The Ecstasy Of Saint Beauty
A few months ago I had the pleasure of an edifying correspondence with an old friend who had recommended to me a trilogy written by Anne Rice (she of the vampire books fame) in which Rice re-imagines the old fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty as an extended BDSM scenario. A very extended, quarter-million words-long scenario, as it happens. Many ErosBlog readers are doubtless familiar with this trilogy already, but for those that aren’t and who like that sort of thing, I’m happy to report that all three books appear to be still in print.
In the course of our discussion, my learned friend grumbled a bit about the fact that, as of late, Ms. Rice appears to have turned her back on such agreeably lurid and salacious content. Once a self-described atheist, she has returned to the Roman Catholicism of her childhood and sworn off writing about vampires, flagellation, etc.
Tish-tosh, I responded. It’s a free country, isn’t it?
Indeed it is, or at least ought to be, my liberty-loving comrade hastened to reply. But isn’t Rice dissing her fans a bit, when she disparages the themes those fans embraced so loyally and profitably?
I turned this thought over in my mind for a while.
What came up was something rather odd. A memory (or possibly confabulation) from childhood, of being a ten year-old faculty brat tagging along with a group of American college students on a tour of a church in Rome called Santa Maria della Vittoria. As you art lovers should be aware, this church contains a famous sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) called The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.
Ten year-old me didn’t really understand why the big kids were elbowing each other and trying not to snicker. Later in life I discovered that Teresa of Avila left us a rather vivid account of her ecstasy, which makes what’s going on here a little clearer.
Beside me on the left appeared an angel in bodily form … He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seem to be all on fire … In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one can not possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it — even a considerable share.
But it’s spiritual pain, so that’s okay, I guess.
Still I couldn’t help thinking more along these lines. I also remembered seeing a lot of renderings of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Pietro Perugino (1446-1524) is perhaps typical in his generous rendering of Sebastian’s arrow-violated flesh:
And one cannot help but notice what pretty flesh it is, too.
No one is safe from suffering in this grand artistic tradition, not even — especially not even — its central figure:
That’s by Caravaggio (1571-1610), a painter of genius who, for my money, would have extracted homoerotic interest from a still-life of a bed of gravel, had he chosen to paint one.
I’m not sure whether Albert von Keller (1844-1920) is mocking this tradition or part of it, but it’s pretty clear he was willing to take it a logical step forward in Mondschein (1894):
These are only four works, presented here only because they happened to catch my eye on a certain day. Other works of a similar inspiration and part of the same grand religio-visual narrative could easily be found by the truckload. I have no doubt that many ErosBlog readers can add their own favorites to the list. If you’re of a certain cast of mind, you will be led to the suspicion that an anthropologist from Alpha Centauri, given the record of humanity’s visual culture and tasked with identifying its largest and longest-lived fraternity of BDSM enthusiasts, might point to a certain institution headquartered in Rome.
For my part I shall confine myself to a more modest conjecture, in response to my friend, and addressed to any fan of Anne Rice who might be feeling dismayed by the current turn in her life. Without this particular grand narrative, in which Ms. Rice was reared, and back into which she has now written herself, there might never have been her own distinctive body of work at all.
Or to put it more simply: no Holy Mother Church, no Naughty Beauty Tales.
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According to my quotes file (which does not have an attribution for this), Stan Rice once said of his wife Anne:
“She’s not into sadomasochism. She just went to a Catholic school.”
Oh, yes. I always enjoy your thoughts, Faustus, and these are particularly great.
I just got done reading part of Robert Mills’ book Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure, and Punishment in Medieval Culture, specifically the chapter “Invincible Virgins.” Apparently lots of people can’t help but comment on a relation between medieval imagery and . For good reason. It’s as if sexuality could intermingle with all these different forms (sainthood, spirituality, countless others) in such interesting ways, and then suddenly sexuality was categorized away into its own cloister. Religion’s too wonderfully complex to not have room for S&M, homoerotics, and all the rest.
At least, that’s what I get out of it. Thanks Faustus. :)
Once a self-described atheist, she has returned to the Roman Catholicism of her childhood and sworn off writing about vampires, flagellation, etc.
Me thinks the glorious old girl went through menopause, and stopped being compelled by jucy girly thrills and frissions and desires, and started yearning more seriously for eternal verities, deeper meaning, and peace.
But that’s just a guess.
See also:
http://www.eros...tasy/
on this verry site.
You found a better picture of Saint T. than I did.
Religion is about our relationship with the universe (and sometimes its creator). That usualy includes the way we conduct our lives in harmony with the universe (and perhaps its creator). Life includes sex. As A fan of moral erotica I don’t see that there is necisarily a conflict between the moral and the erotic. Certainly there is imoral erotica but it is less interesting to me. Somtimes I think these artists understood their subject better than their patrons.
My patron Saint when I did my Holy Communion was St T. I read the big book of saints when I was 11 and liked her because, in my 11 year old mind, she got stabbed by an angel which was cool, I quoted that text to the sister and the father……… You know it now certainly explains a lot now.
my god, that Mondschein is gorgeous.
I watched an interview with AR once, wherein she alluded to (or outright stated– my memory is somewhat vague on this) the fact that she had written her vampire series in reaction to the loss of a child she’d had, i.e., what if there were a world available in which such things did not have to happen. What would be the consequences?
And so, I have to wonder if the Sleeping Beauty series was just another exploration of a similar nature, and if the Christan-oriented (-focused?) literature she’s writing now is not yet another step upon her path as well.
In any event, while I see her as something of a maverick of the paranormal (or paranormal romance) resurgence within fiction, I don’t think she’s the best example of either paranormal lit or erotica. Or the combo. For that, I personally enjoy Morgan Hawke, though YMMV.
I agree with you about the conflation of beauty/pain/erotica that exists in the Catholic tradition, and in Anne Rice’s novels. It was always in her books, from the beginning, and it was one of the awesomest things about them–how they seemed to skirt the gorgeous fringe of religion and secular sesuality.
But if you read her comments, especially the controversial rant she put into the Amazon reviews for her book Blood Canticle, it appears as though she’s turned away from that kind of beauty at all. She’s all but repudiated most of her work, and the very things fans seem to love the most–that line between faith and the erotic–seems to be what she’s most disgusted at having promoted.
I’ve been a fan of hers since 1991, and I feel like she’s turned from the beauty described in your post, and taken refuge in a willfully blind faith. This could be menopause or age, or the serious health problems she endured in the late 90’s, or the death of her husband in 2001 (?).
Something put “the fear of god” back in her, and not in a good way. I do feel she betrayed her characters and her fans. She’s entitled to believe whatever she wants, but her disgusted repudiation of what she created, and of what millions of people grew to love and identify with, was a bit hard to take. She lost a lot of fans, not because she turned back to Catholicism, but because it was such a hostile and judgmental Catholicism.
She in essence built a world, and then judged and abandoned it. It’s less faith, than “god complex”, if you ask me.
While ruminating on your quote from S T, I was struck by a consideration of corporeal geography. If the “angel” plunged his spear directly into her heart, how did he manage to hit her entrails which are a good foot lower than the heart? Unless he was approaching from another direction, in which case, perhaps, the spear should also be in quotes.A somewhat euphemistic statement methinks.