MARIANISM AND MARINA WARNER

...Superficially the plot concerns the role of money...

...But The Takeover surmounts most of its difficulties...

...He even founds a religious community to praise the primitive goddess...

...he speaks in metaphors and myths, recognizing that he can clothe his materialism in striking words: '~ concepts of property and material possession are the direct causes of such concepts as perjury, lying, deception and fraud...

...I f we merely accept the "mad" goings on--the pairing of servants and masters, the odd speech-patterns of foreigners (English, Italian, and American), and the shifting powerplays--we are inclined to dismiss them as an odd jumble or mistake...

...Women in cultures unburdenedby this ideal, such as those of China or of Islam, have not traditionally been more liberated, to put it mildly, than the women of Catholic Christendom...

...Maggie, the heroine, is a wealthy lady who owns (or tries to own) houses, people, and antiques...

...These are not Mary's only fauRs...

...She implies that many readers will settle for cosy coincidence, delightful reading and forget that her novel pursues other directions...

...The engaging candor of this confession is not marred, fortunately, by excessive claims to originality...

...Even now she remains "an instrument of propaganda for a Church committed to female subordination" (147...

...These three entertainments celebrate, in a manner o f speaking, the Centennial Year in American history...

...To be sure, there is good in Mary also, especially in her role as fertility goddess, but even here bitter is mixed with sweet: "women are subjugated to the ideal of maternity...

...Maggie is "stupid...

...The virginal ideal reinforces l~he linking of sin, sex and death into "a web which traps every Christian...

...Its undeniable power and beauty Commonweal" 23 do not heal: rather, the human sore is chafed and exposed" (133...

...her freedom from the pangs of birth focuses exaggerated attention on them...

...and I am enough of a Protestant to be quite untroubled by the prospect...

...Nevertheless, even if her book were rewritten with exemplary attention to both sides of the dialectic, its final question would stand...

...Paul...

...Once we do, we see that it deals with the passing of eras, religions (save one...

...The Takeover is, strangely enough, a fake...

...For in the end this is the way Rohmer himself sees the world...

...the tears of shame and embarrassment in the confessional after teen-age gropings at lights-out parties . . . so potent was the Virgin's spell that for years I could not enter a church without pain . . . but I held fast to my new intimation that in the very celebration of the perfect human woman, both human/ty and women were subtly denigrated" (xxi...

...The Takeover MURIEL SPARK Viking, $8.95 IRVING MALIN Muriel Spark is a disturbing writer because she refuses to offer plain sermons...

...7 January 1977:24 In the meantime, this is one of very few volumes in the immense Marian literature addressed to the educated general reader...

...Therefore, although the Virgin's fruitfulness inspires the gayest and most joyful side of her c u l t . . , against a backdrop of blossom and springtime and dance and song, it does not transform her into a d~vinity who restores the equilibrium between the sexes, or looses women from the bands of tedious biological teleology" (284...

...Her new novel is, however, especially troubling...

...Hubert is perhaps more dangerous than she...

...he takes over the "divine" task of passing judgment on his "cruel" employer...

...She is, after all, the owner of all of her cheracters--she possesses them--and she has to fight the very principles of lying and decei~ they practice...

...Gore Vidal resumes his fictional narrative of the adventures of Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, begun so winningly in Burr: A Novel, with Schuyler's return in 1876 to America, after an extended stay in Europe, to recoup his fortunes by arranging a marriage of convenience for his daughter and negotiating his appointment as United States Minister to France...

...but it would be fairer, I think, to view it as a fairly normal example of what an ex-devotec who has learned to think in currently fashionable categories is likely to make of the Marian cult...

...Mary has at times been useful...

...Spark is concerned with possession--all kinds of possession...

...Or perhaps, being even more decadent than he, Haydee has broken the vase on a simple whim and with complete indifference to its value as art...

...They are not marionettes and they do not broadcast my opinions...

...She has reinforced our unbalanced memories rather than corrected them, as a historian should...

...In being "mediocre" because they are torn between exeremes--not the least of which are the extremes of Kleist's Romanticism and Rohmer's modernism--the characters in the film version of The Marquise o] 0 are terribly compromised...

...Although he tells his delinquent believers --hippies, oddballs, and con-men---that he understands the true faith, he is only another false prophet who, like Maggie, refuses to see through money...

...In turn, this reinforces the believer's need for solace, and swells the Church's authority and power" (338...

...Or is the current Christian situation one in which her role should be no more important than it was, for example, for St...

...The Takeover maintains that only one kind of truth can comfort us--to play with the title of her first nov.el--and that heavenly wisdom can barely be glimpsed in earth-bound texts...

...Haydee has at this point been passed along by the hero, Adrien, to a rich American whose patronage Adrien is courting...

...Perhaps the breaking of the vase is that most moral of all human actions: revenge---an expression of Haydee's secret rage at the way Adrien has prostituted her...

...Consider the climactic moment of La Collectioneuse...

...pseudo-mystical concepts, prophecies, and earthly life...

...But Spark must lie in order to crea~e truth and to instruct us about spiritual life...

...The over-all thesis is that Mary, the Galilean maid, has been transformed by the Church into an oppressive ideal from which Catholic women in particular suffer, although the male of ehe species does not escape unscathed...

...Further, "The icon of Mary and Christ side by side is one of the Christian Church's most polished deceptions: it is the very image and hope of earthly consummated love used to give that love the lie...

...They are found in such standard works as Miegge's (cited by Warner) who explains the connection between the dualistic, other-worldly asceticism of the late classical period and the development of Marian devotion with more scholarly precision than she does...

...Perhaps the best way to grasp its central meaning (and pattern) is by studying its title...

...Nor are her interpretations unusual...

...Mary assimilated many of the features of the foes over which she triumphed, and it is these features, these abuses, which we are most inclined to remember because they are still with us...

...Although it seems made for Hollywood--the casting of the jet-set characters would make a movie in itself--it is underneath all the glittering and showy details, a meditation upon the relation of art and religion...

...But it should not be necessary to have a goddess contrasted with a god, a divinity who stands for qualRies considered the quintessence of femininity and who thus polarizes symbolic and reh'gious thought into two irreconcilably opposed camps" (338...

...The uses, in contrast, are easily forgotten because the paganisms to which they were pertinent have vanished...

...This may be so...

...Hubert, the sometime secretary-advisor-enemy of Maggie, is also a cunning fool (if we can unite these opposite words...

...In the world of symbol, and the worlds of magic, of allegory and mysticism, deceit has no meaning, lies do not exist, fraud is impossible...

...Spark subtly suggests that art itself is her underlying subject...

...She assumes that we will get her slanted messages...

...1876 A Novel GORE VIDAL Random House, $10 The Hundredth Year: The United S t a t e s in 1876 JOHN D. BERGAMINI Putnam's, $12.95 America in 1876: The Way We Were LALLY WEYMOUTH Designed by Milton Glaser Vintage Books, $7.95 ROBERT V. REMIN...

...There were also abuses...

...Apart from a life-time of scholars.hip, it is inevitable that .those who risk works of this scope will often blunder in ways which make specialists wince, but Marina Warner is factually no more unreliable than most intelligent and hard-working generalists who write for the literate public...

...she never underlines her articles of Catholic faith...

...We must reread such passages to see that Spark moves beyond easy irony about Hubert and plants seeds of spiritual truth which bloom unexpectedly...

...John D. Bergamini weaves through the major political and social events of the year with an almost day by day account of what was going on, like a Commonweal: 25...

...Yet at the same time they are also "free" in the sense that they embody Kleist's original version of their story as well as Rohmer's own, and leave it to us to choose between the two...

...BOOKS I MARIANISM AND MARINA WARNER GEORGE A. LINDBECK Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult o f the V t r g i n Mary MARINA WARNER Knopf, $15 This book may well create more excitement than it deserves...

...Rohmer's treatment doesn't exclude either possibility, nor does it deny that the breakage is what it seems on the surface, a perfectly innocent accident...

...Many, whether friends or foes, will read it as a devastating attack on the Mother of Our Lord, on the Roman Church and even on Christianity itself...

...She refuses, except toward the novel's end, to admit ,that she is simply another "servant...

...The author is a thirty-~/ear-old former Features Editor of Vogue whose first book was on the Chinese Empress Tz'u-hsi...

...Yet as an historian and a theologian, I am skeptical...

...Are there features of present, and not only past, culture which can he fruitfully construed in terms of the gospel stories of the Galilean maid...

...They combine themes of long-standing in the non-Catholic literature with contemporary liberationist elements...

...The uses and abuses of Mary have been more varied and flexible than this book indicates, and it would be foolhardy to predict what new ones may be found or old ones refurbished in the changing social and cultural contexts of the future...

...She reminds us, as she did in her first novel, that she as writer is on uneasy ground...

...The animus is evident, but understandable, for the author is, by her own description, an ex-devotee: 'It was only in the last two years at school, when I had been a devout Mariolator all my conscious life, that I felt the first chill wind sigh in the blissful pleasure dome . . . The price the Virgin demanded was purity . . . R is wry now to remember, at this distance, the terror this inspired: the children who spent the night cruciform on the dormitory floor after a 'dirty thought...

...It is the neglect of this adage, as it happens, which is the major structural weakness of the over-all argument...

...Kleist's narrative suggests that events are capable of having insanely opposite qualities at the same time, and this is no doubt what appealed to Rohmer...

...Already four hundred years ago, the Reformers denounced medieval Catholic notions of purity as unnatural...

...Hubert rereal"ks to himself at one point: "Eras pass . . . . They pass every day...

...she is (he materialistic queen...

...The moral neutrality which the breaking of the Chinese vase in La Collectioneuse preserves in Rohmer himself is dictated by his perception of the moral ambiguity of life...

...To that end Adden has also obtained a rare Chinese vase for the American, who is a collector, but in the climactic scene Haydee is leading both men a playful chase around a room and topples the vase off its stand, smashing it to pieces...

...She has now produced a large, comprehensive, lavishly illustrated and interestingly written account of Marianism from its beginnings until now...

...In the middle ages, she was "an establishment prop accepted because, as we have seen in the symbol of her queenship, she could be used to atfzrm the legitimacy of the status quo...

...It is here above all that Warner is at fault...

...Then he felt dejected again...

...She is usually correct...

...Is Mary still useful...

...There is an odd--and, I must add, an ancient --battle between art and divine truth...

...He convinces himself that he is descended from immortal Diane...

...She transmuted the cult of the Great Mother and contributed to the Christianization and humanization of Stoic apatheia and Nee-Platonic otherworldliness...

...But Maggie cannot completely "take over the world" because she cannot control superior, mysterious forces...

...It's a way of seeing the world that is implicit in man's "mediocre" position half-way between heaven and hell...

...When he was making the "moral tales," Rohmer always claimed, "I had no intention of preaching morals, but rather of reflecting on morals . . . . I consider my characters to be free...

...Thus she provokes Spark's satiric thrusts: she lives in rich darkness "hardly needing her flashlamp...

...Jimmy Carter is simply being a good Lutheran (albeit a Baptist one) in assuming that "lust in the heart" is normal even for the justified, even for the born again...

...It cornpels us .to search beneath the painted surface...

...If we can return to Hubert's words about the falsity of language, we can see that Spark uses these not only to point her accusing finger at his ill-conceived plots but at her own artistic struggles...

...In Kleist's work Rohmer has found a vision of life that seems similarly irresolvable...

...Lastly, the heathen origin of the cult of the saints was often asser~ted by sixteenth century polemicists, and there is nothing which make traditional Protestants shudder more than an "Ave Maria" or the Virgin of Guadalupe...

...Warner, but rather the conviction that the Marian model is intrinsically and uniquely oppressive of women...

...He cheered up...

...This theme is repeated again and again: "the very conditions which make the Virgin sublime are beyond the powers of women to fulfill unless they deny their sex...

...Jesus's mother has become inseparably identified with post-biblical accretions which are irredeemably obsolete...

...It is a pity that it is not better...

...Accepting the Virgin as .the ideal of purity implicitly demands rejecting the ordinary female condition as impure" (77...

...It will not appeal either to scholars or to ehe devout, but it is symptomatic of the contemporary mind...

...He "takes over" his flock, but he is seduced by his own words...

...Marina Warner's own answer is that Mary's days are numbered...

...He felt dejected...

...And they each do it in a unique and interesting way...

...Protestants in particular are likely to find the author's major contentions familiar...

...For if desire, as natural as breath or sleep itself, is sinful, then the Christian, like a man in the grasp of a usurer, must always run back to the Church, the only source of that grace which can alone give him reprieve" (50-51...

...The oil shortage, the computerized accounts, the "mysterious and intangible" transformations of property--the novel is filled with reproductions and fakes--are examples of unpredictable and unknown ,aspects of the pattern that she believes she creates...

...For this, however, she advances no evidence...

...Again, "Mary's virginity underlines the pollution of intercourse...

...The final verdict, then, is that "a goddess is better than no goddess at all, for the somber-suited masculine world of Protestant religion is altogether too muoh like a gentlemen's club to which the ladies are admired only on special days...

...The novel is, then, a battle for ownership---over people as well as house-but it does not stay on one comic level...

...In addition, the Church's teaching on contraception and abortion, which stems directly from the same misogynist ideas about the woman's role, exacerbates the terrors of sex and childbirth by maintaining pregnancy as a constant and very real danger...

...No doubt Mary has been used to reinforce subordination, just as Jesus has been used to justify crusades, but abuse does not abolish use...

...She even helped to improve the condition of women in some ways and in some places (as Warner, like any other student of the subject, must at least fleetingly concede...

...It is not, to be sure, "idolatry" and "works-righteousness" which repel Ms...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...She controls the moneyflow...