Some girls want out
Hilary
Mantel
- The Voices of Gemma
Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint by Rudolph Bell and
Cristina Mazzoni
Chicago, 320 pp, £21.00, March 2003, ISBN 0 226 04196 4 - Saint Thérèse of
Lisieux by Kathryn Harrison
Weidenfeld, 160 pp, £14.99, November 2003, ISBN 0 297 84728 7 - The Disease of
Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty by Helen King
Routledge, 196 pp, £50.00, September 2003, ISBN 0 415 22662 7 - A Wonderful Little
Girl: The True Story of Sarah Jacob, the Welsh Fasting Girl by Siân Busby
Short Books, 157 pp, £5.99, June 2004, ISBN 1 904095 70 4
We are living through a
great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has
overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to
the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to
have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name
in the Catholic Almanac Online. When the blessed are turned out at such
a rate, the most they can hope for is a listing by nationality. In the current
listings there are 103 Korean martyrs, 96 Vietnamese martyrs, 122 left over
from the Spanish Civil War (with another batch of 45 in their wake), and a
hundred-plus who have been hanging around since the French Revolution. And for
the canonised, the site lists nine full saints for 2002 alone, though this is a
considerable fall-back from the glory days of 1988, when more than a hundred
came marching in.
Under previous popes, they
dawdled along, at the rate of one or two a year. Gemma Galgani became a saint
in 1940, in the reign of Pius XII. It was a rapid promotion, by the standard of
those days. After a miserable life, Gemma died of TB in 1903, when she was 25.
She is an old-fashioned saint, Italian, passive, repressed, yet given to
displays of flamboyant suffering – to public and extreme fasting and
self-denial, to the exhibition of torn and bleeding flesh. Her behaviour
recalled the gruesome penitential practices of her medieval foremothers and
resembled that of the ‘hysterics’ of her own day, whose case histories promoted
the careers of Charcot, Janet, Breuer and Freud. But we can’t quite consign
Gemma to history, to the dustbin of outmoded signs and symptoms or the
waste-tip of an age of faith. When we think of young adults in the West, driven
by secular demons of unknown provenance to starve and purge themselves, and to
pierce and slash their flesh, we wonder uneasily if she is our sister under the
skin.
Gemma is far less famous
than her contemporary Thérèse of Lisieux, whose remains a short while ago went
on a four-month US tour. Thérèse also died of TB, in 1897, just short of her
25th birthday. Her illness was excruciating and prolonged. But popular piety
preserved the romantic lie about the wasting consumptive and her gentle death;
the sordid realities of vomiting and bedsores were suppressed, and her convent’s
policy of denying Thérèse pain relief was elevated into suffering gladly
embraced. Kathryn Harrison’s short life of Thérèse complements Monica Furlong’s
1987 study, and is in many ways more sympathetic. Neither biographer found the
saint easy to like. Despite her sobriquet of the ‘Little Flower’, Thérèse was
tough when her saintly interests were at stake. She wanted to enter the
Carmelite order at the age of 14, and when the local convent told her to wait
she took advantage of a pilgrimage to Rome to harangue Leo XIII, clinging to
his knees until attendants carried her off.
Gemma never got near the
pope, never managed to get admitted to a convent at any age. They regarded her
as too strange and too sick. ‘They don’t want me living,’ she said, ‘but
they’ll have me when I’m dead.’ Both Gemma and Thérèse were quite sure they
were saints. Thérèse had a fantastic imagination, suffused by fantasies of
being flayed alive and boiled in oil, but the spiritual path known as the
‘Little Way’, expounded in her writing, is about the unheroic journey that
awaits smaller souls. Thérèse lived within the convent rule, which discouraged
displays of zeal, or at least kept news of them behind the grille until the
would-be saint’s CV had been worked over.
Rudolph Bell’s book Holy
Anorexia (1985) concentrates on Italian saints, and is especially rewarding
for connoisseurs of the spiritually lurid. St Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi lay
naked on thorns. Saint Catherine of Siena drank pus from a cancerous sore. One
confessor ordered Veronica Giuliani to kneel while a novice of the order kicked
her in the mouth. Another ordered her to clean the walls and floor of her cell
with her tongue; when she swallowed the spiders and their webs, even he thought
it was going too far. Scourges, chains and hair shirts were the must-have
accessories in these women’s lives. Eustochia of Messina stretched her arms on
a DIY rack she had constructed. St Margaret of Cortona bought herself a razor
and was narrowly dissuaded from slicing through her nostrils and upper lip. St
Angela of Foligno drank water contaminated by the putrefying flesh of a leper.
And what St Francesca Romana did, I find I am not able to write down.
Starvation was a constant
in these women’s lives. It melted their flesh away, so that the beating of
their hearts could be seen behind the racks of their ribs. It made them one
with the poor and destitute, and united them with the image of Christ on the
cross. What does this holy anorexia mean? Can we find any imaginative
connection with a woman like Gemma Galgani? Like her medieval predecessors, she
received the stigmata, the mark of Christ’s wounds. Like them, she was beaten
up by devils. Like them, she performed miracles of healing after her death.
When you look at her strange life, you wonder what kind of language you can use
to talk about her – through which discipline will you approach her?
Born in 1878, Gemma Galgani
spent almost her whole life in the Tuscan city of Lucca. She was the first
daughter in her family, after four sons. Her father was a pharmacist. (This
explains why she is the patron saint of Catholic pharmacists. She is also the
patron of parachutists – it is hard to work out why, and whether she protects
all parachutists, or only Catholic ones.) Her family were financially secure at
the time of her birth, though they became poor in her late teens, after her
father died. Gemma’s mother gave birth to three more children, but died of TB
when Gemma was seven. In losing her mother early in life, Gemma was again like
Thérèse of Lisieux. But whereas Thérèse was brought up in an atmosphere of
stifling religiosity, the Galgani family seem to have been only conventionally
pious, and sometimes barely that; when the young Gemma entered one of her
‘ecstasies’, her sister Angelina brought her schoolfriends home to laugh at
her, and later, when she manifested wounds on her head, body, hands and feet,
her aunt Elisa complained about having to scrub bloodstains from the floor of
her room.
News of Gemma’s florid and
discomfiting style soon leaked out, and no convent would admit her. So her
agonies couldn’t be concealed behind convent walls; she remained a citizen of
Lucca, with a semi-public career. After her family became almost destitute,
another Lucca family took her in, and when she fell into ecstasy, instead of
jeering, they took notes. The priests who surrounded her in her later years,
members of the Passionist order, had little regard for her privacy once they
made up their minds that she was saint material. And yet much we would like to
know remains hidden; and so much we need to know is hidden in the footnotes of
Rudolph Bell and Cristina Mazzoni’s book. There is a certain scattiness, as
well as scruple, in the authors’ methods, and you wish that, for part of the
book at least, they would adopt Harrison’s straightforward and conventional
narrative manner. Harrison recognises that the subject-matter is strange
enough, that it’s pointless to add to the reader’s dislocation. At the centre
of Bell and Mazzoni’s book is Gemma’s own account of her childhood and
selections from her diary and her letters, but without close guidance from the
authors – and we do want to know what they think – it is difficult to fill in
the gaps or to make sense of Gemma’s petulant and flirtatious relationship with
her guardian angel.
The authors do not give us
a sequential account of Gemma’s life and death. They have both written about
Gemma before – the historian Bell in his book on Italian mystics, and Mazzoni,
the literary scholar, in her book Saint Hysteria (1996), in which she
tried to cast light on the relationship between the typical female
manifestations of sanctity and the concept of hysteria, as it was understood at
the turn of the 20th century – that is, around the time of Gemma’s death. Here,
Bell contributes the note on historical context with which the book begins, and
writes on Gemma’s ‘afterlife’ – the process of hagiography and canonisation.
Mazzoni ends the book with a ‘Saint’s Alphabet’, looking at Gemma’s career
through the eyes of feminist theology, cutting up the issues under headings. F
is for Food, P is for Passion and X is for Extasy. The authors’ intention seems
to be that we construct the story for ourselves, rather than receive it
ready-made from them. They want to explain Gemma without explaining her away.
The danger is that her meaning slips between the lines. Gemma is the mistress
of ellipsis, her sentences often petering out after a conjunction; her ‘but’
and ‘because’ conjoin us to nothing but guesswork. Q is for Question, and the
reader has many.
We can understand when
Gemma says that her first memory is of praying beside her dying mother. It is
the kind of first memory permitted to saints, like Thérèse’s sickly assertion
that the first word she could read without help was ‘heaven’. But we don’t know
how to understand a passing mention, in Gemma’s autobiographical notes, of a
household servant who ‘used to take me into a closed room and undress me’. We
don’t know much about Gemma’s education; her teachers’ recollections of her
were muddled and scanty. So we can’t tell how much she had read; how far she
was an original, and how far she was conscious of modelling herself on earlier
saints. Her writing style was childlike, but it is possible that her mind was
not. Like Thérèse, she presents a model of arrested development. Like Thérèse,
she expressed herself simply, but didn’t have simple thoughts.
Sometimes we can trace
Gemma’s efforts to fit herself into a tradition. At around eight years old, she
heard in a sermon of the Venerable Bartolomea Capitanio (d.1833) who combined
the role of mystic with that of teacher, and who was known, Bell says, ‘for
absolutely never striking her students’ – which is a good deal to say, in the
context of Catholic education. Like her medieval predecessors, Bartolomea was
keen on licking floors, but with this piquant variation of self-abasement: she
licked the floor in a pattern of crosses, until her tongue bled. With such a
role model to contemplate, it’s maybe not surprising that Gemma’s first
confession, made at the age of nine, stretched over three days.
What did she have to
confess? Like Thérèse, she describes herself as a little girl who would cry if
she didn’t get what she wanted; if she didn’t cry, she didn’t get. (But what
she wanted, usually, was to spend more time hanging around with nuns, or to be
allowed to give money to the poor.) She was, she says (displaying the streak of
melodrama she and Thérèse share), ‘a bad example to my companions and a scandal
to all’. She liked to stroll out in pretty dresses. One of her teachers called
her ‘Miss Pride’. Behind the formulaic accusation is a bereft, needy little
girl. Whereas Thérèse proudly promenaded on her father’s arm, his ‘little
queen’, Gemma pushed her father away as he tried to hug her. No one was to
touch her, she said; and one thinks of the nefarious servant, in the locked
room. When her one pious brother, a seminarian, died of TB, she took to wearing
his clothes; and when her father died of throat cancer, she slept in the bed
his corpse had vacated. There is something desperately sad about these
gestures. They are quasi-suicidal, for sure, for she hoped to ‘catch’ their
illness – she had very little investment in life – but there is also something
thwarted about them, a bungled attempt at both closeness and control. Living,
she won’t let them touch her; when they are dead, she touches them. She tries
on a man’s life, a priest’s life; she tries to follow her father, who had
abandoned her just as her mother had done years before. Nuns at their clothing
ceremonies dress as brides, so Thérèse had her wreath of orange blossom, and
veil of Alençon lace: Gemma had a sheet with the sweat of death on it.
Thérèse had been the adored
baby of her family, instructed every day by two elder sisters who proceeded her
into the Carmelite convent in Lisieux. Gemma had to beg for instruction. If she
got high marks in class, a teacher rewarded her by spending an hour explaining
some aspect of Christ’s passion and death. After one of these sessions, at the
age of eight or nine, she fell into a high fever, the first of many such
illnesses. Sometimes paralysed, sometimes corpse-like, sometimes bleeding and
almost always starving, Gemma, in her ecstasies, talked intimately with Christ
and with his mother.
What did her ecstasies look
like? They were not like the ecstasy of Teresa of Avila, sculpted by Bernini:
that most passionate, fluid artefact, art’s most convincing orgasm. Gemma lived
in the era of photography, and her spiritual advisers provided her household
with a camera. She looks demure, her hands clasped. Her eyes are raised to
heaven, but she isn’t doing anything dramatic, like rolling her pupils up into
her lids. Jotted down, her words are broken, repetitive, a string of
conventional pieties. Yet she returns from these states of self-hypnosis riven
with supernatural pleasure and shot through with natural pain.
Harrison puts it very well:
‘Ecstasies are unforgettable, and they are tyrannical. Those who experience
them helplessly shape their lives in order to create the possibility of another
encounter with the holy.’ Like all mystics, Gemma is terrified that God will
turn his face away. She wants to love God, but is baffled: how do you do it?
Her confessor cannot help her. Jesus says to her: ‘See this cross, these
thorns, this blood? They are all works of love . . . Do you want to truly love
me? First learn to suffer.’
What should Jesus want her
to suffer? To talk about female masochism seems reductive and unhelpful. You
have to look the saints in the face; say how the facts of their lives revolt
and frighten you, but when you have got over being satirical and atheistical,
and saying how silly it all is, the only productive way is the one the
psychologist Pierre Janet recommended, early in the 20th century: first, you
must respect the beliefs that underlie the phenomena. Both Gemma and Thérèse
believed suffering had an effect that was not limited in time or space. They
could, just for a while, share the pain of crucifixion. They could offer up
their pain to buy time out for the souls suffering in purgatory. Their
suffering could be an expiation for the sins of others, it could be a
restitution, a substitution. Margaret of Cortona said: ‘I want to die of
starvation to satiate the poor.’ Behind the ecstasy is a ferocious moral drive,
a purpose – and no doubt a sexual drive, too. Simone Weil believed that ‘sexual
energy constitutes the physiological foundation’ of mystical experience. Why
must this be true? Because, Weil said, ‘we haven’t anything else with which to
love.’
Such loving isn’t easy.
Thérèse, dying, bleeding from her intestines and unable to keep down water, was
tormented by the thought of banquets. Gemma, too, dreamed of food; would it be
all right, she asked her confessor, to ask Jesus to take away her sense of
taste? Permission was granted. She arranged with Jesus that she should begin to
expiate, through her own suffering, all the sins committed by priests: after
this bargain was struck, for 60 days she vomited whenever she tried to eat. Her
guardian angel was her constant attendant and is addressed in the language of
the playground and the kitchen. Sometimes he brought her coffee, and when she
was weak he helped her into bed. Once he manifested in the kitchen, while the
servant was making meatballs. The devil showed himself, too. He was ‘a . . .
little man, black, very black, little, very little . . . a tiny, tiny man . . .
all covered in black hair’. He would grimace and threaten at the foot of her
bed; he would jump on the bed and pummel her; when she called on Jesus, he rolled
around the floor, cursing. Once he came in the form of a great black dog, and
put his paws on her shoulders. Gemma had the bruises to show, and the charred
paper where Satan had tried to burn her writings.
In 1899, when Gemma was
approaching her 21st birthday, she became paralysed and remained paralysed for
some months. She was so ill she received the last rites. In prayer she appealed
to the Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque, who two centuries earlier had been
confined to bed for four years by paralysis, and who had made a vow to become a
nun if she was healed. The cure was instantaneous and Margaret Mary began a
career of spectacular saintliness. During the long nights when Gemma prayed she
was visited by a strange presence, someone who touched her with burning hands
and prayed with her. After nine nights she was out of pain and able to rise
from her bed.
She recovered from her
paralysis in February 1899. In May she went into a convent for a retreat. She
followed the nuns’ strict timetable for prayer and thought it ‘too easy’. All
the same, she wanted to stay with them, but they wouldn’t let her because of
her poor health. They demanded ‘four medical certificates’ before she could be
considered. Later she would apply to several orders, and be rebuffed. She had
no money for the dowry that convents demanded, but she offered herself as a lay
sister – that is, one of the nuns who performs all the heavy work of the house.
Nobody was keen to take her up on this offer.
Shortly after her rejection
by the first convent, Gemma suffered a crisis. In June 1899, on the eve of the
Feast of the Sacred Heart, the marks of Christ’s wounds appeared on her hands.
She put on gloves and went to church as usual. She said nothing to her local
confessor. She was in the habit of concealing things from him – though she knew
she shouldn’t. This confessor, Monsignor Volpi, the auxiliary bishop of Lucca,
never had much time for Gemma. He seemed to regard her as a potential
embarrassment. He didn’t accept that her experiences were divine graces and
ordered her to terminate her ecstasies as soon as she felt them beginning. Even
after the proceedings for her canonisation had opened, Volpi’s opinion was that
‘she was a silly little thing.’
Why such hostility? Volpi
was a man deeply involved with church politics. During Gemma’s short lifetime,
the era of ‘Catholic intransigence’ was giving way to a tentative accommodation
between church and state. The church in Lucca was as beleaguered as in any
other city, anxious to give no ammunition to liberals and free thinkers, afraid
of being mocked by anti-clerical rationalists. This fear governed the way
clerics responded to Gemma. They did not like excess, or passion, or guest
appearances by Old Nick himself. It was the church that was most anxious to be
reductionist about Gemma’s experiences, to debunk them as ‘hysteria’.
On the occasion of her
paralysis, several doctors had been sent in. Gemma hated doctors. ‘What
distress . . . to have to allow myself to be undressed,’ she says. Having
examined her, she goes on, ‘nearly all the doctors said it was spinal
meningitis, only one insisted in saying it was hysteria.’ Now, after Gemma had
received the stigmata, Volpi brought in a local doctor who said that the wounds
on her head and hands were self-inflicted. He saw marks on her skin which were
easily wiped away; he saw a sewing needle on the floor by her feet. After this,
Volpi told Gemma that when she saw a vision of Jesus she should regard it as
diabolically inspired. She should make the horn sign to ward off evil and spit
in the apparition’s face. You wonder if this advice would have placated the
rationalist opponents of whom the church was so afraid – would they have found
the auxiliary bishop even funnier than the would-be saint?
To Gemma it sometimes seemed
the local clergy were doing everything they could to obstruct her passage to
heaven. At every turn they sought to control and limit her experience. Her
heart told her that the local priests were sometimes wrong, and yet she knew
she would commit a sin if she was not obedient to the men who were set over her
as spiritual authorities. They told her not to trust her imagination; to stop
imagining. Yet her imagination was what connected her to Jesus. Her greatest
trial was the emptiness she experienced when she didn’t see him face to face.
She solved this problem neatly. In one of her ecstasies she dedicated her
imagination to the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary accepted it – which meant that
from that day onwards heaven would work through Gemma’s imagination. Imagination,
in her view, was the essence of reality. Dreams and visions allowed her to see
the true nature of events, discern motivation, penetrate disguises. The devil,
satirical as always, assumed the form of Monsignor Volpi and followed her
through the town. Just so she didn’t miss him, he wore a mitre.
Then to her rescue came a
professional saint-maker, Father Germano, a member of the Passionist order – a
missionary order, founded in 1741, which shared with Gemma a devotion to the
emblem of the Sacred Heart. Germano boasted that he could bring even Garibaldi
to ‘the honours of the altar’. He talent-spotted Gemma on a brief visit to
Lucca, and asked Volpi if he could take over primary responsibility for her
spiritual development. He would publish her biography four years after her
death and it was in his interest that during her lifetime she should feed him
material by putting on paper as much as he could persuade her to confide about
her life and her thoughts. In the same way, Thérèse was ordered to write her
life-story – but by her own elder sister, who was at that time superior of her
convent. Thérèse took to the business with flair and verve, her mind flooded by
recollections of her childhood. Gemma, on the other hand, was not particularly
co-operative. Germano asked her to write him a ‘general confession’. ‘All the
sins of the world, I have done them all,’ she replied. Yet she began to set
down the scant record of her life to date.
When the Passionists looked
at Gemma they did not see a hysteric or a fake. Where Volpi’s doctor had seen
blood that could be wiped away, and that suspicious sewing needle on the floor,
the Passionists saw eloquent wounds. In Julius Caesar, Antony promises
to ‘put a tongue in every wound of Caesar’. Father Germano undertook a similar
duty for Gemma. Meanwhile, his advice to the people around her was to keep her
busy – plenty of manual labour – and away from doctors. Catholic doctors could
be just as bad as ‘unbelievers and freemasons’. Gemma continued fainting,
convulsing, vomiting blood and showing the stigmata; Germano advised her to
pray for the cessation of these physical manifestations and to ask for
spiritual graces instead.
Spiritual graces were
safer; even Germano didn’t want the girl making a holy show of herself. Bell and
Mazzoni demonstrate how potentially subversive Gemma’s physical eloquence was.
The saint first affected by the stigmata was Francis of Assisi, but it has
afflicted many more women than men. It insists on the likeness of the
believer’s body to that of Christ. It argues that the gender of the redemptive
body does not matter. It undermines the notion of a masculine God. It shows
that Christ can represent women and women can represent Christ – no wonder it
makes the church nervous. There is a trap the church has created for itself –
it wants Jesus to have a gender but not sexuality. Under the loincloth of the
crucified Christ, what would you find? Only a smooth groin of wood or plaster.
His ability to love has to centre on some other organ.
Throughout her life Gemma
suffered from palpitations and pains in her chest. Sometimes the beating of her
heart was so violent that everyone around could observe it; at autopsy it was
seen (by a devout doctor) to be engorged with fresh blood. For Gemma, the heart
is the place her pain is centred, the place where metaphors converge. She calls
Jesus ‘the powerful King of Hearts’. Hélène Cixous has pointed out that the
heart is the place where male and female metaphors become one. Both sexes agree
it is there that love is bred and contained. The heart beats faster when you
see your lover, or in the sexual act. It is the place where Gemma’s identity
collapses into that of Jesus. She insists that her heart wants to enlarge; she
uses an expression that also means, ‘to take comfort’. In Saint Hysteria,
Mazzoni shows how the woman mystic pushes language to do what it can, and
abandons it when it reaches its limit. When telling is insufficient, she shows.
This was the church’s great
problem: men’s language, frozen in liturgy and protocol, and women’s language,
plastic, elastic, expressed in the heaving bosom and the arched spine – the
flicky tongue of hysteria, juicy with unspoken words. The church had got itself
embroiled in competing systems of metaphor, parallel discourses which it was
too intellectually cowardly or inept to try to reconcile; it could only shuffle
into shady alliances with the kind of science that suited it. We can see, as
‘Catholic neurologists’ of the time did, that Gemma’s symptoms are a
representational strategy. They are an art form and a highly successful one;
they are also (possibly) the product of mental pain and distress turned into
physical symptoms. We must say ‘possibly’ because we don’t know enough about
Gemma’s illnesses – at least, Bell and Mazzoni don’t give us enough detail to
judge whether they were functional or organic. It seems that her doctors were
more interested in ascribing meaning to her illnesses than in recording their
physical features. If you want to look at Gemma’s life as Freud and Josef
Breuer might have looked at it (Studies in Hysteria was published in
1895) you can collude with the church in describing Gemma as a hysteric. But
where does that get us? Holiness and psychopathology can coexist, and perhaps
by the time Gemma was making her career you couldn’t have the first without
what looked like the second. The state of virginity itself was pathologised,
and part of the definition of psychological health was an ability to defer to
men and accept penetrative sex. Gemma thought she could be both a hysteric and
a saint. She clearly understood that the diagnosis was pejorative, and regarded
it as just another of the humiliations that God had lined up for her.
At the heart of Bell and
Mazzoni’s endeavour is an understanding that a phenomenon may retain spiritual
value, even after its biological and psychological roots have been uncovered.
To describe the physical basis of an experience is not to negate the
experience, as William James pointed out long ago. But now that neuroscience
has such excellent tools for envisaging and describing the brain, we are
tempted to accept descriptions of physiological processes as a complete account
of experience. We then go further, and make value judgments about certain
experiences, and deny their value if they don’t fit a consensus; we medicate
the mysterious, and in relieving suffering, take its meaning away. This won’t
do; there is always more suffering, and a pain is never generic, but particular
and personal. We denigrate the female saints as masochists; noting that
anorexic girls have contempt for their own flesh, we hospitalise them and
force-feed them, taking away their liberties as if they were criminals or
infants, treating them as if they have lost the right to self-determination.
But we don’t extend the same contempt to pub brawlers or career soldiers. Men
own their bodies, but women’s bodies are owned by the wider society; this
observation is far from original, but perhaps bears restatement.
In the ‘Saint’s Alphabet’
which concludes the Bell-Mazzoni book, Cristina Mazzoni works hard at making
Gemma’s story one of the triumph of the disempowered. It is true that the
reckless intensity of her self-belief, combined with her passionate lack of
self-regard, make her seem very modern: a Simone Weil by other means. But very
unlike Weil, she speaks in the language of the nursery. She calls her confessor
‘Dad’. She calls him ‘Mum’ as well, if she feels like it. She calls Jesus her
brother and her lover and her mother. If she obeys Jesus – deferring to him as to
one who has suffered and been humiliated – it can be argued that she took on
his pain not in a spirit of masochism or passivity but in a spirit of
solidarity.
When Gemma was canonised,
the church made a weaselly accommodation with her career history, recognising
the sanctity of her life but not the supernatural manifestations which
surrounded her: manifestations which are so dangerously impressive to lay
people, who are always looking for a sign they can understand – even an
illiterate woman could have read the marks on Gemma’s body. So Gemma got her
reward for being downtrodden, humble, abject – not for being a living testimony
to Christ’s passion. Her bodily sufferings and her visions were not part of her
claim to sainthood. The church recognised that Gemma had actually felt certain
pains and sincerely believed that heaven had sent them; but they were consigned
to the subjective realm. Within the church, pain can become productive,
suffering can be put to work. But outside the church suffering loses its meaning,
degenerates into physical squalor. It only has the meaning we ascribe to it;
but now we lack a context in which to understand the consent to suffering that
the saints gave.
Anorexia nervosa is said to
be a modern epidemic. If you skimmed the press in any one week it would be hard
to see what is perceived as more threatening to society: the flabby, rolling
mass of couch-potato kids, or their teenage sisters with thighs like gnawed
chicken-bones, sunken cheeks and putrid breath. Are we threatened by flesh or
its opposite? Though the temporarily thin find it easy to preach against the
fat, we are much more interested by anorexia than by obesity. We all understand
self-indulgence but are afraid that self-denial might be beyond us. We are
fascinated by anyone who will embrace it – especially if there’s no money in it
for them.
Bell emphasises in his
introduction that what Gemma experienced was ‘holy anorexia’ and that it is
different from anorexia nervosa. But what may strike the reader of a secular
orientation is how similar they are. Starvation, as Bell shows in Holy
Anorexia, was not an extension of convent practice, but a defiance of it. A
fast is a controlled penitential practice. Most nuns fasted to keep the rule:
the anorexics fasted to break it. Most nuns fasted to conform to their
community: the starvation artists aimed to be extraordinary, exemplary. The
secular slimming diet is also conformist and self-limiting. Dieting is
culturally approved, associative behaviour, almost ritualistic. Restaurants adapt
their menus to the Dr Atkins faddists; in a thousand church halls every week,
less fashionable dieters discuss their ‘points’ and ‘sins’, their little
liberties and their permitted lapses. Diets are prescriptive, like convent
fasts – so much of this, so little of that. The anorexic, holy or otherwise,
makes her own laws. Every normal diet ends when the dieter’s will fails, or the
‘target weight’ is reached, at which point the dieter will celebrate, the
deprived body will take its revenge, and the whole cycle will begin again –
next Monday, or next Lent. Diets are meant to fail, fasts to end in a feast
day. Anorexia succeeds, and ends in death more frequently than any other
psychiatric disorder.
Should we be comfortable in
regarding it as a psychiatric disorder? Is it not a social construct? If the
fashion industry were responsible for modern anorexia, it would be true that we
are dealing with a very different condition from holy anorexia. But the
phenomenon of starving girls predates any kind of fashion industry. In The
Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty,
Helen King has amassed a huge number of references to a disease entity that was
recognised from classical times to the 1920s. Greensick virgins went about
looking moony, and didn’t menstruate, possibly because they didn’t weigh
enough; in all eras, food refusal was part of the condition. The cure was a
good seeing to – within marriage, of course. The snag was that men weren’t keen
to marry women of unproven fertility. They must show, by bleeding, how worthy
they were. If green-sickness was a protest against fate, it was a horribly
conflicted and fraught protest. The cloister is the logical destination for
those who protest too much. But in or out of the nunnery, how much should a
good girl bleed? Should she settle for the natural orifice, or bleed from
novelty ones – palms, eyes?
Sometimes the starving
saints broke their fasts, were found at midnight raiding the convent larder.
How did their communities accommodate this embarrassment? They simply said
that, while Sister X snoozed celestially in her cell, the devil assumed her
form and shape, tucked his tail under a habit, crept downstairs and ate all the
pies. Starvation can be, must be, sustained by pride. Sîan Busby’s book ‘A
Wonderful Little Girl’ introduces us to this pride in a secular context. In
1869, a 12-year-old called Sarah Jacob starved to death in a Welsh farmhouse,
under the eye of doctors and nurses who were watching her around the clock.
Sarah had been a sickly little girl whose parents didn’t want to force food on
her. She became a local phenomenon; visitors came to look at her not eating,
and left useful donations. It is likely she was fed, minimally and secretly, by
her siblings. But when the medical vigil began, this source of supply was cut
off, and Sarah was too polite to say she needed anything – even water.
Politely, proudly and quietly, she slipped away while the doctors and nurses
watched.
It is a grim story of
social hypocrisy, deprivation and bone-headed stupidity, but it is also a
shadowy story with a meaning that is difficult to penetrate. This is true of
the whole phenomenon of anorexia. The anorexics are always, you feel, politely
losing the game. When the fashionable and enviable shape was stick-thin, a sly
duplicity was at work. One girl, considered photogenic, could earn a living
from thinness; another girl, with the same famine proportions but less
poster-appeal, would be a suitable case for treatment. The deciding factor
seemed to be economic: could she earn a living by anorexia? If so, make her a
cover girl; if not, hospitalise her. The case is now altered. The ideal body is
attainable only by plastic surgery. The ideal woman has the earning powers of a
CEO, breasts like an inflatable doll, no hips at all and the tidy, hairless
labia of an unviolated six-year-old. The world gets harder and harder. There’s
no pleasing it. No wonder some girls want out.
The young women who survive
anorexia do not like themselves. Their memoirs burn with self-hatred, expressed
in terms which often seem anachronistic. In My Hungry Hell, Kate
Chisholm says: ‘Pride is the besetting sin of the anorexic: pride in her
self-denial, in her thin body, in her superiority.’[*] Survivors are reluctant to admit that anorexia, which in the end leads
to invalidity and death, is along the way a path of pleasure and power: it is
the power that confers pleasure, however freakish and fragile the gratification
may seem. When you are isolated, back to the social wall, control over your own
ingestion and excretion is all you have left; this is why professional
torturers make sure to remove it. Why would women feel so hounded, when feminism
is a done deal? Think about it. What are the choices on offer? First, the
promise of equality was extended to educated professional women. You can be
like men, occupy the same positions, earn the same salary. Then equal
opportunities were extended to uneducated girls; you, too, can get drunk, and
fight in the streets on pay-night. You’ll fit in childcare somehow, around the
practice of constant self-assertion – a practice now as obligatory as
self-abasement used to be. Self-assertion means acting; it means denying your
nature; it means embracing superficiality and coarseness. Girls may not be
girls; they may be gross and sexually primed, like adolescent boys.
Not every young woman wants
to take the world up on this offer. It is possible that there is a certain
personality structure which has always been problematical for women, and which
is as difficult to live with today as it ever was – a type which is withdrawn,
thoughtful, reserved, self-contained and judgmental, naturally more cerebral
than emotional. Adolescence is difficult for such people; peer-pressure and
hormonal disruption whips them into forced emotion, sends them spinning like
that Victorian toy called a whipping-top. Suddenly self-containment becomes
difficult. Emotions become labile. Why do some children cut themselves, stud
themselves and arrange for bodily modifications that turn passers-by sick in
the streets, while others merely dwindle quietly? Is it a class issue? Is it to
do with educational level? The subject is complex and intractable. The cutters
have chosen a form of display that even the great secular hysterics of the 19th
century would have found unsubtle, while the starvers defy all the ingenuities
of modern medicine; the bulimics borrow the tricks of both, and are perhaps the
true heirs of those spider-swallowers. Anorexia itself seems like mad
behaviour, but I don’t think it is madness. It is a way of shrinking back, of
reserving, preserving the self, fighting free of sexual and emotional
entanglements. It says, like Christ, ‘noli me tangere.’ Touch me not and take
yourself off. For a year or two, it may be a valid strategy; to be greensick,
to be out of the game; to die just a little; to nourish the inner being while
starving the outer being; to buy time. Most anorexics do recover, after all:
somehow, and despite the violence visited on them in the name of therapy, the
physical and psychological invasion, they recover, fatten, compromise. Anorexia
can be an accommodation, a strategy for survival. In Holy Anorexia, Bell
remarks how often, once recovered, notorious starvers became leaders of their
communities, serene young mothers superior who were noticeably wise and
moderate in setting the rules for their own convents. Such career opportunities
are not available these days. I don’t think holy anorexia is very different
from secular anorexia. I wish it were. It ought to be possible to live and
thrive, without conforming, complying, giving in, but also without imitating a
man, even Christ: it should be possible to live without constant falsification.
It should be possible for a woman to live – without feeling that she is
starving on the doorstep of plenty – as light, remarkable, strong and free. As
an evolved fish: in her element, and without scales.
[*] Short Books, 152 pp., £5.99, September 2002, 1 904095 23 2.
London Review of Books, Vol.26, Nº 5, 4 March 2004. Hilary Mantel, Some
Girls Want Out, pages 14-18.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n05/hilary-mantel/some-girls-want-out/print
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