by ZELJKA MAROSEVIC
Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary
Penguin, 112pp, £7.99
The virtual absence of the Virgin Mary from the New Testament is so at odds with the proliferation of her myth and image in Christianity, and more specifically Catholicism, that it is almost to be disbelieved. The most famous woman in Western Culture, and the paragon of virginity, womanhood and motherhood, the perfect symbol of Christian love and obedience, and, to borrow a description of Artemis from Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, ‘radiating abidance and bounty, fertility and grace, and beauty maybe, even beauty’, is, as Marina Warner writes in Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, ‘passed over almost in silence’ during the retelling of Christ’s crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension in the Gospels.
While other Marys abound at various retellings of the crucifixion only in the Gospel of John is Mary the mother of Jesus present at the foot of the cross. In this scene, Jesus looks down from the cross and, seeing his mother, cries out, ‘Woman, behold thy son!’ before turning to John and entrusting Mary into his care: ‘Behold thy mother!’ In Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, a retelling of the events in John’s Gospel from Mary’s point of view, the moment is altered. Jesus ‘howled out words that I could not catch.’ In biblical terms, the moment when Jesus calls out binds Mary to Christ through his suffering, and enjoins Mary to John and to the rest of mankind. It is an act that joins her to God and Man, and thus places her at the centre of Christianity, with Christ. It is Tóibín’s intention to sever this connection and present the reader with a version of events that casts Mary in less selfless and more human terms.
In The Testament of Mary, the mother of Jesus steals away before her son has died on the cross so that she can escape her own death:
It was my own safety I thought of, it was to protect myself… despite the desperation, the shrieking, despite the fact that his heart and his flesh had come from my heart and my flesh…I would leave the others to wash his body and hold him and bury him when his death came. I would leave him to die alone if I had to. And that is what I did.
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