“Her mouth was filled with some unknown substance, so delicious, that she would experience that sweetness and pleasure during all the following day”: Sexual/Necro Politics in the Jesuit Relations, 1610-1791

The gender politics driving and focusing in on the “life” but actually death of a “Savage Girl 14 Years Old” intertwine with racial politics of conversion in Jesuit missionaries’ Relations of their work in seventeenth-eighteenth century New France. Juliana Barr’s 2004 article “A Diplomacy of Gender: Rituals of First Contact in the ‘Land of the Tejas'” and Allan Greer’s 2000 article “Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France” provide useful lenses through which to read the Jesuit Relations’, 1610-1791 take on the “Precious and Admirable Life of a Savage Girl 14 Years Old.”

In my research I have become interested in Foucault’s bio power theory applied to the politics of death, or “necropolitics.” Who is deemed worth/y of a death? Of a burial? The necropolitics in moving from her village culture into that of the Jesuits resulted in this “Precious and admirable death of a savage girl 14 years old” (JR 29). How can a death be “precious”? “Admirable”? “Precious” seems to denote her youth; admirable, her internal strength with succumbing to externally induced pain. “Precious” = why readers care or become interested in reading–it’s novel that a death can be both “precious” and “admirable,” and as we have seen in other of our readings such as that of the Casta paintings, novel was of interest to long-eighteenth-century readers, religious and otherwise. The fact that a fourteen-year-old (young), “Savage” (indigenous American) “girl” (female) could be “admirable” then amplifies the “surprising” novelty of this story. 

In delving into this primary text past the title, we see that not only is this death “precious” and “admirable” but it is also sexualized, whether the writer is aware of this fetishization of the body of this fourteen-year-old or not. She “excited the admiration of those who saw her” (30); her mother’s “lips” are focused on acting on behalf of her “heart”; “she was made to smell such ravishing odors of Paradise” and “her mouth was filled with some unknown substance, so delicious, that she would experience that sweetness and pleasure…” (31); finally, she “made an effort to carry the Crucifix to her lips, in order to kiss it while dying” (34; emphasis mine). This sexualization is consistent with early-modern depictions of nuns as experiencing ravishment through their spiritual “union” with Christ, thus rendering sexuality at the forefront of readers’ interest in early modern women’s (religious or otherwise) lives. 

Allan Greer writes that “the stories of saintly lives” which “deserve examination in their own right” contribute “in their way to the emergence of the modern self” in that “hagiography encompassed a wide range of human types: women as well as men, the comparatively humble as well as the great, and, as will be seen presently, Indians as well as Europeans” (Greer 324). This article, “Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France,” was published 20 years ago, in 2000. Still, I find that “history of the self” as a field is dominated by male biographical subjects (Rousseau, etc.) and male authors (Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt, entourage thereof). In her 2015 Literature Compass article “Women’s Life Writing in the Long 18th Century: A critical Survey,” Amy Culley writes,” The spiritual autobiography has been the focus of less critical energy than the scandalous memoir. But a growing recognition of religious writing as an important dimension of women’s authorial experience,, and attention to the relationship between secular and spiritual life writing is producing rewarding insights. Histories are no longer dominated by early Quaker women’s autobiographies or published conversion narratives but rather address the diffuse and diverse forms of women’s religious self-expression from within a variety of denominations” (4). At article’s end, she writes that other genres can/should be analyzed to show when, say, men write about witnessing women’s lives (as is the case in this one we read today) what are the effects/implications of that practice? Still, in 2015, at least in my field of literary/cultural studies and long eighteenth-century life-writing, the “self” is refracting to encompass more religious women but definitely not as many Catholic women as Protestants (Methodists seem to be in vogue). 

It appears, at least from these articles and the historians’ focus on Káteri Tekahkwí:tha, that this might not be the case at least in American history as a discipline. A research question that I now have and plan to follow-up on is: In the history of the eighteenth-century field as well as the history of the self field, is it becoming more common to focus on the lives of Catholic women or is there still a critical focus on Protestants, seemingly due to premodern Catholics’ nut-jobbiness–a technical term–as exemplified by one Jesuit’s execution due to carving crosses onto indigenous children’s foreheads (Greer)?

“Colonial hagiographies were ‘meant mainly to inspire wonder at the way human and divine qualities, mortality, and eternal life could reside together in a single extraordinary person’ (Barr 327).” The life of the (1) young (2) native (3) woman (and this is reminding me of Trinh T. Min-Ha’s 2009 Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, is reduced not only to her death but also to her sexuality (or lack thereof). Where her chastity is idolized, sexual language still seeps out from the male Jesuit/”chaste” narrator. Death is sexualized, the chaste body is idolized and fetishized, in this narrative (and other spiritual autobiographies of women; Teresa of Avila’s comes to mind, though that one focuses on her spiritual methods and not her death and also she wrote it herself–at the behest of her male confessor). The male confessor, also, here in the readings this week is prioritized over the Virgin Mary herself, who only came to “hang out” with the young girl. 

Works Cited

Barr, Juliana. “A Diplomacy of Gender: Rituals of First Contact in the ‘Land of the Tejas.'” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 3, 2004, pp. 393-434.

Culley, Amy. “Women’s Life Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Critical Survey.” Literature Compass vol. 12, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1-11.

Greer, Allan. “Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 2, 2000, pp. 323-348.

“Precious and Admirable Life of a Savage Girl 14 Years Old,” The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites, pp. 26-42. Madison, WI: The Burrows Company, 1899.