The New York Review of Books - USA - 16.12.2021

(EriveltonMoraes) #1
December 16, 2021 41

survival, even when it consists mainly
of paperwork. Groff vividly captures
the maneuvers a woman in the twelfth
century, or any century, would have
needed to make in order to prevail in
an unfriendly world. Marie writes let-
ters cultivating patrons and holding off
meddling churchmen, sends gifts to
families who will make good allies, and
pays to have songs about her abbey’s
glory performed in the cities of Europe.

Less convincing is Marie’s reorgani-
zation of the abbey’s work, to which
she brings the energy of a management
consultant wielding a fresh Ivy League
degree. The nuns she finds are starving,
apparently ignorant of gardening, fish-
ing, or gathering food until seventeen-
year-old Marie arrives to tell them how
to do it. To instill humility, each nun
had been assigned precisely the tasks
she found most painful, leaving the
community in a state of continual tor-
ment. Marie decides there will be “no
more milking done by weeping terri-
fied Sister Lucy, whose sister was killed
by a heifer kick to the head,” along with
other reforms. Why does Marie know
so much at her age, while the other
nuns are cartoonishly incapable of sur-
viving on their own?
Some explanation is to be found in
Marie’s backstory: she ran the family
estate for two years on the sly after
her mother’s death. More to the point,
however, the abbey has to be abject so
that it can be rescued by Marie, who
comes to it as an evangelist for the rev-
olutionary potential of labor:

So many hours have been forever
lost through feebleness and reluc-
tance. There is nothing wrong, she
thinks, in taking pride in the work
of one’s body. She has never been
convinced by any argument for
abasement. Surely god, who has
done all good work, wants work to
be done well.

Here is why Eden was “lazy.” The col-
orless, insipid, and above all inefficient
monastery Marie finds is a stereotyped
version of the medieval past. At one
point she muses that the practice of
reading aloud means that “there is no
private dialogue to challenge the inter-
nal voice and press it forward,” hence
“few of her nuns have the capacity to
think for themselves.” Marie is the
fresh wind of modernity, bringing with
her genius, individuality, and industry.
Perhaps it makes sense, then, that the
rest of the novel consists of an uninter-
rupted litany of success stories. Despite
her early lack of faith, Marie is given a
“great, ground-trembling” vision of the
Virgin Mar y holding a rose that blooms
and disintegrates in her hand:

The petals circle in the wind and
the soft petals each tear down the
great trees of the forest in a pat-
tern. And Marie can feel the pat-
tern in her fingers as though she is
tracing it with her hand, and knows
it to be a labyrinth; and at the heart
of the labyrinth she sees a yellow
broom flower holding upon its
slender stalk a shining full moon.

Marie understands this as an instruc-
tion to build a labyrinth in the forest
around the monastery to keep her ten-
der nuns safe from the predatory influ-
ence of men. The nuns do much of the

construction work themselves, growing
stronger as they do so; in the evenings,
“they return with callused hands, sun-
burnt cheeks, a swagger of exhaustion
and pride in their legs.” Even the young
novices apply themselves, and every-
one is happier and healthier than ever
before now that they have discovered
the joyful potential of exercise. An-
other message from above, and Marie
builds an abbess house, then a water
reservoir. Finally, she breaks the ulti-
mate stained-glass ceiling: she takes
confession and gives her nuns Holy
Communion, eliminating the need for
male priests altogether.
Groff seems unwilling at any point
to let her protagonist suffer defeat. Ma-
rie’s namesake, the mysterious author
of those haunting Breton lais, knew
that the most resonant tales come from

loss. Marie, however, has little time
for melancholy: she is too busy build-
ing up her credentials as a heroine, not
for the twelfth but for the twenty-first
century. When Marie begins listen-
ing to her nuns’ confessions, she hears
stories of rape, molestation, abuse,
murder in self-defense. It is a Me Too
episode made possible by her breaking
the rules, because the nuns had been
unwilling to reveal their traumas to
a male confessor. Marie then boldly
rewrites the prayer books to suit her
community, sneaking to the scripto-
rium to “change the Latin of the mis-
sals and psalters into the feminine, for
why not when it is meant to be heard
and spoken only by women?” This is a
clever nod to the way medieval women
adapted books of prayer and instruc-
tion for their own purposes by using

feminine pronouns and forms (“ab-
bess” instead of “abbot”), but other
signs of Marie’s progressive credentials
are more wishful.
When young Marie is faced with
the exhausting grunt work of the mon-
astery, she begins to empathize with
her childhood servant: “Marie has
never scrubbed a thing in her life. She
wonders, hands aching, how Cecily
did not hate her.” Another privilege
check follows much later, when Cecily
reminds Marie that she is not a self-
made woman but “molded by others,
her mother, her ferocious aunts, her
books, her money.” Marie may be enti-
tled, but Groff is careful to let us know
that she is not at all anti-Semitic, as
any twelfth-century abbess would most
likely have been. Learning of the fall
of Jerusalem, Marie worries that “Jews

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