RIP Hilary Mantel

Very sad to never read any new words of Mantel’s, so here are some old ones I keep returning to, from her 2004 essay Some Girls Want Out, excerpting liberally in case you’ve run out of London Review of Books articles this month:

After a miserable life, Gemma died of TB in 1903, when she was 25. She is an old-fashioned saint, Italian, passive, repressed, yet given to displays of flamboyant suffering – to public and extreme fasting and self-denial, to the exhibition of torn and bleeding flesh. Her behaviour recalled the gruesome penitential practices of her medieval foremothers and resembled that of the ‘hysterics’ of her own day, whose case histories promoted the careers of Charcot, Janet, Breuer and Freud. But we can’t quite consign Gemma to history, to the dustbin of outmoded signs and symptoms or the waste-tip of an age of faith. When we think of young adults in the West, driven by secular demons of unknown provenance to starve and purge themselves, and to pierce and slash their flesh, we wonder uneasily if she is our sister under the skin.

…

‘Ecstasies are unforgettable, and they are tyrannical. Those who experience them helplessly shape their lives in order to create the possibility of another encounter with the holy.’ Like all mystics, Gemma is terrified that God will turn his face away. She wants to love God, but is baffled: how do you do it? Her confessor cannot help her. Jesus says to her: ‘See this cross, these thorns, this blood? They are all works of love ... Do you want to truly love me? First learn to suffer.’

What should Jesus want her to suffer? To talk about female masochism seems reductive and unhelpful. You have to look the saints in the face; say how the facts of their lives revolt and frighten you, but when you have got over being satirical and atheistical, and saying how silly it all is, the only productive way is the one the psychologist Pierre Janet recommended, early in the 20th century: first, you must respect the beliefs that underlie the phenomena. Both Gemma and Thérèse believed suffering had an effect that was not limited in time or space. They could, just for a while, share the pain of crucifixion. They could offer up their pain to buy time out for the souls suffering in purgatory. Their suffering could be an expiation for the sins of others, it could be a restitution, a substitution. Margaret of Cortona said: ‘I want to die of starvation to satiate the poor.’ Behind the ecstasy is a ferocious moral drive, a purpose – and no doubt a sexual drive, too. Simone Weil believed that ‘sexual energy constitutes the physiological foundation’ of mystical experience. Why must this be true? Because, Weil said, ‘we haven’t anything else with which to love.’

…

Throughout her life Gemma suffered from palpitations and pains in her chest. Sometimes the beating of her heart was so violent that everyone around could observe it; at autopsy it was seen (by a devout doctor) to be engorged with fresh blood. For Gemma, the heart is the place her pain is centred, the place where metaphors converge. She calls Jesus ‘the powerful King of Hearts’. Hélène Cixous has pointed out that the heart is the place where male and female metaphors become one. Both sexes agree it is there that love is bred and contained. The heart beats faster when you see your lover, or in the sexual act. It is the place where Gemma’s identity collapses into that of Jesus. She insists that her heart wants to enlarge; she uses an expression that also means, ‘to take comfort’. In Saint Hysteria, Mazzoni shows how the woman mystic pushes language to do what it can, and abandons it when it reaches its limit. When telling is insufficient, she shows.

This was the church’s great problem: men’s language, frozen in liturgy and protocol, and women’s language, plastic, elastic, expressed in the heaving bosom and the arched spine – the flicky tongue of hysteria, juicy with unspoken words. The church had got itself embroiled in competing systems of metaphor, parallel discourses which it was too intellectually cowardly or inept to try to reconcile; it could only shuffle into shady alliances with the kind of science that suited it. We can see, as ‘Catholic neurologists’ of the time did, that Gemma’s symptoms are a representational strategy. They are an art form and a highly successful one; they are also (possibly) the product of mental pain and distress turned into physical symptoms. We must say ‘possibly’ because we don’t know enough about Gemma’s illnesses – at least, Bell and Mazzoni don’t give us enough detail to judge whether they were functional or organic. It seems that her doctors were more interested in ascribing meaning to her illnesses than in recording their physical features. If you want to look at Gemma’s life as Freud and Josef Breuer might have looked at it (Studies in Hysteria was published in 1895) you can collude with the church in describing Gemma as a hysteric. But where does that get us? Holiness and psychopathology can coexist, and perhaps by the time Gemma was making her career you couldn’t have the first without what looked like the second. The state of virginity itself was pathologised, and part of the definition of psychological health was an ability to defer to men and accept penetrative sex. Gemma thought she could be both a hysteric and a saint. She clearly understood that the diagnosis was pejorative, and regarded it as just another of the humiliations that God had lined up for her.

At the heart of Bell and Mazzoni’s endeavour is an understanding that a phenomenon may retain spiritual value, even after its biological and psychological roots have been uncovered. To describe the physical basis of an experience is not to negate the experience, as William James pointed out long ago. But now that neuroscience has such excellent tools for envisaging and describing the brain, we are tempted to accept descriptions of physiological processes as a complete account of experience. We then go further, and make value judgments about certain experiences, and deny their value if they don’t fit a consensus; we medicate the mysterious, and in relieving suffering, take its meaning away. This won’t do; there is always more suffering, and a pain is never generic, but particular and personal. We denigrate the female saints as masochists; noting that anorexic girls have contempt for their own flesh, we hospitalise them and force-feed them, taking away their liberties as if they were criminals or infants, treating them as if they have lost the right to self-determination. But we don’t extend the same contempt to pub brawlers or career soldiers. Men own their bodies, but women’s bodies are owned by the wider society; this observation is far from original, but perhaps bears restatement.

…

When you are isolated, back to the social wall, control over your own ingestion and excretion is all you have left; this is why professional torturers make sure to remove it. Why would women feel so hounded, when feminism is a done deal? Think about it. What are the choices on offer? First, the promise of equality was extended to educated professional women. You can be like men, occupy the same positions, earn the same salary. Then equal opportunities were extended to uneducated girls; you, too, can get drunk, and fight in the streets on pay-night. You’ll fit in childcare somehow, around the practice of constant self-assertion – a practice now as obligatory as self-abasement used to be. Self-assertion means acting; it means denying your nature; it means embracing superficiality and coarseness. Girls may not be girls; they may be gross and sexually primed, like adolescent boys.

Not every young woman wants to take the world up on this offer. It is possible that there is a certain personality structure which has always been problematical for women, and which is as difficult to live with today as it ever was – a type which is withdrawn, thoughtful, reserved, self-contained and judgmental, naturally more cerebral than emotional. Adolescence is difficult for such people; peer-pressure and hormonal disruption whips them into forced emotion, sends them spinning like that Victorian toy called a whipping-top. Suddenly self-containment becomes difficult. Emotions become labile. Why do some children cut themselves, stud themselves and arrange for bodily modifications that turn passers-by sick in the streets, while others merely dwindle quietly? Is it a class issue? Is it to do with educational level? The subject is complex and intractable. The cutters have chosen a form of display that even the great secular hysterics of the 19th century would have found unsubtle, while the starvers defy all the ingenuities of modern medicine; the bulimics borrow the tricks of both, and are perhaps the true heirs of those spider-swallowers. Anorexia itself seems like mad behaviour, but I don’t think it is madness. It is a way of shrinking back, of reserving, preserving the self, fighting free of sexual and emotional entanglements. It says, like Christ, ‘noli me tangere.’ Touch me not and take yourself off. For a year or two, it may be a valid strategy; to be greensick, to be out of the game; to die just a little; to nourish the inner being while starving the outer being; to buy time. Most anorexics do recover, after all: somehow, and despite the violence visited on them in the name of therapy, the physical and psychological invasion, they recover, fatten, compromise. Anorexia can be an accommodation, a strategy for survival. In Holy Anorexia, Bell remarks how often, once recovered, notorious starvers became leaders of their communities, serene young mothers superior who were noticeably wise and moderate in setting the rules for their own convents. Such career opportunities are not available these days. I don’t think holy anorexia is very different from secular anorexia. I wish it were. It ought to be possible to live and thrive, without conforming, complying, giving in, but also without imitating a man, even Christ: it should be possible to live without constant falsification. It should be possible for a woman to live – without feeling that she is starving on the doorstep of plenty – as light, remarkable, strong and free. As an evolved fish: in her element, and without scales.