Mary isn’t only important to Christians. Muslims revere Mary as an example of purity and holiness and submission to Allah, and in the Koran, Sura 19 is named for her. Islam recognized the Immaculate Conception a thousand years before the Catholic church formalized that dogma, that Mary was free of the blemish of Original Sin (which is not to be confused with the dogma of the Virgin Birth of Jesus.)
I’ve always been fascinated with Mary, Miriam, Maryam, the mother of Jesus. Mary repealed the sin of Eve through acquiescence, obedience, and grace. Her Madonna image resonates with every mother and infant, in family snapshots, in advertisements for baby formula, in Christmas cards.
I wonder at Mary’s interior life, whether she regretted her fate, whether she was even capable of imagining another life for herself. She lived in Roman Judea, and traveled to Egypt, she would have seen Roman women, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks. |
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Mary would have known of other women with measures of autonomy: widows, priestesses, merchants, artisans. Did she ever resent her circumstances? She was married at 14 to a man in his forties, was she ever curious about intimacy, did she feel her virginity was a burden? Did she want more children? Was she weary of fearing for her son? Did she wish her destiny had befallen someone else?
Mary who isn't divine, is in a way less human than Jesus was. Her perfection is even more monolithic than Christ’s. Jesus disobeyed his parents, he displayed anger in the Temple, he rebuked God on the cross.
Her perfection pollutes us with an ideal of feminine passivity, a standard to which every mother falls short. Her perfection is alien, it alienates us from the reality of womanhood. Look at Max Ernst’s famous 1926 painting: The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and the Painter . |
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It shocks us by showing us a Mary who’s real, who’s last nerve has finally been worked, and by Jesus no less. (Though she's still quite calm as she whales away.)
Politically, Mary’s passive example is made to order for a patriarchal society, and I wonder why feminists haven't pushed for a renovation of her iconography. I've read Beauvoir, Greer, Cather, Oates, Murdoch, Spark, Woolf, Stein, and Atwood among other great feminist writers, but I've never read speculations about Mary's internal life. I know there must a plethora of academic treatises on Mary, I’d even guess that some seminaries have distinguished Maryologists with shelves of published work on the real Mary. It must exist somewhere, but it’s not made an impact on who and what Mary is to us. Perhaps the popularization of religious scholarship is just too dangerous for academics, not because it would cause riots and persecutions, but because it wouldn’t. |
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