The Cloister Walk (30 page)

“Called back,” carried, as she had requested, out the back door and through the garden to the cemetery, past her beloved flowers in high bloom. A believer in synchronicity, one who reveled in its glorious irony, she'd taken the title of a ghost story she was reading and made it the text of her last letter: “Little Cousins, Called back. Emily.” Her brother had “Called Back” carved on her tombstone, along with the dates of her birth, December 10, 1830, and her death, May 15, 1886.

“You think my gait ‘spasmodic,” she wrote to Higginson at the
Atlantic Monthly.
“I am in danger—Sir—You think me ‘uncontrolled'—I have no Tribunal.” “Perhaps you smile at me,” she wrote. “I could not stop for that. My Business is Circumference.” To friends she had refused to see, she wrote, “In all the circumference of Expression, those guileless words of Adam and Eve never were surpassed, ‘I was ashamed and hid myself.' ”

Like Hildegard of Bingen, Emily Dickinson is one of those pivotal, original poets who emerge from time to time in literary history; steeped in one tradition, they come to transcend it, acting as a bridge between the poetry of the past and that which is to come. Both are poets who emerged from a culture in which the words of scripture were read aloud daily, left to resonate in the poet's ear. Both come from a tradition in which biblical allusion is a commonplace; both stood the traditional mode of expressing such allusions on its head.

Both women were well-educated by the standards of their time, but as they were less grounded in logic and rhetoric than their male counterparts, they were not immersed in a learned culture so much as an oral one, and I suspect that this contributed greatly to their astonishing freedom to engage in serious play with the words of scripture. Both women, for example, freely assume the identity of biblical characters, male and female. Jacob was a favorite of Dickinson's; the idea of wrestling with God appealed to her. Both women boldly lay claim to a prophetic voice, Hildegard couching the story of her calling in the language of Ezekiel and Jeremiah, Emily Dickinson appropriating the words of Isaiah 43:2 when writing to a friend whose engagement had been broken: “When thou goest through the Waters, I will go with thee.” On occasion, Dickinson even claimed a thoroughly divine prerogative, making a striking inversion in several letters to friends when quoting Jacob's statement to the angel (Gen. 32:26); “I will not let thee go except
I
bless thee,” and also Psalm 91, writing “I give
my
Angels charge over thee.” (Emphases mine.)

I believe that references to scripture may be found in every one of her poems and letters. I can never read Psalm 33's “Sing unto him a new song; play skilfully with a loud noise” without hearing her plaintive: “Why—do they shut me out of Heaven? Did I sing too loud?” Emily Dickinson is the patron saint of biblical commentary in the poetic mode. “I believe the love of God may be taught not to seem like bears,” she once wrote, wryly refuting the prophet Elisha. “Consider the lilies,” she wrote to her cousins late as a time of rest, and let it slip away, losing nothing.

Exploitation is at the heart of Maria Goretti's story, so much so that I wonder if it is possible to write about her in the late twentieth century without exploiting her further. In a curious way she reminds me of Marilyn Monroe. A virginal peasant girl canonized as a “martyr of purity” by the Roman Catholic church and a Hollywood sex goddess martyred on the altar of celebrity would seem to have little in common. Yet both make a witness to the perils of being female in life
and
in death. Their lives, their deaths, have been appropriated, squeezed for every drop of meaning by those who've not necessarily had their best interests at heart. Very little is known about Maria Goretti, and all too much about Marilyn Monroe, but each in her own way has become a perfect cipher, a blank page on which others write to suit their own purposes. Both have been so consistently ill-used that they make us cry out, “Enough, already; let her rest in peace.”

The bare facts of Goretti's story sound familiar to anyone who reads a newspaper. In 1902, at nearly twelve years of age, she was knifed to death in an attempted rape. Her murderer, who had threatened her in the past, was Alessandro Serenelli, the son of her father's partner in tenant farming, a boy she'd known for much of her life. When Maria was younger her destitute parents had moved, with their seven children, to a farm in the Pontine marshes of Italy in a desperate but futile attempt to better their circumstances. It was there that the father died of a fever, leaving his wife and children vulnerable to increased economic exploitation. It was there that Maria Goretti received her first communion, and also took on considerable domestic labor while her mother and older siblings worked in the fields. She was murdered in the kitchen of the rented house that her family shared with Alessandro and his father Giovanni.

The apparatus of hagiography so quickly entered into the telling of Goretti's story that one must proceed with caution in interpreting even the simplest facts concerning her life and death. In an article entitled “Maria Goretti: Rape and the Politics of Sainthood,” Eileen J. Stenzel has written, “To read the lives of the saints literally is to misunderstand the polemics and politics of sainthood.” Stenzel discovered, in teaching an undergraduate course on Catholicism, that the story of St. Maria Goretti inevitably polarized her students. “Some,” she writes, “would claim that the rationale for [her] canonization was understandable given the social climate of the 1950s. Others were outraged that the Roman Catholic church would ever have said that a woman is better dead than raped.”

But the literalism that would hear that as the church's message obscures the complexities of Goretti's story and ignores the economic and social realities of her time and place, a rural Italian village of the early twentieth century. As Stenzel points out, it was “the world in which Maria struggled to survive [that] promoted the belief that a woman was better dead than raped.” And by canonizing her, the church has seemed to many to agree. Ironically, it is the church's own eagerness to promote Goretti as a model of chastity that has fostered such cynicism and obscured the most profoundly religious elements of her story.

Hagiography is one of humankind's more strange endeavors. That a child, an illiterate peasant at that, should become of such importance to the Roman Catholic church in the mid-twentieth century that it expanded its official definition of martyrdom in order to canonize her seems ironic to skeptics but to the faithful is evidence of grace. Thomas Aquinas had opened the door back in the thirteenth century, writing that “human good can become divine good if it is referred to God: therefore, any human good can be a cause for martyrdom, in so far as it refers to God,” but until Maria Goretti's canonization in 1950, martyrs were considered by the church to be those who had clearly died for their faith. As Kenneth Woodward explains in
Making Saints,
the church decided that “technically, [Goretti] did not die for her faith. Rather, she died in defense of Christian virtue—a significant though by now routine expansion of the grounds on which a candidate can be declared a martyr.”

Goretti thus earned herself a place in the history of hagiography, paving the way for other twentieth-century martyrs such as Maximilian Kolbe, who died at Auschwitz. She also exposed a fault line in the church's historical treatment of the virgin martyrs, young girls who were executed during the persecutions of Christians in the second to sixth centuries. That they had died because they were Christians was never in dispute, but in accounts of their martyrdoms from the fifth century on, it is their commitment to preserving their virginity that is emphasized. Many of the stories relate the miraculous interventions that occurred when Roman officials sentenced the girls to be sent to brothels. Butler's 1880 edition of
Lives of the Saints
typically praises St. Agnes for her “voluntary chastity,” for “purity,” and for “joyfully preferring death to the violation of her integrity.”

That “joyfully” rankles these days, and maybe always did. But in terming Goretti “the St. Agnes of the twentieth century,” and in expanding the definition of martyrdom to include Goretti as a “martyr of purity,” Pope Pius XII laid to rest the old ambiguity surrounding the virgin martyrs. His use of Goretti proved not ambiguous at all; as Woodward relates, the church immediately set about to make her “the heroic embodiment of the church's sexual ethics.” And, as Scott Hoffman notes in a recent essay on Goretti, the church intended this concept of purity to embrace “not only chastity, but [many] other virtues in opposition to the modern world.”

Maria Goretti's canonization process was remarkably swift. Her canonization was, in the words of one hagiographer, “unique in the history of the church,” because her mother, brothers, and sisters were able to be present. To the modern mind, Goretti seems suspiciously convenient. The Catholic church had need of a young saint who could promote traditional values in the wake of post-war modernism, and as Kenneth Woodward relates, Goretti soon became, in Italy, at least, “the church's most popular icon of holy virginity after the Virgin herself . . . a saint whose story had become symbiotic with the church's teachings on sexual purity.” The purposes to which the Catholic church wished to put Goretti are made abundantly clear in the address given by Pius XII at her beatification in 1947, when he criticized the press, the fashion and entertainment industries, and the military (which had begun to conscript women) and termed Goretti “a ripe fruit of the domestic hearth where one prays, where children are educated in the fear of the Lord, in obedience of parents, in the love of truth, and in purity and chastity.”

Maria Goretti, cipher, was well on her way toward becoming a media event. The sermon preached in Union City, New Jersey, on the day after she was canonized, and covered by the
New York Times,
sounds eerily familiar in mid-1990s America. The priest, echoing Pope Pius XII, called Goretti “a saint of the Christian home” who stood for divinely ordained family values and against “parental absenteeism and juvenile delinquency.” He blasted Hollywood movies, and the popular press in general, for “lurid descriptions of sex crimes and of the lives of notorious murderers,” and even took a stab at comic books, which he termed “the marijuana of the nursery.” As Scott Hoffman notes, dryly, “St. Maria Goretti had arrived on the Jersey shore.” Maria Goretti comics were apparently all right; they were a staple of the small industry that Goretti became in America during the 1950s. She was promoted with such fervor by the American church, held up so insistently as a model for the first generation of post-war baby-boomers and their parents, that Hoffman wonders, “Did [Goretti] die for Christ, or the middle class?”

Reading the devotional literature about Goretti that was aimed at American Catholics in the 1950s, one is tempted to say that she died for whatever purpose one wanted her to. In Helen Walker Homan's smarmy
Letters to the Martyrs,
for example, Goretti becomes a beacon of anti-Communism. As the martyred St. Agnes stood against the Roman Empire, Homan finds that Maria Goretti represents the “Christian principles not compatible with those of a totalitarian State.” Another of Goretti's hagiographers, Monsignor James Morelli, makes Goretti an American patriot. In his book about Goretti, entitled
Teenager's Saint,
he writes that now that the world is “drawing itself into two enemy camps, Communism and Christianity. . . . Our church and our country have no use for weak, lukewarm souls who are always ready to give in to evil. . . . The hour has come for hardy, tough fighters who loyally and openly live a fully Christian life under the banner of the Church.”

Several writers stop just short of praising Goretti for her illiteracy. “Heaven forbid that anyone think . . . that the key to sanctity is illiteracy,” Mary Reed Newland writes in
The Saints and Our Children:
“What God is showing us . . . with the life of this saint is that He alone
can
be quite enough.” While this has interesting theological implications, particularly for liberation theology, such subtleties are lost on the hagiographers of the 1950s. Devotional pamphlets, such as “The Cinderella Saint,” tended to romanticize Goretti's poverty. And Monsignor Morelli, in a chapter entitled “The Little Madonna,” takes the opportunity, over Goretti's dead body, to complain about educated women. “Look at all the ‘career girls,' ” he writes, “who can't even mend a torn dress, or cook a simple meal, let alone manage a household.” (Goretti's selfless dedication to domestic responsibilities, especially after her father died, is much praised in all the accounts of her life.) The career girls, the monsignor finds, “don't compare to the little unlettered Italian girl who had a better way of writing.”