The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [92]
I believe that references to scripture may be found in every one of her poems and letters. I can never read Psalm 33’s “Sing unto him a new song; play skilfully with a loud noise” without hearing her plaintive: “Why—do they shut me out of Heaven? Did I sing too loud?” Emily Dickinson is the patron saint of biblical commentary in the poetic mode. “I believe the love of God may be taught not to seem like bears,” she once wrote, wryly refuting the prophet Elisha. “Consider the lilies,” she wrote to her cousins late as a time of rest, and let it slip away, losing nothing.
MARIA GORETTI:
CIPHER OR SAINT?
Exploitation is at the heart of Maria Goretti’s story, so much so that I wonder if it is possible to write about her in the late twentieth century without exploiting her further. In a curious way she reminds me of Marilyn Monroe. A virginal peasant girl canonized as a “martyr of purity” by the Roman Catholic church and a Hollywood sex goddess martyred on the altar of celebrity would seem to have little in common. Yet both make a witness to the perils of being female in life and in death. Their lives, their deaths, have been appropriated, squeezed for every drop of meaning by those who’ve not necessarily had their best interests at heart. Very little is known about Maria Goretti, and all too much about Marilyn Monroe, but each in her own way has become a perfect cipher, a blank page on which others write to suit their own purposes. Both have been so consistently ill-used that they make us cry out, “Enough, already; let her rest in peace.”
The bare facts of Goretti’s story sound familiar to anyone who reads a newspaper. In 1902, at nearly twelve years of age, she was knifed to death in an attempted rape. Her murderer, who had threatened her in the past, was Alessandro Serenelli, the son of her father’s partner in tenant farming, a boy she’d known for much of her life. When Maria was younger her destitute parents had moved, with their seven children, to a farm in the Pontine marshes of Italy in a desperate but futile attempt to better their circumstances. It was there that the father died of a fever, leaving his wife and children vulnerable to increased economic exploitation. It was there that Maria Goretti received her first communion, and also took on considerable domestic labor while her mother and older siblings worked in the fields. She was murdered in the kitchen of the rented house that her family shared with Alessandro and his father Giovanni.
The apparatus of hagiography so quickly entered into the telling of Goretti’s story that one must proceed with caution in interpreting even the simplest facts concerning her life and death. In an article entitled “Maria Goretti: Rape and the Politics of Sainthood,” Eileen J. Stenzel has written, “To read the lives of the saints literally is to misunderstand the polemics and politics of sainthood.” Stenzel discovered, in teaching an undergraduate course on Catholicism, that the story of St. Maria Goretti inevitably polarized her students. “Some,” she writes, “would claim that the rationale for [her] canonization was understandable given the social climate of the 1950s. Others were outraged that the Roman Catholic church would ever have said that a woman is better dead than raped.”
But the literalism that would hear that as the church’s message obscures the complexities of Goretti’s story and ignores the economic and social realities of her time and place, a rural Italian village of the early twentieth century. As Stenzel points out, it was “the world in which Maria struggled to survive [that] promoted the belief that a woman