The film Stigmata & the Challenge of Conceptualizing Women as Spiritual Agents

The history of Western religion has, for the most part been a history of men's religious stories, practices, and writings. It is quite rare and exceptional to find accounts of religion or practicing groups that place women's experiences at the center. Books, films, and various other cultural products bear this out by demonstrating a stubborn lack of attention to women's religious experiences. At first glance, the movie Stigmata seems like a film that defies this generalization. The movie, starring Patricia Arquette, places a female protagonist and her mystical experiences with Christ at the center of the plot. The woman is modeled after a great figure in the Catholic tradition, St. Francis, and hers is seemingly the story around which the entire movie is structured. Though this apparently unusual use of a woman's direct experience with God seems on an immediate level to be very transgressive, however, the film ends up being even more hegemonic, in a sense because of the way in which it subtly reinforces normative notions of the male-centeredness of supernatural experiences of God in the Catholic tradition.

In this paper I will look at how Stigmata represents sex and gender roles in the Catholic church and in secular America and of how it uses women's sexuality and assumptions about women's lack of spiritual agency to ultimately undermine the legitimacy of authentic feminine experience with the Christian God. I will argue that the movie's emphasis on very structuralist notions of good and evil, man and woman, pure and impure, inevitably sets up a system in which a female's religious authority will be lost. A patriarchal tradition, as the Catholic church most certainly represents, must always scramble to accommodate the abnormality of a woman experiencing a direct link with God. The unwillingness to imagine a situation in which a character like that of Patricia Arquette's character, Frankie, would have a legitimate direct experience with God is a common one throughout the Western (and Western-occupied) world. The emphasis on only granting legitimacy to the written word in the Western religious tradition has always created an environment of hostility to women's non-discursive religious experiences. This paper will also look at how the religious conflicts between the Western patriarchal tradition and female members of a non-Western religious tradition (specifically a group of Ngarrindjeri women) have unfolded and at how such conflicts are similar to the conflict that is represented between Frankie and the priests who would control her in Stigmata.

The Movie as Text
Though in the trailers, the movie Stigmata was billed more as a horror film, it definitely defies that genre. The film features the experiences of Frankie Paige, a young American woman, a self-professed atheist, who suddenly begins exhibiting the wounds of the stigmata after receiving a rosary that was owned by a devout South American priest, Father Alameida. Eventually it is revealed that Father Alameida was an original translator of a mysterious gospel (based loosely on the Gospel of Thomas) who has now somehow possessed Frankie through his rosary. The movie chronicles the intervention of a scientist/priest, Father Andrew Kiernan, and his attempt to save Frankie before the final wound of the stigmata kills her.
Andrew, a most unorthodox priest and a scientist for the Vatican, assures Frankie at the beginning of the film that only the deeply devout are visited with the wounds of the stigmata, and how it is that Frankie has received the wounds remains the mystery to be solved through most of the movie. Finally it is revealed that Father Alameida was a stigmatic, and it is through his possession of Frankie's body that she is exhibiting the stigmata.

The movie opens with scenes of Andrew Kiernan, played by Gabriel Byrne, investigating the death of Father Alameida. There is a definite feeling of sacredness and solemnity as Andrew carries out his scientific investigation of the statue that weeps over the corpse of the holy Alameida. This opening scene portrays the seriousness and the gravity of the work that Andrew is doing and that Father Alameida has done. In stark contrast to this, the scene interspersed with and then immediately following the opening credits depicts Frankie drinking and dancing at a wild club and then having a graphic sexual encounter with her boyfriend (who then disappears for most of the remainder of the movie). The movie certainly foregrounds Frankie's sexuality; in fact, at the beginning of the movie, Frankie reveals that she thinks she is pregnant. During an early scene in the hospital, she is informed that she is not pregnant. It is never really clear, though, whether she loses the baby or was never really pregnant. She loses the physical baby, but she is filled with the spirit of the dead priest; regardless, her body is constructed as a vessel. Frankie's unapologetic sensuality stands in sharp contrast to the sanctity of the scenes of Alameida and Andrew Kiernan.

Another crucial aspect of the movie that bears analyzing is that the writers could not resist interjecting a love story. A movie with a female main character rarely gets by without having a love story involved, and Stigmata was no exception. This actually works out in a rather bizarre way, as the object of Frankie's desire is the rogue scientist/priest, Andrew Kiernan. From the first time the two meet, Frankie flirts with the priest, and he reveals his noble chastity, turning down her advances. Here we see greater evidence of the structural opposition that sets women up as being more embodied, more sexualized, and men as being more spiritual, closer to God. Eventually it is clear that Frankie wants Andrew and that he resists her. Playing right into the cultural narrative that says a good love story is made all the better with a rescue by the man, Andrew sweeps in at the last moment and not only rescues Frankie from the maniacal cardinal who is trying to strangle her, but also exorcises the dead priest from her body just in time to prevent the fifth and final wound of the stigmata from killing her. The movie ends, of course, with a kiss between the two of them, and with the promise of something more.

The movie intersperses scenes of the exclusively male-dominated Vatican in the infinitely holy Vatican City with scenes of the hair saloon that Frankie works at in Pittsburgh. The hair saloon is certainly a female dominated space, and in it women gossip about their daily lives: boyfriends, dates, etc., while in the Vatican scenes, men are discussing matters of great importance. After being afflicted with the first of the wounds of the stigmata, Frankie is asked by a doctor whether she is under any stress at work. Not believing that someone would think she would do such a thing to herself, Frankie responds in a somewhat self-deprecating manner, replying incredulously, "I cut hair."

The correlation between Frankie and St. Francis of Assisi is one that the movie goes to great lengths to reinforce. Her name is the feminine form of the name Francis, and St. Francis was reputed to be among the first in history to be afflicted with the stigmata. The movie ends with a striking scene in which a statue of St. Francis is juxtaposed with images of Frankie walking along in the mist with birds lighting on her outstretched arm. The significance of connecting Frankie to St. Francis carries on with the notion that a woman's spiritual legitimacy must always be defined in terms of a man.

The Movie as a Hegemonic Reinforcement of Dualistic Western Patriarchy
A structuralist theoretical model assumes that there is an essential structure to the human mind, and that cultural artifacts in every society are evidence of this common structure of the brain. Central to this is the notion that binary oppositions (e.g., male/female, nature/nurture, public/private) are fundamental in ascertaining meaning in any given system, be it language, culture, nature, etc. This school of thought was developed by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. According to Lévi-Strauss's theories, universal patterns in cultural systems are products of the universal structure of the human mind. No single element in such a system has meaning except as an integral part of a set of structural connections. These interconnections are said to be binary in nature and are viewed as the permanent, organizational categories of experience (Mascia-Lees and Black, 70-73).

For our uses here, the structural opposition between the sacred and the profane, discussed in greater anthropological detail by Emile Durkheim (1961), will be the key binary that dictates how events in the film Stigmata become narrated and conceptualized. Emile Durkheim identifies the distinctive trait of religious thought as being this "division of the world into two domains, the one containing all that is sacred, the other all that is profane" (Durkheim, 52). Emphasizing the singular importance of these concepts in human thought, Durkheim sees "no other example of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated or so radically opposed to one another" (Durkheim, 53).

Feminist critiques of Levi-Strauss and the structuralist model have pointed out some of the flaws in this influential argument. The most significant flaw that Mascia-Lees and Black identify is that the data does not really substantiate Levi-Strauss' assumption that all societies have had binary oppositions at the foundation of their mental processes. There is a problematic degree of ethnocentrism in assuming that because Westerners in this time and place think in a certain way, that it is the fundamental structure of the human brain. The same critique can be applied to Durkheim's case for the universality of the division of the sacred and the profane. The ethnocentrism in Durkheim's work is even more apparent, in that feminist anthropologists have now produced ethnographies of societies that fundamentally disprove the absolute distinction between the sacred and the profane. An example of such fieldwork that could trouble the notion of an absolute distinction between profanity and sacrality, an ethnography of the Ngarrindjeri by Dr. Diane Bell (1998), will be discussed in the next section.
What structural analyses are very useful for, however, is an analysis of why dominant Western groups respond in certain vociferous ways to things that would blur those binaries in which they have so much invested. This critique is key in Stigmata, as the movie is the very effective acting out of assimilating a potentially transgressive aspect of dominant Western structural thought into a perfectly hegemonic discourse. A woman having a direct experience of God in the Catholic tradition, as this movie presents, is very dangerous in the way it blurs boundaries between the sacred and the profane. There is an intrinsic problematic and an inevitability in presenting a woman's mystical experience of Christ in a binary framework. The tradition of the sacred and the profane is not conducive to permitting generative places for women.

There is a long and troubling tradition in the Catholic tradition of women having supernatural and embodied experiences of God and of the church frantically trying to contain such experiences in their rigid binaries of Truth and Heresy. The very notion of an embodied experience of God (God being equated with the Spirit, the unembodied) as in the stigmata, is already a threat to the opposition between the sacred and the profane. For a woman to exhibit such a direct link is even more problematic, as the woman's body is seen as the polluted body, the impure vessel that is not worthy to channel the spirit of God. Along these lines, the movie would be much more subversive of this structural opposition if it had been Frankie who was channeling the spirit of God. This was not the case, however. It was the holy, the sacred, Father Alameida who had experienced the wounds of the stigmata all through his life. Frankie, through some strange transference when her mother gives her Alameida's rosary, is channeling the priest. Her profane body ultimately serves only as a vessel through which the male priest is bestowed with the wounds of the male savior. Just before they attempt an exorcism, Andrew Kiernan says to Cardinal Houseman, "The girl is fighting for her life. If she receives another wound she is going to die unless we help her." The implication being that these men are the only thing standing between the inactive girl and certain death.

Sherry Ortner (cited in Mascia-Lees and Black), expanding on Levi-Strauss' model of structuralism, argues that the oppression of women is due to women's closer tie to nature. Women, through their bodies being tied to childbirth, menstruation and the like, are more associated with the materiality of the world. This is portrayed in the movie clearly. Frankie's body is sexualized. She is depicted as being merely the vessel for the perpetuation of Father Alameida's noble mission. She bleeds constantly throughout the movie, and is possessed not just by Alameida, but at some points by demons that take control of her body. The movie is continually trying to reinforce Frankie's lack of agency, her connection to Ortner's feminine materiality that must be manipulated by the masculine, intentional force of culture. She is presented as a victim of circumstance who has very little freedom to act. She is the vessel, the messenger. At one key point in the movie, Alameida has completely taken over Frankie's body and is causing her to write an Aramaic account of the lost gospel on her apartment wall. Kiernan rushes in, begins taking photographs and asks, "Who are you?" Alameida, speaking through Frankie's body, replies in Italian, "The messenger is not important." That is to say, the embodied Frankie is not important, only the higher message of the dead priest. It is only when, during the exorcism scene at the end of the movie, Andrew Kiernan offers to himself be Alameida's messenger that Frankie can recover and survive. Kiernan, however, is not visited with the wounds of the stigmata, and is able to move about and do the actual work the Alameida was so passionate about, the dissemination of the lost gospel.

The Catholic church was, not surprisingly, very critical of this film. If ever there were an organization that is entirely dependent on its understanding of the naturalness of the structural opposition, it would be the Catholic church. The greatest controversy about the film would have to be that its epilogue states that it bases its 'gospel of the true words of Jesus' on an actual non-canonical gospel, the Gospel of Thomas. In an article entitled, "Hidden Gospels," Professor Philip Jenkins presents such an argument, complaining that the movie unfairly sets up a dichotomy that identifies the Catholic church as sinister and bad. "…the whole hidden gospels theme is just profoundly anti-Catholic at its core. It appeals to the millions of people who believe that the church has been sitting on the secrets of true Christianity for two thousand years and that someday, truth will out." (sic)

The Movie as Marginalizing Women's Religious Experience
In the Western Cartesian tradition, there is a tremendous investment in maintaining the separation between how men and women are thought of and how we conceptualize what is true and what is not true. The larger issue of the problematic of foregrounding a woman's experience of God is a potential undermining force to that Western notion that men are the spiritual creatures and women are the earthly ones. Strategies of accommodation and containment as to how to deal with women's spiritual experiences often run along very predictable lines. The need of the Australian government (and society) to discredit the religious claims of a group of indigenous women is dependent on this same structural notion we have been looking at. If we assume that all things are, in the structuralist tradition, either true or not true, then it is apparent how much of an investment the Western intellectual, political, and theological machine would have in discrediting and undercutting the significance of women as having non-discursive and embodied religious experiences. Similar to the way in which the significance of a woman exhibiting the wounds of the stigmata had to be undercut in the film to maintain the masculine control over Christian religious experience, the significance of the Ngarrindjeri women having religious connections between their bodies and the land was a potential threat to the hegemony of the Western colonizers that had to be contained.

A patriarchal system (as post-colonial Australian courts, the Catholic church, and, let's face it, the Hollywood filmmaking industry) tends to be very hesitant to place a woman's story in a position of prominence or to grant it any real legitimacy. In Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: a World That is, Was, and Will Be, Diane Bell describes the difficulties faced by Australian Aboriginal women when they tried to stand up to the Australian courts and claim as sacred sites the lands around the Hindmarsh Island, Murray Mouth, and Goolwa area. The Ngarrindjeri women argue that there are many levels of knowledge, and their struggle is to have their own recognized as legitimate. For the courts, knowledge is not a multi-layered thing with sometimes contradictory but not mutually exclusive perspectives. Knowledge is either accurate or inaccurate for the Western colonizers, and the Aboriginal women's insistence on placing their bodily religious connection with their land puts them in a place of opposition to the dominant Western structural system that resists the notion that women's bodies could be anything but the dumb material stuff of nature.

Similarly, the resistance on the part of the church to recognize the seeming contradiction of a sexualized young woman like Frankie, and a self-professed atheist at that, is tremendous, even in light of all the evidence the movie depicts. And on another level, the unwillingness of the Stigmata filmmakers to legitimate Frankie's experience of the Holy Spirit outside of her possession by a holy man is indicative of the same forces that prevented the Ngarrindjeri women from winning the land rights battle in Australia. That is to say, a woman's experience being on its own a legitimate cause for reflection by the dominant group is met with resistance and even verbal or physical violence. Both the Ngarrindjeri women and Frankie experience the impossibility of trying to present a reality that stands outside the strict Western structuralist system within a Western hegemonic culture that wields power over them.

Frankie's character is unceasingly depicted through the patriarchal eyes of the Catholic church, her priestly love interest, or even the male director of the film, Rupert Wainwright. There is a gender-blind androcentrism in the movie Stigmata as a whole that is reflected in the insistence on reading Aboriginal reality through either the texts left behind by the missionaries who first settled in the area, the anthropologists who did early work with the Ngarrindjeri, or, at best, the tradition of the male Aboriginal leaders. The insistence on perceiving women's experiential religious practices through the eyes of men is seemingly an inescapable reality when looking at women's religious stories in Western and in Western-dominated spaces.

The poster for the movie stigmata featured a photo of Frankie's eyes, a huge image of the priest Kiernan coming through a doorway, and the following text along the top of the poster: "Stigmata: The messenger must be silenced." This was the subtext of this film, but on a larger level, this has also been the subtext of the history of women who tried to oppose the structuralist notion of the sacred and the profane and of who gets heard and who should be silenced. For the character of Frankie, for the Ngarrindjeri women, and for all the other women in the history of the Western 'religions of the book,' speaking out is an unwelcome form of resistance that is met with hostility by those who hold the power.

Conclusion
The church, in the Christian tradition, is gendered female. Scriptures refer to the church as the bride of God or, alternatively, the body of Christ. "Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church" (Holy Bible, New International Version; Colossians 1:24) There is a narrative that is set up, which is very much in line with the movie Stigmata, that men are the active force that fill the church. The male actors move about with agency and personal freedom through the physical halls and the historical annals of the church, while women tend to represent the bodies around which or within which holy men make their theologies. The church, symbolized by the female body, has been hollowed out, in a sense, and filled with the male principle: the priests in their holy vestments and the holy binaries with their unyielding rigidity.

The church is, in reality, a more complex system than perhaps I make it out to be here. There are a number of points at which women are able to work within the rigid church system to trouble the boundaries of the generalized masculine dominance and the ultimate structural nature of what can be holy and what cannot. The narratives which are disseminated, however, tend not to be these potentially subversive ones. Stigmata is another example in a long history of cultural texts that re-inscribe that same binary of women being the passive material vessels and men being the active spiritual agents. And there is something to this that is somehow more insidious than a simple narrative that ignores women's experiences. A narrative that seems, on the surface, to present a story of a woman's spiritual agency, but that in fact makes her a tool of masculine structural understandings of holiness, ultimately obscures the lack of awareness of women as religious subjects in the Christian tradition.

References

Bell, Diane. Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: a World That is, Was, and Will Be. North Melbourne, Vic.: Spinifex Press, 1998.

Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Joseph Ward Swain, translator. New York: Collier Books, 1961.

Mascia-Lees, Frances and Nancy Johnson Black. Gender and Anthropology. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2000.