In the name of the Father: The effects of orthodoxy on Roman Catholic women authors

The Roman Catholic ideal of womanhood is silence, obedience, and self-sacrifice; how is a woman to speak as a Roman Catholic? This dissertation addresses this question by reading one group of medieval and three contemporary women authors: Hildegard of Bingen, Hadewijch of Brabant, Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Margery Kempe; Flannery O'Connor (Complete Stories, Habit of Being, and "Revelation") Joyce Carol Oates (With Shuddering Fall, Bellefleur, and Marya: A Life), and Mary Gordon (Final Payments and Men and Angels). Depending on her Catholicism and her life events, each woman negotiates the tension between "Roman Catholic" and "woman" along a spectrum of choices stretching between the Law of the Father and a Return to the Mother. The language informing my spectrum comes from psychoanalytic and feminist theories. The Law of the Father operates hierarchically, demands obedience, and defines woman relative to man (as daughter, wife, mother, and deviant from the masculine norm). The Return to the Mother operates relationally and recognizes difference (seeing beyond what exists to create other possibilities, such as situational ethics and multiple expressions of woman).; My introduction sets up my paradigm for reading by charting the history of the Roman Catholic narrative of woman, comparing it to psychoanalysis, and identifying theories to be used. Chapter one finds that the medieval women disrupt Catholic definitions in patterns predicted by theory, choosing dutiful daughterhood or mystical return. Chapter two argues that O'Connor is conduit for the angry God of wrath. The plurality of voices in her later work ("Revelation"), disrupts narrative authority and deconstructs the Law. Chapter three argues that Oates's use of incest as trope expresses longing for and fury at the absent Mother. Chapter four charts Gordon's movement from the Father's Law (Final Payments) to the realm of the mother (Men and Angels).; These women's self-authorizations reveal Roman Catholic hegemony as less a monolith than a polyvocality. Roman Catholic discourse(s) may be said to constitute, but not determine, women. Through the gaps in Catholicism's master narrative, Roman Catholic women speak in many voices.