Mariette in Ecstasy, Post 5

The first post on Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy can be found here.  

The second post here.  

The third post here.  

The fourth post here.  

Just skimming through the novel to put my final thoughts together and I came across this interesting tidbit.  When Mariette first enters the convent and has a little discussion with her sister, Mother Céline, they discuss the letter that their father wrote explaining that Mariette suffers from “trances, hallucinations, unnatural piety, great extremes of temperament, and…’inner wrenchings’”  Mother Céline asks:

“Was he dishonest in his description?’

“I have no opinion, Reverend Mother.”

“Was he duped then?”  (p. 31)

Now go to the examination scene where when she puts her hands in the water the wounds disappear.

She tells him, “Christ took back the wounds.”

She expects her father to stare at her with fear and astonishment, but he is, as always, frank and unimpressed, as firm as practical as a clock.  “And your feet?” he asks.

“I have no wounds.”

“Even that is miraculous!” Père Marriott says.

Dr. Baptiste smirks at him and then at Mother Saint-Raphaël.  “You have all been duped.” (p.173)

There’s the word twice, “duped.”  That certainly wasn’t an accident.  I’m now convinced that Irene was right at the beginning of our discussion.  Dr. Baptiste is anti-religious.  What I think is central here is that Mariette “expects her father to stare at her with fear and astonishment,” but he does not.  There are two opposing world views here coming into opposition: the supernatural Catholic and the empiricist modern.  It is also interesting we get the supernatural Catholic world view not so much from the Sisters at the priory but from the readings they read as a group.  There are several writers they read.  I can’t remember exactly but I think St. Augustine, St. Benedict, and especially Blessed Julian of Norwich.  The Julian of Norwich readings actually foreshadow Mariette’s experiences. 

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We have discussed three of the major themes of the novel: the ambiguity of religious experience, the shift to a worldview based on empiricism, and the unwillingness of people to change their habitual lives even if Christ has entered their space.  But for me I think the most profound theme in the novel is the theme of holiness through humiliation.  It’s a rather complex theme, so let me try to walk you through it.

First off, I don’t think Mariette’s spiritual “crucifixion” is really from the stigmata.  That is just a sign from God.  Her real “crucifixion” is the humiliation she undergoes first as she is examined and criticized, next when she is expelled from the convent that she dearly wanted to be part of,  and then when for the rest of her life she is looked upon as a fraud.  Those final vignettes of her leading a lonely and isolated life are very poignant.

But this theme of crucifixion through humiliation runs throughout the novel.  Of course we get its opposite, pride.  Pride is the one sin that is most feared.  And as a seventeen year old, zealous in her faith, Mariette suffers from pride in many places.  On her first day at the convent in a conversation with Sister Hermance, the two share their deepest desires.  Sister Hermance first:

“When I joined the order I prayed to go away from home and have home totally forget me.  I have been praying since for humiliations and hardships and perfect atonement for my sins.  And perhaps, too, consumption and an early death.”  She thinks for a second or two and asks, “Is it too much, Mariette?” 

She shrugs.  “I have been praying to be a great saint.”

Sister Hermance peers at her seriously.  “Such pride, Mariette!  You surprise me.”

She smiles.  “I’ll try to be irresistible.” (p. 19)

We do see Mariette’s youthful exuberance in her devotion.  And while we’re all called on to be saints, to want be a great saint requires an exertion rooted in pride.  Sister Hermance reacts to its boldness.  What Sister Hermance desires is way more humble: to be forgotten, perhaps alluding to the Blessed Mother as she fades from the center of the Gospels.  She also wants “humiliations and hardships and perfect atonement.”  We will see Mariette go through all that in time.  Sister Hermance finally adds, “consumption and an early death.”  Mariette too will undergo a spiritual death and the death of her convent life.  We see in Sister Hermance’s desire what Mariette will learn.

If you read through the novel looking for pride and humiliations you will see they come up frequently.  Here are some of her prides: Mariette is Mother Céline’s sister.  She is the lovely girl who’s hair is still uncut.  She is the one they gossip about.  She is the holy one who writes the profound paper on theology.  She takes on penances.  She prays perfectly.  When she is alone in Père Marriott’s chambers, she thinks of herself as a priest, acting it out (p. 39).  In one of the embedded inquest dialogues, Sister Catherine is asked what she thought of Mariette, she says, “She is passionate.  She is perhaps too proud.  She is not hysterical.”  Here is another Sister who sees Mariette’s pride.

And it is Mother Saint-Raphaël who publically identifies Mariette’s pride.  She does at the scene of the open confessions, well prior to Mariette’s first stigmata:

“Our postulant has been too proud.  She has been a princess of vanities.  She has sought our admiration and attention in a hundred ways since she has joined our convent.  She hopes we will praise her for being pretty and fetching and young.  She is slack in her work and lax in her conscience.  She has been a temptation to the novices and a pet to all the professed sisters.  Ever since I have been her mistress, she has been a snare and a worldliness to me and terrible impediment to the peace and interests of the Holy Spirit.  (p. 88)

Look too at Mother Saint-Raphaël’s self-discovery dialogue with Mariette, where the Mother confesses to have also had the sin of pride in her youth (p. 50-51).   So when Mariette gets her stigmata, the one in a handful of people in all of history to have been blessed with one, there too one senses a pride.  The first happens on Christmas Eve:

She holds out her blood-painted hands like a present and she smiles crazily as she says, “Oh, look at what Jesus has done to me.”  (p.112)

This perhaps is her moment of most pride.  No one has questioned her yet.  No one has doubted.  Clearly there is an element of pride in her manner of stumbling forth, holding her wounds as a “present.”  Look at the phrasing: “Look at what Jesus has done to me,” with emphasis on the personal pronoun, “me.”

But throughout the novel, Mariette is also aware of her pride and her necessity to eradicate if from her person.  In her first note to Père Marriott written on her first night at the convent, concluding Part 1, she explains:

Every day and in the midst of every kind of disobedience and failing, I have asked Jesus to have pity on me and either take my life entirely or, in his justice and mercy, give me a great deal to suffer in atonement for my foolishness and the sins of the world.  While there have been times when he permitted me to enjoy the greatest consolations, there have been times of darkness and silence, too, when I felt disliked and in disfavor and, with hopelessness and pining and tears, I prayed to Jesus that was very near Hell.  (p. 42)

She is quite conscious of her sins of which, from what the reader can see, pride stands out.  She asks to suffer in atonement, and the process for that is mortification.  Written on a rafter somewhere in the convent is “They mortify their bodies with abstinence” (p. 48).  Mortification is at the center of the novel.  Mortification in most dictionaries is differentiated into four related definitions.  From the Online Dictionary:

noun

1. a feeling of humiliation or shame, as through some injury to one's pride or self-respect.

2. a cause or source of such humiliation or shame.

3. the practice of asceticism by penitential discipline to overcome desire for sin and to strengthen the will.

4. Pathology. the death of one part of the body while the rest is alive; gangrene; necrosis.

Definitions (1) and (2) are interrelated in that (1) identifies the result of (2) the source, but both at their heart is “humiliation.”  Definition (3) identifies a process of which one overcomes an interior desire for sin, and definition (4) identifies a bodily death, which is at the etymological root of mortify.  So there are three categories here, humiliation, ascetic discipline, and death, and all three figure into this grand theme of the novel.

I mentioned in an earlier comment that, in addition to suffering, humiliation is at the heart of Christ’s crucifixion, and at the start of this comment I mentioned that Mariette’s real crucifixion is her humiliation. 

We see Mariette frequently mortifying herself as an attempt to extinguish desire to sin.  We see her praying all night, we see her lie face down in sympathy with a punished sister, we see her use some sort of instrument to draw blood, we see her welcome a sting from a thorn, we see her scald her hands, among other instances.  When she is asked about scalding her hands, Mariette mysteriously says, “I just want to hurt” (p. 70).  The reader may jump to the conclusion this is part of the self-flagellation that leads to what might be a self-inflicted stigmata.  Hansen makes it ambiguous but the true underlying reason is Mariette’s attempt to extinguish her pride and in turn come closer in sympathy to Christ.  The pains and spilled blood of the stigmata then are not a sign from God that Mariette is any more holy than anyone else, but God’s grace of mortification for her to become more holy.  In that letter to Père Marriott I quoted above, Mariette tells the priest what Christ prophecies for her:

“You will have no solace or pity, not even from your superiors.  You will be tortured by gross outrages and mistreatment, but no one will believe you.  You will be punished and humbled and greatly confused, and Heaven will seem closed to you, God will seem dead and indifferent, you will try to be recollected, but instead be distracted, you will try to pray and your thoughts will fly, you will seek me fruitlessly and without avail for I shall hide in the noise and shadows and I shall seem to withdraw when you need me most.  Everyone will seem to abandon you.  (p. 43)

That letter from that first night is actually the novel in a microcosm.  Abandoned, as Christ was abandoned on the cross, Mariette achieves the ultimate mortification, a humiliation that will last throughout her life.  There is nothing now that she can take pride in.  She is expelled from the convent and defined as a hoaxer.   Thirty years later in her letter to Mother Philomème she writes:

Children stare in the grocery as if they know ghostly stories about me, and I hear the hushed talk when I hobble by or lose hold in my hands, but Christ reminds me, as he did in my greatest distress, that he loves me more, now that I am despised, than when I was richly admired in the past.   (p. 179)

We see now how her pride has been extinguished.  She has arrived at definition (4) of mortification, the death of the old self into the new creation.  He loves her more “now that I am despised.”  So why does God bring her through this humiliation?  Because through the humiliation she has arrived at true and full holiness.  It is not the stigmata that made her holy.  It is the mortification.