Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 46
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Popular Culture Review
reduces the issue from the mammoth one of the relationship between
a woman and her God to the much smaller one of temporal mystery.
Donner hooks the audience with this mysterious opening and then
moves into flashback to solve it. He focuses on Heloise as a young
girl. She lives in a small convent at Argenteuil, the favorite of the
Mother Superior, who tells her that she has two choices, to be "bride
of man, or bride of Christ.''^ These are the only two choices Heloise is
allowed throughout the film, as her uncle says, she is "chattel" and
"in the nwrket." When she becomes pregnant, he says she is "soiled
goods, but not unsalable." She herself says at one point that "1
couldn't bear being talked of as a thing." To our twentieth century
sensibilities, this objectification does indeed seem heinous and
degrading; but would it have to a woman of the twelfth century? She
would have had to look beyond her entire social order, to fly into the
face of the Church, to reject everything she had been taught since
birth. Donner's Heloise does this readily; the actual Heloise, not so
readily at all. Our best evidence for this is Heloise's acceptance of
Abelard's letters of direction, in which he exhorts her to true
vocation. Putting Heloise's life on a cash and carry basis imbues the
film with the Marxist point of view that life is largely determined
by economic factors, a notion more at home in the twentieth century
than the twelfth. The hidden agenda this time is economic and
political as well as philosophical.
This underlying meaning gathers force when Donner has his
Heloise reject religion outright. When Abelard, an absurdly weak
character, has religious pangs, Heloise says to him, "How can 1 fight
your God when he is not mine?" When told of the castration, she cries
out, "There is no God . . . . Pray until your knees are raw, no one will
hear but the spiders." Donner even changes known facts, as when his
Heloise takes no vows until after the castration, and then only to
please Abelard: "You have been crucified. You are my lord, 1 will
have no other-----1 may see you now and then, and touch your hand."
And so she does, when he comes to see her at the Paraclete when they
are both old and prosperous. He even brings their son Astralabe,
whom Heloise named for "an instrument for measuring the distance to
the stars, a way of measuring heaven." Even Abelard has not quite
given up romance, and asks to be buried with Heloise, hoping that "In
God's good time, you will share my bed." He seems to
betting on
the resurrection of his physical f>owers as much as anything else.