The
first post on Ron Hansen’s Mariette in
Ecstasy can be found here.
The
second post here.
Part
2
Summary:
Part
1 was indeed just one day long, the day of August 15th, 1906, and
Part 2 picks up on August 16th and ends on Christmas Eve, December
24th. If you haven’t noticed,
each vignette starts off being dated with the Feast Day Mass in the liturgical
calendar, so the reader can date the events.
Other than the occasional inserted fragment of the inquiry into
Mariette’s experiences, the narrative time flows sequentially.
Mariette
begins to meet the various Sisters, accustom herself to the rhythms of convent
life, and develop her personal intense prayer and contemplative practices,
above and beyond what the Sisters at the convent are required. She meets with the Mistress of Novices,
Mother Saint-Raphaël, a stern elderly woman who is able to discern Mariette’s
personality. Mariette goes through catechism
lessons, of which she is flawless, works the daily activities requiring manual
labor, and increases her devotion through subtle acts of mortification. Mariette writes confidential notes to Père
Marriott about the intensity and dearth of her personal connections with
Christ, and Mother Céline has intercepted them and secretly reads them.
We
see instances of Mariette’s self-flagellation and impulses to increase their
severity. We see scenes of latent sexual
desires and conduct, and even play. We
see a deep, ardent relationship with Christ and a commitment to its fullest
expression. Various sisters notice all
these things, and we the reader can justify what we think happens to Mariette
by pointing to something in this section.
Finally
the last sections of Part 2 dramatize the discovery, painful endurance, and ultimately
death from cancer of Mother Céline. Mother
Saint-Raphaël allows Mariette in the care of her blood sister, where she
watches her older sister undergo the humiliation of medical diagnosis and the
suffering decline and death. Her father
as the local doctor is called up to perform the medical exams. Part 2 ends with Mother Céline’s funeral and Requiem
Mass and Mariette reaching her highest level of ecstasy yet, kneeling in front
of the crucifix in a trance emulating the suffering of the Lord.
###
As
I’ve said, I’m quite amazed at the skill level of Ron Hansen to capture life in
a monastery and the personalities of the nuns themselves. Here’s a little scene of a nun who admires
Mariette.
Compline. Sister Emmanuelle retreats a half-step in her
stall so she can peer behind Sister Antoinette and discretely adore the new
postulant in her simple night-black habit and scarf. She’s as soft and kind as silk. She’s as pretty as affection. Even now, so soon, she prays the psalms
distinctly, as if the habit of silence has taught her to cherish speech. And she seems so shrewd, so pure, so
prescient. Sister Emmanuelle thinks, She is who I was meant to be.
And then the sisters turn
and walk out in silence, and Sister Emmanuelle thrills as she hesitates just
enough so that Mariette passes by. And
then she quickly presses her left hand into the postulant’s. Mariette walks ahead and hides her surprise
as she secretly glimpses her hand and the gift of Sister Emmanuelle’s starched cambric
handkerchief with its six winged seraphim holding a plumed letter M gorgeously stitched into it in hours
of needlepoint. She gives the seamstress
an assessing glance and then Sister Emmanuelle flushes pink as the girl shyly
smiles.
Such
a little scene, and yet so much is communicated. We see during the communal praying of
compline that the sisters are not just vessels performing their religious tasks
but flesh and blood people who get distracted and build affections. At the center of the first paragraph, we get
Sister Emmanuelle’s thoughts in what is called indirect interior monologue, the
actual thoughts of a character even though the narrative is not in first
person. Even though they are praying,
Sister Emmanuelle shifts her head so that Mariette is in her purview, and she
thinks, “She’s as soft and kind as silk.
She’s as pretty as affection.” As
we see elsewhere, being distracted as thus is a minor sin and giving such a
gift would also no be condoned. The very
fact that Sister Emmanuelle does it secretly and that Mariette accepts it in
secret is I think a de facto acknowledgment that it was not proper. Sister Emmanuelle is not a novice. We see from the directory she is 54 years
old, and so quite conscious of her failing.
But these sort of human would be quite natural.
While
I have this scene up, I should bring up another motif that runs through the
novel, that of latent sexual longing. We
see here what might be construed as sexual attraction for another woman. Sister Emmanuelle sneaks peaks at her
beloved, she admires her, she considers her attractive, she is thrilled as
Mariette passes by, she gives her a secret gift, and she flushes pink when the
beloved returns an acknowledging gaze.
So does Sister Emmanuelle have a consciously or unconscious same sex
attraction for Marietter? On the other
hand, she also admires how Mariette prays the psalms, seems so pure and
prescient, which implies a divine knowledge, and she thinks, “She is who I was
meant to be.” This is the language of
religious desire, not sexual.
So which is it?
What I think Hansen is doing is intertwining sexual desire with
religious desire. The Freudian bent
reader – and we moderns have all been shaped by that intellectually flawed set
of notions – would say there is a latent lesbian inclination. But we also know that longing for God is many
times delineated as a sexual pining.
Christ is described as a “bridegroom.”
Various woman saints have undergone a mystical marriage with
Christ. Indeed, the wedding ring St.
Catherine of Siena received was Christ’s foreskin. Biblically we have the Song of Solomon. Isaiah 62:5 (“For as a young man marries a virgin,
So your sons will marry you; And as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, So
your God will rejoice over you.”), Hosea 2:19 (“"I will betroth you to Me
forever; Yes, I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and in justice, In lovingkindness
and in compassion.”), Rev 19:7 ("Let us rejoice and be glad and give the
glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made
herself ready."), Psalm 63:1 (“O God, You are my God; Early will I seek
You; My soul thirsts for You; My flesh longs for You; In a dry and thirsty
land; Where there is no water.”), and others.
The language of religious intimacy is sometimes blurred with the
language of sexual intimacy.
Freud might say that this is within the
unconscious. I don’t know. In Christianity, God is love, and a component
of love is sexuality. And just as in synesthesia,
where one of the five senses is blend with another, so too different types of
love can be commingle. I don’t think
Sister Emmanuelle is having a sexual attraction to Mariette. I think she sees Mariette as she sees Christ,
or at least connects her to Christ. She
says that Mariette is the person she was “meant to be.” Well, Christ is the person we are all meant
to be. This sort of sexual double
entendre is a motif throughout the novel, and allows the reader to consider
Mariette’s love for Christ to have a sexual connotation.
###
It’s
interesting how there was no preparation for Mother Céline getting cancer, no
hints, no talk of her being ill on occasion.
In the early scenes she is perfectly fine. It comes out of the blue. If I were to ask Hansen a question, I would
ask him why? I don’t quite have an
answer for it, and because of the high skill in the authorship of everything
else in the novel, it is unlikely it was an oversight.
But
equally interesting is that we don’t really get that much preparation for Mariette’s
stigmata. She goes from having
“experiences” to bleeding stigmata and coma-like ecstasies. Now there are foreshadows and time shifts of
bringing in clips from the inquest prepares us to some degree, but not
fully. When you look at Mariette in August
on her entrance and even throughout most of Part 2, she is completely changed
in Part 3 after the stigmata. The amount
of change in four months of time is breath taking.
Narratively
Mother Céline is a sort of Mariette’s doppelgänger, a double who serves to show
parallels and contrasts with the main character. The fact that she’s her sister raised in the
same home, having a similar relationship with the father, taken the same vows,
and in the same convent is pretty suggestive of that. That she experiences a crucifixion like
Mariette (and here I’m jumping ahead to Part 3) is also indicative of a
doublet. Her sufferings, like Mariette’s
sufferings, are a recreation of the Christ’s passion. There is the carrying of a cross, pains in
the flesh as of a scourging, stripping, stab wounds to the side, the release of
blood and water, and finally the humiliations.
I’m
not sure we realize just how a crucifixion was meant to humiliate. Stripped naked and staked to a cross (and
believe me they did not leave a loin cloth for privacy) where one slowly dies
in front of the world, unlike a hanging which is fairly quick, is about as
shameful a death as possible. For a Jew
it was deeply shameful because it says so in the Torah: Deut 21:23, “for he
that is [so] hanged is accursed of God.”
I’m sure Christ had loss of bladder and bowels during his passion and
crucifixion, loss of physical control while asphyxiating, and loss of emotional
control under torment. There are
citations of sexual abuse of people undergoing the scurging, and I have read
some speculate Christ may have been subject to that too. Scripture has undoubtedly cleaned up some of
this out of respect to the Lord, but all of this was meant to destroy the
dignity of the crucified.
Mother
Céline’s sufferings, not having the ability to care for oneself, having to
undergo the indignity of a medical examination of her private parts from her
own father no less, having to urinate in front of people in a glass, and
finally the uncontrolled expulsion of blood is destruction of her dignity. She is undergoing the Lord’s passion, of
which we will all have to undergo at some time, unless we are blessed with a
quick death.
I’ll
delineate Mariette’s undergoing of the passion when we get to Part 3. There are differences, contrasts. The most significant is that Céline are
completely biological while Mariette’s are completely non-biological. Theologically one could think of Céline as a
forerunner to Marriete, just as John the Baptist is a forerunner to Christ.
Now
there is also the suggestion that Mother Céline’s sufferings is a seed that
works in Mariette’s psychology. This is
another form of the psychosomatic theory of what happens to Mariette. And just like with the Freudian sexual
psychosomatic theory, Ron Hansen wants the reader with the modernist world view
to be led down this path. Here the
theory would be that Mariette overly identifies with her sister and takes on
her malady, or something to that effect.
Perhaps the term is “psychological identification” but I’m not
sure. But it can’t be. Perhaps one can say that her coma might be so
induced, but there is no way a stigmata can be so induced psychologically.
Reply
to Irene:
Irene,
I wrote my thoughts before I read yours.
Yes, the suggestion of psychosomatic with Mariette identifying with her
sister is intentional but in light of the fact that Mariette's stigmata is real
then one has to re-look at the validity of that cause.
No
I don't believe there is sexual abuse going on with the father. That's what cancer doctors do. I take my mother to a hematologist and even
though it was only suspected that my mother might have cancer, the doctor
routinely examines her belly and breasts.
It's rather embarrassing for me to be there, and I can imagine what my mother
feels. I don't recall the scene with
Mariette. I'll have to re-read
that. But I thought the father was just
doing doctorly things, of which are inherently humiliating. It's humiliating to be in a hospital.
I
too can't put my finger on why those two big events happen on Christmas
Eve. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps it has to do with the
incarnation. I don't know.
Irene
Commented:
II
agree that Celine's examin is standard for a doctor. I just wondered why Hansen
chose to have the father also be the doctor.
My
Reply:
That's
a good question. He didn't have to, did
he? You had asked if he were
anti-religious. There’s a little scene
in Part 3 I just re-read where he happens on a chance meeting with Mariette at
the church. The Grille separates them. She asks about her wounds and she informs him
they have healed. He asks to examine
them. She refuses to show him.
“Just let me look at your
hands.”
She hides them behind her
back.
“Are they bleeding
still?”
She dully shakes her
head.
“Are they healed?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, let me see
how that is done?”
“No, Papa.”
“Examining them won’t
hurt.”
“Christ has forbidden
them to science.”
Her father frowns with
irritation at Mariette and says, “You are talking idiotically.”
“I have said what I have
to say,” she says. We love you
Papa.” And she goes. (p. 140)
I
still don’t know if he’s anti-religious but he definitely stands in for
empirical science. She refuses to give
into the science, though she will have to later. I can’t answer as to why Hansen combines it
with her father. Perhaps because it
makes it even more surprising and undermining of the scientific world view that
it all started under his nose.
As
I was typing the conversation above, I was struck with Mariette’s last words,
“We love you Papa.” Who is included in
the “we”? Céline is dead. The rest of the Sisters? Not sure why that would be. Christ?
Interesting.
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