Leadership secrets of Attila the Nun
Lauren Groff's magnificent novel of a medieval woman’s ambition.
In a Florida bookstore over the holidays I discovered the paperback edition of Matrix by Lauren Groff, and read it straight through. It’s set in the distant past—you learn on the first page that the story begins in 1158 C.E.—but like the best historical fiction speaks constantly to the present.
Matrix tells of Marie, a tall and gangly seventeen-year-old. She is very, very loosely based on a real-life poet, Marie de France, of whom little is known. She lives in what will later be called the U.K., though no such land exists in 1158; it is instead Angleterre, a province of a joint English-French empire that really existed around that time. Marie is, to use the language of the novel, the bastard child of an unnamed king; and she is watched over by Queen Eleanor, a real-life monarch of the era.
Marie burns with love for Eleanor, and her desire for the queen triggers much of the action in the story. But the queen banishes Marie to become a nun—the second in command of a poor and remote abbey. It’s a bitter exile for Marie, who feels driven to do something great and lasting in the world. Gradually she realizes the abbey must be her stage. As the years pass, she learns how to lead the nuns, assert power over the neighborhood, and turn the abbey into the seat of her own little empire.
Every single character in this story is a woman or a girl. The men who dominate medieval society are mostly unseen, like adults in the old Charlie Brown holiday specials: often referred to and sometimes heard squawking, but usually offstage and never named. There is no manspreading or mansplaining in this book, though it’s surely happening out of sight; men usually appear indirectly, as when rumors arrive that the Catholic hierarchy is unhappy with Marie, or a young nun is revealed to be pregnant.
Groff uses this feminist frame to explore much that is universal about human nature, faith, and power. Marie’s machinations and frustrations speak to any modern reader who has ever been part of a company or institution. They reflect the sociology of people in organizations, as well as the difficulty of reforming organizations.
While it‘s true that a fictional tenth-century abbey differs in important ways from a modern-day office, Matrix makes me think of a famous nonfiction book, Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, which turned the story of the ancient conqueror into business management advice. Groff offers a lot to think about.
Through decades of effort, Marie turns the Catholic abbey into something approaching a feminist ideal. Women support one another, develop their talents, build up their muscles while working on infrastructure projects, and fend off male authority. Marie is amassing power, and also elevating her sisters. (I thought of my own study of Lincoln, who appealed to people’s self-interest while also trying to mesh that impulse with a higher purpose.) Though resisted by many of the same women she proposes to help, Marie overwhelms all opposition, resorting to violence when necessary. She identifies the abbey’s untapped sources of wealth and influence. She assembles a team of intimidating enforcers to collect money from local residents who encroach on the abbey’s land. And she gradually builds a cadre of loyal lieutenants to help her.
Having been made a nun against her will, Marie begins with hardly any faith at all, but comes to rely on “god” (never capitalized in this book) and eventually experiences visions of the Virgin Mary. She describes these visions to other nuns and interprets them in ways that conveniently support her plans to improve the abbey and outwit her enemies. Not that her visions are false! She believes in them. But she also is conscious of using her dreams to impose her will. The person who claims a direct line to god has power, because her visions cannot be answered with reason, and would be unholy to resist. In later years, threats to her power arise when someone else claims an inside track to holy truth.
I went through Matrix expecting that the iron fist of man must inevitably crush this medieval woman’s social revolution. But the mostly unseen men are not Marie’s only concern. Some of her lieutenants, who submit to her authority as long as she is around, are more comfortable with the old concept of women as the smaller, weaker sex. They are not comfortable with asserting power, overturning tradition, or taking on risk. When she is gone they will find it all too easy to revert to the patterns of the past.
Groff’s main character does almost everything out of mixed motives, which does not make her story any less grand. I kept thinking about present-day struggles to change American society, or government, or the workplaces I have known—and how that change is often resisted.
Matrix is one of several books I’ve read recently that illuminate human nature through a story of the past. Zadie Smith’s latest, The Fraud, is set in nineteenth-century England. As with Groff’s novel, Smith creates a remarkable woman who moves among people who existed in real life (mostly novelists in this case, Charles Dickens among them).
Some reviewers have seen the novel as a commentary on the Trump era. Part of the story revolves around a man who claims to be the heir to a prominent family. The tales he tells to support his claim fill the newspapers. Elites tend to see through his lies. Common people embrace him because he has a sense of humor and because he embarrasses the upper classes.
There is more to The Fraud than that. Many characters are putting up false fronts of one kind or another—a novelist who has no talent; the people around him who let him pretend that he does; a lower-class woman who marries up; a housekeeper to a married couple who has affairs with both the husband and the wife. The story comments less on current events than on the experience of being human. Which is what I love about good fiction.
Thanks for reading Differ We Must – a companion to my biography of Lincoln by the same name, and my effort to explore our modern-day differences.
Links: