Christianity and Literature

Vol. 54, No.2 (Winter 2005)

Mary and Modesty

Elizabeth Morgan

"... one must travel the road of metaphor, of icon, to come back to that
figure who, throughout a corrupt history, has moved the hearts of men
and women, has triumphed over the hatred of women and the fear of
her, and abides shining, worthy of our love, compelling it:'
- Mary Gordon, "Coming to Terms with Mary"

The Islamic East and the Christian West are in a bind: They don't seem
to be able to escape caricaturing each other, particularly when it comes to
issues of morality and women's visibility. We in the West think that Muslims
are barbarians for covering their women and keeping them cloistered in
the home, ignoring, of course, the common Christian, Jewish and Muslim
traditions of veiling that grew out of a shared cultural context in the Middle
East. Iranian feminist, Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran,
articulates her suspicion that veiling in Muslim countries has far more to
do with control and uniformity than it does with spiritual beliefs. We in the
West push her observation to the extreme and ridicule the Iranian mullahs'
reduction of women to indistinguishable, robotic objects. We claim that
liberation of Afghani women from the hated burka is one of the reasons for
the post 9/11 attack on the Taliban, and cheer modernizing efforts on the
part of the Turkish government to keep veiled women out of public places,
even as the rights of women in Turkey to elect this act of piety are ignored.
We seem convinced that veiling is "evidence for the backwardness of Islam
and the oppression of women" (Delaney 53), even as our ad agencies and
erotic magazines use demeaning images of veiled women to sell everything
from vegetable soup to exotic sex (Shirazi 20, 39-61). Meanwhile, Middle
Easterners have coined the word "westoxication" to express all that they fear
and abhor about profligate Western culture-naked women on the streets,
rampant individualism, entertainment on the lines of "Bay Watch:' What
barbarians these Westerners must be!

209
210 ELIZABETH MORGAN

Are both right? Are both wrong? Or is the question more complicated
than a predictable "clash of civilizations"? Are both East and West buying
into an all-too-easy polarization as a way of avoiding the much more
troubling realization that, in spite of different outcomes, they are wrestling
with the same demons-the, at times, overwhelming power of sexuality and
reactionary (fundamentalist) worship of purity? More particularly, given
the age old locus of sexual power in women (Eve, Venus, Isis, Medusa) and
the perceived need for male control of sexual desire, especially male desire
projected onto women's bodies, is the larger conflict really over demonizing
and possessing womens sensuality? If that is true, and history suggests that
it is, 1 it seems that we in the West need to do two things in order to be
more significantly aware of ourselves and, therefore, better global citizens:
examine the seeming contradictions in our own cultural history, and open
up to cross-cultural dialogue that looks both East and West for clues. This
essay focuses on the former, while hoping for the latter.
And so we turn to a woman who, perhaps, more than any other figure in
art, literature and popular culture has come to embody the Western struggle
with modesty and sensuality, and who may have the most to teach us about
ourselves: Mary, the Mother of Jesus. As "Virgin" Mary, she communicates
both the security of inviolability and the infinite passion of expectations.
As Madonna, she suggests the creative potential of flesh as well as the gift
of unconditional love. As artistic image and literary metaphor, she has
become the articulation of human need for beauty, blessing and boundary.
And as popular icon, she embodies a dissemination and reduction of
great mystery. Historian [aroslav Pelikan refers to her as "our Lady of the
Paradoxes;' including sexual paradoxes--inviolate bride, virgin mother-
and thus he concludes that she "has been the subject of more thought and
discussion about what it means to be a woman than any other woman in
Western history" (219). Well might we look to such a figure to discover
how we in the West have come both to exalt and to fear the potent force of
female sexuality/procreativity, as well as to understand our need, shared
with other cultures, to cover this power with the mantle of respectability.
Not to be overlooked is that Mary, claimed by the West, comes out of the
same Mediterranean context as many Islamic cultural practices, and, indeed,
is exalted in the Qur'an, Thus the paradoxes she embodies might well be
trusted conduits to a larger understanding of cultural sexual dynamics.
We will first look at the pervasive and complex nature of Mary symbolism,
including the gyrations of theological thought that ensued as early and late
church fathers attempted to deal with her suggestive power, then move
 MARY AND MODESTY 211

to Mary as center of the ascetic movement, and end with a consideration

of Mary in Western visual art and, more recently, in what may be called
Mary-haunted fiction. The latter is of particular interest in that, the novel
being a female-friendly genre, it is one place where women have been direct
articulators of the Marian legacy.

Mary as Symbol

If one looks, one sees Marys everywhere--in Catholic, Protestant and

secular contexts. Pelikan asserts that she has inspired more people than any
other woman in history and that this holds true for contemporary times no
lessthan for the "so-called ages of faith" (2). As Catholic sociologist Andrew
Greeley reminds us in his book The Mary Myth, "Virtually every major
painter from the fifth to the sixteenth century painted at least one Madonna"
(10). Looking in art history books, one realizes that she is sometimes
completely veiled, sometimes crowned, occasionally capped, sometimes
blond, sometimes dark of skin and hair, occasionally Asian or African in
feature. She is portrayed reading, nursing, meditating, grieving, covering
penitents with her protective cloak, and flying into heaven. In In Search
of Mary, Sally Cunneen muses that her roles are so complex-i-virgin and
mother, model of purity and refuge for sinners, God-bearer and cloistered
nun, the Queen of Heaven and mother of all-that it is remarkable that they
exist in one person. That, of course, is what makes her so interesting for this
study-she symbolizes characteristics that are either mutually exclusive or
a logical stretch. And, as such, she reveals the paradoxes and limits of our
own fearful desires. As Cunneen asserts, "Mary is far more complex than
either those who pray to her or those who think of her as outdated might
suspect" (xvi).
By way of cataloguing her attributes, Greeley acknowledges that, in the
largest sense, Mary reflects what many female deities through time have
reflected-that the divine is feminine as well as masculine. But even more
pertinent than that, Mary, being the God-bearer, embodies the importance
of sexual differentiation, that which signifies both our identity limitations
and the range of possibilities to which humans are heir. So while she
represents the best of universal human experience-passion, obedience,
grief, faith-she experiences it as both virgin and mother, distinctly female
roles. Greeley then expands those roles to include Madonna, Virgo (virgin),
Sponsa (spouse/lover), and Pieta (Our Lady of Sorrows). Comparing Mary
with her son in terms of gender roles, Pelikan notes that "she has provided
212 ELIZABETH MORGAN

the content of the definition of the feminine in a way that he has not done
for the masculine" (1). Thus it is understandable that she should stand at
the center of Western attempts to possess and control generative power.
The attempts of theologians to deal with the many meanings of Mary
for church and society are both hampered and freed by the lack of biblical
and historical data to draw on. The most expansive account of her life is
apocryphal, the "Infancy Gospel of James;' sometimes referred to as the
"Protevangelium," dating to the end of the second century when widespread
recognition of the divinity of Jesus had elevated Mary to the status of God-
bearer (Theotokos) and emphasized the importance of her initial and
continued purity. In this short text we learn of her miraculous birth to
a barren couple, therefore of Anna's awareness that she has a very special
child and ought to protect this gift from God by keeping her in enclosed
sacred space as a baby and by allowing her to live in the temple from the
age of three. It tells of the priests' intention--as she approaches menses and
threatens to pollute the temple--to give her over to the widower Joseph who
is to protect her but not sleep with her, of the ensuing scandal when she
becomes pregnant, of the testing of Joseph and Mary to prove their sexual
innocence, and finally of the birth of Jesus that leaves Mary miraculously
still a virgin. The emphasis here and enduringly on her extraordinary purity
tells us, among other things, that chastity is most assuredly a Christian virtue
(not at all limited to fundamentalist Muslims and Puritans). So how does
she get to be "Our Lady" of troubadour poetry, mother of us all, and the
darling of painters with their love of rich decor and sensual color?
In the introduction to her book Mary: A History of Doctrine and
Devotion, Hilda Graef speaks to the necessarily veiled nature of all spiritual
truth, even more so of a religious figure about whom few historical facts
are known: "In the Old Testament the light of the final Christian revelation
was perceived only through veils more or less opaque. As this applies to
the figure of the Messiah himself, it is only to be expected that his mother
should remain even more hidden" (Mary, Part 1,3).2 By nature a mystery,
Mary comes to embody mystery for all those who have embroidered her
story out of the needs of their own hearts.' But this has not kept theologians
from trying to make rational sense of it all.
Ambrose, the fourth century church father, deals with the paradoxes of
the flesh, Jesus being both free from sin and born of a human mother, by
explaining: "For the Virgin had something of her own which she transmitted;
the mother did not give [him] something foreign [to her], but she conferred
on him her own from her own flesh, indeed in an unusual way, but by a
 MARY AND MODESTY 213

normal function. For the Virgin had flesh, which she conferred on the
fruit" (quoted in Graef 78). Indeed, matters of the flesh-its goodness, its
weakness-have perplexed us through the ages. Jerome, also fourth century,
tried to avoid the need to explain such things by rejecting the apocryphal
accounts altogether, which did not, however, keep those accounts from being
embraced in both Eastern and Western churches (90). Earlier, Tertullian,
second century church father, tying himself in logical knots to prove that
virgins are first and foremost "women;' and therefore, along with married
women, ought to be covered during worship lest their natural alliance with
the temptress Eve bring shame and temptation into the church, could not
allow Mary to have an elevated status in his theology, claiming that the
blessedness of her womb, necessary for Jesus to be born pure, passed from
her to the disciples, rendering her thenceforth a distinctly marginal figure
(Cunneen 68). His misogynist view, obviously, did not prevail.
Bythe Middle Ages, according to the writings of Anselm, "Mary appears
not only as the Mother of God, but also as the beloved, beautiful Lady of
her spiritual knight who places himself under her protection, because 'it
is incredible that you should not have mercy on the miserable men who
implore you'" (Graef215). The Salve Regina expresses this medieval longing
for mediation and protection by the Queen of Heaven, the Mother of Mercy,
whose sweetness is as important as her power. In the late twelfth century,
a popular German rendition of the life of Mary, based on a Latin model,
strains theology by stressing the "courtly love" element of her position:
When the Bishop asks her to choose a suitor, she is upset because her love is
all for God, the most noble and beautiful knight of them all (262).
And so the paradoxes of Mary's allure and purity multiply. Luther, in
spite of his desire to separate from the superfluous elements of the Catholic
Church, retains much of the teaching about Mary, including her perfect
virginity. Bythe 17th century, a Dominican Father named Vincent Contenson
skirts heresy by making love for Mary necessary for salvation: "'He is hardly
to be considered a Christian and certainly not a Catholic, who is not a
Marian (Marianus) in his heart" (quoted in Graef, Mary, Part 2, 45). In
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a series of miraculous appearances
of the Holy Mother-at Lourdes, at Fatima-push the credibility of Mary's
veneration to the limit, but all the clergy's attempts to quell the tide of
"charismatic" visitations have not kept those appearances from inspiring the
popular imagination. Suffice it to say that Mary fulfills a need for mystery
and mediation and even romance among her worshippers. But more than
that, as cultural icon, she appears to hold in tension the human desire for
214 ELIZABETH MORGAN

intimacy of all kinds and the need for secure limits on desire. Nowhere
is this tension more clearly felt than in the early, and continuing, celibacy
movement, which evolved in response to both religious and social need.

Mary as Center of Celibacy Movements

The Christian modesty and celibacy movements seem to begin with

Paul's admonitions to women to be covered and circumspect during
worship and with his suggestion that all persons should consider celibacy
to be at least as significant as procreative marriage in the sight of God.
Apologists for these movements quickly fixed on Mary as "model of the
life of virginity and self-denial" (Pelikan 116). Yet, feminist theologian
Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza sees pervasive paradoxes in early Christian
practices of modesty and veiling. In that the promise of equality "in Christ"
attracted many women and slaves to the first century church, middle-
class Roman men, interested in off-setting the accumulation of power by
propertied women through containing their wives within the private sphere
(89), were inclined to remain at an anxious distance. Thus, "the conversion
of women, slaves, and young people who belonged to the household of an
unconverted paterfamilias. . . constituted a potential political offense" (263).
Understandably, then, Paul's request that women veil in church, with cloth
head coverings or with confined hair, especially during ecstatic worship, was
an insistence on modesty codes that would have been commensurate with
the culture at large and likely to ameliorate the suspicions of landowners,"
In an essay entitled "Veils, Virgins and the Tongues of Men and Angels;'
Mary Rose D'Angelo reinforces this reading of Paul's first letter to the
Corinthians by acknowledging that the apostle appears to be "sexualizing"
the heads of women prophets, even as he accepts women's prophetic role
in the church (137-8). In D'Angelo's words, he is seeking "to protect the
practices he has approved" (139). Already we find tension between free
expression and the demands of modesty for Christian women, reflecting, as
well, the tension between patriarchal control and a transforming gospel.
Mary as a Jewish woman (at the very least betrothed and a mother)
would have worn a veil in public.' which has been a significant factor in
the development of the Christian veil custom and, since she was often seen
as the first consecrated Christian virgin, in the development of the nun's
habit, although she is rarely depicted in black but rather in the color of
purity, blue." In the early church, the veil was the article of clothing used
by consecrated virgins to distinguish themselves from secular society and
 MARY AND MODESTY 215

to mark that, unlike other virgins, they were not available. Their cutting of
their hair, both chosen and expected, was a sacrifice to God, signifying their
pledge of chastity.
Emphasizing that freedom and restraint were both part of the ascetic
movement, Peter Brown asserts that what turned the tide in the promotion
of celibacy for Christian women in the early church were treatises that
conceded the burden of marriage on women's bodies: "on their danger in
childbirth, on the pain in their breasts during suckling, on their exposure
to children's infections, on the terrible shame of infertility" (25). And since
control of the body was perceived by Paul and others to be the locus of
social order, the idea that celibacy trumped married life as a spiritual state
continued to prevail in elements of Catholic theology and practice. So,
while consecrated virgins and widows seeking to avoid second marriages
took strict vows of obedience, they also escaped some forms of cultural
oppression. In addition, they entered the world of literacy, not freely
possessed by women at the time of the early church, and a conduit to power
in any age (Warner 72).
Virgins living in community were thought to be reenacting the life of
Mary who, according to legend, lived in enclosed sacred space for much of
her early life. When they "married" Jesus, their heads were shaved, throwing
offthe natural veil oflong hair, but, unlike conservative Jewish women who
did likewise at marriage, their loss of hair relieved them from the normal
married woman's subjection (Brown 288). From the second century on,
church fathers preached homilies praising the ascetic life and extolling
chastity based on the life and example of Mary (Warner 68). Ambrose
comes on the scene at a time when the church was encouraging emperors
and governors to allow wealthy widows and virgins to maintain their vows to
the church, rather than marrying. With his view of virginity as the inviolate
state that kept one pure from alien intrusion, he felt it essential that Mary
be declared virgin for life and that nuns take vows for life: 'To follow Mary
[... J was to adopt a state of perpetual, irrevocable virginity" (Brown 356).
This strengthened the church's coffers, as well as Mary's role as the model for
cloistered life, closed in body but open to the spirit.
According to Margaret Miles's Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness
and Religious Meaning in the Christian West, all of this was rather tricky,
as sexual politics always are. Women ascetics, by cutting their hair and
turning their backs on procreation, as did the perpetual Virgin, could in
some ways become like males, but that made them equal to men. These
women were perceived to have religious subjectivity, but this threatened
216 ELIZABETH MORGAN

the notion of "woman" by which men could control women.' As for the
women themselves, although "becoming male" may not have originally
been a female construction of the ideal life, it saved them from the burdens
of patriarchal marriage. But woe to the consecrated virgin who fell into sex
- she was seen as a public whore (69). That women were sometimes baptized
naked in the early church, with unloosened hair, usually a sign of sexual
availability (including prostitution), or penitence, is itself a complicating
factor (48). Veiling or binding the hair signified modesty, loss of virginity,
or subordination to father, husband, bishop, which would certainly be
a prerequisite for baptism; yet during the act of baptism all women, like
Mary, were rendered pure, both abstaining from sexual behavior and doing
penance for the sin of Eve (51). That the unveiled, as well as the veiled self
should simultaneously symbolize sexuality and purity is not surprising; we
are all "plural" when it comes to thinking about the body and its iconic
powers.
Paradoxes continue in the establishment of "proper" dress for
consecrated virgins though the ages. In her recent book The Habit: A History
of the Clothing of Catholic Nuns, Elizabeth Kuhns reveals that although the
veil is designed to signify a giving up of vanity, the fear of losing recruits
impelled some orders to design their habits with a pleasing appearance in
mind-adding a white lining to the veil, for instance, to avoid severe black.
After Vatican II, when nuns were allowed to give up their severe robes and
veils, several fashion designers were approached to help them select a new
look (145).8 Nonetheless some nuns suffered terrible body image anxiety
without their robes, and the tight Wimples left them with patchy baldness.
Their unveiling disoriented them in ways that did not seem at all freeing
(148).9 The medieval mystic, Hildegard of Bingen, however, provides a
lovely alternative view of ascetic dress. Her nuns were veiled in brilliant
red and purple garments-luxurious long white veils on feast days-the
idea being that Christ should be presented with as much beauty as possible
(82)!
This colorful exuberance inevitably suggests the aesthetic excesses
of painters' imaginings of the Virgin Mary over the centuries. Often but
not always veiled, sometimes with diaphanous coverings that allowed the
artists to lovingly render hair while maintaining the modest ideal, Mary is
always a rich subject, painted with the richest pigments, and often swathed
in deep, promising, folds of ornate fabrics. She is never one thing, always
plural, always suggestive. Like Hildegard of Bingen's sisters, images of Mary
indicate that modesty can be far from monolithic and drab. In fact, for all
 MARY AND MODESTY 217

of the postures of submission that Mary assumes in art, for all of the drapery
with which her body is respectfully covered, it is hard to find a rendering
that is in any way drab; and far from remaining in the private sphere, she,
as visual symbol and icon, is displayed and paraded in every public space
possible, reigning over cathedrals, monasteries, palaces, street fairs, and
places of learning. Currently, her image, often a mass produced one, can be
found in gardens, front windows, and on the dash boards of family cars. For
us, surrounded by these images in churches, museums, and popular media,
Mary remains Our Lady of the Paradoxes, bringing our own sensuality and
thinly disguised Puritanism into complex play.

Mary in Visual Art

One of the chiefways Mary has affected the popular imagination over the
ages has been through artistic renderings-renderings that have captured
and kept alive many of the paradoxes that surround her place in ecclesial
and cultural history. I 0 Through them, one finds played out the discrepancy
between the few "facts" one can learn about this humble Jewish maiden
in scriptural canon and the rights and privileges that have accrued to her
over the ages in her role as God-bearer, including a miraculous birth (the
immaculate conception), escape from death (the assumption into heaven),
and royal status (Queen of Heaven). As Pelikan points out, in the case of
Mary, as with other Christian subject matters, "art often anticipated the
development of dogma, which eventually caught up with the iconography"
(194). One might also posit that iconography, the codes by which Mary
and other saints were to be depicted, had, in turn, to catch up with popular
imaginings and desires, and to accommodate the tension between Mary's
historical context and that of the artists, chiefly male, rendering her. II Many
books have been written about Mary as visual icon. Many books have been
written about male artists' ways of seeing, and objectifying, female subjects.
Having little space to cover a vast territory here, we will look only at
representative images, in hopes that the subject will carry its own intrigue.
The Annunciation is one of the most popular events in Mary's life as
depicted in art. Most often one finds Mary in a pose of modest submission:
lowered eyes, hands crossed over her bosom, sometimes veiled (not
technically required of a Jewish virgin but reflecting her later role as mother
and model for cloistered virgins), and often indoors or in an enclosed
garden, seeming in reference to the ironically ever-virgin bride-to-be in
Song of Songs ('1\ garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up,
218 ELIZABETH MORGAN

a fountain sealed" [4:12, quoted in Pelilkan 29]). It is also interesting to

note that she is almost always startled or recoiling from her angelic visitor
as if she is not accustomed to strangers, particularly strange men-and this
intruder is strange!
One of the most intriguing renditions is the ''Annunciation to Mary"
center panel of a triptych painted by Rogier van der Weyden in the first
half of the fifteen century. Here Mary is quite circumspect. Her gesture of
repudiation is no more than a raised hand, her hair tidy but unveiled and
her robe solid black except for a thin white band at the neck. She appears to
be reading a holy text in her bedroom. But what a bedroom it is: crimson
bedclothes, brass chandelier, ornate carpet, fine wood furniture and paneling.
The angel is richly clad in a generous white robe and brocade cloak, both of
which, along with his multicolored wings, allow the artist an extravagance
that is totally eye-catching. And yet, in the way the light comes through
the side window, the first thing the viewer's eye falls on is the illuminated
face of Mary. She is an eminently modest maiden in a richly appointed
upper middle class Dutch home, with period angel, who nonetheless steals
the show from her quiet place in the corner. Like so many renderings of
Mary, she seems totally at home in the world and yet not really of the place,
the very essence of self-effacing modesty but not unfamiliar with earthly
extravagance and theatrical power.
Portraits of Mary as Madonna rival the popularity of the Annunciation
in Byzantine and Western art. Sometimes Mary and Jesus are enthroned
and surrounded by angels, sometimes they are alone together out in nature,
sometimes in the company of cousin John and other saints, and often in
the prescribed poses of Eastern Orthodox icons. One pair of images that
expresses the range of these renderings is "Madonna col Bambino" by
Perugino (late fifteenth century) and "Madonna of the Straw" by Antony
Van Dyck (early seventeenth century). In the first Mary is completely
clothed, although only thinly veiled. Her hair is caught up in neat braids
with a gossamer headscarf barely covering them and blending in with the
mere suggestion of a halo or nimbus. Her face is impervious, placid--she
is not a woman prone to the ravages of passion-and she looks straight out
of the portrait. Yet the fingers with which she touches the baby's hip and
leg are gracefully tender and her head tilts instinctively in his direction.
She is out in nature, no throne, but her dress is a glossy red fabric and her
cloak gathers generously around her lower body. She is a young, serious
Madonna, painstakingly rendered, with a modest but complex coif yet
wearing silken garments that beg to be touched. In contrast, Van Dyck's
 MARY AND MODESTY 219

portrait is blunt, clearly the mother and child shortly after birth. There is a
straw bed to the left of Mary's substantial body; her upper garment is open
to allow for nursing. Her head is completely covered by a rough brown
cloth and her gaze is only for the infant. This Mary is all flesh; she has
just done what most religious authorities consider the most noble thing a
woman can do with her body, unless she has consecrated it to God. (This
Mary, of course, will turn out to have done both.) She is in that moment
after childbirth when the outside world ceases to exist for the mother and
begins to exist for the child, the mother's body being both subject and object
of that transition. In the first portrait the viewer feels addressed; in the
latter, an eavesdropper. Both portray Mary as the intersection of private
and public acts, of restrained spirit and lush embodiment, including the
"flesh" of painter's pigment. While this figure is clearly meant to be seen and
admired (for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways), she cannot, like
other women, be possessed by the viewer, and so escapes the sexualizing
gaze even as her procreative role is visually celebrated. No wonder women
as well as men respond to the enigma of her allure!
In this vein, another fascinating visual pairing is that of Mary the
Mother of Jesus with Mary Magdalene, the attractive sinner turned saint
who, in the popular imagination, did forbidden and suspect things before
she anointed Jesus' feet and saved the apostles from defection by preaching
the good news of the resurrection to them. Hilda Graef points out that,
breaking with iconic distraction, "Renaissance artists depicted the Mother
of God as a beautiful woman of their time, sensuous and entirely of this
world" (Part 2, 2). Thus, imagining her in relationship with Magdalene
in this period would not be far-fetched, although the women are often
presented quite differently. While Mary's hair is tidy and lightly or totally
veiled (if uncovered, the hair often hangs like a veil), Magdalene's hair
is often wild-loose, long, curly, often red and, in particularly explicit
portraits, wrapped around her naked torso with only her breasts showing
through. 12 When they appear together at the foot of the cross, Mary, the
Mother of Jesus, is usually fully veiled and either standing erect or leaning
into the arms of the beloved disciple, while Mary Magdalene, depicted in
total anguish, frequently clutches the foot of the cross, her hair untamed
and falling luxuriantly around her shoulders. Warner comments that these
two figures "form a diptych of Christian patriarchy's idea of woman" (235).
One might also say that artists' renditions conflate that diptych, dramatizing
in extremis the central paradox of Mary the Mother of Jesus-one who
provides the necessary flesh of the incarnation while remaining ever-pure.
220 ELIZABETH MORGAN

For if Renaissance portraits of the Virgin Mary celebrate the sensate appeal
of her beauty and earthly perfection (purity in the flesh), many portraits of
Mary of Magdala exhibit blatant and rebellious sensuality, tamed through
penitence and piety (the flesh purified). In either case, the female subject
both attracts desire and escapes objectification.
Two portraits that exemplify this dance of difference are Sandro
Botticelli's "Virgin of the Sea" (late fifteenth century) and Tiziano Veccellios
"Mary Magdalene" (sixteenth century). Like many Renaissance artists,
Botticelli claims Mary, the Mother of Iesus as "earthly perfection" by giving
her full blond hair, thinly veiled with a gossamer scarf and a translucent
halo. Furthermore, her face is that of Venus in his famous "Birth of Venus"
painting. Mythologically, Venus, like Mary, is a matrix for the intersection
of modesty and sensuality and, in Botticellis work, has the tender face and
flowing, but tidy, tresses ofa celestial being. 13 Mary's face is soft and dreamy;
she looks away from the child, not so much musing on his and her future
grief as wondering what it would be like to travel the seas pictured outside
her window. Her clothing is rich and ornate; she might be able to travel if
she wished. But, no, she is obedient to her spiritual and maternal calling,
holding the child with gentleness and gazing away from the window. A not
unwilling resignation seems to be her lot. In the Titian portrait, Magdalene
looks toward the heavens with sheer undivided devotion. Her curly,
ungroomed hair is clutched around her like a protective garment, a robe of
sorts, but the painter has allowed her breasts to show through as a reminder
of the constant presence and seduction of the flesh, as well, of course, as his
ability to paint them admirably and desirably.
In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi talks openly about the
obsession with women's hair that prevails in fundamentalist Islamic realms,
joking that a single strand of hair showing from beneath a scarf can have
subversive power. As if to give a visual dimension to the sensual power of
loose hair, she describes one of her students' taking off her black mandatory
scarf once inside the house: "She shook her magnificent hair from side
to side, a gesture that I later noticed was a habit with her; she would toss
her head and run her fingers through her hair every once in a while, as if
making sure that her most prized possession was still there" (16). The more
flamboyant images of Mary Magdalene, such as Titian's, celebrate this same
magnificence, and one suspects that it is the complex power of "forbidden"
sexuality, symbolized by unbound hair, that perpetuates her role in art and
in the popular imagination, even as she is celebrated as saint. (Is there any
proof that she was originally a prostitute? Is she really the woman who
 MARY AND MODESTY 221

dried Jesus' feet with her loosened hair?) 14

In Botticelli's portrait of Mary, the Mother of Iesus, we have an obedient,
fully clad and modest Mary, richly adorned and in the exact likeness of his
Venus (a fact which troubled him greatly in later life but which seems an
honest rendering of the crossroads Mary represented to the Renaissance
audiencel.'f in Titian's portrait of Mary Magdalene, we have a naked, wild-
haired woman in a state of spiritual abstraction. Both are holy, both are
fully human-together they speak to us of the universal struggle between
the desires of the flesh and the need to transcend those desires, translated
through the same delight in and fear of women's bodies that we wrestle with
today.
One final depiction of Mary to ponder before leaving this section is the
one, starting in Byzantium, that portrays her as Mother Church, protecting
her people, all classes of people, under a large spread-wide cloak that, in
many cases, if left to fall straight, would be none other than the Iranian
chador. In addressing the double meaning of the chador, before and after
the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Azar Nafisi says: "All through my childhood
and early youth, my grandmother's chador had a special meaning to me. It
was a shelter, a world apart from the rest of the world. I remember the way
she wrapped her chador around her body and the way she walked around
her yard when the pomegranates were in bloom. Now the chador was
forever marred by the political significance it had gained. It had become
cold and menacing" (192). In images of Mary spreading wide her cloak, the
menacing aspects of the heavy mantle are held at bay by the richness of the
dress underneath and by the sanctuary that it provides for penitents of all
types. Sally Cunneen describes these images: "She spread[s] her cloak over
kings, nobles, monks, nuns and ordinary men and women alike, suggesting
that the mercy of God shelter[s] the whole human community" (189).
Two particularly arresting images in this category are the "Madonna della
Misericordia" from a triptych in the Venetian church of Maria Formosa (late
fifteenth century) and Friedrich Schramm's polychrome woodcarving of the
"Madonna with the Protecting Cloak" (also late fifteenth century). In the
first, Mary's dress is bright red, in the latter gold. Both dresses are full and
richly draped, suggesting worldly fashion sense, if not on the Virgin's part,
on the part of the artists, and clearly portraying Mary as worthy of being an
allegory of the church. In these renderings one experiences the "protective
force emanating from the Virgin's cloak:' not unlike the protective power
signified by Nafisi's grandmother's pre-Revolutionary chador, and the sheer
beauty of what her open pose promises to the lost and penitent. 16
222 ELIZABETH MORGAN

So what do we get when we look at images of Mary in art? A modest

maid? A gentle mother? A Venus look-alike? A veiled nun? A well-dressed,
well-coiffed matron? A sister to Magdalene? A protector of the poor and
guilty? All of the above, and often at the same time. Because of the aesthetic
range she invites, Mary speaks to us from her time and in our time, with
many stages in between, of the complex nature of our embodied selves-of
our desires to love and respect ourselves, becoming neither lurid objects
nor objectifiers.
Poets as well as painters have shown us this Lady of the Paradoxes.
Troubadours in the Middle Ages told anguished stories of young men,
struggling between their pure love for Mary and their lust for earthly women.
Reflecting the Jesuits' effort to eclipse pagan celebrations of the Queen of
the May with spring pageants of the Virgin Mary, Gerard Manley Hopkins,
in "May Magnificat;' "captured all the bursting joy of spring and its promise
of fruitfulness in lines so rich and beautiful they stand for all that is best and
happiest in the cult of the Virgin" (Warner 28I). Likewise, Goethe's Faust,
while damned by his lust for Gretchen, is saved by the intercession of The
Eternal Feminine: Mary, who subsumes all other women. Such mysteries
are to be expected in romantic poetry.
But are the paradoxes of how Mary has been perceived and represented
in the human imagination also at play in popular fiction? Since it is hard
to build an extended plot around a virgin saint, we turn to what might
be called Mary-haunted fiction, fiction where Mary appears as an alluring
minor character or where her metaphoric "afterglow;' including the age-
old tension between sensuality and purity, colors the action. We will move
from implicit to explicit evocations of Mary's legacy, beginning with Tracy
Chevalier's The Girl with a Pearl Earring which, being about a Vermeer
painting, bridges the space between visual and verbal articulations, and
being a twenty-first century novel about a seventeenth century event,
bridges time as well. It also offers us a female perspective on a male way of
seeing.

Mary-Haunted Fiction

Tracy Chevalier's The Girl with a Pearl Earring is interesting as a bridge

between visual icon and verbal metaphor because it retells the story of how
Vermeer, a convert to Catholicism and occasional religious painter, came
to use a housemaid as the model for one of his most famous paintings. She
is a full-bodied young woman, on the very cusp of sexual realization, fully
 MARY AND MODESTY 223

tempted by the attentions of a shop boy named Pieter but also traditionally
modest, especially when it comes to men seeing or touching her hair. Thus,
in her own way, she is a veiled woman, holding her sexual availability within
her own grasp. (She could also be protecting the fact that she can rarely
bathe and that her hair is unclean, but the former seems to predominate in
the writer's consciousness.)
Two particular passages are relevant here. Pieter leads Griet out to the
alley where he fondles her breasts, and taking on a sly look, runs his hands
up her neck. "Before I could stop him his hands were under my cap and
tangled in my hair:" She clearly sees this as a sexual assault and grabs her
cap with both hands, saying "No!'" But he, playing with a stand of hair that
he has loosened, declares, "Some day soon, Griet, I will see all of this. You
will not always be a secret to me'" (175). But her sexuality is a secret, one
suspects to her as well as to him, a secret that holds out promise as well as
fear, all of which she is learning to navigate.
This is reinforced in an exchange she has with Vermeer. In arranging
her as a model for his work, he wants her to uncover her ear. She does not
want to but feels she has no choice and so compromises herself a bit: "I felt
under the cap to make sure no hair was loose, tucking a few strands behind
my ear. Then I pulled it back to reveal the lower part of my ear" (181). But
when he wants her to take off her cap, she flatly refuses. He admonishes
her: "you do not want to be painted as a maid, with your mop and your
cap, nor as a lady with satin and fur and dressed hair'" (182). But her
humility, both in terms of sexual modesty and social class, prevails: "I did
not answer. I could not show him my hair. I was not the sort of girl who left
her head bare" (182). Finally, he talks her into at least changing her head
cloth, which she does in the storeroom so as to be private, and then gingerly
settles herself into a pose: "I breathed, afraid that the cloth would fall from
my head and reveal all my hair. But it held-only the end of the yellow cloth
dangled free. My hair remained hidden" (183).
The triumph in that last statement says it all. While remaining humble,
she is nonetheless asserting herself against the wishes ofthe man and master.
She is, for the time being, a woman of modest demeanor, who both knows
her place and yet will not be manipulated by her "betters:' She has definite
limits and yet crosses them, asserting herself against authority, in order to
protect her humble station. That is the kind of complex vigilance women of
poor station have always had to keep. Yet, like Mary, the Jerusalem maiden
of few means, Griet comes to reign over the rich and powerful-in her case,
from a canvas that presents her as inviolable but eminently desirable.
224 ELIZABETH MORGAN

We cannot leave this novel, however, without recognizing the troubling

fact that once Vermeer has crept up upon Griet in the storeroom and gazed
at her full head of wavy hair, she concludes, "Now that he had seen my hair,
now that he had seen me revealed, I no longer felt I had something precious
to hide and keep to myself"(196), and rushes out to give herself recklessly to
Pieter in an alley beside the tavern. Like so many young women, of all ages
and all cultures, she is caught between her desire for respectability and her
knowledge that her sexuality is what others desire. Mary, Maris Stella, the
cultural pole star, can hold out a paradoxical ideal to young women, but no
one can guarantee safety from this kind of objectification.
One of the most powerful examples of lost purity appears in a classic
work of the nineteenth century, ardently Protestant, but Mary-haunted from
beginning to end: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. When Hester
Prynne first appears before the Puritan mob in her role as "fallen woman;'
she is a magnificent creature. Richly clad in crimson velvet, her hair thick,
loose and glistening, she shrugs the bailiff's hand off her shoulder as if to
say, "I will make my own way onto the scaffold!" The third person narrator,
a thinly disguised yet totally empathetic Hawthorne, watches her, and
comments, with no small irony: "Had there been a Papist among the crowd
of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque
in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to
remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious
painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should
remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless
motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world" (10). In this early
scene, a passionately defiant Hester vividly mirrors the Madonna of art,
even as she differs dramatically from Mary in moral portent.
Later, we are to find that when Hester is most like Mary in moral suasion-
-circumspect in behavior, modest in dress-she is least like her in aesthetic
attractiveness. The oddities do not end here, however, for the power that
emanates from Hester in this obscure period, some seven years after the
discovery of her sin and her exposure on the scaffold, comes less from
traditional moral values than from revolutionary musings, reminiscent in
many ways of the almost scandalous declarations of justice for all attributed
to Mary in the Magnificat.
In this stage of Hester's life, she lives quietly and alone, except for the
company of little Pearl, on the very edge of town-between town and the
wild, demon-infested forest. She dresses in coarse somber garments; her
luxuriant hair is hidden under a tight cap (no scandal of a single strand of
 MARY AND MODESTY 225

hair here); she keeps her head lowered as she walks around town gazing
directly into no eye. She does needle work for all occasions, except for
weddings, and assists at sick beds and childbirths. She is saintly-a virgin/
celibate mother in her own right. But she thinks wild heretical thoughts:
"She [has] assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on
the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known
of it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the
scarlet letter" (ll8). Those thoughts are about the dangers of religious
patriarchy and about the need for radical changes in gender relations:
"The very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which
has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be
allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position" (119). While not
addressing gender hierarchy specifically, Mary's Song is equally radical in its
challenging of patriarchal power: "He [the Mighty One] has scattered those
who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from
their thrones but has lifted up the humble" (Luke 1:51-52).
What are we to make ofthese "matrons mild" who accrue political power
through their stations in life as child-bearers, one bearing the Son of God,
the other a daughter of man, both scandalous births out of wedlock? It
would be dangerous to over identify these two personages, which is why this
section is called "Mary-haunted fiction" rather than "Marian fiction:' But
such analogies are instructive if we are to understand our need to articulate,
through icon and metaphor, the complex connections between joys of
the flesh and holy restraint, between modest humility and bold prophecy.
Hawthorne's intimate identification with his protagonist illustrates how
exquisitely these realizations can and do cross gender borders.
Mary Gordon's novel Final Payments brings us both into the twentieth
century and into Catholicism. In this female bildungsroman, Gordon
reflects the post-Vatican II confusion in the church and her own confusing,
bittersweet relationship to "mother church:' As Debra Campbell states in
a recent book entitled Graceful Exits: "Catholic female readers have long
recognized the importance of fiction for saying things about women that
need saying in a church known for curtailing women's speech and revising
or rejecting their personal narratives" (68). Gordon's fiction has been
particularly resonant for many of her readers because her "bad girls" do
not simply leave the church but stick around to make it take stock. Yet
the Virgin Mary haunts her characters primarily as "a stick to beat smart
girls with" ("Coming to Terms with Mary" 11), and only secondarily as the
influential figure who sang of transformative justice shortly after conceiving
226 ELIZABETH MORGAN

Jesus, who gave her son the idea for his first major miracle (John 2.3), and
who, at the cross, was given the task of mothering those Jesus left behind
(John 19.26-27).
At the beginning of Final Payments we meet Isabel, a motherless child,
who has taken care of her father, a man with a fierce relationship to God, for
eleven years. She has served him, much as a penitent might serve a fierce
Father God, basking in the praise it brings her from Father Mulcahy and
other members of the parish, and enjoying the lack of will required by a life
with "the balletic attraction of routine:' But there is a serpent in the garden:
sex. Early on in their "arrangement:' Isabel seduced her father's student
David, as much out of curiosity as desire, and one day, after finding them
in bed together, the father had a debilitating stroke, requiring Isabel's full
attention from now on. Her "vows" were now complete.
Inevitably, the father dies; inevitably Isabel takes off her "veil" and enters
a world of work and relationship, now claiming that her friend Eleanor can
protect her from the sharp edges of her new life "like a veil or a curtain of
flowers" (127). This proves to be an ephemeral protection, however, and
Isabel becomes disastrously intimate with two married men, one out oflust,
one out of love. Ultimately, adultery strains her morality to the breaking
point and, in fear, she retreats once more to the cloistered life, taking over the
care of a cantankerous old woman named Margaret, once the housekeeper
for Isabel and her father. This time Isabel has no love for her "patient"; this
is pure self-sacrifice. This is the self-immolation of anorexic women in and
out of the convent.
And it is true that Isabel has an eating disorder through which she denies
her flesh by overfeeding it. She becomes lethargic and flabby, engulfing her
body in fat, and allows her aging nemesis Margaret to take her to have her
thick long hair chopped off and styled into an unyielding helmet. She comes
to equate sex with disease and, in her self-hating repudiation, becomes a
parody of the holy Virgin, the same parody held up to her when a child in
parochial school. But then Isabel has a revelation. In an angry exchange
with the ever-stringent Margaret, she suddenly comprehends the statement
of Jesus, "The poor you always have with you:' She understands Christ to be
insisting that, like the woman who spread the ointment on his feet, wiping
them with her hair. "We must not deprive ourselves, our loved ones, of the
luxury of our extravagant affections" (298).
Forced purity meets life-giving pleasure, and in Isabel's life, they begin
a tenuous dance together. At this point, her friend Eleanor proves to be
a true protector, coming to liberate her from Margaret's house, fat body,
 MARY AND MODESTY 227

dreadful hair and all, and promising to let her stay in Eleanor's apartment
until she gets her bearings. Isabel comes to see this kind of friendship as a
miracle: "Por they [Eleanor and Liz] had come the moment I called them,
and they were here beside me in the fragile and exhilarating chill of the first
dawn" (307). There is a birth taking place here. And at the risk of sounding
sacrilegious, one might suggest that this scene recapitulates what motivates
many petitioners, male and female, to pray to Mary. In short, they expect
her to show up in her protective mantle and lead them to a reconciliation
of opposites because she-virgin, mother, God-bearer, mother church-
embodies the mysterious complement of difference.
One more novel gets mention: Margaret Atwood's Cats Eye. Nathaniel
Hawthorne is unashamedly Christian and Protestant; Mary Gordon is warily
but persistently Catholic. Margaret Atwood does not wear her religious
heart on her sleeve, which is why the appearance of Mary as herself in Cats
Eye catches the reader wonderfully off guard. And the fact that Mary is seen
with a female painter's eye, brings this section full circle.
Cats Eye describes in excruciatingly familiar detail the painful adolescent
confusion over body image, friendship and compassion experienced by a
young woman named Elaine. In childhood she experiences cruel bullying
at the hands of a friend and fights back by becoming cold and mean herself.
Eventually,she has her revenge, only to discover in adulthood that Cordelia,
her tyrant, was herself terribly insecure and seeking companionship the
only way she knew how. Ultimately, Elaine's psychological revenge has left
her lonely, bereft of a close female friend and coming to rely on the only
figure that has seemed to represent something whole and nurturing about
the feminine-appearances of the Virgin Mary. This is as much a surprise
to her as to anyone, in that her parents are agnostics and the only Sunday
school she ever attended, sporadically at that, was Protestant.
Elaine's first sighting of the Holy Mother comes on a day when she has
been tortuously sent into an icy creek to retrieve a hat thrown there by
Cordelia. It is twilight; she is cold and frightened, and feeling distinctly
betrayed, when Mary appears: "Now she's quite close. I can see the white
glimmer of her face, the dark scarf or hood around her head, or is it hair?
She holds out her arms to me and I feel a surge of happiness. [...] She's
telling me something, 'You can go home now: she says. 'It will be all right.
Go horne" (201). Like her visitor, Elaine ponders these words in her heart.
Years later when she has become an artist and is visiting churches in
Mexico with her husband Ben, she has a second sighting, this time through
a statue of the Virgin that surprises her:
228 ELIZABETH MORGAN

Then I saw the Virgin Mary. I didn't know it was her at first, because
she was dressed not in the usual blue or white and gold, but in black.
She didn't have a crown. Her head was bowed, her face in shadow, her
hands held out open at the sides. Around her feet were the stubs of
candles, and all over her black dress were pinned what I thought at first
were stars, but which were instead little brass or tin arms, legs, sheep,
donkeys, chickens, and hearts. [... J she was Virgin oflost things, one
who restored what was lost. (210)

She recalls, of course, the Virgin of Guadalupe, protector of the poor, being
thanked for all of the milagros she has performed on behalf of farmers and
sick peasants. But Elaine the rich tourist is also needy, lost, and desirous of
being found and restored.
This vision, like the other one is stored away in her memory, until she
finds herself, one marriage broken, another begun, obsessively making her
own images of the Virgin on canvas. Her first image, like these others, is
strong, unexpected, eclectic, with the power to bring together broken bits
and pieces of reality: "I paint her in blue, with the usual white veil, but with
the head of a lioness. Christ lies in her lap in the form of a cub. If Christ
is a lion, as he is in traditional iconography, why wouldn't the Virgin Mary
be a lioness? Anyway it seems to me more accurate about motherhood
than the old bloodless milk-and-water Virgins of art history. My Virgin
Mary is fierce, alert to danger, wily. She stares levely out at the viewer with
her yellow lion's eyes. A gnawed bone lies at her feet" (361). Elaine paints
other images of Mary, but this one is the most arresting, and perhaps the
most healing. The old cruelties are caught up in a starkly reconciling image
of fierce mother love. There are no lowered eyes here, in submission or
avoidance, but a steady return of gaze.
Mary-maiden, matron, miracle worker, protector of virgins, forgiver
of sinners, lioness shielding her cub-she has followed us through the ages,
reflecting our complex selves back to us. At times she has been pushed
to fundamentalist extremes. A brief surfing of the Internet brings up
websites that promote the practice of women wearing veils during worship
as a way of identifying with the Virgin Mary's meekness and humility and
signifying that women's role in the church, family and society is different
from and submissive to a man's, including one website that features direct
quotations to this effect from Our Lady herself. But lest Protestants find
this amusing, there are websites about evangelical women "discovering"
the veil, that is, shapeless cotton jumpers, as a way of dressing modestly.
 MARY AND MODESTY 229

One incredibly earnest Pentecostal woman shares an astonishing amount of

research to justify bobbing her hair. The Mary that haunts these websites is
tame and meek. She lives indoors and never gnaws a bone, but she is used
continuously to bludgeon women into body-shame.
On the other side, of course, we have the "Madonna" of popular culture,
morphing from one identity to another in a frenzy offree choice and making
money hand over fist from sexual posturing."? Her progeny are many and
far less talented than she. They appear in the malls with skintight clothes
and listless eyes, claiming in a recent set of interviews in the New York
Times Magazine (June 13, 2004) that casual sex is preferable to romance
because, after all, failed relationships hurt. (Is this emotional asceticism?)
Learning from tragedy is as outdated in this crowd as empathizing with the
poor. They are part of the reason Middle Easterners perceive the West as
decadent.
The Mary of the wider church/art/literary tradition, however, is a lover
and a healer. She has grieved the illicit death of her son with passion and so
is alive and well in the "Mothers of the Disappeared:' She is loved and sought
by the poor and so is alive and well in the Missionaries of Charity, carrying
dying persons off the streets of Calcutta or New York, and all orders of nuns
who love the world by praying for it and diving into it. She teaches us to
love our bodies because she gave body to Jesus; and she teaches us to protect
ourselves from unwanted sexual advance by her inviolability. Because of
the pervasiveness of her likenesses, and her complex character, she is a key
to the drama in which we in the West contend with the allures and dangers
of sexual differentiation, our longing for intimacy with the other, and our
attempts to protect ourselves from lethal desires for domination. This is no
easier in the West than it is in the East, and perhaps if we could talk past our
caricatures of one another, we might teach each other a thing or two about
the process.
Azar Nafisi has brilliantly begun this cross-cultural conversation
by writing a book for publication in the West in which she records the
hermeneutical adventures undertaken by Iranian students, many of them
veiled women, in reading Western texts, including the scandalous classic
Lolita. Not only does this "memoir in books;' as she calls Reading Lolita in
Tehran, model and encourage the cross-cultural reading of texts, it fosters
the cross-cultural reading of readings of texts. Western readers encountering
Nafisis bestseller see their own reactions to Lolita and The Great Gatsby
unveiled as cloistered, culture-bound interpretations and are invited to open
up to new ways of seeing their own classics. Lolita, for example, becomes a
230 ELIZABETH MORGAN

book about resistance to oppressive seduction, every bit as much as a story

of victimization-a political parable as much as a Freudian study.
Azar Nafisi has a dream of making this kind of dialogue happen on a much
larger scale. In a recent interview for public radio, she said: "Readers come
from different backgrounds, different walks of life, different nationalities.
Can you imagine putting them together in a space where they can express
genuinely what they feel about books--how many amazing interpretations
we'll simultaneously find. I think that apart from all the political solutions
we find, this would be an amazing solution and response to the tyrannies of
our time, no matter where we live, whether in Washington D.C. or in Tehran,
Iran:' She is talking here about getting Western and Middle Eastern students
to meet in a seminar format to discuss one another's texts, to enter into one
another's readings of texts. To imagine this group discussing the Bennett
sisters from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice as well as Isma and Hajila
from Assia Djebar's A Sister to Scheherazade expands our credibility, causing
us to speculate that literary hermeneutics-or aesthetic hermeneutics--just
might become a key player in globalization debates. Looking carefully at
the cultural legacy of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, at where she comes from
and how she has both shaped and been shaped by our mythic imaginations,
would be one way for us to prepare to hold up our end of the dialogue.

Eastern University

NOTES

I See essays in OffWith Her Head: The Denial ofWomens Identity in Myth, Religion

and Culture, edited by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz and Wendy Doniger, for how this
dynamic is manifest in Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish and Christian traditions.
2Por a consideration of veiling and scripture see "Veiled Truth: Reading Djebar
from the Outside;' Christianity and Literature (Summer 2002), 603-620.
3Sally Cunneen reminds us that when the Spanish Conquistadors came to
conquer the Aztecs, "The Indians began to believe that Mary had come with the
Spaniards in order to be with them on their soil." She had come to protect them.
And so the legend of Our Lady of Guadalupe, our "little dark one" was born (219).
4In general, while married Oriental and Jewish women were veiled in public, and
while it was expected that any matron would behave modestly and could veil herself
for protection from natural and human elements, Greco-Roman women often wore
their long hair bound--curled, braided, carefully arranged--Ietting it down in times
of mourning, weddings and ecstatic religious rites.
 MARY AND MODESTY 231

SIn Talmudic times, the head covering was so essential for married women that a
husband uncovering his wife's head in public was, in essence, divorcing her (Kuhns
53).
6 Blue is also the color of sky, connoting eternity and immensity, and the

transparency of truth.
7In the story of the third century martyr Perpetua, she dreams before her
martyrdom that she receives a male body. Nonetheless at the moment of her death
she asks for a pin to subdue her hair, lest her unloosened tresses suggest she is in
mourning (Cunneen 89, Miles 55). Thecla, from the apocryphal story of Paul and
Thecla, to be found in "The Acts of Paul;' dreamed of a life where she could cut
her hair, put on men's clothing and travel with Paul. He, not knowing what to do
with that suggestion, admonished her to keep her hair long, saying "The time is ill-
favored and thou art comely" (II.25).
"One remembers here that upper class Muslim women have always been able to
order "designer" robes and scarves.
9For accounts of the disorientation experienced by unveiled Middle Eastern
women, as accounted for by Franz Fanon in "Algeria Unveiled;'A Dying Colonialism
and novelist Assia Djebar in A Sister to Scheherazade, see "Veiled Truth: Reading
Djebar from the Outside;' Christianity and Literature (Summer 2002), 603-620.
"Much is owed here to the insights of Robert F. McGovern, liturgical painter
and wood sculptor, recently retired from University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
IIAradical example of difference is the contemporary rendering (1999), "Virgin
Mary" by Chris Ofili. It depicts Mary with African features and is made of paper
collage, oil paint, glitter, Polyester resin and elephant dung. The latter shocked
audiences in the United States, engendering accusations of impropriety and
religious slander. But, in truth, the use of dung in art works is a respectful gesture,
grounding image in earth, for Africans, and ultimately can be seen to complement
the incarnational emphasis in much traditional religious art in the West. (See
Heartney, "The Bawdy Art of Catholics:')
12The legend of Saint Mary of Egypt, often associated with Mary of Magdala,
follows similar lines. Entering the wilderness to do penance at seventeen, she stays
there for forty-eight years. When the holy Father Zosimov comes upon her near
the end of her life, she is naked but her body fully covered with curly hair (Miles
64).
DIn In the Eye of the Sun, Egyptian novelist Adhdaf Soueifhas a troubled female
character come upon Botticelli's "Venus" in the Uffizi, and think to herself "her long
rope of hair curling modestly around her shining hip, at one with the waves from
which she was born and the sky towards which she rose-there, there is an image"
what is it if not serenity?" (462).
14The recent film "The Magdalene Sisters" (2002) which studies the incarceration
of supposedly oversexed Irish girls in convent laundries (the last one closed in
1996) plays out the connection between Mary of Magdala and the sexual allure of
women's hair. A runaway who is captured and returned to the convent has her hair
232 ELIZABETH MORGAN

cut so close to the scalp for punishment that her head bleeds. In the last frame,
when she is long out of the laundry, but sees nuns from the incarcerating order on
the street, her spontaneous gesture of defiance, like Nafisi's student, is to pull the
pins from her hair and publicly shake it free around her face.
15In The Nude, Kenneth Clark comments on this visual link between Venus and
Mary: "It is the same head that Botticelli uses for his Madonnas, and this fact, at
first rather shocking, is seen, on reflection, to reveal a summit of the human mind
shining in the pure air of the imagination. That the head of our Christian goddess,
with all her tender apprehension and scrupulous inner life, can be set on a naked
body without a shadow of discord is the supreme triumph of Celestial Venus. [... J
the flow of her body is like some hieroglyphic of sensuous delight" (102).
16See Patrick O'Connor's poem "The Mantle of Mary" written from the point of
view of one of the penitent's seeking solace under Mary's cloak (Greeley 150).
17A recent television special (Bravo, July 16, 2004), dealing with Madonna's

continuous reinvention of herself was ironically entitled "Madonna: Like a Virgin"

after one of her most popular songs.

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