Matrix

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 1

Book 2

Book 3

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 1, Chapter 1 Summary

It is 1158, and Eleanor of Aquitaine has banished Marie from her court and sent her to a distant abbey. She will be installed as a prioress there: a nun just below the rank of abbess. She has some experience in running households, her own mother having died when she was 12. Prior to casting her out, Eleanor told Marie that her awkward looks made her unmarriageable and suited for a cloistered life.

The convent is poor and isolated. Several nuns have died of pneumonia there, and the gardens and livestock are in bad shape. Sister Emme, the abbess, and Sister Goda, the subprioress, receive Marie. Emme, a blind elderly woman, is welcoming toward Marie; Goda is less friendly, as she resents Marie’s sudden usurping of the role of prioress, which she hoped to obtain for herself. Marie also meets Sister Wevuva, the magistra, or mistress of novices. She is fed a spartan dinner, given an herbal bath, and then outfitted in nuns’ garments. Because she is so big-boned and tall, none of her new clothes quite fit her.

She misses Cecile, her long-time servant and best friend, whom she had to leave behind at Eleanor’s court. She also misses Eleanor and the vivid life of the court. She has a desolate first impression of her new surroundings and low expectations for her future there: “All will be gray, she thinks, the rest of her life gray. Gray soul, gray sky, gray earth of March, grayish whitish abbey” (10).

She is led to bed in the dortoir (dormitory) where the other novices sleep. That night, she has a dream that is also a memory. She is a child on a holy crusade in a distant landscape. She is sitting on her mother’s shoulders, among a crowd of people. They are all watching a magical trick: a beautiful woman hidden in a box, which a man repeatedly stabs. The child Marie does not understand at first that this is a magical trick, and is first horrified and then amazed when the woman reemerges unscathed from the box.

Book 1, Chapter 2 Summary

Marie begins her new life at the abbey. At morning chapel, she meets her fellow novices, including Swan Neck and Ruth, who will become her friends. During prayer and singing, she is overcome by a memory of Eleanor’s court at Westminster: “[t]he noise, the brightness, the colors, the warmth” (24).

While doing secretarial work for Emme in her office, Marie overhears the novices gossiping about her through a hole in the floor. This plot device reveals more about Marie’s origins, information that Marie already knows: Her mother was raped as a young girl by a member of the Plantagenet family, making Marie Eleanor’s relative, although she is considered illegitimate. Some years after her mother died, Eleanor took her into her court.

Marie recalls her first meeting with Eleanor, which took place during a crusade in Byzantium (now Istanbul) with Eleanor’s Queen’s Ladies’ Army. Marie was a child at the time, accompanying her mother and aunts. After overhearing her relatives pointing out Eleanor’s tent in hushed voices, she stole into the tent one night with a knife, intending to avenge her mother’s rape. Instead, she was stopped by an awake and half-dressed Eleanor and was immediately disarmed by her: “Powerful as a punch to the chest, the wonder Marie felt then, this first love” (30).

Book 1, Chapter 3 Summary

Marie plots her escape from the abbey by writing a series of lais, narrative lyric poems, to Eleanor. The lais detail dreams and memories, as well as her love for Eleanor herself. She believes that Eleanor, upon receiving and reading the poems, will be moved to free her from the abbey and re-install her in the court.

She fails to hear from Eleanor. Instead, she is punished for venturing outside the abbey without permission, hoping to intercept a letter from the court. When a hawk kills her pet merlin, she falls into despair. Her despair begins to be transformed during prayers one morning. The praying nuns remind her of captive birds, whose song is repetitive and limited because they are in captivity. Yet their song is also clearer and stronger than the songs of wild birds lost in the forest.

She resolves to embrace her role as prioress and institutes several changes in the abbey. She divides the nuns into groups to fish and forage for wild mushrooms on the abbey’s lands. She also uses her own money to buy meat in town, which was not previously allowed at the abbey. Finally, she discovers that many of the renters on the abbey’s land owe the abbey money, a situation that Emme allowed. Marie takes a tougher approach, demanding back payments of rent and kicking those who refuse to pay out of their houses. The renters are frightened of the new prioress but regard her with a grudging respect: “For it is a deep and human truth that most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves” (50).

Book 1 Analysis

Although Marie is in an abbey, there is little sense in these first chapters of her having a religious vocation. There is only a sense of her being an outsider due to her appearance, family circumstances, and sexuality. She is an orphan, her mother having died when she was 12, and is too tall and plain for marriage, at least in the eyes of Queen Eleanor. Even when her mother was alive, moreover, her upbringing was unconventional. She comes from an all-female family of “viragoes,” or warriors, who fought in the crusades and generally comported themselves like men (27). Marie is also a lesbian who became aware of her attraction to women at a young age; she feels a distant love for Queen Eleanor and has a more intimate relationship with Cecile, her servant girl at Eleanor’s court.

These qualities of being an outsider will ultimately make Marie an effective prioress. She is accustomed to fending for herself and managing a household, having done so for some time after her mother died. Her indifference to convention, as well as her time spent fighting in the crusades, serves her well when she confronts the indebted peasants on the abbey’s lands. Unlike the abbess, Marie does not mind being fierce when she has to be, and she understands that her ferocity inspires respect, even as it alienates people. Marie grew up in a matriarchal family, is used to the company of women, and has a broad and imaginative sense of their capabilities.

However, Marie’s main experience of religious fervor in these first chapters is directed toward Queen Eleanor, rather than toward the Church, the abbey, or her fellow nuns. Eleanor occupies Marie’s thoughts to the degree that she becomes a kind of god for her, and she woos Eleanor from a distance, writing her a series of poems that are also spiritual confessions. It is only when Eleanor fails to respond to these poems that Marie turns her attentions toward the abbey and begins to experience a hint of the rewards of cloistered life and the depths of experience concealed behind its walls. This is seen in her reverie about the songs of captive birds, in which she realizes they are more repetitive and limited—but also clearer—than the songs of birds out in the wild.