Book of a City of Ladies

Matrix. Lauren Groff. 2021.

I am a woman married to a man, and we have children. I’m pretty happy about that, but ever since I was very small there’s been a part of me that has wondered about other ways to live. I was never a child who dreamed about marriage and children - I never had the wedding gene, and my own wedding was at the courthouse with only family and then dinner at our favorite restaurant before going home. The stories I always liked best as a girl were fantasies, ones where young girls encountered magic and adventure, and the figure I always liked best in those stories was the witch in the woods.

I never really wanted to be the girl going on adventures; I wanted to be the witch in the woods, the one she came to for guidance. Those witches always seemed to have life figured out - they saw people when they wanted, they had a lot of books and kept herb gardens, and everyone was too afraid of them to tell them what to do. It seemed ideal. I never thought they were lonely - they usually had pets, and occasionally apprentices. And what was most interesting was that there was always some kind of mysterious, unseen network of other witches. You were never the only witch.

Convents, and communities like convents, were a bit different, but I could still see the appeal. Men were interesting, and it was difficult for me to imagine a life where they were completely absent, but I thought it might be nice to live mostly with women and see men sometimes, when you felt like it. That was the most important thing: everything when you felt like it. Men, if you wanted. Children, the same. I think reading both The Mists of Avalon and a biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine were influential in my vision, here. I liked the priestesses of Avalon venturing out and then continually returning to their sanctuary, with each other. I liked the idea of Eleanor living a long and full life with marriages, children, travel and power, before retreating to a community of women at the end of her life.

All of this is to say: I do get it. It didn’t end up being the life I made for myself, and knowledge of real convents and how they function has certainly changed my opinion of most of them. There’s less freedom within the walls than I would prefer, and growing up has meant realizing that romantic love and sex (and yes, parenting) would be very hard things for me to give up. But there is something about an isolated community of varied but alike people that appeals, and I think this appeal is, if not universal, at least common. It may be why the story of Robin Hood and his Merry Men has resonated for centuries. It’s not necessarily the robbing the rich to give to the poor part, though that helps, but the part about leaving society behind to start a new one with your friends. It’s utopian, and you can get to that idea - that something profoundly wrong has happened to the world and our best bet is to retreat in small groups to find new ways of living - from all kinds of political ideologies.

The convent in Matrix is such a place, though it straddles the line between intentional and unintentional community in surprising ways. These women, the main character most of all, were not willing escapees but were instead put in an isolated community for a variety of reasons, most of which reduce to them being unmarriageable. There are disabled women and strong women, too-foolish women and too-clever women, women touched by madness and women too clear-eyed and practical to get along with anyone else. There are rich women who are too ugly to attract good husbands, widows with nowhere else to go, and young girls whose beauty is considered, by their families, too dangerous to be allowed in the wider world. There is queer sex behind these walls, of the loving kind that lasts for years and the infatuation of youth and the physical need and convenience of many people in close quarters with no other option. For all that it’s the middle ages, they have a diverse bunch.

Marie, the woman who enters the convent as an angry, lovesick gay teenager and only leaves it for good in her coffin, is formidable - as true a woods witch as any I’ve seen. Banished behind walls like so many women, she turns her prison into something like a paradise, a place where odd women like her can flourish and find fulfillment. She is powerful, brilliant, and farseeing. She has visions which may or may not be divinely inspired - they tend to lead her towards the accumulation of more power for herself and more wealth for her abbey. She is quite frightening, and not only to the women of the abbey. I kept thinking as I read that I probably wouldn’t much like her if I lived there, but I would probably also do whatever she said, as everyone around her seemed to.

It works as a fantasy, but Groff to her credit is concerned with more than that. You wouldn’t necessarily expect a medieval drama to be partly a treatise on climate change, which we’re used to thinking of as a crime of industrialization, but Groff emphasizes it in interesting ways here. The idea that by shaping our world we also destroy it intersects with the characters' at-times unusual Christianity; climate change resembles something like our original sin, something we couldn’t avoid once we started trying to remake the earth to our liking. I’m not sure where the politics of that perspective takes you; it can end in an anarcho-primitivism that can curdle into ecofascism, which I don’t think is Groff’s goal. But the necessary impermanence of Marie’s experiment in community building is part of the point; all human experiments are temporary. Our attempts to imagine other ways of living will always only succeed until they fail, because every human way of living will eventually fail just as every human life will end.

Nobody can beat entropy, but we’re doomed to try, which is perhaps the most wondrous and tragic thing about us. The witch in the woods never stays there forever, in the stories I loved so much - she’s always called out, or she's forced out, or she dies. What those stories have in common is a sense of a way of life disappearing. Matrix is a novel, I think, about that - about a way of life flowering beautifully before it inevitably disappears. And it is, for a time, beautiful.