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Description
This paper will focus on The Testament of Mary (2012)—a novella by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, whose protagonist-narrator is the ageing mother of Jesus, depicted as spending her last days in exile in Ephesus, remembering her past and reflecting on the events both preceding and following her son’s crucifixion. In her old age, Tóibín’s Mary finds the courage to establish her own mature voice, contest the soon-to-be-canonical depiction of Jesus, and challenge the patriarchal, sanitized representation of her own role in her son’s life (and death). While Mary’s defiant narrativization of her life may be read as an example of the Reifungsroman—the novel of maturation or ripening (Reifung), achieved in old age—the scope and complexity of her story go beyond the feminist agenda customarily associated with the genre (cf. Waxman 1985; Doblas 2005). By making his aged Mary unlearn silence, reject the sacralization of suffering and violence, and reforge herself outside the trope of virginal maternity, Tóibín not only humanizes and individualizes the mythicized woman of Catholic religion, but also challenges her co-option into the discourse of Irish religious nationalism. Insofar as in Irish Catholic nationalism the Virgin Mary is conflated with Mother Ireland (Stubbings 2000; Meaney 2010; Scheible 2025), the fact that the novella’s protagonist re-examines her motherhood and refuses to endorse her son’s sacrifice can be read as Tóibín’s attempt to defy and renegotiate some important aspects of Irish cultural self-understanding. Mary’s meditation on her life course—her Reifung—is a literary means to reassess and rework the religiously mediated constructions of Irish womanhood and collective identity.
Arias Doblas, Rosario. “Moments of Ageing: the Reifungsroman in Contemporary Fiction.” Women Ageing Through Literature and Experience, ed. Brian J. Worsfold, Edicions de la Universitat de Lleida, 2005. 3-12.
Meaney. Gerardine. Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change. Race, Sex and Nation. Routledge, 2010.
Scheible, Ellen. Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction. The Literary Legacy of Mother Ireland. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.
Stubbings, Diane. Anglo-Irish Modernism and the Maternal From Yeats to Joyce. Palgrave, 2000.
Waxman, Barbara. “From ‘Bildungsroman’ to ‘Reifungsroman’: Aging in Doris Lessing's Fiction.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 68, no. 3 (Fall 1985). 318-334.
| Principal domain of study | English literary studies |
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