Motherhood: A Confession by Natalie Carnes

Photo by Jenna Norman on Unsplash

What if St. Monica had written Confessions instead of her son? In Motherhood: A Confession author Natalie Carnes responds to St. Augustine’s work. Each of the thirteen chapters of the book center on a theme found in Augustine’s Confessions which is written as a prayer to God. In Carnes’s book, the first nine chapters are written to her daughter and in the last four she writes to God. In the chapters written to her daughter, the you gets lost. Often Carnes goes off on a tangent and the reader forgets she is writing to her daughter. In the chapters written to God, the You is close, present.

Carnes asks questions to deepen the text. In the chapter “Mercy” she interacts with Augustine on theater. Augustine wrote in Confessions,

I was captivated by theatrical shows. They were full of representations of my own Miseries and fueled my fire. Why is it that a person should wish to experience suffering by watching grievous and tragic events which he himself would not wish to endure? Nevertheless he wants to suffer the pain given by being a spectator of these sufferings and the pain itself is the pleasure. Only when he himself suffers it is called misery when he feels compassion for others it is called mercy . But what quality of mercy is it in fictitious and theatrical inventions? Audience is not excited to offer help but invited only to grieve.

Does viewing suffering in a theater context allow us to understand suffering better? Does it make us more merciful? Or as Carnes interacts with Augustine does “the character’s pain can become a pleasure, captivating the theatergoer and holding her attention. What is this pleasure? It is the pleasure of being moved, of experiencing oneself as merciful without actually doing anything merciful. The mercy is hollowed out. It becomes theatrical.”

Carnes asks even more of Augustine’s text. She questions her own experience of suffering and compassion in the arts. She asks questions dive deeper in the context:

-Are we reducing mercy to an emotion, a virtue of right feeling rather than right doing?

-Are we teaching ourselves that what it means to be good is to have the right opinions, the right affections, or the right taste?

-Am I training myself in a false response to suffering? (50-51)

Carnes never answers these questions but in asking them, she asks them for the reader. We wonder more about this interplay between the arts and suffering.

When I read Augustine’s Confessions for the first time last year,  this particular passage captivated me. I texted my friend, a Shakespearean scholar and actor and wondered if Shakespeare took his words “the qualities of mercy” from Augustine when he wrote that mercy “droppeth like a gentle rain from heaven” in the Merchant of Venice. Certainly, Shakespeare would have read Augustine, especially if he was a Catholic as some scholars have recently thought.

And what of Carnes and Augustine’s thoughts? Perhaps by suffering with the plights and pains of a fictitious characters, then experiencing the rapture an relief of catharses, the audience member rehearses how to live through her own pain, looking for the promise of relief to come?

Karen Swallow Prior’s book On Reading Well argues this very thing.  She argues that a reader can learn to how to live virtuously through the example of characters in literature. The reader does not need to experience lust or temptation to learn how to live a chaste or temperate life.

I feel this was true in my own literary education as a child. I did not have many examples of good behavior growing up but through reading, I discovered alterative actions to the ones I saw modeled for me. I find this fascinating.