Mariette in Ecstasy
By Ron Hansen
HarperCollins, 192 pages, $19.95
It is 1906, in upstate New York, and a beautiful 17-year-old girl is dressed in her dead mother`s wedding dress. The bright, proud daughter of a local doctor, Mariette Baptiste is to be received into the Sisters of the Crucifixion convent against her father`s wishes. Although rumored to suffer
”trances, hallucinations, unnatural piety, great extremes of temperament,” she is accepted as a postulant, the lowest order of women receiving religious instruction.
Presumably, during the course of Ron Hansen`s eerie and brilliant third novel, ”Mariette in Ecstasy,” the young woman will humbly accommodate herself to the convent`s privations: the rules and daily stringencies of meditation, prayer, labor and more prayer. Presumably she will live out the many remaining years of her life in the quiet remove of the convent, among the pastures and ponds and cows.
As Mariette is instructed by one of the sisters, each nun ”is not to tempt the sin of pride with perfumes or rouge or time misspent at the mirror. Especially, she is not to tempt their holy priest with pretty wiles and movements and flattery, as Satan may invite a young woman to do. She should expect loneliness and sadness and illness and hard use. She should expect, too, that she will be tempted to have a particular affection for some of her sisters. Such affections are not permitted. For Jesus Christ ought to be their grandest passion, just as . . . God`s holy will ought to be their only desire.”
Hard use and a passion for Christ are all that Mariette desires. She tells the aged priest of the convent, Henri Marriott, that Jesus has spoken to her. ”Ever since I was thirteen, I have been praying to understand his passion. Everything about it. To have a horrible illness so I could feel the horrors and terrors of death just as Christ did.”
Such piety is not unusual in young postulants, as the reverend mother of the convent notes with the wisdom of her years and knowledge of her own youth. ”Don`t try to be exceptional,” the sister tells her, ”simply be a good nun.” But when a deep gash appears between Mariette`s fifth and sixth ribs, accompanied by holes in her hands and feet, the old priest and the sisters of convent are confronted by the possibility of a miracle in their midst.
Although Mariette suffers a fever of tormented ecstasy, the priest and Mother Saint-Raphael, the mistress of novices, are suspicious that her wounds are self-inflicted and her behavior hysterical rather than exalted. But when the deep wounds heal themselves in a day, not the weeks that would be normal, the sisters are consumed by rumor, joy and resentment. As the reverend mother says, ”secrets are impossible here.”
Secrets, perhaps, but mystery, no. Father Marriott begins his own methodical investigation into the events in the convent. Sufficiently impressed by the possibility of Mariette`s saintliness that he collects a sample of the fluid seeping from her wounds and a dressing stained with her blood, he is further amazed when this same dressing becomes perfumed with the odor of Easter lilies.
The old priest balances his faith with skepticism. He consults the great Catholic texts on the subjects of stigmata and saints. Hansen adeptly reveals only enough detail of Mariette`s stigmata that the miracle remains elusive, half-seen. And the reader is free to contemplate the two possible explanations of her wounds: either they are Christ-given proof of a miracle or they are evidence that her devotion is hysterical and poisoned by overzealousness.
Mariette is confused and humbled and exalted by her wounds, especially when they return: ”She is kneeling there in misery and sorrow when she opens her hands like a book and sees an intrusion of blood on both palms, pennies of skin turning redder and slowly rising up in blisters that in two or three minutes tear with the terrible pain of hammered nails, and then the hand flesh jerks with the fierce sudden weight of Christ`s body and she feels the hot burn in both wrists. She feels her feet twisted behind her as both are transfixed with nails. . . She is breathless, she thirsts, she chills with loss of blood . . . she feels an iron point rammed hard against her heart and she faints.”
More than sensual, Mariette`s suffering is also sexual. She is inexplicably ravished one night in her tiny room and later speaks of a physical union with Christ: ”When he tells me to sleep, I do so at once, and he holds me. And I share in him as if he`s inside me. And he is.” Her words earn her a hard slap from Mother Saint-Raphael, who nonetheless confesses that she believes all that Mariette says.
Among the convent`s trees and work horses and cattails, Mariette`s ordeal occurs in isolation from all that marks the modern age. It may as well be 17th Century France. Yet news reaches the village nearby that a sister has experienced stigmata. The convent`s privacy is breached, and the priest and Mother Saint-Raphael must decide what to do with Mariette. ”I have been troubled by God`s motives for this,” says Mother Saint-Raphael. ”I see no reasons for it. Is it so Mariette Baptiste will be praised and esteemed by the pious? Or is it so she shall be humiliated and jeered at by skeptics? Is it to honor religion and humble science? And what are these horrible wounds, really? A trick of anatomy, a bleeding challenge to medical diagnosis. . .?”
The resolutions to these risky questions are satisfying to the reader and in no way reductive.
A novel such as ”Mariette in Ecstasy,” set at a largely unknowable remove from the present, might feel staged-the author`s research trumpeting
”authenticity” at every detail. But Hansen`s impressionistic evocation of a time and place is masterly and unforced, as it was in his well-received previous novel, ”The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”
Hansen is particularly able to find the physical detail that implies ten more such. Time is marked by the movements of sun and season and nature, as well as the many masses of the convent. Yet the pages turn quickly: this is a book to be read in one sitting.
We live now in a time when faith in miracles has largely been superseded by the revelations of technology. The weeping statue in a small Mexican village seems quaint when compared to the powers of a CAT scanner. An American novelist presumes a great deal when he asks the reading public to contemplate miracles of the flesh. In the hands of a lesser writer, Mariette Baptiste`s story could be merely sensational. But Hansen`s prose is clear and whole:
”Mariette in Ecstasy” has the feel of a short classic. One need not be Catholic nor subscribe to any particular religious doctrine to be intrigued by the questions this novel raises or by its conclusion-which suggests that faith is tempered and deepened by time and loss and that there may be a few rare persons for whom torment is ecstasy.
