Girl Mary

Last year, I opened a form for the documentation of my current project, which can still be completed.

One of the questions is “What book clarified what femininity means to you or in which you found the closest vision to it?”

Some books on that list, I already read like Scarlett or La Medeleni. Of the last one, I don’t remember much, but it is a school lecture and my niece said all the female characters comit suicide wtf So, maybe I should read it again. Statistically more men kill themselves. Women are more resilient, but the author is a man and I wouldn’t be surprised if he put his insecurities on the female characters as male ones couldn’t be that way at the time. Scarlett is the continuation of Gone With The Wind which was my favorite novel as a teenager, though by a different author. Like a fan fic hihi. Both authors women. I think if I wouldn’t have read anything else since then, maybe it would have been my answer too.

Another answer was Women Who Run With Wolves which seems to be a classic for feminists. I never got to read it, so it was my first choice from the 20 something books I was recommended (quite a few people had no such book). It took me several month to read and inspired me to create the performance Who Is Afraid Of Baba Yaga? It is also the only book I ever read the notes as well and the bibliography and selected some doezen or more other books to read of which I already read two. I will probably have to read more jungian stuff at some point …or not, idk.

However, the book I want to write about now is another suggestion I got which is “Girl Mary” by Petru Popescu, which is translated in Romanian as “Girl from Nazaret”. As the author is a US rezident for over 30 years, I suspect the first publication was in English and after in Romanian. Don’t know why he chose this translation. They don’t seem to say the same thing. However, neither emphasizes virginity either, which makes sense since there is no virgin birth in this book. Actually it ends before she runs away from Nazaret. Supposedly this should be a trilogy, but it is unclear to me if the other two book were ever written. Feels like this is a good ending for the story too.

I also like the title as it underlines that she was a girl, not a woman, though the entire book revolves around her getting married and being sexualized by most boys and men she meets since she was 13 years old.

This was a very hard read. I started it last year and left it aside. Then, I got the idea to do an artwork about Mary of Nazaret and decided I should read this book too.

It is fiction and it is well writen, but in the begining of the book there’s a review which says the author gives an accurate description of the life in Palestine of the time Jesus was born.

Inaccuracies which were evident to me:

✨️ there is no mention in ancient Greece or Rome writings of the sky or anything being blue. Egyptians had blue paint, but it wasn’t widley used and even in India where the Gods are nowadays depicted blue, in the Veda, the Gods are dark grey at best. The referance being the colour of the stormy sky or something metaphorical like that.

✨️ the ink wasn’t blue, but black or dark grey, at least in the Roman Empire

✨️ Rome is presented as care free regarding virginity, but men were taking as wife girls before they menstruated to make sure the children were theirs. Women were also presented as free and powerful to some extent, but they had no rights, iresprective of their wealth which didn’t exist since they couldn’t own anything.

Overall, the book seems to be written with modern interpretations and everything seems presented quite stereotypically. In my ignorance, I never wondered where the muslim habits of checking women’s virginity, honor murders and other horrific things like that came about. It seemed to me that in part they could have been influenced by Rome, but turns out that the Jews might have had those habits before Islam. I would need to read an actual history book on this though. But esentially this is why the book was very hard to read. The Jews are portrayed like the shitiest people in this book, especially comparing to the way the Romans are portrayed, which wasn’t particularly good either. Romans just seemed better towards women which is historically false. However, my reasearch for The Thread of the Goddess lead me to find out that the biase against menstruation started with the Jews. For the Romans it was just the signal a girl was too old to marry.

I am particularly sensitive when I hear bad things about Jews, especially since I awoke to the horrible reality of what Israhell is doing and how this context gives way to more hate towards Jews under the pretance of caring for Palestinians. I can not easily shove it aside as fantasy because stories shape our beliefs more than accurate historical evidence does. However, I went on reading since I looked the autbor up and he is married to a Jewish woman. Hopefully she provided some insight into the female character too.

I also faced resistance in reading this book because of the sexualisation of the female characters. However, this book was suggested a a book that shaped someone’s view on femininity so I decided to step back from my own view and see what I could extract from what I read.

Mary is a girl who grew up too fast by modern standards. It seems that girls were raised to expect marriage as soon as they had their first period and neither sex or menstruation were tabu among women. Girls are still socialized to be caregivers and they still grow up faster than boys who are left carefree, but sexually girls nowadays might just be more ignorant than they were back than. After all, the only way to protect your daughter was to prepare her for what’s inevitable. Here, my mind rebels. That this suffering was inevitable, but what I saw in the character Mary was acceptance. It is what it is. But also boundries and security in herself, making sure what is is the best she can insure for herself in that context.

Mary also questions a lot. She questions a God that is portraied in this book as a sub mediocre man, but it is what it is. The question that stayed with me was “What did Eve, what did women do since then, that men are so afraid of them?”. The author does not say clearly why he is afraid of women, but at least he is aware he is afraid. I have my theories on this too.

I will not get into all the stereotypes of men being rough and women gentle or women and men not getting along, but not being able to live without one another either and so on because the whole book is a stereotype with a twist and maybe that is the charm of it.

By the end of the book, I was feeling for the characters and could even laugh and feel ease when Mary thought “It is hard to have children, even before they are born.” This thought came to her after she, 5 months pregnant, climed a mountain on foot to uncover her friend who was burried there and take her back to Nazaret to burry her in the cimetery. She didn’t do it alone, but still… it is hard to have children regardless…