Of Matrices and Salvatrices

Matrix by Lauren Groff

Disclaimer: This is an extremely biased review of Matrix by Lauren Groff. It contains spoilers.

After devouring her novel Fates and Furies as well as her short story collections Florida and Delicate Edible Birds, I knew Lauren Groff could not disappoint me. However, I was still apprehensive about Matrix as its plot sounded much too historical for a literary writer. Until I read it.

Yes, the setting of Matrix can only be called historical and yet this book is so much more. The protagonist Marie (inspired by the 12th century poet Marie de France) is banished to a remote abbey by her half-sister Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. In the first few pages of her journey and arrival, she is described as too tall, too muscular, too wild. Later, she will be addressed by the diocesan in a letter as "oh noble virago", but even in the beginning she is very much the definition of virago: an overbearing woman, a female warrior, even bringing her horse and her bird of prey with her.

She is different from the other nuns not only because of her appearance but also because she has been taught to think for herself.

Marie does not wonder why so few of her nuns have the capacity to think for themselves; she saw from the first moment she arrived that this was planted deep in the design of the monastic life. (129-130)

Crucially, Marie was brought up in the company of other larger-than-life women. Her mother and other female relatives are described as female warriors and crusaders who lived freely with no man telling them what to do. She even spent time at the French court where Eleanor served as a shining example of female power: Queen of France and later of England through marriage as well as Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, patroness of poets and key leading figure in the Second Crusade. It is no wonder that Eleanor has instilled in Marie a hunger for fame and creation.

Of her own mind and hands she has shifted the world. She has made something new.
This feeling is the thrill of creation. It jolts through her, dangerous and alive.
Marie feels it growing in her. She gorges on it. And despite her vow, her prayer in her fleeing terror from the devil, she understands that she is hungry for more. (136)

And she sees for a moment her vast sin, for which she will be punished, because she has pressed it into the labyrinth, this once-pure gift of the Virgin: her hunger for her name to rebound in fame through time. (134)

At first, Marie is full of passionate adoration for the queen. Later, when Eleanor seems to ignore her, she seeks her own fame out of spite. Eventually, however, she wants it for its own sake and reaches a point where the queen can be considered a peer rather than an idol. Eleanor becomes human or Marie becomes something more than human.

It is not all selfish, however, as she comes to realize that the abbey could be a sanctuary for women like her, women who for some reason or other do not fit into secular medieval life. While creating and improving that sanctuary, she eventually goes from hating the abbey to feeling responsible for it and even loving it.

For this community is precious, there is a place here even for the maddest, for the discarded, for the difficult, in this enclosure there is love enough here even for the most unlovable of women. (233)

This is when we get a first glimpse of what the title Matrix might refer to. The abbey itself gains meaning as a womb, something nurturing and loving that protects its vulnerable inhabitants or children from the harsh world outside its walls and provides indiscriminately for all of them.

And without the flaw of Eve there could be no purity of Mary.
And without the womb of Eve, which is the House of Death, there could be no womb of Mary, which is the House of Life.
Without the first matrix, there could be no salvatrix, the greatest matrix of all. (117)

In ancient Rome, a matrix was "a female animal kept for breeding, or a plant whose seeds were used for producing other plants". Ironically, nuns are not supposed to get pregnant yet one of the most poignant scenes in the book has a beautiful young nun dying in childbirth, showing how easily one can pass from the House of Life to the House of Death and vice versa.

As its prioress and later abbess, Marie works hard to make the abbey self-sufficient and succeeds. Eventually, she becomes the saint or spirit of the abbey, protecting the nuns even after her physical death. Whether Eve or Mary, women are whole (holy) in themselves.

I am the shepherdess of all the abbey‘s souls, Marie says at last. (…) We are whole in ourselves. (231)

And she saw at that moment how she could use this greatness for her sisters; she could give up the burn of singular love inside her and turn to a larger love, she could build around the other women an abbey of the spirit to protect them from cold and wet, from superiors waiting to gobble them up, she would build an invisible abbey made out of her own self, a larger church of her own soul, an edifice of self in which her sisters would grow as babes grow in the dark thrumming heat of the womb. (244)

The last sentence sees the nuns praying and working in peace and seems to reference the motto of the Benedictine order: "ora et labora".

Slowly, as they come, their thoughts turn to prayer.
And the works and the hours go on. (257)

As St. Benedict was renowned for encouraging active work alongside prayer and contemplation in his monks, so does Marie order her nuns to contribute actively to the abbey, not through feminine but questionably useful pursuits like spinning and weaving but through (at the time) masculine work such as scribing, fieldwork and construction. One of her nuns creates illuminations and devotional murals and so one could even say that Marie manages to give women the resources and room to create as demanded by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own - all in the 12th century!

Marie herself recognizes her hunger for greatness, feels guilty for it and is punished too. Still, in the end she achieves true greatness not out of that selfish hunger but out of love for her sisters. This is what it comes down to: I love Matrix for its buttery smooth language and timelessness, for its mysticism and its human struggles but I also love reading it as testament to the great things women can achieve when united as one.