The Female Characters in Agnes of God
by Dr Pauline Dimech
The play presents us with three highly distinct female characters. What do you make out of the characters in the play and the interplay between them?
There are three female characters in the play, and these are highly distinct. Sister Agnes is the twenty-one-year-old nun, who is being accused of strangling her newborn child discarding it into a wastebasket in her convent room. It remains unclear almost till the end whether Sister Agnes is deranged, an imbecile or a saint.
The second character is Mother Miriam Ruth, the Mother Superior of the convent. She is a worldly-wise religious woman who wants to protect the fragile Sister Agnes from any further psychological pain. She believes in the young nun. She believes that the young nun is “touched by God,” that Agnes exists on a different spiritual plane from others, shrouded in an innocence that Mother Miriam views as miraculous. So she is highly protective of Agnes, and afraid of how the court-appointed psychiatrist might dissect Agnes’s psyche and diminish or destroy her fragile spirit.
The third character is Dr Martha Livingstone, a professional woman, a lapsed catholic. She takes on the case of the young nun in order to determine whether Sister Agnes is fit to stand trial for the murder of the baby. In the process, Dr Livingstone learns about Agnes’ sheltered life and her obsession with God and with suffering. She makes every attempt to find out who the father of the baby is, to no avail. Dr Livingstone stirs doubts about what goes on within the religious life, particularly the abuse of authority within that context. She stirs doubt about the authenticity of mystical experience, and manifests its similarity to mental illnesses. But, just as much, Dr Livingstone starts a conversation about the Divine and his manifestations, the Church and our relationship to it, sainthood and what it stands for, and so on.
All three characters are deeply moving. The interplay between them is one of conflict, they perplex each other, and they perplex us. They distrust each other, they confront each other, they express concern for each other. It is an interplay that goes beyond the physical, and flows into the philosophical. You have a conflict between two life-worlds antithetical life worlds that seem opposed to each other, so that the play becomes a soul-stirring drama about all sorts of things: about miracles and the clash between reason and faith, “the secular world and the religious world”, the celestial and the terrestrial, and it is through these three distinct characters that all this is achieved.
The play doesn’t have any male characters, yet both the Church and (one would expect) the Courts at the time were predominantly male. What would you comment to this dynamic between the patriarchal institutions and these three characters grappling with each other?
The play does not have any male characters, but that does not mean that the male is not present. Also, the male is present through the underlying references to various institutions. There is a violent dynamic between the patriarchal institutions and these three characters, both individually, and in their relationship with one another. The first institution, you could say, is the Church, which is presented here as a patriarchal structure, and as a structure of domination. You can also see quite clearly that the convent is accountable to the members of the hierarchy who would be male, and also that Mother Miriam has assimilated within herself a kind of role of domination, so that she brings up excuses, such as the excuse of protection, and of avoidance of scandal, and in doing so forces Agnes to be a keeper of terrible secrets..
Besides the Church and the convent, you have other institutions at play: religion is the fundamental one, marriage is also mentioned, and, of course, the courts as an institution, which is also a patriarchal structures, in particular at a time when this play was written in 1979. So you can imagine, Dr Livingstone would have been a female psychologist working with male lawyers. And there are various male elements present. Perhaps you could say that the process of the investigation, becomes much more like the investigation by the inquisition, not only because some very irreligious things come to the surface, but also because religious, rather than psychological issues come to the fore.
Perhaps, what is more serious, is the fact that the very concept of the Divine in this play is very male. We are forced to think of a God who punishes. A God who conceived the child in Sister Agnes’ womb, and then, in his omnipotence, allowed her to kill it, to think of a God who created us, only to then lets us die. This dynamic between these three characters is very much dependent upon the implicit presence of the male figures, however absent they are, and very much dependent upon th institutions that are mentioned.
The play leaves it open to interpretation whether the baby was conceived through supernatural or human intervention. The ending is somewhat inconclusive. The question remains: was the child conceived without benefit of male agency? Either way, the intervention would be associated with masculinity and in the circumstance, an element of violence too (given the state of Agnes). Yet, this violent aspect seems to be only investigated by the court in a limited way. What are your thoughts on this?
Violence, and blood are an integral part of the play, taking various forms. Agnes, for instance, has hallucinations about her dead mother, who in life tortured her horribly with smouldering cigarettes. The stigmata which appear on her body are themselves violent impositions, the birth of the child, and then the murder, are again very bloody events. The violence referred to is always, interestingly enough, indirectly caused by the absent male figures: the absent father of Agnes, for instance, was an indirect cause of the abuse which Agnes suffered from her mother, the birth was a consequence of the violent act of the “lover” who was responsible for the impregnation of Agnes.
The violence which we have in the play takes various forms, therefore: it takes the form of child abuse. It takes the form of rape. It takes the form of mental illness. It takes the form of hallucinations, or of simple memories, that remind the characters of a horrific past. It takes the form of a severe, judgmental attitude of women towards other members of their sex. The violence that results from a strong super-ego that punishes us disproportionately is another example of violence that appears in this play. Violence also takes the form of a harsh God, or rather of an unfortunate representation of God as a ruthless being.
The violent aspect in this play seems to be only investigated by the court in a limited way. In wishing to establish whether Sr Agnes is in a sufficiently stable mental state to go on trial, all the other “violences” seem to be disregarded. True, the question as to how the child was conceived remains unresolved. But there are so many other things that remain unresolved in this play, most probably intentionally.
At the end, all three women — in their various ways — pay a price for a situation that was set off by something outside of their control. How much do you think women today still face a similar fate where they end up as characters in a story not of their making.
These three women represent the suffering of women, the suffering that results because of the Church, because of religion: but also because of their gender. All three pay a high price for a situation that was set off by something or someone outside their control. Agnes, for instance, has been abused, physically, vocally and emotionally, and she represents the victim who exits one abusive relationship, and finds herself in another one which is just as abusive, although in a different way. Clearly, religious life is not for her. She is totally unsuited. Mother Miriam left a wretched marriage to enter an institute of consecrated life which is still very much under the control of a male authority. Dr Livingstone suffered the death of a sister as a consequence of the strict observance of the rule.
Women today still face a similar fate: they often end up as characters in a story not of their making. Women are victims of sexual violence, of crime, of physical violence, of sexual harassment, and research shows that, along with children, women are the biggest victims of war, and even of climate change.
This play reminds us that women are often the forgotten survivors. In this case, the women have survived child abuse, marriage failure, and the loss of a loved one. But this story wishes to be a reminder of the price that women have to pay just for being women.
