The world is ecstatic in its very deeps.” She herself, however, is presented as alienated from and alienating to the twelfth-century world of the novel, her independence dooming her to intellectual isolation. For Marie, “The world holds a great and pulsing terror at its center. (Courtesy Wikimedia)Īt times, Matrix is filled with a very medieval delight in the everyday sensuality of the world as well as its great mysteries.

Poet Marie de France, from an illuminated manuscript. Marie seeks to turn this community into a utopia set apart from its violent, dreary, and misogynistic medieval surroundings. The fictional Marie is an illegitimate relative of the Plantagenet monarchs, and Matrix follows Marie’s emotional and intellectual journeys during the decades of her leadership of a religious community. The character of Marie is based on the theory that Marie de France, twelfth-century romantic poet, was also abbess of Shaftesbury in Dorset. More readiness to explore the beauty and strangeness of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on their own terms would have yielded a richer and more challenging novel. Although this could be an empowering narrative about women’s agency, and about the rich possibilities of living in community, clichés make the medieval world of the novel feel both more artificial and more distant from the present than it might. Among other things, the novel is a Bildungsroman for its protagonist, Marie, who has to learn how to be at peace with herself, and decides to learn how to manage and order her world after being commanded to join a nunnery. It also means a system of categorizing and understanding knowledge, a system within which things come into being.

In Latin, it points us toward the leader and mother of a women’s religious community. The title of Lauren Groff’s ambitious new novel, Matrix, is deliberately multivalent.

Matrix lauren