St. Teresa of Ávila: Author of a Heroic Life by Carole Slade

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102BOOK REVIEWS St. Teresa ofÁvila:Author ofa Heroic Life. By Carole Slade. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1995. Pp. xxU, 204. $35.00.) Since the late 1970's, a number of important studies have sought to demonstrate that, far from being spontaneous, artless, and uncultivated, St. Teresa of AvUa was a setf-conscious and talented, if not always careful, writer. Carole Slade's weU written and clearly organized book St. Teresa ofÁvila:Author ofa Heroic Life is the most recent contribution to this reworking of the saint's image. According to Slade^Teresa's writings "comprise an elaborate project of seU-representation and setf-interpretation" (p. 1). Slade argues that Teresa's Life originated with a command to write a judicial confession in anticipation of a possible inquisitorial process. Teresa, however, subverted this genre, which presumed the respondent's guUt, by shifting the generic resonance ofthe words she employed and by adapting aspects ofChristian autobiography in the tradition ofSt. Augustine's Confessions. Close reading of key sections of the Life, together with the Interior Castle and the Foundations , substantiates this thesis. For example, the first ten chapters of the Life, which present Teresa's pre-conversion life, are informed not only by the genre of judicial confession, but also by that of first-person hagiography. WhUe the prodigal son is the most important figure for Augustine's seU-interpretation, Mary Magdalen and other New Testament women are paradigmatic for Teresa. In the Life, chaps. 1 1-22, and in the Interior Castle,Teresa's presentation of her mystical experience is cast in the Augustinian vocabulary of the faculties of the soul and takes the form of "analogies," such as the four ways of watering a garden , the crystal and diamond castle, the palmetto and tree of life, the silkworm and butterfly. Teresa's post-conversion "new Ufe," Slade points out, finds apostoUc expression in her activity as monastic reformer and foundress. This facet of Teresa's setf-representation is introduced in the Life, chaps. 32-36, which recount the foundation of the first reformed monastery of St. Joseph's in AvUa, and is fully developed Ui the Foundations. GenericaUy, the latter is akin to contemporary New World conquest chronicles in Teresa's presentation of hersetf in heroic terms, as weU as to the "aUegory offemale authority" ofChristine de Pizan's The Book ofthe City ofLadies in the interpolated biographies ofTeresa's nuns. In an epUogue, Slade assesses psychoanalytic interpretations ofTeresa's mystical experience, pointing out that this approach fails to account forTeresa's activism . Two appendices foUow: EngUsh translations of Domingo Báñez's censure of the manuscript of the Life and of Pedro Ibáñez's Judgment on Teresa. The book is rounded off with a bibUography and an index. New ground is broken in Slade's thorough and inteUigent comparison of Teresa and Augustine, as weU as in her discussion of the Life as a judicial confession , ofTeresa's "analogies," and ofthe dual genre oí the Foundations. Classification of the Life as autohagiography is not completely original and should BOOK REVIEWS103 make reference to previous scholarship on this point. Susan Haskins' Mary Magdalen:Myth andMetaphor (1993) may have appeared too late for Slade to have consulted,but it is obUgatory for any discussion of this complex figure. One of Slade's many fascinating insights is that, when Teresa speaks of her parents in the Life, she seems to distance herself from them. After the death of her mother, Slade notes,Teresa adopts the Virgin Mary as her mother. Moreover, Teresa's "later ecstatic vision ofJoseph and Mary as benevolent parents outfitting her with jewels (Life 33.14) . . . might be interpreted in psychological terms as an attempt to replace her own parents with others who could suitably reward her" (p. 74). This suggestion would have been strengthened by consideration of the ubiquitous paternal role that St. Joseph, whom Teresa consistently referred to as her father, had in her life and reform. Moreover, the divine locution that Teresa received commanding her to found St.Joseph's monastery in AvUa indicates that the Teresian Carmel was to be an extension of the Holy FamUy(Ii/e,32.11). This...