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

Marie de l'Incarnation is best known for her work as co-founder of the Ursuline convent in seventeenth-century Quebec. Mary Dunn nevertheless limits herself to explaining how this "cruelest of all mothers," to use Marie's own epithet, could abandon an eleven-year-old son, Claude Martin, to become a nun in 1631. Approaching the question from a variety of emic and etic perspectives, Dunn interlaces objective analyses with highly personal reflections about her own struggles as the mother of a child with developmental disabilities. The result is a thought-provoking post-modern hagiography that aims to diminish, if not completely erase, the historical and epistemological distance initially separating Dunn from her subject.

Dunn's central thesis is that the "the Christian tradition … gave rise to [Marie's abandonment of her son]" (p. 10). She begins by "explicating" the abandonment in Marie's own words, analyzing how she attempted through private correspondence and spiritual autobiography to reconcile her discordant roles as mother and mystic by casting her action as a personal sacrifice in imitation of Christ and in submission God's will—a sacrifice ironically premised on Marie's own maternal affection. Reconstructing a broader historical context in chapter 2, Dunn moves on to "explain" how the abandonment might also be interpreted as "an act of resistance against the norms of seventeenth-century French family life" to the extent that Marie's supposed decision to leave Claude with no material support transgressed an "absolute and essential obligation" of early modern French parents "to protect the patrimony of their children" (p. 49). Dunn shifts her methodology in chapters 3 and 4, drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu to "[situate] Marie within the distinctive social field of seventeenth-century French Catholicism" (p. 12). Revealing the denigration of biological motherhood by ancient and medieval patristic authors, Dunn argues that this traditional disparagement was inflected in seventeenth-century France not only by a long-standing hagiographic topos of maternal renunciation, but also a persistent theme of "abandonment" in the spiritual writings of the French Catholic Reform. Dunn concludes that had Marie been born in a different time and place, she might have inscribed motherhood itself, rather than its renunciation, as a form of spiritual self-sacrifice.

Conventional scholars may grumble that Dunn's book is thin on evidence. A visit to French judicial and notarial archives might have allowed her to reconstruct more fully the social, legal, and material constraints within which Marie operated as she negotiated in practice the gendered nature of French customary laws on widowhood and guardianship (tutelle). Given that Marie entered the Ursulines without a dowry, one is left wondering whether she really could have offered Claude more material support than she did, as she herself (perhaps only rhetorically) alleged. Other scholars will conclude that Dunn's book nevertheless establishes the diminished place of biological motherhood in seventeenth-century French Catholic spirituality. Here, too, greater nuance may be warranted. One conspicuous omission from the book is Vincent de Paul, co-founder of the Parisian foundling hospice, whose Daughters of Charity arguably did pursue at this time a spirituality of self-sacrifice through their engagement in the material and menial tasks of motherhood.

Dunn's book is most successful as a personal memoire of general interest to all scholars. The intimate autobiographical stories that she weaves into her account may offer only limited insight into the distinctive features of seventeenth-century motherhood, but they do reveal how twenty-first century mothers still struggle to balance spiritual or intellectual callings against obligations toward—and affection for—their families. Demonstrating how common concerns can connect people across several centuries, Dunn's book exemplifies how scholarship, like religion, can achieve a communion of understanding, if not necessarily agreement.