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Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840-1970. By Richard D. E. Burton. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. xxvi + 292 pp. $45.00 cloth.
Richard D. E. Burton (retired Lecturer in French and Francophone literature, University of Sussex) concentrates here on the lives of eleven French women, examples of women whose bodies became, as it were, the battlefield of the culture wars of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France. From the well-known Thérèse Martin (The Little Flower), Simon Weil, and Raïssa Maritain (wife of Jacques), to the lesser-known Melanie Calvat (of the La Salette visions) and Marthe Robin (stigmatic), Burton offers details about their sufferings as well as analysis of the meanings each offered for her suffering.
Burton's thesis is clear. "In the postrevolutionary French Catholic imagination, the spiritual function of woman is to weep, bleed, and starve for the salvation of others, to offer herself up as a holocaust to appease a revengeful male deity" (19). And who benefits from the suffering of these (and by extension, of all) women? Men, of course. The male-dominated hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church or the individual men who seem to play leading roles in the stories of these women are presented by Burton as reaping the benefits, spiritual as well as otherwise, of some woman's suffering.
Beginning, perhaps, with Joseph de Maistre and other early-nineteenthcentury royalist (and ultramontanist) supporters, the author relays a clear message. The outrageous...