Sydney Owenson: Rituals and Political Reality through Saint Mary Magdalene in Her Narrative, 'Saint Clair'

Stained Glass Image of Saint Mary Magdalene 

from Google Images

From my book, Innovation in Rhetoric in the Writing of Sydney Owenson...
pp. 208-209:

As Sydney Owenson interweaves the blind devotion to rituals of Catholics with those of the French Revolution, she carefully demonstrates the affiliation of church and state, contrary to legislative decrees in the British Act of Union 1801, which states that those of a particular religious affiliation would not be permitted to hold public office. Thus, those jurisdictions, which primarily consist of Catholic citizens, would not receive representation within the governmental forums and subsequently, would not receive legislation in their favor. Owenson presents this conflicting belief system by cleverly choosing Mary Magdalene, the woman chosen by a few selected medieval scribes to be represented historically as a woman scorned, yet in her narrative, St. Clair, Mary Magdalene is the source of a worshipped relic. In her revolutionary, albeit romantic, style, Owenson challenges her aristocratic audience to reconsider its dependence on ritualistic prejudice against the population it wishes to control. 

Owenson concludes this passage with a reference to a rose, her personal symbol for Ireland. She uses the adjectives, ‘faded, with a tear of genius and sensibility,’ to describe this weathered bloom. This incongruous set of descriptions for a flower held as a ‘sacred vial’ indicates a conflicted perspective. In the following sentence, she reveals with more clarity her conflict, “I confess in one sense but certainly more disinterested in another.” If Owenson attempts to confess to her reading audience her own disinterest in the viability of questionable sacredness in religious relics, she does so by linking her beloved countrymen and women with the possibilities of becoming more conscious of their political reality through their symbolic treasures, such as the weathered rose as the symbol of ancient luster.