Embodying the mother, disembodying the icon: Female resistance in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary
Embodying the mother, disembodying the icon: Female resistance in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary

Summary/Abstract: Informed by the theories of Antonio Damasio on the emotional mappings of the mind, the pres-ent article probes into the Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (2012), originallywritten for the stage as a solo play and later adapted into a novella, to disclose the resistancenarrative of a grieving mother against the official accounts of the Passion of Christ. The ageingMary of this text, who is granted voice and body, defies the symbolic representations of femalesuffering and sorrow that have nurtured cultural history and memory for centuries, and engagesin a corporeal rendering of her version, which she intends to leave as her Testament to the world.The shaping of her consciousness is thus substantiated on her embodiment as woman andmother, against the iconic disembodied Virgin Mary that has formed the axis of the Catholiccult of Mariology, ultimately contributing to dissolve the classical dichotomies body/mind andmatter/spirit, which will be analyzed in depth.

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