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

Year, pages: 2023, 19 - 30

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 analyzed in depth.

Morales-Ladrón, M. 2023. Embodying the mother, disembodying the icon: Female resistance in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary. In World Literature Studies, vol. 15, no.2, pp. 19-30. 1337-9275. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2023.15.2.2

Morales-Ladrón, M. (2023). Embodying the mother, disembodying the icon: Female resistance in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary. World Literature Studies, 15(2), 19-30. 1337-9275. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2023.15.2.2

Publisher: Ústav svetovej literatúry SAV, v. v. i.