carrie gress's
THE ANTI-MARY EXPOSED: RESCUING THE CULTURE FROM TOXIC FEMINITY
reviewed by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books). His
editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut
album, Blood
Guitar, is now available, as is his latest
book, Reflections
on Music, Poetry and Politics.
Despite its many
falterings and regressions, the Judeo-Hellenic-Christian West
over the long and tortuous course of its evolution has produced
the most advanced civilization known to history. Characterized
by the rule of law, scientific discovery, technological invention,
educational opportunity for the masses, economic prosperity,
individual autonomy and relative freedom from the harsh exactions
of nature, it is now collapsing under the attack of forces rising
from within its own existential frontiers.
Its
internal assailants are myriad: domestic Marxism, “social
justice,” global warming, Islam in its various avatars,
anti-Semitism and hatred of Christianity, anti-white bigotry,
educational decline, media malfeasance, and economic illiteracy
leading to the willful accumulation of unpayable debt. But perhaps
the most sinister and destructive of its homegrown adversaries
is radical feminism, which seeks the ruin of motherhood and
the breakdown of the relation between the sexes. It is a plague
the Pharaoh was fortunately spared.
“Almost
overnight,” writes Carrie Gress in The Anti-Mary Exposed:
Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity, “our
once pro-life culture became pro-lifestyle, returning to an
epicurean paganism that embraces everything that feels good.”
How is it, she asks, that the women’s liberation movement
“has demolished so decisively the moral and social structures
of American society?” “There must be something more,”
she answers, “than simple human vice behind the fact that
millions of women have betrayed the most sacred and fundamental
of relationships, that of mother and child,” leaving “husbands
wondering what happened to their wives, fathers wondering what
happened to their daughters, and children wondering what happened
to their mothers.”
Never
in history, she continues, “have mothers been so willing
to kill their children”—3000 per day in the U.S.
in an abortion frenzy of more than Herodian proportions. The
biblical template of Mother and Son, subsumed in the sacred
nexus of Mary and Jesus, has been shattered. Gress concludes
that a demonic force—the anti-Mary—is at work, sundering
women from their God-given roles as mothers and caregivers.
Evil is neither a construct nor a concept; it is real, according
to Gress, and the Prince of Darkness is among us.
Her
central focus is Marian, the Catholic emphasis on hyperdulia
(veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary) and the sacrament of
motherhood. Gress sees the moral and social chasm between life
and lifestyle in the feminist West as precisely an aspect of
the conflict between good and evil. On the one side, there are
the “marks of anti-Mary—rage, indignation, vulgarity,
and pride”; on the other, the true female gifts of “wisdom,
prudence [and the] ability to weave together the fabric of society,”
associated with the Virgin.
We
recall in this connection that the poetic kenning for “woman”
in the Anglo-Saxon literature was “peace weaver”
and the word “lady” derives from the Old English
hläefdige, or “loaf, bread”—a metaphor
for nourishment. The cognate word for the opposite gender is
hläford, or “lord.” One provides sustenance,
the other prepares it; one is, so to speak, the breadwinner,
the other the bread baker. Men kill for the larder and women
cook for the family. Custom and culture from time immemorial,
with few exceptions, establish the distinction between distaff
and spear—a distinction that is now being erased and overthrown.
Feminism represents the very antithesis of both history and
reality. Coventry Patmore’s famous, albeit somewhat treacly,
poem about wifely devotion The Angel in the House was savaged
by Virginia Woolf, a feminist and lesbian, who wrote in The
Death of the Moth that “Killing the Angel in the
House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.” This
is, in effect, feminism’s default position.
Gress’
Catholic conviction about womanly nature may not persuade all
readers. How is it, after all, that millions of women in the
civilized West were so dramatically susceptible to the feminist
message if they belonged to the caring and nurturing half of
mankind? Not all women make good mothers—indeed, many
do not. The Medea complex in its various forms is by no means
anomalous—a bitter woman who has been wronged can kill
her father, poison her lover’s wife and slaughter her
children. In today’s feminist world, however, a woman
need not be wronged to create havoc; she has merely to nurse
not a child but a grievance, whether legitimate or not, and
act as she chooses to rectify what she conceives as a collective
right. She can cut off her husband’s penis, with little
punishment and full legal and societal support, can justify
the killing of allegedly abusive male partners, can put out
a contract on her husband, and can bankrupt her spouse and deprive
him of child custody—all within the purview of the law.
Moreover,
it is not only strident and embittered women responsible for
the calamity we are witnessing, but the vast sodality of compliant
men, aka beta males and “white knights,” who have
surrendered their manhood and paved the way for the feminist
takeover in government, in the media, in schools and universities,
in the military, in corporate culture and in the legal system,
at the expense of both their well-being and the nation’s
political and economic vigor. Relying on both masculine chivalry
and culturally induced guilt, feminists have conscripted their
enemies into an army that would destroy them, attesting to the
infusorial virulence of the feminist campaign. The spear has
been duly blunted.
Further,
one need not adopt a Catholic or Marian perspective to acknowledge
the multifarious ways in which feminism is devastating the civic
culture of the West. From a traditionally conservative point
of view, the abandonment of the feminine for the feminist with
its visceral hatred of the male, its penchant for aberrant sexuality,
and its passionate advocacy for abortion carries out the Marxist
agenda for the destruction of the family, the linchpin of civil
society. It leads inexorably to social upheaval and cultural
decay. It is no accident that many feminists are Marxists, whether
professedly or as “social justice warriors.” Very
few seem even remotely familiar with the virtues of kindness
and charity, and very few seem capable, obviously, of celebrating
the love between a man and a woman. They are, in the words of
novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, “Against Nature.”
They are also, in the estimation of most people of traditional
faith, against God.
And
yet, despite countervailing instances and skeptical arguments,
the traditional relation between mother and child, wife and
husband, holds for the most part in the human imagination and
the historical register and remains firmly in place as a biological
imperative. Biology determines that men inseminate and women
give birth, that in the normal course of events men hunt and
women breast-feed, and that men remain potent far longer than
women remain fertile. It is foolish to resist the hegemony of
genetics. But there is more to it than that. There is something
called love, a spiritual reality that cannot be refuted—except
perhaps by those who have not experienced it.
The
belief in the sacrificial divinity of love between the sexes
is accepted literally by votaries like Gress, for whom the anti-Marian
spirit unleashed by the Father of Lies has corrupted the human
spirit as well as the culture of the West, with feminism clearly
a demonic force eviscerating the vitals of romantic and sexual
reciprocity—the modern expression of expulsion from the
garden. The Devil is indefatigably at work and Moloch is back
in business. The “woman clothed with the sun” whom
we read of in the Book of Revelation is now quailing before
the “great red dragon” that would devour her child.
For my part, I recognize a powerful metaphor, and while I do
not consider myself a believing member of any faith or communion,
I cannot deny the human truth of love as an amalgam of caritas
and eros between a man and a woman, the obligations it entails,
and its bedrock necessity for human flourishing and social continuity.
I acknowledge
Gress’ concern not merely with the social and economic
aspects of marriage and the intact family, but with the mysterious
and sacramental nature of love itself. One thinks of the ancient
Jewish saying that from the loving union of a man and a woman
an angel is born in heaven. There are no prenups in the genuine
marriage bond; the man trusts his wife, the woman honors her
husband. It is a vow between a man and a woman that survives
in the face of all the odds, threats, disruptions, frustrations
and political forces ranged against it. Admittedly, such commitment
is at a premium in today’s feminist climate of suspicion,
cynicism and outright hate, but that does not alter the nature
of love, only the difficulty of finding it.
The
love of a man and a woman, blessed in the marital union, despite
the rigors of life, the distractions of the commonplace and
the tragic circumstances of existence, can be said to have something
of the divine in it. In the words of poet William Blake, love
“builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.” Anyone
who has experienced true love can attest to both its power and
its necessity. Of course, love can take many different forms,
but it is the bond between a man and a woman solemnized in a
viable marriage that is productive, ensuring posterity, preserving
the social order, and in Augustinian terms rendering the City
of Man, however imperfect, a simulacrum of the City of God.
Harmony
between the sexes is what guarantees a measure of happiness
in a troubled world and fosters a sense of fulfillment that
keeps life livable and culture vibrant. In this respect, feminism
is, as Gress writes, the promoter of “confusion, twisted
thinking, decadence, sacrilege and viciousness descend[ing]
ever deeper with every passing day.” An agent of anti-love,
social disorder and, ultimately, of human misery, it will most
likely run its course until the inevitable social and cultural
collapse. Meanwhile, hope against hope, it must be fought with
every resource at our disposal.
