Embodying the mother, disembodying the icon: Female resistance in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary

The classical Cartesian dualism*body/mind has informed much of Western thought since the 17th century and it has also served to validate unbalanced dichotomies, especially those associated with gender roles, which placed women closer to the body or to emotions, and men closer to reason. In their refusal to endorse this reductionism, feminist scholars have been at pains to redefine biased ideological positions and have articulated discourses that delved into the blurring of boundaries of such artificial categories. Besides, recent discoveries in neuroscience have confirmed the linkage of body and mind, suggesting that emotions and feelings, even more than reason, shape our decision-making processes, our consciousness and, therefore, our daily lives. In Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary ([2012] 2013b), a subversive revision of one of the most emblematic symbols of Catholicism, the Passion of Christ, a grieving Mary recollects the last days of her son’s life more than twenty years after his death. Questioning the validity of the Gospels as given truths and refusing to collaborate with the apostles to confirm their version, she vindicates her authority to testify as a witness and give voice to her own experience after years of resisting silence and exile. In so doing, she does not accept to endorse the received image of herself as an atemporal, iconic symbol of a sacrificing mother and defends the authority of her narrative, her Testament to the world. The cult of the Virgin Mary, the Mariology, and its ideological implications for the cultural construction of female silence and motherly sacrifice, are the main targets of Tóibín’s criticism. Engaged in the rendering of a more human version of a flesh and blood woman, he challenges centuries of appropriation and recreation. In her reverie, an agentive and gendered Mary gives shape to her consciousness by means of an unorthodox account that relies on the emotions felt by her body,