Sister Doubt

Piety is pretty sexy, at least in the case of Patria.

Though In The Time of the Butterflies was written over ten years prior to the film, Patria is similar to the nun in The Crime of Father Amaro, the famously controversial Mexican film where a nun pleasures herself to the image of Christ. "I'd see those boys and think, Ah yes, they will come to Sor Mercedes in times of trouble and lay their curly heads in my lap so I can comfort them. My immortal soul wants to take the whole blessed world in! But, of course, it was my body, hungering, biding its time against the tyranny of my spirit." What kind of comfort is she offering here? The sexual undercurrent throughout the chapter - her "body, hungering," - is brazenly depicted. "I smelled her wafer smell and I knew I was in the presence of the holy," says Patria during her first meeting with Sor Asuncion. "My heart beat fast, scared and deeply excited." Is she describing a meeting with the headmistress of Immaculada Concepcion or the chance of getting into the former's habit? I'm just being crass with the second opinion, but taken out of context almost every sentence in the chapter could come straight out of an eloquently written erotica novel. Likewise, Patria's sensuality isn't limited to only men. Her sensual being manifests itself even in interactions with family like her sister Minerva, whom she asks to play with her hair. "Soon her gratifying fingering and her lilting voice would lull me to sleep again." The word 'fingering' generally has only one connotation, and it's a connotation Alvarez is fully aware and conscious of. She's a deliberate writer. Alvarez is a master at using commonly seen language to show, rather than tell, what her characters feel. In this particular case, though, I feel like Alvarez succumbed to cheapening her 'art' for the sake of . In a book full of simple but poetic language, the word 'fingering' is just too blunt, consistency-breaking, and, for lack of a better word, sophmoric. The rest of her novel is written at such a high echeleon that almost any lapse in quality is jarring to the audience. For instance, a reader might have only recognized the sexual component to Patria's chapter on a subconscious level previously, but they're certainly going to notice /something/ when they see Patria's behavior towards Minerva. It's just that obviously. I feel like Alvarez prefers subtlety over bluntness , but now I'm being presumptuous. Maybe Alvarez intentionally threw that word in to make the audience realize what they've really been reading the whole time; to make us feel the same dirtiness or perverseness or shame that Patria surely feels for "hungering" even as a pious young woman. It'd be audience participation at its finest if this was the case. Feeling exactly as Patria feels, the struggle which "came in the dark in the evil hours when the hands wake with a life of their own."

Despite whatever connotations the language in this chapter may have, I don't think that Patria is necessarily a sexual being, so much as an incredibly sensual one. She's just incredibly passionate about her calling. Since it would not be acceptable for a young woman in her station to display overt desire, And then we have all the instances of the color red popping up in Patria's chapter - from the "brilliant red flames" of the flamboyants, to the "plush crimson cushion" in Sor Asuncion's office. (As an aside, the individual petals of a flamboyant are butterfly-shaped, which cycles back to the title of the book.)

Beyond the sensual content of Patria's chapter, she infuses her language with veiled references to BDSM. "They saw the pains I took keeping my back straight during early mass, my hands steepled and held up of my own volition, not perched on the back of a pew as if petition were conversation." Pleasure is pain. Servitude, too, is depicted as being a kind of divine pleasure for Patria. The lines between serving Christ and serving your body are totally distorted and blended together here. In fact, Alvarez almost suggests that Patria's sensuality manifests itself through religious service in an incredibly coquettish, unconfident fashion. Further parallels could be drawn to Marquis de Sade's (how appropriate) work "Justine." Though the titular character is the pinnacle of piety, at least in her mind, she is subjected to desolute horrors - such as being taken in by a group of monks and raped repeatedly by all of them. However, despite the abuse brought upon Justine throughout the novel, she refuses to give in due to self-righteousness, and by the end of the novel is a broken husk who no longer believes in God. Sade even suggests that, had Justine indulged sin for a brief time at the beginning of the book, that she would have been able to ultimately live a pious life by the end - according to Sade, one needs to know sin in order to know the light. Knowing what it's like to indulge in sin strengthens one's faith. Though Patria hasn't seen any of the abuse Justine did, the two characters are similar because their self-righteousness prevents them from knowing what they are preaching against. Bullheadedness can lead to a character's downfall just as easily as indulging in too much sin could; in many ways self-righteousness is even a sin in and of itself. Ultimately, however, Patria is a character of dualities, like many of the works we have read previously.

I feel like Patria has something of an inferiority complex. She needed Sor Asuncion to reassert her faith, that she had what it takes to become a nun; like she needed permission even though it has been known to us since the first chapter that Patria's self-confidence makes her feel superior to most people she comes in contact with. "It was after my conference with Sor Asuncion, once I had begun praying to know my calling, that suddenly, like a lull in a storm, the cravings stopped." Why did Patria's "hungering" stop after Sor Asuncion reassured her potential? It's almost as if . For all of Patria's self-righteousness and confidence, there are aspects to her character which are just as vulnerable and as insecure as a child. She's outwardly independent yet needy simultaneously. By relying on others - God, the Sor, her fiance - Patria is able to reassure herself of her own identity. It's the mother archetype brought to extremes.