writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

Michael Benton asks pointedly of the writer of a hybrid fictive‐history‐biography, “What sort of
truth can we expect from a narrative art form in which verifiable data from history have been
crossbred with the temporal and rhetorical tactics of fiction?” 7 I echo Lyndall Gordon: “a lasting
imaginative truth based on a selection of facts.” 8 Because the past can only “be represented in either
consciousness or discourse in an ‘imaginary way,’” 9 the novel seemed an apt form for reconstituting
a fictive history for Mary of Nazareth.
This novel is a hybrid with boundaries that are constantly shifting imaginatively between
historical, fictive, biographical and autobiographical genres. As novelist, I “construc[t] a narrative of
imagined events” of Mary of Nazareth’s life, and as biographer/ historian I “reconstruct a narrative
from real‐life past events,” or those mythologized by the Church. 10 Situated uncomfortably between
mythological and historical figure, Mary’s life, birth and death are largely unknown and/or
concocted; “raw materials of [her] biography…are presented on other people’s terms [men, the
Church]—partial, and often of uncertain provenance—offering an unreliable basis from which to
fashion the narrative towards its predetermined end.” 11 As writer, I faced the combined tensions of
“the constructed status of historical knowledge, the multivocal nature of evidence, and the fact that
no sources come unmediated nor any interpretation free from bias or attitude” (including my own),
especially in the mythologizing of Mary, immaculately conceived, Aieparthenos (Eternal Virgin),
Theotokos (Mother of God), Madonna, Mater Dolorosa (Mother of Sorrows), Maria Regina (Queen of
Heaven). 12
Indeed, what we purport to know about Mary stems from sketchy history merging with myth. For
1.2 billion Catholics in the world, at the heart of their faith is the powerful and beloved Virgin. The
New Testament is “the earliest source for Mary, and the only one with any claim to historical
validity,” though the “infancy narratives are now acknowledged by scholars to be later additions to
the Gospels….written more than eighty years after the events they describe took place.” 13 “In 325,
the Council of Nicaea exhorted all women to follow her example” as a paragon of virtue and purity. 14
In 431, the declaration of Mary as Theotokos at Ephesus was the “first landmark in the cult of Mary”
which reached a nexus in the Middle Ages and arguably continues to this day. 15 Earliest feasts of the
Virgin were instituted in 5 th century in Byzantium: the Annunciation, Nativity, Dormition,
Presentation, 16 and the Marian Cult is “inextricably interwoven with Christian ideas about the
dangers of the flesh and their special connection with women.” 17 “Of the four declared dogmas
about the Virgin Mary—her divine motherhood, her virginity, her immaculate conception, and her
assumption into heaven—only the first can be unequivocally traced to Scripture, where Mary of
Nazareth is undoubtedly the mother of Jesus.” 18 The rest, as they say, is myth. But the myth has
done much to shape misogynist attitudes and to instill girls and women with the hopelessness in
emulating such a woman as was Mary. Roland Barthes writes: “in myth, things lose the memory
that they once were made,” 19 transforming history into an unconscious consensus about what is
natural. As for the Virgin Mary, “faith has simply wiped out the silt of history in her myth. It comes
as a surprise to believers and non‐believers alike that she is rarely mentioned in the Gospels, and is
not even always called Mary.” 20 That she might have been a frightened, unwed teenaged mother,
with all the trappings of flesh and the frailty of human nature, has been disavowed by the Church and
most Christian faith communities. The question of “what if God’s mother was one of us?” is still
largely verboten. Because the answers, too terrible, would call into question the subjugation of
women, their denial of participation in the Church and the greater community, the binary
construction of woman as virgin and whore. In considering the forbidden question, in daring to
transgress by rewriting Mary’s story, I put her on the side of the much‐maligned Eve of Genesis. Like
Eve, Mary wants knowledge, and in seeking to know, she writes the story of her own life.
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