticism propose, it was women who found a route to religious authority through the doctrine of Christ’s humanity and masculinity. Surprisingly, and to the perpetual unease of ecclesiastics, the indomitable “pious women of the late Middle Ages turned less towards the Virgin Mary than to Christ” (Palumbo 92). Women are perennially denied ecclesiastical authority, not only because of their non-maleness, but also because of their supposedly inborn susceptibility to sin (a teaching that the most recent papal letter judiciously obfuscates). Misogynist discourse has bound women to the position of matter/body in the philosophical binary of spirit/body (Bloch 11). As a result of the sinful speech ascribed to Eve, women became the “embodiment of recalcitrant will and unbridled sexuality” (Sagnella 79)—the theological scapegoat for human fallibility. One means through which religious women could bypass or resist their exclusion from clerical authority involved an increased valuing of personal and embodied encounters with God (Barratt 7). By claiming a privileged relationship with God, the female mystics of the later Middle Ages were seen as having “escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust” by becoming “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). They transgressed their status as the “quintessence of all f leshly evil” (Finke 87). Angela of Foligno’s religious life typifies this phenomenon of insubordination. A middle-aged laywoman, married and with children, she abandoned traditional female duty to commence a life of imitatio Christi (Mazzoni 244). She joined the Third Order of St. Francis of Assisi and acquired a significant number of devotees. An anonymous epilogue in the second part of her book, “Instructions,” praises her as a spiritual leader of the Franciscans: God raised up a woman of lay state, who was bound to worldly obligations, [. . .] who was unlearned and frail. By means of the power divinely infused in her through the power of the cross of

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Christ, God and man, she broke these worldly bonds and ascended to the peaks of gospel perfection. […] She showed us the way of Jesus Christ. […] Thus, a strong woman brought to light what was buried under by blind men and their worldly speculations.2 Angela’s sanctity overturns gendered codes and authorizes her to speak. She ascends “to the peaks of gospel perfection,” despite her lowly status as a lay female. The writer of the epilogue directs his brothers to “Remember, most dearly beloved ones, that the apostles, who first preached Christ’s life of suffering, learned from a woman that his life was raised from the dead” (318). The praise extended to Angela by her male followers recalls Laurie Finke’s assertion that the female mystics attained a “discursive and public power” (81) that unsettled the clerical elite. Caroline Walker Bynum notes that, despite inveterate patristic associations of women with the disorder and weakness of the body, religious women of the later Middle Ages did not simply absorb patristic misogyny. She cites Gertrude the Great, Margaret of Oignt, and Beatrice of Nazareth as devotional women who ignored the doctrinal insistence that, unlike the male, the female is not created fully in God’s image; for example, Catherine of Siena declares to God: “Then when I see myself in you, I see that I am your image” (Bynum, Holy Feast 217). Bynum suggests that “to women, the notion of female as f lesh became an argument for women’s imitatio Christi through physicality” (263). Another way in which female mystics reinterpreted their inferior position in the body/spirit binary was their emphasis on the universal importance of the body as a symbol of humanity—most importantly Christ’s humanity (262). Thus, women did internalize the symbolic role of “body” assigned to them by patriarchy, but Bynum finds that female mystics generally viewed their bodies positively: not as evidence of gendered inferiority, but as a symbol of their especial closeness to Christ. They aimed not to escape their “femininity,” but to celebrate it; ironically, misogynist discourses assisted this effort. In contrast to the piety of male mystics such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Henry Suso, and Francis of Assisi, women’s piety was less metaphorical in its physicality (Milhaven 78). Pious women could desire the male Christ without role-reversal. John Milhaven explores what he terms the “bodily knowing” of Hadewijch and argues with Bynum that religious women “possessed and experienced Christ though bodily perceptions, bodily interactions and bodily feelings” (87). These “interactions” typically involved eating and drinking Christ’s f lesh and blood,


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nursing Him as a baby, drinking from Christ’s wound, and caressing or making love with Him. The belief that Christ was both a divine and a male human, the association of female with f lesh (and humanity), and the masculinist paradigm of sexual love between a man and a woman for the soul’s union with God—all contribute to the female mystic’s paradoxically advantageous position on the negative side of the spirit/ f lesh binary. For Angela, the human body and soul are conjoined just as the divinity and humanity of Christ are conjoined: “The body is ennobled and made secure, restored” (Liber 192). Although the body occupies a “lesser reality” than the soul, the soul is always complicit in bodily sins. Contemplating the horror of Jesus’ torture, Angela writes, “The soul also perceives that it has offended God with its entire body” (256); she realizes that “it is the human soul and not the body which offends” (181). After experiencing Divine love, Angela imagines her body reproaching her soul for having cooperated in bodily transgressions: “My delights were bodily and vile, but you were of such nobility . . . that you should not have cooperated with me” (192–193). Angela’s insistence upon the greater responsibility of the soul for sin gives further insight into why the association of women with the body does not diminish her confidence in the nobility of her soul. During one ecstatic vision, Angela finds her soul embraced and the “members of [her] body [fill] with the delights of God” (148); every part of her body is rendered “docile and in harmony” (189). In moments of ecstasy, Angela often experiences a pleasurable disjointing sensation throughout her body—particularly in her hands (158). She feels her body elongate to accommodate the expansion of her soul. Furthermore, when in a state of despair she lies f lat, but when “illumined,” she finds herself upright and on the tips of her toes, feeling “agile, healthy, invigorated” (177). Angela’s spirituality involves a predominantly literal and synesthetic bodily knowing of Christ; her mystical knowledge comes through the “ears of the body” (134). Finke’s claim that Angela’s writings reveal “an intense loathing for the physical body” (90) is undermined by Angela’s insistence in her Liber that her body not only participates in, and is ennobled by, the love of God, but is also a vehicle to access God’s love. Her body’s positions and gestures are important corporal signposts, indicating the states of her soul. Late medieval emphasis on Christ’s humanity led to increased devotion to the sacrament of the Eucharist (Bynum, Holy Feast 51–53)—a sacrament that was believed to give universal access to Christ. Women associated Christ’s dying body (and the blood that he shed, which gave

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life to humanity) with their own child-bearing female body (Bynum, Fragmentation 179–180). Since the bodies of both Christ and women represent food and self-sacrifice, and since Mary’s body was thought to be the origin of Christ’s corporality, Christ’s body was symbolically female (100). Emphatic female devotion to the Eucharist is linked simultaneously to women’s attraction to a male Christ and to their identification with Christ’s body. Female mystics tended to “monopolize” the body of Christ (Palumbo 44). Appropriately, Angela of Foligno’s writings are replete with Eucharistic visions in which her intimacy with God is publicly revealed through her reception of the host. On one occasion, the host speaks to her, assuring her that “there is no soul in which I rest as I rest in yours” (Liber 211); other Eucharistic visions are purely visual—the host shines like the sun or like a pair of “splendid eyes,” or becomes the beautiful Christ child. Frequently, when enraptured by a vision, Angela is unable to conform to the movements of the congregation and must remain standing while others kneel. During the elevation of the Eucharist, she often feels her soul enter into Christ’s side and she falls to the ground, having lost the ability to speak or move. Another of her bodily reactions to swallowing the host is violent shaking. In one instance, Angela complains that the priest removed the host too soon, demonstrating that, at times, she was “absolutely irreverent towards the clergy” (Palumbo 39). Her woman’s body spontaneously asserts and publicly communicates her special relationship with God. Molly Morrison focuses on the Eucharistic incident in which Angela drinks the bloody wash-water from a leper she has bathed. Angela recounts, “As a small scale of the leper’s sores was stuck in my throat, I tried to swallow it. My conscience would not let me spit it out, just as if I had received Holy Communion” (Liber 163). Morrison argues that Angela undergoes at this moment a “metaphorical ordination” (310–311) in her usurpation of the role of a priest by self-administering the host (the leper’s scab) and the Eucharistic wine (the bloody water). Similarly, Elizabeth Petroff interprets Angela’s ingestion of the leprous f lesh as, most importantly, a public transgression of the ideal of the invisible, passive religious woman (“Rhetoric” 165–166). Angela is among the many female mystics whose direct contact with God rendered a priest’s mediation redundant (Bynum, Holy Feast 233). God tells her: “it is given to you that you have the power to administer and make him present to others” (Liber 275); and clerical mediation is explicitly bypassed when God gives her communion directly by giving her his “freshly f lowing” blood to drink (128). Moreover, Angela’s sensual


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enjoyment of the host is contingent upon her spiritual closeness to God. She reports that eventually the host does not crumble in her mouth, and she savors it for longer than is permitted. This small confession reveals Angela’s sense of her own tendency to transgress the boundaries of acceptable worship. In one vision, she is told by God that “it was not so much the great commentators on the Scriptures who were to be commended, but rather those who put them into practice” (209–210). The “commentators” are implicitly male. Angela’s recognition of Divine favor inspires her deviation from masculinist codes. Just as Eucharistic visions were sites of subversion, women’s particular devotion to bodily self-punishment was an act of implicit defiance against the less extravagant devotion urged by ecclesiastical authorities (Bynum, Holy Feast 243). Angela’s asceticism is initially tireless: “My heart was so on fire with the love of God that I never got tired of genuf lections or other penitential practices” (Liber 131). She writes of beating herself so hard that she raised welts on her head and “various parts” of her body (197); her application of “material fire” to her “shameful parts” (198) illustrates the severity of her penance. However, Angela came to see excessive fasting as a temptation, and Rudolph Bell observes that eventually she relinquished her harsh austerities (108). This tempering of self-mortification, however, could be evidence of the selective notation of Brother Arnaldo, who is revealingly vague and uncharacteristically taciturn about Angela’s austerities. Either way, it is clear that the church was unsettled by the ascetic vigor of women such as Angela.3 The notoriously harsh ascetic practices of female mystics signaled an elitist element in their piety. As Laurie Finke proposes, women’s mysticism underwent “co-optation by the official church” (83). The church harnessed female religious enthusiasm as a force against heresy—a threat initially more imposing than unmanageable, charismatic holy women. Conveniently, for the official church, Angela’s approach to the body/spirit dichotomy opposes the radical dualism of the Cathar heresy (Bynum, Fragmentation 143). Ironically, although Angela denounces Free Spirit heretics for their independence from the official Church (Liber 106), she shares their tendency to bypass clerical mediation. Furthermore, the idea that the beatific vision is attainable in a human lifetime is another Free Spirit heresy in which Angela arguably participates (Lachance 391). Evidence, however, that her writings were useful to clerical authorities lies in the use of her Liber as a holy book among high-ranking Franciscan friars; and, as Rudolph Bell outlines, she mediated conf licts between the Spirituals and the Conventuals in the Franciscan order (110). Even

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Angela’s audacious criticism of male clergy—“preachers cannot preach [the delights of God]; they do not understand what they preach” (Liber 131)—did not undermine her esteem among the Franciscans. It seems that when other disruptive forces preoccupy the Church, the subversive nature of female mystical discourse is overlooked. Overall, it appears that male authorities could not efface, and therefore tried to utilize, the female mystic’s “sense of being special to God” (Bynum, Holy Feast 241). Angela’s acceptance by clerics is qualified, however, by the fact that she was not officially declared blessed until the eighteenth century, and is yet to be canonized (Mazzoni 247).4 Necessarily, a masculine voice co-articulates the teachings of female mystics who could not write, and this complicates scholarly access to their voices; for example, in Angela’s Liber, it is the “unworthy scribe” (Liber 124) Brother Arnaldo, not Angela, who assumes the controlling authorial presence. In the “Memorial,” the first-part of the Liber, the first-person voice of Arnaldo melds with Angela’s, but, as Angela is often referred to in the third person, the text does not attempt the illusion of an unfiltered first-person point of view; yet Arnaldo declares avidly his intent of unmediated transcription: “I would add nothing of my own, not even a single word, unless it was exactly as I could grasp it just out of her mouth as she related it” (Liber 137). Moreover, Fra Arnaldo claims not to fully understand the steps of Angela’s spiritual ascent (particularly steps 19–30), and he humbly likens himself to a sieve unable to collect the “refined f lour” of Angela’s words (137). However, his skepticism concerning the orthodoxy of Angela’s beliefs and his initial horrified response to her fit of screaming outside the Church of Assisi suggest that his professed inferiority to Angela is somewhat fabricated. Furthermore, he maintains his masculine control by attempting to prohibit her from attaining complete poverty; Angela claims, “I was forbidden by the friars and by you . . . [but] in no way could I stray from my determination” (129). Arnaldo also unsuccessfully forbids her to burn her body. As Angela’s confessor, he is a representative of the institution suppressing unorthodox female religious expression, yet he is also Angela’s disciple due to the divine favor he reads in her “unusual” behavior. Arnaldo’s voice is a pervasive masculinist obstacle in the Liber. Tiziana Arcangeli posits that Angela’s voice is lost even before its mutilations by Arnaldo. She cites at least fifty references throughout the Liber to the insufficiency of language to convey spiritual experience (69). Luce Irigaray succinctly captures this phenomenon: “God goes beyond all representation, however schematic in its approximations”


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(197). The impossibility of describing the ineffable renders the mystic’s body the most appropriate symbol for the transmission of visionary experience. Departing from this view of mystical discourse, Cristina Mazzoni argues convincingly for Angela’s subversively eloquent “vociferousness” (251–252), and therefore for her very un-Lacanian lack of silence. In articulating her “blasphemy” (“whatever I say about it [God] is blasphemy” [Liber 205]), Angela self-consciously rejects linguistic limits “implicitly imposed by religious and discursive conventions regarding the Divine” (Mazzoni 249). Mazzoni, however, acknowledges Angela’s hyperbolic physicality and concludes that her mysticism demonstrates a “perfect balance between language and the body” (253). For other scholars, Angela’s body—in its experience of paralysis, and disjointing, and sensations of taste, smell, and touch—becomes, as presented in the text, her most authentic “voice” (Arcangeli 75–76; Sagnella 83). Elizabeth Petroff and Karma Lochrie join Arcangeli in the view that the mystic uses her body to say “unspeakable things” (Petroff “Writing the Body” 214; Lochrie 137). Angela’s encounters with the Divine center on the tangibility of God. When preparing for her wedding night, Angela envisions Christ as the embodied word of God speaking to her through her body: “And he said to me: ‘This is the Word who wished to incarnate himself for you.’ At that very moment the Word came to me and went all through me, touched all of me, and embraced me” (Liber 315). The Word of God, enf leshed in Christ’s body, fuses with Angela’s body, and she is enlightened by the pure Word undistorted by human language. Angela’s conception of her body as a site for contact with the divine complements her sense of the indivisibility of body and soul. Though explicit sexual imagery in Angela’s writing is minimal, she participates physically as a gendered and sexual subject in her soul’s approach to God. Irigaray’s theories about women’s nature and writing have been criticized as falling into an ahistorical “essentialist trap” (Moi 139). Laurie Finke aims to avoid this error by historicizing mysticism as a “site of struggle” entrenched in a “complex network of cultural and ideological constructs” (78). Irigaray, she argues, by concentrating on the affective aspect of mysticism, neglects its complexities as a public discourse. Similarly, Sarah Beckwith rejects the notion of mysticism as a “model of feminine discourse” (196) and examines the “historical attraction of neo-Franciscanism for women” as a site for the formation of a new subjectivity that is “composed” of “the contradictions of the social and symbolic order” (202). I propose that it is irrelevant whether or not Irigaray ignores the historical context of female mysticism,

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essentializing it as irrational (and antithetical to the masculine “dry desolation of reason” [197]); regardless, her exploration of women’s mysticism in “La Mystérique” reaches conclusions similar to those of Finke and Beckwith about the ineffability of visionary experience, its exorbitant physicality, its uses of abjection, and its cultural authority in the late medieval period. One epigraph to Irigaray’s “La Mystérique,” “the Word was made f lesh to make me God,” echoes Angela’s pronouncement: “There is indeed no greater charity than the one by which my God became f lesh in order that he might make me God. O heartfelt love poured out for me! […] O impalpable one, become palpable!” (Liber 308). Irigaray’s allusion to this passage highlights both the egoistic audacity of Angela’s claims of reciprocated love and her emphasis on Christ’s paradoxical transcendence and physicality. Paul Lachance notes that Irigaray’s “La Mystérique” is replete with allusions to Angela’s text, but does not expand upon this observation. Irigaray’s notion that for the mystic “All words are weak, worn out, unfit to translate anything” (193) is affirmed by Angela’s insistence that her words “ruin the reality they represent” (Liber 214). Paintings of the crucifixion distress Angela by signifying nothing (162); and, as Irigaray explains, “no portrait [. . .] could serve to ease the waiting” (195). Angela struggles with feelings of abandonment: “Love still unknown, why do you leave me?” (142); this is echoed in Irigaray’s observation: “abandoned, the soul can hardly keep faith” (195). In addition, Irigaray’s reference to male “voyeurs” who cannot comprehend the mystic’s passion applies to Brother Arnaldo who, amazed by Angela’s ecstatic displays, is “unable to follow her that far. Unable to go and see” (199). Finally, Irigaray’s description of the annihilation of the self into an abyss (a “dark night which is also fire”) finds resonance in Angela’s apophatic experience of darkness when her soul is ablaze with the love of God. Throughout “La Mystérique” the erotic element of female mysticism is stressed. Strikingly, Irigaray associates Christ’s wound with the female genitalia: “ecstasy is there in that glorious slit where she curls up as if in her nest where she rests as if she had found her home—and He is also in her” (200). As Angela is told by Christ, “You are I and I am you” (Liber 205), her love, desire, and knowledge of God ref lect back upon herself. At the moment of mystical union, she finds the “space of her jouissance where she finds Him/herself ” (Irigaray 201). The physical dimension of this union is represented by the mystic’s “outrageous nakedness” (194). Irigaray’s emphasis on the importance of female sexuality in the bodily knowing of Christ finds support in Angela’s Liber.


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When Christ tells Angela of his passion, the doctrine of the redemption of all humanity is erotically personalized. He explains, “I have known hunger and thirst for you; and I shed my blood for you, I have loved you so much” (Liber 140); in return, he asks her to hunger, desire, and languish for him as for an absent lover (151). Many of Angela’s visions contain moments of physical intimacy with Christ. In one vision, she is united with Christ in the sepulcher and she holds his dead body close to her, kisses his breast and mouth, and places her cheek to his. He responds by holding her tightly and placing his hand on her cheek in a gesture of reciprocity (182). Sometimes Christ is Angela’s lover in a purely spirit form—“I am the holy spirit who enters into your deepest self ” (141)—however, when she experiences “the penetration of the divine touch” (Irigaray 195), she lies in an ecstasy for days, physically overwhelmed. Laurie Finke summarizes this eroticism succinctly: “Piety for Angela, as for virtually all female mystics, is palpably physical and sexual” (90). Angela’s sex-specific denunciation of her body, suggested by her practice of burning her shameful parts, is tempered by her insistence upon redemption through her female body and sexuality. Her act of stripping before the cross in order to rid herself of all pleasures and possessions, including her sense of self, is explicitly sexual: she accuses each member of her body of its associated sin and declares a vow of chastity. Thus, the body she offers to God is specifically renounced as female and sexual; however, she makes no reference to the particular lustiness of the female body (or to the sinfulness of Eve). Moreover, in the “Instructions,” she advises her “sons” to consecrate each of their bodily members and senses to Christ (256). In the vision in which she “enumerates each of the sins of each bodily member” (151), Christ tells her of his special love for sinners who, like Mary Magdalene, are reclaimed. Women who repent their sexual pleasures are, it is implied, loved more deeply than virgins. This vision, while evoking her specifically female shame, assures her of a future bliss that is contingent upon and almost exclusive to her femaleness. Significantly, when Angela sees the Blessed Virgin, she delights in finding a woman in the noble role of “interceding for the human race” (185). Angela’s female body—coded as debased and perverse in patristic discourse—serves ironically to heighten her potential for sanctity. According to Karma Lochrie, the medieval body/spirit dichotomy is complicated by a third element—the f lesh. Women signify not simply “body,” but also “f lesh”—the gap, the place of disruption and willfulness where corruption (like that of Eve) originates (Lochrie 120–121).

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Consequently, the female body represents the “perviousness of the f lesh” (122) and “occupies the border between body and soul” (122). This female space of disruption is important if one considers the role of abjection in women’s piety, for through abjection, “the perviousness of the f lesh which is its mark of perversion, also offers the possibility of redemption” (123). The association of women with f lesh, as interpreted by Lochrie, is redolent of Finke’s idea that the “grotesque body” (a term borrowed from Mikhail M. Bakhtin, along with “classical body”) informs representations of the female body in the Middle Ages. The grotesque body is illiterate, female, lower-class, heterogeneous, and disproportionate, with gaps and orifices, whereas the classical body is Latin, male, upper-class, proportionate, and monumental (Finke 88). Through asceticism, the mystic attempts to convert her grotesque body into one that is classical. Through her imitatio Christi, she controls her unruly body more rigorously than patriarchy permits (93, 98). As with Lochrie’s definition of the f lesh, the very instability and permeability of the grotesque body (which is its perversion) indicate its generative tendency—its capacity to contain the classical body, just as the “fissured f lesh” contains the “possibility of redemption.” In Angela of Foligno’s asceticism, both Karma Lochrie and Laurie Finke find confirmation of this embodied phenomenon of rebellious transcendence and transfiguration. Finke locates a striking example of the reconcilement of the grotesque and classical opposition in the incident in which Angela swallows the leper’s scab (93). At this moment, Angela imitates Christ’s act of absorbing and loving that which is repulsive, diseased, and human. In one vision, Christ (in his resplendent classical form) mimics her act of centering out each of her body parts for condemnation and redemption; he enumerates each of his wounds and presents his body as fragmented (like Angela’s) by human sin. Another of Angela’s grotesque desires is to see the bits of f lesh left by Jesus on the cross (Liber 145); and instead she receives a classical vision of Christ’s beautiful throat and arms. Recognizing the paradoxical beauty and ugliness of Christ’s crucified body, she feels joy and pain simultaneously, and the classical and grotesque aspects of Christ’s body and her own are merged; Angela identifies with Christ’s body as grotesque and therefore female, but his body, like hers, also contains the classical and God-like. Significantly, Irigaray also observes the metamorphic nature of the mystic’s self-abasement and experience of abjection: She takes on the most slavish tasks, affects the most shameful and degrading behavior so as to force the disdain that is felt towards


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her, that she feels towards herself. And perhaps, at the bottom of the pit, she finds her purity again. In this way, the blood, the sores, the pus that others clean away, will wash her clean of all stain. (199) Angela’s abject desire for public humiliation, her bodily mortifications, and her desire to drink Christ’s blood (and leper’s pus) are all echoed in this passage. Angela desires to physically express her knowledge of her own nothingness next to God by being publicly tortured to death and “vilified by the whole world” (Liber 150). In this state there is no selfinterest and “the extent of the soul’s elevation corresponds to the extent of its humiliation” (202). This same paradox applies to her view of the body, which is perfected by death and dismemberment. The mystic reassigns her female body the position assigned to it by patriarchy; and, by defining herself as the ultimate example of baseness and filth, she becomes worthy of union with Christ and the dissolution of the subject/object binary that constructed her oppression. She attains public and private empowerment. Thus, it appears that two disparate theories, the psychoanalytic approach of Luce Irigaray and the historical method of Laurie Finke and others, unite in the conclusion that the woman mystic redefined her condemnation to physicality through immersion in it. Female mystics paradoxically empowered themselves through “disciplines constructed to regulate the female body” (Finke 78). The wounds resulting from self-mortification allowed the mystic to gain status as both subject and object, victim and torturer, and to “reconstruct [her] oppression as a form of power through mysticism” (74). Aptly, along with Finke, Sarah Beckwith warns against idealizing the power of women mystics, for the mystic, like a serf becoming a king, enacts a “deposition, a usurpation that changes the terms but never the structure” of the religion (212). Patriarchal structures contain contradictions or gaps through which women have found ways to temper their oppression. The symbolic association of women with the body within official church ideology has been a surprisingly troublesome association with regard to the control of female spirituality. The association is particularly unsettling when Christ’s humanity becomes a doctrinal focus, as it did in the later Middle Ages. Ironically, Christ, whom Irigaray calls “the most feminine of all men, the Son” (200), became most accessible to women— the symbol of his humanity. As both divine and human, soul and body, male and female, Christ “undoes specular logic” (Moi 136). Female mystics, such as Angela of Foligno, who rejected a straightforward body/mind dualism, took advantage of Christ’s disruption of binary

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logic. Consequently, as Bynum suggests, Angela’s ardent devotion to the Eucharist and her self-mortification do not reinforce a misogynist body/spirit dualism. Instead, these practices betray an almost elitist, and definitely subversive, insistence upon female privilege with regard to the personal experience of Christ/God. Angela’s Liber, which is infused with the voice of Brother Arnaldo, exemplifies the difficulty of extracting the authentic voice of the female mystic. Yet, despite theoretical differences as to the ultimate implications of women’s mystical discourse, Irigaray, Finke, Lochrie, and other scholars concur that the mystic’s body becomes the most important sign revealing the subversive implications of her mysticism. This power of subversion nevertheless must be qualified, as Rosemary Radford Ruether presciently acknowledges: “Women’s ministry based on charismatic gifts is both continually reborn in practice and continually marginalized from power in historical Church institutions” (197). Patriarchal structures— as demonstrated by the recent papal denunciation of “feminist rhetoric”—are incessantly seeking out the gaps and spaces of female authority and empowerment, and attempting to close them. Notes 1. John Paul II. “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World.” August 28, 2004. http://www.vatican.va/roman_ curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20040731_collaboration_en. html. 2. Paul Lachance, Angela of Foligno: Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 317. All references to Angela’s Liber are from this work. 3. Catherine of Siena, ignoring the decrees of her male advisors, eventually lived exclusively off the host, and legends proclaim that Angela of Foligno thrived off of the host for twelve years (Lachance 352). The willfulness displayed by these mystics must have vexed clerical authorities, for even one twentieth-century male scholar of Catherine of Siena writes, “In the energetic nature of the Sienese Saint there is somewhat of a domineering spirit, an element of tyranny that was repugnant to me. Her perpetual and very feminine Io voglio ‘I will,’ is in absolute contrast to the gentle Umbrian [St. Francis]” ( Jorgensen 5). 4. In 1297 the Liber was approved by Cardinal John Colonna and eight other theologians (Mooney 36). In addition, Ubertino of Casale credited Angela with his conversion and named her Magistra Theologorum (Mazzoni 247).

Works Cited Arcangeli, Tiziana. “Re-reading a Mis-known and Mis-read Mystic: Angela de Foligno.” Annali d’Italianstica 13 (1995): 41–78. Barratt, Alexandra, ed. Women’s Writing in Middle English. New York: Longman Publishing, 1992.


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Beckwith, Sarah. “A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kemp.” Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages. Ed. Jane Chance. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996. 195–215. Bell, Rudolph M. Holy Anorexia. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. Bloch, Howard R. “Medieval Misogyny: Woman as Riot.” Representations 20 (1987): 1–24. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1991. ———. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973. Finke, Laurie A. “The Grotesque Mystical Body: Representing the Woman Writer.” Feminist Theory, Women’s Writing. Ed. Laurie A. Finke. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. 75–107. Hofmann Paul. The Vatican’s Women: Female Influence at the Holy See. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Cornell UP, 1985. Jorgensen, Johannes. Saint Catherine of Siena. Trans. Ingeburg Lund. London: Longmans and Green, 1939. Lachance, Paul, trans. Angela of Foligno: Complete Works. New York: Paulist Press, 1993. Lochrie, Karma. “The Language of Transgression: Body, Flesh and Word in Mystical Discourse.” Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies. Ed. Allen J. Frantzen. New York: State U of New York P, 1991. 115–140. Mazzoni, Cristina. “On the (Un)Representability of Women’s Pleasure: Angela of Foligno and Jacques Lacan.” Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages. Ed. Jane Chance. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996. 239–262. Milhaven, John Giles. “Medieval Women and Bodily Knowing.” Hadewijch and Her Sisters: Other Ways of Loving and Knowing. Ed. John Giles Milhaven. New York: State U of New York P, 1993. 75–120. Moi, Toril. Sexual Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Routledge, 1985. Mooney, Catherine M. “The Authorial Role of Brother A. in the Composition of Angela of Foligno’s Revelations.” Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance. Eds. E. Ann Matter and John Coakley. Philadelphia: U of Pennyslvania P, 1994. 34–63. Morrison, Molly G. “Connecting With the God-Man: Angela of Foligno’s Sensual Communion and Priestly Identity.” RLA 10.1 (1998): 308–314. Palumbo, Patrizia. “The Body of Christ and Religious Power in Angela of Folgino’s Libro.” Forum Italicum 32.1 (Spring 1998): 36–50. Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda. “Writing the Body: Male and Female in the Writings of Marguerite D’Oingt, Angela of Foligno, and Umilta of Faenza.” Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. Ed. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. 204–224. ———. “Rhetoric of Transgression in Lives of Italian Women Saints.” Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. Ed. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. 161–181. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1983. Sagnella, Mary Ann. “Carnal Metaphors and Mystical Discourse in Angela de Foligno’s Liber.” Annali d’Italianistica 13 (1995): 41–78.


CH A P T E R

T WO

“I Grab the Microphone and Move My Body”—Volatile Speech, Volatile Bodies, and the Church’s Attempt to Measure Holiness M . C . B odde n

Margery Kempe’s opening sentences begin in resistance, and with the body, and it’s a good thing—because her decision not to abide in silence, to exert, even to disrupt, her physical space/body as integral to her participation in a life with God has been subjected to endless communities of criticism, at first frankly hostile and, only latterly, offering a qualified admiration. Nevertheless, despite the thriving religious and scholarly appreciation for Margery Kempe, neither the medieval Catholic community nor the current one has ever, during her lifetime or in the intervening centuries, endorsed her status as a mystic,1 much less her sanctity. I want to explore, very brief ly, the reason for this range of response from communities of scholars, and then to examine the interconnection between the volatile speech and volatile body of Margery Kempe, and the attitude evinced by the scholarly (and Catholic) community toward her place in female hagiography. The reaction of (Catholic) scholars to Margery Kempe is, I think, related to a methodological condition, which, increasingly, has begun to surface in a number of disciplines: namely, the disposition on the part of a field, here English literature, neither to recognize nor scrutinize as problematic its own ethnocentric position as a stance from which

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to interpret the culture of an earlier century, in this case, Margery Kempe’s England. Particularly problematic is its ethnocentric stance toward medieval English female hagiography. “Ethnocentric,” as I use it, means “the inclination” or “habitual disposition” “to view other communities and cultures from the perspective or security of one’s own, and therefore inclined to judge them by the norms or conventions with which one is familiar,” or “to gauge other societies by those criteria which are significant in one’s own society.”2 Catholicism, as with all religions, expresses its ethnocentric stance toward female sanctity in its elaborate criteria both about women and about women’s sanctity.3 It is crucial to note that this ethnocentric stance—whether by scholars or religious scholars—likewise affects the transmission of any text, which, in turn, affects the legitimacy of its subject and the subject’s claimed experience.4 The general methodology of (Catholic) scholars’ ethnocentric stance toward The Book of Margery Kempe is this: we have displaced or perhaps outshouted coherent interpretative communities of Kempe’s world with our own interpretative communities. In Kempe’s world three issues were at stake. First, the issue of women’s speech, especially public speech, triggered strong, even violent reactions during the Middle Ages, to the extent, in fact, that several towns attempted to legislate against it (Coulton 92).5 Second, in the patriarchal culture of Kempe’s period, the transgressive nature of public speech was associated with a transgressive sexuality.6 Third, the issue of women’s physical space/ body is at stake: in a period when women’s bodies were their husband’s or the Church’s, and much of the language surrounding women’s bodies—in Canon Law, sermons, conduct literature, and plays—was a language of vilification, commodification, and the grotesque, Kempe literally negotiated to have her body back (from her husband), openly created a language of transgression and disruption around her body, and interrogated the interconnection between her bodily and symbolic powers. These three issues, as we shall see, have created a crisis in “authorizing” the spirituality of Margery Kempe’s text. Contemporary critics, though they try to free themselves from the prejudices of the Middle Ages that promoted the association of female verbosity with sexuality, still do not like noisy women. In interpretative communities, especially Catholic ones, a particular image of woman still prevails. Noisy women are regarded as disruptive, and their discourse is viewed as disorderly. Even scholars not tied to the image of the ideal woman are tied to the image of a non-noisy woman, a woman not given to public dialoguing and not given to ad hoc public

The Church’s Attempt to MEASURE Holiness

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preaching. This leads me to the second element of the methodology involved in our ethnocentric stance. The relationship between contemporary attitudes toward women who will not abide in silence and the woman saint or mystic who models silence (unless she is haranguing pagan beliefs) has led critics to mount a counterdiscourse to Kempe’s text, specifically its status as hagiography. I am aware that counterdiscourse is involved in the reading (and the writing) of any text insofar as reading is a function of a reader’s personality, of the institutions in which she/he works and lives, and a function of the context in which the text is read. What I am concerned about here is the creation of a particular meaning based upon our expectations of a particular context. When we make genre—here, hagiography—an especially important context for our interpretations, we dramatically reconstruct the text because “genre expectation creates meaning” (Green and LeBihan 187). The effect, thus, of our ethnocentric stance toward The Book of Margery Kempe—the effect, in other words, of our gauging her spiritual culture and her authentic spirituality by criteria considered significant in our own spiritual culture and our own expectations of hagiography—has been to create a crisis in interpreting and “authorizing” the spirituality of her text, in determining what constitutes hagiography. First, then, the issue of Kempe’s (and women’s) volatile speech and volatile body. Margery “Grabs the Microphone” Women unable to control their own voices was a “common thread in medieval literature” (McAvoy 2004, 170) and in medieval socio-religious discourse.7 For her own interpretative communities Kempe’s voluble speech and her loud weeping created a divided view of her spirituality. Some praised her publicly; some cursed her, as she says, and ascribed a devil to her weeping and her preaching. Embedded in Kempe’s text, and its reception, is a particularly virulent ecclesiastical–political feature, namely, the variety of patristic and theological texts supporting the silent female as the ideal female8 (Ashton 103). Its virulence lies in what it leads to: a loquacious woman was associated with a menacing sexuality. “What was preferred was full integrity, a virginal body unbreached in every way” (103). Joyce E. Salisbury observes that women’s sexuality “was perceived to be open and receptive [. . .]” and “this openness was extended to include such things as garrulousness–that is, women with open mouths.” She cites Tertullian (“To His Wife” 43),

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according to whom women who are talkative have “their belly” as their “god,” “so, too, what is neighbor to the belly” (Salisbury 81–102, 87). Karma Lochrie notes that the increased emphasis upon women as f lesh rather than as passive body made possible a gendered psychology of sin and a sanctioning of integritas or the sealed body (a body closed off from the world through chastity, silence, and enclosure) (“Language of Transgression,” 120–123, 127). “I wish you were enclosed in a house of stone, so that no one should speak with you,”9 one of the Canterbury monks exclaims to Margery when she responds to his question by citing a story from Scripture. Impenetrable enclosure is his image, sealing in both body and speech—the whole point of the stone enclosures for cloistered religious women. Thus, in terms of gender and the theological network embedded in Margery Kempe’s description of the monk’s reply (and, indeed, throughout her text), the breaching of the lips assumed a breaching of the virginal body. This is critically significant in the transmission and reception of Kempe’s text. For one thing, in the Catholic Church’s classification of saints, Kempe’s status is already compromised. “For female saints but not for males, the official classification turned on sexual condition: women saints were recorded as either virgin or widow, while men were confessors, bishops . . .” ( JarekGlidden 43–44).10 As Kathleen Coyne-Kelly explains, “What is at stake here is not just the virgin and her body, but the thing that they have come to represent: the body of the Church.”11 As a mother, Kempe already fell into the non-virgin category (along with her role model, Bridget of Sweden)—a tainted status that would have been conspicuously reinforced by her “unauthorized” and, thus, suspect public speech. Add to that Kempe’s contentiousness, and her authenticity as a mystic becomes even more questionable––first, within the male hagiographic tradition that assigns almost universally to female saints a particular narrative pattern of meekness and restraint (Winstead, Virgin Martyrs 18 and Ashton 12–13, 103–106), and second, within the broader patriarchal attitudes toward order and law. For example, as mentioned, two medieval English towns in the fourteenth century attempted to legislate female silence. Further, according to Karen Winstead, a plethora of works voicing hostility toward outspoken, aggressive women appears to have been triggered during this period by the increasing economic autonomy of middle-class women such as Margery Kempe (“Saints, Wives” 153). In the transmission of her text as a record of her spirituality, this situation has scarcely changed: Kempe’s noisy weeping, her bold passages of physical familiarity with Christ and Mary, her frank confession of sexual fantasies, and her repeated ref lections about the


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significance of her weeping were the very features that, being denied any religious or cultural significance by most (Catholic) critics through all but the last decade of the twentieth century, rendered the book inferior in status as literature and denied it a place as discourse of a genuine mystic. From the aborted text published by Wynken de Word in 1501 up to current scholarship, the majority of articles on The Book of Margery Kempe constitutes a counterdiscourse to her narrative, greatly problematizing the transmission of her text.12 As an interpretative community, the scholarly community of the late twentieth century added its own sniffiness, its own attitudes toward noisy women, toward illiteracy, and toward the discourse of spirituality. Even current savvy feminist scholars who have questioned both past and recent cultural readings of Margery Kempe and her book, and who credit her with a great deal, do not credit her with hagiography. For them, she may have “dislocate[ed] social boundaries” (Wilson 226), she may have “appropriat[ed]” and “replaced patriarchal language” with authentic female experience, and she may have “articulate[d] a new ideology of spiritual value through the active life” (Ashley 381), but, in their view, she did not produce a hagiographical text (much less “embody” the signs of sanctity). The sticking point for most scholar– critics’ stance on whether Kempe’s book is hagiographical seems to be this: many mystics and holy women wrote about their spiritual experiences but they did not appear to view their lives as spiritual experiences. They saw God’s work in their lives, they recognized moments of grace and moments of spiritual failure, but they did not write as though they saw their entire life itself as a spiritual experience. Like them, Kempe is talking about God’s work in her life, but she sees her entire adult life as the work of God. Even her contentiousness, her public confrontations, her stances on money, her stances on sexual intercourse were, in her view, all an integral part of her relationship with Christ, all part of her movement toward enuine mystical experience. The distinction is that rather than construing her self as merely the conventional instrument of God—which was the position of the Church and the position expressed in martyrologies and hagiographies regarding all human actions and achievements—she sees every bit of herself, not just her actions and her achievements, but also “hyr felyngys & revelacyons,” even the very “forme of her levying,” not as any mere instrument but as wholly ref lecting God’s goodness. Indeed, in her view, these feelings and revelations and the form of her living are so privileged a part of her special relationship with Christ that, as she records, “ower Lord” has “comawnded” and “chargyd” them to be written so that God’s

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“goodnesse myth be knowyn to alle þe world” (BMK 3–4). Furthermore, she “produces” independent confirmation of her extraordinary relationship with Christ by noting that some of these “archebysshopys & bysshoppys, doctowrs of dyvynte & bachelors” (3) and anchorites to whom she had confided her mystical experiences took it on “perel of her [their] sowle” (3), knowing that they would answer to God, that Margery “was inspyred wyth þe Holy Gost” (3). The disapproval of such verbalized self-consciousness about her place in the mystical tradition is ref lected in scholars’ remarks that note, for example, that Margery appropriates “tropes lifted from [other saints’] texts,”13 or that “she embeds . . . passages and ideas from other texts to validate her own mystical experience” (Taylor 99–100); or, again, “Although Kempe attributed her pilgrimages to be the commands of Christ, these christological desires also conveniently coincided with her own” ( JarekGlidden)14; and when Kempe describes her confrontation with the lawyers of Lincoln (135/26–35),15 a critic not only found it “a bit too reminiscent of Christ in the temple” (Hirsch 45), but openly doubted its veracity.16 Yet it is precisely this very dialogism with the mystical tradition of the past that Laurie Finke sees “as central to the visionary experience” in the series of mystics in her study (29). This “intense interaction of one’s own voice and another’s voice”17 enabled women to engage with cultural representations that “paradoxically confined” them and “enabled them to challenge their cultural figurations” (20–30). It seems to me, then, that construing Kempe’s voiced visionary experience as largely derivative or as fictional illustrates the difficulty of contemporary scholars in getting past her determination to assert her identity, to create her own “self.” These objections to Kempe’s volubility in shaping her subjectivity, derive, I think, from the problem within our (Catholic) ethnocentric stance of understanding holiness. Whether feminist or not, critics’ understanding of holiness is still very much tied to an understanding of the hagiographical past. And the hagiographical past, together with its understanding of holiness, was, largely, a male construct—as research into the language and structure of saints’ lives pretty much concludes.18 This matters, because such texts rarely included daily events and personal experiences of their female subjects, except as events and experiences characteristic of either conventional pious practices or of a saintliness meant to be representative of “ideal womanliness” (Ashton 2). Female hagiography, particularly that written between 1200 and 1500, was largely masculine narrative— “one that [spoke] and [wrote] from the heart of patriarchal power structures . . .” (3). In fact, referring specifically to The Book of Margery


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Kempe, Wendy Harding concludes that despite the rereading of the text by contemporary feminists, they ultimately determine that “masculine definitions of femininity” “shaped” “Margery’s spirituality” (168). Gail Ashton puts the situation more broadly: “All hagiography, but especially female is a textual and cultural construct” (4). What seems to me frankly evident in such a construct is that the paradigm of a life as holy is, therefore, a masculine paradigm. That, in turn, means that any woman writing her life as a ref lection of her relationship with God, who includes in that ref lection her daily events, personal experiences, and feelings, which she candidly views as part of her struggle toward union with God, is bound to create a self that little resembles the “self ” of male-authored hagiography. In the first place, this is a female-authored hagiography.19 Kempe, now over sixty years of age, literally dictates to two scribes her narrative, her understanding of her spiritual identity, her self. Indeed, The Book of Margery Kempe is virtually one long response to all of the interrogations, all of the efforts, by clerics, parish priests, monks, bishops, and neighbors, to determine just who she is. In the second place, as we know, female visionaries, including Kempe, made the body the site of their struggle to define both human and divine experience as well as the meaning of that experience.20 Margery “Moves Her Body” Among other beliefs concerning female physiology, the insatiability of feminine desire supported the notion that women were constitutionally unable to transcend their femininity. Even if they led lives of virginity, they could not fully transcend their bodily limitations (Robertson 148), a position which Gregory of Nyssa reinforces despite the fact that the subject of his remarks is his (beloved) sister, Macrina.21 In theological terms, a woman was “deemed able to perceive God only through that body” (Robertson 149)—unable, therefore, to achieve genuinely spiritual mystical union with Christ. Consequently, “sexuality and notions of the female body became the central issues for women in pursuit of the contemplative life” (149). Julian of Norwich imaginatively explores the very aspect of woman’s physicality that was repeatedly condemned by theologians from Jerome through Bonaventure. For her, those deficiencies (her excess moisture and her menstrual purging) become the precise means of identifying her with Christ. “Like her, Christ, as God incarnate, is dominated by physicality” (154). Margery Kempe is bolder. “She actualizes the metaphors that describe

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mystical union by conveying with voice and body the throes of sexual passion” (Harding 173). Harding has in mind Margery’s tears and sobs,22 but a far more audacious actualization of such metaphors was her public wearing of a white robe, the virginal white of the brides of Christ. In one single rhetorical act, she asserts her sexual freedom, her liberated body, and her autonomous female identity, and she “legitimates” her spiritual union with Christ. In “a world that devalued women’s bodies” (Huenneke 128),23 Kempe publicly inscribes on her own body its corporeal worth and autonomy. She takes into the civic sphere her conf lict about (traditional) celibacy in “her determination to resist submission of her body to any worldly purpose” (131). This “spectacular” selfpresentation not only challenged conceptions of fixed categories (namely, of virgin, widow/singular, married), but also defied fixed social identities of wife and mother and religious visionary. The Mayor (of Lincoln?) recognizes her challenge when he objects: “I wil wetyn why Þow gost in white clothys, for I trowe Þow art comyn hedyr to han a-wey owr wyuys fro us & ledyn hem wyth Þe” [I want to know why you go about in white clothes, for I believe you have come hither to lure away our wives from us, and lead them off with you] (BMK 116/12–14). In Margery’s view, Christ is singling her out as “a synguler lover,” “a mayden in thi sowle,” “myn owyn derworthy derlyng,” and “myn owyn blyssed spowse” (BMK 52–53). This allows her to “reinterpret social and religious conventions, putting in place new definitions that are consistent with the needs of lay piety” (Ashley 379). When Margery forlornly asks Christ if she will dance as “maidens dance now merrily in heaven,” Christ replies that “for as much as you are a maiden in your soul, I shall take you by the one hand in heaven and my mother by the other hand, and so shall you dance in heaven with other holy maidens and virgins” (52/26–30, translation mine). Ashley concludes that the “external definition of virginity given by conventional religion has been replaced by a chastity of soul which can coexist with the demands of married life in the world” (379). We see this same imagistic depiction of her relationship with Christ in those visions where she describes, in a memorably sensual way, her lying alongside Christ and touching his feet, and we note it again in her physical participation as a helpmate to Mary in a holy family scene (chapters six and seven, 52–55). Kempe openly transgressed the old barriers between the sacred and the secular. She interconnects her earthly experiences with divine presence in the record of her dialogues with Christ. The most acutely personal example occurs in chapter twelve: God tells her that she is pregnant


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again, and later she mentions that she feels “unworthy” to hear God speak to her when she is still having sex with her husband. Even Margery’s relish of food and drink—distinct from other mystics’ abstinence from it—becomes a means of presenting “her body as a strong witness to God” (Mazzoni 177). Cristina Mazzoni remarks on Margery’s “repeated, almost obsessive references to food and drink at the height of her spiritual experiences” (172). In one of her visions, for example, Margery looked after the child Mary “until she was twelve years of age, with good food and drink,” and later, in the same vision, she carried a “f lask of wine sweetened with honey and spices” (Windeatt 52–53). In Beverley, under house arrest (chapter fifty-three, 169), Kempe is slipped “a surreptitious cup of wine to quench her thirst (brought to her by the jailer’s wife by means of a ladder placed outside the window)”—a scene “instantly recognizable as the representation of an orthodox imitatio Christi” (McAvoy 2002, 166). The fact that “the love that she put into her preparation of food [for herself, her husband, and her children] spilled on the food itself ” (Mazzoni 182) leads Mazzoni to suggest that readers “accept and read against the grain an anecdote” that Margery herself objected to as a tale contrived against her not long after her conversion. On a fish day, sitting at a table rich in various fish, Margery was reported to have chosen to eat the good pike instead of the humbler red herring, exclaiming: “Ah, false f lesh, you would now eat red herring, but you shall not have your will.” “And with that she set aside the red herring and ate the good pike” (Windeatt 288). Mazzoni proposes that rather than reject the tale as false or even slanderous, “we could instead choose to read this story as the portrayal of a situation where, in tune with her harmonious life passages to and from feasting and fasting, Margery identifies excessive abstinence as sinful, and enjoyment of good food as a divine grace” (182, emphasis mine). Kempe’s exploration of her body and her sexuality gave to her, in other words, a narrative code that completely broke with the narrative code of male hagiography. With male hagiography, the principles and assumptions about holiness were expressed through “external, immediately recognisable holy symbols” intended to “validate the idealized female subject,” for example, ordeals of sexual abstinence, patience, charity, and devotion to the passion. Ashton claims that “Any potential transgressions conf licting with a cultural ideal of womanliness—such as moments of autonomous action or speech— are glossed, and a potentially subversive subject is brought back into the safe confines of hagiographical genre and the Church” (12). Consider, for example, the impulse of the hagiographer who went so

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far as to characterize a certain “female saint by her silence,” despite her success as a preacher, at least one of whose sermons her own biographer had heard (Petroff ix). With female-authored hagiography, however—and this is significant—the body as the site of their struggle opened to women visionaries the means to “redefine the meaning of female silence and powerlessness” (217). I would like to propose that Margery Kempe moved beyond even that limited triumph. As I see it, her exploration of her body and her life as an integral part of her relationship with Christ unapologetically dissolved, for the first time, the boundaries between the sacred and the secular. It’s true that with other saints, boundaries between the f lesh and mystical discourse are crossed, (e.g., Catherine of Siena, Angela of Foligno, Julian of Norwich), but in Kempe’s case, she is the first to give in her text as much space to the minutiae of her life as she does to her visions and dialogues with Christ. For her, the obstacles in her travels, the hostility of other pilgrims, the confrontations with friars, monks, and parish priests, the anxiety about her sexuality, and the continuous verbalized ref lections about the public censure and, at times, support of her visible devotion through her loud weeping were, all, integral to her struggle to “redefine God and the experience of God in her life” (217). Her body moved beyond the struggle of female powerlessness to a bolder spirituality. She moved mystical discourse to a new register. The effect of her text was to remove the limits from the hagiographical frontier. But here an interesting problem within contemporary interpretative communities arises: feminists critics, many of whom have retrieved Kempe’s text and rescued its cultural and social value, seem themselves unable to take that final step of conceding dissolved barriers and the implication of authentic mysticism that it invites. Despite feminists’ concerns with intersubjective elements of women’s experience, feminists’ advocation of the body as a source of voice and truth and authentic experience, and their approval of transgressive and subversive means for overcoming masculine control of one’s cultural and religious orientation, many feminists, in the case of Margery Kempe, seem not only to resist the dissolution of the boundaries between the sacred and the secular, but, indeed, also seem intent upon preserving them. We have seen their resistance to the authenticity of her expressions of mysticism in the frequent reconstruction of her remarks and her events. But it is more evident in the almost sweeping failure to accord her text a hagiographical status. Even when Kempe employs traditional male hagiographical methods of negotiating a self (her self, i.e.), for example,


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when her actions or dialogue ref lect the sources that she quotes—a practice undertaken by all hagiographers and all biographers—her attempts are called into question by our interpretative communities. Consider that the chief saints (Bridget, Marie D’Oignes, and, possibly, Angela Foligno) whom she quotes about their tears, about their dress, and about their travel also expressed their intense spirituality through tears and phrases modeled on earlier saints’ lives. Yet their tears and expressions are not faulted as conferring authority upon their selves; no contemporary critic foregrounds their traits as tropes; they are allowed to be traits of holiness.24 Nor are their clothes or lack of them pointed out as a form of staging their holiness. When Angela of Foligno imitated Christ’s nakedness and suffering by removing all of her clothes at the foot of the crucifix in church, her confessor and friends were horrified and ashamed at this, and critics, too, have been appalled by this mimesis, but no critic saw her behavior as staged, and not a one resisted crediting her narrative as hagiographical. In fact, Angela of Foligno’s action has been described by one contemporary critic as “seeking to imitate Christ; in her mimesis of his nakedness and his suffering, she mimes nakedness and suffering for us as readers. For her, Christ is not a text to be read, but a role to be acted.”25 Peter Dronke, while noting Angela’s gradual distancing of self from accepted modes of conduct, nevertheless places her among “Many holy women [who] had meditated on the loving surrender of the bride; but Angela acts it out [at the foot of the crucifix]” (215). With Kempe, however, the counterdiscourse has had the effect of suppressing the religious significance of her dictated work. Kathleen Ashley, whose work is one of the richest and most sympathetic examinations of how Kempe’s text “enacts a solution to the cultural dilemma of how to achieve spiritual validation while remaining an active member of mercantile society” (374), comes closest to ceding to Kempe the authenticity of a holy text. Yet, as she compliments Kempe on giving spiritual validation to the active life, she writes, “the life it describes is ostensibly directed toward the sacred to the exclusion of mundane social obligations” (377). The term “ostensibly” is itself a non-validating term, meaning, as it does, “to all outward appearance.” Had “ostensibly” been omitted, leaving us “the life it describes is directed,” the effect would have given to Kempe’s text the nod toward a hagiographical stance. In a sense, all counterdiscourse about a genre attempts to “fix” the genre. And yet, we have learned elsewhere to free ourselves of this impulse to stabilize and fix genre boundaries. We’ve accepted Richardson’s series of letters as a novel—which is what he called it; and

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we have accepted a nearly transformational morphing of that genre in John Barth’s works. In poetry, too, we have a boundless tolerance for endless forms of writing, and recently, we have accepted the dissolution of the boundaries between fiction and biography in the once controversial Ronald Reagan biography, as well as in Ann Oakley’s 1984 autobiography, Taking it like a woman, in which she invents characters. Culturally, therefore, we have agreed not to cling to the old standards and forms of the novel or of poetry, or of autobiography or biography. Why then do we persist in hanging onto old standards of hagiography? What is it about our own communal identity, our own interpretative communities, that wishes to keep the boundaries of that genre rigid? Is it not that our current (Catholic) culture’s attitude toward women’s public speech has problematized a genre for us? And have our expectations of a genre, then, created a particular meaning—that is, what constitutes hagiography? And, finally, has not this, in turn, problematized something much more profound, namely, what constitutes religious and spiritual values? Notes Variation on Comics Continuum. http://www.comicscontinuum.com/stories/0207/10/ perryindex.htm. 1. I am aware of Mariateresa Fumagalli Beonio-Brocchieri’s argument that the term “mystical” in the Middle Ages “is used neither for the state of a soul nor for an experience, even less for a person, man or woman,” but, instead, refers solely to theology, as in “mystical theology.” I employ the word as it is popularly used in current medieval scholarship, namely, as BeonioBrocchieri expressed one of its forms, “an intimate relationship of origin between God and human beings on the basis of which humans can turn to God and be reunited in ecstasy, excessus, or deification” (19). But I would modify her description with Ellen Ross’s representation of the more typical medieval mystic: “They do not seek momentary ecstatic experiences of God . . . but rather they envision a holistic lifelong path on which a growing relationship with the Divine is coupled with a deepening love of self and neighbor” (49). 2. For “ethnocentric” I am relying on Webster’s Third International Dictionary (1993) and The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992), both of which offer as their first and most usual meaning of the term “the inclination” or “habitual disposition” “to view other communities and cultures from the perspective or security of one’s own, and therefore inclined to judge them by the norms or conventions with which one is familiar.” 3. Mirk’s Festial (ca. 1382–1390), a set of homilies for a clerical audience, uses the Virgin Mary as the model of female holiness: she is quietly submissive, meek, obedient, virginal—one whose exemplary goodness is both exterior and interior (15–16, 231–232). Other features of saintliness included “asceticism, contemplation, and active service; and extraordinary manifestations of power, such as miracles and visions,” Elizabeth A. Petroff , Body and Soul, 162. 4. I am aware of Lynn Staley’s cogent study in which she regards The Book of Margery Kempe as a fiction and proposes a “Kempe” or a “Margery” as the author whom she distinguishes from the “protagonist” Margery. Two episodes (among several) contradict Staley’s chief thesis. The first


5.

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9.

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is Kempe’s having Christ authorize, as a test, her sexual fantasies with naked clerics in which the devil forces her to be “comown to hem alle.” Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, The Book of Margery Kempe (BMK), 145. The second is Kempe’s insistence that she contrived the wearing of a hair-cloth nightly so that her husband never noticed it through years of intercourse with him and the bearing of children. The first episode is outright unsound theology for both the Middle Ages and our own twenty-first century: the end never justifies the means (achieving virtue cannot use, as its means, fantasies of gratifying the sexual urges of naked clerics); the second episode exhibits such psychic perturbation that it would render untrustworthy that person’s critiquing of cultural and political/religious views. Both episodes propose that the “author” cannot evaluate certain fundamental elements of her life, much less that she can evaluate the complex spectrum of her culture. “At Billingham [in Northumberland or Durham].” See also, online, Extracts from the Halmote Court Rolls of the Prior and Convent of Durham, 1345–1383.[20] for Hazelden (Hesilden). For example, in Book I, chapter 46, p. 149, the Mayor of Leicester having heard of her public speaking, called her “a false strumpet.” In the following chapter, p. 151, the Steward of Leicester, after asking “many questions, to which she answered readily and reasonably,” “took her by the hand and led her into his chamber, and spoke many foul, lewd words to her, intending and desiring, as it seemed to her, to overcome her and rape her.” And seeing her “boldness in that she was not afraid of any imprisonment, [he] struggled with her, making filthy signs and giving her indecent looks [. . .].” All references will be from Windeatt’s The Book of Margery Kempe except for the Middle English citations which will be from BMK. Translations based on BMK are my own. The conduct book entitled the Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry (ca. 1372), and the mystery play, “Noah” from The Townley Plays (early 1400s). Eve’s real sin was her speech, according to the Knight of La Tour Landry. Not only did she answer “too-lightly,” but also, he emphasizes, she answered “with-oute counsaile of her husbonde,” Chapters XXXIX–XLVI. Ashton remarks that woman was perceived as “represent[ing] the border between body and soul, the fissure within which boundaries might be erased, for she especially was, even physically, open to corruption and concupiscience” (138). “I wold þow wer closyd in an hows of ston þat þer schold no man speke wyth þe.” BMK, 27. The exchange occurred during the famous interrogation scene at Lambeth by Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury. The phrase “while men were confessors, bishops,” cited by Jerek-Glidden as found in Robertson (40), appears to include pages beyond Robertson’s quote. See Robertson, chapter 3, pp. 32–43. Apart from Theresa of Avilla and Catherine of Siena, women saints have been categorized by the Catholic Church according to the “virgin/virgin martyr or nonvirgin” status (E. Stuart 17). Coyne-Kelly, 102. “These two bodies are equated many times in patristic texts. For example, Jerome says that ‘no vessel of gold or silver was ever so dear to God as the temple of a virgin’s body.’” Coyne Kelly cites Jerome’s Letter XXII to Eustochium. Hope Emily Allen refrained from passing judgment upon Kempe’s mysticism. Rather, she “intended her notes to be a study in Margery Kempe’s suggestibility” (xi). The charge of hysteria that presumably disqualified her from consideration for authentic holiness and the charge of a “constructedness” of text that appropriated the ideas and motifs of currently circulating saints’ lives and manuals on spirituality have never quite disappeared from scholarship, even in the twenty-first century. For a broader scope of the book’s reception history, see Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 224–228. Helen C. Taylor, diss, introduction, no page number, 2nd page.

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14. Susan F. Jarek-Glidden. See also pp. 132–133, concerning the confrontation with the Archbishop of York. Glidden writes, “The resulting confrontation scenes in which Kempe emerges as victor, must therefore be regarded at least in part as fictive accounts with the requisite literary license taken.” 15. BMK, chapter 55, p. 135; Windeatt, chapter 55, p. 174. 16. Hirsch, 45, offers a second reason: “men of the law do not traditionally admit shortcomings of whatever sort [. . .].” 17. Finke, 29, quotes M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 354. 18. The predominately male-authored hagiographic tradition is a premise in Amy Hollywood’s insistence that scholars need to make a distinction between “male and male-defined understandings of women’s religiosity and women’s own texts” (88). 19. My former graduate student Kate Haffey’s view is especially relevant here: Margery’s relation of her carnal desires and her later temptation with the genitals of clergy men become very interesting when we consider the fact that she was dictating this to a priest. It is amazing that these conversations took place, but to suggest that a writer would sit down and create a woman who relates these images to a priest is, I find, even less believable. Margery (a real Margery) as a vessel of God (or who thinks she is a vessel of God) would feel a need to relate her whole life, including that scene. An autonomous author creating a fictional character would have no such need and might think that he or she is risking the book not being published should such material be placed in it. 20. Most frequently quoted is Jerome’s judgment: “As long as a woman is for birth and children, she is different from man as body is from soul. But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman, and will be called a man.” Commentary on Ephesians II, chapter 5 (cited in Harding 179). 21. Gregory of Nyssa’s account is found at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/macrina. html#life. See “Introduction” to his Account. 22. Given the necessary restrictions of space in this volume, I must forgo a discussion of Margery Kempe’s tears and sobs, which certainly involved bodily movement. For its extensive treatment elsewhere, see, especially, Santha Bhattacharji, 220–241. 23. Jane L. Huenneke, 128. Huenneke here cites Leslie A. Donovan, Women’s Saints’ Lives, 122. 24. Gail Ashton, p. 11, quotes Heffernan, who identifies a pattern in hagiographical tales where the act of writing gathers up all the myths and stories surrounding its subjects, whether oral, eyewitness record, or previous, perhaps contradictory, versions of a fictional life, and offers a sanctioned authority that allows all to be brought back into a Christian paradigm. As a result, it might be said that the subject’s single-minded pursuit of virtue is to achieve union with Christ rather than to perfect self or character (FT 4). 25. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, 214 (and endnotes 22–24), writes that Angela’s “focus on physicality seems to be reinforced by God himself when she joyfully recalls on her way home: ‘All your life, your eating and drinking, sleeping and all your living is pleasing to me’” [translation, Petroff ].

Works Cited Ashley, Kathleen. “Historicizing Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe as Social Text.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28. 2 (1998): 371–388. Ashton, Gail. The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography. NY: Routledge, 2000. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.


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Beonio-Brocchieri, Mariateresa Fumagalli. “The Feminine Mind in Medieval Mysticism.” Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance. Eds. E. Ann Matter and John Coakley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. 19–33. Bhattacharji, Santha. “Tears and Screaming: Weeping in the Spirituality of Margery Kempe.” Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination. Eds. Kimberley Christine Patton and John Stratton Hawley. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2005. 220–241. Coulton, G.G. Medieval Village, Manor, and Monastery. NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1960. Coyne-Kelly, Kathleen. “Menaced Masculinity and Imperiled Virginity in the Morte D’arthur.” Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Eds. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999. 97–114. Donovan, Leslie A. Women’s Saints’ Lives in Old English Prose. Cambridge: Brewer, 1999. Dronke, Peter. Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Finke, Laurie. “Mystical Bodies and the Dialogics of Vision.” Maps of Flesh and Light. Ed. Ulrike Wiethaus. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993. 28–44. Green, Keith and Jill LeBihan. Critical Theory and Practice: A Coursebook. London: Routledge, 1996. Halmote Court Rolls of the Prior and Convent of Durham, 1345–1383.[20] . October 26, 2006. www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/Manor.html. Harding, Wendy. “Body into Text: The Book of Margery Kempe.” Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature. Eds. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. 168–187. Hirsch, John C. The Revelations of Margery Kempe: Paramystical Practices in Late Medieval England. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989. Hollywood, Amy. “Suffering Transformed: Marguerite Porète, Meister Eckhart, and the Problem of Women’s Spirituality.” Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics. Ed. Bernard McGinn. NY: Continuum, 1994. 87–113. Huenneke, Jane L. “Groupies for Jesus: Sexual Freedom and Female Identity in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, and The Book of Margery Kempe.” Proceedings of the 11th Annual Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature. Minot, ND, 2003. Jarek-Glidden, Susan F. Conjoining Silence and Speech: The Textual Voice of MargeryKempe. Diss. DA9422456, Boston University, 1994. Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe, Trans B. A. Windeatt. London: Penguin Books, 1994. ———. The Book of Margery Kempe. Eds. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen. Early English Text Society, OS 212. London: Oxford University Press, rpt. 1997. La Tour Landry, Geoffry. The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry. http://www.hti.umich.edu/ cgi/c/cme/cme-idx?type=HTML&rgn=DIV0&byte=7892759. Lochrie, Karma. “The Language of Transgression: Body, Flesh, and Word in Mystical Discourse.” Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies. Ed. A.J. Frantzen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. 115–140. ———. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Mazzoni, Cristina. “Of Stockfish and Stew: Feasting and Fasting in The Book of MargeryKempe.” Food and Foodways: Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment 10 (2003): 171–182. McAvoy, Liz Herbert. Authority and the Female Body in the Writing of Julian of Norwich. Studies in Medieval Mysticism. Suffolk: D.S.Brewer, 2004.

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McAvoy, Liz Herbert. “aftyr hyr owyn tunge”: Body, Voice and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe.” Women’s Writing 9.2 (2002): 159–176. Mirk, John. “Mirk’s Festial.” Part 1. Ed. Theodore Erbe. The Early English Textual Society. ES 96. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 1905. Oakley, Ann. Taking it like a woman. New York: Random House, 1984. Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda. Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Robertson, Elizabeth. Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990. ———. “Medieval Medical Views of Women.” Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature. Eds. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. 142–167. Ross, Ellen. “She Wept and Cried Right Loud For Sorrow and For Pain.” Maps of Flesh and Light. Ed. Ulrike Wiethaus. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993. 45–59. Salisbury, Joyce E. “Gendered Sexuality.” The Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. Eds. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage. NY: Garland Publishing, 1996. 81–102. Stuart, E. Spitting at Dragons: Toward as Feminist Theology of Sainthood. London: Mowbray, 1996. Taylor, Helen. Hagiography to Autobiography: Generic Conflation in the Book of Margery Kempe. Diss. DA 9129933, University of Connecticut, 1991. Tertullian. “To His Wife.” A Select Library of the Ante-Nicene Fathers. Grand Rapids: Eardmans Publishing, 1951. 43. Wilson, Janet. “Margery and Alison:Women on Top.” Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays. Ed. Sandra McEntire. NY: Garland, 1992. 223–237. Windeatt, Barry. The Book of Margery Kempe. Trans. B.A. Windeatt. New York: Penguin, 1994. Winstead, Karen A. “Saints, Wives, and Other ‘Hooly Thynges’: Pious Laywomen in Middle English Romance.” Chaucer Yearbook 2 (1995): 137–154. ———. Virgin Martyrs. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.

CH A P T E R

T H R E E

Letters from the Convent: St. Teresa of Ávila’s Epistolary Mode Joa n F. Ca m m a r ata

The medieval view of women as frivolous, inconstant, irrational, and given to their passions is still perceived as the norm in Early Modern Spain where Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) writes under the constraints of circumscribed sex roles and gender expectations.1 Her situation is most tenuous because she communicates from a position of triple marginalization: she is a woman, a cloistered religious, and a new Christian. In the hostile social environment of the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation, Teresa’s individual, and epistolary, identity is formed by the multiple aspects of societal and sexual tensions. While in her prose narratives Teresa portrays herself as the submissive female to subvert patriarchal strategies, there is a new language and a different voice in her letters, which ref lect her struggles, ambitions, and accomplishments in the public sphere. Her letters, written during the last fifteen years of her life and numbering almost five hundred, provide a record of how a woman is successful in attaining her goals and how she creates a worthwhile identity in spite of the intellectual, social, and psychological forces of a restrictive society. Letters are a valuable resource for critical inquiry because they reveal the complex dimensions of personhood and the experiences that shape social and political theories. Early Modern women must consciously create an appropriate written language because their words and the adequacy of their language will often endure male scrutiny. Teresa’s

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letters provide a valuable clue to a language that invents the self within the tradition of women’s culture, the mostly oral tradition, which is not the authoritative written discourse of males. She mediates through the dominant structures that define her passivity by acknowledging and conceding that her credibility will be questioned. Teresa’s letters provide a criterion for a typology of feminine epistolography in their reconstruction of a woman’s life during a point in history of feminine disadvantage. Neither the restrictions placed on women outside the convent nor the limitations of a cloistered life hindered Teresa in her capacity as religious reformer and foundress for the Carmelite Order. Confronted with a laxity of regulations in her convent, Teresa pursued the reforming of the religious order as well as the individual to oppose the Protestant Reformation and reestablish Catholicism. She overcame the resistance of the Calced Carmelites to the restoration of the Order’s original austerity and, in 1562, founded St. Joseph’s of Ávila, the first of many Discalced Carmelite convents. She drew up a new Constitution, with bylaws, that Pius IV authorized in a brief dated February 7, 1562. Restrictions on female judicial pursuits abound in Early Modern legal tracts: “Woman is excluded from a wide variety of legal functions, including acting as witness, making contracts and administering property . . . they may not be judices, nor magistrates, nor advocates; nor may they intervene on another’s behalf in law, nor act as agents” (Maclean 77). However, in her reform of the Carmelite Order, Teresa assumed duties generally forbidden to women in her times, as she was the first and final manager in title deeds and purchases, debts, legacies, and support of her foundations. Given her excellence in reform and leadership, Father Rubeo, the apostolic visitor and general of the Carmelites, bestowed on her the authority to found other convents and priories in Castile, including male monasteries. Teresa’s reformist enterprise triumphed two years before her death with the brief from Rome that granted the independent Discalced province on June 22, 1580 (Hatzfeld 18). First published in 1658 but not in their entirety,2 Teresa’s letters deal mainly with problems in her reform, the foundations, economics, family, and the politics of the Order. She wrote to members of the Court, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, her confessors, family, sisters, and even the king, Philip II. In her letters to Philip II, Teresa asks for his help in certain matters (not mentioned in her letter but related personally by Juan de Padilla to the king) with the promise that the more the Order progresses, the greater his gain in prayers for himself and his family (Letters I: 118; June 11, 1573).3 She astutely beseeches him, for love of

St. Teresa of Ávila’s Epistolary Mode

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God and Mary, to command that the Discalced have a separate province because Our Lady calls on him to protect her Order (Letters I: 188; July 19, 1575). He is the king, after all, and so Teresa does ask pardon for being bold, but she justifies herself by declaring that the Lord hears the poor. In letters to male clerics, aristocracy, and benefactors, one may perceive the semblance of a subordinate woman, but Teresa shows the same confidence and authority that she does in letters to her sisters and family. To achieve her goals, Teresa quickly learned to negotiate her communicative approach through the strategy of religious humility and obedience (Márquez Villanueva, “Vocación” 355). She learned that one must deal with people according to their temperament (Letters I: 142; June 1574). The gender-inscribed communicative formula and style of Teresa’s letters reconstruct a feminine history that underscores individual triumph over gender deficiency. Claudio Guillén observes that letters reveal personal subjectivity: “The author of a real letter may be mirroring and shaping through the written word a particular version of himself . . .” (85). Letters give Teresa a “mediation” of space (Altman 24) in which there is not only physical distance but also the intellectual distance from which to assess herself. It is through the structure of the epistolary genre, in writings directed in confidence to specific individual readers, that Teresa shapes a version of herself to fully reveal her human personality and the actuality of a woman of her era. She sheds the detached, retiring persona of her vita contemplativa to surmount historical gender constraints and her limitations as a Discalced Carmelite to be successful in her vita activa in the roles of reformer, foundress, religious superior, spiritual teacher, businesswoman, and advocate. In her Way of Perfection, a guide to the attainment of spiritual perfection through the practice of prayer, Teresa counsels her sisters on the three essentials of a life of prayer: fraternal love, humility, and detachment. Teresa insists that a vow of radical poverty, a vestige of medieval monastic reform, be written into the Discalced bylaws. Teresian detachment from the material world presupposes the breaking with family ties to bring freedom from the social and financial interests that interfere with spiritual pursuits (Way of Perfection, Complete Works 2: 39; chapter 9). A denial of family is, implicitly, a denial of identity, that is to say, lineage. In her writings, Teresa reiterates her good faith by constant professions of loyalty to the doctrines of the Church, and she attributes any errors to her ignorance or her gender. This circumspection, or humility topos, is not only an acknowledgment of her inferior status as a woman, but, most likely, also a recollection of another aspect

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of cultural otherness, her converso heritage.4 Teresa’s paternal grandfather, Juan Sánchez de Toledo, was a converted Jew, who was brought before the Inquisition in 1485 and given a penance for heresy and crimes against the faith (Márquez Villanueva, Espiritualidad 146). Teresa undertook her reform and her writings in a sociocultural context in which there was suspicion of new Christians, and all activities were subject to censure by the Inquisition. It is not clear whether her fear of reprisal is predicated on the Inquisition or arises from her feeling of unworthiness, as a woman, to write edifying material, but she begs those who read her Life to send it back to her with all possible precaution (Letters I: 50; June 23, 1568), and even requests that it be recopied so that her handwriting not be recognized (Caminero 553). Her Life is not published until 1588, six years after her death, after it has passed the most careful scrutiny of theologians and the Inquisition.5 Teresa’s great concern is that the Inquisition not oppose her foundations. Unlike other religious orders of the time (Lynch 27), she did not prepare statutes against the admission of new Christians to the Order.6 She ignored the prejudice of limpieza de sangre, purity of bloodline, by opening her convents to all and by accepting the financial help of the converts. Indeed, new Christians provided the support for Teresa’s foundations and, in return for their philanthropy, the contributors enjoyed the prestige of having their name associated for posterity with the patronage of a monastery or the right to family burials in the chapel (Márquez Villanueva, Espiritualidad 157 ff ). Perhaps it is Teresa’s converso heritage, an aspect of cultural otherness, that provoked her egalitarianism, as well as her disapproval of those who boasted of the honor of their illustrious lineage. On this issue, she recommends self-restraint to her nuns. She says, “Let the sister who is of highest birth speak of her father least: we must all be equals” (Way of Perfection, Complete Works 2: 112; chapter 27). Teresa preferred that the sisters of her convents assume a new identity without reference to parental lineage, and she herself gave up her less-than-illustrious family name, Ahumada, to be called Teresa of Jesus. As a woman, Teresa wrote in the vernacular, under the constraints of acceptable discussion, of agreement of silence. Formulaic structures of humility, courtesy, and inadequacy encode her experiences for linguistic expression.7 The very fact that an astute, politically wise woman repeats the orthodox line about woman’s insufficiencies and man’s wisdom and learning, reminding her readers consistently and constantly that she is only a woman, supposedly silent, and that men are the legitimate interpreters of Scripture, suggests how she prevented her dialogue


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from supporting patriarchal attitudes. Christian humanists were determined to keep women’s knowledge under control:8 “Even though Erasmus, More, and Vives actively supported the education of women, they did so within private and domestic concerns. For the most part, the educated Renaissance woman was silenced and marginalized, deprived of all but a few limited outlets for her intellectual abilities” (Glenn 128). Teresa was denied the tools of technical theology by not being taught Latin. This personal limitation later caused Teresa great distress when, in 1559, the local Index of the Spanish Inquisition banned vernacular translations of the Bible (Elliott 237) and deprived Teresa of her favorite mystical works. Subsequently, as foundress and spiritual leader of the Discalced Carmelites, Teresa stressed that applicants to her convents must know how to read Latin well (Letters I: 102; March 7, 1572). A gender-based alienation from language is expressed in the stereotypical association of woman with the aguja (sewing needle), a silent act, and of man with the pluma (pen). A woman’s language, acceptable only as oral, not written, discourse, is not the authoritative discourse of males. Adrienne Rich has appropriately noted, “No male writer has written primarily or even largely for women, or with the sense of women’s criticism as a consideration when he chooses his materials, his theme, his language. But to a lesser or greater extent, every woman writer has written for men even when . . . she was supposed to be addressing women” (37). Teresa’s words will not only be read, but they will also be scrutinized, reviewed, judged, and, perhaps, burned by men of letters.9 In her didactic prose works, she is supposedly writing in obedience to her confessors, at their request, and for the edification of her sisters. Teresa is expected to direct herself specifically to her own sex and to write within the tradition of women’s culture, the subcultural tradition.10 Hers is a “fellowship of discourse” (Foucault 226) that circulates within a closed community according to strict regulations. The feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan maintains that woman defines self in terms of connectedness in a matrix of relationships with others (8). For Teresa, the art of communication has a shared set of assumptions in the presence of an interpretive community. Her language is self-referential, personal, and conversational, as well as circular and digressive. Teresa’s letters, like her prose works, are undeniably feminine, clearly in the sense that they are culturally constructed, but also in the sense of Hélène Cixous’s definition of “écriture féminine” as more f luid and less fixed than masculine discourse. Cixous sees writing as a power identified with patriarchal principles that women can use to effect

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change: “Writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures” (249). Virginia Woolf labeled letters a woman’s art that historically offers women a convention to manipulate when they are barred from others that men control: “The art of letter-writing is often the art of essaywriting in disguise. But such as it was, it was an art a woman could practice without unsexing herself ” (60). In the epistolary technique of writing to the moment, letters partake of a dialogism that makes the voice interior and exterior simultaneously and provides an intimate and honest expression of the self in a simple, personal writing style that is more accomplishment than art. A letter can denote a conversation or a dialogue between friends who are at a distance. Conversation is the model for Teresa’s epistolary form as she strives to create a reciprocal commitment to dialogue with the interlocutor. In a lively conversational tone, Teresa uses the epistolary genre, the form of writing acceptable for her gender, to broach a range of topics and situations in letters that are discursive, narrative, and varied. This complicates the matter of classifying her letters, which participate in several themes and move between different subjects. A large number of Teresa’s letters typify the epistolary category of “mixed letter” as defined by Erasmus. In her letters, Teresa informs and instructs, counsels and gives advice; she offers caring and consolation, petitions and admonitions. She provides thoughtful solutions to health and family dilemmas, spirituality to make life bearable, consolation for sickness and death,11 solutions for domestic concerns,12 and directions for the reform. She can be demanding or cajoling, consoling or mocking, rebuking or loving, confident or unsure in her particularly woman’s text that is neither wholly private nor wholly public. The discourse about the details of everyday life and friends, stereotypically feminine, is a flood of thoughts without an attempt to control their logic or structure. To a greater or lesser extent feminine epistolarity is written under erasure. Women have been defined and delimited by a “society which permitted only an internal or psychological space in which to express themselves” (Smith 24). Teresa suffers internal and external censorship, postal inefficiency and political surveillance. She herself demands the destruction of her letters. Even though a letter has one intended recipient, there is always the danger that it will find a wider circulation. A letter is a potential disclosure if it is intercepted by the wrong person, even though it may not be conspiratorial. In the transfer from the private to the public sphere, a larger audience may judge the content of


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a letter suspect. Teresa instructed her recipients to read her letters, make note of her instructions, and then burn the letters. Concern that her correspondence would fall into the wrong hands prompted Teresa to unseal a letter to Father Gracián in order to cross out passages that she feared might be damaging if ascribed to her; she also requested that Father Gracián destroy the letter after he read it (Letters II: 562; May 8, 1578). Fortunately, Father Gracián did not always pay much attention to the Saint in this matter, but Ana de Jesús, in obedience, destroyed all but one. Most unfortunately, St. John of the Cross destroyed Teresa’s letters to prevent information falling into the hands of the Calced Carmelites who persecuted him. After her death, he burned packets of her letters either due to the pain of his grief or as proof of his desasimiento, detachment from worldly things as preached by his mentor. There is general agreement among the critics that Teresa rigidly adheres to the epistolary code of her age.13 In letters that fit into the established categories of persuasion, petition, counsel, consolation, and, most importantly for Teresa, mixed letters that leap from one subject to another, her epistolary style mirrors Early Modern precepts. Her context encompasses the external factors and the social conditions that authorize these speech acts. Teresa is aware that the art of writing letters is the art of using conventions. She employs formulaic structures that are requisite to social etiquette and develops themes through commonplaces, similes, and examples. She carefully and deliberately adapts the letters to the station and personality of the one addressed. Her letters are contextual acts that consider the recipient, the subject matter, the purpose of the missive, and the acceptable conventions of the discourse that satisfy the expectations of the reader and writer. Teresa’s letters are shaped by her addressee not only in what she communicates but how she communicates. Her consciousness of a specifically delineated reader affects her tone and style.14 Teresa intentionally, and sometimes obsequiously, repeats the recipient’s title many times throughout her letter in a strategy to get what she is after. She is adept in the art of strategy, as articulated by Michel de Certeau: I call a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that become possible as soon as a subject with will and power . . . can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats . . . can be managed. As in management, every “strategic” rationalization seeks first of all to distinguish its “own” place, that is, the place of its own power and

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will, from an “environment” . . . it is an effort to delimit one’s own place in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other.” (35–36) Teresa’s letters reveal a psychological perspicacity through which she approaches her readers on their own terms and establishes her position of power to gain authority and exercise her will. Teresa achieved the difficult task of acquiring female literary authority through the appearance of conformity but what is, in essence, the subversion of patriarchal norms of discourse. According to epistolary codes, response letters should follow the same order of topics as the remitter’s letter (Vives, De conscribendis 864). In general, Teresa shapes her new letters from the phrases and paraphrases of letters to which she responds. Her writing is a means of speaking, almost as if she were having a present-day telephone conversation, with, of course, the responses of the recipient delayed. There is an exchange with an external reader who is not the self but with whom the writer, Teresa, has a special relationship: “Reader consciousness implicitly informs the act of writing itself ” (Altman 186). Her monologue is really a dialogue in which she predicts the response or the effect of her letter on the recipient. Teresa counseled her sisters from afar, as the older to the younger, in a nurturing attitude, giving permission for those who were ill to partake of good food and the comforts forbidden by the reform. She told Ana de la Encarnación, Prioress at Salamanca, not to give up eating meat because some pampering is preferable to the alternative of illness (Letters I: 131; January 1574); however, Teresa herself did not always follow her own advice. In other instances, Teresa exacted obedience and humility in her Order. She admonished, reprimanded, and censured indiscretions that could put the reform in jeopardy. She was annoyed at two Castilian friars who were imprisoned when found in a house of ill repute; they should have considered the reputation of the Order (Letters I: 181; June 18, 1575). Teresa advised that friars should be hermits and not travel about looking after evil women. Teresa acknowledges that she wrote so hurriedly and under such time constraints that she never proofread her letters. Is it that she is so pressed for time, as she often comments (Letters I: 412; January 17, 1577)? Or is it that “Rereading one’s own letter entails a switch in perspective—from writer to reader—and a consequent distancing that may lead to selfdiscovery” (Altman 92)? Because of her constant references to the burden from which she is never liberated, her letter writing becomes her “daily


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martyrdom” (Rodríguez and Egido 428), and she is astonished that she could stand it. She generally wrote late at night, until after midnight, and was left with only a few hours’ rest before morning prayers. She even wrote while traveling for the foundations. It was not uncommon for Teresa to ask the recipient of her letter to pass it along to a few people so that she would not have to write other letters; for example, the same letter was to be read by three prioresses. Until 1577, almost everything was written in her own hand. When her strength failed her, the doctor recommended that she not continue writing after midnight and that she not write in her own hand. In one of her letters, she openly praised Ana de Bartolomé as her secretary (Letters II: 899; December 4, 1581). But even when someone else wrote for her, she would write the last sentence herself. Much as we might complain that we do not have time for leisure reading, Teresa was so overburdened with obligatory letters that she had no time to write letters for pleasure. The negative feminine characteristics of capriciousness, duplicity, and incoherence function as ontological signifiers in Teresa’s description of woman’s nature. She diagnoses these imperfections as inherent deficiencies of her gender and, in effect, reiterates the opinions current in the sixteenth century about woman’s more limited powers of reason. Teresa seems to confirm this through her affinity for the personal oneto-one format of the letter, a composition that requires little formal education and no scholarly training. Jacques Derrida has defined the place of woman as a “non-place”; to write from it or in it is to situate oneself in the realm of the undefinable (111–113). Writing from this non-place, Teresa openly acknowledges her difference, underscores it, and establishes her own subjectivity to subvert previously held identity assumptions, but without the threat of challenging the dominant culture. She accepts and celebrates her difference in a discourse that crosses both cultural and textual lines as she creates in her letters an intimate and honest expression of the self. She undermines the patriarchal discourse through a paradoxical strategy of acceptance, reiteration, and overemphasis of feminine inferiority as she cloaks herself with her womanliness to acquire the freedom denied her gender. Teresa, who was later named a Doctor of the Church, becomes adept at docta ignorancia, a cleverness that does not recognize itself as such (Certeau 56). Instead of contributing to woman’s worthlessness, Teresa subtly, but systematically, invalidates the effects of male discourse through her technique of strenuously validating it. For contemporary readers, Teresa’s letters afford messages of all kinds that we must decode. The code is generally determined by her

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contextual relationship to her recipient. We read her letters from the perspective of the reader, the author, and ourselves. The “discursive practice” of epistolography involves power relationships wherein power and knowledge are joined together, and Teresa uses the rules to her benefit. The letter is, in a sense, a manner of autobiography in that it ref lects personal history. Teresa’s letters lay bare the most intimate portrait of the many facets of her personality and the inf luence she exerts in her private-turned-public sphere. Her letter writing is a tool in the struggle to create an identity and a vision of the world through a genre that allows her to be critical and creative. Through the letters of both public and private individuals, we can begin to piece together the intellectual history of a period and the social history of a people. Notes 1. The human attributes conventionally associated with gender are ref lected in the normative perception of male discourse as rational, controlled, terse, strong, and balanced, while in contrast, women’s discourse is vapid, silly, hyperemotional, trivial, and excessive (Ruthven 108). Analogous to the speech of a madman as described by Michel Foucault (217), the discourse of women is received as null and void, without truth or significance, and inadmissible as evidence. 2. Fray Luis de León does not include Teresa’s epistolary production in his edition of her complete works. Father Gracián is the first to see the merit of publishing Teresa’s letters for their courtesy and discretion, but an edition does not appear until 1658. The majority of the letters have disappeared, being lost or burned at her request as a cautionary measure, so it will never be known exactly how many she wrote. There are close to five hundred that are extant (476 are known; 246 are original autographs), but this is considered only a third of the original number she wrote. Silverio de Santa Teresa believes that Teresa wrote almost five thousand (xli). Efrén de la Madre de Dios and O. Steggink believe that even fifteen thousand letters would be a conservative guess (863). 3. All citations of Teresa’s works are from the editions of E. Allison Peers: The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus and The Letters of Saint Teresa of Jesus. 4. Teresa’s Jewish heritage is the subject of various studies: see Serís, Alonso Cortés, and Egido Martínez. 5. Teresa lived under the scrutiny and threat of the Inquisition; see Llamas Martínez, Márquez, and Kamen. Her Life was twice delated to the Inquisition, which caused her great mortification until the inquisitorial tribunal at Seville finally exonerated her. At the height of the struggle between the Calced and Discalced Carmelites, Teresa took the precaution of using code names to give her letters the security of anonymity, e.g., she called herself Laurencia, Father Gracián was Eliseo, and even God was named Joseph. For a more extensive list, see Hatzfeld (109–110). 6. In 1597, the Carmelite Constitution admitted the proviso of refusing those who traced their convert heritage back four generations, which would have excluded Teresa, whose grandfather was a convert (Egido Martínez 169). 7. The best exposition of Teresa’s rhetorical strategies is given in Alison Weber’s important study. 8. In his The Education of a Christian Woman (1524–1528), the humanist Juan Luis Vives reinforces the common opinion about the weak nature of woman and her inclination to sin. Vives


9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

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favors education for women so that they may be virtuous married women but he condemns the public exhibition of this instruction. Baldassare Castiglione, the Italian enlightened social commentator, offers similar arguments in favor of and against female inferiority in The Book of the Courtier (Il cortegiano 1528). While he contends that men and women have the same capacity for virtue, he ultimately reiterates common social conventions about the legal and matrimonial subordination of women (201–282). Father Diego Yanguas ordered Teresa to burn her Conceptions of the Love of God (1571–1573), her commentary on the portions of Solomon’s Song of Songs that were read in the Carmelite Divine Office. The patriarchal rules that controlled discourse by denying access to certain individuals excluded women from commentary on the Scriptures. See my study of Teresa’s spiritual interpretation of the profane love of the Song. As Foucault describes, “not all areas of discourse are equally open and penetrable; some are forbidden territory (differentiated and differentiating) . . .” (224–225). Teresa’s writings, in a style of direct expression based on experience, authorize a tradition of convent writing by later Hispanic nuns. In their significant study, Arenal and Schlau present an in-depth analysis of the writings of colonial nuns in the seventeenth century. Letters of consolation are popular in the Early Modern period and could be offered not only for deaths but also for loss or injury. Both Erasmus (169) and Guevara (I, 61, 411; II, 27, 316) provide examples of letters of consolation. These letters are permitted to be lengthier so that consolation could be expressed more leisurely. In her letters of consolation for deaths of children, wives, husbands, brothers, and sisters, Teresa encourages the bereft to have confidence in God and to let Christian resignation to God’s will heal their sorrow. Often Teresa recommends that others bear their trials with resignation and joy because this is the road to Our Lord. According to Teresa, life is made up of crosses, but blessings will come from suffering because the things of this life are of little duration; see my article on Teresa’s letters of consolation. To her favorite brother Lorenzo, Teresa offers both spiritual and temporal advice. She tells him how to run his household, where the servants should be lodged, and how his kitchen should be arranged. Her nephews’ education is also a concern because she fears they might fall in with the wrong crowd, which she calls the “stuck up” set in Ávila (Letters I: 261; July 24, 1576). She is happy that Lorenzo has returned to Spain to educate his children and she advises her brother that the boys should attend the College of the Company of Jesus. Pilar Concejo confirms that “La estructura de las cartas revela que conocía y le eran familiares las reglas de código epistolar de su época. El esquema es sencillo: encabezamiento, invocación y saludo, contenido o cuerpo de la carta, conclusión, despedida, fecha y firma” (279). Teresa “sigue rígidamente, sin concesión de ninguna clase, los imperativos del código espistolar de su época” (Rodríguez and Egido 436). We cannot document with certainty with which manuals of epistolography Teresa actually came in contact or those that she knew from second-hand sources. We do know that she read Antonio de Guevara’s work (Morel-Fatio 63; Concha 106). She recommends to her fellow Carmelites his spiritual writing, Oratorio de religiosos y exercicio de virtuosos (Valladolid 1542), a practical manual for religious life that is addressed to persons of both sexes. Could she also have had access to his manual of epistolography? Teresa may have learned of Juan Luis Vives’ treatise from her interaction with her confessors and with those who were educated. It is likely also that at some point she would come across the manual of Gaspar de Tejeda. In 1562, she left the convent for Toledo to console the widow of the Marshal of Castille. She did not know how she should address the widow but she was informed that the title was “Señoría.” Even though she had someone write it out for her, she still did not master it. She confessed her failure to her hosts and ended up addressing them as “Vuestra merced,” a less elite title. This mortifying experience is likely to have inf luenced Teresa to learn the proper forms of address. We may conjecture that it is perhaps at this time that she becomes acquainted with the works of Guevara, Tejeda, or maybe even Torquemada.

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14. As Torquemada advises, you must tailor your letters to your reader: “a los moços, como a moços, y a los viejos como a viejos; a los philosofos y sabios en cosas de ciencia . . .” (186).

Works Cited Alonso Cortés, Narciso. “Pleitos de los Cepeda.” Boletín de la Real Academia Española 25 (1946): 85–110. Altman, Janet Gurkin. Epistolarity. Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982. Arenal, Electa and Stacey Schlau. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Caminero, Juventino. “Actitud intelectual de Santa Teresa en su ambiente social.” Santa Teresa y la literatura mística hispánica: Actas del I Congreso internacional sobre Santa Teresa y la mística hispánica. Ed. Manuel Criado de Val. Madrid: EDI-6, 1984. 535–570. Cammarata, Joan. “Sacred and Profane Love: St. Teresa of Ávila.” Selected Proceedings of The Pennsylvania Foreign Language Conference. Ed. Gregorio C. Martín. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University, 1992. 74–78. ———. “Epistola consolatoria y contemptus mundi: el epistolario de consuelo de Santa Teresa de Ávila.” Actas del XIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas. Ed. Florencio Sevilla y Carlos Alvar. Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 2000. 301–308. Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1959. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. New French Feminisms. Eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken Books, 1981. 245–264. Concejo, Pilar. “Fórmulas sociales y estrategias retóricas en el epistolario de Teresa de Jesús.” Santa Teresa y la literatura mística hispánica. Ed. Manuel Criado de Val. Madrid: EDI-6, 1984. 275–289. Concha, Victor García de la. El arte literario de Santa Teresa. Barcelona: Ariel, 1978. Criado de Val, Manuel, ed. Santa Teresa y la literatura mística hispánica: Actas del I Congreso internacional sobre Santa Teresa y la mística hispánica. Madrid: EDI-6, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Egido Martínez, Teófanes. “The Historical Setting of St. Teresa’s Life.” Carmelite Studies I (1980): 122–182. Elliott, J.H. Imperial Spain 1469–1716. New York: St. Martin’s, 1964. Erasmus, Desiderius. De conscribendis epistolis. Trans. Charles Fantazzi. Collected Works of Erasmus. Vol. 25. Ed. J.K. Sowards. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. 1–254. Foucault, Michel. “The Discourse on Language.” The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. 215–237. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. Guevara, Antonio de. Libro primero de las Epístolas familiares. I, II. Ed. José María Cossío. Madrid: Aldus (Real Academia Española: Biblioteca Selecta de Clásicos Españoles, 10, 12) 1950, 1952.


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Guillén, Claudio. “Notes toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter.” Renaissance Genres. Essays on Theory, History and Interpretation. Ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. 70–101. Hatzfeld, Helmut. Santa Teresa de Ávila. New York: Twayne, 1969. Kamen, Henry. La Inquisición española. Madrid: Taurus Ediciones, 1974. Llamas Martínez, Enrique. Santa Teresa de Jesús y la Inquisición española. Madrid: CSIC, 1972. Lynch, John. Spain Under the Habsburgs. I. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Márquez, Antonio. Literatura e Inquisición en España (1478–1834). Madrid: Taurus Ediciones, 1980. Márquez Villanueva, Francisco. Espiritualidad y literatura en el siglo XVI. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1968. ———. “La vocación literaria de Santa Teresa.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 32 (1983): 355–379. Morel-Fatio, A. “Les lectures de Sainte Thérèse.” Bulletin Hispanique 10 (1908): 17–67. Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision.” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose, 1966–1978. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979. 33–49. Rodríguez Martínez, Luis and Teófanes Egido. “Epistolario.” Introducción a la lectura de Santa Teresa. Ed. Alberto Barrientos. Madrid: Editorial de Espiritualidad, 1978. 427–472. Ruthven, K.K. Feminist Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Santa Teresa de Jesús. Obras de Santa Teresa de Jesús. El epistolario. Vols. 7–9. Ed. Silverio de Santa Teresa. Burgos: Biblioteca Mística Carmelitana. 1921–1924. ———. The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus. Ed. and trans. E. Allison Peers. 3 Vols. London: Sheed and Ward, 1944–1946. ———. The Letters of Saint Teresa of Jesus. Ed. and trans. E. Allison Peers. 2 vols. Westminster, Maryland: Newman, 1950. ———. Obras completas. Ed. Efrén de la Madre de Dios and Otger Steggink. Madrid: BAC, 1982. Serís, Homero. “Nueva genealogía de Santa Teresa.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 10 (1956): 365–384. Smith, Paul Julian. The Body Hispanic. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Tejeda, Gaspar de. Primero libro de cartas mensageras, en estilo cortesano, para diuersos fines y propósitos con los títulos y cortesías que se vsan en todos los estados. Valladolid: n.p., 1553. Torquemada, Antonio de. Manual de escribientes. Eds. María Josefa C. de Zamora and A. Zamora Vicente. Madrid: Anejos del Boletín de la Real Academia Española (Anejo XXI), 1970. Vives, Luis. De conscribendis epistolis (1536). Obras completas. II. Ed. and trans. Lorenzo Riber. Madrid: Aguilar, 1948. 841–879. ———. The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual. Ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Weber, Alison. Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Woolf, Virginia. “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters.” Collected Essays, III. London: Hogarth Press, 1967.


CH A P T E R

FOU R

Talking out of Church: Women Arguing Theology in Sor Juana’s loa to the Divino Narciso Je a n n e G i l l e s p i e

Juana de Asbaje was born mid-seventeenth century on a hacienda in rural Mexico where she learned to read and write in her grandfather’s library. She had a passion for Latin and a talent for verse that also made her popular in the Viceregal Court in Mexico City. Her disdain for life at court, however, prompted her to enter the convent, where she pursued her studies, wrote religious and secular plays and verses, composed music, and served as the convent accountant. Sor Juana also performed science experiments and corresponded with Kepler and other European scientists on contemporary scientific methods and philosophies. Sor Juana kept her connections with the Viceregal Court and occasionally was commissioned to write love verses for courtiers. She also was commissioned by various churches for musical and theatrical works to commemorate religious events such as the Feast of Corpus Christi and the dedication of new buildings. In Untold Sisters (1989), Stacey Schlau and Electa Arenal established that women writing in the convents of Spain and its colonies were not anomalies, but were often responsible for not only the history of the convents but also for developing entertainment and educational materials within the convent walls (148–151). Like Sor Juana, nuns would write dramatic and poetic texts to be performed for their sisters. They also composed and performed music for their ceremonies. While many

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of these texts have only recently become accessible because of the work of these two and other dedicated scholars, the texts of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz have been available to the public since the late seventeenth century. Sor Juana’s texts were so popular that they were published in Madrid as early as 1689. While Sor Juana’s talents made her a popular literary figure in her time, many suspect that her rhetorical talents and pro-female stance during a theological debate ended her “public” literary career. After Archbishop Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz published Sor Juana’s Carta atenagórica (Athenagoric Letter) in 1690, chastising a sermon by a renowned scholar for being sloppily argued, the archbishop publicly took her to task, posing as the nun “Sor Filotea.” Sor Juana’s Respuesta a Sor Filotea (Response to Sor Filotea), written three months later but published posthumously, offered a powerful rationale for allowing women to study and to participate in intellectual pursuits. This is perhaps her most well-known unruly work because it argues a pro-female stance, citing examples of learned women from the Bible and from history. After this critical encounter, under pressure from the clergy, Sor Juana ceased her intellectual pursuits, although Elías Trabulse’s careful analysis of the final years of her life and the materials in her possession when she died has shed new light on this assumption. Interestingly, many works by Sor Juana have been categorized as “unruly” in their subtexts because they use female models. As Electa Arenal first pointed out, Sor Juana’s Primero sueño (First Dream) followed typically baroque structures and themes of ecstatic poetry; however, in this conventional baroque poetic form, Sor Juana consistently incorporated only female images and historical figures to achieve her poetic union with the divine (124–125). Sor Juana privileges the female voice in the poem “Hombres necios que acusáis” and in theatrical compositions such as Los empeños de una casa. Stephanie Merrim examines the “womanspeak” of Sor Juana’s theater in detail (94–123).1 Grady Wray examines this dimension in conjunction with her pro-criollo attitude in her Ejercicios devotos (Devotional Exercises) dedicated to the Virgin Mary. While many examples of pro-female arguments exist, in the loa to the auto sacramental El Divino Narciso (Divine Narcissus), Sor Juana pushes the limits of baroque sensibilities and her own “unruliness” one step further. In this work of theater, Sor Juana debates theological principles with women’s voices as seen in some of her previous work, but this time, she also privileges the Amerindian female voice of “America,” the “india bizarra” (gallant Indian) of the loa. At the moment in which

Sor Juana’s LOA to the DIVINO NARCISO

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Sor Juana composes this loa, she is a double rebel. She not only argues religion from a female perspective, but also illustrates that Amerindian religion and European religion have much in common. Because Sor Juana’s voice is American and female, her work may also be studied as a striking example of literature classified as “Spanish American baroque,” or barroco de Indias. In many ways, this style itself could also be considered unruly. In her investigations of the work of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the existence of a barroco de Indias in colonial Latin America, Kathleen Ross explains that traditional scholarship, where a text is measured against existing standards to see how well it has followed them, has limited the analysis of Americanproduced texts to a symbolic vein, which views the American texts as “hybrids,” and to a materialist vein, which sees them as “transplants” of European culture (Ross 4). The hybrid interpretation sees texts from the Indies as a fusion of American and European cultures into a new product, while the transplant theory sees the texts as deeply ingrained with the European literary heritage but existing in a new place. Ross believes that, while these models help in the understanding of colonial baroque texts, they present only a partial view. The texts must also be understood from a literary perspective in their historical and literary contexts (5). The advent of feminist and cultural criticism produced new paradigms with which to judge these texts. These new paradigms allow the analysis and understanding of a true barroco de Indias as a conf luence of European criollo society and American geography and indigenous heritage. Ross explains that this “American” literature, produced principally by the criollo elite, ref lects a “constant wavering of language from dominant to subordinate positions, resulting in subversions of European models even when those models are consciously being imitated” (7). Sor Juana’s construction of an unruly, Spanish American baroque— barroco de Indias—in the loa to the auto sacramental, El Divino Narciso, illustrates this wavering from the dominant to the subordinate positions. Sor Juana privileges the subordinate American voice by introducing the loa with a tocotin, a Nahuatl poetic musical form. She then establishes that the Mesoamerican historical and cultural heritage is ancient and as valid as European history. At the same time, Sor Juana conducts a theological debate between two female voices, adding another surprising and subversive twist to both Catholic and Mesoamerican theology. Sor Juana’s treatment of indigenous peoples contrasts sharply with the popular opinion of the natives in baroque Mexico. In the late

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seventeenth century, poor economic conditions, devastating epidemics, and the general decline of the colonies were blamed upon the laziness and propensity for intoxication of the Amerindians. The arguments justifying the conquest and the exploitation of these people expressed a century and a half earlier by López de Gómara and Sepúlveda had become deeply ingrained in the intellectual community, despite the vehement objections of Bartolomé de las Casas. Benjamin Keen describes the Western attitude toward the indigenous American populations in the seventeenth century: “Hostility dominated the Spanish attitude toward the Indian in this period. This hostility ref lected the triumph of the anti Indian reaction that began in the Spanish court under Philip II” (173–174). Sor Juana and a group of Mexican intellectuals, including Sigüenza y Góngora, argued that the native populations of Mexico had enjoyed a civilized historical tradition long before the arrival of Europeans. While these intellectuals debated the good and civilized nature of the native inhabitants, a devastating uprising occurred in New Mexico, demoralizing the indigenist apologists. Sor Juana’s loa to El Divino Narciso appears to have been composed in an effort to reanimate support for the native populations. In her treatment of the Mesoamericans in the loa, she explains that they are the descendants of a valiant race and have enjoyed centuries of a civilized lifestyle. In the loa, indigenous characters called América and Occidente enter with a group of native dancers, singing a tocotin, a Nahuatl performance text used to recite historical or religious information. The term “tocotin” is derived from the drumming patterns used to introduce a Nahua performance text called a “cuicatl.” Many of these texts, transcribed in the mid-sixteenth-century manuscript called the Cantares mexicanos, include drum notation, as Richard Haly indicates in “The Poetics of the Aztecs.” Haly has tentatively established the meter for the drum notations based upon the agglutinative nature of the Nahuatl language and the notations of TI, TO, CO, and QUI in the manuscript. Haly explains that these represent the different tones that can be produced on the two drums used to accompany the texts as they were performed (94). Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Haly’s investigation is that he identifies the drumming pattern “TO+CO+TI+CO+TO+CO+TI” as a pattern specific to performance texts that are performed in FEMALE voices. While Haly does not call this type of text a tocotin, the last three tones TO+CO+TI of the drum cadence suggest the common term tocotin. We have seen Sor Juana’s preoccupation with female models before: Georgina Sabat-Rivers and


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Electa Arenal among others have highlighted this phenomenon, but here, by using a female Amerindian musical/poetic form, Sor Juana asserts the validity of both American and female voices. This is not the only text in which Sor Juana uses Amerindian voices or pro-American models. Georges Baudot has studied the texts Sor Juana wrote in Nahuatl (849–859), and Sabat-Rivers has examined the pro-America stance of several loas composed by Sor Juana (“Apología de América” 267–291). What is interesting in the language of this particular loa is that Sor Juana writes in the Amerindian tocotin but uses no Nahuatl words, except the current term for the local Amerindians “Mejicanos.” She also uses no specific names of indigenous celebrations or divinities. This composition is for a criollo audience, and we see the wavering between the dominant and the subordinate cultures in New Spain that Ross describes. According to Robert Stevenson, tocotins were often performed during ensaladillas along with negrillas and villancicos of various ethnic origins: sevillanas, asturianas,and so on, where the composer tries to imitate ethnic speech patterns and to construct humorous “diversions” (9–10). It would not be terribly surprising, then, that the tradition of performance texts that ref lect the cultural regions of Spain be expanded to include American voices and regions. This is precisely what we see in this loa introduced with a tocotin celebrating the heritage of pre-Hispanic Mexico: “Nobles Mejicanos, / cuya estirpe antigua, / de las claras luces del Sol origina” (383; Noble Mexicans / whose ancient lineage / in the bright light of the Sun originates). As the loa opens, the Amerindians sing two stanzas of the tocotin dedicated to this ceremony. The tocotin occupies the same performance space as the loa in calling the attention of the audience to the performance that is about to occur. By using the tocotin, however, the Amerindian musical/poetic form is privileged. The first stanza identifies the holiday the Amerindians are celebrating as the day for revering the “Great God of the Seeds”: “pues hoy es del año / el dichoso día / en que se consagra / la mayor Reliquia, / ¡venid adornados / de vuestras divisas, / y a la devoción / se una alegría; / y en pompa festiva, / celebrad al gran Dios de las Semillas!” (383; well today is the day of the year / the blessed day / when we venerate / the most important Relic / Come, adorned / with your emblems / and to devotion / unite joy / and in festive pomp / celebrate the Great God of the Seeds!). The traditional loa also sets the tone of the text to come as a religious performance—the difference here is in the use of Amerindian poetics in a Spanish, Catholic dramatic tradition.

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As the representation unfolds, the second stanza expounds upon how this God of the Seeds has provided sustenance and how offerings to him should be made: “Y pues la abundancia / de nuestras provincias / se Le debe al que es / Quien las fertiliza, / ofreced devotos, / de los nuevos frutos / todas las primicias” (383; And thus, the abundance / of our provinces / is owed to Him who is / He who fertilizes them / offer devotions / of the new fruits / all the very best). This stanza is punctuated by the estribillo (refrain) naming the divinity the Great God of the Seeds. The principal staple crop of Mesoamerica was maize, and the title God of the Seeds also indicates the God of Corn. Many variations of this entity occurred throughout Mesoamerica. Two very prolific manifestations who were actively worshiped with blood sacrifices were Centeotl, the “Corn Divinity,” who represented the young ear of corn, and Xipe Totec, “Flayed One,” whose dry outer skin emulated a ripe ear of corn with the husk over it. In sacrifices to Xipe Totec during the festival of Tlacaxipehualitzli, blood was often mixed with maize offerings to enhance their value (Brodas 197–198). The identification of the Great God of the Seeds with one particular Mesoamerican divinity is problematic and exemplifies the wavering between the voice of the conqueror and that of the conquered described by Ross. Sor Juana has several divinities from which to choose, but she never specifies which Mesoamerican divinity she calls the Great God of the Seeds. Benjamin Keen, citing Sahagún, believes that the deity is Huizilopochtli, the Mexican cult figure to whom similar sacrifices of maize mixed with blood were also made (174). María Sten feels that it must be the “Corn God” Centeotl or the God[dess] of the Young Corn Plant, Xilonen (119–123), although Sten makes the point that Sor Juana’s effort to cast the God of Corn in agreement with the norms of Christian faith is evident (123). Another possible divinity is the pan-Mesoamerican rain divinity known as Tlaloc in Nahuatl, Cosijo in Oaxaca, and Cha’ac in Maya languages. This figure provided rain for the crops by piercing his palms and letting the precious f luid drip onto the earth. In return, humans were to perform auto-sacrificial acts in thanks for good weather and to assuage the divinity in bad weather. The next stanza suggests the sacrificial nature of the ritual with instructions that the celebrants: “¡Dad de vuestras venas / la sangre más fina, / para que, mezclada, / a su culto sirva; / y en pompa festiva celebrad al gran Dios de las Semillas” (383; Give from your veins / the finest blood / so that mixed [with the finest fruits] / it will serve His cult; / and in festive pomp / celebrate the Great God of the Seeds!). This is an invocation for a


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bloodletting activity to produce nourishment that ref lects the rituals devoted to Tlaloc. Although the exact divinity is not named, Sor Juana’s use of auto-sacrificial images highlights her awareness of ancient ritual, either from first-hand knowledge or from the ethnographic sources. Sten suggests that Sor Juana has read Acosta or Torquemada, or perhaps both (120). It is also possible that Sor Juana’s association with Sigüenza y Góngora (Ross 7) inf luenced her knowledge of Mesoamerican history and culture. The refrain that punctuates the stanza, “¡y en pompa festiva, /celebrad al gran Dios de las Semillas!,” (and in festive pomp / celebrate the Great God of the Seeds!) is repeated throughout the loa and becomes the very crux of the conversion argument. It also establishes the images linking food and sustenance with theology. The theme of food and its preparation is treated elsewhere in Sor Juana’s compositions; she used the kitchen and food as a model for education, especially in favor of the education of women and the benefits of the kitchen as a research laboratory: “Si Aristóteles hubiera guisado, mucho más hubiera escrito” (Sor Juana 839; If Aristotle would have cooked, he would have written much more). This discussion of food and sustenance opens up another surprising avenue in Sor Juana’s treatment of the encounter—a theological debate between two female characters, América and Religión. These characters are knowledgeable in religion and culture and, through images of preparing food and offering nourishment, they argue the philosophical and theological points of this cross-cultural contact. The male participants, Occidente and Celo, proffer reactionary comments, militaristic attitudes, and visceral responses to conf lict and challenge. The brute force of Celo and the constant deliberation on food and pleasure by Occidente present satirical representations of male figures, in contrast to the intellectual discourse that occurs between the women. This treatment would have been well-received in a convent audience. The dialogue regarding the nature of the Gran Dios de las Semillas alternates between theological discussions in female voice and violent militaristic threats and actions between the males in the work. Following the tocotin invocation, Occidente makes a very graphic reference to the human sacrifices offered to this god: “ya las entrañas que pulsan, / ya el corazón palpita / aunque son (vuelvo a decir) / tantos . . .” (384; already the viscera pulsate / the heart is already beating / although they are [I repeat] / so many). América responds with a much more esoteric observation on the nature of the Dios de las Semillas, who has provided

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Mesoamerica with abundance and fed his devotees from his own purified “f lesh”: Demás de que su protección no limita sólo a corporeal sustento de la material comida, sino que después, haciendo manjar de sus carnes mismas (estando purificadas antes de sus inmundicias corporales), de las manchas el Alma nos purifica. (384) And of which His protection is not limited to Merely corporal sustenance By the material ingested But rather after making a Delicacy of his very f lesh (first being purified of its corporal filth) from stain the Soul purifies us. This discussion establishes the Repast for which the Mesoamericans are thankful and reiterates the auto-sacrificial act of offering one’s body as nourishment and of the need to cleanse oneself before partaking, reminding the audience of a eucharistic play. Interestingly, in Mesoamerica, the divinity Tlazoteotl, literally “Filth Eater,” was the female divinity responsible for ritual cleansing and for childbirth. Missionary priests commented upon the cleanliness of the Mesoamericans and used their ideas of cleanliness and the dangers of corporeal contamination to couch the Christian concept of “sin.” An Amerindian image of cleansing here continues to support the connection with baptism in preparation for the Eucharist that will be presented in the following auto sacramental. América invites the other singers to continue to celebrate their deity: “Y así, atentos a su culto / todos conmigo repitan:” (And so, dedicated to His cult / all repeat with me); the singers and dancers respond: “¡y en pompa festiva, / celebrad al gran Dios de las Semillas!” (384; and in festive pomp / celebrate the Great God of the Seeds!). At that moment Celo, a conquistador, and Religión, an elegant Spanish dama, enter. The Europeans,


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ironically, interrupt the sacred, respectful religious ceremony. Religión criticizes Celo for allowing this blatant idolatry to continue, to which Celo responds with a brandished weapon and a desire to extract vengeance from the idolaters. Religión, however, is optimistic in the Amerindian potential as converts and decides, after pointing out the idolatry, to invite them in peace to receive her message (384). Despite Celo’s brandished weapon, it is Religión who first confronts the Mesoamericans and insists that they leave their “miserable” life: “Occidente poderoso, / América bella y rica, / que vivís tan miserables / entre las riquezas mismas: / dejad el culto profano / a que el Demonio os incita.” (385; Powerful Occidente, / beautiful and rich America / you live so miserably / among the same riches: / leave your profane cult / to which the Demon incites you). In Religión’s discourse, the message that the Amerindians are powerful and rich is offset by the commentary that they serve the devil. At the same time, Occidente and América speculate on the origin of these strange characters, and then Occidente expresses his appreciation of Religión on a physical level: “¡Oh tú, extranjera Belleza! /¡oh tú Mujer peregrina! / Dime quién eres, que vienes / a perturbar mis delicias” (385; Oh, you, foreign Beauty / Oh you Woman traveler! / Tell me who you are, you who comes / to disturb my pleasure). After Religión states her missionary intent, Occidente and América remark upon the folly of this activity, again privileging the native voice. América proclaims that Religión is “crazy” and instructs the Mesoamericans to ignore her and continue their ceremony, to which the Mesoamericans respond with the familiar estribillo. The Mesoamericans’ attitude irritates Celo who insists he will punish this crime against his spouse. When Occidente challenges his authority Celo responds, boasting of his military skills and the Divine sanctions under which he operates (385). In response, Occidente remains baff led by Celo’s utterances and irritated for being interrupted in the devotion to the Divine: “Que no entiendo tus razones / ni aun por remotas noticias, ni quién eres tú, que osado / a tanto empeño te animas / como impedir que mi gente / en debidos cultos diga . . .” (385; That I do not understand your reasons / nor even have the slightest idea who you are, what a bold / endeavor you have undertaken / to impede my people / from their required devotion, tell . . .). The Amerindians are cast as the devout and the Europeans as those who would impede the veneration of the Divine. At this point, the Amerindian celebrants again proclaim the refrain to the Dios de las Semillas. Continuing the twist of perspective, América calls Celo a crazy barbarian. In most texts, especially those supporting López de

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Gómara and Sepúlveda, the native populations were considered the barbarians and the Europeans the “civilized” people (Keen 175). By calling the European military forces “barbaric,” Sor Juana situates herself well in the rhetoric of Sigüenza y Góngora’s pro-American debate. When América instructs her followers to continue the celebration, Celo erupts, proclaiming that since the first attempt to convert them in peace had failed, the Mesoamericans must submit under military force, and the requisite battle ensues. Celo chases and subdues América while Religión bests Occidente. The Mesoamericans admit that European weapons are too much for them, but they refuse to submit to Religión even though she has spared their lives from the wrath of Celo. Religión explains why her “reason” is what is needed to actually convert América: “porque vencerla por fuerza / te tocó; mas el rendirla / con razón, me toca a mí, con suavidad persuasiva” (387; because vanquishing her by force / is your style; but to turn her / with reason is my job, with persuasive gentleness). In this discourse, the female character is in complete control of the military force and the activity of converting the indigenous people. The rhetorical power of Religión serves as a more powerful tool than the military prowess of the Spanish forces. The Mesoamerican response is not very promising, however, and despite Religión’s “compassion,” América is unconvinced: “Si el pedir que yo no muera, / y el mostrarte compasiva, / es porque esperas de mí / que me vencerás, altiva, / como antes con corporales, después con intelectivas / armas, estás engañada;” (387; If requesting that I do not die / and showing your compassion / occurs because you hope to defeat me, haughty woman, / as before with corporal, later with intellectual / arms, you are mistaken). América resists Religión’s arguments and Occidente concurs, stating that although he is captive, the agressors will not be successful in turning him from his God of the Seeds (387). The Amerindian dedication to their religion and to their divinity does not waiver. With a captive yet not submissive audience, Religión begins to investigate their Dios de las Semillas. She asks Occidente: “¿Qué Dios es ése que adoras?” (387; What God is this whom you adore?). He explains again that his God fertilizes the fields that give fruit and controls the rain and washes away the sins of his followers. Also, this God offers himself for their nourishment. Religión, startled at the similarity with Christian beliefs, mutters in an aside that the Serpent must be playing tricks with her. At this point, the voice of the colonizer begins to understand the indigenous culture and adapt her rhetoric and her conversion strategies (387).


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América questions Religión further, inquiring how there can be any other God so benevolent as the Mesoamerican one? Religión, in good rhetorical form, cites an outside authority, the Apostle Paul, to interject the “not-a-new-god, but a previously unknown-god” defense used to spare Christians from the death penalty in Athens. People who introduced new gods to be worshiped in Athens were put to death; however, if worshipers could prove that their deity had existed before, worship of that deity would be tolerated. Religión continues that this previously unknown God “el Dios Verdadero” is actually the one responsible for the abundance that the Mesoamericans celebrate: “Pues si el prado / florecido se fertiliza / si los campos se fecundan, / si el fruto se multiplica, / si las sementeras crecen, / si las lluvias se destilan, / todo es obra de Su diestra;” (388; Well if the f lowering / meadow is fertilized / if the fields are fecundated / if the fruit multiplies / if the crops grow / if the rains fall, / all of it is the work of His skill). América inquires about worship practices, which are again in the realm of cooking and the kitchen: “¿será tan propicia / esa Deidad, que se deje / tocar de mis manos mismas, / como el Idolo que aquí / mis propias manos fabrican de semillas y de sangre / inocente, que vertida / es sólo para este efecto?” (388; would this Deity / be as favorable, that would permit me / to touch [Him] with my own hands, / like the Idol that here / my very hands mold from seeds and innocent / blood, that is shed only for this purpose?). In the Mexican festival of Tlacaxipeualitzli, dedicated to Xipe Totec, the image of Xipe was formed from maize dough “f lesh” and decorated with seeds (Brodas 197–198). This incarnation was then broken apart and eaten in compliance with the strict rules of the ritual consumption of human f lesh. The connection with “The Body of Christ” and “The Blood of Christ” celebrated in Christian communion is not lost on Sor Juana or her audience. The nature of the Mesoamerican ritual is not lost on Religión either; she understands the correlation here: en el Santo Sacrificio de la Misa en cándidos accidentes, se vale de las semillas de trigo, el cual se convierte en Su Carne y Sangre misma; y Su Sangre, que en el Cáliz está, es Sangre que ofrecida en al Ara de la Cruz,

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América also sees the connection: “Ya que esas tan inauditas / cosas quiera yo creer. / ¿será esa Deidad que pintas, / tan amorosa, que quiera ofrecérseme en comida, / como Aquésta que yo adoro?” (388; Now that these almost inaudible / things I would want to believe. / Would it be this Deity that you paint, / so loving, who wishes to offer [Himself ] to me to eat, / like That one that I adore?). When América asks for proof of this God’s good intentions, Religión begins to introduce the auto “El Divino Narciso,” which is designed to teach the Mesoamericans about Christianity through the sacrament of baptism in preparation for communion. Occidente finally understands and points out the ancient Amerindian custom to prepare and cleanse before eating (389). As we have seen, Tlazoteotl, “Filth Eater,” was the mother of Centeotl, the Corn Divinity (The God of the Seeds), and it was she who helped cleanse those who had become dirty. In Sor Juana’s construction of Occidente’s ancient custom, the idea that the Mesoamericans have been worshiping the True God all along is insinuated: “que así es mi costumbre Antigua” (389; as is my ancient custom). Celo and Religión brief ly discuss technical matters regarding the representation of the Auto sacramental and the loa closes with Occidente still thinking about his stomach: “¡Vamos, que ya en mi agonía / quiere ver cómo es el Dios/ que me han de dar en comida!” (390; Come on, in my agony / I wish to see what this God is like / that you are giving me to eat!). América and Celo join Occidente, singing: “diciendo que ya / conocen las Indias / al que es Verdadero / Dios de las Semillas! / Y en lágrimas tiernas / que el gozo destila, / repitan alegres / con voces festivas: (390; saying that now / in the Indies they know / the one who is the True / God of the Seeds! / and in tender tears / shed in joy, / they repeat, happy / with festive voices:).


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All of the participants, Celo and Religión included, join to complete the estribillo: “Dichoso el día / que conocí al gran Dios de las Semillas!” (390; blessed is the day / that I met the great God of the Seeds). The act of conversion is the culmination of the wavering between European and American voices. When the actual “conversion” finally occurs, it is difficult to decide who has converted whom, since the Europeans sing the Mesoamerican song to the Gran Dios de las Semillas! The Europeans accept the God of the Seeds as their own by allowing the substitution of the Mesoamerican celebration of human sacrifice— the eating of the body of the God of the Corn Seeds—for the European celebration of human sacrifice (Christ) and His ritual consumption in the communion wafer made from wheat Seeds. The most radical change in the entire process is one of “recipe,” not of theology or of geography. Again, this detail privileges the “female” realm of the kitchen; this would have been a nod to the audience members viewing the presentation of this work in the convent. Many convents in the Spanish Empire were (and are) famous for culinary innovations or special delicacies; and we have seen that Sor Juana was comfortable in the kitchen laboratory. Sor Juana privileges the power of a recipe and also highlights the similarities between pre-Hispanic and Catholic religions. Despite the subversive treatment of the subject, the natives must still become Christian. The colonizers still prevail, the criollo society still is linked tightly to its European roots; but it is from the corn seed, introduced by the tocotin, directed by a female character—América—and nourished by the blood sacrifice of the American deity that Sor Juana allows her unruly barroco de Indias to f lourish. Note 1. See Merrim’s collection of essays Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. This collection brings together many well-known scholars to examine “feminist” aspects of Sor Juana’s works. For an excellent overview of recent scholarship on Sor Juana, see Dorothy Disse’s website, Other Women’s Voices.

Works Cited Arenal, Electa. “Where Woman Is Creator of the Wor(l)d: Or, Sor Juana’s Discourses on Method.” Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. Ed. Stephanie Merrim. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991. 124–141. Arenal, Electa and Stacey Schlau. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in their Own Words. Albuquerque: U New Mexico P, 1989.

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Baudot, Georges. “La trova náhuatl de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Estudios de folklore y literatura dedicados a Mercedes Díaz Roig. Eds. Beatriz Garza Cuarón and Yvette Jiménez de Báez. Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1992. 849–859. Brodas de Casas, Johanna. “Tlacaxipehualitzli: A Reconstruction of an Aztec Calendar Festival from Sixteenth-Century Sources.” Revista española de antropología americana 5 (1970): 197–274. Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la. Obras completas. Mexico: UNAM, 1979. Disse, Dorothy. Other Women’s Voices: Translations of women’s writing before 1700, http://home. infionline.net/~ddisse/juana.html. Haly, Richard. “The Poetics of the Aztecs.” New Scholar 10 (1986): 85–133. Keen, Benjamin. The Aztec Image in Western Thought. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1971. Merrim, Stephanie, ed. Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991. ———. “Mores Geometricae: The ‘Womanscript’ in the Theater of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. Ed. Stephanie Merrim. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991. 94–123. Ross, Kathleen. The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza de Góngora: A New World Paradise. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Sabat-Rivers, Georgina. “Apología de América y del mundo azteca en tres loas de Sor Juana.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (Universidad de Puerto Rico) 19 (1992): 267–291. Sten, María. Vida y muerte del teatro nahuatl. Jalapa: U Veracruzana P, 1982 (1974). Stevenson, Robert. “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Musical Rapports: A Tercentenary Remembrance.” Inter-American Music Review 15 (1996): 1–21. Trabulse, Elías. Los anos finales de Sor Juana: Una interpretación (1688–1695). Mexico: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México, CONDUMEX, 1995. Wray, Grady. The Devotional Exercises / Los Ejercicios Devotos of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico’s Prodigious Nun (1684/51–1695). Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2005.

CH A P T E R

F I V E

Angela Carranza, Would-Be Theologian Stac e y S c h l au

The case that the Lima Inquisition brought against the Augustinian holy woman Angela Carranza (Peru, 1643?–after 1694) remains one of the most notorious in the annals of the Spanish Holy Office on either side of the Atlantic. A neighborhood saint, self-styled mystic, entrepreneur, and would-be theologian, Carranza managed to write or dictate 543 notebooks (7500 folios) of visions, mystical explications, and theological treatises—all of which were collected and burned during the proceedings against her. Also confiscated and destroyed were the many relics that she had distributed and sold to pious souls. Today, her only extant words are those transcribed into the Relación (Account) of her case compiled by Dr. Francisco Valera of the Lima Tribunal for the Supreme Council in Madrid,1 a well-organized and easily read document dated 1699, five years after Carranza was sentenced. Like others of its genre, the Account was written to inform and convince Spanish leaders that in fact Peruvian personnel had accomplished their task in an efficacious manner, guided by the rules that governed all the Spanish and colonial inquisitional tribunals. In the second half of the seventeenth century, several Peruvian clerics publicly complained about the enormous proliferation of holy women. Yet not all female visionaries ended up before the Inquisition— although of course some did—and not all wrote down their experiences. Examples of contemporaries of Angela Carranza include Josefa de la Madre de Dios, a spiritual daughter of the same confessor as Angela Carranza, who gained some fame while managing to remain within

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accepted limits (Mannarelli 50); and Angelita de Olivitos, against whom the Inquisition began a case in 1689, accusing her of false visions and revelations and finding her guilty in 1693 of being a liar and suspected of Illuminism. One of the best-known, Jacinta Montoya (who gave herself the religious name “de la Santísima Trinidad”), had founded a religious school for poor girls, and probably had contact with Angela Carranza. She was investigated after denouncing herself in 1701. Montoya, too, had written many folios about her visions and revelations, as well as about her husband, Nicolás Ayllón, a popular neighborhood saint of indigenous ancestry. After his death, a process of beatification was discussed, but church officials eradicated his cult. Jacinta Montoya died in 1711 without the proceedings ever having been concluded (Millar Carvacho 115). Angela Carranza’s case attracted a great deal of attention, probably because she had established herself in the popular imagination. That she had had ecstasies and trances in churches, plazas, and other public places was not doubted, although their provenance was. Her claims to such experiences as having had visits from the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary, angels, and saints; having risen to heaven several times; having been carried to Rome by angels to see the Pope; having had repeated contact with souls in purgatory and with the devil; having eaten bread and milk with God; and having played with the Child Jesus led to her being judged an ilusa (false visionary) and a liar, suspected of pacts with the devil. Yet below the surface of religious questions lies a host of other issues: challenges to ecclesiastic authority, internicine church politics, suppression of female economic independence, and conf licts with the viceroy, to name a few. Lima, the city in which Carranza came to prominence and then to her downfall, achieved its greatest opulence in civil and ecclesiastic edifices, social life, feast days, and processions in the seventeenth century (Tord 19). To adorn these buildings, and despite the difficulties and expense of obtaining raw materials, painting and sculpture f lourished (Kelemen 4, 6). Predominantly religious, the visual arts served to inspire spirituality and, in the case of Angela Carranza (among others), to foment the vivid visual detail of ecstatic trances. The Virgin Mary was, naturally, a most popular subject of the visual arts. One of the most prevalent art forms in Peru was the “dressed statue” paintings of Mary, usually with the Christ Child in her arms. These were literally paintings of statues in churches and chapels. Artwork as an expression of religious sentiment was perceived to perform sacred tasks. The Franciscans in Lima, for instance, maintained

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that their statue of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception was responsible for dowsing the fire in the building where the Spaniards had taken refuge during the siege of Cuzco in 1536; the same image was said to have interceded to minimize damage in Lima from an earthquake on November 27, 1630 (Dean 172–173). The inf luence of such iconography on Angela Carranza’s visionary life, including its use as inspiration, cannot be underestimated. We know little about the external events of Carranza’s life, especially before she arrived in Lima. She was estimated to be forty-six years old at the beginning of the Account (275 r), but it is unclear when that estimate was made. We do know that she was arrested in December 1688, the same month in which the prosecutor requested that the qualificators conduct a theological examination of her notebooks, a process that took three years. Born to a Creole and a Spaniard, who, she testified, were both Old Christians with no record of arrest or reconciliation by the Holy Office, she grew up in Córdoba, in the province of Tucumán. While she initially claimed to be a virgin (358 r), she later changed that part of her testimony.2 She asserted that she had wanted to get married, but lacked the dowry. A few scholars have noted that when she arrived in Lima in 1665, Carranza—poor, single, no longer young—had few economic opportunities. Especially after the Inquisition carried out several campaigns of public morality that cleared the streets of swindlers, petty thieves, and procuresses, the best recourse for carving out a subsistence living in a city filled with women alone, all of whom were trying to survive, would have been religion (Sánchez 268). If, ideologically, women’s options “f luctuated between passivity and escape, between acceptance and rebellion” (Flores Espinoza 61),3 then the niche that Angela Carranza carved out for herself, although risky, had some chance for success. As Ana Sánchez has noted, “Angela managed the benefits of saintliness with a real business sense” (282). During this historical period, when books that recounted saints’ lives were extremely popular and art inspired miracles and ecstasies, for women, particularly, saintly behavior required certain prescribed elements, among which were humility and obedience to (male) religious authority. Given those constraints, however, attaining recognition could mean increased status. Sociologically, religious notice brought a host of other, more material rewards, which, Millar Carvacho claims, were even more attractive to women than to men, because of their gendered marginalization (112). He neglects to factor in, however, the gender role expectations that limited women’s possibilities for action

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and thought. Rational knowledge, for instance, was viewed as masculine; only divinely communicated or inspired information might accrue to the female of the species. Under the added conditions of poverty and lack of other opportunities to escape economic penury, as well as the conceptual imperative that imbued religiosity with power, becoming a holy woman would indeed have seemed an attractive solution. Especially in the Andean region, and most notably for inhabitants of Lima, in whose city Isabel Flores de Oliva, known as Rosa de Santa María, St. Rose of Lima (1586–1617) had lived, and whose canonization in 1671 and later declaration as the patron saint of America ensured her acceptability as a model, the spiritual connection between saving themselves and helping to reestablish order out of what was perceived to be social chaos seemed clear. Others, such as Mariana de Paredes y Flores, Mariana de Jesús (1619–1645), called the Lily of Quito, became famous as well. The figure of “the holy woman who suffered in order to expiate the city’s sins” (Glave 118) appeared repeatedly throughout the seventeenth century. Then, too, the number of “holy women” was also closely tied to the kind of religiosity propounded in sermons and through other means, such as saints’ Lives, which emphasized virtuous behavior rather than miracles. Women considered extraordinarily spiritual were transformed into heroes in popular devotion, because they served as intermediaries with the supernatural world (Sánchez 274). Unlike nuns, holy women did not take the standard vows of chastity, enclosure, obedience, and poverty. Given the ecclesiastic suspicion of mystical experience and the dogmatic attribution of original sin to Eve and her daughters, they could easily be seen as out of control, persons who might upset the established order even when they were under the direct tutelage of clerics: “the binomial holy woman–confessor was considered suspect by ecclesiastic authorities, who doubted the sincerity of women or simply their capacity to assimilate their confessors’ teachings” (Iwasaki Cauti 590). If they questioned the behavior of their social betters or placed themselves in the public eye, as Angela Carranza did, the suspicion of heterodoxy increased. In short, a holy woman could easily find herself defined as a false visionary or as an Illuminist, accused as well of making pacts with the devil. Inherent in the formulated beliefs of women’s closer association with the world, the f lesh, and the devil, as well as their inability to use reason, the referent ilusa (female false visionary) serves as a catch-all term to describe a wide range of transgressions whose common feature derives from the ecstatic’s desire for independence and individuality, while paradoxically immersed in the accepted godhead of her religion.


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Many women’s drive toward self-empowerment through spirituality took a convoluted, indirect path that involved misdirection, sidestepping, and dependence on otherworldly communication with sacred figures. Carranza, for example, seems to have listened only to inner counsel, not to priests; she reported that she literally could not hear sermons because divine music interfered (354 r). As María Emma Mannarelli succinctly puts it, “She does not read words mediated by men, she listens to the divine voice” (61). Even so, especially when coupled with race, class, and historical factors, such strategies might not suffice to prevent punishment. The Lima Inquisition, like its counterparts elsewhere in the Spanish empire, ref lected social and political trends, as well as helping to define them. Not only were different crimes emphasized, depending upon a person’s gender, race, and class, but also the focus of activities varied in different periods, according to prevailing state and church concerns. After the reunification of Spain and Portugal (1580) and the consequent emigration of large numbers of New Christians from the peninsula, for instance, American tribunals embarked upon a period of renewed repression of accused Judaizers. Whoever the defendants, though, their voices primarily emerge filtered through the formulae, procedures, and personnel of the inquisitional process. Undoubtedly, words and ideas are shaped and reshaped by the processes in which they occur. Elements of orality exist in tension with rigidly defined methodologies and means of articulating, just as the encounter between interrogator and either defendant or witness reveals underlying friction. Mannarelli observes, “to work with these texts is to confront, in some ways, the oral culture of the subaltern” (13). The social context, an almost postmodern mixture of oral and written discourses, the language of the courts and of Catholicism, and the framework of the confessional mean that these mediated texts are characterized by hybridity of form and content. The Account of the proceedings against Angela Carranza includes the transcription—exact, according to its author (Valera)—of long passages from her notebooks. In those sections, then, oral exchange as interrogation is not precisely a factor, while the transmission of writing is.4 The convoluted process of transmuting Carranza’s texts into an Account for the Supreme Council, with its selection and commentary, obliges the accused to write words, the words that she has already written, positioned so that they may then be used against her. The theme of writing emerges in several ways. There is at times a mixture of first- and third-person voices that could probably be

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attributed to Carranza but also might have to do with Valera’s transcription, thus eliding the shift between her voice and an authoritative voice that comments on hers. She queries: “What is this for? so much writing and she used to ask her confessors if it could be that this is weakness, or frailty, or a dream?” (359 v). Here, the accused makes use of a common rhetorical strategy; she attempts to fend off criticism and accusations a priori by expressing concerns about correctness herself and thus placing responsibility for any wrongdoing on her confessors. Unfortunately for her, the tactic did not work. After the qualificators had reviewed her notebooks for three years, the inquisitors determined that her writings were heretical. When they pronounced the sentence ordering Carranza’s reclusion in a convent, it included the provision that “she be deprived of paper, ink, and pens, so that she does not write” (371).5 Both the defendant and ecclesiastic officials explicitly make connections between (false) spiritual exemplarity and the act of writing. Questions about accuracy and purpose of transcription emerge from the manuscript, as do theological and visionary concerns. The religious issues are especially salient regarding two of Carranza’s primary doctrinal assertions, which take up areas of dogma that were hotly contested in the early modern Catholic church: the Immaculate Conception and the official stance on St. Anne’s and St. Joachim’s roles in the story of Jesus’ birth. The two themes join, of course, through the question of determining and providing explanations for the Virgin Mary’s lineage and her proper place in dogma and ritual. When, during the twelfth century, the concept of the Immaculate Conception was first explicitly formulated, it quickly became a matter of great controversy.6 Bernard de Clairvaux, for instance, opposed it. In the thirteenth century, Aquinas (a Dominican) did as well, arguing that Mary was cleansed of original sin after conception and before birth (Stratton 3). Nevertheless, the closely linked cult of Anne grew during the thirteenth century, becoming widespread by the fourteenth. Franciscans, Carmelites, and Carthusians had all adopted the Immaculate Conception as doctrine at least a hundred years before it was declared a dogma of faith by the Council of Basel in 1438. Since the pope declared this council schismatic, however, its action did not take effect. In the sixteenth century, the Council of Trent (1543–1565) insisted on viewing Mary as free of original sin, but did not actually declare a doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. At the same time, it reduced St. Anne’s role and status, so that her cult was never again as strong. Nevertheless, St. Anne was a cultural symbol of immense authority, who appealed to

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a wide range of people. Her iconography, which—like everyone— Carranza saw daily in churches and chapels, in paintings and sculpture, fostered a vivid image of this divine personage and others in the minds of the faithful. In Spain, and therefore in its colonies, the Immaculate Conception came to have enormous ideological and practical importance. For the monarchy, it carried political weight. The development of Spanish Immaculatist iconography was essentially a fifteenth-century phenomenon. During this period, St. Anne’s cult increasingly came to be associated with the conception of Mary. Her devotion grew dramatically in the second half of the century, aided by Franciscan preachers and the celebration by other orders of the Immaculate Conception (Stratton 29). While throughout the sixteenth century Spanish monarchs tacitly approved of the doctrine, in the seventeenth they began to publicly articulate their support for belief in the Immaculate Conception. King Philip IV, for instance, became a follower of Luisa de Carrión, an extremely popular Spanish holy woman and proponent of the Immaculate Conception.8 Also during the early seventeenth century, Spanish pressure on successive popes, advocating the elevation of the doctrine of Immaculate Conception to dogma, greatly intensified. The monarchy established a royal junta by the seventeenth century, which dedicated itself solely to the question of Immaculate Conception. Under the king’s auspices, the junta sent a series of special emissaries to Rome to plead the cause (Stratton 4). The pope approved the celebration of a feast day for the Immaculate Conception throughout Spain in 1645 (99) and the bulls of 1661 and 1664 made the cult official in Spain and its dominions (138). During the entire seventeenth century, theological controversy about the Immaculate Conception raged in Peru. The Virgin Mary was proclaimed the patron saint of Lima, and the University of San Marcos, like that of Paris, began to require candidates for a degree in theology to defend the mystery. The Dominicans were popularly condemned for rejecting the Immaculate Conception because, although the theological question had not been resolved, the populace embraced its devotion. In Lima in 1662, a huge procession sponsored by the Franciscans under the title of “Mary conceived without stain of sin,” followed by other, similar activities, took place; the Dominicans refused to participate. People took to the streets one night, taking out of the shop of Nicolás de Ayllón the image of Mary before which he had prayed, and bringing it to the Franciscan convent while all the church bells in the city except those of St. Dominic tolled. The following year, more

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processions and demonstrations occurred; one of the biggest was cosponsored by the Jesuits and the Augustinian monastery. Finally, after their provincial’s death, on July 19, 1664, the Dominicans capitulated.9 Carranza shared both popular belief about the Immaculate Conception and antagonism toward the Dominicans for their recalcitrance. She recounts that while in hell, for instance, she saw all the demons dressed as Dominican lay tertiaries, praising the Virgin Mary (330 r). Several chapters of the Account of Angela Carranza’s trial transcribe in detail her argument for the Immaculate Conception, although at the same time Valera notes its heretical elements and inherent contradictions (334 v). She recounted, in the unlikely case that there would be any doubt about the validity of the doctrine, several confirming visions. The first was of an angel in a boat, with a whip and Justice. The whip was for Justice to use, to whip anyone two hundred times who said that St. Anne had married a second time, and Justice, “so that the Inquisition could burn those who denied that the Most Holy Mary was conceived in grace” (296 r).10 An interesting twist of rhetoric here enlisted the authority of the Inquisition to support Carranza’s argument, apparently indicating that the holy woman thought she needed all the theological support she could muster. Essentially, her proposition rested on the foundation of the purity and saintliness of SS. Joachim and Anne. In summary, according to the would-be theological writer, they were relatives of Adam and Eve, had drunk from the River Jordan, and had eaten fruit from the Tree of Life, brought from Paradise (282 v). With such parents, Mary must have been born without original sin. In other words, Carranza clearly attributes Mary’s freedom from original sin not to divine intervention during Anne’s pregnancy, as Aquinas had, but to her lineage. The worship of Anne, and of Mary, necessarily lies at the heart of Catholic dogma and practice, since Jesus was their progeny. The ancillary role played by Joachim gradually gave way to a more prominent one for Joseph, his counterpart in the next generation. Still, the tripartite image of Anne, Mary, and Jesus lasted much longer in the colonies, at least in Mexico, than in Spain. Charlene Villaseñor Black has convincingly argued for a difference in the seventeenth-century Spanish and New Spanish churches regarding St. Anne. Because the Spanish church after the Council of Trent actively worked to suppress the role of St. Anne (as matriarch) in favor of a renewed emphasis on St. Joseph (as patriarch) in iconography and popular worship, her importance


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diminished in Spain. But the same was not true, she avers, in seventeenth-century New Spain. Carranza’s work demonstrates that, at least in her case, St. Anne’s popularity had not died out in the other major Spanish colonial metropolis either. While certainly she favored intimacy with Jesus, Carranza chose to include an exegesis of the life of his grandmother, the mother of his mother as she was often called, in her notebooks. The self-styled Angela of God became the spiritual mother of her followers of both genders and, she claimed, of priests. St. Anne was the patron of both childless women and women giving birth, which raises significant questions for consideration when thinking about Angela Carranza, who never became a biological mother but certainly aspired to spiritual maternity. Medieval iconography emphasized St. Anne’s importance in establishing a female principle that symbolized the family as a social structure of the new modern states (Luna, “Santa Ana” 55). After the Council of Trent and other reformist trends, though, in the Renaissance this iconography gave way to a different focus: the representation of St. Anne teaching her daughter how to read (55). Especially before the Council of Trent, many sculptured images reinforced the conceptual framework of the written, rather than oral, word as a link between the two women, thereby establishing education—and language—as female. Thus, biological maternity combined with the image of mother as purveyor of knowledge.11 In his 1649 treatise, The Art of Painting, however, the eminent court painter and inquisitional official Francisco Pacheco criticized the pedagogical emphasis, noting that such a depiction credited St. Anne rather than the Holy Spirit for Mary’s education. He outlined a modified set of religiously acceptable standards that focused on Mary’s divinely induced learning process, at the expense of Anne as instructor. Lola Luna points out that “in analyzing the figures, his displacing the mother in favor of the daughter eliminates the maternity/ language association” (“Santa Ana” 58). A third recurring element of the mythology surrounding St. Anne’s maternity demonstrates the power of prayer. After twenty years of sterility, Anne’s fierce desire for a child, articulated as constant prayer, led to the miraculous conception of Mary. Most texts purporting to offer Anne’s biography (she is an apocryphal figure who does not appear in the bible) recount the sequence of events similarly. Speaking of a biography of St. Anne published in 1600 by the intellectual Spanish nun Sor Valentina Pinelo, titled Book About the Praises and Excellence of the Glorious

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Saint Anne, Lola Luna has commented that St. Anne’s life seems to be conceived of as a doctrinal tract exalting virgin motherhood, that succession of miraculous pregnancies that began with her and continued with Elizabeth and Mary. She notes that “It is prayer, an elaborate form of supplication, that sanctifies Anne, returning her creative capacity and fecundity to her and introducing her into the lineage of the gods” (“Sor Valentina Pinelo” 92). An ardent defense of the Immaculate Conception, Pinelo’s treatise predates Carranza’s by almost a century. Although the two women occupy quite different chronological, geographic, intellectual, and social positions, they nevertheless share not only the Order (Pinelo was an Augustinian nun, Carranza a lay Augustinian tertiary) but also a profound interest in proving the Immaculate Conception through Anne’s exceptionality. That extraordinary quality was confirmed, in Carranza’s framework at least, when the Holy Spirit impregnated Anne. Carranza’s belief system could easily establish and maintain a connection between metaphoric maternity and prayer, based on the model of St. Anne. Mannarelli identifies two fundamental characteristics of the Lima holy woman’s identity: intimacy with Christ and the defense of inspiration through prayer (63). The theological defense of Immaculate Conception, including St. Anne’s divinity, made both possible. Here, I focus on this aspect of Carranza’s exegesis, partly in order to demonstrate how she attempted to transform dogma into a comprehensible framework with which she might operate in the world, and also to establish her capacity for seeking out female role models who justified her own exemplarity; for if she asserted adhesion to imitatio, it was not only of Jesus but also of his mother and grandmother. In the Account, many folios are dedicated to Carranza’s interpretation of the Immaculate Conception and to her concomitant analysis of St. Anne’s and St. Joachim’s roles in achieving their miraculous task. To accomplish this, she offers background information, including the transcribed physical portraits of SS. Anne and Joachim. These have the f lavor of images visually transmitted on a daily basis, with a sense of personality that Carranza probably added. Their vividness and idealized beauty ref lect Baroque sensibilities, notwithstanding Pacheco’s dictum that they be portrayed as elderly, with wrinkles. St. Anne, for instance, is very pretty, neither very tall, nor short . . . a round face, very white, lustrous skin, without wrinkles . . . a well-proportioned nose, spread out and frizzy eyebrows the color of her hair . . . thick-lipped,


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very white hands . . . she was rich, and had in her house, which was well-governed, a lot of abundance. That she was not very old; that she adorned herself with pearls, and other rich ornaments; and that she also sprinkled herself and washed with perfumed waters. (283 v–284 r) She describes St. Joachim more succinctly, as “tall, robust, with a full face, large nose, thick lips, pink, coarsely featured . . . he was clean and neat, dressed well” (284 r). Together, the two form a physical impression of personages worthy of the distinction bestowed on them. Writing in a notably disdainful tone and pointing out contradictions, Valera gives the Immaculate Conception prominence, probably to emphasize her errors. To introduce the subject, he commences by commenting that Carranza wanted to “prove the mystery of the Conception of the Most Saintly Virgin Mary free of original sin” (282 v) by insisting . . . that they [Anne and Joachim] left the family tree of Adam and Eve, and enjoyed divine gifts, as though equal to the Holy Trinity; and that, in this state of purity, and original Justice, they drank water from the Jordan River, ate fruit from the Tree of Life brought from Paradise, which contained Jesus Christ as he is in the Holy Sacrament. And from the substance of said fruit was formed in St. Joachim and St. Anne the seminal material, totally pure, from which were conceived in St. Anne’s womb, by dint of St. Joachim’s effort, Christ Our Lord and the Most Holy Mary, who . . . because she was formed from material that was the same Jesus Christ, continued on pure and free of all sin, and [free] even of the danger of being its presence. (282 v–283 r) This account, while appearing fanciful, nevertheless has the virtue of explaining all contingencies regarding Mary’s freedom from original sin. It provides an understanding of her perfection as second-generation, for the Holy Spirit did not only purify her parents, but it also placed them in a state of innocence—they both returned to a virgin state (287 v). Accordingly, they became the second Adam and Eve (284 v). The passage also emphasizes that Mary and Jesus were conceived at the same time. Elsewhere, Carranza recounts that Anne conceived Jesus first, just before his mother (289 r), that St. Anne and the Holy Spirit together made him, the Holy Spirit rocking St. Anne in God’s cradle during the process (290 r), and that “Jesus Christ’s birth from Mary was so that he would be born in public” (289 v). In fact, according to Carranza, the

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Holy Spirit transferred Jesus from Anne’s heart to Mary after Joachim died, and after Mary had been born and presented in the temple (292 r). Importantly, St. Anne’s role in the two succeeding births of Mary and Jesus is absolutely paramount. Having suffered childlessness for two decades, she becomes the conduit for the most significant births in the Catholic pantheon, a success story of the first magnitude. The author seeks to prove St. Anne’s importance in other ways as well. She insists, for instance, that Anne was the first person for whom God descended to earth (296 r). Further, the Holy Spirit married her (292 r). And when she died, the Holy Spirit watched over her body until she was buried, then remained in her home for nine days until her possessions were dispersed. Carranza adds the detail that the angels congratulated Anne rather than offering their condolences upon her death. Once in heaven, St. Anne distributes the chairs to saints and angels (293 r). Finally, in her account, when Jesus was resurrected, Anne and Joachim were resurrected as well (296 v). An interesting aspect of Carranza’s narrative is the description of Anne’s and Joachim’s relationship, which she contrasts with that of Mary and Joseph. There is no hint of the medieval legend of the three Marys—of Anne having had other daughters—in her story. In fact, except for the impregnation by the Holy Spirit, St. Anne is portrayed as completely faithful to her husband, even after his death. Once, she appeared to Angela de Dios and told her to put a rag on the face of anyone who said that she had been married twice (296 r)! They seem the perfect couple, despite the difference in their ages. Anne is a model wife: “she was very much a homebody, [and] did not allow visits from either women or men.” The relationship between the two more resembles that of a father and daughter than a husband and wife: “and they saw each other as father and daughter, had separate beds, and prayed frequently” (284 r). Once heavenly personages enter their lives, first a parity between Anne and Joachim and then her preeminence occurs. When St. Anne had the revelation that she was about to be a sacred mother, for instance, she was admonished not to tell St. Joachim, because he was too talkative (295 v). Portrayed as an ideal couple, the two were cleansed together, and therefore stopped excreting and began emanating a fragrance at the same time (288 v). They divided everything equally, including the water from the Jordan River and the fruit from the Tree of Life that the angels brought them (e.g., 285 v). While Anne was designated a monstrance and chalice, Joachim took orders as a priest (287 r). He was also consecrated bishop and pastor by the Holy


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Spirit: his f lock consisted of Anne, Mary, and Jesus (287 v). Bucking the current of the seventeenth century, when the trinubium of Anne, Mary, and Jesus had already been replaced in dominant iconography by that of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, Carranza leaves Joseph out of the picture of familial bliss entirely. In the same passage, she contrasts Joseph and Joachim in two significant ways: Joseph was jealous of Mary’s pregnancy and participated in original sin; Joachim never expressed jealousy (at first he thought she was sick) and had been cleansed of original sin. Carranza claims that Joseph was not Mary’s husband, but rather like a churchwarden, “like here the wardens of the confraternities” (294 v). Perhaps she means to imply with this assertion that he misapplied and even abused his marital role, giving himself formal status in the church hierarchy instead. After explicating in great detail and repeatedly, with variations and contradictions, as Valera points out, the genesis of the Immaculate Conception, Carranza discusses her special connection, both personal and theological, to St. Anne and to the doctrine. She takes up her proximity in nobility to the grandmother of Jesus by reporting God’s dictum about her lineage: “That God told her she was similar to St. Anne in being of the priestly tribe, because she was the mother of priests; and to St. Joachim, who was of the royal tribe of David, because she, by the blood she had of Mudarra, Castillo, and Carranza, was of royal blood” (301 v). The connection to Anne through maternity is clear here; the conceptual framework of mothering priests adds a special dimension. Repeatedly throughout the manuscript, Carranza refers to herself as the mother of priests (e.g., 276 r, 301 v, 354 r). On one Three Kings Day, she finds herself in Bethlehem. Jesus, who is also there (without his mother), informs Carranza that she “was to take the place of his mother, because she was a virgin, and mother of priests” (354 r). With all priests (not to mention Jesus) as her sons, the pope became her eldest (345 v), so she might talk to him freely. She thereby subverts the gender hierarchy of her religion and society, and establishes herself as a powerful personage, one to be reckoned with. The theological stance that Carranza adopts is equally, perhaps even more, self-aggrandizing. One of the titles that God gives her is “defender and protector of the Conception” (305 r), a lofty position, to say the least, for a person of such humble social status. Indeed, he even denominates her, “Teacher, Doctor of the Doctors” (282 r, 303 v). By the end of the seventeenth century, St. Teresa of Ávila had been popularly called a doctor of the church for a century, but she was not officially designated as such until the late twentieth century (1970), when she became the first woman

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to bear the title. As a woman, by virtue of her gender and the official position that the church put forth, based on St. Paul, Carranza should not have been articulating theological arguments, nor referring to herself (even if she put it in God’s mouth) in such terms. She backs up her daring, however, by asserting divine authority and placing doubt in the mouth of the devil. Once, God questioned her about her knowledge, commenting, “Angela, you’re very learned, who taught you? And she responded, the Holy Spirit has inspired me” (322 v). Another time, when she puts the devil in handcuffs, he shouts at her, “How could a little woman like you, silly and ignorant, dare to catch me?” (319 r). Still, although there was an enormous amount of popular support in the viceroyalty for the Immaculate Conception, the actual defense of the doctrine would most probably have been left to male clerics with university degrees, trained in classical rhetorical argumentation and religious exegesis. In the notebooks, moreover, the divinity asserts about the written works, “that her writings were to be the light, and declaration of the writings of the nun of Agreda, which were obscure, and theological, and hers clear and simple, and that they were to obscure everything that had been written until now of the Conception of the Virgin” (304 v).12 The double play in the same sentence, between “obscuros” (dark) and “obscurecer” (to obscure), the first with a negative connotation and contrasting Agreda’s density of concept and language with the clarity and simplicity of Carranza’s doctrine and the second with the positive meaning that the Peruvian holy woman’s treatise will replace any previously written on the subject, drives home the point—that Angela Carranza verbalizes the proper orthodox position vis-à-vis the Immaculate Conception. To reinforce the assertion, elsewhere she insists that the Virgin Mary and God have both told her that “she was the grapevine, or shoot that extends and makes a vine with many branches, and that her writings were the branches or fruit that everyone should know, that Joachim and Anne were pure and Maria was conceived in grace, and the glory of God” (363 r–363 v). God is angry with the pope (Innocent X) for not making the Immaculate Conception dogma. The pope has, he says, “cataracts in his eyes, for not seeing the purity of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, and that she [Carranza] would teach him the ABCs” (314 r). The f lavor of the language here articulates the religious stance in a popular register while emphasizing Carranza’s maternity and didactic position. Upon seeing the sentence, only with difficulty might the reader avoid imagining a mother who scolds her child for misbehaving. None of the rhetorical strategies of obedience, humility, or self-deprecation, so


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common in the texts of women who were judged orthodox, mar the speaker’s attitude of authority. The author takes on all opposition to Immaculate Conception, including the devil. In hell, she asks him why he testified that St. Anne had been married twice and had other daughters. He responds that he hadn’t, “that Authors from here had feigned that nonsense” (329 v). Does “here” mean “on earth” or “in Peru”? It would help to understand how widely she throws the net of criticism of theologians. Perhaps the answer lies in another anecdote. While in hell, she sees devils in the form of theology professors in Lima, from all the Orders, publicly orating against the mystery of the Immaculate Conception. She engages them in debate and wins, so that the devils, amazed, heap opprobrium on her (331 r). Another time, while in hell she sees herself with a rose in her hand; the devil explains that the rose symbolizes the mystery of the Immaculate Conception (329 r). Both the Virgin Mary and the patron saint of Lima, and of America, who once brings the holy woman some guavas (327 v), support the contention of Carranza’s exemplarity: “On one occasion, that St.Rose [of Lima], predicted to her confessor, that in future times a woman would come to Lima, who would be a defender of the Conception and would fill the world with lilies, saying it for Angela, like St. Rose for roses” (347 r). Carranza’s divinely inspired knowledge extends to Jesus’ mother: the ecstatic has a vision in which she is told she has been the first author who has said, and defended, that the Virgin Mary “did not owe the debt [from original sin]” (331 v). Mary’s purity, it is implied, extended throughout her life, and Carranza claims to be the first to defend that position. Furthermore, she claims knowledge of Mary’s soul before incarnation: before being conceived in Anne, the soul “looked around, paid attention, and suffered martyrdom” (291 v). Undoubtedly, despite the approval of successive confessors, she treads dangerous theological waters for a person in her social and religious position; only a sense of her own exceptionality and perhaps a desire to establish herself as worthy of admiration as a spiritual exemplar could have motivated and justified—in a limited sense—the transgression. Angela Carranza must have seen the possibility for self-authorization in defending St. Anne as an exemplar. Exploring the connection between her depiction and explication of St. Anne in particular and the role she donned as Mother Angela sheds light not only on one of her strategies for survival, but also on the socioreligious context that made possible her meteoric, if brief, career as a neighborhood saint and popular theologian.

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In religious terms, certainly, if any of the propositions attributed to her are really hers, she espoused views heretical to the Catholic Church. But her principal aim seemed to be more self-promoting and selfaggrandizing than religious. That is, having arrived as a country hick, she used religion to make her way in the big city. She was an entrepreneur who built up a business from selling relics and other religious objects, dropping into trances in public places, writing, and speaking a religious discourse that touched people from a wide range of social classes and situations. For a number of years she succeeded, undoubtedly helped by her Creole status and the historical moment in which she lived. Ultimately the strategy backfired: her gender, class, and precarious status outside convent walls all worked against her continued reputation as a saint and, after her reclusion, records of what happened to her are missing. In a sense, though, she did not become lost to history, since her case has remained one of the best-known in the annals of the colonial Peruvian Inquisition. Notes 1. The Relación contains, of course, not only passages that Valera claims to have transcribed from Carranza’s notebooks, but also a summary record of her trial. Hereafter, folio numbers of citations refer to this document. 2. In one audience, she admitted to a “bad friendship” with a male friend in her hometown. Several male witnesses also testified that they had had sexual relations with her. 3. All translations into English from Spanish are mine. 4. The notebooks spanned the years 1673–1688: 1673–1678, written in her handwriting; 1679–1682, in Fray Joseph del Prado’s (278 r); 1683, in other educated men’s; and 1684– 1688, in Fray Agustín Comán’s (278 v). Since Carranza dictated what she did not write out (278 v), many of these pages mediate between the oral and the written. 5. For an additional perspective on these quotes, see Mannarelli 62. 6. The Immaculate Conception did not become official dogma of the Catholic Church until the mid-nineteenth century. 7. The information in this paragraph is primarily based on Ashley and Sheingorn’s Introduction. 8. In 1625, Carrión’s followers numbered 40,000; among them were the king, his brothers, Princess Margarita, who had professed in the Convent of las Descalzas Reales, Prince Albert of Savoy, five cardinals, and more than 150 convents. The Inquisition, disquieted by her popularity, in 1634 accused her of falsehoods and witchcraft. She died in 1636 at seventy-six years of age, without the case having been resolved (cf., for instance, Guilhem 174). 9. Most of the information in the two previous paragraphs is based on Sánchez 288–290. 10. I am not sure whether Justice is an allegorical figure or a symbol (such as scales), but it is clearly associated with the Inquisition rather than civil authorities or an abstract concept. One early modern meaning of “ justicia” was “punishment” (cf. Diccionario de Autoridades, v. 2, p. 336). 11. St. Anne’s popularity increased in the post-Tridentine years in Spain also because of Luther’s attacks on her.


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12. María de Jesús Agreda (1602–1665), Spanish Discalced Franciscan nun and spiritual advisor to King Philip III, wrote a famous biography of the Virgin Mary, The Mystical City of God. Controversial because the author claimed it was based on a revelation, the tome was condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1681 and by the Sorbonne in 1696, although the Spanish Inquisition had previously pronounced in its favor.

Works Cited Ashley, Kathleen and Pamela Sheingorn. “Introduction.” Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society. Eds. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn. Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1990. 1–62. Dean, Carolyn. “The Renewal of Old World Images and the Creation of Colonial Peruvian Visual Culture.” Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America. Ed. Diana Fane. New York: Brooklyn Museum and Harry N. Abrams, 1996. 171–182. Flores Espinoza, Javier F. “Hechicería e idolatría en Lima colonial (siglo XVII).” Poder y violencia en los Andes. Eds. Henrique Urbano and Mirko Lauer. Cusco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas, 1991. 55–74. Glave, Luis Miguel. “Santa Rosa de Lima y sus espinas: La emergencia de mentalidades urbanas de crisis y la sociedad andina (1600–1630).” Manifestaciones religiosas en el mundo colonial americano. Eds. Clara García Ayluardo and Manuel Ramos Medina. México DF: INAH, CONDUMEX, Universidad Iberoamericana, 1993. 109–120. Guilhem, Claire. “La Inquisición y la devaluación del verbo femenino.” Inquisición española: Poder político y control social. Ed. Bartolomé Bennassar. Trans. Javier Alfaya. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, Grupo Editorial Grijalbo, 1981. 171–207. Iwasaki Cauti, Fernando. “Mujeres al borde de la perfección: Rosa de Santa María y las alumbradas de Lima.” Hispanic American Historical Review 73.4 (1993): 581–613. Kelemen, Pál. Peruvian Colonial Painting. Brooklyn NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1971. Luna, Lola. “Sor Valentina Pinelo, intérprete de las Sagradas Escrituras.” Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 464 (1989): 91–103. ———. “Santa Ana, modelo cultural del Siglo de Oro.”Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 498 (1991): 53–64. Mannarelli, María Emma. Hechiceras, beatas y expósitas: Mujeres y poder inquisitorial en Lima. Lima: Ediciones del Congreso del Perú, 1998. Millar Carvacho, René. Misticismo e Inquisición en el virreinato peruano. Los procesos a los alumbrados de Santiago de Chile 1710–1736. Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 2000. Sánchez, Ana. “Angela Carranza, alias Angela de Dios.” Catolicismo y extirpación de idolatrías. Siglos XVI–XVIII. Eds. Gabriela Ramos and Henrique Urbano. Cusco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas, 1993. 263–292. Stratton, Suzanne L. The Immaculate Conception in Spanish Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Tord, Enrique. “The Viceroyalty of Peru, 1532–1825.” Gloria in Excelsis: The Virgin and Angels in Viceregal Painting of Peru and Bolivia. Eds. Barbara Duncan and Teresa Gisbert. New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1986. 6–21. Villaseñor Black, Charlene. “St. Anne Imagery and Maternal Archetypes in Spain and Mexico.” Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500–1800. Eds. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. 3–29.


CH A P T E R

SI X

Resituating Carvajal’s Vida in Protonovelistic Narratives A na Ko t h e

Seal over her confessional autobiography: “Pido y ordeno a mis compañeras, que, si yo muriere, guarden con llave estos papeles, sin que nadie rompa sus sellos. Y si mi confesor estuviere en Inglaterra, se los entreguen; y si no, los quemen delante de sus ojos dellas.” (Carvajal 4) Seal over her letters: “Sin que se lean en caso ninguno, por ser cosa de la conciencia.” (Carvajal 4) In the perceptive introduction to her translation of selected writings by Luisa de Carvajal, who lived from 1566 to 1614, Elizabeth Rhodes points out the problematic history of reading Carvajal’s “confessional autobiography” or “spiritual life story” and letters: Overall, there is a certain amount of violation and voyeurism built into any investigation such as this one into the nooks and crannies of an early modern woman’s private relationship with God, which is what Carvajal’s confessional documents were meant to reveal. (Rhodes, This Tight Embrace viii) First, Rhodes contextualizes Carvajal’s confessional writing as more religious than autobiographical, thereby softening the editorial

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incursion of publishing Carvajal’s private life (it’s not private; it’s religious). And, importantly, she stresses the highly voyeuristic character of their publication: “Likewise, reading Carvajal’s letters violates the seal that still clings to some of them, and draws us close to other illegitimate readings, such as those of the individuals who intercepted them on their way to their destinations”1 (Rhodes viii). Sometime after Carvajal’s death in 1614, her English confessor and first biographer, Michael Walpole, SJ, pointed out her desire to keep her own writings private, as expressed in the opening quotation. As an editor, Rhodes distances herself from Walpole’s and other male editorial incursions by promising to recontextualize Carvajal’s writings so that her “spiritual life story” is no longer exclusively made the property of men. This study seeks to extend Rhodes’s gesture to recontextualize Carvajal’s epistolary writings, most notably her confessional autobiography, or what I have come to call her “Autobiographic Vida,” which has a fairly long albeit sporadic publishing history, beginning with Luis Muñoz’s 1631 edition of her Vida y virtudes. My approach has two interrelated aspects: first, a discussion of the relationship between editorial prefatory performances and an implied reader(ship) within an epistolary tradition, and, second, how prefatory performances tie into a much broader dynamic of seventeenth-century epistolary fiction in Europe. Carvajal’s text can and should be read within the voyeurism of this protonovelistic context. Readers then, as now, gaze upon her passionate pain. As we look at a key section about her youth, even her most intimate moments were subject to a panoptic male gaze.2 Her efforts as a writer, then, expose and in a sense denounce this gaze that, I suggest, caused her to rebel against the social mores of silent obedience associated with Catholic women of her time. Our very examination of her pain recalls Kristine Ibsen’s claim regarding self-presentation in spiritual autobiographies: “the problem is that presenting herself as a body [in pain], as a spectacle for her reader’s enjoyment, only further underscores his control, for the pleasure of voyeurism” (38–39). The gaze cannot be ignored while reading Carvajal’s Vida as a part of a highly popular religious genre. In the few studies that have been made of Luisa de Carvajal’s writings, the writings are usually situated within what Rhodes calls “an impressive number of female religious writers’ life stories and works [that] were published and avidly read from the 1580s through the midseventeenth century” (“Luisa De Carvajal’s Counter-Reformation” 888); and what Kathleen Ann Myers calls “this very popular narrative genre among the religious community of New Spain” (35).3 Carvajal

Resituating Carvajal’s VIDA

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must have known how popular her Vida might become. Was her seal meant to protect the content it guarded or to tantalize its reader? Autobiographic Vidas and Carvajal’s Life Story In her discussion of the Vida as a narrative genre, Myers identifies two general purposes within this genre, and Carvajal’s Vida clearly follows one of them: “revealing the nature of the interior life of the subject as much to one’s self as to the reader” (37).4 Furthermore, Myers notes that these Vidas follow the same general narrative formula, the formula “that delineates the Christian education of the author, his or her vocation for the religious life, and his or her efforts to follow a life dedicated to God” (37).5 While Carvajal’s Vida follows this formula, her elaboration of or heightening of what Rhodes in her article calls Carvajal’s “sacrificial ethics” (894) and “vivid lust for and appreciation of suffering” (895) charters a passionately physical journey that could well belong to the nun who supposedly wrote the Portuguese Letters.6 What parts of Carvajal’s life does her Vida cover? In keeping with the genre, the first part is devoted to her childhood, which covers the early death from illness of her wealthy and noble parents—first her mother and shortly thereafter her father—when Carvajal was very young. She then went to live with her mother’s aunt, María Chacón, who resided in the court of King Philip II in Madrid as a lady-in-waiting for the king’s sister, Juana of Austria. Juana had taken secret Jesuit vows, and it is likely that Carvajal’s long history with the Jesuits started there. What Carvajal records in her Vida, though, is the severe piety with which she was raised owing to her governess’s harsh religious practices. Thus, she lived in the court with her grandaunt from age six to ten, growing up with the royal children, notably the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, until her aunt’s death in 1576. Then, she passed to her maternal uncle’s care in Soria, where she would live for the next twoand-a-half years. The severity of her penitential practices increased, and when her uncle, a noted diplomat and the Marqués de Almazán, returned and moved the house to Pamplona, he himself came to oversee her spiritual practices. In her examination of Carvajal’s manuscripts, Rhodes notices that “Carvajal’s clean copy of her life story ends precisely when she reaches the date that her uncle came into her life” (3). Rhodes further points out that not only did the Marqués instruct and watch Carvajal’s penitential dramas, “but it seems likely that he watched their enactment from some unseen locale” (3). The

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degree to which Carvajal’s life of sacrifice was and still is subjected to voyeurism is highly ironic. The Vida emphasizes Carvajal’s desire to become a martyr by demonstrating the extent of her sacrifice in her early years. In the Vida, Carvajal claims to have desired martyrdom in England as young as age eighteen: “este llamamiento se asentó con fuerza en mi alma, que fue a los 18 años de mi edad” 7 (Abad 222). While Rhodes, in her article, does not question Carvajal’s claim (895), Anne Cruz feels that Carvajal’s correspondence does indeed contradict her Vida (99). Cruz points out that, in fact, Carvajal never really intended to go to England before 1605, “when her confessor and her Jesuit neighbors approved the trip” (102).8 Originally, Carvajal engaged in a lengthy lawsuit against her brother, among others, to secure her inheritance so that she might use it to establish a convent in Flanders, where her girlhood companion, the Infanta Isabel, had become established as an archduchess. However, after the Jesuits’ plan to establish Isabel as the successor to Queen Elizabeth9 —a plan Carvajal supported—fell through, she decided to turn the money over to the Jesuit order, who saw in her a fervent missionary. Rhodes speculates, in her article, that the Jesuits, who were under severe scrutiny under James I at the time, found her desire for martyrdom abroad useful: “she was able to accomplish innumerable services for the Catholic cause which Catholic men could not, not the least of which was to move about in public” (902). Therefore, a Catholic order not known for its warm inclusion of women made use of Carvjal’s gender, granting her an enormous amount of autonomy while she lived abroad from 160510 until her death shortly after her second arrest in 1614.11During her years in London, Carvajal oversaw a house staffed by Catholic women12 while ministering to Catholics in jail, who were often awaiting execution. Letters to her contacts on the continent show that she appeared to be in constant need of money, which the Jesuits occasionally sent or denied (Abad 1965). The Vida was written and sealed at some point shortly before her death and mostly focuses on her religious fervor, desires for martyrdom, and a justification for her mission to England as part of God’s will—all elements of the Vida genre, as identified by Myers. Myers divides the Vida genre into hagiographies and spiritual autobiographies. The biographical introduction to Carvajal’s Vida published in Abad’s 1966 edition clearly falls into the former category, while Carvajal’s Vida itself falls into the latter. Spiritual autobiographies, Myers points out, can be traced back to Augustine’s Confessions. The dimension of autobiographical intimacy and autorelevation found in


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Augustine returns to Western literature only after the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in England (e.g., Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe), and for the purposes of Myers’s and my studies, it returns with lasting inf luence in Saint Teresa of Ávila’s The Book of My Life in the sixteenth century. Teresa’s main contribution to the genre lies, according to Myers, in her adding a confessor into the formula writer—God. While Augustine writes to God, Teresa’s discourse is mediated by a confessor, “a mere human being” (40).13 Teresa deals with the authority of her immediate male superior without disempowering herself, claims Myers quite convincingly, and most Hispanic religious women writers of Vidas followed Teresa’s lead in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first way Teresa empowers the self, which is missing from Carvajal’s Vida, is through the indirect “instructions” on how to read the narrative given to the confessor/reader in one’s own preface or introduction (44). Perhaps this is missing because Carvajal meant for her Vida to be destroyed, which gives an outside prefatory writer much more control, as we shall see in the next section. The second mode of empowerment employed by Teresa and her literary followers is the convention of divine authority (44); the writer is only doing the work of God, and so the confessor’s skepticism seems unwarranted. This strategy does show up in Carvajal’s work, beginning with her own birth as a work of God. Her Vida begins: “The most sweet virginity of God was served to cast me into this world following many entreaties and Prayers of my mother, who beseeched of Him a daughter” (Rhodes 39). Her life as a work of God is continually stressed throughout the Vida, and most emphatically in her vows, especially that of martyrdom (1598), which enabled her to do missionary work in England: “desiring above all things, though despicable as I am, that in this and in all else the inestimable will of God be accomplished in me” (Rhodes 121). Prefatory Politics Writing her own preface or introductory material, as did Teresa of Ávila or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and many other religious women who had to address a confessor and who subtly if not wittily undermined him, would have undoubtedly given Carvajal’s writing a certain autonomy, if not self-empowerment. The only direction left to us for reading her Vida forbids anyone but her confessor to read it. While Walpole honored to a degree Carvajal’s request to keep her confessional autobiography away from the public sphere (as determined by the printing press), the

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two most notable editions of her Vida—Muñoz’s (1631) and Abad’s (1966)—used her impassioned request for privacy as a springboard for publication. Neither editor apologized for publishing, against its author’s wishes, a text whose “purpose was to produce an image of an obedient woman whose greatest aspiration was to manifest the will of God through her body” (Rhodes 32). For the purposes of this study, I am considering Carvajal’s request as her own sort of preface, or paratext in the sense elaborated by Gérard Genette in Seuils, and discussed by Jenny Mander in her 1999 study of eighteenth-century narratology: “the paratext defines the text as a recognizable object for public consumption, enabling it to be made sense of within existing discursive structures” (Mander 58). While emphatically rejecting any sort of publication, even manuscript circulation for Carvajal’s immediate readers, her request functions as an autobiographical preface that recognizes the enclosed story as a possible object for public consumption. But since this recognition ironically rejects the possibility of publication, her editors had to resort to other tactics to present her text. But why didn’t they ignore her request altogether? Why did they include it as part of their prefaces? I argue that their appropriation and subsequent subordination of Carvajal’s authority was in keeping with prefatory discourse in publishing women’s literature—whether or not it be fictional. Fictional or historic, her text is first of all literary. We previously saw how it was part of a particular genre. When discussing the prevalent use of first-person homodiegetic narration (i.e., emulating autobiographic discourse14) in eighteenth-century French novels, Mander warns her readers that “other scholars have shown that the polarization of fictional and historical discourse does not fully take place until literature and history are established as two independent institutions” (65). Since it is not until the nineteenth century that we see such a separation, readers should take into account that the autobiographical genre need not be considered entirely factual or fictional, but rather a mixture of the two. Autobiography should, though, fulfill two important requirements for discursive authenticity: its author should claim full responsibility not only for the creation of the text (which Carvajal’s paratext insinuates), but also for its organization. It is the questionable nature of Carvajal’s responsibility in relation to Myers’s second requirement, and not just its spiritual content as noted by Rhodes, that distinguishes Carvajal’s text from a conventional autobiography. It is at this point impossible to determine to what extent there was editorial manipulation of her textual organization, or to what extent the organization is determined by the confessional genre.


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Carvajal’s paratext does not completely follow the discursive norms that tend to underscore the veracity of an autobiography for its readership, but it does curiously advance the modesty topos so common to women’s texts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To ask not to be published can be viewed as a form of modesty. Indeed, the writer’s refusal to publish is much more emphatic than the apology so common among women writers.15 This is particularly true in the preface to her work, given how the editor displays Carvajal’s objection to publication. As displayed, it plays up her modesty—an important feature in a nun. Even exceptional nuns, such as Teresa of Ávila or Sor Juana, who were able to successfully publish their works, resorted to the ubiquitous modesty topos. And, in the case of Sor Juana, if at first she didn’t offer a preface modestly presenting her work, modesty was thrust upon it by the preface of another.16 The first edition of Sor Juana’s Inundación Castálida, published in Madrid in 1689, was prefaced anonymously. Her introducer excuses her from sloth (the idleness associated with writing poetry) and mendacity, also associated with poetry, closing the prologue with the “readership anxiety” common to publishing in print: I warn, too, as those who knew her in Mexico know, [. . .] composing verses was not her profession; only a talent she had. [. . .] [It is a] truth that our Poetess supports by her benign, disinterested, docile, liberal, and generous bearing. [. . .] I know that my warnings aside, if something seems wrong, you will say what you will.17 In the third edition, appearing a year later, in place of the editorial prologue, Sor Juana adds her own verse introduction. While the “modesty excuses” remain, the “readership anxiety” takes on a much more sarcastic edge: “And so it is, think as you will, / I do not die to have them read, and you are free to do with them, / whatever comes in your head.”18 Curiously, the un-gendering of the modesty topos in Sor Juana is exceedingly rare among Hispanic women writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.19 Religious or not, both men and women writers often resorted to the modesty topos when presenting their texts in the sixteenth century, although its use dropped off sharply among male writers in the seventeenth century. Women, who were not yet as confidently publishing their work, continued to apologize for their audacious and “unfeminine” gestures of publication well into the nineteenth century. For example, in Spain at the beginning of the seventeenth century, closer

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to the time Carvajal was writing her spiritual autobiography, María de Zayas also introduced her heptameronesque collection of stories by apologizing for being a woman and daring to write. Toward the beginning of her prologue, “Al que leyere,” Zayas writes, “Who doubts, I say again, that there will be many who attribute madness to this brazen publication of my scribblings, being a woman, who in the opinion of some idiots is the same as being incompetent.”20 Unlike Zayas, Carvajal’s voice remains marginal to the editorial introduction. As presented by her editors, Carvajal’s rhetoric of modesty is invoked by the absence of the author’s voice, and so bears a striking similarity to the editorial paratext of Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves. In this case, the editor withholds the author’s name and even reverses her gender (referring to Lafayette as “he”) because “he was afraid that his name would diminish the success of his book.”21 Presenting the author gendered as an anonymous man certainly preserves Lafayette’s female modesty and rank.22 It is therefore important to recognize Carvajal’s gesture presented in the editorial prefaces to her work as a variation on the modesty topos, appropriated in a particularly voyeuristic way. During the rise of the novel from the Portuguese Letters through Clarissa, this technique of editorial authentication served a dual purpose: to voyeuristically expose a woman’s private text before an increasingly demanding market of readers while ironically preserving her modesty. At the same time, it “establish[es] the source or provenance of the text which presents the story, explaining how it has found its way into the hands of the editor” (Mander 59). Who can forget Guilleragues’s famous prefatory remarks to Alcofardo’s Lettres portugaise (1669)? “I have found the way, with much worry and effort to recover an exact copy of the translation of the five Portuguese Letters, which belonged to a worthy gentleman who served in Portugal.”23 Early in the next century, Richardson’s prefatory remarks to Clarissa, while not specifying the origin of the letters, authenticate them by indicating their deviance from a coherent narrative in at least two ways. First, they don’t follow classical norms: “[Other gentlemen] insisted that the story could not be reduced to a dramatic unity, nor thrown into the narrative way without divesting it of its warmth and of a great part of its efficacy” (36). Second, they are lent an air of spontaneity: “the letters on both sides are written while the hearts of the writers must be supposed to be wholly engaged in their subjects” (35). While the amatory fiction of the early novels is a different type of subject matter from a spiritual or confessional autobiography, they share the same editorial intervention or presentation that shapes the reading


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public’s approach to the main text. And while Carvajal’s text is spiritual in nature, it is also most certainly passionate and intimate—a most important feature shared by other early homodiegetic novels. It is the passion and intimacy that the editors wish to exploit as “mere” presenters of someone else’s text.24 The Expression of Self in Epistolary Narratives: Passion, Authenticity, and Fiction The relationship between the epistolary genre and the rise of the novel has been well-documented, especially in terms of gender. In her recent book, The Female Pen: 1621–1818, B.G. MacCarthy is careful to compare and yet distinguish between the purely epistolary form and the autobiographical form in seventeenth-century narratives. [Autobiography] shares with the epistolary method the impossibility of giving a convincing portrait of the hero physically or mentally, without self-consciousness. The authobiographical narrative, has, moreover, a peculiar disadvantage in that the f low of events in the life of the narrator is arrested while he recounts the past, and the vividness one would expect from a personal relation is often lessened by the def lection of interest from the living narrator to the happenings he describes. (242) It is important to keep this distinction in mind. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this study, I continue to consider autobiography as a type of epistolary genre, or perhaps “homodiegetic,” as Gérard Genette would call it. As MacCarthy surveys several seventeenth-century women writers, she underscores the importance of emotional directness as a most important element in epistolary narratives. Margaret Newcastle’s letters (1644) were, according to MacCarthy, written “with complete spontaneity and forthrightness” (245); the Portuguese Letters (if one is to believe they were indeed written by Mariana Alcoforado and not Guilleraques) “showed an effort to express emotions and ideas in a vivid and spontaneous manner” (251); while Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters to a Gentleman (1696) “recorde vividly and poignantly the emotions which agitate this woman’s heart” (252). While Carvajal’s self-portrait is not as spontaneous as it might have been had it been purely composed of letters, it certainly contains the self-consciousness and passion that

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one finds in early epistolary fictions. Her passionate display contains deep agony and ecstatic joy. Note the sorrow expressed due to the penitence forced upon her by her uncle: “Our Lord gave me such abundant tears that my eyes seemed like streams” (101). Or the joy in the spiritual poems appended to the end of her 1631 Vida: “And now I belong to no one / except to Love, / who with powerful bonds / so bound me, / and His love knots are / so exquisite, / that upon binding, they release, / and I know it well” (173). Such emotional intensity is present throughout her entire work. Spontaneity is lent to her autobiography in the display of her refusal to publish. Carvajal’s prefatory presentation is also in keeping with another common factor in the rise of epistolary fiction: that of collecting women’s voices. In his book Epistolary Fiction in Europe: 1500–1850 (1999), Thomas Beebee points out the numerous studies—by April Alliston, Elizabeth Cook, Elizabeth Goldsmith, Katharine Jensen, Linda Kauffman, Ruth Perry (and, incidentally, his own)—that have traced the rise of epistolary fiction in Europe (beginning with Ovid) and that demonstrate “that the familiar letter gradually became a literary genre at which women were conceded to excel, as long as they restricted themselves to certain literary and cultural stereotypes, such as that of the abandoned lover” (105). Beebee also makes a point, already raised by Elizabeth Goldsmith in Writing the Female Voice, regarding male ventriloquism and the silencing of the female voice in epistolary fictions: since Ovid “writing” Sappho, men have written a female voice. Whether or not an epistolary female voice was actually female, Beebee further indicates that, in the Renaissance, the female voice became quite a collectable good: More care was taken to educate women than at any previous point in European history, and the resulting epistolary production by women scholars was eagerly seized upon by publishers. The correspondence of learned women became a “collector’s item.” (108–109) The publication of women scholars’ letters in the Renaissance is transformed into the collection of all women’s epistles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Leah Price points out how, in Richardson’s Clarissa, “each successive edition raised more urgent ethical questions about its characters’ impulse to appropriate others’ writing” (8). It is through the propensity, in the sixteenth through the eighteenth


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centuries, to collect and publicly display the private voice of an educated woman that we might gaze upon Carvajal’s display of self. As Beebee and others, such as Linda Kauffman and Joan DeJean, have demonstrated, the display of an intimate or private female self—whether or not written by a woman—is related to “disorderly” writing. And disorderly writing becomes associated with unmitigated passion and intimate self-expression. In The Fictions of Sappho, DeJean reads the various Renaissance reformulations of Ovid’s Sappho, culminating in the seventeenth century with “the wholesale promotion of Woman abandoned but still given over to the force of her desire” (96). Laclos, in Dangerous Liaisons, following the tradition of the Portuguese Letters, has his protagonist, Valmont, directly associate unreasoned or nonsensical writing with tenderness, and tenderness with women (Beebee 114). The marking of a gender difference within a literary genre, Kauffman notes, ties preconceived gender difference (women write messier) to notions of nature and nation: women’s writing discloses a wilder nature, just as a country like Portugal—and, I would add, Spain—might be considered less orderly than France or England (97). Amorous passion in the Portuguese Letters, or, rather, the “compulsion to express the inexpressible” (Kauffman 112), runs a similar rhetorical purpose in Carvajal’s autobiography. Instead of direct amatory desire, we are presented with a mystical or spiritual, yet also physical, desire that is written, as Ruth Perry points out, in a context of separation and isolation (93). Carvajal lived in a type of separation and isolation that was nevertheless ironically surveyed and monitored. From an early age, Carvajal was required to share her spiritual desires and penitential practices with others, most notably her uncle. He would oversee her prayers, asking “for a strict accounting of whether I had attained prayer or not, never forgetting to inquire about it, and whether I had fallen asleep”25 (Rhodes, This Tight Embrace 75). Furthermore, he considered withholding spiritual information from him a fault: “I had a fault in that I concealed my inner feelings, penitential activities, and spiritual exercises too much”26 (75). Her reply to this accusation is double-edged: “And it is true that I did so whenever it was possible, because it seemed to me that one should reveal the least of what was much, and of what little I saw in myself, nothing”27 (75). She at once concedes that he is right, while maintaining her position of spiritual privacy. While maintaining a seeming modesty, she also contradicts her uncle’s, and perhaps even her confessor’s, orders to tell all. One wonders, then, how much she is indeed revealing to her readers. Despite her claim to maintain spiritual privacy, this did not prevent her uncle, her confessor, or us, from looking in on her.

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Most of the account of her mid-teens at her uncle’s home involved vivid descriptions, like the following one, of the penitential activities he encouraged her to undergo, supervised by a servant and at times observed by her uncle himself. And the care my uncle took to see that I was humiliated and broken with this sort of penance cannot be easily believed.28 And thus he would order at times that they [the servants] lead me unclothed and barefoot, with my feet on the extremely cold f loor, with a cap on my head that only held my hair, and a towel tied to my waist, a rope at my neck, which sometimes was made of bristles and others of hemp, and my hands tied with it, from one room to another, like an evil-doer, until arriving at the last small oratory that was at the end [of the passage]. It was a locked room and removed from the rest of the house and in a very secret part. And in front of me, pulling lightly by the rope, went one of the servile women of Our Lord of whom I have spoken, and at times she uttered words of humiliation and shame. (103) Given her disinclination to share the greater part of her spiritual exercises with her listeners or viewers, these accounts may only reveal a small part of what she felt about them, and even perhaps what occurred during them. In the second letter of the Portuguese Letters, Mariana similarly plays with the dilemma of self-representation and voyuerism that dominates the communication of intimacy. And her passion is also marked by the humiliation and the “vivid lust for and appreciation of suffering” that we find in Carvajal’s Vida. Speaking of a possible French rival to her love, the nun confesses to her former lover: Sometimes, methinks, I could even submit to wait upon her whom you love. Your bad treatment and disdain have broken me down so far that at times I do not dare to think of being jealous of you for fear of displeasing you, and I go so far as to think that I should be doing the greatest wrong in the world were I to upbraid you. I am often convinced that I ought not to let you see, so madly as I do, feelings which you disown. (63)29 Although Mariana may be the fiction of her translator, both the Portuguese nun and Luisa de Carvajal demonstrate an awareness of the complexities involved in writing and reading one’s passionate self,


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complexities exploited by the expanding publication industry. Thus, when put into press, the desire for martyrdom, as Ibsen points out, “further reveals the sadistic implications of the commodification of the female body as narrations glory in the most gruesome details of ascetic practice” (74). Perhaps, though, the eroticization of ascetic (and perhaps aesthetic) pain transgresses commodification when considered as transgressing binary norms. As Virginia Burrus puts it in her introduction to The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography, our current gaze upon the martyred female body “affirms the holiness of a love that is simultaneously embodied and transcendent, sensual and spiritual, painful and joyous; that may encompass but can by no means be limited to the demands of either biological reproduction or institutionalized marriage; that furthermore resists the reductions of the modern cult of the orgasm” (2). Resituating the display of Carvajal’s Vida makes it possible to see her as more than a mere victim of voyeurism; we are able to see her as a self-aware subject of the panoptic gaze; all too aware, perhaps, of her helpless situation before a pervasive and oppressive law that compels us to at least appreciate, if not respect, her ability to write down an account of her extraordinary life. Recontextualizing the Vida, not only within its own genre but within the broader framework of the rise of the novel, reaffirms the appropriation of women’s voices into a primarily male-dominated publishing arena. The genre of Vida writing is itself limited regarding self-expression: “While there is little question that many of the religious women of this period wanted to write, evidence indicates that, given the choice, they would not have composed first person accounts of their intimacies with God rather than other, more authoritative narratives” (Rhodes, This Tight Embrace, x). Rhodes’s, Cruz’s, and Myers’s insistence on redescribing Carvajal as a woman who paradoxically escapes the confines of religion to find self hood as a missionary in England allows current and future readers to gently and carefully listen to the whispers escaping from the spaces between the printed lines. Notes Epigraph: “I request and order my female companions that, should I die, they keep these papers under lock and key without anyone breaking their seal, and if my confessor is in England, they be given to him, and if not, that every one be burned before their very eyes” (This Tight Embrace vii). They should not be read under any circumstance, since they treat matters of conscience” (This Tight Embrace vii). Rhodes opens her prologue with this quotation.

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1. “Sin duda se ha perdido suyas y mías muchas, sólo por no querer tener un poco de cuidado aquellos a quien se encomiendan” (Epsitolario 215, Carta 78 A Inés de la Asunción). [Doubtless many of yours as well as mine have been lost, due only to a lack of desire to exercise diligence on the part of those to whom they are entrusted (trans. Rhodes 253)]. 2. I call upon Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze to gender Foucault’s metaphor of the prison panopticon. 3. “este género narrativo tan popular entre la comunidad religiosa de la Nueva España.” All translations of Myers are mine. In her article, Myers refers to religious women writing in New Spain (today Mexico) as well as in the context of Spain. 4. “revelar la naturaleza de la vida interior del sujeto tanto a sí mismo como al lector.” 5. “que alinea la educación cristiana del autor, su vocación para la vida religiosa, y sus esfuerzos por seguir una vida dedicada a Dios.” 6. Considered a protonovel by some critics, this epistolary narrative consists of a series of (fictional) letters written by a Portuguese woman who entered a convent after being abandoned by her French lover. 7. “this calling became strongly instilled in my soul at the age of eighteen” (translation mine). 8. “cuando tanto su confesor como sus vecinos jesuitas de Valladolid aprueban el viaje a Inglaterra” (translation mine). 9. The Jesuit support of Isabel as successor to Queen Elizabeth was the latest in a series of attempts to return the English throne to a Catholic ruler. Previously, the Jesuits had supported the widely held notion outside England that Mary Stuart would succeed her cousin Elizabeth I on the throne of England and thus return the country to a Catholic ruler. Their hopes were dashed upon Elizabeth’s execution of Mary, and other events such as the failure of the Spanish Armada under King Philip II. However, Philip was persistent in his efforts and used his daughter, Isabel, to (unsuccessfully) claim the thrones of England and France. 10. She arrived in England just before the Gunpowder Plot (November 1605). 11. She found herself in jail twice for consistently preaching in public places such as markets. 12. Her correspondence at the time shows evidence that she hoped to turn this female residence into a convent (Abad 1965). 13. “un mero ser humano.” 14. The uniqueness of the first-person or homodiegetic narration was also stressed by Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, who points out that the Lettres portugaise moves from an active address to a single reader (“ formule monophonique directe” [334]) to a different, passive and self-ref lective register (“mode passif ” [335]) in order to communicate “l’absence de comunication” (335). 15. The list of early modern women writers excusing themselves for being a woman is great. For example, Anne Bradstreet concedes, perhaps ironically, in her prologue: “Men can do best, and women know it well”; Lady Elizabeth, future queen, wrote of her translation of Marguerite of Navarre’s A godly Medytacyon of the christen Sowle, “marke rather the matter than the homely speache therof, consyderying it is the studye of a woman […]” (qtd. in Travitsky 142). 16. The first edtion of Inundación castálida, a collection of her poetic works, in 1689 did not come with her own preface. It was not until the 1691 edition that her preface was hastily (it seems) added. 17. “Advierto tambien, que saben los que en Mexico la trataron, [. . .] el componer versos, no es profession [sic] a que se dedica; solo es habilidad que tiene. [. . .] Verdad, que nuestra Poetisa apoya con su proceder benigno, desinteressado [sic.], docil, liberal, y caritativo. [. . .] Bien sé que mis advertencias no obstantes, como algo te parezca mal, dirás lo que te pareciere” (translation mine). 18. Trans. Margaret Sayers Pedén. “Esto es, si gustas creerlo, / que sobre eso no me mato, / pues al cabo harás lo que / se te pusiere en los cascos.”


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19. For further discussion of this curious omission, please see my essay “The Tantalizing Absence of Gender Reference in the Prólogo al lector by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” in Feminism in Multi-Cultural Literature. 20. Quien duda, digo otra vez, que habrá muchos que atribuyan a locura esta virtuosa osadía de sacar a luz mis borrones, siendo mujer, que, en opinión de algunos necis, es lo mismo que una cosa incapaz. Translation mine. 21. “il a craint que son nom ne diminuât le succès de son livre” translation mine. 22. While the male gendering might be due to the reference to the word “author” as universally male, whether or not the writer is male or female, it still has the effect of gendering the writer as male. 23. “J’ai trouvé les moyens, avec beaucoup de soin et de peine, de recouvrer une copie correcte de la traduction de cinq Lettres portugaises qui ont été écrites à un gentilhomme de qualité, qui servait en Portugal” translation mine. 24. This strategy of presenting the text as someone else’s is certainly not new. Both Chaucer and Boccaccio claimed to have heard the stories they cite as originating from others. However, for the purposes of this study and as Ruth Perry perceptively notes, as late as the eighteenth century, “Booksellers often advertised the fact that a set of letters had not been intended for publication because privacy, like virginity, invites violation” (70). This is painfully evident in the preface introducing Isabella Whitney’s sixteenth-century publication of her verse “Letters by a Woman to Her Unconstant Lover.” 25. Y tomábame mi tío estrecha cuenta de si habí tenido mi oración o no, sin olvido, y de sim me había dormido. 26. Y según decía mi tio, tenía falta en disimular demasiado los interiores sentimientos, penitencias, y espirituales ejercicios. 27. Y es cierto, que yo lo hacía así cuanto me era posible, pareciéndome que de lo mucho se debía mostrar lo menos, y de tan poco como yo en mí veía, ninguna cosa … 28. Rhodes’s footnoted remark to this sentence reads: “There was evidently much more ritualized violence involved in these ‘exercises’ than Carvajal’s final draft reveals.” 29. Prestage, The Letters of a Portuguesse Nun (Marianna Alcoforado).

Works Cited Alcofardo, Marianna (attributed to). The Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Trans. Edgar Prestage. London: David Nutt, 1893. Augustine. Confessions. Trans. F. J. Seed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2006. Beebee, Thomas O. Epistolary Fiction in Europe: 1500–1850. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Burrus, Virginia. The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Carvajal y Mendoza, Luisa de. Epistolario y poesías. Ed. Camilo María Abad. Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 179. Madrid: Atlas, 1966. ———. Escritos autobiográficos. Ed. Camilo María Abad. Barcelona: Juan Flors, 1966. Cruz, Anne J. “Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza y su conexión jesuita,” AIH Actas. University of California at Irvine, 1992. 97–112. DeJean, Joan. Fictions of Sappho: 1546–1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Genette, Gérard. Seuils. Paris, 1987. Goldsmith, Elizabeth. Writing the Female Voice: Essays in Epistolary Literature. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. Ibsen, Kristine. Women’s Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.

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Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. Inundación Castálida. Madrid: Juan Garcia Inpanzon, 1689. ———. Poems: A Bilingual Anthology. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Binghamton: Bilingual Press, 1985. Kauffman, Linda. Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Kothe, Ana. “The Tantalizing Absence of Gender Reference in the Prólogo al lector by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” Feminism in Multi-Cultural Literature. Ed. Antonio Sobejano-Moran. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellon Press, 1996. 123–136. Lafayette, Madame de. La Princess de Clèves. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967. MacCarthy, B.G. The Female Pen: 1621–1818. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Mander, Jenny. Circles of Learning: Narratology and the Eighteenth-Century French Novel. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999. Myers, Kathleen Ann. “Sor Juana y su mundo: La inf luencia meditativa del clero en las ‘Vidas’ de religiosos y monjas.” Revista de literatura 61.121 (1999): 35–59. Perry, Ruth. Women, Letters, and the Novel. New York: AMS Press, 1980. Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa. New York: Viking Press, 1985. Rhodes, Elizabeth. “Luisa de Carvajal’s Counter-Reformation Journey to Self hood (1566– 1614).” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 887–911. ———. Editor and Translator. This Tight Embrace: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1566–1614). Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000. Teresa of Ávila. The Book of My Life. Trans. Mirabai Starr. Boston: New Seeds Books, 2007. Travitsky, Betty, ed. The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981. Zayas, Maria de. Tres novelas amorosas y tres desengaños amorosos. Madrid: Castalia, 1989.

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Through the Grate; Or, English Convents and the Transmission and Preservation of Female Catholic Recusant History Ton ya Mou t r ay Mc A rt h u r

Introduction In her discussion of the literary representations of seventeenth-century English Catholic women, the cultural critic Frances E. Dolan states that “Catholics provoked more prolific and intemperate visual and verbal representation and more elaborate and sustained legal regulation than any other group” (8). Although Catholics were not only the wealthiest but also the largest minority group in post-Reformation England, the Protestant orientation of much seventeenth- and eighteenth-century histories and literary studies has tended to obscure the important role of Catholics in shaping British history and literature; only recently have critics taken on the work of examining this history as shaped by and as a response to Catholic women.1 This essay considers the role that English Catholic nuns and their convents performed in the formation of a secular Catholic history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In spite of the Rule of the Clausura, which resulted in the implementation of architectural barriers between the cloister and the outside world, and the geographical dislocation that separated British Catholics from their cloistered relatives

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abroad, the textual histories of the secular accounts discussed here suggest that the boundary between the laity and religious women was quite permeable.2 Both groups of women shared the same religious and political concerns and worked cooperatively to preserve a shared Catholic identity.3 Furthermore, laywomen not only corresponded with their cloistered relatives, but also visited and lodged with them at their convents. As I argue, one important function of the English convents abroad was their preservation and legitimization of Catholic laywomen’s narratives of political and religious resistance in England. Not only were the English cloisters safe houses for f leeing recusants from England; they also safely housed the heroic accounts that these recusants brought with them. In describing the English convent and its relationship to secular culture, I will borrow and expand upon Michel Foucault’s concept of the “heterotopia,” a term coined in his lecture “Des Espace Autres” (1967), that denotes a space that is both within a culture and outside of it, a space that creates an alternative way of seeing the outside, and yet allows the outside limited access to the interior (24, 26).4 English convents on the continent were not impregnable sites of Catholic resistance but were accessible to the broader Catholic community. These convents thus functioned as “heterotopias”: not only did they carry on a geographically clandestine English Catholic monasticism in a post-Reformation English culture, but they also served as institutional repositories within and through which an ongoing recusant history was recorded and preserved for posterity.5 Although the two recusant narratives discussed in this essay take place almost a century apart, both narratives are concerned with the complicated sets of loyalties that Catholic laywomen negotiated. Lady Falkland, Her Life (1645) depicts the life of Elizabeth Cary, a Catholic convert during the reign of Charles I. The narrator, most likely Cary’s daughter Lucy, presents Cary as a dutiful wife, mother, and subject, who attempts to square these obligations with her Catholic conscience. Almost a century later, Winifred Herbert, the Countess of Nithsdale, penned her famous letter of 1718, “Winifred Countess of Nithsdale to [the Lady Lucy Herbert],” detailing her heroic rescue of her husband from the Tower of London after his arrest during the Jacobite uprising of 1715. The Countess of Nithsdale’s heroism reveals her loyalties, not only as the wife of a Catholic Scottish Jacobite, but also as a mother able, through ingenuity and trickery, to secure the paternal legacy for her son.6 The textual histories of both of these accounts—their movement from the outside to the inside of the convent—reveal that the narratives

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exist in large part because of the efforts of English nuns living on the continent. Cary’s labors on behalf of her children resulted in their removal to France, in particular her daughters’ safe transfer from England to the productive literary climate of the English Benedictine convent in Cambrai. This environment allowed one of them, with the collaboration of her siblings, the space and time to remember, revise, and record her mother’s story. The Countess of Nithsdale’s intrepid break-out of her Jacobite husband remained an unrecorded oral tale until she committed it to paper when asked to do so by her sister, Lady Lucy Herbert, prioress of the English Augustinian convent in Bruges. Herbert’s convent is responsible for copying, circulating, and eventually returning the Countess of Nithsdale’s manuscript to her own descendents in the nineteenth century. In both cases, recording and preserving the recusant wife’s legacy was not a project undertaken alone, but was a shared task between lay and religious women.7 Connections between these women facilitated the trafficking of recusant histories through the grate and into the convent, a surprising place indeed to discover histories that expand our understanding of how secular Catholics in post-Reformation England managed their spousal, religious, and political allegiances. Histories of Resistance, Lay and Religious The concerns of and connections between lay and religious Catholic women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are grounded within the post-Reformation histories of Catholics in general and the specific histories of both groups of women. English Catholics were socially integrated natives who looked and spoke like everyone else. Legal statutes and anti-Catholic polemic used the term “recusant” for those Catholics who refused to conform openly to Protestant prescriptives (Dolan 8). The Oxford English Dictionary Online defines recusant as “One, especially a Roman Catholic (Popish recusant) who refused to attend the services of the Church of England.” A more descriptive definition of recusant links nonconformity to a refusal “to submit to some authority, [or] comply with some regulation.” As the critic Julian Yates elaborates, “recusants were men and women who held themselves apart, whose absence from Church meant that they assembled elsewhere, that they met in private” (64). From the standpoint of anti-Catholic polemic, recusant men and women posed a threat to sovereign authority and, hence, to national stability.

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Many recusants attempted to walk the tightrope of Catholic obedience and deference to their monarch, although these two aims were constantly at odds. Said another way, the recusant’s challenge in a post-Reformation England was that of maintaining separate physical and mental spaces while coexisting among Protestants and within the ideological environment they created (Yates 71). As will be seen, the success of this balancing act by two Catholic wives, Elizabeth Cary and the Countess of Nithsdale, required a constant interplay of loyalties among one’s husband, children, Church, and monarch. Between them, these women relocated children, a husband, documents, assets, and themselves; the Countess of Nithsdale was even eventually exiled from England. Exile abroad cost recusants the privileges of citizenship while freeing them from the regulations of English law. As Yates argues in his discussion of English Jesuit groups abroad, English Catholic “elsewheres” were crucial to Catholics’ survival in that such communities “re-routed” not only wealth, but also Catholic space itself (68). Women participated in the foundation of Catholic “elsewheres,” as the historian Clare Walker argues in her book Gender and Politics: “religious houses represented their determination to develop non-conformity . . . in what amounted to an overtly political act” (12). Leaving England was an act both daring and dangerous: not only did young women often travel alone, dependent upon underground Catholic networks, but English port authorities were also on the watch for Catholic women attempting voluntary exile. In spite of these restrictions, the first continentally located English cloister was founded in Brussels in 1580, and twenty-two more followed in the next century, all founded, managed, and inhabited by Catholic women from the British Isles. As the century continued, this inf lux into convents corresponded to women’s involvement in and support of the succession of James II and the Stuarts’ attempts to regain sovereignty at the Jacobite uprisings in the eighteenth century (Walker 12, 38). Historians and critics are right to claim women’s physical removal from England as an act of political defiance. Catholics in England maintained a tight network with English institutions on the continent. These networks frequently ran along family lines; often sisters joined the same convents, keeping the daughters within a family together. With their secular sisters and friends, cloistered Catholic women looked forward to a time when the teaching of the next Catholic generation and the institution of monasticism would be legal in England. Thus, cloistered women represent, especially for historians today, the epitome of nonconformity in their “overt rejection of English religion, law, and

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society” (Walker 2). Yet, historically, nuns were the focus of less Protestant polemic than Catholic laywomen. We must not underestimate the ways in which laywomen took the brunt of anti-Catholic misogyny, as they negotiated their Catholicism within an adverse political and religious geography. As Dolan asserts, “the ‘problem’ of English Catholic women was most often defined as the problem of recusant wives” (62). Recusant wives were a visible reminder of, as the critic Arthur F. Marotti argues, “the persistence of the ‘old religion’ within the new Protestant nation, and [this was] further exacerbated by the fact that four Stuart monarchs married Catholic queens” (3).9 The problem was not simply these women’s persistent Catholicism, but their inf luence domestically as mothers and wives. To be sure, the recusant wife of the Protestant Sir Henry Cary wielded inf luence inside and outside of the home. Elizabeth Cary, who lived from “1585 or 6” to 1639, read her way into Catholicism, reversing the stereotype that women’s ignorance was the cause of their recusancy and the reason why they needed male supervision (Dolan 27).10 Written in 1645 by one of her daughters, The Lady Falkland: Her Life provides a detailed, vivid, and human portrait of Elizabeth Cary’s Catholic conversion, and her struggles to maintain her Catholic faith, to effect the conversion of her family, and to stay in the good graces of Charles I through the patronage of his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria. Cary’s Life has usually been read as a supplement to her drama, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), and thus has received little independent attention in spite of its fascinating portrayal of her complicated political and familial position in early Stuart England.11 Interestingly, Cary’s marriage does not fit into the typical pattern of Catholic families; it is usually argued that a husband’s outward, passive conformity to the Church of England provided a cover so that his wife and family might surreptitiously but actively participate in Catholic practice (Dolan 65; Rowlands 157). Instead, Cary converted to Catholicism in 1626, after the birth of her children, and in spite of her husband’s unwavering Protestantism.12 Cary thus lived apart from her children since her husband “would not permit them to live with her” (208). Yet, as the writer of the Life makes clear, before and after her conversion “she seemed to prefer nothing but religion and her duty to God before his will” (195). In fact, the narrator writes with Cary’s Catholicism in mind from the beginning, asserting her loyalty to king and husband unless their wills ran contrary to her conscience.13 Henry Cary interpreted his wife’s conversion as her stubborn defiance of his wishes and the temporal authority of the king. But Elizabeth Cary

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framed her conversion differently, as a rhetorically savvy letter to Charles I reveals: “I am secure, how cleere I am, from the least disobedience, to your maiesty . . . [Y]ou have not upon earth, one of any beleefe, that is more loyally affected, to you” (Life 282). Cary manages to reaffirm her loyalty and submission to the king in spite of her acknowledged Catholicism (285).14 Cary dutifully deferred any agency in her children’s upbringing to their Protestant father, although she eventually secured their Catholic conversions after her husband’s death in 1633. The narrator of the Life emphasizes that Cary did not verbally catechize her children; instead she trusted “wholly in God for the rest, as well for their conversion as means to maintain them, having promised them (to make them willing to come to her) not to speak of religion to them till they should desire it” (223). The judicious reserve painted into Cary’s character suggests that her narrator was aware of others’ suspicions about the power lorded over children’s education by Catholic mothers, as well as the legislation that attempted to restrict their inf luence in the early seventeenth century.15 One common legal curtailment of a mother’s power after the death of the father involved the king’s turning over of the children’s wardenship to a Protestant next-of-kin, although in practice most children were probably maintained by their mothers (Dolan 139). In the case of Cary, her eldest grown son, Lucius, argued that his care of his siblings was motivated by Cary’s lack of material resources, although it is likely he was concerned about her Catholic inf luence over them. Yet, Lucius had not been given legal wardenship over his siblings, a fact that Cary used in her defense to the Lords of the Council after she deceptively retrieved her two youngest sons from Lucius’s household. The narrator tells us that “she had in that done nothing contrary to the law, since she could not be said to have stolen that which was her own, her son having no . . . right to keep his brothers from her against her will and theirs, having never been committed to him neither by the state, nor their father” (25). Cary argues that her retrieval of her sons cannot legally constitute “stealing” since Lucius has no rights over them. Despite her vulnerable legal status, Cary bypassed the censure of the Council. Cary managed not only to avoid punishment for the retrieval of her sons, but she also laid the groundwork for their journey abroad to St. Edmunds in Paris, a Benedictine convent in which they were later educated. Using casuistry, a form of argumentation based upon equivocation and mental reservation and employed by Catholics during her time, Cary dissimulated to the Council: “The lords telling her it was against the law to send them to seminaries, she desired them to prove


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they were sent to any such place (they being indeed in London, but she was willing they should think, if they pleased, that they were already over, that they might the easilier pass when they should go)” (259). Although not lying, Cary led the Council to believe her sons were already abroad, thus minimizing the Council’s motivation to keep strict watch over the Cary household. Soon after that, Cary did effect, through a network of Catholic alliances, the safe transfer of her sons to the Continent. The trafficking of women or children abroad for the purposes of a Catholic education or religious life was illegal; since the reign of Elizabeth I, heavy penalties applied to parents or guardians who sent their children to the continent. By the reign of Charles I, these penalties included high fines and the loss of property, public offices, the right to bequeath a legacy, and legal recourse for any cause (Dolan 143). Despite such risks, the eventual transfer abroad of six of the Cary children reveals that Catholics put much value in Catholic education and perceived the English monasteries and convents on the Continent as sites within which their children could find root and further a tradition of English Catholicism. Cary secured Catholic belief and practice within her family by transporting her children away from the religious debates of England to a location where Catholic belief and practice were normative. As the Catholic polemicist Jane Owen explains in her Antidote against Purgatory (1634), “For if neither any places of Residence beyond the Seas had beene provided, and furnished with sufficient maintenance for the bringing up of English Schollers . . . Catholike Religion had beene utterly extinct many yeares since, in England” (203–205). Between 1636 and 1639, Patrick, Henry, Mary, Lucy, Elizabeth, and Anne Cary were safely relocated: the sons to St. Edmunds, Paris, for schooling, and the daughters, all of whom were professed, to the Benedictine English convent in Cambrai. It is here, in 1645, that one of these daughters wrote the Life, recording for a cloistered audience Elizabeth Cary’s recusant legacy. A little less than a century later, another recusant legacy, that of Lady Winifred Herbert, Countess of Nithsdale (1699–1749), also found its way into an English Catholic convent by means of family ties. The Countess of Nithsdale’s sister, Lady Lucy Herbert (1669–1744), the prioress of the Augustinian English convent in Bruges from 1709 until her death, requested that Nithsdale recount the details of the successful rescue of her husband, William Maxwell, the fifth Earl of Nithsdale, from the Tower of London. Because the Countess of Nithsdale’s allegiances are rooted in the history of Scottish Catholic Jacobitism, her account takes on a more

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strikingly political f lavor than does Cary’s. Winifred Herbert, later the Countess of Nithsdale, came from a prominent Welsh family. Her father was the Marquis of Powis who became the Lord Chamberlain of James II at his palace in St. Germain-en-laye, after James’s deposal from the English throne in 1688. Winifred Herbert spent the first part of her life in the company of the exiled English Court, an environment that solidified a sense of comradeship and community among English Catholics. This location also gave her sister, Lucy, access to English religious communities, allowing her the opportunity to make an informed decision as to where she would profess (Morris vi). Most likely Winifred Herbert met her husband, William Maxwell, at St. Germain, during his excursion abroad in 1699; the two were married in Paris that same year (Carlaverock 1.416). After their marriage, Winifred and William resided at Terregles, one of their homes in southern Scotland. William was descended from a long line of Scottish Catholics, the Maxwells of the South of Scotland who lived in the border region. After the siege of the Maxwell Castle, Carlaverock, in 1300 by King Edward’s English army, the Maxwells shifted their loyalty from the English Crown to the Scottish, from which they received lands and patronage for several generations. Thus, Maxwell loyalty to the English Crown depended upon whether the Stuart monarchs, particularly those with Catholic sensibilities, were in power. Like other English and Scottish Stuart supporters, the Earl of Nithsdale desired the restoration of the Stuarts to the English throne after James II’s abdication in 1688. Yet, because such ventures were politically and personally risky, many Jacobites secured their estates beforehand. Accordingly, the Earl assigned his lands (the earldom of Nithsdale and lordship of Terregles) to his son, William Lord Maxwell, in 1712. This was a prudent step, since the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 was unsuccessful: captured at Preston, the Earl was subsequently imprisoned within the Tower of London, a fate he shared with other notable Scottish Jacobites (1.422).16 In her letter to Lucy Herbert, the Countess of Nithsdale outlines for the reader the history of Maxwell resistance to the English, a history that was still alive in memory at the time of the Earl’s arrest: “[Parliament] had not yet forgot that his grandfather held out, as the last garison in Scotland, his own Castle of Ca[r]laverock, and render’d it up but by the King’s own orders, so that, now they had him in their power, they were resolv’d not to let him slip out of their hands” (2.223–2.224). Because the Countess of Nithsdale knew that the Maxwell family’s history of resistance to English authority would weigh heavily against the Earl,


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she undertook a dangerous winter journey, primarily on horseback, across the Scottish borderland to London. Surprised at her own success, she wrote to her sister-in-law, Lady Traquir, “I must confess such a journey I beleeve was scarce ever made, considering the weather, by a woman” (1.451). Once in London, the Countess of Nithsdale framed herself as the passive “wifely” agent of her husband’s orders in order to justify her public actions on his behalf, including an episode in which she was dragged on her knees across the f loor petitioning the king for her husband’s pardon (2.223). As an obedient and faithful wife, she pleaded with the king at the request of her husband, since “for my part I did not think it would be of any [benefit]” (2.232). Whereas Cary simulated a deference to her husband’s authority in order to maintain her own position with the king, the Countess of Nithsdale’s supposed wifely submission allowed her to act boldly under her husband’s orders. As the Countess’s tale affirms, recusant narratives can reveal surprising divisions of labor and power between spouses: together, the Countess and her husband provide an example of “Catholic spouses conspiring together to survive,” as well as a mutual work toward furthering the Catholic Jacobite party (Dolan 70). Unable to procure his pardon, the Countess of Nithsdale took another course, disseminating a casuist “story” to the guards of the Tower in order to lend the false impression that her husband would be pardoned. She describes her performance: [I] went strait out of the Parliament House to the Tower, and, putting on as cherful a look as I was able, went up, and told the guards at each place where they were, that I came to bring good news about their prisoners, for . . . the petition having pass’d in their favour, and than pulld out some small thing out of my poket, and bid them drink the K[ing]’s health, and the Peers. (2.225) Like Elizabeth Cary who led the Council to believe that she had already sent her sons abroad, the Countess of Nithsdale used the news of Parliament’s pardon of some of the Jacobite prisoners in order to suggest to the guards that her husband would also be released. Passing her f lask around certainly put everyone in a festive mood. Her work paid off: the next evening, set for the escape of her husband, she states that “[t]he poor guards, who, upon the litle I had given them the night before, were in good humour, lett me in and out with my people very willingly . . . because they were persuaded there would be a pardon

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upon what I had told them the day before” (2.226). Such simple ingenuity worked as it kept the guards from accurately comparing the number of individuals who entered with those who exited. The Countess of Nithsdale’s trickery went even further. She entered the prison with the tall Mrs. Mills, and once in the Earl’s cell, Mrs. Mills handed off her riding hood to the Earl. The Countess finished the disguise by fastening a blond wig to his head, coloring his eyebrows blond, painting his dark beard white, and applying some rouge to his cheeks. She next escorted him out of the prison as the tearful Mrs. Mills, who had left the prison room earlier in disguise. Finally, to give her husband time to hide, the Countess of Nithsdale went upstairs alone to say goodbye. Parroting his voice, she performed a dialogue with herself, “and walk’d up and down the room, as if we had been walking and talking together, till I thought he had time enough to be out of their reach” (2.227). Taking her final “solemn leave,” she rigged the door so that it could not be opened but from the inside. After her husband’s speedy departure to Calais, the Countess of Nithsdale maintained a low profile, demurely denying to her important friendly connections any complicity in her husband’s escape (1.434).17 Playing her part as the relieved yet innocent wife, the authorities concluded: “since I had so much deference for the Government as not to appear, it would be a cruelty to search for me” (2.230). Thus, the Countess of Nithsdale decreased the government’s attention toward herself by exhibiting a proper consideration for its authority. The Countess’s narrative is not quite finished. Before her departure for London, she had buried the family papers in the garden, which outlined her son’s inheritance, since her mission’s success would likely motivate the government to search and dispose of them. She explains: “so, as I had riskt my life for the father, I was resolved to run a second risk for the benefit of the son” (2.231). The Countess of Nithsdale understood both the short- and long-term effects of her actions, strategizing not only for the temporary safety of her husband, but also for the future of her family’s legacy. Once at home, she worked against the clock, tricking her neighbors to believe that “I had leave to doe it” (2.231). Securing the papers and traveling quickly back to London, she learned that King George had declared that “I had done him more mischief than any woman in Christendom.” Her lawyer advised her to go abroad since “in matter of treason . . . a wive’s head answers for her husband’s” (2.232). Although, as Dolan states, female recusants typically had “few rights or privileges to lose” and thus could use their position of legal inferiority in order to aid the Catholic cause (63–64), the


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Countess of Nithsdale’s increasing visibility conferred upon her the likelihood of legal punishment. In the end, however successful Nithsdale had been at eluding the authorities and fooling those around her, such notoriety made her an obvious example of the sort of recusant wife who “was better out of the way,” as she terms it (2.232–2.233). Joining her husband abroad in the service of James Stuart III, the two eked out the rest of their lives with the limited resources of the disappointed Stuart court in Rome.18 Writing to her sister, Lady Lucy Herbert, the Countess of Nithsdale assures her that “noe body but your selfe could have obtain’d [this account] from me” (2.234). Just as she buried the family papers in the garden in order to preserve her son’s legacy, so she hides “as full an account as I can give you of that affair” in the “elsewhere” of the cloister, the site within which her story is protected and will contribute to the historical record (2. 222). Both the Countess of Nithsdale’s and Elizabeth Cary’s histories paint a picture of recusant wives’ defiance of the State through argumentation, bold actions, and the rhetoric of wifely submission, revealing the measures that Catholic women took in obedience to their political and religious affiliations. Even more fascinating are the textual histories of Cary’s and the Countess of Nithsdale’s accounts. Both of these women’s cloistered relatives played a key role in the production and preservation of their stories, an involvement that reveals nuns’ admiration of their secular sisters’ courage, and their sense of the importance of these histories for posterity. Trafficking Texts through the Grate: The Convent as Heterotopia The important role that English convents played in the trafficking and preservation of recusant accounts suggests we must further expand our understanding of how these convents functioned for and were perceived by Catholics at home. Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia allows us to further trace the significance of the English convent to the issues at stake in this essay: the conveyance of recusant accounts to the continent, their preservation and dissemination, and their status as Catholic history. Foucault broadly defines heterotopias as real places, existent in every culture, that are “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all of the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested,

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and inverted” (24). Foucault argues that groups within a given culture construct idealized alternatives to society, using that society’s very resources and systems as starting points. Certainly English convents abroad functioned as “counter-sites” to a post-Reformation English culture, retaining and emphasizing a distinctly “English outlook” (Walker, Gender and Politics 12–13, 6). English convents provided an alternative English culture of female Catholic celibacy to that of Protestantism, marriage, and childbearing. Furthermore, it is my contention here that English convents were central in the construction and preservation of female lay histories that further complicate and widen our understanding of the relationships between husbands and wives, Catholics and Protestants, subjects and kings. We know that Catholics engaged actively in the preservation of their heritage. Cultural historians are just now f leshing out the ways in which English nuns abroad contributed to the larger corpus of both Catholic historical and devotional writing.19 While laywomen kept an oral tradition of family history alive, English nuns wrote chronicles, obituaries, and family histories (Walker 162). However, English convents abroad were not simply single sites of Catholic resistance, chronicling their own collective narratives, but were, for a broader Catholic community, primary loci for the recording and preservation of lay histories as well.20 Even so, the history of female monasticism throughout Europe has been largely framed by a legacy of enclosure: Catholic nuns were bound by the Rule of Clausura, established in 1563 at the Council of Trent, which codified female enclosure and entailed various architectural additions, such as the grille, double-locked doors, and barred windows. Monastic rules typically frowned upon frequent contact with the outside world through correspondence and orally transmitted news. Thus, the Rule of the Clausura perpetuated the notion of female confinement in the Catholic cloister disseminated by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century anti-Catholic polemicists who charged convents with “locking” away English women from their natural vocation as wives and mothers, a perception that reverberates for centuries in British literature. A far more expansive understanding of Catholic women’s religious life is underway: Walker demonstrates that many English nuns retained regular contact with their friends and families, as common political and religious causes kept religious women active in secular current affairs (“ ‘Doe Not Supose Me’ ” 162). Foucault’s discussion of the accessibility of heterotopias to members on the outside further characterizes this more f luid model of the convent: “Heterotopias always presuppose a


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system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public space . . . To get in one must have a certain permission” (26). As the writings and biographies of both English nuns and laywomen reveal, Catholic women on the outside had this permission and acted upon it since they shared indissoluble familial, religious, and political bonds with their cloistered sisters. The Countess of Nithsdale’s story provides compelling evidence of laywomen’s access to the cloister. Prioress Herbert and her nuns had certainly heard the story first-hand from the Countess herself: the Chronicle of the Convent of the Augustinians in Bruges states that Nithsdale arrived at the convent on August 12, 1716, less than six months after the rescue of her husband, and remained until September 14, before meeting him in France (Morris ix–x). Just as the Countess of Nithsdale retrieved her family’s legacy for her son, so does Herbert recover the Countess’s tale by requesting that she commit it to paper two years after her visit. In her letter, the Countess cites her willingness to comply with her sister’s desires, stating that “My Lord’s escape is such an old story now . . . but since you desire the account . . . I will endeavour to call it to mind” (2.222). That Herbert understood the importance of her sister’s account to Catholic recusant history is evident in her very request: the Countess’s letter provides an important counter-narrative to the predominant, Protestant-inf lected polemic of Catholic sedition during this time, grounding her loyalty to the cause of the Scottish Catholic Stuarts in opposition to England’s disloyalty to its true Sovereign, James III. Herbert’s community first copied and then circulated the letter among other convents, thus spreading a history of resistance that would eventually find its way among female religious in England in the nineteenth century (Grundy 138).21 The Chronicle reveals that in Herbert’s time the nuns were very much aware of the Countess’s “great renown,” either from the Countess herself or her letter. Indeed, the Chronicle brief ly re-summarizes the Countess’s exploits, describing her endeavors as “heroic” (Morris x). The Chronicle finishes this work of preservation by recording the Countess of Nithsdale’s tale within its own account of Prioress Herbert’s life. These two stories are thus bound up together physically in manuscripts that remain intact because of the inf luence of sisterly connections and the role that Herbert’s convent performed in the letter’s historical preservation. Just as the Countess of Nithsdale and Herbert collaboratively recover history, so do Cary and her children undertake the project of preserving

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their joint legacies. Cary’s persistence and determination end with six of her children’s safe transfer abroad and placement within Catholic communities. In turn, at least three of her children appear to have worked together, at different times, remembering and revising the life of their mother. In doing so, her children retrieved and preserved their mother’s legacy by recording it on paper and burying it in the archives of the convent. Heather Wolfe presents convincing evidence that the primary author of the Life is Cary’s daughter Lucy, who became Dame Magdalena upon her entrance into the English Benedictine monastery in Cambrai in 1638 (51–52, 59–64). Along with her sisters and two other women, Lucy professed in 1640; together, these nuns produced more writing and more kinds of writing than any other group professed before or after; from them, it is most likely Dame Clementina (Lucy’s sister Anne) who transcribed a copy of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations (Foster note 8; Wolfe 45).22 Lucy contributed to this convent’s oeuvre by rewriting the traditional vies edifiantes of lay widows and wives in early modern England, which usually focus on portrayals of women without “jarring notes of conf lict and failure” (Rowlands 162). In the depiction of her mother, however, Lucy displayed her weaknesses, such as her overeating, multiple debts, and forgetfulness, providing readers with a human and realistic portrait of her mother.23 Lucy’s own death-notice, placed alongside the manuscript of the Life, underscores Cary’s impact upon her daughter: from an “obstinate, haughty, disdainful, jeering Lady,” Lucy became an “obedient child” due to the “prayers and tears of the lady her mother who never ceased to implore heaven for the conversion of her children, being a woman of extraordinary piety, as will appear in the relation of her life written by a person who knew her very well” (Latz 120–121). Thus, both documents are inextricably bound in their textual production: the tale of Lucy’s conversion and subsequent entrance into religious life follows upon her mother’s narrative, detailed and vivified in the daughter’s hand. After Lucy’s death, but before the manuscript was bound in 1650, it is supposed that her sister Mary and brother Patrick worked further on the manuscript, adding additional information such as pedigrees and travel itineraries in the margins and deleting unnecessary material. Wolfe concludes that, since at the minimum four different hands contributed to the final version, the Life is “a truly collaborative text” (64). Indeed, Patrick’s access to the manuscript suggests that even as a layman (Patrick’s work on the text most likely took place prior to the beginning of his novitiate at Douai in 1650), his Catholic and filial ties to his sisters in Cambrai enabled


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him to participate, across the boundary of the grate, in the writing of his mother’s legacy. It is important that we continue to explore the placement and function of recusant texts within conventual archives. Foucault describes heterotopias within history as “the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages” (26). This aptly describes one important aspect of how Protestants and Catholics thought of the Catholic convents abroad. Against the grain of mainstream British Protestant culture, the convent seemed a locked space, frozen in medieval time, refusing to participate in progressive heteronormative culture. For Catholics, English convents abroad functioned on several levels. The convents were real and symbolic bastions of English Catholic education and monastic practice in a post-Reformation England. Furthermore, as this essay has suggested, their institutional role served to legitimize their archives as repositories for both religious and lay Catholic histories; for recusant accounts in particular, archival preservation lent historical credibility and immunity from libelous anti-Catholic polemic. Thus, the convent required simultaneous impregnability and permeability, closed off from dangerous outside threats whose purpose was to misrepresent, and yet porous to its Catholic networks and the histories they produced. On a practical level, with more access to print and time to write and maintain the historical record, nuns could accomplish the work that their lay friends and relatives could not. Discussing seventeenth-century anti-Catholic polemic, Dolan points out that it “downplays the possibility that a female figure could become the object of women’s desire and reverence” (150). As the stories of Elizabeth Cary and the Countess of Nithsdale reveal, nuns’ admiration of laywomen’s heroism in the secular sphere suggests that while cloistered virgins may have had more patriarchal approval in the Church and a higher status of “holiness” than their lay counterparts, cloistered women certainly held their Catholic sisters’ accounts of brave feats in high regard, writing, copying, and preserving these stories, literally inscribing them into history. Notes 1. Shell states, “Historians have become familiar with the idea that . . . Catholicism was the enemy against which an emergent Protestant nationalism defined itself ” (109). Walker makes similar claims of Restoration history (“Prayer, Patronage” 22). For English Catholic women’s impact upon history and literature, see Walker, Gender and Politics; Latz, “Glow-Worm Light”; Grundy, “Women’s History?”; and Rowlands, “Recusant Women.”

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2. See Walker, Gender and Politics 14–15, 99–10, and “Prayer, Patronage.” 3. For connection between English nuns and laywomen, see Dolan, Whores of Babylon; Walker, “ ‘Doe Not Supose Me,’ ” and Gender and Politics 27–29, 55–57, 72–73; Grundy, “Women’s History?” 4. I will be using Jay Miscowiec’s English translation, “Of Other Spaces.” 5. Walker discusses the institutional role of convents in furthering an English Catholic identity for future generations (Gender and Politics 11). 6. Elizabeth Cary’s Life reprinted in her Tragedy of Mariam. The Countess of Nithsdale’s letter reprinted in Book of Carlaverock. All citations are from these sources, unless otherwise i ndicated. 7. Dolan notes that post-Reformation convents transmitted and preserved women’s texts for a much “smaller, and more privileged, group” (“Reading” 330). 8. See also Walker, 12, 38; Grundy, 127. 9. See also Dolan 148. 10. For Cary’s birth and death dates see Life 9, 183. For English women’s conversion to Catholicism through reading see Dolan, “Reading” 331–332. 11. For a hesitant approach toward the Life, see Weller and Ferguson’s edition, 50. For interest in the text independently, see Latz 117. For historical and literary aspects of the Life, see Wolfe 1–85. 12. The narrator claims that Henry Cary converted to Catholicism before he died (220–221). 13. For a discussion of this Catholicizing of Cary’s pre-conversion years, see Wolfe 77–85. 14. For Wolfe’s discussion of Cary’s “conscience,” see 13–20. 15. See Dolan 136–142. 16. For a history of this rebellion, see Sinclair-Stevenson, Inglorious Rebellion 73–59. 17. Ironically, it was learned later that the Earl of Nithsdale was granted pardon before his escape became known. 18. See Carlaverock 1.468–482, 1.440—1.444. 19. See notes 1 and 2. 20. Walker states that “nuns understood that convent walls . . . were f luid” in terms of the political strategies they used in order to maintain their way of life (Gender and Politics 7). 21. See also Carlaverock 2.223 note 1. 22. See Wolfe 45, note 93, for a partial list of these nuns’ writings and Latz 78–80. 23. See Wolfe 74; Dolan, “Reading” 346–356.

Works Cited Cary, Elizabeth, Lady Falkland. The Tragedy of Mariam The Fair Queen of Jewry with The Lady Falkland: Her Life by one of her Daughters. Eds. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Dolan, Frances E. Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. ———. “Reading, Work, and Catholic Women’s Biographies.” English Literary Renaissance 33.3 (November 2003): 328–357. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Trans. Jay Miscowiec. Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22–27. Grundy, Isobel. “Women’s History? Writings by English Nuns.” Women, Writing, History: 1640–1740. Eds. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. 126–138.


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Latz, Dorothy L. “Glow-Worm Light”: Writings of 17th Century English Recusant Women from Original Manuscripts. Salzburg: Institut Fur Anglistik und Amerikanistick Universitat Salzburg, 1989. Marotti, Arthur F. “Alienating Catholics in Early Modern England: Recusant Women, Jesuits and Ideological Fantasies.” Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism. Ed. Arthur F. Marotti. London: Macmillan, 1999. 1–34. Morris, John, ed. The Devotions of the Lady Lucy Herbert of Powis. London: Burns and Oates, 1873. Nithsdale, Countess of. “Winifred Countess of Nithsdale to [the Lady Lucy Herbert].” The Book of Carlaverock: Memoirs of the Maxwells, Earls of Nithsdale, Lords Maxwell & Herries, 2 vols. Ed. William Fraser. Edinburgh, 1873. 2.222–2.234. Owen, Jane. Antidote Against Purgatory. St. Omer’s, 1635. “Recusant.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Rowlands, Marie B. “Recusant Women: 1560–1640.” Women in English Society: 1500–1800. Ed. Mary Prior. London: Methuen, 1985. 149–180. Shell, Alison. Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Sinclair-Stevenson, Christopher. Inglorious Rebellion: The Jacobite Risings of 1708, 1715, and 1719. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971. Walker, Claire. “Prayer, Patronage, and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns and the Restoration.” Historical Journal 43.1 (2000): 1–23. ———. “ ‘Doe Not Supose Me a Well Mortifyed Nun Dead to the World’: Letter-Writing in Early Modern English Convents.” Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700. Ed. James Daybell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. 159–176. ———. Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Wolfe, Heather, ed. Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters. Cambridge: Renaissance Texts from Manuscript Publications, 2001. 59–64. Yates, Julian. “Parasitic Geographies: Manifesting Catholic Identity in Early Modern England.” Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism. Ed. Arthur F. Marotti. London: Macmillan, 1999. 63–84.


CH A P T E R

EIGH T

“Must Her Own Words Do All?”: Domesticity, Catholicism, and Activism in Adelaide Anne Procter’s Poems Ch e r i L a r se n Hoec k l e y

Adelaide Anne Procter contributed more poetry than any other writer to Charles Dickens’s commercially successful, staunchly humanist periodical Household Words. Procter also contributed more poetry than any other writer to the London women’s rights periodical The English Woman’s Journal (EWJ). Adelaide Procter occasionally emerges in Victorian literary studies as the talented, devoted daughter of Bryan Waller Procter (who also published poetry under the pseudonym Barry Cornwall) and his wife Anne Skepper Procter, whose Bedford Square home was a frequent gathering place for Dickens, the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, the cultural critic Thomas Carlyle, the art historian Anna Murphy Jameson, the actress Fanny Kemble, the poet Robert Browning, and a variety of other well-known and respected literary figures. Procter also passionately defended the scandal-plagued actress and writer Matilda Hays, with whom she had an emotionally intense relationship. Procter occasionally finds a place in church history for the handful of her poems that have become Protestant hymns, especially “The Lost Chord,” set to music by half of the famous Victorian opera team, Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan. Catholic historians have not noticed the support she offered Catholic charities, such as the Providence Row Women’s Night Refuge in London, by selling her devotional poetry. In fact, the array of Procter’s roles and activities seems to have

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contributed to a general cultural forgetting of this Victorian Catholic poet and women’s rights activist. Procter’s unruly combination of interests, practices, social circles, and professional activities pushes her out of traditional contemporary critical and historical categories. This difficulty in categorizing Procter also highlights the range of contexts and cultural impulses that mark her thinking and her poetry, creating an often humorously ironic edge— critical of her contemporaries’ views of church and family—in poems that her middle-class Victorian readers could still enjoy as sentimental, pious, and typically domestic. Procter’s few poems gathered into recent anthologies share with her less studied writing a double-edged use of the languages of domestic ideology and conventional piety, often to critique Victorian gender practices.1 Few commentaries on Procter, however, have taken seriously the interweaving of her contexts as Catholic in the years immediately following the Oxford Movement, as women’s rights activist, as active philanthropist for Catholic charities, and as comic spirit in lively communities of Victorian women. Despite recent relative critical silence on Procter’s work, by several accounts Procter sold more poetry than any Victorian poet other than Alfred Tennyson. Charles Dickens described her poems as “possessing much more merit” than “the shoal of verses perpetually setting through the office” of Household Words, or of All the Year Round, the second periodical Dickens published, in which Procter’s poetry also appeared. Many readers first encountered Procter’s poems in Dickens’s publications, printed alongside essays, short stories, and serial novels by other Victorian writers better remembered than Proctor: Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell.2 Despite her poetry’s popularity with Victorians, many of Procter’s titles can rouse in twenty-first-century readers an antipathy toward the kind of moralism that Victorians frequently employed to justify nominal Protestant hegemony, surveillance of women, and female submission: “Cleansing Fires,” “Strive, Wait, and Pray,” “The Angel of Death,” and “The Warrior to his Dead Bride.” These poems at first fit uneasily alongside Procter’s frequently anthologized trilogy—“A Woman’s Question” (1858), “A Woman’s Answer” (1861), and “A Woman’s Last Word” (1861)—which offers a nuanced alternative to the representation of a woman’s voice in Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue (1855), from which Procter pointedly borrowed the title for her trilogy’s final poem. Yet clear connections exist between her traditionally sentimental poetry and her poetry vocally advocating women’s rights; in fact, some of her sentimental poems call on her readers to reconsider Victorian gender ideology. In many other poems, such as

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“The Names of our Lady,” “The Sacred Heart,” “Kyrie Eleison,” and “The Shrines of Mary,” Procter boldly embraces her chosen Catholic faith. None of these overtly Catholic poems appeared in either of her early collections, Legends and Lyrics: Series One (1858) and Legends and Lyrics: Series Two (1861), nor were they the poems she submitted to Dickens for publication in his middle-class, secular family periodicals, but many of these poems embody the same double-voicedness as her more generally Christian poetry. Procter’s more clearly Catholic poems were all gathered in A Chaplet of Verses, an 1862 benefit publication for The Providence Row Women’s Night Refuge. Of the poems in that Catholic collection, only “Homeless” still appears in anthologies of Victorian poetry and of women writers. Perhaps part of the cause for this occluded memory of Procter can be found in Charles Dickens’s cultural biases, since his biography of Procter remained inf luential through the twentieth century. Until the 1990s, most work on Procter (including the Dictionary of National Biography— which might be seen as the authoritative reference for English biography) all but ignored other sources in favor of referring to—or quoting at length or simply plagiarizing—Dickens’s idiosyncratic essay.3 From his literary pulpit, Dickens roused his readers through playing high priest for a secular religion that worshipped women as domestic angels, and of all of that religion’s resulting misogyny.4 This particular authorial practice of idolizing women overshadowed many elements of Procter’s life and work when Dickens wrote the biographical introduction for the posthumous publication of her collected poems. While one might expect that Dickens’s familiar relationship with Procter’s parents and his professional role as her editor would prompt an appreciation of the nuances of her poetry and her charitable work, he chooses instead to focus on three stock incidents in her life: her childhood education, one continental journey marked by her attendance at a peasant’s wedding, and her death scene. Rather than drawing on Procter’s various experiences in women’s rights, philanthropy, and professional writing, he relies on his skills as a novelist and represents her as one more in his catalogue of self-sacrificing, dutiful, female heroines: Little Nell, Florence Dombey, Esther Sommerson, Agnes Wakefield. To look beyond the myopic representation of Procter as model middle-class domestic angel that Dickens’s brief biographical sketch left to literary history, one only need turn to the less-remembered memoirs published by her friends in the Langham Place circle. Procter’s letters provide even richer context to reveal the pointed, and sometimes comic, irony that gives political edge to her pious images and language.

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Procter shared political interests with readers of EWJ—a periodical with a quite different ethos from Dickens’s publications. When Dickens wrote the biographical introduction to Legends and Lyrics, he omitted EWJ from the list of publications where Procter’s poetry had appeared. In spite of the regular presence of Procter’s contributions to the EWJ, he maintains this silence, while including her contributions to both Cornhill Magazine and Good Words, though only two of her poems appeared in each. The omission speaks loudly for Dickens’s desire to represent Procter as a submissive woman who was also an adept professional poet—the ideal contributor to his periodicals. The English Woman’s Journal was established by Procter’s close friends Barbara Leigh Smith and Bessie Rayner Parkes, both of whom described themselves as writers and political economists. Prior to establishing the EWJ, Leigh Smith, Parkes, and Procter had collaborated on The Married Women’s Property Committee. That joint venture included an ad hoc group of women writers in London who convened to reform marital property laws, particularly to abolish the principle of coverture that automatically gave husbands ownership of their wives’ property on marriage. The Langham Place Circle, as this female alliance became known, was particularly interested in improving women’s economic status, first by lobbying for reform of Married Women’s Property Laws, then by establishing EWJ, and eventually by promoting female employment.5 While Procter was the most frequent contributor of verse to both EWJ and Household Words, for the women’s rights journal she also wrote articles about the social restrictions on women, about female work, and about women’s property.6 These essays provide ample evidence for her enthusiastic embrace of the women’s rights activities out of the Langham Place offices. Beyond contributing to EWJ, Procter brought her literary talents to editing Victoria Regia (1861), a collection inf luenced by the earlier nineteenth-century genre of the gift annual. Victoria Regia was designed to showcase the skills of the female printers of the Victoria Press, trained and employed through Langham Place efforts to provide jobs for London women. Because so many of them contributed to its table of contents, the volume functions as a roster of the creative women of the Langham Place Circle. Victoria Press supervisor Emily Faithfull wrote the introduction, while Bessie Rayner Parkes, Isa Blagden, Mary Howitt, Isa Craig, Matilda M. Hays, Anna Mary Howitt Watts, and the group’s mentor Anna Murphy Jameson, all contributed at least one poem. Procter contributed “Links with Heaven,” one of the most traditionally sentimental poems in her entire corpus.


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“Links with Heaven” ref lects on dead children’s heavenly power to bring spiritual grace to their surviving mothers, in a conceit that, for readers today, might exceed sentimentality and lapse into the simply maudlin. With the poem’s four-line stanzas and alternating rhyme scheme, only Procter’s surprising use of enjambment and line breaks saves the poem from the sing-song of doggerel. For instance, the fourth stanza notices Those little hands stretched down to draw her ever nearer to God by mother love: we all Are blind and weak,—yet surely She can never With such a stake in Heaven, fail or fall. Line breaks allow the reader to anticipate the rhyme, but also make clear that spiritual blindness and weakness do not aff lict mothers alone but mark “we all.” By the 1861 publication of Victoria Regia, readers would have gained familiarity with Procter’s intensely sentimental poetry through both volumes of Legends and Lyrics, as well as through its periodical publication. New to Procter’s early readers, though, might have been this poem’s final emphasis on the Virgin Mary as eternal mother to all. In Procter’s poetic vision, “children’s place in heaven” is “nestled at Mary’s feet,” where she offers a “little chant to please them, slow and sweet” and distracts them with her rosary “beads” or the “white lilies” that are part of her iconography. Through the occasion that both the volume and the women’s press create for calling on the name of England’s Queen, Procter shifts the emphasis, still honoring Victoria but moving through her to “our dear Queen” in heaven, the Mother of Jesus. The final gesture maintains an overwhelmingly sentimental tone, but also comments politically in its allusion to England’s maternal sovereign. Furthermore, the children’s proximity to the Queen of Heaven suggests that mothers have the highest heavenly status because their children’s prayers are “more mighty” than those of all other saints in heaven, inverting the traditional Victorian domestic hierarchy of father, mother, child. Though she must rely on images of dying children to complete the gesture, Procter invokes a Catholic understanding of Mary to introduce secular and Protestant readers to the possibility that a heavenly order critiques Victorian gender ideology’s power structure. Procter’s editorial and marketing endeavors for Victoria Regia demonstrate her acumen about economic and political power; her poetic vision of power reversals in heaven, in other words, does not result merely from

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naiveté. She turned her characteristic energy to soliciting contributors for the volume from among her extensive literary circle, concentrating her persuasive powers on writers who would increase the volume’s prestige and marketability to more effectively publicize the female press.7 Procter succeeded in augmenting the offerings of members of the Langham Place Circle with poems from nearly forty other Victorian literary celebrities, including Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thackeray, as well as Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, Harriett Martineau, Coventry Patmore, Dinah Craik Mullock, F. D. Maurice, George MacDonald, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Caroline Sheridan Norton, along with the Catholic poets Aubrey De Vere and Lady Georgianna Fullerton. In addition to providing Procter with the kinds of practical uses of her poetic gifts that she found invigorating, her experiences at the Langham Place offices expanded her vocabulary of economic metaphors and themes that attest to her poetic commitment to economic justice, particularly where she saw women treated inequitably. According to the obituary that her fellow activist Jessie Boucherette wrote for EWJ, Procter became the “leading person” and “animating spirit” behind the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women in Langham Place (19). Procter’s jovial humor quite likely prompted the Circle’s habit of referring to the society by its acronym: SPEW. SPEW developed a female employment registry, provided women’s occupational training, and organized female-run businesses such as The Victoria Press and a law-copying office to employ recently trained women and to showcase their marketable skills. Eventually SPEW leadership began exploring respectable outlets for female emigration and for helping women make employment contacts abroad. Boucherette describes her friend the poet attending diligently to SPEW duties that ranged from writing circulars to answering letters. Procter’s clerical work for SPEW intimately acquainted her with the difficulty single women faced finding work, even when not struggling against the added hardships of anti-Catholic bigotry and homelessness. Procter’s letters make clear her sensitivity on others’ behalf to this bigotry; more than once she sought a position in service for a Catholic girl or woman, specifying that the family who hired her be “broad-minded” or “Catholic.” In her obituary, Boucherette differentiates EWJ from “other periodicals of purely literary stamp,” which she knows will memorialize Procter as a poet (17). Instead, Boucherette opts to narrate Procter’s guiding involvement through the EWJ offices in the formation of SPEW and to set down the poet’s enthusiasm for the various gains for women that EWJ achieved.


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Procter’s freedom to give voice to impulses of female resistance grew, in part, from her own identity, which complicated Victorian gender and ethnic stereotypes. Her Catholicism placed her outside the direct discipline of Victorian Protestantism, though she could clearly pass as Protestant, or unmarkedly humanist, in the pages of Dickens’s mainstream periodicals. The women involved in Langham Place either tended toward the Anglican Church or were from prominent London Unitarian families. Bessie Rayner Parkes, granddaughter of Joseph Priestley, was one such Unitarian, until she followed Procter into the Catholic Church. Neither working-class nor Irish, Procter and Parkes enjoyed the protections of social and economic privileges that eluded many women who shared their Catholicism in nineteenth-century urban centers. In a telling comment, Parkes voices the distinctiveness of Procter’s social position when she remembers that in “her religious attitude she resembled a foreign rather than an English Catholic. She looked like a Frenchwoman mounting the steps of the Madeleine, or a veiled Italian at St. Peter’s” (“Montagus” 165). Parkes’s apparent compliment in memorializing her friend’s stateliness also distances Procter from the Irish Catholics both Parkes and Procter knew of, and whom Procter met at the Providence Row Women’s Night Refuge. Though Parkes seems to anticipate some anxiety about ethnicity, and possibly about class, in her readers’ understanding of Catholicism, her rhetorical masking of the issue by distinguishing Procter as a “continental” Catholic dignifies that anxiety more than Procter ever does in her poetry when choosing to write of Irishness or Catholicism. Indeed, Procter converted to Catholicism on the continent, apparently while visiting a Catholic aunt in Turin. Parkes makes clear that Procter chose to keep silent on her conversion out of filial attachment to her father; so exact details of her motives and of place are difficult to determine in letters or memoirs. By the late 1850s, however, Procter was clearly immersed in London’s Catholic life, attending mass at the Brompton Oratory as often as her frail health permitted and following the teachings of the Oxford Movement preacher Dr. Henry Manning. Her letters also indicate that she avidly read Catholic devotional texts from across centuries and participated diligently in spiritual retreats. Her younger sister Agnes also converted to Catholicism and eventually joined the Order of Irish Sisters of Mercy. That Order ran the Providence Row Women’s Night Refuge, which benefited from the sale of Procter’s Chaplet of Verses. Though a significant number of the poems in Chaplet focus on Mary’s many traits, Procter also includes poems exploring liturgy, such as “Kyrie Eliason,” and English/Irish politics, such as “An

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Appeal (The Irish Church Mission for Converting the Catholics),” along with a ballad of feminine struggles with church and family, “Milly’s Expiation.” In Chaplet’s range of topics, a careful reader sees how Procter’s prophetic interests and desires for holiness and justice extend beyond the narrow range of pious concerns easily recognizable in her devotional poems. Read as companion pieces to each other, poems in A Chaplet of Verses make clear how the confident and subtle political critique in the frequently anthologized trilogy “A Woman’s Question,” “A Woman’s Answer,” and “A Woman’s Last Word” grows from Procter’s conviction that a Catholic spiritual economy rooted in justice overwhelms any domestic or political economy. Her sense of a more just order beyond the traditions of the secular middle class allows her to use the language of domesticity and traditional piety while creating the possibility for a broader spectrum of acceptable female behavior than a middle-class, Victorian woman might expect to have sanctioned. “The Legend of Provence,” a poem that appears in Legend and Lyrics rather than A Chaplet of Verses, illustrates in brief her complicated use of the Catholic tradition. This narrative of a runaway nun named Sister Angela brings the repentant nun back to her convent to find that the Virgin Mary has preserved her place and taken on Angela’s convent duties during her absence. The nun’s sexual transgressions—and the passionate, adventurous life that prompted them—are miraculously erased from history when she returns, leaving open the possibility for a standard reading against female sexual independence.8 However, Procter’s irony allows her to critique a sexual double standard that continues to punish female sexual license while ignoring male promiscuity. Furthermore, when Mary speaks to Angela she reminds her that “man’s forgiveness may be true and sweet, / But yet he stoops to give it.” Mary, on the other hand, brings Angela “Love that lays forgiveness at [her] feet,” refusing to see herself as spiritually or morally superior to Angela in her purity. Similar denials of sexual hypocrisy, of necessary authority in male voices, and of limitations on women’s vocations, as well as of gendered property practices, permeate poems from A Chaplet of Verses such as “Milly’s Expiation” (the story of a young Irish woman who lies to provide an alibi for her fiancé) and “Homeless” (which explores the causal link between female homelessness and the moral rigidity of domestic ideology on the one hand, and London prostitution and female suicide on the other). Both Dickens’s introduction to her collected works and Parkes’s family memoir of the Procters suggest that Adelaide contracted fatal tuberculosis


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from work with London’s poor and homeless. While the handful of Procter’s preserved letters leaves little record of her involvement with Providence Row, the introduction she wrote for A Chaplet of Verses demonstrates her detailed knowledge of the architecture, the schedule, and the mission of Providence Row Women’s Night Refuge, as London’s only shelter for Catholic women in 1860. When Procter writes of the residents there, her comments emphasize the women’s particular economic vulnerability and the risks of degradation they face on the street. However, her awareness of the need for shelter for “women and children utterly forlorn and helpless” clearly motivates her support more than any concern with purging the London streets of sexual sin. In other words, the introduction suggests that Procter locates the Night Refuge’s moral benefit in its physical protection for a powerless population, not in its role in containing female sexuality. As a closer reading of her poetry makes clear, her moral concerns are with economic justice and mercy, rather than with sexual surveillance. Procter reveals no attitudes that would conf lict with valuing sexual purity; she simply refuses to place female sexual license at the center of social and moral decay. Readers might be forgiven for assuming female purity overrides Procter’s other concerns because eighteen of the thirty-two poems in the collection display overt devotion to the Virgin Mary. Procter points out, though, that the Mother of Jesus has many faces and names; the fourth poem in A Chaplet of Verses, “The Names of Our Lady,” details those traits by dedicating twelve of its seventeen stanzas to different roles: “Refuge of Sinners,” “True Queen of Martyrs,” “Health of the Sick,” “Mother of Sorrows,” “Our Lady Dear of Victories,” “Help of the Christian,” “Star of the Sea,” “Bright Queen of Heaven,” “Our Lady of the Rosary,” and others. Certainly, these names all suggest models of piety and support for followers of Mary in leading lives of holiness. However, as Procter’s catalogue of names suggests, that holiness extends well beyond female chastity to include courage for sailors, justice in ruling powers, consolation for the sick, and compassion in sorrow. Of Mary’s many characteristics, Procter chooses to focus not on purity but on poverty in exile. The first extended mention of Mary occurs in the introduction, when Procter appeals to “the Mother who wandered homeless through inhospitable Bethlehem, and the Saint who was a beggar and an outcast upon the face of the earth,” to “watch over this Refuge for the poor and desolate, and obtain from the charity of the faithful the aid which it so sorely needs.” Procter artfully weaves this thread through the collection until she ties it together in the allusions of the final poem, “Homeless.”

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Primarily, the stanzas in “Homeless” alternate between questions about an unidentified speaker’s experiences on London streets and answers from a series of interlocuters who understand those experiences with a confidence that asserts the social effectiveness of their middle-class propriety. By the final stanza, a biblical framework for reinterpreting the interlocuters’ assertions illuminates their faulty reasoning. With the complete text of the poem before them, readers attuned to the irony in Procter’s voice will begin to detect the weakness in those assertions from as early as the line where a “fair lady” lauds “Christian England” for its attentiveness to house pets: It is cold, dark midnight, yet listen To that patter of tiny feet! Is it one of your dogs, fair lady, Who whines in the bleak cold street? Is it one of your silken spaniels Shut out in the snow and the sleet? My dogs sleep warm in their baskets, Safe from the darkness and snow; All the beasts in our Christian England, Find pity wherever they go— (Those are only the homeless children Who are wandering to and fro).

10

Look out in the gusty darkness,— I have seen it again and again, That shadow, that f lits so slowly Up and down past the window-pane:— It is surely some criminal lurking Out there in the frozen rain? Nay, our criminals are all sheltered. They are pitied and taught and fed: That is only a sister-woman That has got neither food nor bed,— And the Night cries, “Sin to be living,” And the River cries, “Sin to be dead.” Look out at that farthest corner Where the wall stands blank and bare:— Can that be a pack which a Pedlar Has left and forgotten there?

20


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His goods lying out unsheltered Will be spoilt by the damp night air.

30

Nay;—goods in our thrifty England Are not left to lie and grow rotten, For each man knows the market value Of silk or woollen or cotton…. But in counting the riches of England I think our Poor are forgotten. Our Beasts and our Thieves and our Chattels Have weight for good or for ill; But the poor are only His image, His presence, His word, His will;— And so Lazarus lies at our door-step And Dives neglects him still.

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While less overtly Catholic than many of the poems in Chaplet, “Homeless,” pointedly engages in domestic economies and practices, allowing Procter to critique standards of feminine propriety that fail to account for the cultural value of female sexuality, imagination, and dignified employment. The double-voicedness of poems such as “Homeless” makes clear Procter’s simultaneous belief in the importance of political change and in the inadequacy of political activism alone without a shift in cultural imagination about women’s roles. Poetry and Christianity, Catholicism particularly, offered Procter venues to prompt that cultural shift. When read with the context of Procter’s first-hand knowledge of Victorian women’s economic, and therefore sexual, vulnerability and of Procter’s learned devotion to Catholicism, the concluding poem “Homeless” illustrates how the collection invigorates prevailing notions of Victorian femininity, Christianity, and the poetic profession. While the religious subtlety of “Homeless” may have contributed to its long life in anthologies, by allusion to earlier poems “Homeless” reinforces the Catholic themes voiced more directly throughout Chaplet of Verses. For instance, while the Virgin Mary is not named in “Homeless,” she sought shelter on the night Jesus was born, as Procter’s introduction clearly reminded her readers. After perusing the thirty-two poems in the collection, with eighteen concentrating on Mary, some of Procter’s readers would undoubtedly have thought of Christ’s mother when arriving at the final poem’s anonymous “sister–woman” (21), for whom there is no room at any English inn.

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Rather than invoking Mary to praise traditional female purity, Procter’s repeated images suggest that homeless women’s economic vulnerability causes their physical and sexual vulnerability, and through those images Procter raises alternative, somewhat progressive representations of female sexuality. The wandering condition of the sisterwoman aligns her with the mother of Jesus, but the London voices rushing to call any of her actions “sin” also align her with the other Mary in Christ’s circle, Mary Magdalene. Christian tradition has considered Mary Magdalene a repentant prostitute. In “A Desire,” Procter makes clear Victorian Christians’ responsibility to offer solace to those seen as Magdalenes in their midst, “with broken hearts to soothe, / And penitent tears to dry.” Considering “A Desire” and “Homeless” together opens the possibility that both the biblical Magdalene and her Victorian “sister–woman” are continually misread, and consequently oppressed, through excessive concern with female sexuality. For instance, the “sister–woman” finds herself ironically tossed between the cries of the Night that it is a “Sin to be living” and the cries of the River that it is a “Sin to be dead” (23–24). Yet the narrative voice contrasts the shelter available to convicted criminals with the accusations the “sister-woman” faces for suffering with “neither food nor bed” (22); these accusations only increase if she misguidedly chooses a bed when no honorable place is open to her. While these allusions to the dual perils of the sexual double-standard and sexual surveillance are rather compact, the longest poem in the collection, the dramatic monologue “Milly’s Expiation,” relies on the voice of a priest to draw with more detail the theme of the possibilities of misprision in male scrutiny over female sexuality. Procter’s work with women from across social classes both at Providence Row and at the Langham Place Circle offices would have strengthened her sense of domestic ideology’s inadequacy to address the material conditions of many women’s lives. Furthermore, her familiarity with women from across London’s social spectrum familiarized the poet with the impossibility of understanding an individual woman’s actions through a set of lenses developed and imposed on Victorian women universally. Perhaps more surprising, she also would have found encouragement to restrain a critique of varieties of female sexual behavior in Father Frederick Faber’s devotional writing. In Growth in Holiness Faber devotes a chapter to “external conduct,” but remains absolutely silent on sexuality. Instead, he admonishes Catholics to remember that “to attack other’s faults is to do the devil’s work for him; to do God’s work is to attack our own” (65–66). In keeping with this Catholic ethic,


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Proctor raises the possibility that the economically secure English (herself and her readers) are too preoccupied “in counting the riches of England,” and as a result, the “Poor are forgotten.” Avoiding the error of “the river” and “the night” in her poem, Procter finds it sufficiently pious to attack the economic fault, for which she might be guilty, and to remain silent on what might appear as sin in others. Faber’s admonition to “bridle the tongue” may also be the force that keeps Procter from openly vilifying either the “fair lady” (2) who keeps “silken spaniels” (4) “safe” (8) while homeless children freeze on the street or the associates of the counting houses who forget to value the poor so that they are left rain-soaked and hungry. The obtuse “fair lady” shows all the marks of respectable middle-class femininity, but she earns Procter’s censure for her tenacious resistance to seeing the people her protective spirit excludes. Still, Procter launches this criticism only through ironic juxtaposition, rather than through direct condemnation. In reading Procter’s poetry one may accurately view her attention to the ruthlessness of middle-class respectability as receiving scrutiny, but not ignominy, and therefore allowing for the status quo. Again, the Faberian doctrine of charitable silence comes into play as Procter turns her attention to the merchants and mothers who do not look to see the needs of the urban homeless around them. Aware of that doctrine, Procter relies on the poetic quality that Isobel Armstrong identifies as “double-voicedness” to suggest culpability. Furthermore, double-voicedness allows for the possibility that England’s rather obtuse “fair ladies” might miss the criticism lobbied against them and enjoy Procter’s poetry sufficiently to buy copies of A Chaplet of Verses, finally contributing to the welfare of the homeless poor they live otherwise segregated from. Importantly for Procter’s fund-raising purposes, wealth alone is not the cause of England’s sinfulness, but the cause is rather the social myopia wealth encourages. Her reference in the final stanza to Lazarus and Dives makes this distinction clear.9 In St. Luke’s gospel, the ill beggar Lazarus stations himself outside the mansion of Dives, who walks past Lazarus everyday without acknowledging him. When Lazarus dies, he ascends to heaven and to the company of the patriarch Abraham. Dives eventually finds himself in “hell, being in torments,” and petitions Abraham to help him. From heaven, Abraham tells Dives that he had all his reward on earth, and Lazarus had none, but is enjoying his reward now. Few biblical figures attain the wealth that Abraham enjoyed, but Jesus’ parable in this gospel suggests that Abraham securely found a place in heaven. In the final line of Chaplet of Verses, then, Procter’s allusions

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suggest that wealth alone does not keep one from the eternal glory she believed in. Refusal to recognize the potential alleviation of suffering that one’s wealth can provide might have that hellish consequence, the poem’s final words imply. Like Dives, caught in the day-to-day tasks of amassing and protecting their wealth, the inhabitants of “thrifty England”—or the fair lady and the keepers of the wool, cotton, and corn warehouses—do not see the homeless women and children who surround their activities. With a characteristic archness, Procter suggests that these figures are too preoccupied with caring for pets, or for public security against crime, or for national prosperity, and are wrongly distracted from seeing the suffering on their doorsteps. Procter urges her readers to a keener awareness of the inhabitants of the Night Refuge, or those like them in the characters her readers discover in the poems “The Homeless Poor” or “The Beggar.” Moreover, Procter offers herself as example, using her material gifts to make these Victorian brothers and sisters of Lazarus more comfortable. In the years following Chaplet’s 1862 publication, Procter’s work continued to command sufficient respect from the Providence Row Board of Governors that her poem “Homeless” appeared on the frontispiece of the institution’s annual reports. The book was still selling more than thirty years later when Bessie Rayner Parkes wrote her brief memoir of Procter, claiming that “profits of this little book . . . were so considerable that Monsignor Gilbert founded a bed in the Refuge called the ‘Adelaide Procter Bed’ ” (“Montagus” 176). Like “Homeless,” many other poems in A Chaplet of Verses reveal Procter’s awareness that her poetry might offer a partial solution to the problems of Catholic women arriving in London. It does not seem likely that homeless Catholic women would have found tremendous support in the literary gifts available through purchasing Procter’s poetry. The residents of Providence Row profited differently, as subjects imagined differently by middleclass readers, and also as beneficiaries of the sale of the poems. Notes 1. Selections from Procter’s poetry appear in anthologies edited by Valentine Cunningham; Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle; Francis O’Gorman; Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds; and Dorothy Mermin and Herbert Tucker. Three of the five include “Homeless,” and four of the five contain at least part of the “Woman” trilogy. 2. I am indebted to Anne Lohrli’s masterful archival research on Dickens’s Household Words for these descriptions of his periodical. 3. Gill Gregory’s The Life and Work of Adelaide Procter makes an important exception to this rule, analyzing Procter’s work through her literary connections to four male figures: her father


4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

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Bryan Waller Procter, Robert Browning, and John Keble (author of The Christian Year), as well as Charles Dickens. While Gregory demonstrates both Procter’s professionalism and her literary talents to extend the curtailed view of Procter that Dickens’s biography offered, the book’s relative silence on her Catholicism and the absence of any female figures who shaped her work (Anna Jameson, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Anne Skepper Procter) inadvertently affirm many of the long-standing approaches to Procter. In The City of Dickens, Alexander Welsh fully articulates an argument that has now become a critical commonplace showing how Dickens’s female characters helped in the elevation of domesticity to the status of secular religion. Candida Lacey offers detailed and lively background on the extensive work and social and political networks of Langham Place Group members. Two essay series and one article illustrate her contributions: “Adventures of Your Own Correspondents in Search of Solitude” and “Madame Recamier” along with “Women Watchmakers at Christchurch.” Both Gill Gregory and Jessie Boucherette attribute these essays to Procter. Adelaide Anne Procter’s letters to Bessie Rayner Parkes, 16–20. Bessie Rayner Parkes’s Correspondence with the Procters. Bessie Rayner Parkes Papers. Girton College Archives. Both “A Tomb in Ghent” and “Legend of Provence” have already been examined in other critical readings, though without attention to Proctor’s Catholicism. See, for instance, Gill Gregory’s work. Luke 16:19–26.

Works Cited Boucherette, Jessie. “Adelaide Procter.” The English Woman’s Journal 12 (March 1864): 19ff. Collins, Thomas J. and Vivienne J. Rundle, eds. The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999. Cunningham, Valentine, ed. The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Faber, Frederick William. Growth in Holiness; or the Progress of Spiritual Life. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co, 1855. Gregory, Gill. “Adelaide Procter’s ‘A Legend of Provence’: The Struggle for a Place.” Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader. Ed. Angela Leighton. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. 88–96. ———. The Life and Work of Adelaide Procter: Poetry, Feminism and Fathers. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 1998. Lacey, Candida Ann, ed. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986. Leighton, Angela and Margaret Reynolds, eds. Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Lohrli, Anne. Household Words: A Weekly Journal 1850–1859. Conducted by Charles Dickens. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. Mermin, Dorothy and Herbert Tucker, eds. Victorian Literature: 1830–1900. Boston: Thomson Heinle, 2002. O’Gorman, Francis, ed. Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Parkes, Bessie Rayner. Bessie Rayner Parkes Papers. Girton College Archives. Girton College, Cambridge. ———. “Montagus and Procters.” In a Walled Garden. London: Ward and Downey, 1895. 135–178.

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Procter, Adelaide. Letters to Bessie Rayner Parkes. Bessie Rayner Parkes Papers. Girton College Archives. Girton College, Cambridge. ———. Legends and Lyrics: A Book of Verses. Series 1. London: Bell & Daldy, 1858. ———. “Adventures of Your Own Correspondents in Search of Solitude.” The English Woman’s Journal IV (1859): 34–44, 100–114. ———. “Women Watchmakers at Christchurch.” The English Woman’s Journal IV (1859): 278–279. ———. Legends and Lyrics: A Book of Verses. Series 2. London: Bell & Daldy, 1861. ———. “Madame Recamier.” The English Woman’s Journal VI (1860): 225–236, (1861) 297–305, 373–383. ———. A Chaplet of Verses. London: Longman, Green & Longman, 1862. “Procter, Adelaide Ann.” Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. Leslie Stephen. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1882. 416. Welsh, Alexander. The City of Dickens. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1986.

CH A P T E R

N I N E

The Legacy of Laveau in the Practice of Helen Prejean: The Tradition and Territory of New Orleans’ Spiritual Advisors Ba r ba r a E c k s t e i n

In 1852 a man sentenced to die was taken to the scaffold outside New Orleans Parish Prison just behind Congo Square, in full view of the public, as was the custom. Just as the gallows opened and the noose began to tighten, the execution went awry. An enormous black cloud that had blown overhead let loose with a tremendous storm. The frightened spectators, running amok, charged the scaffold and were further terrified by being entangled with the hanging man. Somehow the condemned man continued to live. Later, within the walls of the prison, this man was hung—again—and the law was changed so that all subsequent death sentences were carried out within the prison, away from the public’s eyes and their susceptibility to horror. So recount informal historian Herbert Asbury in his 1936 book about the New Orleans underworld and New-Orleans-born writer Robert Tallant in his 1946 book about New Orleans voodoo (Asbury 270–276; Tallant 68–73). After this interrupted execution, many claimed that voodoo queen Marie Laveau caused the storm, for she was the condemned man’s spiritual advisor (Asbury 270–276; Tallant 72). Repeated stories say that between the 1850s and the middle 1870s, Laveau, a free Creole of color, not only nursed the victims of yellow fever with her herbal remedies and

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whatever other powers were at her disposal, but also acted as spiritual advisor to men awaiting execution in Parish Prison in the French Quarter.1 According to an 1881 obituary, she would sit with the condemned in their last moments and endeavor to turn their last thoughts to Jesus. Whenever a prisoner excited her pity Marie would labor incessantly to obtain his pardon, or at least a commutation of sentence, and she generally succeeded. (Daily Picayune) This obituary further observes that “the cultivated” appreciated her skill in medicine and herbal healing; only “the ignorant attributed her success to unnatural means and held her in constant dread.” Although Asbury concurs—her spiritual advising was wholly Roman Catholic— prolific stories indicate she was widely remembered as the voodoo queen endowed with the power to produce interrupting storms (Tallant 72). Another of the conf licting obituaries declared that “with her vanishe[d] the embodiment of the fetich [sic] superstition” of “old Louisiana,” but stories of her work and life were not so easily laid to rest (New Orleans Democrat). In the New Orleans environs not only all subsequent voodoo practitioners but also all subsequent spiritual advisors enter the discursive legacy, the orature, of Laveau when they approach their work.2 The most famous late-twentieth-century heir to Laveau is Sister Helen Prejean, spiritual advisor to men on Death Row in Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola and author of her own story about that experience, Dead Man Walking.3 How she participates in the folkways evolving from the stories of Laveau and maps a spiritual territory emerging from the folkways—especially the Catholic folkways—of the place are the subjects of this essay. I argue that this local territory, inf lected by local folkways, more than any national or global reach of Prejean’s book, is the appropriate geographic scale in which to adjudicate its principles of spiritual advice. Defining the Catholic Folkways of the Place While Asbury and Tallant and some of the oral storytellers who inform them may see a need to distinguish Catholic, European-defined practice from voodoo, African-defined practice, the syncretism of voodoo ritual and belief in the Western Hemisphere is everywhere obvious, not least in the stories about Marie Laveau. Not only mutually inf luential,

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Catholicism and voodoo together shaped other systems of belief and practices of faith. One such religion, for example, is found in the woman-centered, largely African American Spiritual Churches of New Orleans ( Jacobs and Kaslow, 92). In Laveau’s role as advisor to condemned men, she was participating in—perhaps, in some cases, even initiating—a set of syncretic spiritual traditions that continued to inf luence New Orleans’ spiritual advisors through the twentieth century. Battles to control the Laveau legacy destabilize any precise political claims for her work. The period in which she visited prisoners was one of dramatic changes in New Orleans. The year 1852, assigned to the aborted hanging, was an especially traumatic one for free Creoles of color such as Laveau. In that year the 1836 partition of the city into three separate municipal districts, two Creole and one American, ended. With that reunification, free Creoles of color and slaves lost their relatively safe haven in the autonomous Creole districts. “For many years after the Civil War, creole black leaders recalled 1852 as the year of the breakdown of their sheltered and privileged order in New Orleans.”4 Circumstances of 1852 required a spiritual if not supernatural power such as that attributed to Laveau. Policing of the city also underwent peripeteic change in the years of Laveau’s prison work, seeing both the first significantly integrated police force after 1868 and a violent white reaction to that reform in the 1870s (Rousey 102,107). Stories of her building altars, hearing confessions of sins, and conducting prayers present Laveau as usurping the authority of the priests even as they recover her as a devout Catholic. Although that laudatory Daily Picayune obituary paints a sentimental tableau of nurse Laveau at the side of Pere Antoine (who died in 1828), Fray Antonio de Sedalla— popularly remembered as Pere Antoine—was himself often a renegade defying his Church superiors. He maintained power in New Orleans from 1785 to 1790, and from 1795 to 1828, by aligning himself with independent-minded laymen of St. Louis Cathedral and by offering information to the Spanish crown in exchange for the patronage of King Charles IV—even after the United States bought the Louisiana territory (Baudier 209–210, 259). Publicly, American Governor Claiborne vowed to stay out of the battle with Sedalla when, in 1805, the newly appointed pastor of the Cathedral appealed to him to oust the old priest. Privately, he wrote President Jefferson describing Sedalla as a powerful and dangerous man (258). If the young Laveau was aligned with Sedalla, then she would not have been the demure and docile Victorian female envisioned by the Picayune in 1881. She would instead have been an apprentice to a master who knew how to manipulate the

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volatile colonial situation and retain the overwhelming devotion of his frontier f lock. It can be no surprise that stories describe her as a confessor who functioned as a visible ally of condemned men rather than a conventional, veiled intermediary between God and man. As a spiritual advisor, she was not, by all accounts, a prison chaplain serving at the pleasure of Church and state. White, middle-class, a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph, Helen Prejean begins her twentieth-century Catholic practice in south Louisiana without immediate access to the creolized spiritual tradition of Laveau that she will later enter. She instead finds her place within the traditional beliefs and governing structures of the Catholic Church and the more European-inf luenced Catholic cultural practices of south Louisiana: “ ‘All New Orleans is Catholic,’ remarks a local Catholic school Principal. ‘If New Orleanians are not Catholic, they are in a sense catholic with a little ‘c’ ” (Nolan 8). The Catholic colonial heritage is everywhere obvious in New Orleans and environs. Not only do the street names evoke its presence in the city, but also its archives house the official records of the colonial enterprise, records that ref lect emergent categories of residents: “The earliest use of the term Creole [in south Louisiana] for which we have written evidence are descriptions of individual settlers in the baptismal, marriage, and death registers of the Catholic church in Mobile and New Orleans, the two main outposts of the f ledgling French colony on the Gulf Coast” (Dominguez 95). Transferal of the territory to Spain tightened the imbrication of Church and state: “I . . . appointed . . . swear before God, on the Holy Cross and on the Evangelists, to maintain and defend the mystery of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady the Virgin Mary, and the royal jurisdiction to which I appertain in virtue of my office,” intoned all public officials intending to work in the Spanish colony after 1769 (Baudier 179). Yet to attract Americans, English, and their capital, the Spanish crown held the power of its colonial Church in check (211). The official Church in New Orleans evolved in accord with the sociopolitical customs of the territory. This meant that in the nineteenth century, on the one hand, Irish, Italian, Latin American, and Spanish immigrants “drew solace from the well-rooted Catholic church in New Orleans” (Hirsch and Logsdon 91–100, 97). On the other hand, while the Church “long resisted the complete racial segregation of its congregations, ... well before the Civil War, the diocese had forbidden racial intermarriage, denied the entrance of black men into the priesthood, and implemented segregation in its schools, cemeteries, and

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lay societies.” Some churches had segregated pews, and the Church prelates were supporters of the Confederacy who sanctioned slavery (Logsdon and Bell 234). New Orleans street names do immerse residents and passers-by in a Catholic world extending from France and Spain. But in the new world, the saints—St. Ann, for example—are the addresses of New Orleanians like Laveau, whose syncretic New World spiritual practices made them pilgrimage sites. St. Louis Cathedral sheltered the obdurate and irremovable Pere Antoine who ruled by a vote of his local (male) parishioners when his church superiors, whose authority derived from the European church, would not support him. The saints of the city and the region take their meaning as well from their proximity to precolonial names such as Mississippi and Atchafalaya, as well as African diasporic names such as Angola. In the territory of the lower Mississippi River and the Atchafalaya Basin, these and innumerable other encounters have defined multiple catholicisms. Although the African American in-migrants of the Civil War and postwar nineteenth century brought with them American protestant religions, and the cosmopolitan city saw immigration from Asia, eastern Europe, and other corners of the world’s religions, it is the postcolonial resonance of those earlier colonial encounters that define the cultural conditions in which—and the field of faith on which—Laveau, then Prejean, did their work. The Place of Spiritual Advice From her home on St. Ann, Laveau visited Orleans Parish Prison a short walk away. Built in 1834, the prison remained at the site contiguous to Congo Square until well after her death in 1881. In 1895 it was moved to Tulane Avenue away from the Creole Quarter (Asbury 257). When execution was later confined to the state penal institution, any spiritual advisors for prisoners awaiting execution would have to make their way outside New Orleans to the Louisiana State Penitentiary. The first Louisiana State Penitentiary was built in 1835 in Baton Rouge, purportedly as a modern replacement for the vile jail in New Orleans. But after nine brief years of prison reform, Louisiana’s legislature—then controlled by Americans rather than Creoles— decided running a prison was too expensive. So from 1844 to 1901, except when controlled by Union troops, the prison was privately run.

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Continuing the prewar system, the black and white postwar Republican legislature contracted with former Confederate Major Samuel James to act as lessee. James “maintained for twenty-five years the most cynical, profit-oriented, and brutal prison regime in Louisiana history” (Carleton 20). Convicts’ labor was sold to build the New Orleans Pacific Railroad and levees and to work the plantations, including James’s eight-thousand-acre plantation called Angola for the African home of the slaves who once worked it. In 1901, after reports of numerous abuses, the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola was reestablished as a state-controlled institution, but one that maintained the convict lease system (Carleton 194).5 Made nationally infamous by its brutality and nationally famous by its rodeo, by the anti-death penalty work of Sister Helen Prejean, and by the social and spiritual reforms of warden Burl Cain, Angola is today the sole site of execution in Louisiana.6 Hanging at Angola was the method of execution until 1940 when the state legislature replaced it with electrocution. Then, from June of 1961, when Louisiana suspended death as a punishment, until December 14, 1983, when Robert Wayne Williams was killed by electrocution at Angola, there were no executions at the prison (DMW 18, 36, and 43).7 During that hiatus, in July 1982, Helen Prejean first drove from New Orleans to Angola to receive approval to visit Elmo Patrick Sonnier on death row, the first step toward her inheritance from Marie Laveau. Prison officials gave Sonnier the choice of designating his pen pal Sister Helen friend or spiritual advisor. His decision enabled her acquisition of intimate knowledge about sequestered execution crucial to the formation and inf luence of her opposition to the death penalty. It is the category “spiritual advisor” that drives the narrative’s plot and the political action of its author. That category also places the controversy evolving from Prejean’s spiritual advising and her written story squarely within what 1930s southern regionalist Howard Odum called folkways that circulate in the New Orleans region through stories about “Mother Laveau.” In her narrative Prejean presents herself as a recognizably religious woman. Her gender, independence from the demands and pleasures of being a wife and mother, and interpretation of Vatican II as a mandate for political action on behalf of the poor come to define how she occupies the category of spiritual advisor. Her self-definition as religious woman provokes a criticism in kind: she is a threat to the pope’s, or the priests’, or the middle-class citizenry’s, or the government’s, or the Bible’s rules; she consorts with the devil; she has romantic feelings for

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her death row advisee; she is a Communist. Prejean’s written narrative folds these folkways that arise as her work becomes public into her story, shaping their presence to her purpose. But that purpose is to demonstrate the learning curve of spiritual advising rather than to arrive precisely on a dime; multivoiced controversy, mistakes, dissent, and moral challenge are a necessary part of that long-term process. These forces keep the multiple stories within her text alive—if not altogether on their own terms, then at least in a semblance of the moral panic the topic of execution demands. Rather than following cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall in defining moral panic as a media-hyped public response in excess of the purported cause, I imagine its inverse: a necessarily acknowledged moral confusion in need of public debate and political action (Cohen; Hall et al.). While urban folkways synchronically link the stories of Laveau and Prejean, the government’s technicways of execution place the two women in the continuum of historical time and progressive innovations and thus seem to draw them apart. (Technicways are the industrial, urban, modern, standardizing practices Odum contrasted to regional folkways.) Although the technology of execution changes from the nineteenth century of Laveau to the twentieth century of Prejean, the government practice of execution also changed within the Laveau stories themselves: public chaos is said to have driven the process of hanging into seclusion in the New Orleans of 1852. This story signals a foundational alteration that reverberates from tales about Laveau to Prejean’s narrative, for the process of execution and the response of the public were thus contained. Prejean’s rhetoric often returns to this distinction between public and private, ancient and modern, punishment, so central in Michel Foucault’s familiar arguments in Discipline and Punish (1979) about controlling the subjects of the state. If execution is not excessive punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, then why is it hidden away in the bowels of death row at Angola? she asks. If it deters violent criminals, relieves the anguish of crime victims, and quells the fears of the public, why not put executions on television so that the whole of society might benefit? If the purpose of secluded execution is to shield the general public from horror, is the production of that horror—the enactment of execution—in fact for the public good? How remote should the citizenry be from punishments inf licted in their name? What are the spiritual consequences of this remoteness?

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Remoteness as defined by bioregionalists and clarified by ecological feminist Val Plumwood provides perspective on the death penalty and other public moral issues as it also speaks to the difference between the geography of Laveau’s spiritual work and of Prejean’s. Bioregionalists claim that small-scale human communities with close ecological relationships to the nonhuman (and human) world around them are in the best position to make good ecological decisions about that region. Those remote from the region are less sensitive to signals from nature and to the effects of their daily productive and consumptive habits on the region. Plumwood argues, however, that proximity to nature does not necessarily preclude insensitivity to its signals, and so spatial remoteness is not the only or the best means of understanding the term. She defines three additional kinds of remoteness: consequential remoteness (where the consequences [of actions] fall systematically on some other person or group leaving the originator unaffected), communicative remoteness (where there is poor or blocked communication with those affected . . .), and temporal remoteness (from the effect of decisions on the future). (566) If we include human relationships within our definition of ecology—as we should—then we can say that when the hanging was moved inside New Orleans Parish Prison in 1852, the public became more spatially and more communicatively remote from the consequences of official actions taken in their name. When the site of execution moved from Parish Prison to Angola, and the means of execution changed from hanging to electrocution to lethal injection, the practice of execution and its effects on a human body became increasingly remote from the citizenry of New Orleans and its environs. What was once obviously subject to urban folkways became an ever more private and remote technologically sanitary ritual. With each move, the state performed the ritual through yet more precise technicways designed to eliminate mistakes that would leave the executioners and any who witness the execution open to moral panic. Warden Frank Blackburn tells Prejean “that a guard, matching the inmate’s height and weight, does a dry run from the cell to the chair to make sure the ‘Tactical Team’ can ‘contain’ the condemned prisoner

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[still in leg irons and handcuffs] should he put up a fight” (DMW 35).8 These precautions are taken not because the prisoner is in any position to hurt anyone physically. Rather, if the prisoner could struggle free or if the method of execution failed to hide his—almost, but not always, his—pain, witnesses behind the plexiglass who came to see a man die would be wrenched from their remote position by a dead man walking.9 While those Laveau ministered to were housed and hung within her own neighborhood, Prejean’s advisees are a half-day’s drive from New Orleans in a remote location. About her first drive to Angola she writes, “I have a poor sense of direction, so I have carefully written down the route to the prison” (DMW 23). This drive takes her out of her present home in New Orleans’ St. Thomas public housing development and through a varied topography. It feels good to get out of the steamy housing project onto the open road, to see the sky and towering clouds and the blue, wide waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Highway 66, which dead-ends at the gate of the prison, snakes through the Tunica Hills . . . It is cooler and greener in the hills, and some of the branches of the trees arch across the road and bathe it in shadow. (DMW 23–24) Prejean is not exaggerating the beauty of the landscape approaching Angola; it is, for good reason, the site of J. James Audubon’s paintings of Louisiana wildlife. She relishes this physical and aesthetic distance from the New Orleans public housing development where she has been working and living, while she is also still some distance from death row within Angola. Here in Audubon country she is “close to nature” and physically remote from both St. Thomas and Angola in a way Laveau was not. But she then counters these details of spatial and (human) ecological remoteness with a willed resistance to consequential, communicative, and temporal remoteness. I think of the thousands of men who have been transported down this road since 1901, when this 18,000-acre prison was established. About 4,600 men are locked up here now, half of them, practically speaking, serving life sentences . . . In 1977 . . . the life-imprisonment statute was reformulated [in Louisiana], effectively eliminating probation, parole, or suspension of sentence. (DMW 24)10

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Unable to act as a spiritual advisor to condemned men within her neighborhood, Prejean begins here to deviate from the directions she has written down. That is, she maps what I will call a spirit region, a spatial territory within which consequential, communicative, and temporal remoteness can still be effectively resisted despite the prison’s location outside the neighborhood and even the city limits. In this newly mapped spirit region, a moral decision as grave as state-sponsored execution can best be adjudicated by the citizenry of those environs. I use the language of law and politics deliberately. Inside a consciously mapped spirit region their definitions of justice and public participation are subject to the scrutiny of principles deriving from different premises. Someone with a self-described “poor sense of direction” may seem an unlikely cartographer, but it may be just this inability to retain prescribed direction from designated authorities—be they professional cartographers, highway engineers, or governors—that enables Prejean to create a map undaunted by city, parish, or state boundaries. The subtitle of Prejean’s Dead Man Walking is An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States (emphasis mine). The book’s national and international reception and the national and global reach of Tim Robbins’s movie inspired by it leave no doubt that the book’s inf luence has been on a scale in excess of the spirit region mapped in the narrative.11 It is easy to imagine that the book has entered debates on the death penalty in every state in the United States and in most nations in the world. In fact, Prejean’s website records her global travels in the service of abolition (“Report”). E. E. Schattschneider, author of The Semisovereign People, the classic 1960 analysis of postwar U.S. democracy, would applaud Prejean’s enormous success at expanding the scope of the conf lict by gaining some control over its visibility. So I am swimming against the tide when I argue, as I emphatically want to do, that her book’s effectiveness lies not in any claims—even her claims—for a national scale or a global reach, but in its ability to map a spirit region—a literal territory— in which the moral decision can best be considered by its diverse public. Those in Iowa or Rhode Island, Israel or Indonesia, who want to replicate its impact need to recreate its cartographic work in their own territories with their own folkways and their own terrain. Otherwise, this narrative of New Orleans and environs is likely to be read only as a condescending cautionary tale. “Do WE want to sink as low as Louisiana with its debased justice system that allows corrupt governors to walk on the wild side and executes indigent prisoners?”

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Schattschneider concedes that “there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about any given scope of conf lict . . . A change of scope makes possible a new pattern of competition, a new balance of forces and a new result, but it also makes impossible a lot of other things” (17–18). While national anti-execution forces have found in Prejean, her book, Robbins’s film, an opera of her story, and a PBS documentary about that opera greater visibility for their cause (DMW opera and “And then”), I question the power of this enlarged scope and greater visibility substantially to change conditions and sustain those changes in the territory of south Louisiana in and around New Orleans. Without attention to the scale of the spirit region, we risk making a lot of important things impossible. By law, capital punishment is, of course, a state decision facilitated by rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court. Prejean’s narrative traces the decisions by the high court, by the Louisiana state legislature, and by the governor, which have enabled the reinstatement and continuation of the death penalty. Those jurisdictions matter. The authority of the court and the legislature is enacted within those federal and state territories. But as geographer Denis Wood reminds us in The Power of Maps (1992), maps construct the world; they do not reproduce it. If one wants to resist the purposes for which one map is drawn—the boundaries of Louisiana map the boundaries of an execution zone—then one must produce an alternative map drawn from a different perspective, for a different purpose. We need “dueling maps,” as Wood argues (184). Mapping the Spirit Religion The alternative map Prejean constructs is of a spirit region centrifugally capacious enough to welcome humanity—however corrupt or condemned—and yet centripetally compelling enough to demand atonement from each individual in turn. Such a space requires permeable boundaries rather than rigid and patrolled borders. The map of a spirit region creates a territory better understood if compared to a bioregion rather than a geopolitical territory such as a city, parish, state, or nationstate. In “Living by Life,” bioregionalist Jim Dodge urges readers to let definitions of bioregion emerge from practice, specifically an anarchic governing practice that he defines as “out of their control,” rather than simply outside of any controlling idea (8). The spirit region I propose draws on this idea of the impermanence and permeability of borders and the ways they emerge from practice as needed. But such a territory

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must be answerable to the questions, what is a region’s own internal logic? Who will apprehend it? Use it? And how? These questions find useful answers in Wood’s assertion that all maps are constructions by someone for a purpose and that we need to know the creators of a map and their purpose in order to read the rhetoric of the map. In Seeing Like a State (1998), political scholar James Scott conveys just how tragic the consequences can be when a society is made legible—mapped—for the purposes of social engineering. While the legibility promoted by the modern state grounds our freedoms as much as our unfreedoms, Scott argues, when we find it linked to high-modernist top-down desire, an authoritarian state determined to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society, large-scale disaster is the consequence. This formula for catastrophe applies to global capitalism as much as to any governmental state now or in the past. For anyone wishing to avoid such tragedies, the task is clear: capacitate civilians possessed of what Scott calls metis (knowledge from practical experience) and what, after Odum, I am calling regional folkways, folkways about Marie Laveau, for example. Wood does not stop in encouraging us to read official maps as constructions. He wants to inspire map-making in all of us. He distinguishes between mapping, which is the mental order that all humans must give the world, and map-making, which is a conscious effort to construct a territory of whatever scale for a specific purpose (Wood 32). Prejean engages in map-making for the purpose of defining a territory in which the most intellectually and emotionally informed consideration of the death penalty can occur. Her stories of her eyewitness experiences defy the technicways meant to keep citizens remote from state-sponsored execution. In doing so, those stories participate in the local folkways of spiritual advisors, an internal logic from which the permeable spirit region emerges. Her map also emerges, as it happens, from the internal logic of the lower-Mississippi’s hydrology, which is constantly making and rearranging south Louisiana. It is fitting for Prejean’s purposes and mine that the site where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers forces the Mississippi into the channel they have built for it and away from the Atchafalaya Basin is at Simmesport, Louisiana, on what the locals call Old River, just across from Angola. This shifting lower Mississippi region is the precarious territory on which the ecological, economic, social, political, and spiritual life of south Louisiana resides. Prejean never does actually draw the map that her stories make; what she does provide is a journal that narrativizes the map-making process.

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In another context I presume to draw and explicate the maps implied by her text (Eckstein chapter 7). But for the purposes of my argument here I will begin to lay out the conditions for the making of her maps. Three major, intersecting categories of place render the space of the spirit region visible and, in this sense, define Prejean’s map-making. One includes sites relevant to the politics of state execution: the crime scenes; death row; the offices of the Prison Coalition; the meeting rooms of the Pardon Board; the Governor’s office; and the office of a grass-roots anti-death-penalty organization at Hope House contiguous to New Orleans’ St. Thomas public housing development. The courtroom, crucial to crime drama, does not figure on Prejean’s map. Hers is not rhetoric that hinges on the law’s binary of guilt and innocence and its assertion of its power in specific jurisdictions. She meets both Sonnier and Robert Willie after they are convicted of gruesome murders and sentenced to death. She records her education in the law but is not riveted on its dichotomy. This is not a story of the innocent unjustly convicted. It is a story of the poor unjustly punished, a story with a long legacy at Angola. This is a problem solvable only through massive participation of regional citizens. She thus brackets the legal binary so as to recognize guilt and innocence in virtually everyone she encounters—including the governor, members of the parole board, and herself—in the course of her work as spiritual advisor. The second category of selection follows from the first. It includes areas of socioeconomic need within the parameters mapped by the politics of execution as she experiences them. So, St. Thomas public housing, Sonnier’s mother’s home in public housing, and Willie’s family’s working-class home are significantly located relative to the sites mapped by political execution. The absent fathers of the two condemned men—a sharecropper, a prisoner—were poorer still. The third category that defines the spirit region Prejean maps includes sites of Roman Catholic presence: the homes, offices, and meetingrooms of victims, prisoners, archbishops, the prison chaplain, the governor, the district attorney, the parole board president, economic justice workers, Prejean’s mother—virtually all the players in the drama. These three categories of place together form an internal logic and a territorial triangle from which the boundaries and purposes of Prejean’s spirit region emerge. As Prejean tells her story, she makes her map. When, in 1982, the Louisiana Coalition on Jails and Prisons sends her the name of a potential pen pal on death row, this initiation to her work with the death

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penalty is, as she tells it, an aside in the drama of her daily work at Hope House within St. Thomas. The lines of her map begin from that site. “Not death row exactly,” she says, “but close” (DMW 3). Each recollection of that first appearance of Sonnier’s name and address is juxtaposed with a paragraph about conditions for the then fourthousand-plus residents of St. Thomas. Following the 1971 synod of bishops who “declared justice a ‘constitutive’ part of the Christian gospel” and the 1980 decision of her religious order to “‘stand on the side of the poor,’” Prejean moved to 519 St. Andrew Street to join the neighborhood of St. Thomas, as Laveau lived on St. Ann among those to whom she ministered. It is not Sonnier, the Prison Coalition, or the death penalty per se that propels Prejean into a position as known spokesperson against execution; it is instead “my community’s” decision for social justice and their facilitation of her “radical” recognition that Jesus’ good news to the poor had been an admonition to resist their poverty and suffering and that his challenge to the aff luent had been “to relinquish their aff luence and share their resources” (DMW 5–6). She enters the political map of official execution through the socioeconomic map of the St. Thomas neighborhood and enters St. Thomas through the authority of Jesus and the legitimacy attached to the interacting local, national, hemispheric, and global scales of her Catholic community. Even my inchoate foray into map-making here should soon elicit from all readers the objection that Prejean is only one map-maker of New Orleans and environs. More than concede this point, I take it. Every map is not only through someone, as Wood insists, but every map, “every view, is taken from somewhere” (28). Prejean’s view begins from St. Thomas in New Orleans and rivets on the death chamber at Angola. Her public persona as a spiritual advisor rides on a current of folkways f lowing from the syncretic spiritualism of New Orleans’ Laveau. And yet her view is also from Mama’s house in Baton Rouge, the vantage point to which Prejean repeatedly returns. When, after Willie’s execution, she wants to do something “natural,” she puts on jeans and washes the car in her mother’s driveway (DMW 213). Her family home is where she stays on the days of the midnight executions. When she must leave her first advisee Sonnier or her second advisee Willie alone in their isolated cells, she can rest in her mother’s embrace. It is often through analogy with the reactions of her own mother should violence take one of her children away that Prejean imagines the anger and pain of victims’ families. Although her narrative ends where it began with the locations of the two saints, with her return to

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the families of murdered relatives at St. Thomas and other poor neighborhoods in New Orleans, and with Lloyd LeBlanc, the father of a murdered boy, at the St. Martin of Tours chapel in St. Martinville, she enters this last place through her family home in Baton Rouge. For her protection, her brother Louie accompanies her in the night drive through Acadiana to the 4 a.m. vigil at St. Martin’s (DMW 242). Prejean’s spiritual practice and her narrative work make a map that links St. Thomas to Angola, and both to St. Martinville, but the maps she makes are from her comfortable childhood home where her mother’s love waits. Her text returns repeatedly to the knowledge that this site of the protective embrace is not where her advisees at Angola, the victims’ families at St. Martinville, or her neighbors at St. Thomas reside. From their own location, these St. Thomas neighbors formed the St. Thomas Residents Council (STRC) that made a different map, one drawn from their view, out of the legacy of urban folkways, in the oldest and one of the most violent of the New Orleans public housing developments contiguous to the historic Garden District, near the port moving up-river away from the tourist sites, and in the corridor of riverside warehouse district renovation.12 The efficacy of spiritual advice depends upon such multiple mappings of local territory endowed by diverse attachments to folk legacies such as Laveau’s. Notes 1. Asbury and Tallant repeat stories of her prayers with the condemned and the altars they built together in the jail cells. For a nineteenth-century version of this story, see “The Condemned.” 2. For explanation of orature, see Joseph Roach 11–12. 3. Subsequently DMW. 4. Logsdon and Cosse Bell in Hirsch and Logsdon 201–261, 207–208. 5. In 1998 there were still eighteen hundred workers at “the [18,000-acre] farm” and wages ranged from four to twenty cents per hour (The Farm and Angola Museum). 6. The latter three circumstances have all been recorded in successful films: The Wildest Show in the South, The Farm, and Dead Man Walking. 7. The legislature reinstated the death penalty as a possible punishment in 1977. 8. We can see the practice drill in The Farm. 9. Death by lethal injection occurs in two phases. The first numbs the muscles. After that first injection, witnesses see a body completely at rest, but inside that body is suffocating. The second injection stops the heart. 10. Of the Angola inmates, 85 percent will die there (The Farm). 11. See reviews by Berry, Wills, Schroth, and Rafferty, and response by Silvio. 12. Their map-making is also explored in Eckstein.

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And Then One Night: The Making of Dead Man Walking. Dir. Linda Schaller. San Francisco: KQED, 2001. Angola Museum. http://angolamuseum.org/. Asbury, Herbert. The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld. NY: Knopf, 1936. Baudier, Roger. The Catholic Church in Louisiana. New Orleans: Louisiana Library Association, 1939. Berry, Jason. Rev. of Prejean’s Dead Man Walking. National Catholic Reporte. July 2, 1993: 9. Carleton, Mark T. Politics and Punishment: A History of the Louisiana State Penal System. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971. Cohen, Stan. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972. “The Condemned.” Daily Picayune. May 10, 1871: 2. Daily Picayune. June 17, 1881: 8. Dead Man Walking. Feature Film. Dir. Tim Robbins. Polygram Filmed Entertainment: Working Title/Havoc Production, 1995. Dead Man Walking. Opera. By Jack Heggie. Libretto by Terrence McNally. Premiered San Francisco, 2001. Dodge, Jim. “Living by Life: Some Bioregional Theory and Practice.” Home! A Bioregional Reader. Eds. Van Andrus, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1990. 5–12. Dominguez, Virginia R. White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Eckstein, Barbara. Sustaining New Orleans: Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City. New York: Routledge, 2005. The Farm: Life Inside Angola. Documentary Film. Jonathan Stack and Liz Garbus with Wilbert Rideau. Gabriel Films, 1998. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1978. Hirsch, Arnold R. and Joseph Logsdon, eds. Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Jacobs, Claude F. and Andrew J. Kaslow. The Spiritual Churches of New Orleans: Origins, Beliefs, and Rituals of an African-American Religion. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Logsdon, Joseph and Caryn Cosse Bell. “The Americanization of Black New Orleans, 1850– 1900.” In Hirsch and Logsdon. 201–261, 207–208. New Orleans Democrat. June 17, 1881. Nolan, Charles E. A History of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Strasbourg, France: Editions du Signe, 2000. Odum, Howard W. and Harry Estill Moore. American Regionalism: A Cultural–Historical Approach to National Integration. NY: Holt and Co., 1938. Plumwood, Val. “Inequality, Ecojustice, and Ecological Rationality.” Debating the Earth: the Environmental Politics Reader. Eds. John S. Dryzek and David Schlosberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 559–583.

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Prejean, Helen, C. S. J. Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States. NY: Vintage, 1993. ———. “Report from the Front.” http://www.prejean.org. Rafferty, Terrence. “Amazing Grace.” Rev. of Robbins’s Dead Man Walking. The New Yorker. January 8, 1996: 68–71. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. NY: Columbia University Press, 1996. Rousey, Dennis C. Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805–1889. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Schattschneider, E. E. The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960. Schroth, Raymond. Rev. of Prejean’s Dead Man Walking. America 18 (September 1993): 20. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Silvio, Lucy, C. S. J. “Raking in the Money?” America 8 (March 1996): 10–11. Tallant, Robert. Voodoo in New Orleans. NY: Macmillan, 1946. The Wildest Show in the South: The Angola Prison Rodeo. Documentary Film. Dir. Simeon Soffer. Gabriel Films, 2000. Wills, Garry. Rev. of Prejean’s Dead Man Walking. New York Review of Books 40 (23 September 1993): 3–4. Wood, Denis with John Fels. The Power of Maps. New York: The Guilford Press, 1992.


PA RT 3

Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries


CH A P T E R

T E N

“Reluctant Catholics”: Contemporary Irish-American Women Writers Sa l ly Ba r r E b e s t

In “Confessions of a Reluctant Catholic,” Irish-American novelist Alice McDermott describes the genesis of her narrative style and focus: “Gradually, as the pattern of my own work began to come clear, I began to understand that this repetition of what might be called Catholic themes, Catholic language, had meaning that I did not at first recognize, meaning that went far beyond matters of craft and convenience and material at hand. Gradually—no lightning bolts here—I began to realize that the language of the church, my church, was not only a means to an end in my fiction but an essential part of my own understanding of the world.” Catholicism, she continues, “was the native language of my spirit” (12–16). McDermott is not alone. Despite the United States’ reputation as a secular country, “Catholic themes, Catholic language” pervade the works of contemporary Irish-American women writers. Running throughout their novels are themes of guilt and repression, suffering and penance, transcendence and redemption, prayer and forgiveness, fatalism and free will. Why is this important? Two reasons: apart from the furor surrounding the 1963 publication of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, the contributions of contemporary Irish-American women writers have been generally overlooked. Very little has been written about the women in midcentury—McCarthy, Elizabeth Cullinan, and Maureen Howard; even less has been done on contemporary writers such as Mary Gordon,

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Alice McDermott, and Erin McGraw.1 Yet this cohort represents one half of Irish-American literature—the female half. More importantly, contemporary Irish-American women’s writing reveals their uncertain relationship with the Church. Novels of the 1960s and 1970s tend to question or reject Catholicism, whereas novels in the 1980s and 1990s increasingly reconcile those feelings—on the authors’ own terms— only to reject the Church again in the new century. Not surprisingly, these movements parallel women’s political activity within the Church, as well as its ongoing effort to deny women equal rights. In sum, the works of Irish-American women writers offer a feminist literary history of Catholicism between 1965 and 2006. In this chapter, I chart these parallels. First, I examine key works published in the 1960s and 1970s by Mary McCarthy, Maureen Howard, and Elizabeth Cullinan that exemplify women’s displeasure with or rejection of the Church. Then I discuss examples of transitional works by Mary Gordon, Joyce Carol Oates, and Alice McDermott in the last three decades of the twentieth century, which suggest a truce or tenuous return. I conclude this analysis with writers in the new millennium— McDermott, Eileen Myles, and Erin McGraw—whose novels offer alternatives to the traditional Church. Each section is contextualized with discussions of the Church’s political activities during that period, and, whenever possible, comments by the authors confirming those links between fiction and reality. Irish-American Women Writers at Mid-Century Catholic women are not generally synonymous with feminism. Indeed, this group was not involved in feminism’s first wave (1898–1920), which was closely tied to women’s suffrage, because it was “implicitly ‘anti-Catholic’” (Ruether 3). However, between 1920 and 1950 many of the Catholic lay movements “became the seedbed for the Catholic left of the 1960s, and some developed an explicitly feminist perspective.” During the 1960s and 1970s, groups such as the Grail—Catholic laywomen who believed women had the potential to change the world—and the Catholic Family Movement (CFM) sought to promote a feminist agenda along with social action. Both groups ran afoul of Church authorities. Members of the Grail were evicted from Church property; the CFM broke with the Church after the Pope reaffirmed the ban against birth control in the 1968 Humanae Vitae (Kalven 6–7). Such activities provide a context for the attitudes conveyed in the

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writings of Mary McCarthy, Maureen Howard, and Elizabeth Cullinan in the 1960s. Mary McCarthy is a logical starting point. Although McCarthy rejected the Catholic Church, she was unable to shake its tenets—a tendency characteristic of most Irish-American women writers. Stacey Lee Donohue attributes McCarthy’s conf licted attitudes, characters, and behavior to her heritage: “Mary McCarthy is identifiably a Catholic writer, writing in the Irish-American literary tradition . . . She broke away from an anti-intellectual, puritan, sexist Irish-Catholicism succeeding as a writer, participating in the sexual, political and intellectual freedom of the 1930s and 1940s, but still struggling with the Church’s restrictive definition of women, and a historically and culturally Irish fatalism” (87–88). This is most obvious in McCarthy’s most infamous work, The Group (1963), a novel that paved the way for her female successors’ entree into second-wave, twentieth-century feminism. In The Group, McCarthy explores the aspirations of seven female graduates of the Vassar class of ’31, juxtaposing what Grail cofounder Janet Kalven terms “pre-feminist” desires for a meaningful career and a happy marriage with the realities of American society in the 1930s. In the process, McCarthy introduces the reader to formerly taboo subjects such as birth control, women’s sexual pleasure, adultery, impotence, mental illness, homosexuality, spouse abuse, and the double standard. In a time when birth control had only recently been legalized, McCarthy’s characters discuss it openly. One of the males suggests it is used only by “adulteresses, mistresses, prostitutes, and the like,” as opposed to respectable married women. Although McCarthy’s alter ego, Kay, contradicts him, she is no better, declaring that “Birth control . . . was for those who know how to use it and value it—the educated classes” (75). Such a statement speaks volumes, for with it McCarthy not only takes on the Church, but the birth control movement itself, which was aimed at “controlling” the growth of the working class. Margaret Sanger maintained that “Women and men of the working class are so drained and exhausted in health and energy by their work, poor food and bad housing, that it is impossible for them to give birth to healthy offspring, thus making them unfit” (qtd. in Tobin 204). Since the majority of the working class were Catholic and thus prohibited from practicing birth control, Sanger’s arguments were viewed as a deliberate slight. The Church didn’t help dispel this misperception. During the period in which The Group occurs, contraception had just been accepted by most Christian, non-Catholic denominations. Only the Catholic

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Church refused to budge, instead issuing Casti Connubii: On Christian Marriage, which stated that “any use whatever of marriage, in the exercise of which the act by human effort is deprived of its natural power of procreating life, violates the law of God and nature, and those who do such a thing are stained by a grave and mortal f law” (qtd. in Tobin 211). In addressing this and other taboos, McCarthy effectively spat in the face of the Mother Church. Maureen Howard’s Bridgeport Bus (1961) is no less critical. Howard tells the story of thirty-five-year-old Mary Agnes Keely’s coming of age and losing her mind. The plot is framed by “Ag’s” rejection of the Church because she associates it with her hypocritical Irish Catholic mother, whom Ag has supported since high school (while her brother went off to Fordham). Because her mother has nothing better to do, most battles entail Church-related guilt. When Ag cannot attend the Novena because she has a French class, Mrs. Keeley begins a familiar refrain: “‘God knows’—she started the harangue right away—‘you were brought up a good Catholic girl, that you should choose a lot of dirty French books over your religion. And thank the good Lord’ (with a tremolo) ‘your father is not here to see you an ingrate to your mother’ ” (10). Tired of feeling belittled and ultimately betrayed by her mother, Ag moves to New York, where she finds an apartment and a job and begins a relationship with her coworker. When Ag finds herself pregnant, she returns home. As the novel ends, thirty-seven-year-old Ag has been confined to a Catholic home for wayward girls to await the birth of her illegitimate child. When she asks why she was put there, a nun tells her to “pray to God” (303). Periodically, the girls are “herded to Mass,” where altar boys cover the rail with doilies “as if the swollen penitent girls who straggled up the aisle were not quite clean” (304). Taken piece by piece, these scenes are more funny than damning; taken as a whole, however, they offer a sarcastic statement on what Howard seems to perceive as the Church’s hypocrisy and willful retreat from reality. Patricia Keefe Durso argues that Catholicism presents itself in Howard’s writing “more for mood and dramatic effect than anything else” (57). Throughout her novels, “reverence for the natural world displaces reverence for the ecclesiastical world, where parents ‘try to make Catholics’ out of their children (Before My Time 109), where children try to deal with the ‘shredded ends’ of their Catholicism as adults (Grace Abounding 32), and where, ultimately, literature and art become the new religion” (48). Elizabeth Cullinan’s novel, House of Gold (1970), similarly debunks sentimental Irish-American stereotypes: the saintly Irish Catholic


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mother (Mrs. Devlin), the willing self-immolation of a daughter (Elizabeth) to care for her widowed parent, and the self-sacrifice of children (Mothers Mary James and Helen Marie) who give their lives to the Church. As the novel opens, Mrs. Devlin is dying and her children, now grown, return to the family home. Each of them evidences the psychic damage of an overbearing, overly religious mother, but her daughters suffer the most. The eldest, Elizabeth, along with her husband and two daughters, has recently moved out of Mrs. Devlin’s home. Elizabeth feels guilty for having moved, even though she served as her mother’s housekeeper and her family had lived in Mrs. Devlin’s attic. The nuns, Mothers Mary James and Helen Marie, who entered the convent in their early teens at their mother’s bidding, are far from saintly: they cannot get along with each other but say nothing, for they have been trained to restrain their words and thoughts. To deal with such problems, Mother Mary James turns to Librium, Mother Helen Marie to sleep. Through these characters, Cullinan seems to conf late, if not equate, Mrs. Devlin’s control with the power of the Church, as evidenced in the book’s title and the inappropriate, gold-plated touches throughout the house (remnants of the Devlin’s fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration). Discussing Cullinan’s novels and short stories, Kathleen McInerney notes that “Cullinan creates narratives of constriction and containment: the voices of generations of daughters, bound by familial duty and a discourse of Catholic doctrine, are heard as they struggle to identify and escape this architecture of containment that is their inheritance” (98). Through her fictional characters, Cullinan describes the effects of the Church on a great number of Catholic women in the latter half of the twentieth century. Ambiguous Relationships With the Church During the next two decades, women increasingly clashed with—and were punished by—the Church. In a two-year period alone, the National Coalition of American Nuns publicly denounced a study by the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Pastoral Research and Practices because it refused to support the ordination of women; a young American girl took her plea to become an altar girl all the way to Rome; a woman who had administered an abortion clinic was denied a requiem mass; and priests were ordered to deny Communion to members of NOW (Seidler and Meyer 79). Sexuality has always been a

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contentious issue between women and the Church. Rosemary Radford Ruether notes that “Feminist Catholics believe that the root of this defect [in Church policy] is the view that sexuality is sinful in itself and opposed to the higher spiritual life, allowable only within heterosexual marriage for the purpose of procreation, and the concomitant view of women as a lesser form of humanity, linked with the inferiority of the body and sexuality, whose primary destiny is motherhood” (8). Many of these issues appear in Irish-American women’s novels published during the 1970s and later. Jeana DelRosso argues that these reading these novels “exposes the diverse, perhaps contradictory, almost always conf licted positions from which women write about Catholicism today, positions from which they variously view the church as vehicle of repression, of subversion, or of liberation” (12). Such contradictory positions can be traced in the novels of Mary Gordon, Joyce Carol Oates, and Alice McDermott. Mary Gordon’s Final Payments (1978) exemplifies this mixed view. After caring for her right-wing, widowed, stroke-ridden father for eleven years, Gordon’s Isabel finds herself unable to mourn his death because she’s thrilled to be free. Isabel rejects suggestions from the family lawyer that she, a college graduate, become a housekeeper. Instead, she turns to her lifelong friends, Eleanor and Liz, for advice. Unfortunately, Isabel’s immaturity and stif led sexuality make her easily seduced by Liz’s husband, and shortly thereafter she becomes involved with Hugh, another married man. When Hugh’s wife publicly exposes their affair, Isabel withdraws from her newfound life, vowing to do penance. Isabel’s guilt could be said to ref lect the Church’s view regarding extramarital or adulterous sex. At the same time, although Gordon initially personifies the Church through the character of Isabel’s tyrannical father, her novel suggests that sexuality is not sinful, for through Isabel’s explorations she finally comes of age and gains self-knowledge, in the process exploring her attitudes toward and rejection of the Church. Indeed, by the novel’s end, Gordon comes full circle. Although Isabel initially rejects religion, her indifference fades as she begins to mourn her father and finds solace in their shared faith. The Church plays a role in liberating Isabel, for she is able to leave her self-imposed exile only after visiting with her family priest, reading Holy Week prayers, and attending to the Good Friday Message. Leafing through her Missal, she finds a holy card with lines from Julian of Norwich, stating, “He said not thou shalt not be tempted/ He said not thou shalt not be troubled/ He said thou shalt not be overcome” (300). These lines


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give Isabel the courage to write to Hugh (who has left his wife) and ask him to wait for her. Susana Hoeness-Krupsaw observes that Mary Gordon writes frequently of shame and guilt as psychic artifacts of an Irish-American Catholic girlhood (202). As in Howard’s Bridgeport Bus, Gordon’s characters are often challenged by the moral issues of caring, or not caring enough, for a dying parent. Revealing ethnic and class consciousness in addition to gendered themes, Gordon’s fiction, poetry, and critical essays speak directly to the power relationships between men and women within the family and the Church, creating a vision of IrishAmerican women’s identity affirmed within communities of supportive women. Joyce Carol Oates is not generally categorized as Irish-American and her novels do not usually examine Catholic schisms between religion and sexuality. We Were the Mulvaneys (1997) is an exception. In this novel, Oates explores sexuality and redemption through a story about rape’s impact on the victim and her family. Although this novel follows several plot lines, the catalyst is Mrs. Mulvaney’s failure to fulfill her sacred obligation of motherhood by abandoning her child in order to “save” her husband from grief over their daughter’s date rape. “God help me,” he tells his wife, “I can’t bear the sight of the girl any longer” (185). So overnight, Corinne Mulvaney spirits away their seventeenyear-old daughter, abandoning her with a distant aunt, refusing to discuss the decision with her children or to allow Marianne to visit, and rarely visiting her. The punishment for the mother’s sin is suggested by the past tense title, We Were the Mulvaneys, for the family disintegrates. What makes this novel distinctly Irish-American lies not only in the mother’s punishment, but also in the abandoned daughter’s transcendence. Days after the rape, the Protestant Mrs. Mulvaney finds Marianne praying in a Catholic church. “How many hours in solitude, in St. Ann’s Church, had given her a strange stubborn placidity new to Marianne Mulvaney” (142). Because of her faith, Marianne is able to survive independently— albeit shakily—at age seventeen, slowly healing, supporting herself, and forgiving her family. Obviously, part of this stance is due to Marianne’s feelings of guilt and self-blame, but without her faith, she could easily have perished literally, through suicide, or figuratively by descending into prostitution or promiscuity. An analysis of Oates’s oeuvre suggests that faith may be a facet of a female’s inner strength, for religion per se does not play a major role in her novels. More prominent are explorations of rape’s effects on the

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victim, which in turn are related to Oates’s characterizations of the masculinity and alcoholism of her Irish-American male characters (see Lee). As one of her characters says in What I Lived For, Every Irish family knows these griefs, like a secret rosary. Every Irish family has said this rosary . . . The good girls who run off and return home pregnant and humiliated and their young lives ruined together . . . The nun, safe in the convent, who goes laughingmad and is sent back home again. The mother of six, or nine or eleven children who dies of the last-born, mother and infant burning up together in fever, given the sacrament of extreme unction by the parish priest, and buried together. Forever and ever, amen. (547) Alice McDermott is Oates’s polar opposite. Throughout most of her literary career, McDermott has focused more on faith than sexuality. Beatrice Jacobson suggests that McDermott’s use of detail could be “best described as sacramental, a trait which places her in the context of earlier Irish-American women writers . . . Just as the Catholic tradition of sacramentals imbues objects with religious function, so early Irish-American women writers linked objects to faith, to the spiritual world” (125). In McDermott’s award-winning Charming Billy, for example, the repeated lifting of the drunken Billy by his cousin Dennis and his wife Maeve resembles the care of the dead Christ by the apostles and Mary. Moreover, Billy’s alcoholism is linked to his religion. He seeks out bars as avidly as he seeks out churches, but even bars become sacred sites where he connects with his past love and with his faith (127). Running throughout this 1998 novel is the overriding theme of faith. Just as Billy clings to his faith to assuage the loss of his fiancé, Dennis turns to the Church when his wife is dying, as does his mother on her deathbed. In the novel’s closing pages, the narrator explains, “Their faith—all of them, I suppose—was no less keen than their suspicion that in the end they might be proven wrong. And their certainty that they would continue to believe anyway” (280). That statement seems to ref lect McDermott’s attitude toward the Church. As she says in “Confessions of a Reluctant Catholic,” her spiritual life has been comprised of years of “semi-indifference, occasional rejection, political objection, and unshakable associations” (13). Events of the early twenty-first century only reinforced those feelings.


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Moving Away From the Church The late 1980s marked a significant change in Church policy. Whereas the 1960s and 1970s saw conf lict resulting in a degree of progressive change, Pope John Paul II’s support of the “traditionalist countermovement” effectively put a halt to it (Seidler and Meyer 162). John Paul disapproved the ordination of women, banned female altar girls, reiterated the ban on birth control, decided the Vatican would develop a new constitution governing convents based on a sixteenth-century rule, and threatened to expel nuns who had publicly supported abortion (163). Such statements angered and alienated many women. In her chronicle of “American Catholic Feminism,” Rosemary Radford Ruether describes the results: “Although the official Church has seemed more determined than ever to deny the feminist critique on issues of sexuality and ministry, the vehemence with which the Vatican seeks to silence such questions itself points to the actual success of Catholic feminism in gaining a wide and sympathetic audience for its issues among American Catholics” (11). By century’s end the Church’s intransigence resulted in a concomitant resistance from the women it affected. These movements can be traced in the novels and short stories of Alice McDermott, Eileen Myles, and Erin McGraw. Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy stands in stark contrast to her subsequent novel, Child of My Heart (2002). Written in the aftermath of the 9/11 bombings, faith nurtured by the Irish-American community has been rejected for self reliance, mysticism, and respect for nature. Yet in some ways, the novel retains traditional thematic characteristics. A modern-day bildungsroman, it traces the coming-of-age of teenager Theresa, attained by losing her virginity and her young cousin, Daisy, in a single summer. Whereas Charming Billy is set in Manhattan, Child of My Heart moves to the Hamptons. There is no sense of community in this WASP enclave; indeed, Theresa’s parents have moved there specifically so she can marry into the upper class. Because this is an alien social milieu and her parents commute daily to the city, Theresa feels abandoned; she lacks teenage companions and seems displaced in this rural, albeit beautiful setting, which stands in stark contrast to the prevailing theme of death. Unlike Charming Billy, here death is presented not as a cause for celebration of the afterlife, but as stark and inevitable. After one of the neighbors’ cats, Curly, is killed, Theresa recalls, “It was not Curly anymore, that lifeless thing Debbie had cradled, not in my recollection of

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it. It was the worst thing. It was what I was up against” (169). Recounting her role as Macduff in her parochial school’s production of Macbeth, Theresa explains that although the nun “‘kept yelling at me to wring my hands . . . to get all pop-eyed when he hears about his family,’” she didn’t. “‘I just said it like it was something he always knew was going to happen. I just said’—I give a kind of nod, as I had done that night on the stage— ‘All my pretty ones.’ I said, ‘Heaven looked on, and would not take their part’—not a question, like he always knew” (172). Nor does Daisy’s death lead to ref lections on eternal life; rather, ref lecting on its imminence, Theresa has “a f lash of black anger that suddenly made me want to kick those damn cats off the bed and banish every parable, every song, every story ever told, even by me, about children who never returned” (179). In sum, nature has supplanted religion, and love and morality have been displaced by dispassionate curiosity, if not cynicism. In her analysis of the novel, Jacobson observes that Theresa decides to give up her virginity to an older, married artist “with deliberation, not the passion typical of such trysts. Almost devoid of desire, Theresa understands the sex act as key to her survival as a person and as an artist. Sexual agency—not seduction or submission—will enable her to survive emotionally and artistically” (134). When they finish, Theresa gets up and dresses as the artist watches. “Although I can hardly see you, from here, without my glasses, I suspect you’re beautiful, standing there,” he says, to which she replies: “Back to my work,” and walks out (226). In contrast, Eileen Myles remains identifiably Irish Catholic. Her best-known novel, Cool for You, is set in a Boston peopled by IrishAmerican citizens. In a scattershot style, Myles touches on various examples of the mistreatment of women—nuns, young girls, elderly ladies, her grandmother, herself—by the males in her life and the masculine hierarchy of the Church. “I’ve often thought of a female Christ,” she writes. “Mostly the world can’t take it . . . because of what a meaningless display female suffering simply is. If you belittle us in school, treat us like slaves at home and finally, if you get a woman alone in bed just tell her she’s all wrong, no matter what sex you are. . . . I mean if that’s the way it usually goes for this girl what would be the point in seeing her half nude and nailed up? Where’s the contradiction? Could that drive the culture for 2,000 years? No way. Female suffering must be hidden, or nothing can work. It’s a man’s world and a girl on a cross would be like seeing a dead animal in a trap” (15–16). In its straightforward style and message, this novel/memoir—like its characters—ref lects the changing times. Just as the Irish Catholic


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neighborhoods of the 1950s and 1960s gradually shifted and changed shape and texture, Myles’s work is a hybrid genre, mixing fiction, poetry, autobiography, and memoir (Kremins 190). But Myles goes even further. She may be the first Irish-American woman writer to exit the closet in print. Cool for You (2000), a nonfiction novel, traces her coming of age amidst growing recognition of her sexual preferences. Erin McGraw takes yet another approach. In her second book of short stories, Lies of the Saints (1996), McGraw raised questions about faith, vacillating yet ultimately affirming the need for it. But McGraw’s stance changes in the twenty-first century. Her novel, The Baby Tree, ref lects many women’s disappointment in the Church. The protagonist, Kate Gussey, is a pro-choice Methodist minister living with her second husband in southern Indiana. Obviously, Kate’s character is designed to make a political statement. If she were Catholic, she couldn’t be a priest, divorced, or remarried, nor could she be openly pro-choice. “But at a practical level,” McGraw explains, I made Kate a Methodist minister because I wanted to write about a woman in ministry. As it happens, I think the Church’s position on the ordination is about as wrong-headed as most of its social positions, but I was less concerned about the book making a statement than having the opportunity to explore some issues. The Methodist church was the first to ordain women (in the 1930s), and the Methodist position on abortion is explicitly pro-choice. (McGraw interview) Still, this is no diatribe. Although McGraw uses the novel as a vehicle to point out the inequities of the Church’s restrictions, she does not neglect to detail the challenges and frustrations engendered (pun intended) by change. The plot revolves around three seemingly unrelated subplots, each of which is complicated by and ultimately intertwined around a single issue: abortion. As pastor, Kate feels it her duty to take in Mindy, a pregnant teen kicked out by her parents. At the same time, Kate’s husband, Ned, has invited Kate’s newly arrived ex-husband Bill-o to stay with them in the parsonage until his new house is built. Meanwhile, an ultraconservative fundamentalist group—the Sanctuary Christians— has decided it’s their duty to question the existence and beliefs of a female minister and if possible, lure away Kate’s congregation. Throughout the novel, Kate’s inner turmoil is foregrounded. When she learns that her ex-husband fathered Mindy’s child, she knows the

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girl will receive neither psychological nor financial support. Consequently, rather than continuing to ignore the girl’s blithe platitudes about her child’s future, she begins hammering home the realities and responsibilities of motherhood: prenatal nutrition, colic, tardy development, juvenile delinquency, the “money, the plans, the youth slipping daily away” (186). Finally, Mindy makes her decision: “What else can I do? It’s sad, but like you keep saying, I’m not ready for this” (187). Once Mindy decides to abort her pregnancy, Kate supports her. She drives Mindy to the clinic, signs her in, and sits with her. But as they converse, the girl admits she’s there because of the baby’s father: “It isn’t that he doesn’t want a baby; this just isn’t the time,” she tells Kate. “A baby now would bring us unhappiness . . . It may not seem like it to some, but coming here [to the clinic] is our stake in tomorrow. . . . He said I could think of it as the path to our future” (195). Mindy has not made this choice; the baby’s father has coerced it. With this knowledge, Kate switches gears. “Put your pants on,” she tells Mindy. “If you knew what you were doing, you’d be crying now, hating me. You’d be hating Bill-o too, or at least you wouldn’t be loving him. You need to wait. You need to remember what you’re doing” (196). As the book concludes, Mindy, who has had time to make her own choices, decides to have her baby adopted. And Kate, who has allowed both of her husbands to deny her motherhood, independently decides to adopt Mindy’s baby. Although the “abortion plot” drives the action, this multilayered novel takes pains to detail the depth and breadth, the frustrations and challenges of a pastor’s duties to show that women can be married and serve the church. *

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Taking a variety of narrative approaches, Irish-American women’s novels raise issues common to contemporary women in the Catholic Church. They feature female protagonists coming of age despite, and often in defiance of, traditional expectations regarding a woman’s “role.” They decry sexism, alcoholism, violence, and abuse. They promote independence yet reiterate the importance of motherhood. They emphasize the strength that comes from family, friends, and community. They show the rise and warn us of the fall of feminism. In the process, they strip away the anachronistic dichotomies that have long


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stereotyped women. No longer Madonna or whore, seductress or worthless hag, lover or mother, women in these novels are complex individuals to be reckoned with. They point out the Church’s weaknesses in dealing with women while they remind us of the need for faith. Will it continue? In 2002, a three-year study of American Catholics conducted by Commonweal and the Faith & Reason Institute concluded that “young adult Catholic women are trending Democratic, lured partly by moral-cultural liberalism (‘choice’ in reproductive and lifestyle matters) as well as the old lunch-bucket liberalism” (Bole 16). In 2003, Commonweal reported that “Reliable surveys of U.S. Catholic public opinion show that an overwhelming majority of Catholics ignore the teaching on birth control, that a sizable majority favor an end to a mandatory celibate priesthood—usually around 65 to 70 percent—and that a similar number are open to considering women in the ministry” (Lakeland 14). In a 2004 survey, approximately 60 percent of voting Catholics “agreed that abortion should be legal under some or all circumstances,” 75 percent rejected the view that “Catholics have a religious obligation to vote against pro-choice candidates,” and 78 percent disagreed with the church opinion that “Communion should be denied to Catholic politicians who support abortion’s legality” (DiIulio 11). Most recently, a survey by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) found that whereas “only 30 percent of Catholics go to Mass . . . most Catholic [college] students choose not to participate in Catholic life” (Reidy 15). This cohort seems more congruent with the views of twenty-first century IrishAmerican women writers. While they are not an inclusive list, Alice McDermott, Eileen Myles, and Erin McGraw are representative of the genre. And they do not factor the Catholic Church into their characters’ lives. Like many Catholic women, Grail cofounder Janet Kalven has left the Church; nevertheless, she remains cautiously optimistic: “I see hopeful signs of new life everywhere, significant, widespread changes of consciousness. Perhaps we will achieve a critical mass—the hundredth monkey—that will tip the balance in Church and society toward a profound transformation. Perhaps a new religion will grow out of the present ferment. In the meantime, I have my feminist support and action groups” (45). Whatever happens, Irish-American women writers will continue providing a feminist literary history of these changes.

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1. Charles Fanning’s first and second editions of The Irish Voice in America introduce approximately fifteen contemporary Irish-American women writers; in Catriona Maloney and Helen Thompson’s Irish Women Writers Speak Out, four of the seventeen authors are Irish-American. Only Caledonia Kearns’ anthologies, Cabbage and Bones and Motherland, and Sally Barr Ebest and Kathleen McInerney’s collection of critical essays, Too Smart to be Sentimental, focus solely on Irish-American women.

Works Cited Bole, William. “Communitarian Lite: American Catholics & Their Politics.” Commonweal (September 13, 2002): 12–16. Cullinan, Elizabeth. House of Gold. Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1970. DelRosso, Jeana. Writing Catholic Women: Contemporary International Catholic Girlhood Narratives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. DiIulio, John J. Jr. “The Catholic Voter.” Commonweal (March 24, 2006): 10–12. Donohue, Stacy Lee. “The Reluctant Radical: The Irish-Catholic Element.” Twenty-four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy. Eve Stwertka and Margo Viscusi. Westport, CO: Greenwood P, 1996. 87–99. Durso, Patricia Keefe. “Maureen Howard’s ‘Landscapes of Memory.’ ” Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish-American Women Writers. Eds. Sally Barr Ebest and Kathleen McInerney. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame UP, 2007. 52–80. Fanning, Charles. The Irish Voice in America. Lexington, KY: U of Kentucky P, 1999. Gordon, Mary. Final Payments. New York: Ballantine Books, 1978. Hoeness-Krupsaw, Susana. “The World of Mary Gordon: Writing From ‘the Other Side.’ ” Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish-American Women Writers. Eds. Sally Barr Ebest and Kathleen McInerney. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame UP, 2007. 201–219. Howard, Maureen. Bridgeport Bus. New York: Penguin, 1961. Jacobson, Beatrice. “Alice McDermott’s Narrators.” Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish-American Women Writers. Eds. Sally Barr Ebest and Kathleen McInerney. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame UP, 2007. 116–135. Kalven, Janet. “Feminism and Catholicism.” Reconciling Catholicism and Feminism? Eds. Sally Barr Ebest and Ron Ebest. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame UP, 2003. 32–46. Kearns, Caledonia. Cabbage and Bones. New York: Holt, 1997. ———. Motherland. New York: Wm. Morrow, 1999. Kremins, Kathleen. “Blurring Boundaries: Eileen Myles and the Irish-American Identity.” Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish-American Women Writers. Eds. Sally Barr Ebest and Kathleen McInerney. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame UP, 2007. 189–198. Lakeland, Paul. “Consulting the Laity.” Commonweal ( June 6, 2003): 14–15. Maloney, Catriona and Helen Thompson. Irish Women Writers Speak Out. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2003. McCarthy, Mary. The Group. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1963. McDermott, Alice. Charming Billy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. ———. “Confessions of a Reluctant Catholic.” Commonweal (February 22, 2000): 12–16. ———. Child of My Heart. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. McGraw, Erin. Lies of the Saints. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996.


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———. The Baby Tree. Ashland, OR: Storyline P, 2002. ———. E-mail Interview. June 29, 2004. McInerney, Kathleen. “ ‘Forget About Being Irish’: Family, Transgression, and Identity in the Fiction of Elizabeth Cullinan.” Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish-American Women Writers. Eds. Sally Barr Ebest and Kathleen McInerney. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame UP, 2007. 97–115. Oates, Joyce Carol. What I Lived For. New York: Signet, 1994. ———. We Were the Mulvaneys. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1996. Radford Ruether, Rosemary. “American Catholic Feminism: A History.” In Ebest and Ebest. 3–12. Reidy, Maurice Timothy. “Catholicism on Campus.” Commonweal (April 4, 2006): 10–15. Seidler, John and Katherine Meyer. Conflict & Change in the Catholic Church. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1989. Tobin, Kathleen A. “Catholicism and the Contraceptive Debate, 1914–1930.” In Ebest and Ebest. 202–216.


CH A P T E R

E L E V E N

Marie-Claire Blais Revises John Keats: Sadean Moments and Anti-Catholic Sentiment in Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel B e n P. Robe rt s on

How shocking oh Lord how shocking. —Grand-mère Antoinette, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel,1 published in 1965 by Canadian author Marie-Claire Blais, depicts a decidedly bleak view of human existence. Blais creates a Gothic world dominated by darkness, cold, and transgressive behavior, and her characters must strive selfishly for the freedom simply to exist. The book opens just after Emmanuel’s birth on a bleak winter day in a dark world that must be Blais’s native Québec.2 The focus of the text shifts quickly toward three of Emmanuel’s siblings, Jean-le-Maigre (Skinny John), le Septième (meaning the seventh because he is the seventh child; his name actually is Fortuné), and Héloïse. As Blais follows their lives, she confronts several forms of sexuality, from Jean-le-Maigre’s incestuous involvement with his brother to Heloïse’s autoeroticism in a convent. At key points in the narrative, Blais creates deliberately provocative moments that critique the Catholic Church’s repression of sexuality in Québec in the 1960s. I refer to these provocative moments as Sadean moments because they

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draw from the tradition cultivated by the Marquis de Sade in the late eighteenth century. Additionally, these moments likely are inspired also by the poet John Keats, whose life parallels that of Jean-le-Maigre and whose poetry, at times, exhibits the same kind of Gothic morbidity that Blais wishes to evoke. In provoking readers with Sadean moments, Blais manages to challenge the hegemony of Catholicism in Québec while creating a type of writing grounded in the experience of being a native of Québec. The literature of Québec offers unique opportunities for trans-Atlantic study. The province retains a long tradition of cultural connection with France while remaining connected with English-speaking Canada and Britain and simultaneously acting as neighbor to the United States. The conf luence of cultures in Canada has increased the difficulty for the writer who wishes to create uniquely Canadian literature. As critic David Stouck comments, “Living in the shadow of two strongly-defined cultures, English and American (not to mention the effect of France on Quebec), Canadian artists have always been highly self-conscious of their cultural limitations and their relative insignificance in the international context” (22). Stouck’s parenthetical mention of Québec illustrates the additional challenge of the Québécois writer, whose task proves even more difficult than that of his or her English-speaking Canadian counterparts. The creation—or further development—of a uniquely Québécois literature proves nearly impossible. Jan Gordon comments that France and the United States are “the two countries to which the Quebecois doubtlessly feel the attractions and repulsions of dependency” (481). She goes on to state that “[n]either the writer nor the country can discover who they are independently of a derivative existence” (481). Marie-Claire Blais certainly felt those attractions and repulsions. Indeed, she lived in France for a year in 1961 (and lived there again in the early 1970s), and as she wrote Une saison, she was living in Wellf leet, Massachusetts, where she stayed several years. In the United States, Blais felt more liberated as a writer. Despite progressive changes in Québec, she still felt constrained by traditional Québécois values, and the United States offered her a more amenable—and less Catholic—atmosphere in which to write. Though self-exiled from her home province while writing Une saison, she continued to read the work of her fellow Québécois writers while she also perused the writings of such authors as Proust, Balzac, Camus, Gide, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Kaf ka, James, Woolf, Faulkner, and T. Mann.3 An avid reader, Blais certainly also was familiar with the Marquis de Sade and with John Keats. By the time she wrote Une saison, Keats had

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a long-standing reputation as a major British Romantic poet, and de Sade finally was receiving serious critical attention from writers such as the French theorist Simone de Beauvoir. Consequently, Blais may have borrowed directly from de Sade and Keats as she wrote her novel, and even if she did not, she certainly borrowed from the literary traditions that de Sade and Keats helped to develop. Une saison is, perhaps inevitably, a literary descendant of French and British Gothic literature. Blais did not imitate her predecessors. Instead, she appropriated elements of French and British literature to construct a novel that is uniquely Québécois through its use of Sadean techniques that rewrite the Keatsian tradition in Blais’s own terms.4 To construct the Québécois novel, Blais paradoxically relied on precedents from France and England while simultaneously challenging the power of an institution that may be cast as representative of those same precedents—the Catholic Church. Blais’s early years had been inf lected strongly by Catholic dogma. In her own words, “I . . . was educated at convent schools where, as a boarder, I was subject to stricter discipline than the day students. I began to write stories at about the age of ten but since I was discouraged from it and even punished for it, I felt guilty about my imaginary world” (Wakeman 163). The early Catholic-inspired guilt over her role as a writer, combined with an emerging lesbian identity that she openly acknowledged and that the Church condemned, would have been enough to inspire Blais to react against Catholicism in her writing. As she admitted in an interview with Barry Callaghan in 1965, “I want to be free of such things, what you call systems” (Callaghan 32). However, the contemporary intellectual climate of Québec also gave impetus to Blais’s antiCatholic stance. During the mid-1960s, Québécois attitudes shifted toward liberal sensibilities as part of the Quiet Revolution (la révolution tranquille) that accompanied the leadership of Prime Minister Jean Lesage. In The History of Canada, Kenneth McNaught refers to the Quiet Revolution as “a revolution [. . .] against both American and English-speaking Canadian economic and cultural domination,” and he characterizes the movement as involving “modernizing reforms in education, limitations on the inf luence of the clergy . . . and clear intimation of still wider use of state powers to achieve French-Canadian aspirations” (298, 305–306). In short, the Quiet Revolution encompassed more than just embracing liberal attitudes. It also included nationalistic—separatist—attitudes that would encourage writers like Blais to attempt to write novels that were uniquely Québécois.5

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Although Blais wrote Une saison in the United States, she remained aware of the political and cultural situation in her home province, where the hegemony of the Catholic Church finally faced serious opposition. As Mary Jean Green, one of Blais’s biographers, describes the climate before the revolution, “In a French-speaking Canadian province dominated by a rigid and monolithic Catholic church, writers were censored, and all expressions of sexuality were strictly repressed” (2). Critic Claude Racine notices a fear of sexuality in Québécois literature, while Blais scholar Jan Gordon analyzes the situation in Puritan terms to comment that “the representatives of Catholicism in Blais’s fiction constantly cite a healthy sex urge as ‘evidence’ of man’s depravity” (Gordon 469). Blais found the censorship unbearable and participated in the revolutionary movement in Québec by insisting on the exploration of sexual issues in her novels.6 Indeed, as Nicole Brossard has noticed, Blais goes so far as to make the very act of writing a sexually charged activity in Une saison (137). The Church—and the associated censorship that it encourages in Une saison—represents the literary dependence on French, British, and perhaps even American models that a Québécois writer experiences. Writing in 1986, literary theorist Fredric Jameson suggested that all “Third World” literature may be read as national allegory (65–88). Although Québec definitely does not qualify as a so-called Third World country, the Québécois tendency toward nationalistic thinking does create parallels between the literature of Québec and that of the Third World. The traditional, conservative Catholic education of Québec privileged an agricultural existence that revered clerical authority and eschewed industrialization. Lucien Goldmann argues that “cette education a maintenu les Canadiens-français dans un état d’arriération et d’infériorité non seulement économiques et sociales, mais aussi intellectuelles, créant ainsi une situation d’oppression quasi coloniale [this education maintained French-Canadians in a state of backwardness and inferiority, not only in economic and social terms, but also in intellectual terms, thus creating a quasi-colonial situation of oppression]” (402). The quasi-colonialism that Goldmann recognizes in Québec encouraged writers to create the same kind of national allegory that Jameson discusses. Hence, for Blais, to challenge the Catholic Church is to challenge, symbolically, the tradition of dependence on literary models from other countries and from English-speaking Canada. The mere act of writing about sexuality makes Blais’s novel transgressive,7 but Blais takes her transgression a step further to write about sexuality in relation to the Church and to inf lect that sexuality


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with a degree of perversity that might shock many readers. Hence, although Québec’s religious traditions provided significant obstacles to Blais through oppressive restrictions, Catholicism actually empowered her as a writer, for it gave her an ideology against which she could react, knowing that most of her readers in her home province would be of Catholic backgrounds. When Blais dares to mix the sexual and the religious, she follows a precedent set forth by the Marquis de Sade. Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised (1791) provides a fine example of de Sade’s own daring. In Justine, sexual perversion in religious contexts becomes a carnivalesque celebration of the grotesque. Indeed, de Sade subjects his readers to such an extent of grotesqueness that Justine ceases to be a serious novel and becomes, instead, a desensitizing, dark comedy that depicts a series of caricatures rather than human beings.8 Reading de Sade’s Justine can be a difficult experience, for de Sade subjects the title character to one sexual degradation after another, involving urination, whipping, blood-letting, forced sodomy, coprophagy, and a host of other activities that the Church would condemn as perverse. De Sade is at his most transgressive when he makes representatives of the Church the perpetrators of these perversities. One of the best-known examples from the book involves the Benedictine monastery of Saint Mary-in-the-Wood. Here, four monks—Sévérino, Clément, Antonin, and Jérôme—hold women captive to be subjected to an endless string of atrocities. Justine eventually escapes, but only after months of pain and suffering. De Sade is relentless, and his text has a numbing effect on the reader. The effect is intentional, as evidenced by Clément’s comment to Justine, “[L]et us accustom ourselves to evil and it will not be long before we find it charming.”9 Readers are unlikely to find de Sade’s work charming once they have reached the end, but they may see value in the text as an experiment in the effects of shock. Blais was not interested in duplicating the numbing effects that de Sade’s works evoke. However, the plot of Une saison does suggest that she wished to elicit an analogous sense of shock at certain moments in her narrative—Sadean moments. Supported by such moments for effect, Blais’s deliberately provocative stance moves beyond merely opposing Catholic restrictions and addresses specifically gender-based limits placed on the female author. Critic Karen Gould writes that Blais is “preoccupied with the problems of censorship, repression, and silence, which confront women, in general, and the female artist, in particular” (15). While the Catholic Church restricted expressions of sexuality in the works of male authors, a woman’s writing about sexuality was

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doubly transgressive, and for her to write about feminine sexuality overran the bounds of propriety so far that the author’s work might simply be dismissed as worthless trash. Blais refused to adhere to the restrictions. In Une saison, she confronts both male and female sexuality, and she even empowers Héloïse by allowing her sexual pleasure without the participation of a man. However, Blais also captures the sense of despair that accompanies the modern, unrestricted existence that she creates. After all, for characters like Jean-le-Maigre and Héloïse, sexuality is not an expression of love or pleasure, but a cry for help, an expression of existential angst. Arnold Davidson suggests that when Blais writes, she “exhibits a grimly dark and gothic vision,” and Jan Gordon captures the pain of Blais’s characters with her comment, “Not one of her novels lacks a bedridden youth, a parent being eaten away by cancer, or prolonged bouts of vomiting.”10 Indeed, the grimness of Blais’s world in Une saison is as unrelenting as de Sade’s seemingly unending series of narrative shocks in Justine. The difference between the two is that Blais pushes her narrative to the level of shocking her readers only occasionally, never quite reaches the level of shock to which de Sade aspires, and does not attempt to maintain a sustained sense of shock over many pages of the narrative. Within Une saison, the Sadean moments can be grouped roughly into three increasingly transgressive categories: moments associated with Emmanuel’s family life, moments associated with Héloïse and the convent, and moments associated with Frère Théodule. Blais constructs the fewest Sadean moments related to Emmanuel’s family life. The family members, demoralized by their meager existence, subconsciouly—or perhaps even consciously—realize their own status as trapped beings in a hopeless world. To emphasize the family’s hopelessness, Blais treats these Sadean moments with a f lippancy that tends to de-emphasize their importance in the narrative. For example, Emmanuel is a nightly witness to his mother’s rape by his father. The narrator describes the father as “the giant intruder who raped his mother every night, as she lay moaning in a gentle whisper, ‘Please, the children are listening . . .’ ” (102). Granted, given Emmanuel’s ignorance of sexuality, his viewpoint may be tainted, especially since he views his father with fear. Any young child might mistake the sexual act for some type of attack. However, the grimness of the rest of the tale suggests that Blais’s choice of the word rape is deliberately provocative, and the passage, coming immediately after a description of Emmanuel’s breast feeding and his being held “in the silent sheltering wing of sleep” (101), may be classified as a Sadean moment, given


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the mild shock Blais administers to her readers with the unexpected introduction of the word rape. A similar Sadean moment occurs earlier in the text in a scene in which Jean-le-Maigre and le Septième battle the cold and a lice infestation as they attempt to fall asleep for the night. Le Septième finally manages to doze for a few moments until he feels Jean-le-Maigre’s knee “sliding between his legs” (38). Suddenly, the text erupts into a frenzy of adolescent lust coupled with religious references: “ ‘It would be best if we confessed right away, tomorrow morning,’ Number Seven [le Septième] commented, hurriedly removing his shirt while Jean-Le Maigre was pushing Pomme [one of their other brothers] over to the other side of the bed” (38–39). Jean-le-Maigre refers to their sexual activity as a “bad habit” and “debauchery” (39–40), and both boys are especially concerned that they need to confess their sin. However, their motivation for confessing is not to assuage guilt and receive absolution, but rather to relish the retelling of the act: “ ‘We’ll go and confess as soon as day breaks,’ Jean-Le Maigre said, his mouth already watering at the idea of telling the Curé his sins” (39). Indeed, after le Septième’s “last moist caress f low[s] over his fingers,” Jean-le-Maigre insists that they “pay a visit to somebody virtuous” since they are unable to go to confession at the moment (40). They sneak upstairs to visit their sister Héloïse, who is now living at home after having been sent away from the convent. The brothers’ nighttime visit to Héloïse becomes the catalyst for another Sadean moment and inaugurates the second category of Sadean moments—those associated with Héloïse and the convent. Ostensibly, the brothers wish to see an example of piety, but the true reason for the visit may be to determine whether, as le Septième suggests, Héloïse sleeps in “her convent shift . . . with her cross on her chest,” or whether, as Jean-le-Maigre has speculated, “she sleeps with nothing on at all” (37). The boys are delighted to find that Héloïse is no more pious than they are. Jean-le-Maigre relates Blais’s first Sadean moment involving Héloïse when he comments, “[M]y brother and I were very surprised, and happy to be so, when we discovered that our sister was doing on her own what we ourselves like to do together, or with our two brothers when Alexis and Pomme are awake” (41). Héloïse lives upstairs, where she supposedly meditates and fasts all day apart from the rest of the family. The revelation that she is masturbating, however, constitutes another of Blais’s shocking moments that challenges the Catholic Church’s interdictions on autoerotic activity and, in more general terms, on discussions and descriptions of sexuality. Moreover, Héloïse’s

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association with the convent makes this moment even more transgressive on Blais’s part than the moments involving the mother and father and Jean-le-Maigre and le Septième. As the narrative unfolds, Blais reveals that Héloïse now lives at home because the Mother Superior caught her masturbating within the sacred precincts of the convent itself. Banished from the convent, the girl continues her autoerotic activities at home, but they have become less gratifying. Blais describes Héloïse with grim humor: “She had stripped herself of all her clothes in preparation for this rite; but inspired by some ceremonial sense of modesty, she had neglected to remove her black stockings, which were still held in place by two elastic bands that made scarlet circles around her long thin thighs” (79). For Héloïse, the solitary sexual activity is a rite, a ceremony. She performs it seemingly out of a twisted sense of duty rather than as a result of the desire for pleasure. Indeed, Blais once again uses the word rape—this time to describe Héloïse’s fantasized partner—and she relates Héloïse’s fantasies in a passage tinged with violence. Héloïse’s lust for a young priest, for Sister Saint-Georges, and for Mother Gabriel-des-Anges constitutes further transgression and thus reinforces Blais’s own rebellion against Catholicism within the text. The rebellious nature of Une saison is compounded later when Blais decides to place Héloïse in a brothel. Initially, Héloïse has some difficulty acclimating to the new environment, and Blais takes advantage of the situation to develop another Sadean moment. As the narrator notes, “Héloïse decided to take down the lascivious photographs that had been hung all over the walls of her room . . . [S]he had a feeling that it would be better to replace these pictures with the crucifix from her convent cell” (115). The brothel keeper, Mme Octavie, is horrified, and although she returns the photographs to their proper places on the wall, she does not touch the crucifix beside them. Blais’s juxtaposition of crucifix and pornography makes a clear statement of protest over the Church’s repression of sexuality in Québec of the 1960s. She takes her protest further to suggest little difference between the convent and the brothel: “Ardent and incurable in her passions, Héloïse did honor to Mme Octavie, who, although she had announced with pride that she wanted no convent girls in her house, had in fact filled it almost with nothing else” (117). The implications of such a statement are far from positive for the Catholic Church. While it may seem that Blais hardly could have been more scathing than she was in her depiction of Héloïse in the brothel, her treatment of Frère Théodule is even more damning. As a member of the clergy,


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Théodule should be the epitome of piety. He is, instead, the opposite, a pedophile who preys on the local youth. Even his family name, Crapula, is meant to evoke the French word crapule, which denotes a debauched scoundrel (Viswanathan 757). Théodule first appears in chapter four, after Jean-le-Maigre has been sent to the Noviciat. The narrator states that “the Devil began to appear to Jean-Le Maigre, cautiously at first, then more and more often. He came in through the dormitory windows, stepping out of the moonlight, wearing his black robe, his fur hat down over his forehead, his muddy shoes held in his hand” (49–50). The Devil then slips into Jean-le-Maigre’s bed. In another Sadean moment, which introduces the third and most transgressive category of such moments, Blais bluntly reveals his identity: “Seen by the light of day, the Devil was none other than Frère Théodule” (50). As if the hopelessness of his existence were not enough, Jean-le-Maigre must endure molestation. From this point forward in the narrative, Blais casts Théodule as a vile, malicious, predatory creature. He is, according to biographer Mary Jean Green, “a victim of a celibate institution that attempts to suppress sexuality” (22), but he also is one of the many priests who, to use the critic Jan Gordon’s words, “stalk almost all of Marie-Claire Blais’s novels” (470). Théodule not only engages in sexual activity with the boys of the Noviciat, but as director of the infirmary, he also secretly experiments upon them, and his experiments sometimes result in death. He takes perverse pleasure in perusing Jean-le-Maigre’s writing and in providing for the boy’s medical needs. Although Jean-le-Maigre is dying of consumption anyway, Blais surrounds the circumstances of his death with a vagueness that could suggest that Théodule kills him as he has many other boys. Sadly, Théodule does not grieve but continues his predatory activities. He eventually is expelled from the Noviciat when his activities are discovered, but he simply continues his predation elsewhere. Like Jean-le-Maigre, he wishes to confess his sins, but also like Jean-le-Maigre, the confession simply spurs him to further molestation. “He went in peace,” the narrator comments of Théodule’s confessions, “then began doing it again next day, or, given the chance, the very same day as his confession” (99). Indeed, at the end of the tale, Théodule proposes a walk “down by the river, under the bridge” to le Septième, who naïvely agrees to the proposal (128). Alone with the boy, Théodule, in another Sadean moment, pulls off his belt and asks to be whipped, whereupon le Septième attempts to f lee. Théodule catches him, and le Septième awakes the next morning on the bank of the river. The narrator explains, “He wasn’t

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dead, as he had thought. His clothes were scarcely torn. But putting his hand up to his neck, he felt a mark that still burned as he touched it” (132). Although Blais refuses to be explicit about what happened, the implication is that le Septième has been raped. The Sadean moments that Blais incorporates into Une saison certainly help the author to develop the Gothic qualities of the narrative. Blais may or may not have borrowed the technique directly from the works of the Marquis de Sade, but Une saison definitely occupies the position of analogue in relation to fictions such as Justine. In contrast, the poetry and life of John Keats may have provided more direct inf luence. Biographer Mary Jean Green writes that Blais bases the character Jean-le-Maigre on Rimbaud and Keats.11 Indeed, I would suggest that Jean-le-Maigre is Blais’s modern embodiment—her modern revision—of Keats himself. Both Keats and Jean-le-Maigre are poets who die at young ages of tuberculosis after enduring long periods of illness. Blais’s revision of Keats, however, is far darker than the reality of the poet’s life. Blais’s recreation of Keats’s consumptive death in Jean-le-Maigre suggests a powerful Gothic symbol of repressed, self-consuming sexuality. Just as the tuberculosis consumes Jean-le-Maigre from within (as it did Keats), the desire to write about sexuality consumes the censored Québécois writer of the 1960s. Moreover, the Sadean moments that Blais includes in Une saison are primarily masturbatory and/or homosexual in nature and, therefore, cannot result in the creation of new life. Blais thus implies that her characters’ attempts at self-constructed meaning in a hopeless world are, ultimately, futile. By extension, one might also conclude that the creation of a literature unique to Québec also is futile under the circumstances Blais perceives. The fact that John Keats was an orphan further supports the supposition that he was the basis for Jean-le-Maigre. The poet’s father died when the boy was eight, and his mother when he was fourteen (Bate 12, 21). While Jean-le-Maigre technically is not an orphan, his parents are unavailable emotionally, and it is his grandmother, Grand-mère Antoinette, who feeds him scraps as he begs under the table. Perhaps, as a Québécois writer, Blais identified with Jean-le-Maigre, in Fredric Jameson’s terms, as a symbol of her own authorial existence. If the gruff father represents the traditions of Britain and the tired mother those of English-speaking Canada, then Grand-mère Antoinette, whose name recalls that of French royalty,12 may represent inf luences from France. The traditions of the United States, where Blais wrote Une saison, might fit into such a scheme as the predatory Frère Théodule, who offers Jean-le-Maigre a place to stay but exacts harsh payment in return.


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One final piece of evidence that suggests a possible connection between Une saison and Keats is Keats’s own use of Gothic techniques and legends in his poetry. Keats biographer Andrew Motion comments that Keats “enjoyed gothic extravagances” (248), and clearly poems such as The Eve of St. Agnes, The Eve of St. Mark, Lamia, and Isabella exhibit the same Gothic morbidity that Blais wishes to evoke in her novel. Keats based The Eve of St. Agnes, for example, on the legend of a martyr who was, according to the nineteenth-century writer Henry Ellis, “condemned to be debauched in the public stews before her execution” (qtd. in Stillinger, “Commentary” 453). Such a humiliating punishment would have garnered sympathy from Blais, who would have recognized its inhumanity and would have condemned any source of authority—the Catholic Church or otherwise—that would condone such revenge. Although the poem does not dramatize Agnes’s plight, it acknowledges her story through the tale of Madeline and Porphyro and represents, according to critic and editor Jack Stillinger, Keats’s “most sustained production in the Gothic mode” (Reading 59). The Eve of St. Mark also is based on a legend. As Henry Ellis summarizes, “It is customary in Yorkshire . . . for the common people to sit and watch in the church porch on St. Mark’s Eve, from eleven o’clock at night till one in the morning. The third year (for this must be done thrice), they are supposed to see the ghosts of all those who are to die the next year, pass by into the church” (qtd. in Stillinger, “Commentary” 457). The awareness of impending doom evident in the story on which the poem was based would have appealed to Blais and may well have shaped her own aspirations toward the Gothic in Une saison. While The Eve of St. Agnes and The Eve of St. Mark partake of the Gothic, Keats’s Lamia and Isabella do so more pointedly and include surprises in their plots that parallel the Sadean moments of Blais’s novel. Blais would have been intrigued by the morbid ending of Lamia in which Lycius’s new wife is revealed to be a mythical, predatory lamia— part snake and part woman. Finally, Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil (based on a tale from Boccaccio’s The Decameron) perhaps is the most pertinent of Keats’s poems in relation to Blais because Keats shocks his readers in a way that even more closely approximates the Sadean moment. Aggrieved that her brothers have killed her lover Lorenzo, Isabella uncovers his grave and then decapitates the body. She plants the head in a pot of basil, but when her brothers steal the pot, she withers and dies. Blais, who lamented the sadness that she believed suffused the whole of French Canada (Callaghan 32), would have viewed Isabella’s plight— her anguish—as representative of the human condition, and Blais

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would have appreciated the shock that Keats elicits with the revelation of Isabella’s gruesome attachment to her lover’s remains. Blais likely was aware of poems such as Isabella, and as she created her own dark world in Une saison, she may have drawn inspiration from Keats’s poetry. Whether she relied directly on Keats is not clear, but Blais unquestionably drew from the larger tradition of Gothicism that Keats helped to expand. Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel relies on relentlessness and excess for its effect, and nothing truly changes by the end of the book. Blais maintains a dark, hopeless tone throughout the narrative and punctuates it with brief moments of excess to shock her readers—to jar them into realizing that nothing has improved for Jean-le-Maigre and his family and that nothing ever will. Grand-mère Antoinette’s exclamation to herself, “How shocking oh Lord how shocking,” which I have used as epigraph, aptly conveys Blais’s intent (94). Although readers desensitized by works such as de Sade’s Justine may scoff at the relative tameness of Blais’s Sadean moments, they at least must acknowledge the authorial intent to shock. When spring arrives at the end of Une saison, and Grand-mère Antoinette whispers to Emmanuel, “Everything is going well . . . Yes, everything is going well,”13 her apparent optimism is deceptive. Her words border on the kind of naïveté that Voltaire’s Pangloss exhibits in Candide, and in fact, in the middle of Une saison, Jean-le-Maigre actually uses Pangloss’s own words, “everything is for the best,” to reassure le Septième one evening in the reformatory.14 In fact, the world depicted at the end of Une saison still is the world into which Emmanuel was born at the beginning of the tale. The family lives a bleak existence in which sexuality allows no more than an expression of existential angst. Pomme has lost three fingers in a factory accident; le Septième apparently was raped recently and is contemplating the theft of bicycles and car headlights; and Héloïse is supporting the family with her earnings from the brothel. Near the end of the book, the narrator muses of le Septième, “Without doubt he would end up in prison, as his father had so often told him,” and Jean-le-Maigre already has predicted that Emmanuel, too, will die of consumption in the Noviciat (132, 94). Jean-le-Maigre also predicted, in his book Family Prophecies, that “his brother Pomme would end up in prison, Number Seven [le Septième] on the scaffold, and Héloïse his sister in a brothel” (94). As symbols of the Québécois writer’s place in a literary world dominated by inf luences from abroad and by the repressiveness of Catholicism at home, the family members embody Blais’s own frustrations as an author during the 1960s. Blais truly was an unruly


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Catholic woman, for the dominant religion of her home province provided inspiration as a repressive force against which she could react through her literary art. In characteristic form, Blais does not offer a solution for the writers of Québec. Instead, she implies simply that she and her fellow writers resignedly must endure.15 Notes Epigraph. Marie-Claire Blais, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel, trans. Derek Coltman (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992) 94. 1. Although I will refer to Blais’s novel as Une saison to remind readers of its French-language origins, my quotations will come from Derek Coltman’s 1992 translation, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart). 2. Scholars generally agree that the novel is set in Québec. See, e.g., Mary Jean Green (MarieClaire Blais [New York: Twayne, 1995] 15), Philip Stratford (Marie-Claire Blais, Canadian Writers and Their Works Series, series ed. William French [Toronto: Forum House, 1971] 41), J. M. Kertzer (“Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel: A Season in Hell,” Studies in Canadian Literature 2.2 [1977]: 278), and Margret Andersen (“The Church in Marie-Claire Blais’ A Season in the Life of Emmanuel,” Sphinx 2.3 [1976]: 40). 3. Green 3; Wakeman 163; When Barry Callaghan interviewed Blais in 1965, the author acknowledged a strong French inf luence on her work (31). 4. Literary critic David Stouck suggests that Une saison is “a particularly Canadian work of art” (26) and that Blais has “created both a fully dramatic and genuinely Canadian work of art” (26). I would suggest that Une saison is not just a Canadian work of art, but specifically a Québécois work of art. 5. In Canada: A Modern History, J. Bartlet Brebner reminds his readers of the 1960’s “discontent of French Canadians with the state of their own province, and particularly with alleged English dominance in Quebec” (544). As George Woodcock comments, separatism “seized hold of a great portion of the intellectual world in Quebec” (229). 6. In the interview with Barry Callaghan, Blais commented, “I have found this freedom [to be more objective] in the country” (30). She believed that living and working in a rural setting in the United States freed her of the constraints of Québécois tradition. 7. Nicole Brossard comments, in the “Afterword” to the English translation of Blais’s novel, “To speak of sexuality is in itself a form of transgression” (137). 8. Lewis Corey quotes Simone de Beauvoir as saying that “no living people are brought into play” in de Sade’s writings (18). 9. Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy 609. 10. Arnold Davidson 247; Gordon 469; From Paul Chassé’s viewpoint, “L’univers blaisien est monstrueux [The Blaisian universe is monstrous]” (83). 11. Green 132; J. M. Kertzer advances a strong argument in favor of Une saison as a “literary descendent of Rimbaud’s inf luential work” and specifically compares it to “Une Saison en Enfer” [“A Season in Hell”] (284). Other critics, such as Gilles Marcotte, have advanced similar arguments (Le roman à l’imparfait: Essais sur le roman québécois d’aujourd’hui [Montréal: Editions la Presse, 1976]). 12. Jacqueline Viswanathan suggests that Grand-mère Antoinette and Jean-le-Maigre have names that are “presque royaux [almost royal]” and compares Grand-mère Antoinette with Marie Antoinette ( Jean-le-Maigre reminds her of King Charles the Fat.) (756).

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13. Blais 132; Philip Stratford sees hope at the end of Une saison, as does Gilles Marcotte (124, 129). Vincent Nadeau, however, disagrees (103), as does Jan Gordon, who sees the lack of progression in Blais’s plot as a means of heightening the “hopelessness of her characters imprisoned in a world without choice while simultaneously forcing upon them the compulsion to escape” (468). 14. François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Candide, trans., ed., and introd. Daniel Gordon (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999) 42; Blais 70. 15. Joyce Marshall sees the theme of the novel as, “ ‘You get used to everything, you’ll see’—a message less of hope than of blind animal endurance” (73).

Works Cited Andersen, Margret. “The Church in Marie-Claire Blais’ A Season in the Life of Emmanuel.” Sphinx 2.3 (1976): 40–46. Bate, Walter Jackson. John Keats. 1963. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996. Blais, Marie-Claire. Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel. Montréal: Editions du Jour, 1970. ———. A Season in the Life of Emmanuel. Trans. Derek Coltman. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Trans. Guido Waldman. Ed., introduction, and notes by Jonathan Usher. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Brebner, J. Bartlet. Canada: A Modern History. New ed. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1970. Brossard, Nicole. “Afterword.” A Season in the Life of Emmanuel. Trans. Derek Coltman. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992. 134–138. Callaghan, Barry. “An Interview with Marie-Claire Blais.” The Tamarack Review 37 (1965): 29–34. Chassé, Paul P. “Le Québécois d’après les romans de Marie-Claire Blais.” Modern Language Studies 2.2 (1972): 83–89. Corey, Lewis. “Marquis de Sade—The Cult of Despotism.” The Antioch Review 26 (1966): 17–31. Davidson, Arnold E. “Canadian Gothic and Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska.” Modern Fiction Studies 27.2 (1981): 243–254. de Sade, Marquis. Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised (1791). Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings. Comp. and trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. 1965. New York: Grove Press, 1990. 447–743. Goldmann, Lucien. “Note sur Deux Romans de Marie-Claire Blais.” Structures mentales et création culturelle. Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1970. 401–414. Gordon, Jan B. “An ‘Incandescence of Suffering’: The Fiction of Marie-Claire Blais.” Modern Fiction Studies 22.3 (1976): 467–484. Gould, Karen. “The Censored Word and the Body Politic: Reconsidering the Fiction of Marie-Claire Blais.” Journal of Popular Culture 15.3 (1981): 14–27. Green, Mary Jean. Marie-Claire Blais. New York: Twayne, 1995. Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. Keats, John. John Keats: Complete Poems. Ed. Jack Stillinger. 1978. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982. Kertzer, J. M. “Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel: A Season in Hell.” Studies in Canadian Literature 2.2 (1977): 278–288.


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Marcotte, Gilles. Le roman à l’imparfait: Essais sur le roman québécois d’aujourd’hui. Montréal: Editions la Presse, 1976. Marshall, Joyce. “Blais, Marie-Claire.” The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Gen. ed. William Toye. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1983. 72–74. McNaught, Kenneth. The History of Canada. New York: Praeger, 1970. Motion, Andrew. Keats. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. Nadeau, Vincent. Marie-Claire Blais: le noir et le tendre; etude d’Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, suivie d’une bibliographie critique. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1974. Racine, Claude. L’Anticléricalisme dans le roman québécois (1940–1965). Cahiers du Quebec [I]. Montréal: Hurtubise HMH, 1972. Stillinger, Jack, ed. “Commentary.” John Keats: Complete Poems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982. 417–485. ———. Reading The Eve of St. Agnes: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Stouck, David. “Notes on the Canadian Imagination.” Canadian Literature 54 (1972): 9–26. Stratford, Philip. Marie-Claire Blais. Canadian Writers and Their Works Series. Series ed. William French. Toronto: Forum House, 1971. Viswanathan, Jacqueline. “Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel de Marie-Claire Blais: Introduction à l’analyse du personage romanesque.” The French Review 52 (1979): 755–758. Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de. Candide. Trans., ed., and introd. Daniel Gordon. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999. Wakeman, John, ed. “Blais, Marie-Claire.” World Authors, 1950–1970: A Companion Volume to Twentieth Century Authors. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1975. 163–164. Woodcock, George. Canada and the Canadians. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1970.


CH A P T E R

T W E LV E

Catholicism’s Other(ed) Holy Trinity: Race, Class, and Gender in Black Catholic Girl School Narratives Je a na D e l Ro s so

When we consider Catholicism in regard to contemporary women’s studies, we tend to identify it as “difference” only in relation to other categories of analysis; in other words, we link Catholicism to issues of gender and class, often in ways that do not ref lect favorably upon the religion. The association of the Roman Catholic Church with gender discrimination is hardly surprising. The writings of many feminist theorists display a serious concern about the relationship between gender and Judeo-Christian religions, but the Catholic Church is particularly problematic for feminists because it perpetuates distinctly gendered repressions: it indoctrinates young girls into their limiting roles as Catholic women, marginalizing them from participation in the church hierarchy of administration and clergy. Class issues are also particularly relevant to Catholicism; indeed, the institution is often referred to as the “immigrant church,” reinforcing the stereotype that Irish, Italian, and Polish working-class peoples solely constitute its membership (Gandolfo 7). Catholic literature by women speaks to this characterization of the church: Mary Gordon’s characters in Final Payments must fight against being regarded as a “mess of immigrant knuckles,” and Nancy Mairs refers to her conversion to Catholicism as a “discernable step down” (Gordon 7; Mairs 89). Moreover, the church’s origins among immigrants in the United States, in conjunction with its

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clericalism—the system by which its ministers also serve as its administrators—have resulted in its perception as anti-intellectual, a perception that would apply not just to European Catholic immigrants but to black Catholics as well (Gandolfo 6). Yet while class and gender are widely considered necessary categories of analysis in studies of Catholic literature and culture, race is not. Such a discrepancy seems to emerge from two presuppositions: one, that race equals blackness; and two, that Catholicism is not a significant issue for black Americans. The first presupposition is not entirely unfounded; popular perception at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the United States does equate “race” with black and white relations. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (1997), describe how their experiences as women of color in the United States have centered around their assumed connectedness to African American women. This aspect of a racist ideology, they claim, understands color as blackness: “our racialization as Caribbean and Indian women was assimilated into a U.S. narrative of racialization, naturalized between African Americans and Euro-Americans. Our experiences could be recognized and acknowledged only to the extent that they resembled those of African American women” (xiv). Alexander and Mohanty have experienced exactly that which popular American culture presumes: race is socially constructed as blackness. It is thus less than surprising that contemporary scholarship on Catholicism fails to recognize the ways in which our nation rewrites race as blackness. Nevertheless, this trend remains disturbing. I am perhaps more disturbed, however, by the second supposition: that black Catholics are not a significant group in the United States. First, this assumption simply is not valid: there are 2.3 million African American Catholics in the United States (Secretariat), making up especially large contingencies in cities such as New York (110,000 black Catholics), Chicago (100,000), New Orleans (90,500), Washington, D.C. (75,000), and Baltimore (25,000) (Harfmann 3–4).1 Black emigres from the Caribbean also often have Catholic backgrounds and thus constitute a large number of the Catholics living in the United States; for example, of the 110,000 black Catholics reported in New York in 1984, more than half of this number represents people from Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, and the Caribbean Islands (Harfmann 3). And these numbers are growing. Between 1975 and 1984, the black population in the United States increased by only 17.3 percent, but the number of black Catholics increased by 41 percent; these figures include a large

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number of foreign-born blacks as well as those born in America (iii, 6). Nor is this preponderance of black Catholics a recent phenomenon; Vernon C. Polite argues that “African Americans have affiliated with Catholicism and benefited from Catholic schooling since the early colonial era. Records from the 1500s document that some of the earliest Africans and African-Caribbean settlers in the colonies professed Catholicism” (62). However, such statistics often go unrecognized; as Diana L. Hayes notes, “Despite the changing demographics that reveal a Catholic church increasingly made up of people of color, the church’s public image is not Black or multihued, it is White, an image that denies the history of the church’s origins in the Middle East and Africa” (330). And as Stephen Ochs points out, the dearth of black leadership in the Catholic church explains why, until very recently, Catholicism has been regarded as “the white man’s church”; in 1998, while the U.S. church could boast five hundred African American Catholic priests, there were only fourteen African American Catholic bishops, seventyfive African American pastors, and one African American Catholic Superintendent of Catholic Schools (iii; Secretariat). Scholarly work on the subject of the role of religion in modern American race relations is also lacking (McGreevy 4). However, Catholicism has been and clearly remains a religion practiced by blacks of African and Caribbean descent in the United States, suggesting that further study of the relationship between race and Catholicism is crucial to our understanding of the ways in which Catholicism functions in race relations in the Americas. Second, the assumption that Catholicism is not relevant to U.S. blacks ignores the possibility that Catholicism largely informs race relations, as we understand that phrase in the Americas, regardless of an individual’s religious leanings. Catholicism in the 1990s remains a mainstream religion with far-reaching effects for religiously diverse groups of people. One of the most significant ways in which blacks, whether they are Catholic or not, are exposed to Catholicism is through Catholic education. Researchers suggest that large numbers of blacks in the United States have, for example, attended Catholic schools, even if the students themselves are not Catholic; between 1970 and 1985, the total Catholic school enrollment declined 32 percent, but ethnic minority student totals in Catholic schools increased 27 percent (Bredeweg 15). In 1990, 22.2 percent of students in Catholic schools were African American, up from 8.2 percent in the 1970s (Irvine and Foster 1). And in the 1998– 1999 school year, 209,261 black students attended parochial schools (McDonald 13). Catholic schools, especially in urban areas, continue to

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offer quality education to increasing numbers of ethnic minority students, whether or not those students are Catholic; a 1985 study by Frank H. Bredeweg suggests that as many as 64 percent of black students attending Catholic schools are not Catholic (17). This number may also be increasing. In the Baltimore Metropolitan area, for instance, in the 1997–1998 school year, 391,097 students attended public schools; 147,272 of these students (37.7 percent) were African American (Maryland State Department of Education 8). In the archdiocese of Baltimore, however, 5252 African American students attended parochial schools: 3.5 percent of the population of African American students in the Baltimore area. But only 1305 of these African American students in parochial schools were actually Catholic—75 percent were non-Catholic (Brechin). What we must consider, then, are the effects of this parochial education upon young African Americans, Catholic or not. The value of a Catholic education for young black people remains contested. At the heart of this debate lies the question of whether or not Catholicism indoctrinates young people into an assimilationist view of dominant white U.S. hegemonies or instead encourages and enables a celebration of ethnic heritages and cultures. Interestingly, the history of Catholic education in the United States demonstrates that, despite some disapproval within the church hierarchy,2 the Catholic church as institution has often been a proponent of segregated schooling—separate Polish, Italian, and Irish parochial schools were the American norm in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (York 19). Whether that segregation has provided safe, effective, strong educational experiences that allow for the cultivation of different immigrant languages and cultures or has resulted in separatism is the question at hand. Proponents of Catholic education for African Americans argue that such an education promotes the academic excellence of students who might, in a public school, receive neither the attention nor the course work necessary to excel. A 1982 study by Father Andrew Greeley, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, found that “black and Hispanic students who attend Roman Catholic secondary schools display much higher levels of academic effort and achievement than black and Hispanic young people attending public schools” (3). Gary Wray McDonogh, in Black and Catholic in Savannah, Georgia (1993), argues that Catholic schooling in Savannah contributed to the formation of a distinct, unified, “black and Catholic” identity, even among nonCatholic students (92–93). Darlene Eleanor York claims that the church has traditionally supported cultural distinctiveness and individual spiritual expression, and that “the deleterious effects of race, gender,


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and social class seem to be ameliorated, if not eradicated, in Catholic schools” (19, 39). Yet while many argue the benefits of parochial education, critics such as Michael McNally disagree, contending that American Catholic education often participates in a color blindness that ignores racial issues. Unlike those in Polish or Irish parish schools, he claims, teachers in most black schools are not of the same ethnic background as their students, and therefore such schools do not preserve cultural language, heritage, or ethnic pride (183). The same debate that crops up in research on Catholic education appears in literature. Contemporary literature by women examines this intersection of Catholicism and race, exploring specifically the various effects of Catholicism upon the young black woman and attesting to the ways in which each category inf luences the other within a feminist context. This essay, therefore, considers the intersection of race, gender, and Catholicism in the recent girlhood narratives of women writers of the Americas in order to contend with their varying assessments— ranging from racist to liberatory—of a black Catholic education. My goal here is to examine how Catholic girl school narratives function as mediations and representations of the impact of the Catholic Church upon the lives of black girl students. Exploring the ways in which race and religion intertwine, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, in Racial Formations in the United States (1986), argue that by the time of the Enlightenment, science only served to replace religion as a rationale for racism (63). Ruth Frankenberg agrees, claiming, “Anglo colonizers of what was to become the United States brought with them arguments for white racial superiority articulated in the language of Christianity. These were succeeded by, and absorbed into, so-called scientific racism, and biology- and evolutionbased theories of race hierarchy” (72–73). I argue further that religion has never been fully replaced as a signifier of modern racial awareness, but that it continues to inform directly our conceptions and definitions of race today. Therefore religion, like race and gender, also constitutes one of the “ ‘regions’ of hegemony, areas in which certain political projects can take shape” (Omi and Winant 68). Such hegemonies are difficult to unravel; they seem natural, as Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney point out (12). A feminist reading, then, of the role of the Catholic Church in black Catholic girl school narratives will challenge the existing assumptions about these intersections of race and religion. Following Omi and Winant’s claim that such regions of hegemony overlap, I propose that the category of class frequently overlaps with the racialized and gendered issues in my study. Deborah King argues, “For

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blacks in the first half of this century, class and race interests were often inseparable” (66). Not surprisingly, issues of race, class, gender, and Catholicism remain entangled in much contemporary literature by women. This essay, then, investigates this holy trinity of women’s studies through the lens of Catholicism in Jacqueline Jordan Irvine’s essay, “Segregation and Academic Excellence: African American Catholic Schools in the South” (1996), as well as in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and Merle Collins’s Angel (1988). I use the term “narratives” for these texts to stress the kinship of fiction and nonfiction, because elements of fiction operate in memoir and autobiography, and the reverse is often true as well. Thus I read both fiction and memoir as reworkings of a similar body of materials that comprise these Catholic girlhood narratives. I do not claim that discrepancies among black Catholic individuals or groups—or within Catholicism itself—do not exist or, more significantly, that they are not important. I only hope to demonstrate affinities in order to show that the intersections of race, class, and Catholicism may provide a location that produces some consistent and often ambivalent outcomes. Furthermore, I will suggest that it is not just a woman-centered but a womanist consciousness—an awareness of particularly gendered, racialized, and class-based roles and rules, as Alice Walker uses the term (xi)—that characterizes these Catholic girl school narratives and that occludes the more repressive overtones of Catholicism by informing and highlighting its feminist dimensions. I will begin my examination of race, class, gender, and Catholicism by looking at “an educational memoir,” a personal essay by Jacqueline Jordan Irvine entitled, “Segregation and Academic Excellence: African American Catholic Schools in the South.” A Catholic girl school narrative, this essay embodies the conf licts and tensions of a young black woman’s experience of Catholicism. Growing up an African Methodist Episcopalian in Alabama, a state with a small Catholic presence, Irvine attended the Mother Mary Mission Catholic School—a school whose student population was, at the time, 99 percent non-Catholic and 100 percent black. Irvine discusses the awareness of difference she and other Catholic school students experienced in relation to public school children, who accused them of “ ‘talking like white folks’ ”; she also refers to the cruel and sometimes wrongful corporal punishments that were inf licted upon the students by the strict, authoritarian sisters (90). Additionally, Irvine discusses the color blindness that characterized the school’s white faculty: the only acknowledgments of the students’ African American heritage were “the one statue in the courtyard of the


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black saint, Martin de Porres, to whom a few references were made, and the singing of an occasional spiritual during music classes” (88). This whitewashed version of Catholic education, in which only superficial attempts to include African American history and background are made, is not anomalous; McDonogh affirms this particular Catholic school experience, arguing that “education provided the path through which a predominantly white church, represented by foreign-born nuns and priests, evangelized a black community it did not understand” (97). Despite these serious problems, Irvine finds benefits in her Catholic school upbringing. Rather than having to take the vocational track courses in home economics, typing, and shop that were offered in the public schools, Irvine was required to take courses such as literature, drama, languages, and music—a curriculum that prepared her and her classmates for college. Italian-American women writers such as Louise DeSalvo and Marianna DeMarco Torgovnick discuss how their high schools encouraged them to take secretarial rather than academic courses; Irvine’s experience implies that race overrode gender in the antielitist Mother Mary Mission School so that all black students, female and male, were prepared for white-collar rather than blue-collar occupations. Irvine also suggests that her Catholic education combined with her AME religious background to allow her to learn about different religions, to recognize her own personal religious beliefs, and to acquire a f lexibility that ref lected not just her religion but her life. She writes, we watched private Catholic confessions and public AME testimonials. We admired the Catholic father and our Protestant preacher. Latin masses and altar boys’ prayers were no problem; neither were spirituals and revivals. We unabashedly interacted with white nuns in black habits as well as Black ushers in white uniforms. I am amazed how well we, as small children, mastered this fine art of cultural switching. (89) Irvine’s youthful merging of her African Methodist Episcopal background with her Catholic school training is an impressive achievement for such a young girl, and one that offered her a diverse background that helped her to make decisions about her spirituality as well as providing her with cultural f lexibility. McDonogh, too, recognizes that Catholic schooling can provide spiritual fortitude, suggesting that a Catholic education offered blacks “mobility and strength of resistance as well as belief ” (97).

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A similar experience of Catholicism appears in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Probably one of the more famous black American coming-of-age stories, Lorde’s “biomythography,” as she terms her memoir, is perhaps less well-known as a Catholic girl school narrative. Yet the first several chapters of Zami concern themselves with the young Audre’s experiences in a parochial school; moreover, Audre’s mother, Linda, is devoutly Catholic. A West Indian from Grenada, Linda tries to make sense of the United States for herself and her children: “There was so little that she really knew about the stranger’s country. How the electricity worked. The nearest church” (10). She does know, however, About burning candles before All Souls Day to keep the soucoyants away, lest they suck the blood of her babies. She knew about blessing the food and yourself before eating, and about saying prayers before going to sleep. She taught us one to the mother that I never learned in school. Remember, oh most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession, was ever left unaided . . . (10) Linda begins her children’s Catholic education at home, teaching them a mixture of religious superstition not unlike that which the nuns teach at Audre’s Catholic school. Like the historical American immigrant church Anita Gandolfo discusses, which sustained its faith through a rich devotional life centered around the mass but augmented with the kinds of public devotions we see in the May crowning stories in Amber Coverdale Sumrall and Patrice Veccione’s Catholic Girls (1992), or the private observances of the prayers and candle-burning to patron saints of Mrs. Santangelo in Francine Prose’s Household Saints (1981), Linda also supplements her faith—and that of her children—through private traditions and rituals (Gandolfo 7). But Linda’s brand of Catholicism is distinctly woman-oriented; her prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Memorare, impresses upon her children, especially Audre, the relevance and significance of a female power, a power Audre likens to that of Linda herself: “My child’s ears heard the words and pondered the mysteries of this mother to whom my solid and austere mother could whisper such beautiful words” (Lorde 11). The Memorare, for Linda, is a womanist prayer; as Diana Hayes writes, “It is, perhaps, in their reinterpretation of the role and presence of Mary, the mother of God, that Black Catholic women can make a significant contribution. Too


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often seen as a docile, submissive woman, Black Catholic womanists, instead, see a young woman sure of her God and of her role in God’s salvific plan” (332). For Audre, this prayer to Mary becomes subversive—both to the authority of her own mother and to that of a male-dominated church. Unlike her older sisters, Audre begins her education at a public school because “the catholic school had no kindergarten, and certainly not one for blind children” (Lorde 21). Though the Catholic school is unable to meet the needs of Audre due to her disability of impaired vision, the public school is unable to accept her abilities, which include reading and writing at a young age. Rather than enabling the smothering of those abilities, Linda persuades the nuns at the parochial school to allow Audre to enter the first grade there. The sisters at St. Mark’s School are dedicated “to caring for the Colored and Indian children of america [sic],” yet their means of doing so remain less than liberatory (27). Audre recalls the methods that the sisters used to delineate the good students from the bad, the smart from the dull: “The thing that I remember best about being in the first grade was how uncomfortable it was, always having to leave room for my guardian angel on those tiny seats, and moving back and forth across the room from Brownies to Fairies and back again” (30). The racist, color-oriented overtones of good children as Fairies and bad as Brownies are not lost upon Lorde, and this bigotry follows Audre throughout her Catholic school education. The first black student at St. Catherine’s high school, Audre begins to understand the extent to which American racism can inform a Catholic education. If the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament at St. Mark’s School had been patronizing, at least their racism was couched in the terms of their mission. At St. Catherine’s School, the Sisters of Charity were downright hostile. Their racism was unadorned, unexcused, and particularly painful because I was unprepared for it. (59) Audre finds that she is unwelcome at St. Catherine’s from the very beginning: when her mother first registers Audre for classes, the priest tells Linda that “he never expected to have to take colored kids into his school” (60). Audre also recalls that the principal, Sister Victoire, “sent a note home to my mother asking her to comb my hair in a more ‘becoming’ fashion, since I was too old, she said, to wear ‘pigtails’ ”(60). The principal clearly remains unable—or unwilling—to understand

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the gendered tradition and cultural heritage that inform the way Audre wears her hair, in braids. In “Beauty Rites: Towards an Anatomy of Culture in African American Women’s Art” (1995), Judith Wilson contends that black hair “not only allegorizes black ideological conf lict along assimilationist versus anti-assimilationist lines, but also enacts a larger struggle over African American identity” (50). Paulette Caldwell, in “A Hair Piece: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Gender” (1997), argues further that “a black woman’s hair is related to the perpetuation of social, political, and economic domination of subordinated racial and gender groups” (300). Braiding, then, for Audre, becomes a symbol of both blackness and womanhood, one that white society—in Audre’s case, the American Catholic Church—both trivializes and despises. Audre becomes further differentiated as Other by her fellow students. Her classmates make fun of her, leaving mean messages in her desk, and when Audre reports this treatment to her teacher, Sister Blanche informs her “that she felt it was her Christian duty to tell me that Colored people did smell different from white people, but it was cruel of the children to write nasty notes because I couldn’t help it” (Lorde 60). Additionally, Audre’s older sister Phyllis, a senior at St. Catherine’s, is not allowed to participate in her own class trip: “the nuns had given her back her deposit in private, explaining to her that the class, all of whom were white, except Phyllis, would be staying in a hotel where Phyllis ‘would not be happy’ ” (69). Despite such setbacks, Audre continues to take pride in herself, knowing that she is the smartest student in her class. But when she loses the election to be class president, which is supposed to go to the best student, the young Audre still cannot understand what has happened: “something was escaping me. Something was terribly wrong. It wasn’t fair” (63). What is escaping the young Audre, but clear to the older Lorde, is the revelation that the priests and nuns at St. Catherine’s do not simply refuse to resist but instead actively contribute to the segregated, discriminatory status quo of the United States at the middle of the twentieth century. And although her mother’s teaching of Catholicism is liberating for Audre, that of her Catholic education is not. Angel by Merle Collins, like Zami, offers a black Catholic girl school narrative with roots in the Caribbean. Born in Grenada to an Anglican mother and a Catholic father, Angel experiences conf licts with the church as early as her baptism, when the Catholic priest disapproves of her name because it is not a saint’s name and rejects outright Doodsie and Allan’s choice of their Anglican friend Ezra as godmother (18).


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Nevertheless, Doodsie and Allan send Angel to the Convent High School because “the convent gave girls just the sheltered, good type of education that was best” (105). Yet Angel receives more than just an academic education at this Catholic school; she learns, for example, about politics, or at least about U.S. politics: “in the convent, all of us, say endless prayers for merciful God to kill Castro and leave Cuba in the hands of beautiful America” (201). Significantly, it is here, too, that she learns firsthand about the limitations that will be placed on her because of her blackness: “She remembered always that day during her first year at school, when one of the nuns who took a deep interest in her welfare told her that she should ask her mother to have her hair ironed or straightened so that it would look decent” (113). Like that of the young Audre, Angel’s hair is considered unacceptable by the sisters at her Catholic school. Black hair again becomes “a symbolic medium,” the main locus of difference (Wilson 11). By advising Angel to straighten her hair, the nuns attempt to assimilate Angel as much as possible into Western stereotypes of femininity and beauty and succeed in making her self-conscious and embarrassed by her appearance. Angel further learns that, ironically, despite her name, she cannot be an angel in the school plays because she is too dark-skinned, thereby limiting her enjoyment of her favorite occupation: “The Christmas plays she also loved, and would have liked to be an angel in one, but angels were white, or at least very fair and she would not even dare whisper the idea to her closest friend. Still, she loved them and wished she looked more like the girls who could participate in them” (Collins 113). Angel is taught in her Grenadian Catholic school the American cultural concept that white equals goodness and that her darkness, therefore, renders her sinful, inferior. Indeed, the pictures of Jesus as a white man with blue eyes holding the globe in his hand only further reinforce the racist and colonialist agenda of a church that remains deeply invested in a politics of color, a politics against which Angel eventually rebels (174). Angel’s differences in school are class-related as well, because Grenada’s ruling white and mulatto middle classes worked to control the number of blacks moving into their ranks. Although Angel gains confidence when she and her friend Ann can bond together and “laugh . . . at the fair-skinned girls who tossed their heads,” she keenly feels her societal difference from the other girls (115). The representative for Angel of her family’s social position is Doodsie, her unglamorous mother who didn’t go to the beach often for picnics as all the best mothers did in books and essays, who didn’t

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frequent the cinema, whose fingernails were stained from peeling provision and looked nothing like those of the pretty mothers in all the books, who never wore one of those frilly white aprons which made kitchen work look so inviting, whose kitchen looked nothing like the beautiful ones in books. (114) Again, Angel accepts Western world views of the place of woman in the home, in the kitchen—views that nonetheless make such a position look alluring. This vision of white or light, middle- to upper-class womanhood, problematic in itself, does not coincide at all with Doodsie’s position as laborer both in the home and out, struggling to feed her children and sacrificing to provide for them a good education. Unable to understand or accept that such visions of homemakers in white frilly aprons offer only a propaganda that exploits women of every class and color, Angel continues to seek access to that vision. Both color and social difference are ultimately manifested in Angel’s hair, which Angel is finally able to convince Doodsie to straighten for her after telling her mother that she believes “some of the nuns looked at her with scorn because her head looked so scruffy and bad” (114). The convent school further undermines Angel’s sense of self-worth through its intolerant teachings on marriage, family, and other religions: And then one day, during the religious knowledge class in second form, Angel had a rude shock. Mother Superior said that not only was living together without being married a mortal sin, but if a Catholic got married in a non-Catholic church, then that was no marriage and the person and the whole family was living in sin until there was a confession and repentance and a real marriage in a Catholic church. (108) Angel agonizes for weeks when she “discovers” that her entire family is going to hell because her parents were not married in the church. Doodsie, however, a religious woman in her own right, questions and dismisses these Catholic rules and power structures: “ ‘As for me is awright. I always talkin to God. We have an understanding’ ” (108). Doodsie thereby institutes a power struggle between the roles of parent and religion in the education and indoctrination of Catholic children. This conf lict between family and religion, however, does not represent a simple dichotomy; for example, Ma Ettie, Doodsie’s mother, speaks in Grenadian dialect, but her prayers are spoken in standard English in the


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text (5). This simple but insidious manifestation of a Catholic colonialist agenda suggests that such indoctrination has been an ongoing process in this part of the Americas for many generations. Despite these negative experiences with Catholicism, Angel discovers ways in which the church can be useful to her as an individual and, later, as a political rebel. She learns a measure of balance from her college friend Elizabeth who, although dedicated to Mary, “didn’t let her belief in the church let her close herself from the joys of life that the church frowned upon” (151). During her time at the University in Jamaica, Angel rebels against the rigid, hierarchical Catholicism represented in the text by her father, with whom she constantly clashes. But she also realizes that a liberation theology can emerge from her Catholic background: “‘Even de Christ allyou talkin about was fightin against people like dat same blasted pries who tink he so great!’” (173). Although Angel ends far from the Catholic upbringing that so informed her childhood, she is able to garner these tiny pieces of it to use in her adult life. While Lorde’s and Collins’s texts do offer at least a suggestion of the healthy effects of the Catholic Church upon black girl students, they do not come close to the kind of internal conf lict—the ambivalence—that reigns in Irvine’s memoir. Rather, they see institutional Catholicism as a largely repressive, often devastating force that reinforces the multiple jeopardy of racism multiplied by sexism multiplied by classism that King discusses (47). Thus the ideological perspectives of black Catholic girl school narratives range from ambivalence to rejection of Catholicism; this tendency toward negativity can perhaps be explained through the racism that permeates the Catholic Church in general, but specifically in the Americas. Indeed, the history of the church and racism in the United States is bleak: there is little evidence of systematic efforts by the Catholic Church to convert enslaved or, after Emancipation, freed African Americans; its support of segregated schooling, parishes, and religious orders was often motivated more by an attempt to preserve a racist status quo than by a desire to provide sites of African American support and community; and, as Ochs writes, “The exclusion of all but a handful of black men from the Roman Catholic priesthood until well into the twentieth century both symbolized and helped to perpetuate the second class status of blacks within the Catholic Church” (Franklin 48–49; Garibaldi 128–129; Ochs ii). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that contemporary women writers are less than forgiving of the role of the church in the lives of young black girls, whose experiences with Catholicism are informed not just by race

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and class but also by gender. Indeed, the resistance to Catholicism in many of these stories is rooted in a sense of not just a racialized but a growing feminist awareness of the limitations placed upon black women by the Catholic Church. The liberating aspects of a Catholic Church are rarely found in the Church itself in these narratives; nor are they often found in a Catholic education in these stories. Rather, the promise of the Church for the black Catholic girl often emerges from the figure of the black Catholic woman—whether mother-figure, or the Blessed Virgin Mary, or Our Lady of Guadalupe. Thus we must read these girl school narratives with an eye for the kinds of resistance they suggest Catholicism offers, but also with an awareness of the unique restrictions the Church places upon women of color. These girl school narratives demonstrate concern with the Catholic Church as institution, testifying to the often negative intersections of Catholicism and race in parochial education, overlappings that are only further compounded by gender and class. Yet literature by contemporary women writers such as Irvine, Lorde, and Collins attests as well to the continuing significance of Catholicism for women of color, a presence that also offers the promise of strength—not through the institutions of church and school but rather through community, through people, particularly through the positive female figures that the Catholic Church—whether knowingly or not—fosters. Notes Longer versions of this essay appear in NWSA Journal 12.1 (Spring 2000): 24–43, published by Indiana University Press, and in Chapter Four of my book, Writing Catholic Women: Contemporary International Catholic Girlhood Narratives (Palgrave 2005). 1. Such numbers are not “hard,” as Harfmann points out; they include a variety of parish accountings of black Catholics, ranging from the numbers regularly attending church to those registered with a parish to those living within the parish boundaries and self-identifying as Catholic (Harfmann 10). These numbers also rely upon varying definitions of “black.” For example, the number of black Catholics in the archdiocese of New York includes Haitians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Caribbean peoples as well as Spanish-speaking blacks (3). 2. For example, the Irish-American bishops tended to oppose strongly the “segregated” Catholic parishes and schools.

Works Cited Alexander, M. Jacqui and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Brechin, Jennifer. Division of Planning and Council Services. The Division of Catholic Schools. The Archdiocese of Baltimore. Personal communication. May 6, 1999.


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Bredeweg, Frank H., C.S.B. United States Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools, 1984–1985: A Statistical Report on Schools, Enrollment, and Staffing; Special Focus on Minority and Non-Catholic Enrollment. Washington, D.C.: The National Catholic Educational Association, 1985. Caldwell, Paulette. “A Hair Piece: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Gender.” Critical Race Feminism: A Reader. Ed. Adrien Katherine Wing. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 297–305. Collins, Merle. Angel. Seattle: The Seal Press, 1988. DeSalvo, Louise. Vertigo: A Memoir. New York: Dutton, 1996. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1993. Franklin, V. P. “First Came the School: Catholic Evangelization Among African Americans in the United States, 1827 to the Present.” Growing Up African American in Catholic Schools. Eds. Jacqueline Jordan Irvine and Michele Foster. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996. 47–61. Gandolfo, Anita. Testing the Faith: The New Catholic Fiction in America. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. Garibaldi, Antoine M. “Growing Up Black and Catholic in Louisiana: Personal Ref lections on Catholic Education.” Growing Up African American in Catholic Schools. Eds. Jacqueline Jordan Irvine and Michele Foster. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996. 126–140. Gordon, Mary. Final Payments. New York: Ballantine Books, 1978. Greeley, Andrew M. Catholic High Schools and Minority Students. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982. Harfmann, John, s.s.j. Statistical Profile of Black Catholics. Washington, D.C.: Josephite Pastoral Center, 1984. Hayes, Diana L. “Feminist Theology, Womanist Theology: A Black Catholic Perspective.” Black Theology: A Documentary History, Volume II, 1980–1992. Eds. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993. 325–335. Irvine, Jacqueline Jordan. “Segregation and Academic Excellence: African American Catholic Schools in the South.” Growing Up African American in Catholic Schools. Eds. Jacqueline Jordan Irvine and Michele Foster. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996. 87–94. Irvine, Jacqueline Jordan and Michele Foster, eds. Growing Up African American in Catholic Schools. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996. King, Deborah K. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology.” Signs 14.1 (1988): 42–72. Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1982. Mairs, Nancy. Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Maryland State Department of Education. The Fact Book 1997–1998: A Statistical Handbook. Baltimore: 1988. McDonald, Dale, P.B.V.M. United States Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools, 1998–1999: The Annual Statistical Report on Schools, Enrollment, and Staffing. Washington, D.C.: The National Catholic Educational Association, 1999. McDonogh, Gary Wray. Black and Catholic in Savannah, Georgia. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1993. McGreevy, John T. Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Racism in the Twentieth-Century Urban North. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,1996. McNally, Michael J. “A Peculiar Institution: A History of Catholic Parish Life in the Southeast (1850–1980).” The American Catholic Parish: A History from 1850 to the Present. Ed. Jay P. Dolan. Vol I. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. 117–234.

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Ochs, Stephen J. “Deferred Mission: The Josephites and the Struggle for Black Catholic Priests, 1871–1960.” Diss. University of Maryland, 1985. Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986. Polite, Vernon C. “Making a Way Out of No Way: The Oblate Sisters of Providence and St. Frances Academy in Baltimore, Maryland, 1828 to the Present.” Growing Up African American in Catholic Schools. Eds. Jacqueline Jordan Irvine and Michele Foster. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996. 62–75. Prose, Francine. Household Saints. New York: Ivy Books, 1981. Secretariat for African American Catholics. African American Fact Sheet. National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference. Washington, D.C., 1998. http:// www.nccbuscc.org/saac/factsheet.htm. Sumrall, Amber Coverdale and Patrice Veccione, eds. Catholic Girls. New York: Plume, 1992. Torgovnick, Marianna. Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Wilson, Judith. “Beauty Rites: Towards an Anatomy of Culture in African American Women’s Art.” The International Review of African American Art 11.3 (1995): 11–17, 47–55. Yanagisako, Sylvia and Carol Delaney. “Naturalizing Power.” Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis. Eds. Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney. New York: Routledge, 1995. 1–22. York, Darlene Eleanor. “The Academic Achievement of African Americans in Catholic Schools: A Review of the Literature.” Growing Up African American in Catholic Schools. Eds. Jacqueline Jordan Irvine and Michele Foster. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996. 11–46.

CH A P T E R

T H I RT E E N

Challenging Catholicism: Hagar vs. the Virgin in Graciela Limón’s The Memories of Ana Calderón M a ry Ja n e Su e ro - E l l io t t

In the tradition of revisionary women’s fiction, The Memories of Ana Calderón redefines patriarchal narratives to recuperate subordinated female subjectivity. Contemporary Latina writing has had a significant role in the development of oppositional literature that redefines dominant mythologies, official masternarratives, and religious doctrines exploiting the raced female identity as subordinate other. In practicing radical redefinition, Graciela Limón challenges a foundational mythic narrative of Western civilization: Christian philosophy. Her novel seeks to restructure the fundamental premises of patriarchal doctrines and raced narratives. She does so by paralleling the narratives of La Virgen de Guadalupe and the Old Testament’s Hagar. Although both gendered and raced, as cultural personae they are polar opposites of each other. While the Virgin is exalted as the Mother of God, Hagar remains the ostracized concubine of a sinning Abraham. With a recuperative rereading of Hagar’s story, however, Limón’s protagonist obtains a new perspective on her Self; through her protagonist’s journey toward self-validation, Limón redefines the poor brown woman’s subjectivity. The history of the Catholic Church in Central and South America has exploited the iconic figure of La Virgen de Guadalupe, also known as La Virgen Morena or the Brown Virgin. An icon of hope for millions of poor brown women, La Virgen Morena models a passive and

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long-suffering femininity. Although lately appropriated by feminist artists and scholars as a figure of potential empowerment for women, La Virgen remains problematic as the idealization of the feminine. Culturally, La Virgen de Guadalupe has been a symbol of gendered colonization, subordinated as brown and female.1 With Memories, Limón challenges this raced idealized femininity by rejecting the Catholic icon in favor of a redefined Hagar. This Old Testament character may be read as the Virgin’s alter ego: also raced, classed, and gendered, Hagar is a relatively minor figure in Biblical narrative. Exploited for her fertility, then banished as the embodiment of Abraham’s mistake, she survives to raise the patriarch of a new people, one parallel to the central protagonists of Judeo-Christian scripture. Limón uses the heretofore marginalized Hagar to challenge Catholicism and reject the passivity and stasis represented by La Virgen, thus creating an alternative model for a raced and gendered Catholic identity. Limón challenges negative social constructions of poor brown womanhood through strategic redefinition.2 In Memories, she creates an ultimately empowered heroine against restrictive definitions of the raced feminine disseminated by essentialist doctrines of Spanish Catholicism as established in Central and South America. Limón’s practice of textual redefinition counters pejorative definitions of brown womanhood by revisioning the Old Testament narrative of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham. In Genesis, the barren Sarah and Abraham fail to trust in God’s promise to make Abraham the great patriarch of a nation of descendants through Sarah. Abraham follows his wife’s advice when she suggests that Hagar, an Egyptian servant, become a surrogate mother. When Sarah becomes pregnant at ninety, she and Abraham banish Hagar and her son Ismael from the community as reminders of their weakness. After an angel of the Lord rescues Hagar and Ismael from the desert, they are promised that, like Isaac, Ismael will become the founder of a “great nation” (Gen. 21:18). Limón’s revision focuses on Hagar as the central protagonist, simultaneously legitimizing her character as an ethnic, gendered subject and her f light as agentive migration. A pivotal aspect of Limón’s challenge to Catholicism is the rewriting of Hagar’s character against traditional renderings of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Rather than emphasizing the oppositional potential in literary portrayals of the Virgin, Limón uses the brown Virgin as a negative model of subordinated piety. La Virgen is represented in the text by an immobile statue forever restricted to the oppressive space of

Limón’s THE MEMORIES OF ANA CALDERÓN

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her Shrine. She embodies stasis, limitation, and submission in direct contrast to Hagar, whom the novel defines through migration, survival, and independence. Memories thus rejects dominant definitions of womanhood disseminated by the Catholic Church in Mexico and often perpetuated in Mexican American culture, offering a viable alternative to the example of the Virgin by rewriting Hagar’s story, a revisionary act that is central to the text’s larger function as alternative cultural production. Although Ismael’s death in the novel seems to contradict a parallel reading of Hagar’s and Ana’s stories, his death makes sense within the text’s revisionary agenda—in redefining the feminine role, the text refocuses attention on the potential for female agency. Interpretations focusing on Ismael make Hagar a mediating figure, a gendered body whose primary function is to bear a future patriarch. In contrast, Limón both directly recenters the narrative to focus on Ana and theorizes female agency through an engagement with ethnoracial identity. Implicit in Hagar’s narrative is an ethnic difference that informs her fate. Limón translates Hagar’s name as meaning “emigration” or “f light,” thus paralleling Ana’s story with Hagar’s and underscoring the ethnoracial subtexts in each narrative. As an Egyptian, Hagar emigrates from a different ethnocultural community to work for Abraham’s family. Hagar’s son establishes an ethnic nation separate from Isaac’s. Because Limón’s revision focuses on the mother, the potential for agency lies within Ana; the central narrative subjectivity belongs to the raced female who ultimately reconciles with a past vexed by masculinist and colonialist cultural ideologies. In the Bible, Ismael and Isaac represent the ancestral heads of peoples later opposed in a history of geopolitical conf lict. The novel’s allegorical revision replaces a legacy of war and violence with an inner reconciliation between opposing forces in Ana’s life. Thus distinct from the Bible, in which Ismael’s character sustains ethnic difference, Memories engages a racialized subjectivity through Ana. From his brief appearance in the text, Ismael seems completely Americanized by his adoption into an Anglo-American family. In contrast, although expressed primarily through gendered struggle, Ana’s character ref lects racial conf lict. When her father, Rudolfo, banishes Ana from the family, he also, in effect, banishes her from their Mexican American community. She escapes her father’s abuse in the home of the white Basts, later she befriends the Caucasian Jewish owners of a manufacturing company, and finally she succeeds in a capitalist system dominated by Anglo-Americans. As she lives in self-isolation and rises

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up through the capitalist ranks, Ana disassociates herself from the Mexican side of her ethnicity, embodying, even to herself, only the American half of her Mexican American self. However, her immigrant status and the defining experience of migration, like Hagar’s, racialize Ana’s identity. Furthermore, the Virgin as a negative gendered model is linked to a racialized history: la Virgen de Guadalupe is a creolized Mexican icon created in part by an imperialist culture in a colonialist context. It is with Ana’s final return to Mexico that the narrative more explicitly references her ethnicity— the novel’s conclusion makes clear that any kind of resolution for Ana necessitates a reconciliation with a past informed by ethnoracial identity. It is during her second visit to Mexico that Ana begins the process toward resolution with her gendered past and Mexican cultural heritage. As Limón redefines exile through Ana’s physical and psychological return, she transforms Ana’s sense of self. This process of redefinition metaphorically references Hagar’s migration, rewriting Hagar’s story to empower the raced and gendered subject against the colonized passivity of the Virgin’s femininity. In reversing her exile, Ana simultaneously “moves” from one ethnocultural context to another and from a subjectivity recoiling from a perception of imposed objectification on the basis of racialized ethnicity and gender to subjecthood informed by a positively syncretized cultural identity. If race is a subtext of gender in this text, nation is a subtext of race. The themes of migration and immigration, references to labor exploitation, the implicit historical background of Spanish Christianization and U.S. land appropriation, Ana’s disassociation from the representatives of Mexican culture, her material success in a U.S. capitalist system, her family’s economically motivated exile from Mexico, her self-exile from a Mexican cultural legacy and her return—all speak to the nationalist nature of the racial subtext. Assuming, as Homi Bhabha argues, that nations can be defined as narrations,3 then, as Edward Said points out, both culture and cultural resistances can be created, articulated, and perpetuated through narrative forms such as the novel.4 In this way, I read Limón’s revision of the Biblical story of Hagar as a form of cultural production that disrupts more traditional interpretations supporting dominant cultural and ideological narratives. Limón’s engagement with the Bible responds to cultural narratives of masculinist and imperialist dominance over raced and gendered identities such as Ana’s. By challenging the dominant narratives informing Latin and Mexican American Catholicism, Limón creates a cultural space for a newly empowered ethnic American subject. The


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creation of this cultural space necessarily includes the transformative reconfiguration of symbols and systems of meaning that inform definitions of nation and national identity. Thus Ana learns to accept herself and find happiness as a woman of color in the United States, as both Mexican and American. Limón’s rejection of the creolized model of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the affirmation of Ana as agentively raced and gendered through her identification with Hagar’s revised story signify a liberatory redefinition of ethnic American identity. Several characters in the novel mirror the Virgin’s passive femininity and colonialist history: Ana’s mother, the penitent woman, and the female migrant workers. Ana reacts directly to each of these examples of gendered and raced identity either in visceral revulsion or conscious rejection of their social roles and psychological realities. In stark contrast, by the end of the novel Ana has learned to deliberately emulate the alternative subjectivity exemplified by Limon’s redefined Hagar, one characterized both by ethnoracial exile and by struggle, survival, and agency in a patriarchal world. In this way, Memories rejects the Catholic ideal of female subordination as nonviable, offering an empowered alternative for the raced and classed woman. During her childhood in Southern Mexico, Ana feels confined by cultural definitions of gender transmitted both through her mother’s example and through her father’s gendered hatred, which stems from his irrational belief that Ana’s femaleness corrupts: “everyone always reminded me that I must have done something bad to my mother’s womb . . . because after me two boys . . . died. . . . I knew my father resented me for what I had done to my mother’s insides . . .” (12–13). Not only is Ana, as female and first-born, a disappointment by the standards of a patrilineal culture, but Rudolfo’s subsequent association of Ana with the deaths of his male children reveals an underlying misogyny that pathologizes the feminine. Ana’s early ambition of becoming a famous dancer metaphorizes the text’s association between gender liberation and movement. Ana repudiates the traditional role of wife/mother living in poverty by imagining herself in this alternative role. Liberated by both literal and figurative movement, Ana’s imagined alternative contests an essentially static model of femininity, one represented here by her mother and later by the Virgin, the penitent woman, as well as the migrant women laborers. For Ana, Rudolfo’s decision to move north after his wife’s death means leaving her home and the gendered fate it represents. Her

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eagerness to migrate evokes the relationship between gender and movement introduced by Limón’s choice of epigraph: the angel of the Lord said, “Hagar . . . where have you come from and where are you going?” She answered, “I am f leeing. . .” The angel of the Lord said to her, “. . . The Lord has heard you in your humiliation . . .” (Gen. 16:8,11) This Biblical passage reads instructively when analyzed in conjunction with the novel’s opening passages. Hagar’s f light, in light of Ana’s ambitions, becomes a metaphor for female movement away from imprisoning gender roles.5 Flight here signifies a negation of female confinement within the limitations of normative femininity. Furthermore, the relationship between gender and migration, a kind of movement, also has a colonially informed racial context—the imperialist histories of both the Spanish Conquest and U.S. appropriation of Mexican land helped create the political and economic situation that has facilitated Mexican immigration to the United States as migrant laborers. Once in the United States, Mexican immigrants are racialized and then discriminated against socially, economically, legally, and politically. Limón’s text actively works against this process when both the negation of female confinement through the symbolics of movement and a racialized migration are sanctioned by God, a supreme power. Limón’s choice of epigraph legitimizes the gendered quest for agency through the paralleling of a radically reinterpreted Biblical passage with a raced and gendered protagonist’s fate. Ana is motivated by ambitions to better herself, ambitions realizable within the text’s symbolic economy only through the migration, such as the f light informing Hagar’s story in the epigraph, that renders possible other forms of mobility—social, economic, and even psychological. Thus, during a visit to relatives in Mexico City while traveling north, Ana is disappointed when her aunt warns the children about the dangers of the big city, refusing to let them explore and taking them instead to visit the Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Here the author sets up a dichotomy between movement and stasis, between the secular and the religious, between an unknown defined by unlimited potential and the known limitations of the patriarchal Church. This dichotomy ref lects the tension between subject potential and a specifically patriarchal and therefore restrictive cultural and spiritual force for Ana.


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Ana’s discomfort at the Shrine highlights the inherent patriarchy of the Catholic Church here represented by a female icon: “I didn’t like the Shrine because it was spooky and the buzzing of prayers frightened me” (30). Embodied at the Shrine is the brown Virgin, La Virgen Morena, who may signify either a creolized figure of gender empowerment or colonialist resistance.6 The Virgin Mary as iconic figure, however, is also inherently ambivalent. In Catholic cultural iconography, the Virgin symbolizes feminine subordination, self-sacrifice, and stasis. The Virgin’s femininity may represent the idealized passivity of both a gendered and a colonized other. Traditional representations of the Virgin imply an acceptance of a culturally subordinating colonialist past and therefore are opposed to representations of the Virgin as an empowered embodiment of a conf licted past. With her rewrite of Hagar’s story, Limón reinforces the negative symbolics of the Virgin of Guadalupe, emphasizing the limitations of the gendered icon by counterposing the movement inherent in Hagar’s f light and the immobility embodied in the statue of the Virgin. The Virgin, representing the Catholic Church in a colonized culture, symbolizing a colonially informed cultural ideal of subordinated brown womanhood,7 becomes antithetical to the agentive development of a gendered, raced subjectivity. Ana’s discomfort in the confined physical space of the Shrine stages a definitive moment in her life. As Ana kneels in prayer, she “notice[s] a woman hobbling on her knees toward the main alter. She was dressed in black, and she wore a long shawl that covered her head. . . . her face was puffy and blotched from crying.” Ana recounts her reaction to this sight: “The crying woman scared me so much that I felt my heart pound . . . I . . . wonder[ed] what sin could be so great to cause such sadness” (30). The woman’s black garb, coupled with her great distress, suggest a sexual transgression in their contrast with the calm purity of the white clad Virgin.8 Thus, it is at the Shrine that Ana first learns about the polar definitions of womanhood created and perpetuated by the binary logic of a masculinist and originally imperialist religious philosophy. Together, the iconic figure of the Virgin Mary and the penitent woman embody the Madonna/whore binary. Although the figures of the Virgin and the penitent woman are polar opposites in terms of perceived purity, for both, movement is constricted—the Virgin’s stasis parallels the crying woman’s restricted hobbling. The female migrant worker serves as another negative role model for Ana, one that mirrors the passivity and submission inherent to La Virgen Morena as Catholic icon. Picking tomatoes under exploitive

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conditions near the Mexico/U.S. border, Ana determines never to resemble the women working alongside her: “I . . . looked around at the women; I knew that some weren’t much older than me. I watched them toiling . . . [l]ike dumb animals . . . I saw their bony faces marked by grayish blotches, their eyes sunken and sad, their skin aged beyond its years” (40). She instinctively resists the fate of the female migrant workers, understanding their oppression as primarily gendered. However, here, as with her mother, the Virgin, and the penitent woman, gender is raced. In the imperialist histories of both Mexico and the United States, class and race have been mutually constitutive. Because the female migrant workers belong to a class defined by poverty, the Spanish imposition of social “pigmentocracy” in Mexico f urther identifies them as negatively racialized. According to Ramón Gutiérrez and Genaro Padilla, in Mexico since the sixteenth century, “[o]ne’s social class and position in the division of labor was . . . visibly assessed by one’s physical color. This consciousness of color . . . is one of the enduring lamentable legacies of Spain’s conquest” (19). The United States practices its own brand of “social pigmentocracy” through the negative racialization9 of, and subsequent discrimination against, Mexican and Mexican American immigrants.10 Inherent in Ana’s disassociation with these women, therefore, is an implicit connection between gender and race oppressions; she recoils from the imposed cultural subordination of a specifically gendered and raced identity. Ana’s fear of the limitations she associates with her gender and race manifests itself psychologically in a sense of inner fragmentation: “I knew that in just a few years . . . I would be the same as the women surrounding me. I saw that . . . my hope of being a dancer . . . was nothing but a fantasy . . . I felt something inside of me shatter . . . I wanted . . . to become invisible” (40–41). Because Ana only sees the oppression of those gendered and raced, she disassociates herself from them, thus denying vital aspects of her subjectivity rather than working toward self-actualization through the development of gendered and raced agency. The migrant workers’ psychological stasis echoes the developmental stasis embodied by the Virgin’s statue and negates the potential promised by movement in Ana’s dream of dancing and in Hagar’s f light. However, by contrasting the female migrant workers’ fate with Hagar’s mobility and Ana’s later migratory experience, Limón redefines the metaphorical potential in the meaning of migration, affirming the positive in the trope of movement. In contrast to the negative role models of the Virgin, Ana’s mother, the penitent woman, and the migrant workers, Limón creates a viable


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model for her protagonist in Hagar. When Ana first hears her narrative, she is living with Amy and Franklin Bast, friends who protect Ana after Rudolfo almost kills her because of a premarital pregnancy, cursing her and her child. She immediately is struck by Hagar’s fate, relating to Hagar, who, like herself, is punished for the consequences of a sexual transgression with ostracization from her community. Essential to the text’s project of redefinition and to its challenge to traditional Catholic dogma, Ana’s interpretation focuses on Hagar as an individual worthy of God’s attention. Read traditionally, Hagar’s story does not belong to her as much as it does to Abraham, Isaac, and Ismael. Hagar, an Egyptian “handmaid” exploited as a concubine, is cast as the marginalized, gendered, ethnic other. Limón, however, offers an alternative interpretation that both develops Hagar’s role and depends on Ana’s newly evolved ability to express herself through voice. This dependence between the expression of female voice and the revisiting of an ancient narrative further emphasizes the feminist content of the revision and highlights the agency behind Ana’s interpretation. Ana’s identification with Hagar enables her to speak; simultaneously, Limón rewrites Hagar’s role within the Biblical story through Ana’s voice. “[N]o longer afraid to say what she was thinking,” Ana explains to Amy and Franklin: It seems to me that the Lord saved Hagar because she was important on her own; because she was who she was. She came first, and God needed her so that her son could exist. That means that Hagar was more valuable than her son . . . I think that the story is . . . about Hagar, and about how God wanted to save her for something other than just having Ismael. (101) Ana’s use of her voice demonstrates a strengthening subjectivity.11 Her identification with Hagar empowers her because she reads Hagar’s character as legitimized by God. Ana refocuses attention onto Hagar as a viable individual rather than the sexually exploited ethnic other whose worth is measured only in terms of her reproductive function. Ana’s reinterpretation of Hagar’s narrative role as transcending her maternal function defines Limón’s novel as resistive cultural production that derives its subversive quality from the feminist revisioning of traditional cultural narratives. After losing custody of her son because of his father’s betrayal and alienated from her Mexican American community because of Rudolfo’s hatred, Ana spends the next twenty-five years working in isolation. Although she succeeds materially in fulfilling her childhood ambition

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of self-betterment when she becomes a capitalist millionaire, her success remains external. Stunted psychologically by her bitter resentment against the gendered oppression of her past, Ana only begins to find happiness in a two-year affair with a handsome young employee that ends with his accidental death. She is traumatized further when she discovers with horror at his funeral that her lover was her long lost son, Ismael.12 In desperation, Ana contemplates suicide. She ultimately rejects this option in favor of revisiting the Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City. There, dressed in black, a reincarnation of the penitent woman, Ana crawls bleeding toward the statue of the Virgin and prays for forgiveness. She feels nothing. “[T]here was no answer . . . The Virgin was silent and there was no miracle to calm Ana or to help her rid herself of the disgust and shame that had stalked her ever since she could remember” (195). Once again, Limón rejects the passive symbolism of the Virgin Mother as a viable model for the raced ethnic subject. She furthermore rejects the penitent woman’s seeming acceptance of a culturally imposed, doubly inferiorized identity (both female and sinful) as a potential path toward resolution for Ana. Ana’s visit to the Virgin’s Shrine cannot signify empowerment because she returns dependent on a representative of falsely idealized brown womanhood. Ana finds the answer to the self-loathing initially caused by her internalization of Rudolfo’s misogyny and later intensified by her experiences with incest and exilic alienation when she revisits Hagar’s story and is motivated to migrate yet again and return to the site of her birth and her mother’s death.13 There, Ana begins to make sense of her own life through her reinterpretation of Hagar’s fate: I began to see that . . . despite my father’s hateful curse . . . despite my sins, and even after finding Ismael only to have him disappear from my life, still, like Hagar, it was for me to choose to go on living because I was given a life to live. This thought . . . free[d] me . . . from the desert of worthlessness into which I had been cast by my father’s disdain . . . I . . . began to make my way back home. I was at peace because . . . I had discovered the value of who I am. (198–199) This pivotal moment of revelation directly contrasts with those in which Ana has felt silenced and invisible; Limón structures Ana’s seizing of agency through the Hagar myth—it is Ana’s rediscovery of this myth that allows self-empowerment and facilitates a return to her


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ethnoracial self. Immediately after rereading Hagar’s story, “the enigma of Hagar swirled around [her] . . .” (196), and Ana decides “to return to the place of [her] birth, hoping to find the answer there” (197). Ana has not been able to resolve the tragedies of her past within Anglo-American culture. When she returns to Mexico, she returns to the Mexican legacy of her Mexican American self. It is in this context that her interpretation of Hagar’s story fully coheres with her own life; this connection allows her to accept a conf licted past and find peace. Ana’s revived selfassociation with Hagar not only liberates her from the limitations of an internalized self-hatred, but also promises a new emotional and spiritual connection with her Mexican American identity. Ana’s return, enabled by a revived identification with Hagar and signaling reconciliation with her past, points to the broader context of exilic dislocation. Ana’s character is doubly exiled; first through her family’s forced exile from economic hardship, then through a continual self-exile from Mexico and thus from a certain part of her identity. Because her exilic condition is responsible in part for her fragmented sense of self,14 it is crucial for her to reverse her exile and confront a past full of psychological and physical violence. It is through Ana’s identification with Hagar that the text redefines the meaning of exile from one primarily informed by loss to one made more agentive. Limón transforms the meaning of exile from one negatively informed by colonialist histories, religious patriarchy, international hierarchies, and conflicting cultural values to one in which the condition of exile becomes a space of oppositional potential. Ana’s radical interpretation of Hagar’s story, which motivates her return, serves to simultaneously rewrite a personal narrative of exile. Through revisionary strategies, Limón moves her protagonist and, by implication, an immigrant Chicana subjectivity from the fragmentation indicative of exiled disorientation and gendered oppression to identificatory resolution enabled by a recuperated ethnocultural legacy and female agency. By rewriting a Biblical narrative, Limón revisions conservative patriarchal definitions of the gendered and raced identity, developing an empowered alternative for the Catholic Chicana subject in this way. Ana, born into a reality in which her identity is negatively raced and gendered, only achieves self-validation through a conscious identification with a recuperated Biblical character. It is through a recuperated Hagar that Limón empowers her protagonist against a culturally powerful and pervasive Catholic icon. In terms of mobility, strength, and self-affirmation, Limón’s recontextualization of Hagar challenges and subverts the colonized passivity of the Virgin as ideal femininity. In this way, Limón creates an alternative Catholic identity,

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one that rejects the colonization of the feminine to empower the rebellious potential in the raced and gendered subject. Notes 1. In Women Singing in the Snow (1995), Rebolledo explains, “Within Christianity, the iconography and discourse of the Virgin Mary have traditionally urged women to submit, obey, accept” (114). For a comprehensive anthology of essays on the Virgin of Guadalupe as a creolized symbol of raced and/or gendered empowerment, see Goddess of the Americas (1996). 2. For criticism that theorizes Latina writing as resistant cultural production utilizing narrative revisioning, see Alvina E. Quintana, Angie Chabram Dernersesian, Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero, Eliana Ortega and Nancy Saporta Sternbach, and Adela de la Torre and Beatríz M. Pesquera. 3. Both Bhabha in the introduction to Nation and Narration and Said in Culture and Imperialism explore the modern concept of “nation” as narratively constructed, or, as Bhabha puts it, “as a form of narrative” (2). 4. Said sees “stories” as one of the primary methods by which imperial agendas have been disseminated as well as “the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history” (xii). 5. According to Mary Russo’s The Female Grotesque, “freedom as expressed in boundless f light is still an almost irresistible image. In women’s writing . . . it appears again and again” (11). 6. According to Margaret Randall’s “Guadalupe, Subversive Virgin,” the Virgin of Guadalupe “embodies two characteristics: femaleness and color. That is, she is a woman within the long history of male deification. And, dark-skinned, she appeared to an Indian in the context and continuing presence of European invasion” (115). 7. For a brief discussion of racial identity in Mexico postconquest, see the introduction to Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage by Ramón Gutiérrez and Genaro Padilla. For a sociological study of the coherence of race and class in contemporary Mexico, see James W. Russell’s After the Fifth Sun. 8. With the penitent woman, Limón recasts the legendary figure of La Llorona. Her story resembles Ana’s in its maternal and cultural loss and with its intimations of chaotic sexuality and betrayal. As the polar opposite of the Virgin, the crying woman functions in the novel much like La Llorona does in Chicano folklore. 9. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s introduction to Third World Women defines the negative racialization of immigrant identity ref lected in Ana’s experience (25). For more on the negative racialization, labor exploitation, and the coherence between class and race in Mexican American history, see Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America. 10. For analyses of the labor exploitation of Third World women, see Anzaldúa, Chicana Voices, Cynthia Enloe, Adela de la Torre, and Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. 11. In Talking Back, bell hooks associates voice with empowered subjecthood: “Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited . . . a gesture of defiance that heals . . . It is that act of speech . . . that is the expression of our movement from object to subject . . .” (9). 12. Here Limón also rewrites the myth of Oedipus. Representing Jocasta, the paternally cursed Ana unwittingly commits incest with her son, considering suicide after realizing the truth. However, when Ana rejects suicide, Limón rejects the traditional symbolism behind death as suitable punishment for gendered transgression, refusing to portray Jocasta/Ana as a gendered repository of sinful perversion. With the novel’s recontextualization of a Biblical narrative, this revision suggests a rewrite of dominant Western discourses.


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13. Without condoning incest, Limón transforms its traditional meaning within the context of Ana’s emotional cartography. Because of patriarchal forces such as Rudolfo’s hatred and Ismael’s father’s betrayal, Ana cannot recognize her son and subsequently loves him inappropriately. The incest, however, results in Ana’s transformation—the incestuous relationship leads to a reconnection with those aspects of her subjectivity previously dislocated. 14. In this context, emotional self-exile is represented in part by physical migration. In exile from her Mexican community and cultural legacy, Ana denies vital aspects of her identity as a whole; this denial leads away from integration and toward identity fragmentation and its attending unhappiness.

Works Cited Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 3rd ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1988. Alexander, Jaqui M. and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge, 1997. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Bhabha, Homi K. “Introduction: Narrating the Nation.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Routledge, 1990. 1–7. Castillo, Ana, ed. Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Americás: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 1996. Córdova, Teresa, Norma Cantu, Gilberto Cardenas, Juan Garcia, and Christine M. Sierra, eds. Chicana Voices: Intersections of Class,Race, and Gender. Albuquerque, NM: U of New Mexico P, 1990. de la Torre, Adela. “Hard Choices and Changing Roles among Mexican Migrant Campesinas.” Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies. Eds. Adela de la Torre and Beatríz M. Pesquera. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1993. 168–180. de la Torre, Adela and Beatríz M. Pesquera. “Introduction.” Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies. Eds. Adela de la Torre and Beatríz M. Pesquera. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1993. 3–23. Dernersesian, Angie Chabram. “And, Yes . . . The Earth Did Part: On the Splitting of Chicana/o Subjectivity.” Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies. Eds. Adela de la Torre and Beatríz M. Pesquera. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1993. 34–56. Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1989. Gutiérrez, Ramón and Genaro Padilla. “Introduction.” Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. Eds. Ramón Gutierrez and Genaro Padilla. Houston, TX: Arte Público P, 1993. 17–25. hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston, MA: South End P, 1989. Limón, Graciela. In Search of Bernabé. Houston, TX: Arte Público P, 1993. ——— . The Memories of Ana Calderón. Houston, TX: Arte Público P, 1995. ——— . Song of the Hummingbird. Houston, TX: Arte Público P, 1996. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Introduction.” Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1991. 1–47.

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The New Student Bible. King James Version. Eds. Philip Yancey and Tim Stafford. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992. Ortega, Eliana and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. “At the Threshold of the Unnamed: Latina Literary Discourse in the Eighties.” Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Eds. Asunción Horno-Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1989. 2–23. Quintana, Alvina E. “Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters: The Novelist as Ethnographer.” Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Eds. Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994. 72–83. Randall, Margaret. “Guadalupe, Subversive Virgin.” Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Americás: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. Ed. Ana Castillo. New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 1996. 113–123. Rebolledo, Tey Diana. Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. Tucson, AZ: U of Arizona P, 1995. Rebolledo, Tey Diana and Eliana S. Rivero. “Introduction.” Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature. Eds. Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero. Tucson, AZ: U of Arizona P, 1995. 1–33. Russell, James W. After the Fifth Sun: Class and Race in North America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994. Russo, Mary. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 1994. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

CH A P T E R

FOU RT E E N

Dis-robing the Priest: Gender and Spiritual Conversions in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Pa m e l a J. R a de r

The narrative of Louise Erdrich’s epic-novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) oscillates between the first- and thirdperson perspectives of Father Damien. A peripheral character of Erdrich’s earlier novels, Father Damien Modeste comes into focus in Last Report as a confession-seeking historian of his mission, Little No Horse. The narrator–priest discloses to the reader that he is a woman, a former nun, Agnes DeWitt. Mindful of her new cultural milieu, Agnes accepts quietly her self-anointed responsibilities as a priest. In a framing narrative of f lashbacks, the conjoined story of Agnes DeWitt and Father Damien reveals not only how the former novice comes to wear the black robe, but also how a mission priest embraces Anishinaabe ways while many clerics denounce them.1 Furthermore, Erdrich’s treatment of gender in Last Report reinstates a syncretic tradition wherein Ojibwe and Catholic beliefs fuse, marking Agnes’s multilayered assimilation process. Agnes adopts masculine mannerisms, assumes a priestly deference, and learns the Ojibwe culture and language. In Last Report, through her complex characterization and narrative skein, Louise Erdrich brilliantly examines the possibilities and challenges of living a multilayered existence that defies dichotomous

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categories such as Catholic-Native; Euro-Native (American); male– female; and simple definitions of truth–fiction. With her twinned character of Agnes-as-Damien, Erdrich the writer playfully examines gender’s assumed roles and shifting cultural contexts, and she explores her character’s distinction between public and private selves. The personal and civic identities are symbolically veiled by the cassock, which separates the public role of the masculine priest and the private female self. However, Father Damien undermines both Catholic and Ojibwe customs in his adoptive gender and cross-cultural beliefs; both Damien and Agnes can be viewed as folkloric shape-shifters who possess f luid Ojibwe trickster-like attributes—spirit and human, woman and man, colonizer and converted.2 Erdrich’s priest authors a fictional autobiography and lures the reader into believing that as a woman–priest the narrator constructs a saint’s biography, or hagiography. The novel uncovers a layering of identities—one woman’s body exposes a host of embedded identities; this intricate life of a tripartiteself links itself brief ly to the eccentricity of another Catholic character: Sister Leopolda, née Pauline Puyat. In Last Report, Erdrich entwines the stories of two complex, unconventional Catholic women: Pauline and Agnes. While Erdrich’s earlier quartet of novels testifies to Sister Leopolda’s unclearly motivated asceticism, the author now privileges the story of the ever vigilant, yet tender, Father Damien with that of the cruel Sister Leopolda. Both characters, a spiteful nun and a woman– priest, undermine and transgress the standardized Catholic Church’s expectations for their respective ecclesiastical callings. Yet in f leetingly revisiting the ubiquitous Leopolda and examining this character through the lens of Damien, Erdrich resuscitates Father Damien to create a quizzical but steadfast figure.3 Unveiling his gender only to his readers, the now-elderly Father Damien continues his one-sided correspondence with the pope and relates his censored biography to the visiting priest Father Jude Miller. The latter seeks to investigate the miracles associated with Sister Leopolda, a nun in the Sacred Heart Convent at Little No Horse. Revealing his dislike of Leopolda, Father Damien paradoxically withholds and unfolds his story, which, as he explains to Father Jude, is conjoined with Leopolda’s. To Father Damien, Leopolda confesses she has murdered Napoleon Morrissey and attempts to blackmail Damien because she admits derisively that she has seen him undress. The reader slowly learns that, like the Chippewa people, Leopolda knows the priest’s secret, having addressed him as Sister Damien (273). Leopolda’s knowledge threatens Father Damien’s foothold in the Anishinaabeg

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community and could “cause him to leave”; and he wonders “who would listen to the sins of the Anishinaabeg and forgive them—at least not as a mirthless trained puppet of the dogma, but in the spirit of the ridiculous and wise Nanabozho” (276). Here, while Father Damien broods over Leopolda’s self-serving ways, he also reminds the reader of religious dogma’s pitfalls. Furthermore, as these lines reveal, the cleric distinguishes between a forgiving spirituality—which he favors in practice—and an abstract dogma. Not only does Damien act as confessor who is acquainted with his adoptive Chippewa cultural context, but he also values the spirit of their “ridiculous and wise Nanabozho,” a trickster, distinguishing him from his predecessors.4 These lines underscore Father Damien’s humanity, which enables his role as a transcultural priest. In his position of an irreplaceable, empathetic confessor, Father Damien refuses to masquerade as a dogmatic actor and heartless spiritual guide. Yet, as put forth by Sister Leopolda, the reader must ask if the priest is indeed a blasphemous imposter—Sister Damien, or Agnes DeWitt—who poses as a mission black robe—and if he deserves narrative as well as confessional authority. Finally, the passage calls attention to the framing narrative’s subversive structure, which acknowledges a bifurcated audience. Damien’s interior monologue places the reader in the privileged role of confessor–biographer and displaces the visiting Father Jude’s edited version of Damien’s life. Moreover, Father Damien cunningly replaces Sister Leopolda’s potential hagiography with his own narrative. In order to better understand Father Damien, the reader must become acquainted with Agnes DeWitt and her numerous transformation processes. Part I, entitled “The Transfiguration of Agnes,” recounts the pivotal events of Agnes’s life from 1910 to 1912 and contains subheadings, two of which refer to Agnes’s transformations as miracles of her disguise and divine rescue (40, 42). In 1996, when the novel opens, Father Damien ref lects on his youthful days as Agnes DeWitt, who, for a short while, took the veil as Sister Cecilia, the convent music teacher. Sister Cecilia, “[a]t the piano keyboard, . . . existed in her essence, a manifestation of compelling sound” (emphasis mine 14). Unique among her sister-peers, Agnes-as-Cecilia does not see herself as just a piano instructor, but believes she is of sound and music, underscoring her unique spiritualized self-perception. In the convent, the novice’s ecstatic piano playing reverberates with profound spiritual emotions; however, it speaks to and disturbs the nuns’ all-but-forgotten worldly sentiments such as loss and delight. Furthermore, the naïve Sister Cecilia experiences—and later recognizes as—a sexual climax, which “she felt was the natural

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outcome of this particular nocturne played to the utmost of her skills . . . ” (15). In her formative years, Sister Cecilia may confuse her musical orphism with spiritual ecstasy; clearly, the vow to serve God discourages such dissident sensuality. Conf licted and aware, the nun cannot simultaneously be her music with its sexual climax and still be a bride of Christ. Nor can she forgo playing Chopin; so Sister Cecilia, “the woman in the habit became a woman to the bone,” and she departs in a slip (16). As the section’s title forecasts, Agnes indeed perceives herself to be transfigured; she outwardly changes her appearance with the habit and name as Sister Cecilia, but she exalts her own inner ecstatic transformations. While her explanations are spiritual, she cannot contain them to the confines of the convent and its ascetic demands. Her spiritual and musical passions are fiercely unruly. From Agnes to Sister Cecilia and back to Agnes, the last finds herself living and working on a farm with Berndt Vogel, whom she loves, but refuses to marry because “it was well-known that Miss DeWitt’s first commitment had been to Christ” (22). After a series of calamitous events, a robbery and shooting that result in Berndt’s death, Agnes DeWitt meets a priest en route to his new assignment, Father Damien Modeste—the first. However, there is a f lood of biblical proportions, and Agnes is swept along in its currents. Not far up the river Agnes De Witt came upon poor Father Damien Modeste, whom she freely admitted she disliked even as she pitied him now . . . His clothing, his cassock, and the small bundle tangled about him, a traveler’s pouch tied underneath all else, Agnes put on in the exact order he had worn them. (44) Agnes reveals her human imperfections with her honest dislike of the poor priest and her desire to survive by claiming the dead priest’s material possessions and identity. Instead of haphazardly dressing for warmth, she attentively mimics the man’s orderly dress as if preparing herself for her new job description. Agnes, now in Father Damien Modeste’s woolen robe, heads northward to the Ojibwe land, to which the cleric was bound, and she undergoes another transformation. When she arrives at Little No Horse, Agnes internally composes a list of rules, underscoring once again the reader’s confidant-role. Here, Agnes itemizes, “[s]ome Rules to Assist in [Her] Transformation: [to] [m]ake requests in the form of orders. [To] [a]sk questions in the form of statements. [And to] [a]dvance no explanations” (74). These rules mark Agnes’s adaptations of what she perceives to be learnable gendered


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behavior, particularly authoritative masculine speech, which absolve her from clarification, explanation, and uncertainty. A bit of humor— “sharpen razor daily” and exercise for neck muscles—demonstrates Agnes’s recognition of the physical male body. Agnes, as Father Damien the womanly priest, conceals her gender beneath the robe that marks her transformed community identity as masculine, embodying two significant transgressions: gender and profession. As a former nun, Agnes inherits Sister Cecilia’s knowledge of Catholicism, allowing her to pass not only for a man, but a mission priest. But at the core of Father Damien is the articulate, self-aware Agnes. “She transformed herself each morning with a feeling of loss that she finally defined as the loss of Agnes. Ah, Agnes! . . . As she left the cabin, her thoughts became Damien’s thoughts” (76). This passage marks the great schism of the self, and of a consistently transformative being; Agnes’s quotidian ritual, sacraments aside, consists of waking, binding her breasts, and donning the robe before she can leave her quarters as the priest. In thought, Agnes recognizes the merging of her self and her thoughts with Father Damien’s as she applies the thirdperson singular pronoun “she.” Moreover, the reader recognizes that Agnes’s self is narratively constructed; it is Agnes who narrates her daily, self-effacing ritual to become Damien. The woman must recede at daybreak as she routinely reconstructs herself as a priest, and then the ritual reverses itself in the evening when the breasts of Agnes are unbound. The interior monologue underscores the narrative voice of the novel and its complex gender constructions. This passage highlights the schism of genders as well as time and space. While Agnes remains at the core of Damien, she feels her thoughts and behavior become his when she wears the robe outside the cabin, as her rules reveal. In the crepuscular, nocturnal hours, Agnes dwells in the shelter of bedclothes, and inhabits the robe after dawn. Furthermore, the body of Agnes acts as an annal, testifying to her history of a past life “when she had been a nun.” The terrain of conflict is the singular-shared body of Agnes Dewitt, Sister Cecilia, and Father Damien, containing, at times stif ling, a higher, inexplicable passion; in transforming her self, or selves, Agnes defies traditional patriarchy when she reinvents her adopted gender and profession because of her boundless, unconventional spirituality. Finally, the narrative acts as a shape-shifting character that confides in the reader–confessor, who cannot clearly determine what Father Miller hears. While the reader remains tuned in to Agnes and Father Damien’s internal conf licts and musings, it remains that, on the outside, Damien

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appears as an agent of the encroaching white world in his black robe. Traditionally, the Catholic Church would assign a priest to a Reservation outpost for civilizing and converting the indigenous people to its tenets. The Anishinaabeg people could naturally assume that Father Damien would be following in the path of his predecessor, the deceased Father Hugo. Not only must Agnes physically transform herself daily, but she must also routinely alter the Chippewa community’s impressions of her as a stereotypical priest. Driving the cleric to his new post, an Ojibwe man called Kashpaw warns the recently transfigured priest, Leave us full-bloods alone, let us be with our Nanabozho, our sweats and shake tents, our grand medicines and bundles. We don’t hurt nobody . . . Our world is already whipped apart by the white man. Why do you black gowns care if we pray to your God? (63) Here, Kashpaw illustrates the surviving spiritual traditions in place to which he and other “full-bloods” tenaciously adhere. The Chippewa man informs Damien that he and his God would be trespassing not only on Indian land but also on traditional spiritual customs; belonging to the white world, the priest and his emblematic robe symbolize the unwelcome material and spiritual intrusions of the white world. While Kasphaw “sensed something unusual about the priest from the first,” he may not have predicted the black robe’s openness and eventual conversion (64). Father Damien commits yet another transgression by respecting and adopting Ojibwe beliefs. He subverts the conversion process by inverting it, transforming and aligning his own belief system with Chippewa ways. In fact, in a letter to the pope, Father Damien admits, “The ordinary as well as esoteric forms of worship engaged in by the Ojibwe are sound, even compatible with the teachings of Christ” (49). Instead of reporting successful baptisms and conversions, he suggests, in short, that those from Little No Horse already practice Christian-like ways. While Agnes DeWitt’s external priestly transformation may seem merely circumstantial and deceitful, she does gain recognition for her personal uniqueness from the community. The elder Nanapush, like Kashpaw, compares Father Damien to Wishkob, an Ojibwe two-spirit person. Kashpaw, riding silently at times, wonders if this was a man “like the famous Wishkob, the Sweet, who had seduced many other men and finally joined the family of a great war chief as a wife . . .” (64). A biological male, this Wishkob assumed the gender role of a woman, as wife to the chief and as Kashpaw’s grandmother.


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Agnes’s successful transformation as Father Damien is strongly linked to the community in which she lives. What becomes realized at Little No Horse would not be possible in a white diocese. Gender constructions in the white American mainstream remain primarily binary. However, the widely shared Native American belief of the two-spirit offers a more f luid economy of gender and points of resistance to Euramerican categories of sex and gender. An integral and gifted member in many of the Native American cultures is the two-spirit person, one who embodies a quality of and a connection to the spirit world. However, while most Indian communities define the two-spirit people by their gender roles, the white ethnographers all too often conf late gender (or spiritual) roles with sexual ones. This Euramerican focus on—or preoccupation with—sexuality instead of gender is revealed in the labeling of feminine men as berdache, suggesting both abnormality and homosexuality. But the term itself has neither cultural ties with Native peoples nor traditional relevance to their gender roles prior to European contact.5 Early white ethnographic sources emphasize the sexual roles without really recognizing their cultural specificity. In the last fifteen years, Native American anthropologists such as Evelyn Blackwood have recognized the need to reread and correct writings by white anthropologists, such as Walter Williams; Blackwood underscores native people’s distinctions of gender and sexuality, and observes, “individuals possessed a gender identity, but not a corresponding sexual identity, and thus were allowed several sexual options. Sexuality itself was not embedded in Native American gender ideology” (emphasis mine).6 Unlike European American binary constructions, Native American gender is not exclusive to a male or female construction, nor is it linked to sexuality. While Williams seeks to show the gender uniqueness in Native cultures, he fails to italicize or to choose an alternative, less-offensive nomenclature than berdache or amazon, the masculine-woman; his study further disappoints its readers with his preference—again—for culturally displaced signifiers. Most certainly, characteristics of strength and courage do constitute the gamut of normative qualities for women in Native American cultures while the warring Greek amazon is in fact culturally anomalous.7 More recently, a compilation of views and essays on two-spirits was published as Two-Spirit People (1997).8 Collectively, these perspectives stemmed from two consecutive anthropological conferences in 1993 and 1994 as well as a 1993 American Anthropological Association session, entitled “Revisiting the ‘North American Berdache’ Empirically and Theoretically.” Contributors to this anthology ref lect the range

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of views shared by Indian writers, anthropologists, and Indian anthropologists. Most significantly, the authors generally concur in their reiteration that gender—not sexuality—unifies Indian peoples’ perceptions of two-spirits. The introduction underscores the cultural relevance of the label two-spirit, or two-spirited, which “was coined in 1990 by Native American individuals during the third Native American/ First Nations gay and lesbian conference in Winnipeg” (2). The term, therefore, is understood to be a comprehensive one for various roles. Native American cultures recognize gender diversity, transgenderism, cross-dressers, multiple gender categories, and homosexuality instead of the binary or composite Euramerican categories (9). In the unique figure of Father Damien, Erdrich’s Last Report offers a new reading of gender in contemporary Native American and American literature. Father Damien eludes a white construction of gender as sexuality, blurs the outlines of the performed (masculine) and personal (feminine) selves, and spurns a simplified label of cross-dresser. And even if one were to apply a white ethnographer’s taxonomy to a white figure in the text, Damien is neither berdache nor amazon. He is, because his Chippewa community reads him as such, closer to Wishkob. Instead of wondering, like Kashpaw, the elder Nanapush, during a chess game, asks the priest what he is, and the reader, through the use of pronouns, understands that Agnes replies. “I am a priest,” she whispered, hoarsely, fierce. “Why,” said Nanapush kindly, as though Father Damien hadn’t answered, to put the question to rest, “are you pretending to be a man priest?” (emphasis mine 231) Nanapush, whose own name alludes to his trickster-like role in Erdrich’s work, sees a feminine Agnes in Father Damien. Still uncomfortable, Agnes asks Nanapush if it is so obvious, and he responds, “‘But still it is a question maybe just in my mind why you would do this, hide yourself in a man’s clothes. Are you a female Wishkob?’ ” (231). The question shows the elder’s understanding of both Chippewa and white ideologies; Nanapush, knowing that Damien-as-Agnes is not Chippewa, understands her cross-dressing behavior as culturally anomalous in her culture, but offers her a place in his as Wishkob. Suggesting that Agnes could indeed be a unique, spirited person reveals Nanapush’s acceptance of gender variance, and he too recognizes the binary oppositions relative to her world when he confirms her chiasmic, cross-cultural, uniqueness. “ ‘So you’re not a woman-acting man, you’re a man-acting


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woman’ ” (232). This dialogue between Nanapush and Agnes echoes Kashpaw’s first impressions of the priest as womanly and unusual while underscoring Nanapush’s Nanabozho qualities: he enervates Damien to beat him at chess. Nanapush further reveals to Damien that he and Kashpaw spoke once of Father Damien’s uniqueness, but, since the priest did not discuss himself, the Chippewa elders showed their respect by keeping their observations to themselves. This shared secret comments not only upon the topics of sexuality and gender as taboo, but also as inherited, colonial taboos. White colonization of the United States radically altered a preexisting two-spirit tradition among Native peoples. Killing and labeling the two-spirits as oddities, in what Native American scholar Paula Gunn Allen calls “psychological colonization,” fracture their expectations of the individual’s role in community. Allen further explains this process of alienating the individual from his or her culture: “If you hate the traditions you hate part of yourself as Indian. If you hate yourself, that weakens your resolve to oppose white colonization . . . We must recolonize ourselves” (qtd. in Williams 228). Furthermore, Allen tells Williams, “[t]he connection to the spirit world, and the connection between the world of women and men, is destroyed when the berdache tradition declines” (qtd. in Williams 228). Ultimately, to survive, some Native people adopted the dichotomous Christian split of the material and spiritual worlds, carrying over into gender distinctions as male or female, even reclaiming berdache. And from these borrowed gender distinctions, sexuality came to the foreground, rigidifying gender identities. However, as the dialogue between Father Damien and Nanapush discloses, both cultural groups need to revisit the imposed colonial gender categories. The character of Father Damien demonstrates how a female priest becomes comfortable in both the Catholic and Little No Horse worlds. Agnes’s Transculturation and Her Sexuality With the two-spirit ideology, we grasp the hazard of letting gender subsume sexuality. Agnes’s sexuality as Father Damien, therefore, is not altered by her assumed gender role. While priests, like nuns, take vows of celibacy, an assumed sexual abstinence does not necessarily deny the presence of sexual preference or practice. Agnes bears a history of both spiritual and sexual ecstasy, as Sister Cecilia playing the piano and as Berndt Vogel’s common-law wife. She is a passionate woman, borne by

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the miracles of her survival (a shooting spree and the f lood) and transfiguration to Father Damien, mission priest at Little No Horse. In order to dedicate herself to the mission community, Agnes must keep her true identity concealed, first by forgoing intimate relations and shared living quarters, which circumstantially help her adhere to an oath of celibacy. While it is almost ironic that Agnes never officially takes the vows of a seminarian, she does assume them as part of her priestly duties as Father Damien. However, when the diocese sends another priest, Father Gregory Wekkle, to Little No Horse, it is the still-youthful Agnes, not Damien, who is tempted by the sensuality of her new assistant : “A faint, low, clean, and intensely sexual workman’s sweat. Agnes felt herself leaning into the air around him” (emphasis mine 196). With only a wall of books to divide the beds of the two priests, the woman beneath the cassock of her performed role experiences a physical attraction toward this man. Without mentioning the smell of old books, she catalogues his scents of fire, soap, burnt wool, and sweat and leans closer to him. A confused Father Wekkle experiences relief to learn that Agnes is beneath the priestly robe. “Only, in the depth of the night, with the window curtained, they made love with a charged tenderness that left them faint and weeping” (201). Although Father Gregory advocates that they leave Little No Horse together to live as a couple, “married legally and happily,” Agnes refuses him (206). Breaking one of her rules, she finally explains, “I cannot leave who I am,” thereby revealing an acceptance of her identity as a woman–priest (206). Agnes is more than Gregory’s lover: she is the one who listens to and forgives the people “in the spirit of the ridiculous and wise Nanabozho” (276). Agnes’s daily transformations as a priest reiterate her unyielding commitment to her community and parish as she earns their confidence and trust. The clothes then become metonymous for Father Damien’s quiet steadfastness, which accentuate his ubiquitous yet unobtrusive spiritual charisma. The cloth, while it conceals her physical body, allows Agnes to move among her people as a spirited body. She even compares herself to Damien’s robe: “I shall be a thick cloth” (74). Instead of reading the cloth as merely a shield—concealing and protecting identity, it may buffer Agnes’s passions—more significantly, Agnes as Damien can absorb and perform her responsibilities. Conversely, Father Damien’s (poorly!) hidden femininity facilitates his ever-growing affection and acceptance among the Chippewa. “The men waited for him, accustomed by now to the priest’s combination of delicacy and shrewd toughness” (161–162). There is an implied respect


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and confidence in the priest’s ability to perform his duties of confession and mass. Although Agnes never attempts to be Chippewa in dress or mien, she respects their beliefs, practices, and language. As Father Jude notices, “Ojibwe words and phrases had crept into Damien’s waking speech and now sometimes he lapsed into the tongue, especially in his frequent confusion over whom he was addressing. ‘Neshke! Daga naazh opwaagaansz!’ ” (51). This is the same language Agnes was eager to absorb on her ride out to Little No Horse with Kashpaw. Furthermore, having acquired cultural sensitivity and linguistic f lexibility, Damien is rewarded with the community’s acceptance of him. As he muses on his role as confessor, the reader understands that Agnes speaks publicly as Father Damien. Hearing sins was work that required all of the tactful knowledge he had developed during the years spent among these people. His people. He was proud to say he had been adopted into a certain family, the Nanapush family, whose long dead elder had been his first friend on the reservation. (5) Damien self-corrects “these people” to an emphatic “his people” because Nanapush and his family appreciate him completely—as a black robe, a possible Wishkob, a “man-acting woman,” a woman–priest, and a friend. Here, the masculine pronouns (his and he) abound, reiterating these thoughts as a priest’s—and not a woman’s—musings. Equally, Damien, in his role as confessor, values what he has aurally and orally learned from his Chippewa community. Allowing Damien to perform his clerical roles, the people place their confidence and trust in the outsider to share in their daily routines as they collectively invent new ones. Agnes is at the heart of Father Damien’s success as a priest because her spiritual and community devotion combines her performed gender and profession. The Anishinaabeg people protect and remain loyal to Damien, particularly the character of Mary Kashpaw. For example, when Agnes sends Gregory Wekkle away, she concocts an anodyne to dull her anguish and even considers death, falling into an opium–strychnine-induced slumber of dreams. Mary Kashpaw, the priest’s silent Chippewa caretaker, believes she ventures into his dreams to bring him back and does. He, upon waking, goes to see the elder Nanapush. “The way Damien understood it, he was to help, assist, comfort and aid, spiritually sustain, and advise the Anishinaabeg. Not the other way around” (214). The pragmatic—instead of dogmatic—Damien recognizes his humanity: he

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requires the friendship and comfort of others. Although Damien and, therefore, Agnes repeatedly question their conjoined identities, they remain dedicated to their community because the people “help, assist, comfort and aid, spiritually sustain” in return (214). The Chippewa appreciate and ascribe meaning to Damien’s presence on the reservation. We learn repeatedly that the Chippewa value Damien’s spirituality on their own terms. One day, Damien unlocks the convent piano, but it is Agnes who summons the dormant snakes with her playing; her unveiled talent earns the priest a more widespread confidence of the community.9 In the priest’s Christian faith, the leitmotif of the snake may refer to the temptations of sex and knowledge in the Garden of Eden. But in the Chippewa context, Nanapush explains to the priest that the creature acts as a linking and unifying force between worlds. “And it was the great snake, wrapped around the center of the earth, who kept things from f lying apart” (220). These snakes, beckoned by Agnes’s musical performance as Father Damien, underscore the community’s faith in him and in his noted difference and uniqueness, which they interpret as a gift. Like the great snake, Damien is a transformative, regenerative creature, shedding his woolen skin; moreover, in Chippewa terms, his love for his people offers a fundamental cohesion—not the disease and chaos traditionally left by the white man, a usurper of land and religion, but a patient, kind resoluteness. The Chippewa continue to come to the priest for baptisms and marriages, while Father Damien yields to their customs and teachings. In turn, Father Damien had been converted by the good Nanapush. He now practiced a mixture of faiths, kept the pipe, translated hymns or brought in the drum, and had placed in the nave of his church a statue of the Virgin—solid, dark, kind eyed, hideous and gentle. He was welcome where no other white man was allowed. (276) The priest’s “mixture of faiths” marks his concession to spiritual and cultural compromises without exclusive Catholic ultimatums, reading the irony in his own syncretic conversion. Damien receives invitations to Chippewa homes and communal spaces. The ultimate welcome “where no other white man was allowed” extends into the Ojibwe afterlife. Contemplating his final vanishing act, death, Damien has a vision of a black dog, which he spurns. There is no one I want to visit except in the Ojibwe heaven, and so at this late age I’m going to convert, stupid dog, and become at


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long last the pagan that I always was at heart before I was Cecilia, when I was just Agnes . . . (310) In life, Agnes (Cecilia and Damien too) dedicates herself to her Chippewa congregation, offering spiritual guidance and friendship. And in death, she seeks their eternal company. There is a final paradox. While the Agnes–Damien character anticipates a Chippewa afterlife, she continues to reinvent and transfigure her beliefs. Paradoxically, Agnes performs a role and becomes a priestly paternal figure but remains a spiritual iconoclast. Agnes actualizes her traditionally feminine life-giving capacity as she gives birth to herself as Father Damien. Furthermore, she proffers a radically alternative baptism: death by drowning. Agnes, knowing she must maintain Father Damien’s secret, rows out to an island in the lake with her fermented provisions, and then “she’d put stones in her pockets and walk out where the water dropped suddenly to an unknown depth. She would open herself to the water, she would let creation fill her” (347). Death by her own hand would defy the sin of suicide in the Church, and death by drowning reiterates the Chippewa beliefs that “[t]here was no place for the drowned in heaven or anywhere on earth” (Love Medicine 295). However, Agnes imbibes a copious amount of wine, ordinarily reserved for the miracle of transubstantiation, and therefore never makes it into the water to die. Inebriated, she falls in a fit of laughter, rupturing a blood vessel over her left ear. Filled with wine, laughter, and then blood, the unconventional, yet ever embracing Agnes “put her arms out into that emptiness” (emphasis mine 350). The dark lake water will not be the cause of her death but the site of her burial. Last Report acts as the subversive, unwritten hagiography, which reiterates a priest’s uniqueness—even eccentricity. Instead of Sister Leopolda, the initial subject of Father Jude Miller’s investigation, Father Damien will become the subject of Miller’s fruitless inquiry. However, Erdrich’s narrator confesses to the reader what she cannot confess to the diocese. Disappearing, Agnes and Damien do not leave a physical body behind, only copies of letters in the bishopric. The reader then becomes privy to the written and unwritten final reports at Little No Horse, conceding that the passion of Father Damien could not be conventionally related. Furthermore, Erdrich’s textual body, Father Damien’s narrative, replaces the strange disappearance of Agnes’s physical body that eludes probing as well as beatification. The circumstances of Father Damien’s death evoke the readers’ empathy, signaling that, as his implied confessor, we have accepted Father Damien and Agnes’s conjoined transgressions.

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1. I will use Ojibwe when talking about the culture; the Chippewa or Ojibwe call themselves Anishinaabe (also Anishinaabeg) or “the people.” In the novel, Father Damien also prefers Anishinaabeg to the Anglicized Chippewa. 2. The Ojibwe trickster character of Nanabozho, or Nanabush, is an amalgamation of a spirit and human being, who changes its physical forms in traditional folklore. Erdrich’s Nanapush is understood to be trickster-like. For background on the trickster figure, see Ridie Wilson Ghezzi’s introduction to “Nanabush Stories From the Ojibwe” 443–447. Also, see Overholt and Callicott’s Clothed-in-Fur. For additional scholarship on Erdrich’s characters as tricksters, see Gerald Vizenor’s “Trickster Discourse” in Narrative Chance. Jeanne Rosier Smith’s “Cosmic Liberators and Word Healers” in Writing Tricksters is particularly unique because she recognizes Erdrich’s role as a trickster author (71–110). 3. Erdrich’s ever-growing berth of literature excites readers and scholars. Lorena L. Stookey’s Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion (1999) and Hertha D. Sweet Wong’s Love Medicine: A Casebook (2000) testify to the bounty of critical works on the Erdrich oeuvre, such as Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks, and to the growing interest in Erdrich’s works in the classroom. However, there is a notable gap in critical inquiry of and focus on the character of Father Damien in Tracks and The Last Report. Rowson’s piece in Mother Jones, “Louise Erdrich: Cross-dressing the Divine,” offers a review that piques interest without probing too deeply into the Agnes-Damien character. More recently, Peter Beidler’s essay “Gender and Christianity” offers useful pedagogically centered inquiries instead of a scholarly reading of the novel. 4. While I will not define or read Father Damien as a trickster figure, I will show his crosscultural aspects as shape-shifter. See note 2. 5. Berdache stems from the French bardache, whose origins derive from the Persian and Arabic bardj, evolving in French to mean the passive homosexual partner and even “kept boy” or “male prostitute.” See Sue Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, “Introduction,” Two–Spirit People 4; the editors, like many scholars of Native American gender studies, often refer to and seek to revise Henry Angelino and C.L. Shedd’s 1955 American Anthropologist publication, “A Note on Berdache” where the authors conf late berdache with transvestism, 126. 6. See Native American scholar Evelyn Blackwood’s “Sexuality and Gender” 36. 7. Blackwood comments on normative warrior qualities for Plains Indian women. Early colonial ethnographers’ descriptions of these women revealed culture-bound biases, imposing “Western” beliefs about normative and deviant gender roles. See Blackwood, 37. 8. Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang, eds. Two-Spirit People. Page numbers are cited in the work. 9. Nanapush tells Damien that the snakes were “a sign of great positive concern among the old people, for the snake was a deeply intelligent secretive being, and knew all the cold and blessed spirits who lived under stone and deep in the earth” (220).

Works Cited Angelino, Henry, and C.L. Shedd. “A Note on Berdache.” American Anthropologist. 57.1 (1955): 121–126. Beidler, Peter. “Gender and Christianity: Strategic Questions for Teaching The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.” Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich. Eds. Greg Sarris, Connie A. Jacobs, and James Richard Giles. New York: MLA, 2004. 140–146. Blackwood, Evelyn. “Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes: The Case of Cross-Gender Females.” Signs 10.1 (1984): 27–42.


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Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 1993. 1984. ———. Tracks. New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 1988. ———. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 2001. ———. “The Transfiguration of Agnes.” U.S. Catholic. (November 2001): 24–27. Ghezzi, Ridie Wilson. “Introduction to Nanabush Stories From the Ojibwe.” Coming to Light. Ed. Brian Swann. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. 443–447. Gleason, William. “ ‘Her Laugh an Ace’: The Function of Humor in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Casebook. Ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 115–135. Jacobs, Sue Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Long, eds. Two Spirit People. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Overholt, Thomas W. and J. Baird Callicott. Clothed-in-Fur and Other Tales: An Introduction to an Ojibwa World View. Lanham: UP of America, 1982. Owen, Louis. “Erdrich and Dorris’s Mixedbloods and Narratives.” Other Destinies. Ed. Louis Owens. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. 192–224. Peterson, Nancy J. “ ‘Haunted America’: Louise Erdrich and Native American History.” Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. 18–50. Rainwater, Catherine. “Reading between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich.” American Literature 62.3 (1990): 405–422. Rowson, Josie. Interview. “Louise Erdrich: Cross-dressing the Divine.” Mother Jones (May/June 2001): 102–103. Sanders, Karla. “A Healthy Balance: Religion, Identity, and Community in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” MELUS 23.2 (1998): 129–155. Schultz, Lydia A. “Fragments and Ojibwe Stories: Narrative Strategies in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” College Literature 18.3 (1991): 80–95. Smith, Jeanne Rosier. Writing Tricksters. Berkeley: UC Press, 1997. Stookey, Lorena L. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Van Dyke, Annette. “Of Vision Quests and Spirit Guardians: Female Power in the Novels of Louise Erdrich.” The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Ed. Allan Chavkin. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1999. 130–143. Vizenor, Gerald, ed. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Walsh, Dennis. “Catholicism in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and Tracks.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25.2 (2001) :107–127. Williams, Walter. The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Wong, Hertha D. Sweet. “Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: Narrative Communities and the Short Story Cycle.” Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Casebook. Ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 85–106.


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ON

CON T R I BU TOR S

M. C. Bodden is associate professor of English at Marquette University. Her books include The Old English Finding of the True Cross (D.S. Brewer, 1987) and, currently, in draft form, Speaking as a Woman: Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England. She has published articles on language in English Studies, Anglo-Saxon England, and Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture. Her articles on gender and language in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales have appeared in volumes published by the University of Toronto Press, Palgrave, St. Martin’s Press, and Ashgate. She is a Fulbright Research Fellow and a Killam Fellow of Canada. Joan F. Cammarata is professor of Spanish at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York. Specializing in the literature of Early Modern Spain, she has authored the book Mythological Themes in the Works of Garcilaso de la Vega (Porrúa, 1983) and is the editor of Women in the Discourse of Early Modern Spain (University Press of Florida, 2003). She has published articles on Garcilaso de la Vega, Cervantes, Teresa of Cartagena, and St. Teresa of Ávila. She is past president of the Northeast Modern Language Association. Jeana DelRosso is chair of the English Department and associate professor of English and Women’s Studies at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. Her book, Writing Catholic Women: Contemporary International Catholic Girlhood Narratives, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2005, and her articles have appeared in NWSA Journal and MELUS. Sally Barr Ebest is professor of English at the University of MissouriSt. Louis. She is author of Changing the Way We Teach (SIUP), co-author of Writing From A to Z (McGraw Hill, 1994), and coeditor of Reconciling Catholicism and Feminism? (Notre Dame UP, 2003).

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Barbara Eckstein is the author of Sustaining New Orleans: Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City (Routledge, 2005) and coeditor of Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American Cities (MIT Press, 2003). She is a professor of English at the University of Iowa. Leigh Eicke is assistant professor of English at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Her essay on Jane Barker was published in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 (Cambridge UP, 2002), and she is currently working on a book-length study of gender and Jacobitism in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain. Jeanne Gillespie is associate professor of Spanish and associate dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her recent book Saints and Warriors: The Fall of Tenochtitlan from the Tlaxcalan Perspective (University Press of the South, 2005) addresses the narrative strategies used by the indigenous allies of Cortés to record their participation in the defeat of their Aztec enemies. Gillespie also has coedited a volume on women’s voices in the Spanish Empire, which is forthcoming from University Press of the South. Cheri Larsen Hoeckley is associate professor of English at Westmont College. She has written several essays on Victorian women poets and is the editor for Shakespeare’s Heroines by Anna Murphy Jameson (Broadview, 2005). Her current project examines Catholicism’s imaginative power for Protestant and Catholic mid-Victorian women writers. Jennifer Judge is a doctoral candidate at York University, in Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include feminist theory and women in literature. Currently her work examines satire as a mode of feminist cultural criticism in the Victorian novel. Ana Kothe is associate professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez. She has published articles on issues of gender in Modern Language Studies, English Language Notes, and Women’s Studies. Currently, she is completing a translation of selected works by the seventeenth-century nun and writer Ana Abarca de Bolea. Tonya Moutray McArthur is assistant professor at Russell Sage College. She has published articles on women and religion in Victorian Literature and Culture, Studies in English Literature, and the Gaskell Society Journal.


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Pamela J. Rader is assistant professor of English at Georgian Court University, a Catholic women’s liberal arts university in central New Jersey, where she teaches World, Multi-Ethnic American, and Women’s Literatures. Her essay on redefining masculinities in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek is forthcoming from Rodopoi Press. Ben P. Robertson is assistant professor of English at Troy University in Troy, Alabama. He is the bibliographer for the Keats-Shelley Journal. He recently published essays in NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics and the South Asian Review and is the general editor of, Themes of Conflict in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature of the American South (Mellon 2007) and Conflict in Southern Writing (ATSP, 2006). He is working on a book-length examination of the Romantic moral romance in the fictions of Elizabeth Inchbald and Nathaniel Hawthorne and has just completed a three-volume edition entitled The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald (Pickering & Chatto, 2007). Stacey Schlau is professor of Spanish and Women’s Studies at West Chester University, Pennsylvania. She has published Spanish American Women’s Use of the Word: Colonial Through Contemporary Narratives (University of Arizona Press, 2001); the critical edition Viva al siglo, muerta al mundo: Obras escogidas de María de san Alberto (1568–1640) (University Press of the South, 1998); and, with Electa Arenal, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns In Their Own Works (University of New Mexico Press, 1989; second edition, Pennsylvania State UP, 2008), as well as numerous articles on Hispanic women writers, especially in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. A collection coedited with Emilie Bergmann, Approaches to Teaching Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Modern Language Association Press) is scheduled to appear in 2007. Mary Jane Suero-Elliott is an independent scholar living in the Bay Area. She has taught at the University of Washington, Seattle Pacific University, Antioch University, and Seattle University. Her research focuses on Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American writing and theories of transnationalism and globalization. Upcoming publications include “Subverting the Mainland: Transmigratory Bilculturalism in U.S. Puerto Rican Women’s Fiction” (University of Washington Press). She has recently completed a book entitled Transmigratory Subjectivity in Contemporary Latina Fiction.


I N DE X

Abad, 90, 92, 100, 101 abjection, 3, 10, 18, 20 abolition, 148 abortion, 163, 167, 169–170, 171 Abraham, 135, 207–209, 215 Acosta, José de, 61 African American Catholics, see black Catholics African American literature, see under individual authors agency, 110 gendered, 201, 211, 212, 213, 215–217 raced, 211, 212, 213 and migration, 208, 217 through sexuality, 168 Alexander, M. Jacqui, 192 with Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 192: Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, 192 Angela of Foligno, 2, 4, 9–23, 34, 35 Liber de Vere Fidelium Experientia, 10 Angelita de Olivitos, 70 Anglican, 129, 200 see also Protestant Anne, Saint, 74–75, 76–81, 83, 84n11 anti-Catholicism, 107, 109, 116, 119, 128, 160, 177 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 74, 76 Arcangeli, Tiziana, 16, 17, 22

Arenal, Electa, 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 67, 239 with Schlau, Stacey, 51, 52, 55, 67, 239: Untold Sisters, 52, 55, 67, 239 Armstrong, Isobel, 135 Arnold, Matthew, 128 Asbury, Herbert, 139, 140, 143, 153n1 asceticism female, 15, 20, 36, 99, 222, 224 see also mystics, female Ashley, Kathleen, 29, 32, 35, 84 Ashton, Gail, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 37, 38 Audubon, John James, 147 Augustine, Saint, 90–91 Confessions, 90–91 authority divine, 37, 82, 91, 152 ecclesiastical, 9, 15–16, 22, 38, 70, 71, 72, 76, 143, 160, 178, 185, 199 female, in the church, 10–12, 18, 22, 26, 27–28, 35, 42–43, 47, 48, 51n1, 74, 82, 83, 92, 141, 196, 199 sovereign, 108, 109, 114 autobiography, see memoir autoeroticism, 175, 181, 182, 184 see also sexuality autonomy, for women, 28, 32, 33, 90, 91 Bakhtin, Mikhail, M., 10, 20, 38n17 Balzac, Honoré de, 176

242

Index

Barratt, Alexandra, 10, 11 barroco de Indias, see Spanish American baroque literature Barth, John, 36 Baudot, Georges, 59 Beatrice of Nazareth, 12 Beauvoir, Simone de, 177, 187n8 Beckwith, Sarah, 10, 17–18, 21 Beebee, Thomas, 96, 97 Epistolary Fiction in Europe, 96 Behn, Aphra, 95 Love-Letters to a Gentleman, 95 Bell, Rudolph, 15 berdache, 227–228, 229, 234n5 see also two-spirits Bernard of Clairvaux, 12, 74 Bhabha, Homi, 210, 218n3 Bible, the, 45, 56, 77, 134, 135, 144, 208, 209, 210, 212, 215, 217, 218n12 bildungsroman, see coming of age bioregion, 146, 149 birth control, 160, 161, 167, 171 black Catholics, 5, 191–204 Blackburn, Frank, 146 Blackwood, Evelyn, 227, 234n6, 234n7 Blais, Marie-Claire, 5, 175–188 Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, 5, 175–188 Blagden, Isa, 126 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 101n24, 185 The Decameron, 185 bodiliness, 9, 12 and self-punishment, 13, 15, 19, 21 body, female, 3, 9, 10, 12–14, 17–22, 25–28, 31–34, 37n8, 37n11, 38n20, 88, 92, 99, 164, 209, 222, 225 as text, 2 body of Christ, 9, 12–13, 14, 17, 18–21, 32, 65, 67 as symbolically female, 14 body-mind dualism, see body-spirit dualism body-spirit dualism, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 19, 21–22

Bonaventure, Saint, 10, 31 Bredeweg, Frank H., 193–194 Bridget of Sweden, Saint, 28, 35 Brossard, Nicole, 178, 187n7 Brother Arnaldo, 10, 15, 16, 18, 22 Brown Virgin, see Guadelupe, La Virgen de Browning, Robert, 123, 124, 137n3 Boucherette, Jessie, 128, 137n6 Burrus, Virginia, 99 The Sex Lives of Saints, 99 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 22 Cain, Burl, 144 Caldwell, Paulette, 200 “A Hair Piece,” 200 Callaghan, Barry, 177, 185, 187n3, 187n6 Camus, Albert, 176 Canadian literature, see Canadian writers Canadian writers, 176–178 Carlyle, Thomas, 123 cantares mexicanos, 58 carnivalesque, the, 179 Carvacho, Millar, 70, 71 Cary, Anne, 111, 118 Cary, Elizabeth, 106–120 The Tragedy of Mariam, 109, 120n6 Cary, Lucy, 106, 111, 118 Casti Connubii: On Christian Marriage, 162 Carmelite Order, 42, 43, 47, 50n5, 50n6, 51n9, 51n13, 74 see also Teresa of Ávila Carranza, Angela, 3, 69–85 Relacion, or Account, 69–85 Carvajal, Luisa de, 3–4, 87–101 Vida, 3–4, 87–101 Cathar heresy, 15 Catherine of Siena, Saint, 12, 22n3, 34, 37n10 Catholic Church and censorship, 46, 178, 179, 184, 222 and education, 3, 51n12, 55, 70, 89, 110–111, 119, 142, 168, 177, 178, 193–204

Index and girls, 5, 70, 128, 162, 163, 165, 167, 168, 182, 191, 195–204 and immigration, 143, 210, 212 and politics, 4, 5, 10, 27, 37n4, 42, 46, 70, 73, 75, 91, 106, 107, 108–109, 112, 115, 116, 117, 125–126, 129–130, 133, 142, 144, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 160, 161, 169, 171, 178, 201, 203, 209, 212 and segregation, 142–143, 194, 200, 203, 204n2 and sexuality, see female, sexuality and the working class, 129, 151, 161, 191 as threat to cultural heritage, 34, 194,–195, 196, 200 black leadership in, 193 charities, 123, 124, 125 conversion, 4, 5, 22n4, 33, 42, 44, 50n6, 61, 63, 64, 67, 100n9, 106, 109–110, 118, 120n10, 120n12, 120n13, 129–130, 191, 203, 222, 226, 232 dogma, 11, 19, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 81–82, 84n6, 162, 163, 177, 202, 207–208, 215, 223, 231 guilt, 159, 162, 163–165, 177, 181 polemic, 111 rejection of, by women, 88, 160, 161, 203, 208, 211 role of women in, 2–6, 9–11, 26, 36, 105–120, 160, 170–171, 191–192, 222: see also convent; see also nuns; see also priests, female; see also women Catholic colonialism, 55, 75, 76–77, 142–143, 178, 193, 195, 201, 203, 208, 209–213, 217–218, 229 Catholic drama, 55, 59, 89, 109 Catholic Family Movement, 160 Catholic feminism, see feminism, and Catholicism Catholic iconography, 71, 75, 76, 77, 81, 127, 207–208, 210, 213, 217, 218n1

243

Catholic schools, see Catholic Church, and education Catholicism American, 59, 73, 141, 163, 167, 171, 192–193: see also black Catholics British, 4, 100n9, 105–120, 129 Chicana, 217 Irish, 4, 129–130, 161, 162, 168 Irish American, 142, 159–172, 191, 194–195, 204n2 Latin American, 142, 207, 210 Mexican, 209–210, 217 Native American, 222 Québécois, 175–178 Scottish, 106, 111, 112–113, 117 Spanish, 45, 59, 67, 69, 73, 75, 76–77, 85n12, 142, 208, 210, 212 celibacy, 32, 116, 229–230 Certeau, Michel de, 47, 49 Charles I, 106, 109, 110, 111 Charles IV, 141 Civil War, American, 141, 142, 143 Chicana subjectivity, 217 Christ as female, 14, 18, 20, 21, 31, 168 Cixous, Hélène, 45 Claiborne, William Charles Cole, 141 Clairvaux, Bernard de, 12, 74 class, 5, 20, 28, 73, 84, 124, 125, 129, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 142, 144, 151, 161, 165, 167, 191–192, 195–196, 201–204, 208, 211, 214, 218n7, 218n9 and race, 5, 191–192, 195–196, 201– 204, 208, 211, 214, 218n7, 218n9 classism, 203 clericalism, 192 Collins, Merle, 5, 196, 200–204 Angel, 196, 200–204 colonialism, see Catholic colonialism cloister, 28, 41, 42, 105–106, 108, 111, 115, 116, 117, 119 Collins, Wilkie, 124 coming of age, stories of, 162, 167, 169, 170, 198“Confessions of a Reluctant Catholic,” see McDermott, Alice

244

Index

confessors, 9, 16, 28, 35, 37n10, 42, 45, 51n13, 69, 72, 74, 83, 88, 90, 91, 97, 99, 142, 223, 225, 231, 233 Cornwall, Barry, see Proctor, Brian Waller convent, 3, 4, 5, 37n5, 42, 44–45, 51n10, 51n13, 55, 61, 67, 74, 75, 84, 84n8, 90, 100n6, 100n12, 105–108, 111, 115–119, 120n5, 120n7, 120n20, 130, 163, 166, 167, 175, 177, 180, 181–182, 201–202, 222, 223–224, 232 as brothel, 182 convent schools, see Catholic Church, and education converso, 44 Counter-Reformation, the, 41, 88 coverture, 126 Coyne-Kelly, Kathleen, 28, 37n11 Craig, Isa, 126 Creole, 71, 84, 139, 141–142, 143 criollo, 3, 56, 57, 59, 67 Cruz, Anne, 90, 99 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 3, 55–68, 91, 93, 101n19 Carta atenagóica, 56 Ejercicios devotos, 56 El Divino Narciso, 3, 55–68: loa, 3, 55–68 “Hombres necios que acusáis,” 56 Inundación Castálida, 93, 100n16 Los empeños de una casa, 56 Primero sueño, 56 Respuesta a sor Filotea, 56 cuicatl, 58 Cullinan, Elizabeth, 159, 160, 161, 162–163 House of Gold, 162–163 Cult of the Virgin, see Mary devotion Dame Clementina, see Cary, Anne Dame Magdalena, see Cary, Lucy Davidson, Arnold, 180, 187n10 death penalty, 65, 144, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153n7 death row, 140, 144, 145, 147, 151–152

DeJean, Joan, 97 The Fictions of Sappho, 97 Delaney, Carol, 195 with Yanagisako, Sylvia, 195 DelRosso, Jeana, 164 Derrida, Jacques, 49 De Vere, Aubrey, 128 DeSalvo, Louise, 197 Dickens, Charles, 123, 124–126, 129, 130, 136n1, 137n3, 137n4 All the Year Round, 124 Cornhill Magazine, 126 Good Words, 126 Household Words, 123, 124, 126, 136n2 Dodge, Jim, 149 Dolan, Frances E., 105, 107, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 119, 120n3, 120n7, 120n9, 120n10, 120n15, 120n23 Donohue, Stacey Lee, 161 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 176 Dronke, Peter, 35 Durso, Patricia Keefe, 162 east-west divide, 1 Ebest, Sally, 2, 6n4, 172n1 with Ron Ebest, 2, 6n4: Reconciling Catholicism and Feminism?, 2, 6n4 écriture feminine, see Cixous ecological feminism, 146 ecstasy, spiritual, 13, 18, 19, 36n1, 224, 229 education, see Catholic Church, and education Ellis, Henry, 185 epistolary genre, 3, 41–53, 88, 95–96, 100n6 as feminine, 46, 95–96 Erasmus, Desiderius, 45, 46, 51n11 Erdrich, Louise, 5, 221–235 The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, 5, 221–235

Index ethnicity, 59, 129, 165, 193–195, 208, 209–211, 215–216 and Catholicism, 129, 165, 193–195, 208, 209–211, 216 Eve, 11, 19, 72, 76, 79 as sinful, 11, 19, 72 exile, 4, 108, 112, 131, 164, 176, 210–211, 216–217, 219n14 execution, 90, 100n9, 139–140, 143–152, 185 politics of state, 151 see also death penalty see also death row see also electrocution see also hanging Faber, Father Frederick, 134–135 Fanning, Charles, 172n1 Faulkner, William, 176 female authority, 10–12, 18, 22, 26, 27–28, 35, 42–43, 47, 48, 51n1, 74, 82, 83, 92, 141, 196, 199 autonomy, 28, 32, 33, 19n38, 90, 91: see also female, independence body, see body, female chastity, 19, 28, 32, 72, 131 emigration, 128, 208–210, 212, 214, 216, 219n14 identity, see identity, female inferiority, 9, 12, 43, 49, 51n8, 114, 164 independence, 70, 72, 130, 144, 165, 170, 209: see also female, autonomy migration, see female, emigration monasticism, 43, 108, 116 resistance, 2, 3, 11, 25, 32, 106, 117, 129, 135, 147, 167, 204, 210, 213–214, 215, 218n2 sexuality, 5, 11, 17, 18, 19, 26, 27–29, 31–32, 33–34, 37n4, 41, 71, 130–131, 133, 134, 161, 163–165, 166, 167, 168, 178, 179–180, 182, 187n7, 213, 215, 218n8, 223–224, 229–230

245

femininity masculine, 31 normative, 12, 46, 49, 71, 133, 135, 208, 211, 213, 230, 233 passive, 210, 211, 213: see also Mary, Blessed Virgin Western stereotypes of, 201, 202, 234n7 feminism, 170, 171 and art, 208 and Catholicism, 2, 4, 5, 6n4, 160, 164, 167, 171 and conf lict with the Catholic Church, 11, 22, 160, 167, 171 and ethnicity, 215 and race, 192, 195, 196, 204: see also womanism first wave, 160 second wave, 161 Western, 2 feminist theory, 3, 29, 30, 31, 34, 57, 67n1, 208 ecological, 146 literary, 2 literary history, 160, 171 psychology, 45, 229 Finke, Laurie, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17–18, 19, 20, 21, 30, 38n17 Flaubert, Gustave, 176 folkways, 4, 140, 144, 145, 146, 148, 150, 152–153 Foster, Michele, 193 with Irvine, Jacqueline Jordan, 193 Foucault, Michel, 10, 45, 50n1, 51n9, 100n2, 106, 115–116, 119, 145 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 11, 12, 22n3 Frankenberg, Ruth, 195 Franklin, V. P., 203 Free Spirit heretics, see Cathar heresy Fullerton, Lady Georgianna, 128 Gandolfo, Anita, 191–192, 198 Garden of Eden, 232 Garibaldi, Antoine M., 203 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 124

246

Index

gaze, male, 88, 100n2 see also voyeurism gender and Christ, 10 and class, 191, 194–196 and ethnicity, 210–212 and race, 5, 192, 194–204, 210, 214 and religion, 2, 3, 28, 81–82, 84, 144, 179, 191 and Victorian ideology, 124, 127, 129 and writing, 41, 43, 45–46, 49, 94, 95, 97 as social construction, 11, 225, 226–229 Native American, 221–234 see also female see also femininity Genette, Gérard, 92, 95 Seuils, 92 George I, 114 Gertrude the Great, 12 Gide, André, 176 Gilligan, Carol, 45 Goldmann, Lucien, 178 Goldsmith, Elizabeth, 96 Writing the Female Voice, 96 God as male, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 21 Gómara, Lopez de, 58, 64 Góngora, Sigüenza y, 57, 58, 61, 64 Gordon, Jan, 176, 178, 180, 183, 187n10, 188n13 Gordon, Mary, 159, 160, 164–165, 191 Final Payments, 164–165, 191 gothic, the, 175, 176, 177, 180, 184–186 Gould, Karen, 179 Grail, the, 160, 161, 171 see also Kalven, Janet Greeley, Andrew M., 194 Green, Mary Jean, 178, 183, 184, 187n2, 187n3, 187n11 Gregory of Nyssa, 31, 38n21 Gregory, Gill, 136–7n3 Grundy, Isobel, 117, 119n6, 120n3, 120n8 Guadelupe, La Virgen de, 204, 207, 208, 210–213, 216, 218n1, 218n6 Guillén, Claudio, 43

Guilleragues, comte de, Gabriel-Joseph de La Vergne, 94, 95 Portuguese Letters, 94, 95 Gula, Sharbat, 1, 6n1 Gunn Allen, Paula, 229 grotesque, the, 10, 20, 26, 179 female body as, 10, 20, 26 Gutiérrez, Ramón, 214, 218n7 Hadewijch of Antwerp, 12 Hagar, 207–219 hagiography, 3, 4, 5, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29–31, 33–36, 38n18, 38n23, 90, 99, 222, 223 see also spiritual autobiography hair, female, 78, 98 as representation of black womanhood, 199–200, 201, 202 see also Caldwell, Wilson Hall, Stuart, 145 Haly, Richard, 58 “The Poetics of the Aztecs,” 58 hanging, 139, 141, 144, 145, 146 Harding, Wendy, 31, 32, 38n20 Harfmann, John, 192, 204n1 Hayes, Diane L., 193, 198 Hays, Matilda, 123, 126 Henrietta Maria, 109 Henry of Halle, 10 Herbert, Lady Lucy, 106–107, 111, 112, 115, 117–118 Herbert Maxwell, Winifred, Countess of Nithsdale, 106, 107, 108, 111–112, 113–115, 117, 119 heresy, 15, 44, 74, 76, 84 see also heterodoxy heterodoxy, 4, 72 see also heresy heteronormative, 119 heterotopia, 106, 115, 117, 119 Hoeness-Krupsaw, Susana, 165 Holy Spirit, the, 19, 77, 78, 79–80, 82 holy women, 15, 29, 35, 69, 72 see also nuns homelessness, 128, 130–136

Index homosexuality, 161, 184, 227, 228, 234n5 see also lesbianism Howard, Maureen, 159, 160, 161, 162–165 Before My Time, 162 Bridgeport Bus, 162, 165 Grace Abounding, 162 Howitt, Mary, 126 Humanae Vitae, 160 humanist, 45, 50n8, 123, 129 Ibsen, Kristine, 88, 99 iconography, 71, 75, 76, 77, 81, 127, 207–208, 210, 213, 217, 218n1 identity Catholic, 106, 120n5, 129, 208 communal, 36, 225 epistolary, 41, 43, 49, 50 ethnic, 129, 165, 217, 218n4, 219n14 female, 30, 36, 41, 129, 165, 200, 207, 208–211, 214, 216, 225, 230 lesbian, 177 racial, 194, 200, 207, 208–211, 214, 218n7, 218n9 sexual, 227 spiritual, 31, 44, 78 Illuminism, 70 ilusa, 70, 72 Immaculate Conception, 71, 74–76, 78–79, 81–83, 84, 142 imitatio Christi, 11–12, 20, 33, 78 immigrant church, in America, 191, 198 imperialism, 210, 212–214, 218 Inquisition, 41, 44, 50, 69, 70, 71, 73, 76, 77, 84, 84n8, 84n10 Lima, 69, 73, 84 Roman, 85n12 Spanish, 45, 85n12 integritas, or the sealed body, 28 intercessors Blessed Virgin Mary, 198 priestly, 9, 14, 15 saintly, 76 Irigaray, Luce, 16–17, 18–19, 21, 22 “La Mystérique,” 10, 18

247

Irish American Catholics, see Catholicism, Irish American Irish Catholics, see Catholicism, Irish Irvine, Jacqueline Jordan, 193, 196–197, 204 “Segregation and Academic Excellence,” 196–197 Islam, 1, 5 Jacobite, 106, 107, 108, 112, 113 Jacobson, Beatrice, 166, 168 James II, 108, 112 James III, 115, 117 James, Henry, 176 James, Samuel, 144 Jameson, Anna Murphy, 123, 126, 137 Jameson, Frederic, 178, 184 Jerome, Saint, 31, 37n11, 38n20 Jewsbury, Geraldine, 128 Joachim, Saint, 74, 76, 78–81, 82 John of the Cross, Saint, 47 Josefa de la Madre de Dios, 69 Joseph, Saint, 76, 80, 81 Jule, Allyson, 2, 6n4 with Bettina Tate, 2, 6n4: Being Feminist, Being Christian, 2, 6n4 Julian of Norwich, 31, 34, 91, 118, 164 Kaf ka, Franz, 176 Kalven, Janet, 160, 161, 171 see also Grail, the Kauffman, Linda, 96, 97 Kearns, Caledonia, 172n1 Keats, John, 176, 177, 184, 185–6 Eve of St. Agnes, The, 185 Eve of St. Mark, The, 185 Isabella, 185 Lamia, 185 Keen, Benjamin, 58, 60, 64 Kemble, Fanny, 123 Kempe, Margery, 10, 25–35, 36n4, 37n6, 37n12, 38n14, 38n22, 91 The Book of Margery Kempe, 26–27, 29, 31, 36n4, 37n6 King, Deborah K., 195, 203

248 Lachance, Paul, 15, 18, 22n2, 22n3 Laclos, Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de, 97 Dangerous Liaisons, 97 Lafayette, Madame de, 94 La Princesse de Clèves, 94 Latina literature, 207, 218n2 see also Mexican American Latz, Dorothy L., 118, 119n1, 120n11, 120n22 Laveau, Marie, 139–140, 141, 142, 143–147, 150, 152, 153 lay histories, 116 La Virgen Morena, see Guadelupe, La Virgen de Lacey, Candida, 137n5 laywomen, 106, 107–109, 116–119, 120n3, 160, 179 lesbianism, 177 see also homosexuality letter-writing, see epistolary genre liberation theology, 203 Limón, Graciela, 207–217, 218n8, 218n12 The Memories of Ana Calderón, 207–217 Lochrie, Karma, 10, 17, 19, 20, 22, 28, 37n12 Lohrli, Anne, 136n2 Lorde, Audre, 196, 198, 199, 200, 203, 204 Zami, 196, 198, 199, 200, 203 Luna, Lola, 77, 78 Luisa de Carrión, 75, 84 MacCarthy, B. G., 95 The Female Pen, 1621–1818, 95 madonna-whore dualism, see virginwhore dualism Mairs, Nancy, 191 MacDonald, George, 128 male promiscuity, 130 Maloney, Catriona, 172n1 with Thompson, Helen 172n1 Mander, Jenny, 92, 94

Index Mann, Thomas, 176 Mannarelli, María Emma, 70, 73, 78, 84n5 Manning, Henry, 129 map-making, 140, 148–153, 153n12 Margaret of Oignt, 12 María de Jesús Agreda, 82, 85 Mariana de Jesús, 72 Marie D’Oignes, Saint, 35 Marotti, Arthur F., 109 Martineau, Harriett, 128 martyr, 29, 37n10, 49, 83, 90, 91, 99, 131, 185 Mary, Blessed Virgin, 28, 32, 43, 56, 70, 74–77, 78, 79, 80–81, 82, 83, 85n12, 92, 125, 129, 130, 131, 133, 142, 198, 199, 203, 204 and female sexuality, 130, 134 and gender, 14, 127 and visual arts, 70, 77, 81, 218n1 as eternal mother to all, 127 as intercessor to Christ, 198 as passive figure, 36n3 as role model, 11, 36n3, 131: as impossible role model, 213 as virgin and mother, 79, 80, 127, 133 see also Immaculate Conception Mary devotion, 75, 129, 131 Mary Magdalene, 19, 134 see also virgin-whore dualism maternity and family, 81 and prayer, 78 and virginity, 77 as education, 82 see also motherhood matter-body dualism, see body-spirit dualism Maurice, F. D., 128 Mazzoni, Cristina, 9, 11, 16, 17, 22 McCarthy, Mary, 159, 160–162 The Group, 159, 161 McDermott, Alice, 159, 160, 164, 166, 167, 171 Charming Billy, 166, 167 Child of My Heart, 167

Index “Confessions of a Reluctant Catholic,” 159 McDonogh, Gary Wray, 194, 197 Black and Catholic in Savannah, Georgia, 194, 197 McGraw, Erin, 160, 167, 169, 171 Baby Tree, The, 169 Lies of the Saints, 169 McGreevy, John T., 193 McInerney, Kathleen, 163, 172n1 McNally, Michael J., 195 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 9 memoir, 4, 36, 50, 87–101, 125, 129, 130, 136, 168–169, 196, 198, 203, 222 Merrim, Stephanie, 56, 67n1 metis, 150 Mexican American, 209, 210, 214, 215, 217, 218n9 see also Latina literature Meyer, Katherine, 163, 167 with Seidler, John, 163, 167 migration, 73, 128, 143, 208–210, 212, 214, 216, 219 see also agency Milhaven, John, 12 ministers, female, 169 see also priests, female misogyny, 12, 22, 109, 125, 211, 216 missionary, 62, 63, 90, 91, 99, 221, 223, 225, 230 modesty, 93–94, 97, 182 as topos, 93–94, 97 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 192, 218 see also Alexander, M. Jacqui monasticism, 43, 106, 108, 116, 119 Montoya, Jacinta, 70 Morrison, Molly, 14 Mother Angela, see Carranza, Angela motherhood and control of daughters’ sexuality, 162, 164, 165 and race, 199–202, 204, 214 and marriage, 32 as Catholic ideal, 78, 106

249

as protestant ideal, 116 as homemaker, 127, 135, 151, 211 of priests, 81, 226 coerced, 180, 208 church as mother, 162, 163, 166 God as mother, 10, 168, 198 single, 170 spiritual, 66, 77, 144 see also Mary, Blessed Virgin see also maternity see also virginity see also virgin-whore dualism Motion, Andrew, 185 Mullock, Dinah Craik, 128 murder, 152, 153, 220 Muñoz, Luis, 88, 92 Myers, Kathleen Ann, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 99, 100n3 Myers, Kilmer, 10 Myles, Eileen, 160, 167, 168–169, 171 Cool for You, 168–169 mystics, female, 9–22, 22n3, 25, 27–34, 37n12, 45, 69, 72, 97, 167 and sexual relationship with God, 9, 11, 18, 19 and silence, 16 as utilized by Catholic church, 16 National Coalition of American Nuns, 163 Newcastle, Margaret, 95 Nithsdale, Countess of, see Herbert Maxwell, Winifred Norton, Caroline Sheridan, 128 novitiate, 118, 183, 186 NOW, 163 nuns, 44, 72, 78, 98, 115, 162, 163, 166, 167, 168, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 229 as female role models, 93, 130 as writers, 51n1, 55, 56, 77, 82, 85n12, 89, 93 English Catholic, 105, 107, 109, 116– 119, 120n2, 120n20, 120n22 see also convent

250

Index

Oakley, Ann, 36 Oates, Joyce Carol, 160, 164, 165–166 We Were the Mulvaneys, 165–166 What I Lived For, 166 Ochs, Stephen J., 193, 203 Omi, Michael, 195 with Howard Winant, 195: Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s, 195 oral tradition, 73, 107, 231 as feminine, 42, 45, 116 original sin, 72, 74, 76, 79, 81, 83 Owen, Jane, 111 Oxford Movement, 124, 129 parole, 147, 151 Pacheco, Francisco, 77, 78 The Art of Painting, 77 Padilla, Genaro, 214, 218 Parkes, Bessie Rayner, 126, 129, 130, 136, 137n3, 137n7 Patmore, Coventry, 128 Paul, Saint, 65, 82 Perry, Ruth, 96, 97, 101n24 Petroff, Elizabeth, 14, 17, 34, 36n3, 38n25 Pinelo, Sor Valentina, 77–78 Book About the Praises and Excellence of the Glorious Saint Anne, 77–78 Plumwood, Val, 146 Polite, Vernon C., 193 public housing, 147, 151, 153 Pope Benedict XVI, 10 “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church,” 10 Pope Innocent X, 82 Pope John Paul II, 10, 11, 167 “Letter to the Women of the World,” 10 Pope Pius IV, 42 Prejean, Sister Helen, 140, 142, 143–153 Dead Man Walking, 140, 144, 146–147, 149, 152 Price, Leah, 96

priests, female, 81, 141 see also ministers, female prisoners, 50, 112–114, 139–144, 146–148, 151–152, 186 probation, 147 Procter, Adelaide Anne, 123–136 A Chaplet of Verses, 125, 129–136: “A Desire,” 134; “A Woman’s Answer,” 124, 130; “A Woman’s Last Word,” 124, 130; “A Woman’s Question,” 124, 130; “An Appeal (The Irish Church Mission for Converting the Catholics),” 129–130; “Milly’s Expiation,” 130, 134; “Homeless,” 125, 130, 131–134, 136 “Kyrie Eliason,” 125: “The Names of Our Lady,”125; “The Sacred Heart,” 125; “The Shrines of Mary,” 125 Legends and Lyrics, 125, 126: “The Legend of Provence,” 130, 137 Victoria Regina (ed.), 126: “Links with Heaven,” 126, 127; “The Homeless Poor,” 136 “The Beggar,” 136 Procter, Brian Waller, 123, 137 Prose, Francine, 198 Household Saints, 198 Protestant, 123, 127, 165, 197 hegemony, 105, 107, 109–110, 117, 119, 124 Reformation, 42 religions, 108, 129, 143 see also Anglican see also Unitarian Proust, Marcel, 176 Québécois literature, see Québécois writers Québécois writers, 176–178, 184, 186, 187n4 race, 191–197, 200, 203, 204, 218n1 and academics, 194, 197, 201

Index and female identity, 73, 207, 208–214, 216, 217, 218 and nation, 58, 218n7, 218n9 as blackness, 192, 195–6, 197, 200 Racine, Claude, 178 racism, 195, 199 as multiple jeopardy, 203: see also King, Deborah in the Catholic church, 203 rape, 37n6, 165, 180–182, 184, 186 Ratzinger, Joseph, see Pope Benedict XVI recusant, 106–109, 111, 113, 114, 115, 117, 119 religious syncretism, 140, 141, 143, 145, 152, 210, 221, 232 religious women, see women, religious Rhodes, Elizabeth, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 97, 99, 101n28 Rich, Adrienne, 45 Richardson, Samuel, 35, 94, 96 Clarissa, 94, 96 Rimbaud, Arthur, 184, 187n11 Roach, Joseph, 153n2 Robbins, Tim, 148, 149 Romanticism, 177 Rose of Lima, Saint, 72, 83 Ross, Ellen, 36n1 Ross, Kathleen, 57, 59, 60, 61 Rowlands, Marie B., 109, 118, 119n1 Ruether, Rosemay Radford, 22, 160, 164, 167 “American Catholic Feminsim,” 167 Rule of the Clausura, 105, 116 Sabat-Rivers, Georgina, 58–59 Sade, Marquis de, 176–177, 179–180, 184, 186, 187n8 see also Sadean moments Sadean moments, 175–176, 179–181, 184, 185, 186 Said, Edward, 210, 218n3, 218n4 saintly intercessors, see intercessors, saintly saints, see under individual saints see also women, saints

251

Sánchez, Ana, 71, 72, 84n9 sanctity, female, 12, 19, 25, 26, 29, 30, 33, 35, 36n3, 71, 99, 119, 131 Sanger, Margaret, 161 Schattschneider, E.E., 148, 149 Schlau, Stacey, 51n10, 55 with Arenal, Electa, 51n10, 55: Untold Sisters, 51n10, 55 Scott, James, 150 secular, 32, 34, 55, 105–108, 115, 116, 119, 125, 127, 130, 137n4, 159, 212 segregated schooling, see Catholic Church Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 58, 64 Seidler, John, 163, 167 with Meyer, Katherine, 163, 167 Sedalla, Fray Antonio de, “Pere Antoine,” 141, 143 seminary, 110, 230 sexism, Catholic, see misogyny sexuality, 186, 229 female, see female, sexuality gender and, 227–229, 234n6 incest, 175, 180, 181, 216, 218n18, 219n13 molestation, 178, 180 reclamation of, 168, 169, 229 transgressive, 26, 32, 33, 178, 179– 180, 181, 187n7, 213, 215 as existential angst, 180, 186 as sinful, 11, 19, 33, 164, 218n12 see also autoeroticism see also celibacy see also chastity see also homosexuality Shell, Alison, 119 Smith, Barbara Leigh, 126 Sinclair-Stevenson, Christopher, 116 silence, 44, 135, 218 female, 17, 25, 27, 28, 34, 45, 179, 216 sin, original, see original sin and cleanliness, 21, 62, 66 Spanish American baroque literature, 57, 67

252

Index

speech, women’s, 11, 16, 25–28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 46, 47, 56, 114, 215, 218n11, 225 public, 26–28, 36 spirit-body dualism, see body-spirit dualism spirit religion, 146, 149 spirit region, 148–151 spiritual advisor, 85n12, 139–145, 148, 150–153 spiritual autobiography, 50, 87–99 see also hagiography spiritual grace, 29, 33, 76, 82, 127 spirituality, 9, 13, 21, 26–29, 31, 34, 35, 37n12, 46, 70, 73, 197, 223, 225, 232 and writing, 27–28 Sten, María, 60, 61 Stevenson, Robert, 59 Stillinger, Jack, 185 Stouck, David, 176, 187n4 subaltern, the, 73 suffrage, women’s, 160 Sumrall, Amber Coverdale, 198 with Veccione, Patrice, 198: Catholic Girls, 198 Suso, Henry, 12 Tate, Bettina, 2, 6n4 with Jule, Allyson, 2, 6n4: Being Feminist, Being Christian, 2, 6n4 Tallant, Robert, 139, 140, 153n1 Tennyson, Alfred, 124, 128 Teresa of Ávila, Saint, 41–51, 81, 91, 93 technicways, 145, 146, 150 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 123, 128 Third World literature, 178 tocotin, 57, 58, 59, 61, 67 Tolstoy, Leo, 176 Thompson, Helen, 172n1 with Maloney, Catriona, 172n1 Torgovnick, Marianna, 197 Torquemada, Tomás de, 61 Trabulse, Elías, 56

Trollope, Anthony, 128 two-spirits, 227 Unitarian, 129 see also Protestant Vatican II, 144 Veccione, Patrice, 198 with Sumrall, Amber Coverdale, 198 Catholic Girls, 198 Villaseñor Black, Charlene, 76 Victoria, 127 Virgin Mary, see Blessed Virgin Mary virginity, 19, 31, 32, 36n3, 37n10, 37n11, 71, 78, 79, 81, 91, 101n24, 119, 167, 168 symbolic, 27, 28, 32 virgin-whore dualism, 19, 28, 32, 134, 171, 213 voice, see speech Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de, 186 Candide, 186 voodoo, 139, 140–141 voyeurism, 18, 87, 88, 90, 94, 99 see also gaze, male Walker, Alice, 196 see also womanism Walker, Clare, 108, 109, 116, 119n1, 120n2, 120n3, 120n5, 120n8, 120n20 Walpole, Michael, 88, 91 Watts, Anna Mary Howitt, 126 Welsh, Alexander, 137n4 Williams, Walter, 227, 229 Wilson, Janet, 29 Wilson, Judith, 200, 201 Winant, Howard, 195 with Omi, Michael, 195: Racial Formation in the United States, 195 Winstead, Karen, 28 Wolfe, Heather, 118 woman of color, 211 see also black Catholics see also Mexican American

Index womanhood, 200, 202, 208, 209, 213, 216 womanism, 196, 198, 199 women and culture, 26, 27, 36, 36n2, 37n5, 42, 45, 168, 192, 200, 209, 213, 217, 227, 234n7 and devotion, 9, 11, 14, 15, 22, 33, 34, 56, 63, 72, 75, 116, 130, 198, 231 and legal issues, 42, 51n8, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 114, 161, 212 and marriage, 6n1, 11, 51n8, 114, 161, 170 and piety, 9, 11, 12, 15, 19, 20, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32, 36, 37n10, 69, 71, 89, 118, 124, 125, 130, 131, 135, 181, 208 and silence, 26, 27, 34, 44–45, 179 and work, 126–131, 214, 218n10 as mother, see motherhood as priests: see priests, female; see women’s rights to ordained ministry of color, 139, 141, 192, 193, 202, 204, 211: see also black Catholics; see also Mexican American education of, see Catholic Church, and education holy, see holy women intellectual, 41, 43, 45, 56, 58, 61, 78, 96, 97, 150, 161 liberation of, 1 migrant workers, 211–214 oppression of, 1, 2, 4, 5, 21, 99, 124, 134, 178–179, 209, 214, 216–217 poor, 70, 71, 131, 207–208 professional, 43, 71, 81–82, 84, 124, 125, 126, 128, 137n3, 225, 231 religious, 11, 12, 14, 15, 28, 38n18, 41–52, 78, 106–107, 116, 114, 202: see also cloister

253

rights of, see women’s rights sexuality, see female sexuality submissive, 36n3, 41, 46, 126, 199 successful, 34, 41, 80, 93, 94, 111, 113, 115, 140, 210, 216, 227, 231 surveillance of, 46, 97, 108, 111, 124, 131, 134 writing, 2, 17, 31, 38n18, 41–56, 83, 91–99, 100n15, 120n7, 125–128, 159, 160, 161, 164, 166, 169–171, 172n1, 195–198, 203, 204, 207, 218n5 see also female see also femininity see also feminism see also feminist theory see also gender see also laywomen see also under individual religions Women’s Liberation Movement, see feminism, second wave women’s rights, 114, 123–126, 160, 202 to ordained ministry, 167, 169, 171 see also priests, female see also women, legal issues women’s self-empowerment, 21, 22, 73, 91, 208, 216 women’s speech, see speech, women Woolf, Virginia, 46 Wood, Denis, 149, 150, 152 Word, Wynken de, 29 Wray, Grady, 56 Yanagisako, Sylvia, 195 with Delaney, Carol, 195 Yates, Julian, 107, 108 York, Darlene Eleanor, 194 Zayas, María

de, 94

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