Matrix

During Marie’s first night in the abbey, she has a dream that is also a memory. The dream is of a beautiful naked woman in a box, being stabbed by a man with a knife; it was a magic trick that Marie saw as a child, which she did not realize at first was a trick. Although the dream seems like a nightmare, it is suffused with a strange yearning. It is vivid and noisy, but Marie’s new monastic surroundings are quiet and drab, and it seems to represent the chaotic and vibrant world that Marie left behind. The proud, beautiful woman in the box also anticipates Marie’s first sighting of Eleanor in a tent during the crusades; Eleanor was also nearly naked at the time but imposing to Marie because of her pride and beauty.

Marie has this memory again on her deathbed. This time, however, the memory is more overtly about entrapment. Rather than admiring the woman’s poise and beauty from a distance, Marie puts herself in the woman’s impossible position: “[S]he is the woman in a box. She is slithering away from the swords coming in from all angles, contorting her body in the darkness so that she will not be stabbed […]” (248). In some ways, the box anticipates the coffin that Marie will soon occupy, as the repeated stabbings evoke the pain that she is feeling and her efforts to stave off death. Yet, the image also symbolizes the contortions that a woman must perform in order to survive, and Marie understands herself to have been occupying such a box all of her life: “Yes. It was like this, her life” (248).