In one of the last emails of the semester, Carolyn responded to my draft writing project, asking me how my main character got the way she was (Beasley). Did something happen in her life to make her the way she is, or was she born that way?
The fact that she had to ask made me confront a real flaw with a lot of my writing: I don't write origin stories for my characters. Normally, I could get away with this, but in this case, my character is so internally extreme, Carolyn had a perfect right to ask.
I don't feel that it is necessarily useful to state this sort of information in the story itself, but I certainly should know it. For one thing, it allows me the option to fill in the past, or drop hints, or - if nothing else - it informs the way I write the character in the present.
It was a tremendous and well-deserved kick in the butt, even if Carolyn didn't mean it that way. She should have - and I'm grateful. So, how does a young woman manage to develop such a fixation on religious transcendence, especially now?
Accounts of the more ecstatic saints, like Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Sienna, or Rosa of Lima are very vague as to the origins of this desire to be so thoroughly involved with a direct dialogue with god. In all cases, accounts suggest this extreme religious fixation began very young. In the case of Rose of Lima, at the age of four (Hansen). Teresa of Avila is said to have pledged "the flower of her virtue" to Christ at the age of nine (Teresa of Avila). One has to wonder how many nine-year olds know what the "flower of the virtue" is, never mind giving it away.
It's hard to sort the hype from the reality. With the exception of Teresa, who wrote her own autobiography, most of the saints lives are written by someone else, and often many years after their deaths.
There seems to have been a desire to establish that the subject was spiritually superior from the very beginning, following along the lines of a Christ child who never cried, never got colic (Soeherman).
"...The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes,
but little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes..."
(Away in a Manger)
Many hagiographers sought to establish that these women are born this way.
In the modern world, with the insistence that so much of what we are is determined by our DNA, including personality traits like outgoingness, shyness, musical talents, etc. one might, from a science perspective, have reason to insist that my character was simply born with a predisposition to search out transcendental experience.
Certainly there is a lot of historical evidence to suggest that many people, born in different times, cultures and religions have pursued behaviour that led to ecstatic experiences. Considering the ubiquity, it would not be unfair to suggest that perhaps my character was born with a "god gene".
However, this is fictionally unsatisfying to me, and I'm sure to many readers, especially in the present day. In the time of the hagiographers, before psychology and psychiatry, there was little motivation to explain a drive like this, since it was considered such an admirable and laudable pursuit.
In the 21st Century, we view a lot of this behaviour, whether self-harming or not, to be aberrant. Therefore, we look for causal factors.
My character's father has died when she was very young. It occurred to me that, I could take a Freudian psychoanalytical approach to establishing the cause as the seeking out of an alternative father figure that could result in this sort of religious devotion to the ultimate father figure, God (Spencer). However, this is the first idea that occurred to me, and because of this, I felt it was too obvious an explanation - no matter how psychologically sound - verging on cliche.
There is also a considerable amount of writing that suggests that mystic lives were often adopted by Medieval sufferers of trauma and abuse (Atlas). This was, of course, the first explanation that many of my readers of an early draft of the story assumed. But, as I explained before, I really wanted to stay away from the spectre of sexual abuse. However realistic it might be, I considered it, like the death of the father, too pat an explanation, fictionally.
The other explanation that occurred to me, and the one I prefer, and propose to pursue, is the idea of a kind of virally inspired religious addiction.
There is some precedence for this in science fiction. Both Frank Herbert and Alistair Reynolds have written about populations being infected by that caused the sufferers to become intensely religious (Reynolds).
Of course, this idea is not appropriate for my story. But it did get me thinking that perhaps one of the places a person might experience altered states of consciousness, and become intensely attracted to them, would be during illness - childhood illness. If a child were growing up in a very religious setting, and were deathly ill, a mother might pray out loud at the beside of a feverish child, infusing their hallucinations and fevered dreams with religious imagery.
This offers an explanation of both nature, in the form of an early childhood illness, and nurture, in the form of the religious behaviour the people around her might indulge in at her bedside while she is in a semi-conscious and psychologically vulnerable state.
Looking at the early paintings of Frida Kahlo, and their intensely religious imagery combined with images of herself, and her own very damaged body, does suggest a sort of religious reading of suffering - a kind of physical experience she associated with martyrdom: a translation of physical pain into ecstatic experience (Goldsmith).
At a formative age, the experience of this type, combined with, perhaps pain and illness, might act as the seminal experience that would lead to a life-long obsession to regain that state.
This, for me, is a far more satisfactory explanation of the origin of my character's obsession with religious transcendence. It also offers an explanation of how, if pain accompanied her early experiences, she would have reason to believe that pain might play a significant part in triggering new ones.
Many thanks, Carolyn, for being such a great critical friend.
References:
Anonymous. "Away in a Manger" Hymn. Wikipedia. 14 May, 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Away_in_a_Manger
Atlas, Jerrold. "Medieval Mystics' Lives As Self-Medication for Childhood Abuse".The Journal of Psychohistory. Fall 2003 31,2: 145-169. 13 May, 2008 http://primal-page.com/atlas.htm
Beasley, Carolyn. "First Couple of pages of the novel." E-mail to author.13 May 2008.
Goldsmith, Marlene. "Frida Kahlo: Abjection, Psychic Deadness, and the Creative Impulse" Psychoanalitic Review, 91.6 Dec. 2004. May 15, 2008 http://www.atypon-link.com/GPI/doi/pdf/10.1521/prev.91.6.723.55959.
Hansen, Leonardo. "Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima, Virgen del Tercer Orden de Santo Domingo, Patrona de la America". Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, Mexico. 1847. 9 May, 2008 http://cdigital.dgb.uanl.mx/la/1080016593/1080016593.html
Reynolds, Alistair. "Absolution Gap". Gollancz 2003.
Soeherman, Miguel. "A Child Observes and Imitates - Sermon". EWTN Website. Nov. 2006.
13 May, 2008 http://www.ewtn.com/library/CHRIST/childobserv.HTM
Spencer, Boyd. "Sigmund Freud: Lecture notes for Theories of Personality". Easter Illinois University. nd. 13 May, 2008 http://psych.eiu.edu/spencer/Freud.html
Teresa of Avila, "The Life of Saint Teresa of Jesus." Gutenberg Project Website. 1904. 9 May 2008 http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8trsa10h.htm.
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