Graceful Exits: Catholic Women and the Art of Departure

INTRODUCTION

I N T R O D U C T I O N : F L I G H T Flying is a woman’s gesture—flying in language and making it fly. We have all learned the art of flying and its numerous techniques; for centuries we’ve been able to possess anything only by flying; we’ve lived in flight, stealing away, finding, when desired, narrow passageways, hidden crossovers. . . . Women take after birds and robbers, just as robbers take after women and birds. They go by, fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down. . . . A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there’s no other way. There’s no room for her if she’s not a he. If she’s a her-she, it’s in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the “truth” with laughter. —Cixous 1976, 887–888 These words from Hélène Cixous’s groundbreaking essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” capture the radical and irreversible quality inherent in women’s writing. The act of writing from within her own experience takes a woman back to her roots and across boundaries. It may mean leaving behind the persons, places, and things that she has loved, suffered for, and always envisioned at the center of her life. When she depicts women as birds and robbers, Hélène Cixous, an Algerian Jewish writer, is not writing with Catholic women in mind. A whole range of interested parties, from devout Catholics to secular feminists, might argue that Catholic women are too orderly and obedient to fit Cixous’s description and that they represent the exception that proves the rule. In The Feminine Mystique, first published in 1963, Betty Friedan initially seems to present supporting evidence for this stereotypical portrait of Catholic women. Upon closer examination, however, we see in Friedan ’s almost isolated example drawn from Catholic women’s experience evidence that Catholic women’s reputation for obedience shrouds more complex realities. Friedan interviewed a Catholic woman who had resigned from the state board of the League of Women Voters under pressure from her husband, her priest, and the school psychologist, who insisted that her political activities outside of the home were having an adverse effect on her daughter. “It’s more difficult for a Catholic woman to stay emancipated,” she told Friedan. When Friedan caught her on the kitchen phone hatching new strategies for the local Democratic Party, the overtly obedient stay-athome Catholic mother admitted that she carried on a covert life of political activism by phone. She confessed that she “hid her political activity at home‘like an alcoholic or a drug addict, but [she didn’t] seem to be able to give it up’” (Friedan 1983, 352). Even within the obedience of this dutiful Catholic mother, we see a pattern of transgression and flight, carefully hidden like an addiction but pursued consciously as a survival strategy. It turns out that flight, known by many names (including escape, exodus , exile, diaspora, and crossing over), represents a central theme in the life-writings of twentieth-century Catholic women.We see images of flight not only in the works of famous renegades and resisters such as Mary McCarthy, Mary Daly, and the contributors anthologized in Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence, but also in the writings of Mary Gordon and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, who have taken great pains to remain within the Catholic fold, albeit on their own terms. Much as they need to negotiate and custom -tailor the institutions of marriage and vowed religious life to fit their own needs and special gifts, twentieth-century Catholic women need to negotiate and renegotiate their relationship to the Catholic church. Texts written by Catholic women bear witness to this often very intimate negotiation process which takes place whether or not the women choose to remain faithful practicing Catholics. Some feminists, like Cixous and Virginia Woolf before her, insist that women’s writing, the kind that truly and honestly comes from lives lived in women’s bodies, always represents an exodus from the structures and conventions established by the men who make the rules governing language and...