Marie's Struggle With Gender Roles

In addition to Marie’s struggles with gender roles and the way she is forced to rewrite the body, she is constantly conscious of her sexage in terms of the appropriation of the products of her body. Her concerns with sexage are in terms of her tears themselves, rather than her actions within her gift of tears overall. Once her gift of tears first appears, Marie had not yet been ridiculed for her excessive tears. In turn, she allowed the tears to flow “so copiously from her eyes [and] on the floor of the church and plainly showed where she had been walking” (179). For a time, her tears, a product of her body were naturally running down her face, and onto the natural floor of the church, being appropriated by the patriarchal church itself. Conversely,

She “would catch the tears in the linen cloth with which she covered her head” (180). Not only is she hiding her tears, but the entirety of her face and hair. Hair and face are parts of the bodily text read by men as sexually significant and a primary script of objectification of women. Additionally, soaking up her tears was no simple task. Daily, Marie “went through many veils…since she had to change them frequently and put a dry one on in place of the wet one she had removed” (180). Beauty and the tears from her body are both capable of being commandeered by societal pressures, exemplified in the priest’s ridicule. In her article "Disturbances In The Social Body: Differences in Body Image and Eating Problems among African American and White Women." Meg Lovejoy comments that “the body is a form or surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and commitments of a culture are inscribed” (Lovejoy 239). By removing and covering aspects of her body out of sight of societal hierarchies, Marie is protecting her body and rewriting a bodily text that conforms to the patriarchy’s structuralist

Rather than this preparation being a spiritual concern, it was physical for Marie, she used her body as vellum on which she wrote the final chapter of her mystical story. In Marie’s case it is clear that “mysticism for these early medieval women was described as closely related to their physicality and that their encounter with the divine was often portrayed in erotic terms” (Brown 76). With the promise of an erotic encounter nearing, and with sex having been an unspeakable act for some time, she physically shuts down. Marie’s body was “shriveled from illness and fasting that her spine touched her belly button and the bones in her back seemed to be lying under her stomach as if under a thin linens cloth” (183). The fact that Marie chose not to eat for weeks, is her final example of how important her physical appearance was to her entire life. In fact, Marie’s death overall “brought many of these disparate elements- Marie’s sexuality and her chastity, her body and her will, her devotion and her asceticism, her symbolic maternity and her spiritual bride hood-back into sharp focus” (Brown 2). This final act was possibly her most effective both in exhibiting her religious capabilities and how far Marie will go to submit to patriarchal