Mariette in Ecstasy
Beverly, Elizabeth
WHAT LOVE IS THIS? NARIETTE IN ECSTASY Ron Hansen Edward Burlingham Books, $20, 179 pp. Elizabeth Beverly In 1906, young Mariette Baptiste enters a convent in upstate New York where her older...
...she esteems her full breasts as she has seen men esteem them...
...How can they be required to handle such a gaudy display as blood "scribbling" down a beautiful young girl's arms...
...Elizabeth Beverly In 1906, young Mariette Baptiste enters a convent in upstate New York where her older sister Reverend Mother Celine is the prioress...
...In Hansen's novel, Celine is the older "sister" whom "little Mary" approaches...
...This last choice clearly represents our late twentieth-century embrace of the extraordinary, and attests to our desire to honor the miraculous without having to believe in it...
...I am pleased and satisfied with Hansen's decision to let us weigh this mystery as we will, and as we should all sacred acts...
...In fact for many of them, the cloister represents a retreat from the singular, and an embrace of, if not the secular, then certainly the mundane...
...Mariette is a postulant...
...Hansen is at once a canny and an uncanny writer...
...Reverend Mother Celine, who grows very ill, is contending with mysteries of her own...
...Although the mystery of the "authenCommonweal ticity" of Mariette's wounds may tantalize us, Ron Hansen is tantalized by another mystery: the uses of earthly power when a purported miracle moves into an ordinary community...
...If the world of cloistered women determines the atmosphere of belief and doubt within which Mariette must function, the world of men is still the one which must determine Mariette's fate, and in this way, the book shifts into the realm of gender politics in a surprisingly predictable fashion...
...More specifically, what does this mean if one is a woman...
...No wonder some of the sisters are disheartened, for if God in his heaven is behaving like any man on earth, then what is the point of the exhausting enterprise of daily spiritual life...
...This is a deft and necessary move, if we are to believe that some sisters find Mariette's ecstasy an extravagance while others find it a perfection...
...Baptiste, a man of science who misses her terribly...
...Hansen's world buzzes with precise life...
...For although these religious live in a convent, we quickly come to realize that this group of women is neither more nor less privileged in the acceptance or rejection of the miraculous than is anyone else...
...Pere Marriott wishes to guide her with gentleness...
...she wants to be a saint...
...But what do we do with God...
...When the body becomes an instrument of devotion, how does one draw a clear line between agape and eras...
...Hansen's choice of Mariette is, of course, not necessarily God's choice...
...She is lusciously beautiful with cascades of chocolate hair bound under her scarf...
...I do believe it happened," and affirms both his belief in the mysterious events he must evaluate and his amazement even at himself, we can expect that her father, Dr...
...And what love...
...Baptiste, will be somewhat less amazed, somewhat more critical...
...but his reverence for language startles...
...For Mariette is young and beautiful...
...At the same time Hansen recognizes the longing for human recognition in the solitude of exacting spiritual discipline, and he hearkens back to the scene of female recognition in Luke in which pregnant Elizabeth "sees" Mary as Mother of God...
...We might also wonder about her mental stability...
...But Celine's womb is not full of life, and Mariette, full of longing both for the Lord and for her sister's kindness, remains unrecognized by her own sister...
...Hansen addresses with marvelous and somewhat shocking ease one of the greatest challenges of our incarnation...
...Hers is a body that any man would choose...
...Around her other sisters carry on the devotions of daily work...
...We could ask earnestly if God has chosen Mariette's body for a demonstration of his passion, or whether Mariette is a fraud who has simulated a miracle...
...How does one feel fully and with abandon, and still trust oneself to be physically prudent...
...But what I wonder about is the lurking masculinity of God and his intentions regarding Mariette...
...The effect is never fussy, but exhilarating, as if every act of language in this small book is an act of reverence...
...His craft is almost visible...
...While Pere Marriott says to her, "I don't believe it's possible...
...But this familiar privileging of female youth and beauty does allow a shiver of cynicism to enter not only a fictional convent in upstate New York, but also the tired mind of a reviewer who admires Hansen at least in part because he reveres that which is fresh and startling and wholly new in God's vast creation...
...The longing for female recognition is set against an ongoing male rivalry between Mariette's spiritual father, Pere Marriott, and her earthly one, Dr...
...This is a loss of great consequence...
...Others are irritated by this distraction...
...She awaits miracles to befall her...
...And if God has chosen her and not Sister Saint-Stanislas or Sister Saint-Luc, then what does this say about God...
...This leap brings Mary to womanly life...
...His work resembles the vast and remarkable creations of early nineteenth-century landscape architects, who, through the sheer artistry of planning, planting, and visionary cropping, created realms of apparently easygoing Nature out of a generally messy earth...
...What does it Commonweal mean to suffer for Christ if one's body is vibrant with life...
...The intentionality of every word and the crafting of every sentence are implicit...
...For ultimately, this in an inquiry into balance: what it takes for a community to maintain its balance while a young and thrilling girl whirls giddily with the love of God...
...To continue with this summary would be to reveal unfairly what happens in Ron Hansen's short, tightly coiled novel, but it is no mystery that the central focus of the story might well be whether or not Mariette's ecstasy, the manifestation of Divine Love in the form of stigmata, truly comes from God...
...In the Gospel, of course, John's leap in Elizabeth's womb is an affirmation of the Lord's presence...
...some are distracted by a longing for Mariette's saintliness...
...has she quite unconsciously deluded herself into manifesting Christ's wounds...
...The flanks of cows, the scent of grasses, the crests of clouds, the "zing" of an iron shovel—these are the common glories of God and, for many, are miracle enough...
Vol. 119 • June 1992 • No. 12
