ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the instances where folk women in the authors' works function mostly as "wise women", either in the folk forms of the Virgin Mary or in roles similar to that of the midwife. The wise-women characters reflect different interpretations of the Virgin Mary and the folk culture role of the midwife, sometimes from opposite angles. The folkloric aspects of Mary's speech, cultural Catholicism, and behavior support this undercutting of nationalist-appropriated folk women. For the most part, the allusion to the Virgin Mary, either as an oversimplified ideal or as a more vibrant folk woman, stays in the background while the story focuses on the midwife's adventures. The chapter begins with Zora Neale Hurston's dismissal of the Virgin Mary and along with her much of Christianity, moved toward Mary Lavin's polite but sometimes searingly cold distancing of the nationalistic interpretation of the magna mater, in the final assessment.
