Lifting the veil
The actress Audrey Hepburn gave her finest performance in 1959’s The Nun’s Story, as a willful young nun who struggles with her vows in the 1930s and 1940s. The film was well received upon release but subsequently dismissed by feminist critics. That reaction puzzled Professor Maureen Sabine, who was educated by nuns. In response, she has written Veiled Desires, a detailed analysis of the portrayal of nuns in film.
“I became interested in this hostility to the film and in re-interpreting it,” she said. “Here is a heroine – although she’s a cloistered nun, she’s very intelligent and career orientated. She’s an individualist with an integrity resisting institutional conformity. It struck me that’s one definition of a feminist.”
“Feminists see the vow of obedience and conclude that nuns are handmaidens of a patriarchal church. But what they often forget are their bold pioneering activities – in America they built the infrastructure of the Catholic church and ran the parochial school system and the hospitals.”
Professor Sabine found many examples of cinematic nuns who defied the submissive stereotype, such as Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St Mary’s and even Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. They all showed a strong undercurrent of sexuality – a life force that is a reminder that nuns are also women with passion and purpose.
“The drive you see in the cinematic nun is a reflection of eros, of reaching out, and this appeals to the public. In The Sound of Music, for instance, you have aspiration, restless desire, a search for something more in songs like Climb Every Mountain.”
“These actresses are calling attention to this erotic drive and how it might be channelled into religious life and service.”
Professor Sabine explores her topic through a variety of academic lenses, including literary analysis, feminist history and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, theology, religious history and film criticism. “It turned out to be the most difficult project that I have done,” she said, “but I really enjoyed it.”
Veiled Desires is published by Fordham University Press.
Married to Christ
Christianity is rich in allegorical images and when Dr Carolyn Muir stumbled across a story of a ‘mystic marriage’ between St Catherine of Alexandria and Jesus Christ, she was intrigued. How do you translate this abstract idea of unifying the soul with god into an image? Especially when, as she subsequently found, both male and female saints ‘married’ Christ.
“In the 13th and 14th centuries there were a lot of individual mystics who wrote very graphically about having mystical unions. This is a theological concept you can find in many religions, not just Christianity, but here you also have this gender factor. You can gloss over the text as an allegory, but what do you do when you have to depict it? And who looked at these images?” she said.
Dr Muir studied published and unpublished materials and determined there were certain conventions in mystic marriage imagery. Female saints, represented by St Catherine and St Agnes, are shown marrying Christ as a baby based on a vision St Catherine had of the infant Christ giving her a ring after she converted to Christianity. Male saints, represented by St John the Evangelist and St Bernard of Clairvaux, are depicted embracing an adult Christ.
The two images are combined in Henry Suso, who was beatified but never made a full saint. He wrote about his love and marriage to ‘Eternal Wisdom’. Wisdom is female in the Old Testament but identified with Christ in the New Testament, so Suso’s mystic union crosses gender boundaries.
“There are very rare images of Suso wedding Christ who is depicted as a woman,” Dr Muir says. “In terms of the conventions, there’s a ring ceremony but there’s also emotional and physical intimacy.”
As to who looked at these images,14th century nuns were quite keen on them. “St John was one of their favourites and one nun was said to have levitated in front of a sculpture showing his mystic union with Christ,” noted Dr Muir.
Her findings, and the images, are contained in her new book, Saintly Brides and Bridegrooms: The Mystic Marriage in Northern Renaissance Art, published by Brepols Publishers.
“I became interested in this hostility to the film and in re-interpreting it,” she said. “Here is a heroine – although she’s a cloistered nun, she’s very intelligent and career orientated. She’s an individualist with an integrity resisting institutional conformity. It struck me that’s one definition of a feminist.”
“Feminists see the vow of obedience and conclude that nuns are handmaidens of a patriarchal church. But what they often forget are their bold pioneering activities – in America they built the infrastructure of the Catholic church and ran the parochial school system and the hospitals.”
“The drive you see in the cinematic nun is a reflection of eros, of reaching out, and this appeals to the public. In The Sound of Music, for instance, you have aspiration, restless desire, a search for something more in songs like Climb Every Mountain.”
“These actresses are calling attention to this erotic drive and how it might be channelled into religious life and service.”
Professor Sabine explores her topic through a variety of academic lenses, including literary analysis, feminist history and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, theology, religious history and film criticism. “It turned out to be the most difficult project that I have done,” she said, “but I really enjoyed it.”
Veiled Desires is published by Fordham University Press.
Married to Christ
“In the 13th and 14th centuries there were a lot of individual mystics who wrote very graphically about having mystical unions. This is a theological concept you can find in many religions, not just Christianity, but here you also have this gender factor. You can gloss over the text as an allegory, but what do you do when you have to depict it? And who looked at these images?” she said.
Dr Muir studied published and unpublished materials and determined there were certain conventions in mystic marriage imagery. Female saints, represented by St Catherine and St Agnes, are shown marrying Christ as a baby based on a vision St Catherine had of the infant Christ giving her a ring after she converted to Christianity. Male saints, represented by St John the Evangelist and St Bernard of Clairvaux, are depicted embracing an adult Christ.
“There are very rare images of Suso wedding Christ who is depicted as a woman,” Dr Muir says. “In terms of the conventions, there’s a ring ceremony but there’s also emotional and physical intimacy.”
As to who looked at these images,14th century nuns were quite keen on them. “St John was one of their favourites and one nun was said to have levitated in front of a sculpture showing his mystic union with Christ,” noted Dr Muir.
Her findings, and the images, are contained in her new book, Saintly Brides and Bridegrooms: The Mystic Marriage in Northern Renaissance Art, published by Brepols Publishers.
See original article: http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/Bulletin/2013_Jun_Vol.14_No.3/books/index.html
