The Feminine and the Sacred

In recent years there has been increasing interest in the element of spirituality in Julia Kristeva’s writings. Works such as Transfigurations: Theology and the French Feminists edited by Kim, St Ville and Simonaitis (1993), French Feminists on Religion edited by Joy, O’Grady and Poxon (2002) and my own Women’s Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (2004) have highlighted Kristeva’s often provocative writing on religion and the way in which her theories may be used to illuminate the frequently neglected topic, at least amongst literary critics, of spirituality in women’s fiction. In her native Bulgaria, Kristeva was raised in the twin dogmas of Marxism and Roman Catholicism. As outlined both in Au commencement était l’amour (1985) and in The Feminine and the Sacred (2001), she discarded Roman Catholicism during her teenage years. Facing up to the fact of her own mortality, she could not, she writes in The Feminine and the Sacred, believe either in an after-life or in a supreme being. Whilst she had faith that the thought of the species would continue (the only kind of after-life in which she believes), she felt obliged to concede that her individual mind would perish with her body (Kristeva, 2001, 47-8). Despite her abandonment of formal belief, Kristeva’s work continues to be informed by the Judeo-Christian tradition even when she seeks to challenge it. Indeed the development of her punning redefinition of heresy as ‘herethics’, a word used to express the type of reaching out to the other in love which she sees as characteristic of women, demonstrates the close link in Kristeva’s work between heretical thinking and a new type of feminist ethics. The evolution of her work has shown a continued interest in the loss of security caused by the break-up of religion in Western culture and the way in which psychoanalysis has taken over from religion in healing psychic wounds. In Tales of Love, Kristeva draws parallels between the Christian discourse of love and the psychoanalyst’s relationship with her client and she introduces religious terms such as agapeic love into psychoanalytical discourse. In an interview she has stated: ‘For me, in a very Christian fashion, ethics merges with love, which is why ethics also merges with the psychoanalytic relationship’ (Kristeva, 1986, 20). Two of Kristeva’s essays, ‘Stabat Mater’ and ‘Motherhood According to Bellini’, contrast idealizations of motherhood in Roman Catholicism with the mother in psychoanalytical discourse in order to elaborate a new psychoanalytic understanding of motherhood based on an herethics of love. In ‘Stabat Mater’, following Marina Warner, Kristeva argues that the orthodox view of the Virgin Mary has often been used to suppress dissent. Her arguments, as we saw in chapter four, are very relevant to the way in which the Catholic religion developed in

Ireland, where the patriarchal construct of the Virgin was used to control and define women. ‘Our queen of heaven may dominate the mystic depths, but she is rarely seen along the byways of power within the Church community’ comments Kristeva dryly in The Feminine and the Sacred (Clément and Kristeva, 2001, 71). In this chapter I explore different aspects of Kristeva’s writing on spirituality in the context of Irish women’s writing. I first look at the way in which religion was used in Ireland to control and suppress women, as illustrated in the writing of Mary Lavin. I then discuss the portrayal in two of Kate O’Brien’s novels, The AnteRoom and That Lady, of the way in which their private faith enables her heroines to resist pressure from the symbolic order. In the third section I explore Kristeva’s anxieties about the loss of soul in modern society in the context of Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, Eva Trout (1968). Finally, following Kristeva’s argument, in Revolt, She Said, that new forms of spirituality are a necessary defense against institutionalism and political dogmatism, I examine Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s novel, Dancers Dancing, which presents a young woman who, through her discovery of a sense of the sacred in nature, creates a private space for herself within the life of the nation. For Kristeva, as she makes clear in The Feminine and the Sacred (Clément and Kristeva, 2001, 26), there is a definite distinction to be drawn between religion and a sense of the sacred (hence the title of this chapter). Religion and belief, interpreted in the widest sense, are, she explains, always consolatory, proposing omnipotent father figures and the comforting illusion that we are not subject to nature, biology or mortality. In this sense she associates orthodox religion with the symbolic order. A sense of the sacred, for Kristeva, involves celebrating the border between nature and culture, a border of which women, she believes, are particularly conscious (Clément and Kristeva, 2001, 27).