BlackOxford's Reviews > Matrix

Sisterhood

I may not understand Groff’s intention with this book. Or perhaps I do, in which case I don’t like it. It is historical fiction only in the broadest sense that a woman called Marie Abbess of Shaftesbury did exist. Anything else is mostly legend. And Groff’s casual conflation of two historical characters on the basis of a shared given first name (Marie of France, a contemporary but very different woman than Marie d'Anjou) seems a bit out of line even in fiction. It seems to me the book is much more a feminist polemic. It is obviously a vision of a feminine utopia, a Shakerism without the men anywhere in sight, and contentedly gay.

The problem is that Marie uses increasingly ‘male’ tactics to get and keep control over her visionary paradise. She begins with fraud, moves on to manipulation and intimidation, and ultimately resorts to violence in order to get her way. It seems to me that her female-only hideaway is just another form of domination in a world ruled by domination.

Anyway, here are my notes to justify my conclusion. Beware: spoilers ahead if you care about reading the book without prejudice:

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Marie wants it all, or at least everything that the 12th century has to offer - ridin’, huntin’, and shootin’, with a well-prepared feast of roast swan afterwards, which she can enjoy wearing the latest fashions from France. As the illegitimate child of Geoffrey of Anjou, she reckons she has the right to such things. But the Empress Matilda thinks otherwise, so off she’s packed to Angleterre.

Marie is a woman’s woman (nudge, wink) who became imprinted (enamoured, obsessed) with the good Lady Eleanor of Aquitaine (her half-sister) while on a purported Women’s Crusade to Jerusalem (a sort of medieval Hadassah cruise one supposes, which it was not historically - wives did accompany husbands; Eleanor was along for the ride, armor and all). Marie is hopeful that her devotion to Eleanor, now Queen of the English as well as the French will earn her the points necessary to fulfil her dream. What she gets instead is a forlorn nunnery in wet and dreary Wiltshire…

… And no word from the beloved Eleanor who is off flooding the Plantagenet gene pool (and then regretting much of the outflow from the overcrowded space). Marie’s admiration for Eleanor is mysterious (it is more likely, historically, that she was focused on her half-brother Henry II). Eleanor has slept her way to the top of the social ladder, something Marie wouldn’t even consider given her preferences. Eleanor is apparently a looker; Marie is a butch two feet taller than her peers with a face like… well, a horse. Eleanor has learned how to take and maintain power in a world of men; men don’t exist in Marie’s world except as faceless, nameless ghosts who are best avoided. Eleanor is ‘establishment’ through and through; Marie gives up on that world entirely in order to create her own anti-establishment.

Nevertheless Marie uses what she has, her growing band of nuns, to make a name and a position of respect. And she thinks she has found what makes Eleanor so successful: “Women in this world are vulnerable; only reputation can keep them from being crushed.” So she develops an image of ruthless competence and dedicated persistence. And she is not above using the church itself to further her ambitions. As she has learned from her blind, dotty abbess, “Mystical acts create mystical beliefs.”

Marie creates a set of phoney accounts to mislead the local bishop about the convent’s growing wealth. And flirtatiously flatters her own female superiors into submission. Corruption is necessary after all to fight corruption, she muses. And for a woman of definite sexual tastes, the abbey provides the casual but close companionship she desires. And why not, since men aren’t involved, there’s no biblical prohibition against womanly mutual comfort. She is getting accustomed to this business of faith as well: “How strange, she thinks. Belief has grown upon her. Perhaps, she thinks, it is something like a mold.” And her principle belief is that men are the carriers if not the source of evil and will be banned entirely from the abbey’s estates.

Marie’s post-menopausal visions are the driving force of her middle age (Groff spends several pages on Marie’s hot flushes, suggesting she likes the image of women of a certain age as witches). They tell her to make the abbey an “island of women” entirely enclosed and fortified against the vagaries of the (male-inhabited) world. Over the objections of her senior nuns she builds a enormous labyrinthine maze around the abbey. All hands contribute, neglecting their religious rituals but designing and building new machines, roads, dams, and fortifications with military precision.

Marie’s project is noticed by both the nobility and the church authorities. And not favourably. But Marie has already started a massive international PR programme to quell criticism.:

“through the countryside, the women will tell stories, woman to woman, servant to servant and lady to lady, and the stories will spread north and south upon this island, and the stories will alchemize into legends, and the legends will serve as cautionary tales, and her nuns will be made doubly safe through story most powerful.”

Eleanor, freed finally from family and regnal strife, seems to approve Marie’s efforts. So Marie receives a new vision and a new project. Hoping to entice Eleanor to retire in the abbey, Marie starts the building of an enormous abbess house. For this skilled men are needed. Appropriate precautions are taken. Blindfolds are necessary for any member of the community who bring the men food, drink, and pay. The maze provides security. But there is a gap in defences, enough for some sperm to sneak over the wall, as it were, and one of the naughty novices gets pregnant, miscarries and dies. Marie works jointly with the Queen “against the old carrionbirds Gossip and Rumor.” to bury the scandal.

Marie has made her dream a reality through cunning and wit. She has power, power to maintain a “second Eden.” She is the new Eve. And as Eve was a precursor of the Virgin Mary so the Virgin is a precursor of Mother Abbess Marie. She is turning into an apocalyptic fanatic: “Marie sees evil settling on the world, an evil overcoming the goodness in the hearts of even the holy.” She essentially forms her own church, installing herself as high priestess: “I will take upon my own shoulders the abbey’s sacerdotal duties.” She says Mass, takes confessions, changes the Latin ritual to feminine endings, and performs the other roles canonically reserved for males.

It is in the confessional that Marie gets to understand the depth of suffering her flock has undergone at the hands of men: “she sorrows for her daughters in their lives before, the secret invisible weights they have dragged behind them into the abbey.” Rape, abuse, the guilt of fighting and not fighting off these men. Out of fear, love or loyalty no one snitches to the authorities. Marie, of course, knows everyone’s secrets at this point. Prudence prevails.

Cults produce other cults, Marie finds, as competition emerges in the abbey’s ranks. The first rule of power is to protect power. If two mystical prophets share the same time and space, one of them is false. Marie manoeuvres her potential rivals out. She expands her physical empire, even as Eleanor is dying and loosing hers. Marie feels elation rather than sorrow. “She feels royal. She feels papal.” She even encroaches on Crown land. Unfortunately protection of this dramatic enlargement of her ambition will require murder, and the death of her friend. With this last comes regret and a personal revelation:

“Marie’s arrogance brought this final illness upon Wulfhild. Her endless hunger ate up the daughter of her spirit. The need to enlarge this abbey she has thought of as an extension of her own body. Her actions always in reaction to the question of what she could have done in the world, if she had only been given her freedom.”

Yet she still refuses to recognise the papal interdict of England forbidding all religious rights - the ultimate arrogance. In Marie’s quiet island of women and work, ritual and observance go on as usual for years. Even in old age she can successfully resist men wielding power through deceit and misinformation more than equivalent to their own. She is unrepentant, missed by her sisters in death, and portrayed by Groff as a sort of light that failed.

Seriously?

I get it, I do. Tricking Da Massa is rewarding revenge and one has to admire Marie’s ingenuity (or rather Groff’s). Men are mostly shits; history demonstrates their danger to women. And Marie’s ability to still raise an orgasm or two well into her seventies is admirable indeed. But if that’s the sum of Marie’s life, it might have been wasted in better ways. The image of Eve (the first Matrix) and the Virgin Mary (the greatest Matrix) engaged in an eternal sensual kiss, both embraced by Abbess Marie (the last Matrix) isn’t really sufficient to maintain either a mystical cult or visionary momentum. Ultimately Marie couldn’t institutionalise herself and her vision. Both passed apparently into obscurity. Groff’s resurrection doesn’t add much of value to the legends.

I await the avalanche of Mariolatrus abuse.