Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 46

44 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.