In 1906, a stunningly lovely 17-year-old girl forsakes her wealthy father’s home to become a postulant at the convent of the Sisters of the Crucifixion. The name of the order is important to what follows. Mariette Baptiste’s older sister is the mother superior. At first all the nuns are enchanted by this beautiful child’s piety and good nature. She is a temptation to some, who want to pet her or make her a special friend. Within months, the mother superior dies of cancer and immediately thereafter Mariette experiences the stigmata: the physical manifestation on her body of the wounds Christ received on the cross.
Consternation in the convent. The nuns are divided on what has happened; the younger sisters think Mariette a saint, the older think her a fraud. Of course envy and hatred are involved: these are mediocre people confronted by the miraculous. Either way, she’s a threat to this community: to order, discipline, authority, enclosure and poverty (the townspeople come, bring gifts). In time, she must be dismissed because the imperative for these rural virgins is the recovery of placidity and mediocrity. The new prioress explains to Mariette: “God gives us just enough to seek him, and never enough to fully find him.” That Mariette has found him is an affront to the community.
Though Mariette is the pivot on which his story turns, Hansen doesn’t want us to know her very well. He’s interested in her only as an agent dropped into a culture, and her effect on it. Hansen’s task was to develop a smothering atmosphere in which an irreligious reader can still breathe. The effect is engrossing. Hansen writes a beautiful prose: single lines, separated by spaces, sound like tocsins. The nuns have the forms of faith arrayed in order, but can they deal with the truth?
