Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

She pets Mariette's wrist and kisses a knuckle. She whispers, "We are so privileged." She holds the palm open and kisses it. "You have turned your face from me too often. You have been frightened by my affection."

With reverence Sister Hermance licks the blood inside the hand wound. "I have tasted you. See?" Tears streak shining paths down her cheeks as she says, "Ever since I first met you, I have loved you more than myself."

Mariette Baptist is a teenager when she leaves her home to join an order of French nuns living in upstate New York. Her sister, Mother Celine, is the prioress at the nunnery, and their father is a severe and skeptical doctor who is befuddled and disappointed by his daughters' calling. As a "postulant"--that is, a probationary not-yet nun--Mariette distinguishes herself through her piety. She confesses to the nunnery priest, Pere Marriott, that she often has visions of Christ in which they converse, and during which she begs to experience the kind of suffering that will bring her closer to him. And yet her piety--and her beauty--are not prized by everyone; to some of the nuns it looks like pride or arrogance. These differences are brought to a crisis when Mariette begins to manifest the stigmata: the wounds in Christ's hand, feet, and side received at the crucifixion.

Is Mariette a saint or a liar? Hansen, as you might expect, offers no clear conclusion to the question: it seems equally likely that the dreamy, aloof Mariette experiences a miracle as it does that she wounds herself, either through a pathological need for attention or a real psychotic break. (Equally likely, that is, if you come into the book willing to believe that such things are possible.) The question dogs the nuns, too, who are divided into pro- and anti-Mariette camps: gossiping, sending letters to the Pere, et cetera. As the Prioress Saint-Raphael--whose responsibility to keep the nunnery together is threatened by Mariette's ecstasy--notes, it is hard to understand God's intention in afflicting Mariette this way. There is no gain, material or spiritual, for the nunnery or anyone else in Mariette's stigmata, not even, it seems, for Mariette. As the Pere observes, the stigmata are gratia dei gratis, given by God's will and not through any desert or lack thereof; saints and reprobates both have manifested the stigmata throughout history. In this way the very uselessness of the stigmata may be part of their miraculousness: a reminder that God's will is inscrutable.

Mariette in Ecstasy is an interesting contrast to Sylvia Townsend Warner's book about a nunnery, The Corner That Held Them. While the latter applies a Marxist lens to the nun's life, showing the ways that even spiritual lives are ultimately shaped by the relations of capital and labor, Mariette in Ecstasy really asks us to consider what the spiritual life of a nun demands. Hansen often lingers on short scenes of pastoral life--the tedium of wash day, the family of skunks that have gotten into the corn cob, stuff like that--in a way that reminds us that a nun's life is one of contemplation and stillness, a life that Mariette's miracles must inevitably interrupt and transform. The antipathy of the anti-Mariette factions may be a kind of jealousy, generated by those who submitted obediently to a life of quietude only to find ostentatiousness rewarded. On the other hand, there is a queer sensuality--queer in both senses--to the pro-Mariette factions captured neatly in the above passage, where Sister Hermance literally licks the wound in Mariette's hand.

I really enjoyed Mariette in Ecstasy. Its pastoral simplicity seems borrowed from the Cather tradition of American writing, but it belies a crypticness that is not easily solved. The question of skepticism--are Mariette's miracles real or fake--is only the most superficial of several questions about faith, belief, and obedience that give the book a quiet power.