The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l'Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Tradition by Mary Dunn (review)

In this original interpretation of the life of Marie de l'Incarnation (1599–1672), historian Mary Dunn focuses on the controversial maternal sacrifice at the heart of her subject's vocation. Widowed in 1619, Marie abandoned her young son Claude (1619–96) to the care of distant relatives and entered the Ursuline convent in 1631. As a nun, she traveled to Quebec, where she established Canada's first convent school and initiated groundbreaking educational work with the native tribal women. Famous for her mystical writings, Marie maintained throughout her life a detailed correspondence with her embittered son, who in adulthood became a scholarly Benedictine monk. Pope Francis canonized Marie in 2014. Dunn examines an obvious problem: how could the abandonment of one's children—especially when no economic provision is made for their upbringing—seem so virtuous in the world of seventeenth-century Catholicism when it would appear so morally odious in our own? In exploring this enigma, Dunn draws widely from postmodern resources: Bourdieu's sociology, Kristeva's psychoanalysis, and the contemporary literature on maternal thinking. Her most daring move is to bring to bear her own autobiographical experience as the mother of a special needs child when investigating possible motives for Marie's decision to abandon her son. Given the subjectivity of this autobiographical perspective, Dunn's thesis concerning Marie's vocational choice may not be completely convincing, but it is not for lack of intellectual ambition or spiritual and emotional courage.

Dunn explores in detail the trauma caused by Marie's abandonment of her eleven-year old son to the care of her in-laws when she entered the Ursuline order in 1631. The pain of loss experienced by Claude is excruciating: he runs away from home, repeatedly begs his mother to return, and even organizes a riot with stone-throwing classmates when they invade the convent cloister and shout for the nuns to release his mother. Throughout her life, Marie would express sorrow at the abandonment. In her autobiographical Relation, she describes the emotional laceration initiated by her departure: "I saw tears fall from his [Claude's] eyes, which made me see what was happening in his soul. He made me feel such a great compassion that it seemed that my soul was being torn from me" (5). Throughout their correspondence, Marie and Claude, both apparently happy and distinguished in their respective monastic careers, will lament the emotional burden of their separation.

To clarify the mother's abandonment of her child, Dunn wisely avoids a psychological explanation that would tax Marie with emotional coldness or cruelty. Marie clearly loves her child and bitterly regrets the suffering and the impoverishment the rupture caused Claude. Dunn convincingly probes the theological justifications for this explicitly religious act of abandonment, pointing out that the biblical command of Jesus to "hate one's father and mother" for the sake of the Kingdom was routinely used to justify separation from one's family, even one's children, when professing the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. She suggestively argues that the seventeenth century's spirituality of abandonment, summed up in the école française's concept of anéantissement, also justified this excruciating act of abandonment. Like the abandonment of one's material goods through the vow of poverty, the abandonment of one's family for the sake of Christ represents a spiritual and emotional self-annihilation proper to the monastic life.

Less convincing is the argument Dunn bases on gender. In chapter three, devoted to the marginalization of motherhood in the Christian tradition, she argues that the religious exaltation of the abandonment of children by a mother entering the convent shows how little the Catholic faith, at least in its Tridentine form, valued maternal love and the instinct to bond with one's children. But such an interpretation faces...