Women Mystics Confront the Modern World: Marie de l'Incarnation and Madame Guyon

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 1999 by Larissa Juliet Taylor

Marie-Florine Bruneau, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. x 279 pp. $19.95. ISBN: 0-7914-3662-4.

Until recently, women in the colonial empires of Spain and especially France had received little attention from scholars. This is changing dramatically, as shown by these two books whose protagonists include women who spent most or all of their lives in the Americas.

Bruneau's study, informed by yet challenging the works of Michel de Certeau and Caroline Walker Bynum, examines two Frenchwomen: Marie de l'Incarnation and Madame Guyon. Both lived at a time when rationalism and positivism were making inroads against religious mysticism.

Marie de l'Incarnation, born Marie Guyart in Tours in 1599, is one of the most fascinating yet neglected women of the early modern world. Until Natalie Zemon Davis published an excellent study of her in Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (1995), she was almost unknown outside of Canada. In 1631, refusing offers of remarriage and leaving behind a teenaged son and her family, Marie joined the Ursuline order in Tours. Three years later, after reading the Jesuit Relations, she was inflamed by a desire to do missionary work in New France, a dream that became reality when she embarked for Quebec in 1639. Her goal was a school that would provide training for the daughters of French settlers and civilize and Christianize the natives.

During the remaining thirty-three years of her life, Marie worked toward those goals, overstepping the bounds firmly set for women during the Catholic Reformation. Besides leading her sisters and teaching children, Marie chronicled her experiences of this new world in letters, historical writings, and memoranda; she also mastered four Indian tongues and wrote dictionaries and catechisms in Huron, Algonquian, and Montagnais. In the course of her writings, she provides social and natural historical details often omitted by the Jesuits.

Ironically, it was the abandonment of her son, Claude Martin, that led to the preservation of many of her works for posterity. Once in New France, she wrote letters to her son, responding to his reproaches and urging him to follow in her footsteps by joining a religious order. When he did so, Marie not only fulfilled one of her dreams, but gained an official channel for the publication of her writings. Since the Middle Ages, most female saints and mystics had had their experiences validated through male confessors. This need for male authorization only increased with the Tridentine reforms, which more than ever before imposed clausura and silence on women. Through Claude, Marie received official recognition for her efforts and authorization of her mystical calling while at the same time deflecting the anger of her son. Bruneau sees Marie as an active agent in the process: "Marie de l'Incarnation accomplished this reversal by playing on, and twisting, two topoi that are characteristic of the female mystic autobiographical tradition: the abandonment of children for the love of God and the authorization to write based on a clerical injunction" (59).

Bruneau demonstrates that once she was "on her own" in New France, Marie's mysticism changed dramatically. She had not merely left her son in the Old World, but also the ecstasies and visions that had characterized the first part of her life; she eventually expressed contempt for such manifestations. Bruneau argues that "... because she had chosen a rhetoric of health and ordinary obedience in order to legitimate her call to the mission, she could no longer negotiate her sufferings against the authority that constrained her will nor assign a theological meaning to them as female mystics of previous centuries had done..." (50). At least in this particular case, the author is able to refute effectively the hypotheses of both Bynum and de Certeau.

Because of her connections to Bossuet and Fenelon, the case of Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Mothe-Guyon is much more well known. Mme. Guyon did not play the game so well. While Marie had managed to use clerical and familial conventions to her advantage, Mme. Guyon shunned both, calling down on her the wrath of both Church and family. "Guyon's apostolic desire fitted no existing, established institutions. She understood her mission as the teaching to everyone of the 'interior path'..." (142). Guyon's audacious defense of her freedom to write and preach the Quietist message brought her into conflict with a patriarchal church that saw only subversion. Moreover, her disciples were men - men who had been trained outside of the Catholic Church. Unlike Marie de l'Incarnation, Guyon continued to experience the bodily manifestations of the mystic throughout her life, attempting to use them to legitimize her authority. This may have worked well in the Middle Ages, but no longer. Guyon was portrayed by Bossuet as a dangerous madwoman, a laughingstock, and was imprisoned in the Bastille. Yet she was not easily silenced. In her Autobiography, published in 1720 and immediately translated into several languages, Guyon used the genre "as a place of uncovering and covering, a place to negotiate conventions, a place where one tries to give to oneself and to the reader an acceptable image of oneself' (219). Although she eventually offered her external obedience, Guyon's was a resistance made effective by faith in her beliefs.