The Legend of Sister Beatrice: Crossing Boundaries
Mail-o demo, que prazer
non ouv’ én, fez-lle querer
tal ben a un cavaleiro
que lle non dava lezer,
tra en que a foi fazer
que sayú do mõesteiro;
mais ant’ ela foi leixar
chaves que tragía
na cinta, ant’ o altar
da en que criía.
Pero el Demonio urdió
que ella llegase a querer
a un galán caballero
que no cejó hasta hacerla
salirse del monasterio;
mas la monja, antes de huir,
fue a poner las llaves,
que ella traía en el cinto,
en el altar de la Virgen
en quien ella creía.
Cantiga XCIV de Alfonso X el Sabio
(1252-1284)
The first version of the story of a nun called Beatrice who escapes from a
convent to live in sin, appears in the work of Caesar of Heisterbach, (died circa
1240, although his Dialogus miraculorum appeared in 1473), and later in the
work of Johannes Herolt (Sermones discipuli or Promptuanum exemplorum,
1474). As Donald McGrady (McGrady 2011:2) points out, in both the works by
Heisterbach and Herolt, which are very similar, the devotion of the nun to the
Virgin (emphasized by her prayers and the leaving of keys upon the altar) was
repaid when, after living in sin as a prostitute for fifteen years, Beatrice returns to
the convent and is forgiven:
‘…por fin la cuitada vuelve a su monasterio, y alli descubre que ha sido reemplazada durante
todo este tiempo por la Virgen, y que tiene fama de muy honorable y santa.’
‘…finally the guilty nun returns to her monastery, only to find that she had been replaced all this
time by the Virgin, and that she is treated as a highly honorable and saintly figure’.
The quotation at the head of the essay comes from the Cantiga XCIV of Alfonso
X el Sabio (1221-1284). In the thirteenth century, there was religious tolerance in Toledo for example Christians, Jews and Muslims lived in harmony. The split
between the religious and the secular worlds was not as marked as it would be
later, with the coming of the Inquisition. In various Cantigas by Alfonso X el Sabio
not only does the nun have sexual relations with a man but she becomes
pregnant (recounted in Cantigas 7, 55, and 94, in which the lovers are said to
have several sons). The transgression of the nun in abandoning the convent,
leaving the sacred place behind her and entering the secular world, is treated in
a way that would seem more appropriate to the twenty-first century than the
thirteenth. In Cantiga 94, when the nun returns to the convent and recounts what
has happened to the community, she calls on her lover to confirm the truth of
what she says.
With the passage of time we see the gap between the religious and secular
worlds widening, and in the work of Félix de Vega Carpio (1562-1635), (better
known as Lope de Vega) in the play 'La Buena Guarda', the secular and religious
worlds are clearly separate. In the dilemma of the nun, in this play called Clara,
torn between her vocation and her human passion the split is very clear, but the
divine world is never completely absent. Félix, the convent's mayordomo,
(steward), abandons Clara because he has problems of conscience, and when
Clara returns to the convent to make penance for her sins, she clearly expects to
be punished. In Lope de Vega there is a strong sense of shame, and a
preoccupation with the division between divine and human love. Félix, in his
confused state, refers to Clara as being both his 'esposa' and 'eterno dueño', a
term more often associated with God, and by the end of the play fear of
accusations of blasphemy must have obliged Lope de Vega to re-establish that
term as referring to God rather than to a sinful woman. As Elaine Canning says
(Canning 2007:861)
‘Ultimately, fear of divine vengeance forces Félix to act again and to re-establish God as
the omnipresent dueño. Consequently, as a result of preoccupations with human and
divine love, the very title of ‘eterno dueño’ is displaced until it returns to its rightful
owner within this religious comedia.’
Lope de Vega explored human fallibility in this play and put a lot of his own
anxiety about human frailty into his character Félix, as he himself struggled with
his own frailties in preparing for ordination into the priesthood in 1614.
The legend of Sister Beatrice undergoes a number of transformations in its
reincarnation at various points in time, and across Europe, from the Middle Ages
to the nineteenth century. The lines from Cantiga 94 above refer to the fact that
before her departure, Beatrice leaves her keys on the Virgin’s altar, symbolising
her continued attachment to sacred love. After a period of transgression she later
repents and returns to the convent. In the mediaeval story we have both the
human impulse to passionate love for a man and the sacred love for the Virgin.
However one key element that is missing from these few lines of Alfonso X is the
notion of Beatrice as a gate-keeper, and thus symbolically someone on the
border between two worlds - the sacred and the profane. The version of the
legend re-told by José Zorrilla (1817-1893) is Margarita la Tornera. The 'tornera'
is the guardian at the gates of the convent, and it is in this poem that the legend
of Beatrice/Margarita encounters that of Don Juan, who first appears in the play
by Tirso de Molina (1584-1648) El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra.
The image of Don Juan was already established as that of the great seducer by
the time of Zorrilla, as he re-appears in numerous plays, not to mention the opera
by Mozart and the poem by Byron. In the Zorrilla poem Margarita conducts a
lengthy conversation with Don Juan, who regales her with tales of a life of
pleasure beyond the convent walls. As a gate-keeper, the nun has a foot in both
worlds - the closed world of the convent, and the world outside which is full of
vice - she is open to the possibility of flight from the convent, to being seduced by
passing strangers. By the nineteenth century, much is made of the idea of the
nun reaching the age at which her physical beauty would be of interest to
passing 'gentlemen', whereas an earlier, more strictly religious interpretation of
the legend would have simply opposed the sacred world devoted to the Virgin
within the convent walls and the sinfulness of the world outside the convent in
general. However it is in the Romantic period that there is an interest in a return
to mediaeval legend, though in the re-telling a greater openness to human
romantic love, with all its trials and tribulations, and a greater awareness of the
world of vice and debauchery that was never too far away, should true love fail.
In the short story by Charles Nodier, (1780-1844), Légende de Soeur Béatrix, he
delves first into the margins of classical literature, then the mediaeval period for
its tales of mystery - simple stories which are passed down from generation to
generation, pagan tales that have survived alongside those selected as the basis
of a proper, formal classical education. One of those centres on the monastery of
Notre-Dame-des-Épines-Fleuries. In the first part of the legend, a nun walking in
the grounds of the convent sees a vision of the Virgin Mary in a halo of light
around a flowering thorn bush, and the Virgin is then venerated at the convent
ever since, and this nun becomes known as 'The Saint'. Then two centuries later,
appears another nun, a descendant from the family of the Saint, who is custodian
of the holy shrine, and this guardian of the flame is Béatrix:
'La soeur custode s'appelait alors Béatrix. Agée de dix-huit ans tout au plus, elle avait à
peine entendu dire qu'elle fût belle, car elle était entrée à quinze ans dans la maison de la
sainte Vierge, aussi pure que ses fleurs.'
(The sister guarding the Convent was called Beatrice. Now barely eighteen, she had
hardly heard any man call her beautiful before at fifteen years of age she entered the
house of the Holy Virgin, as pure as the flowers she tended.) (Nodier 1961:788)
Nodier pictures Béatrix at eighteen, having entered the convent at fifteen, and
barely aware of accounts of her beauty. However Nodier paints her as a
passionate being, full of 'rêves, de mystérieuses langueurs et d'ineffables
transports', (dreams, mysterious sighings, and transports of delight) even though
her devotions are initially to the image of the Virgin. Then appears the figure of a
young man, Raymond, wounded in the forest, who arrives at the convent needing
care, and Béatrix recognises him as the young man to whom she might have
been betrothed, following the wishes of both their fathers. When she confesses
her feelings to the Virgin, she is clearly caught between the physical and spiritual
worlds, symbolised by the fresh flowers she places at the shrine and the dead
ones she hides in a scapulary. She runs away with Raymond and they live out
their passionate love for each other for a year, going to festivals and leading a
decadent life, but still she retains something of her allegiance to her life as a nun.
When Raymond tires of her, she spends years in the wilderness, and Nodier
makes much of her fall from grace, and her descent into a world of debauchery.
However, those dead flowers she kept come to flower again, symbolising the
resurgence of her former life of devotion, and when she eventually returns to the
convent, she is welcomed with open arms and forgiven, and honoured as a saint
in her turn after her death, thus echoing the mediaeval tales of Heisterbach and
Herolt .
To return to Zorrilla's poem, it was published in 1840-1841 in his ‘Leyendas y
Tradiciones’, and set in Palencia, a Castillian city. In this version of the tale,
Margarita is a sixteen year-old nun with a candid and foolish character, who is
persuaded to run off with Don Juan, leaving with the lines:
Al fin yo parto, Señora,
Mi confianza en Ti sabes;
En prueba, toma estas llaves….
Así Margarita hablando,
con lágrimas en los ojos
ante la imagen de hinojos
los sacros pies la besó,
y dejándola las llaves
y encendida la bujía,
traspuso la galería
ganó el jardín y partió
At last I depart, Señora,
You know I have trust in you;
In proof of this, take these keys
Talking in this way, Margarita,
With tears in her eyes
Knelt before the statue,
Kissed her scared feet,
And after leaving her
Crossed the gallery,
With a lighted candle,
Reached the garden and departed. (Zorilla 1965:73)
After six months Don Juan tires of the young nun and talks of this to an old
friend, who turns out to be the nun's brother, who Don Juan then kills in a duel.
Don Juan abandons Margarita in an inn, and she returns to the convent. In
echoes of Nodier's version, we find Margarita entering the convent at nightfall:
Margarita, amedrentada,
buscando asilo seguro
acogióse al templo oscuro…
Frightened, Margarita,
Seeking safe sanctuary,
In a dark temple, took refuge…(Zorilla 1965:103)
The Virgin tells her that she had taken her place because she was always
devoted to Her. There is both the simple, frank expression of devotion to the
Virgin, and a fascination with a taste for puerile loose living as symbolised by
Don Juan, echoing Zorrilla's more famous work, Don Juan Tenorio.
In Don Juan Tenorio, Don Juan enters a convent to seduce a nun, Doña Inés,
having won a wager with his friend Don Luis that he could seduce more women
in the space of a year. Don Juan tries to save himself by offering to marry the
nun, but when his offer is rejected by Don Gonzalo, her father, Don Juan kills the
father and his friend Don Luis. The play ends with the ghosts of Doña Inés and
Don Gonzalo fighting over Don Juan whose fate hangs in the balance between
heaven and hell, but in the end he escapes damnation.
In an English poem 'A Ballad of a Nun' by John Davidson, published in 'Ballads
and Songs' (1894) we find a lighter handling of the tale, with Beatrix by this time
already described as guilty of sin while in the convent, and needing to purge
herself with self-flagellation. She is quickly drawn to the world outside at carnival
time:
Fillet and veil in strips she tore;
Her golden tresses floated wide;
The ring and bracelet that she wore
As Christ's betrothed, she cast aside. (Davidson 1894:55)
In this version, she wanders half naked into the streets, and in a reversal of the
Spanish poem where she showed devotion to the Virgin Mary by kissing the feet
of the statue of the Virgin at the gate, she instead wantonly throws herself at the
feet of a young man, which she kisses, and asks to be taken to bed. She is still
taken back by the convent when she has had her fill of debauchery and returns
as a fallen woman, but in the Davidson version she is hardly led astray, but is
herself the instigator of her own descent into the world of sin.
There is a progression in the evolution of the legend from a Catholic tale of
redemption, investing much in the power of the Virgin Mary to forgive those who
stray from their faith, to one in which there is an increasingly prurient interest in
the image of the fallen woman, even the thoroughly debauched woman of
Davidson's poem, contrasted against the background of an image of a pure,
untouched one. In the tale by Nodier, there are two nuns, the Saint, who saw the
Virgin in a bush of thorns that miraculously flowered and were filled with light,
and then two centuries later the more ambiguous figure of Beatrice, who is
capable of being driven by earthly passion while retaining something of her
earlier life, to which she eventually returns. Davidson's figure is marked as one
who dreams of sinning even while chastising herself for her wayward thoughts,
but who eventually gives herself totally to earthly passion. She is also described
as a force of nature, with references to the wild weather leading her away from
the convent, echoing her inner lust.
Based on the archetype of Don Juan, José de Espronceda, (1810-1842) in El
Estudiante de Salamanca, conjured a parallel figure, Don Félix de Montemar:
‘Segundo don Juan Tenorio
Alma fiera y insolente,
Irreligioso y valiente
Altanero y reñidor:
Siempre el insulto en los ojos,
En los labios la ironía,
Nada tiene y todo fía
De su espada y su valor.’
A second Don Juan,
A fierce and insolent soul,
Irreligious and brave,
Arrogant and quarrelsome:
Insult in his eyes,
Irony on his lips,
He fears nothing, trusting only
His sword and his valour.'
(Espronceda 1979:4)
He seduces Elvira:
' Elvira, amor del estudiante un día,
Tierna y feliz de su amante ufana,
Cuando al placer su corazón se abría,
Como al rayo del sol rosa temprana:
Del fingido Amador que la mentía,
La miel falaz que sus labios mana
Bebe en su ardiente sed, el pecho ajeno
De que oculto en la miel hierve el veneno
Elvira, once cherished by the student,
Was tender and happy and proud of him;
So her heart blossomed with her pleasure,
Like the morning rose basking in the sun;
Dying with thirst, she drank
The false honey that flowed from the lips
Of her deceitful lover, her trusting breast
Innocent to the sweet, wicked poison.'
(Espronceda:1979:4-5)
Elvira is though a more conventional figure of the innocent young woman led
astray by the cavalier seducer, and as the poem evolves the image of virginal
purity cast aside by a false lover again has echoes of the Beatrice story, but
Espronceda's is a classically Romantic vision of the fallen woman, while Nodier's
story, and Davidson's poem especially, reflect a more prurient, masculine
fascination with the woman's loss of innocence, but show the woman as capable
of not only bringing about her own downfall but also of revelling in sensual
pleasure. However, the woman doesn't speak for herself, she is seen as a
character in a melodrama, viewed from a distance, and the return to the convent
ensures a bourgeois comfort in that the woman is ultimately saved by faith,
whereas in the Don Juan story women are merely cast aside and replaced by
other lovers. Don Félix however is a more macho incarnation of Don Juan than
that conjured by Byron, who rather allows himself to be seduced by women than
taking the trouble to seduce them!
The evolution of the Beatrice story in the nineteenth century can be seen as one
that remains within the framework of the Catholic faith while stretching the
boundaries of acceptability in its exploration of female sexuality. Much is made of
the virginity/Virgin dichotomy - the tension between spiritual purity and longing for
sexual fulfilment, but it is not seen as being in the power of the women to
experience sexual fulfilment for themselves without being either completely
damned or, 'saved' through the forgiveness of the church, through a return to
faith. There is a strong sense of a 'male gaze' in the framing of these tales.
In the Beatrice legend, and the legend of Don Juan with which it is closely
intertwined, the loss of innocence is always set within a moral frame of
transgression and divine retribution. By the nineteenth century the power of the
divine to evoke the kind of fear that Lope de Vega's audience would have
experienced was much diminished, and literary creation could suspend the
dominant conventional Christian morality by exploring themes that were rooted in
distant time (such as ancient legends) or by reviving figures that were already
well-known and thus familiar Baroque villains, like Don Juan. But if anything it is
the modernity of the thirteenth century Alfonso X el Sabio, echoed in the later
texts of Heisterbach and Herolt, in allowing the pregnant nun to be welcomed
back into the convent that brings the Catholic story at least as far as the
nineteenth century. Beatrice, (or Clara or Margarita) are figures in a landscape,
and as fallen nuns they are variously 'pure' or sinning, sinful or sinned against
perhaps, but they are not yet modern women, capable of making judgements for
themselves, and assuming their own destiny.
John Dixon and Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres
References
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British Library)
Carpio, Lope de Vega (1562-1635), 2002. – La Buena Guarda – (María
del Carmen Artigas ed.) Madrid, Verbum
McGrady, Donald 2011, Alfonso X: Fuente de La Buena Guarda de Lope
de Vega, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 88:7
Canning, Elaine, 2007, Identity and the refashioning of role in La Buena
Guarda: The cases of Carrizo and Félix’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies
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Zorilla y Moral, José (1817-93), 1946.: Leyendas y Tradiciones (Buenos
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(M.A. Rees ed.), London : Grant and Cutler : Tamesis Books, , (Extracts
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