Domesticity, Feminism...and Mary Magdalene 9 comments

By Ann Conway

For several years, my secret vice has been the Domestic Blogosphere. Posy Gets Cozy is one of thousands of blogs that celebrate childrearing, house decoration, yarn, pets and, often, historical fiction of the English cottage variety. Invariably written by women, these blogs depict a world of traditionally feminine pleasures.

I’ve always liked sewing and crafts and find these glimpses into this “little world” of the domestic comforting, albeit sometimes superficial. Women’s lives come across as lovely terrariums, under glass.

This world is very different from the milieu in which I came to womanhood. Cambridge, Massachusetts in the early 1980s was wildly feminist. I was unprepared for this; I hardly knew what feminism or “the Left” was. Once, I told a grad school colleague (a women’s health activist), that I was ambivalent about abortion rights; the next time I saw Judy, she thrust upon me a thick envelope with dozens of pro choice pamphlets containing information that I already knew.

I didn’t respond, but she never stopped haranguing me. Admitting ambivalence about any aspects of the women’s movement was a sign of patriarchal brainwashing, so I learned to keep my mouth shut.

I never really fit in. I loved my boyfriend and my embroidery. I even went to Mass.

My mother and my aunts, who were masterpieces of contradiction in their female roles, informed my refusal to commit to one or another women’s platform. They proclaimed devotion to “the Blessed Mother,” that traditional icon, but they all worked outside the home. My Aunt Gabe had the first car in the neighborhood, a Model A. My mother, who went back to work when I was four, knew several languages and made more money than my father. My Aunt Harriet practically ran the Democratic Party in Rhode Island.

They also smoked, drank Manhattans, and bought fur coats for themselves late in life. They hated housecleaning and crafts.

But none of them were feminists. Not on your life, they said.

The women in my family were tender and tough, their stories full of nuance. But in the domestic blogosphere and traditional feminism, there is little space for contradiction. Neither narrative really captures the complexities of women’s lives.

This extends to religion. Recently I read “The Saintly Sinner,” in Joan Acocella’s essay collection, Twenty Eight Artists and Two Saints. The topic is Mary Magdalene, whom Acocella finds elusive, even as she explores the saint’s depictions in art and liturgy. Sometimes the Magdalene is decorative and voluptuous, holding an ointment jar. Sometimes she is cleaned up and penitent. More recently, she is a feminist icon, as in The Da Vinci Code or Woman with the Alabaster Jar. Mary Magdalene is Christ’s wife, his best buddy, or the “Apostle to the Apostles” of Gnosticism (this latter version Acocella finds a bit of “a showy visionary...the best student in class, constantly raising her hand”).

It is only when we are actually with the Magdalene, in the little we know of her story, Acocella suggests, that she becomes truly compelling.

The biblical picture is sketchy and disputed. But not in that one scene in John, that beautiful morning when the Magdalene visits the tomb. She is afraid during the dangerous and solitary journey. And confused. Seeing an angel, she says plaintively: “They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid Him.”

When the Magdalene finally realizes that Christ is actually there, she reaches for him, crying “Rabboni!” only to be abruptly told, “Touch Me Not,” an interchange which Acocella views as perhaps the New Testament’s most striking depiction of “the confrontation with death, with losing forever the thing you love.” Nevertheless, Magdalene is given an “authority on matters of the soul.” She alone is told, “go to my brethren and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father.”

It is the story itself here, at first appearing simple, that is in fact deeply nuanced. It is the words themselves, not the structures of ideology that give the Magdalene her power.

We need more stories, more words, like them.