EMBODYING THE MOTHER, DISEMBODYING THE ICON: FEMALE RESISTANCE IN COLM TÓIBÍN’S THE TESTAMENT OF MARY

• Authors: Morales-Ladrón Marisol
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Informed by the theories of Antonio Damasio on the emotional mappings of the mind, the present article probes into the Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (2012), originally written for the stage as a solo play and later adapted into a novella, to disclose the resistance narrative of a grieving mother against the official accounts of the Passion of Christ. The ageing Mary of this text, who is granted voice and body, defies the symbolic representations of female suffering and sorrow that have nurtured cultural history and memory for centuries, and engages in a corporeal rendering of her version, which she intends to leave as her Testament to the world. The shaping of her consciousness is thus substantiated on her embodiment as woman and mother, against the iconic disembodied Virgin Mary that has formed the axis of the Catholic cult of Mariology, ultimately contributing to dissolve the classical dichotomies body/mind and matter/spirit, which will be analysed in depth.

Keywords

EN

PASSION OF CHRIST; MARY; RELIGION; CORPOREALITY; MOTHER; ICON; COLM TÓIBÍN

• Publisher: Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: World Literature Studies
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 19 – 30

Contributors

author

Morales-Ladrón Marisol

• Department of Modern Philology, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, Universidad de Alcalá, C/ Trinidad, s/n, 28801 Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), Spain

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2100-7346

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2023.15.2.2