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

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 1999 by Larissa Juliet Taylor

Like Marie de l'Incarnation, Madre Castillo is little known outside of her native Colombia, eclipsed by the more famous American writer Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. The author of numerous works, including an autobiography, Madre Castillo is described by McKnight as "both a product of the ideologies and practices of her time and an agent who interprets herself within and against them" (3). McKnight breaks the book into three parts: a theoretical framework, contexts for religious women's writings in Spain and Spanish America, and a discussion of the texts themselves. In many ways, part one is the most interesting. Using feminist literary criticism, McKnight suggests that Madre Castillo expressed an agency of resistance and creativity in her writings brought about in part by the Catholic Reformation's ideology of self-representation. Some parallels with Marie de l'Incarnation immediately come to mind when McKnight suggests that "Madre Castillo could write herself into an orthodox representation and at the same time open a space for her creativity and power within official male territory" (27). The author argues that it was the genre of the spiritual vita itself that permitted the development of a subjectivity that challenged the Church, although doing so successfully required walking a tightrope.

Weaving in and out of "degradation and elevation," Madre Castillo's autobiography details her troubles with her nuns and servants as well as her spiritual and physical tribulations. Although she employs the humility topos, her writing is often self-congratulatory in that she recognizes the meanings of her visions and experiences. It was the act of writing itself that was transformative. Although Madre Castillo often derogates women with her language, she also allows strong female characters to emerge from the pages, in the process narrowing the gap between authority and woman. As with so many of her predecessors, Madre Castillo suffers, but her suffering comes from her fellow creatures, whereas her mystical engagement with God is above that, allowing her to bear the slings and arrows. In fact, McKnight argues that Madre Castillo found her authority in the great female mystics who had come before her. Often, like them, her message is amenable to patriarchal ideology, yet McKnight concludes: "The patriarchy of her discourse also has its chinks.... These holes in the containment field allow her to find satisfaction - comfort she calls it - in a feminized intellectual encounter with a dangerous text and to speak about its relevance to her experience, if in a voice that is not entirely free. She writes in her papeles a message of submission, and yet she lives in those papers an experience of subtle subversion" (221).

Both Bruneau and McKnight, using feminist theory, have thrown new light onto texts and authors who have been neglected. They have shown how the frontiers of the "New World" offered possibilities, however briefly, to women. They have also shown how these women both internalized and interrogated the paradigms of the past. In the process, the authors challenge many of the theories about mysticism and women's devotion that recent scholarship has produced. Not everyone will agree with these interpretations, but they will do what all good scholarship does - make its readers think.