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The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers: Critical Essays

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The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers: Critical Essays The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers 99780230600256ts01.indd780230600256ts01.indd i 99/11/2007/11/2007 66:25:17:25:17 PPMM This page intentionally left blank The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers Critical Essays Edited by Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke, and Ana Kothe 99780230600256ts01.indd780230600256ts01.indd iiiiii 99/11/2007/11/2007 66:25:17:25:17 PPMM 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 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. 9780230600256ts01.indd iv 9/11/2007 6:25:18 PM For unruly women everywhere 99780230600256ts01.indd780230600256ts01.indd v 99/11/2007/11/2007 66:25:18:25:18 PPMM This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Acknowledgments xi Introduction Unruly Catholic Women Writers through the Centuries 1 Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke, and Ana Kothe Part 1 Medieval through Seventeenth Century Chapter One Female as Flesh in the Later Middle Ages and the “Bodily Knowing” of Angela of Foligno 9 Jennifer Judge Chapter Two “I Grab the Microphone and Move My Body”—Volatile Speech, Volatile Bodies, and the Church’s Attempt to Measure Holiness 25 M. C. Bodden Chapter Three Letters from the Convent: St. Teresa of Ávila’s Epistolary Mode 41 Joan F. Cammarata Chapter Four Talking out of Church: Women Arguing Theology in Sor Juana’s loa to the Divino Narciso 55 Jeanne Gillespie 99780230600256ts01.indd780230600256ts01.indd vviiii 99/11/2007/11/2007 66:25:18:25:18 PPMM viii Contents Chapter Five Angela Carranza, Would-Be Theologian 69 Stacey Schlau Chapter Six Resituating Carvajal’s Vida in Protonovelistic Narratives 87 Ana Kothe Part 2 Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Chapter Seven Through the Grate; Or, English Convents and the Transmission and Preservation of Female Catholic Recusant History 105 Tonya Moutray McArthur Chapter Eight “Must Her Own Words Do All?”: Domesticity, Catholicism, and Activism in Adelaide Anne Procter’s Poems 123 Cheri Larsen Hoeckley Chapter Nine The Legacy of Laveau in the Practice of Helen Prejean: The Tradition and Territory of New Orleans’ Spiritual Advisors 139 Barbara Eckstein Part 3 Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries Chapter Ten “Reluctant Catholics”: Contemporary Irish-American Women Writers 159 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 175 Ben P. Robertson 9780230600256ts01.indd viii 9/11/2007 6:25:18 PM Contents ix Chapter Twelve Catholicism’s Other(ed) Holy Trinity: Race, Class, and Gender in Black Catholic Girl School Narratives 191 Jeana DelRosso Chapter Thirteen Challenging Catholicism: Hagar vs. the Virgin in Graciela Limón’s The Memories of Ana Calderón 207 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 221 Pamela J. Rader Notes on Contributors 237 Index 241 99780230600256ts01.indd780230600256ts01.indd iixx 99/11/2007/11/2007 66:25:18:25:18 PPMM This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editors would like to thank everyone who made this book possi- ble, 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. 99780230600256ts01.indd780230600256ts01.indd xxii 99/11/2007/11/2007 66:25:18:25:18 PPMM This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION Unruly Catholic Women Writers through the Centuries Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke, and Ana Kothe 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 prob- lematic 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 conflicts 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 impera- tive to understand these struggles as they existed and continue to exist in the Western world. 99780230600256ts02.indd780230600256ts02.indd 1 99/11/2007/11/2007 66:25:49:25:49 PPMM 2 Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke, and Ana Kothe 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 A llyson 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 collec- tion 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 comple- ment 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. 9780230600256ts02.indd 2 9/11/2007 6:25:49 PM Unruly Catholic Women Writers 3 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 argu- ing 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.
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