Graceful Exits: Catholic Women and the Art of Departure

1 "I Leap over the Wall”

Picture to yourself, then, my excitement when, on withdrawing myself in horror from my surroundings and slamming the door of my interior citadel, I discovered therein, bubbling and seething like a witches’ cauldron in the depths of what I believe is to-day known as the subconscious mind, something which obviously just couldn’t wait another minute for its release. There was only one way of effecting this. I sat down, took up my pen and began to write. —Baldwin 1950, 279 With these words Monica Baldwin traced the origins of her memoir I Leap over the Wall, a book written throughout the 1940s in other peoples’ guest rooms and bungalows and in rented flats by a woman desperately in need of a room of her own. Baldwin’s memoir is about leaving“the cold, clean spaciousness” of the cloister which “breathed silence and consecration ” (Baldwin 1950, 35; unless otherwise specified, all subsequent [ 1 ] 1 “i leap over the wall” references in this chapter are to this source) and explores how that pure, uncluttered, unowned sacred space had inscribed itself on the author’s mind and heart and even the way she experienced her own female body during the twenty-eight years (1914–1941) that she had spent as a contemplative nun in England. It is a book about leavings in both senses of the word: about mustering the Courage to Leave, in this case the convent, and how certain aspects of the abandoned life in the cloister cling to a woman long after she leaves the convent precincts. Despite its suggestive title, I Leap over the Wall is not a sensationalist book, a lurid exposé of life behind convent walls. It is a candid personal narrative which describes the spiritual and emotional journey undertaken by a woman with the courage to confess, after almost three decades as a cloistered nun, that she had made the wrong decision. She was “a Square Peg in a Round Hole” (vi). Baldwin’s memoir depicts a middle-aged upper-class Englishwoman and her attempt to put together the jagged pieces of her identity: to reconcile her strong, and intellectually sophisticated, commitment to the Catholic religion with her intense desire for the personal space in which to discover at 50 years of age what it means to be “free to be yourself” (83). Undoubtedly, what captured most readers’ attention when Baldwin’s book first appeared was the author’s exotic past, or rather, the absence of a past life. Monica Baldwin was a latter-day female Rip Van Winkle. A reviewer in Time magazine called Baldwin “Thomas Merton in reverse . . . a nun who went back to the world” (January 30, 1950, 90). Readers in the early 1950s could appreciate the taboo-breaking qualities of Baldwin ’s memoir in ways that their counterparts a half-century later cannot. Baldwin’s book stood out as an anomaly. There were plenty of books and magazine articles describing why sophisticated modern men and women were turning to the Catholic church for spiritual sustenance, enough for some people to speak of a postwar Catholic revival. Baldwin’s memoir, accompanied by Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, provided evidence of a countervailing movement, Catholic women’s flight from the church and from the constraints of Catholic institutions such as convents or convent schools. The latter trend continued and escalated throughout the second half of the twentieth century , and, even more disturbing within the Catholic fold, some of the women went public, writing personal narratives to chronicle, and perhaps to justify, their departures. These departure narratives assumed a variety of forms and generated considerable controversy. Baldwin’s departure story belongs in the company of Antonia White’s Frost in May (1933), Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), Mary Gordon’s Final Payments (1978), and Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey’s No Turning g r a c e f u l e x i t s [ 2 ] Back (1990). Like these and other exodus stories, several of which automatically placed their authors on the late-night talk-show circuit, Baldwin’s memoir broke taboos by daring to speak in a public forum about Catholic women’s agency and mobility. Baldwin’s emphasis on the spiritual significance of Catholic women’s prerogative to change their minds, as well as their vocations and locations, led readers, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, to see Catholics in a new...