Confessions-Final Review

In the novel Confessions of a Pagan Nun, great injustices take place. The main character, Gwynneve, is a peaceful, gentle woman who lived her days trying to feed those who have no food and give medicine to those with disease. But what she really loved was the freedom that came with words, writing, speech, and thought. The book is split between two stories—the past and the present, which is called “Interruption”. In her tales about the past she speaks of the druid she was in love with, Giannon, as well as her mother and her love for the freedom that is brought by words. The Interruptions are much darker, displaying gruesome events taking place at a church.

The Interruptions mostly involve Sister Aillenn, a nun with a lack of sanity, and an abbot who brings nothing but harm. They also tell of a dead infant whose grave is constantly being disturbed. At one point the tiny corpse disappears, creating drama between the sisters and the abbot. At first it is just a horror that haunts the nuns and the abbot, especially Sister Aillen for, at the time, unknown reasons.

As the story progresses, she tells of how Giannon was taken away from her by Christians who hated him for being a druid. At the same time that she is telling of this, in the Interruptions, she tells of Sister Aillenn's story. It turns out that when Aillenn was younger, she'd fallen in love with the abbot, and he with her. To keep from ruining each others' purity, a terrible iron device was put around her pelvis. He then left her with her wounds from the device to live in a church. Her parents sent her away when she became depressed, and she ended up going to a church to become a nun...where the abbot also lived.

The story slowly falls apart, with sadness in the main part and ruined psychology in the Interruptions. In the main story, Gwynneve is searching high and low to find Giannon. In the Interruptions she tells of how she has been chained up because she has been accused of doing demonic things and being a heathen. The stories meld together as she finds out that the silent monk who lived on the grounds was, in fact, Giannon himself. His tongue had been cut out.

Gwynneve was then executed, to the sadness of the village people. In the epilogue, Giannon himself writes of her death, using his words to speak of how the villagers went to the well that she'd been pushed into and throw in pieces of food and flowers, and they would ask Gwynneve for help with problems or just for forgiveness for something or another, only to be met with silence.

At one point, Gwynneve writes, “Use words to please, to instruct, to soothe. Then stop speaking.” This is the last thing she writes before Giannon begins his part, before she is taken and killed. Words are so important in this book, and though they are lost behind the horrors and losses in the middle of the novel, they come back with importance greater than anything else. Gwynneve has perished, Giannon silenced, but people still went to her to hear the words she would never say, and Giannon kept writing. Their words went on past their silence, giving them the freedom, even in death, that no one could take away from them.

It says a lot about the way we should live our lives. No matter what happens, your words will live on past you. A lot of people feel incredibly insignificant, as though what they say isn't truly heard, but what they don't realize is that just having those words to say in the first place is an amazing gift that no one else can give or take from them. Gwynneve starts out talking about how words are free and she wants so badly to learn how to read and write, in order to have more freedom...so many people out there would rather play video games or sports than learn how to read or write.

Maybe if people could fully grasp the concept that just being able to think their own thoughts in their mind and use words that no one can take from them is the greatest freedom they will ever get. In the US Constitution, it says that, as Americans, we have a freedom of speech. Yet so many people hold back, keeping their words in their heads instead of letting loose their opinions and thoughts. So many people remain quiet, while Gwynneve let out her words in any way that she could, so desperate to take her freedom as her own.

For the majority of the book she talks about how she can only write about what happens, instead of actually speaking them. But then, later on, she gets fed up with the abbot's ways and speaks her mind in cunning, clever ways that make him mad. Though her words get her killed, they are still her own and she wields them like a weapon. Though Giannon cannot speak, he still writes of what has happened.

Truly, the ones in the book who have died are the abbot and Sister Aillenn, who try so hard to kill their own words. They tear themselves away from their own freedom by not speaking, not writing, and barely thinking without inflicting harm upon themselves.

Those with words can be silenced, but it is better to be silent and free than to be loud and restricted, imprisoned, a slave to the ways of thinking that others hold.

Confessions- Review- The Return

Last time, I talked about how the book has a strong message about words and writing being like that of freedom. This time, I'll be talking about one character specifically. She is called Sister Aillenn, and I am not sure of the pronunciation. Throughout the book she appears in every other chapter, or in every 'Interruption'. She is described as being young and beautiful, though somewhat insane.

At one point, in this church filled with religious people, there is a dead infant that they have to bury. In each of the following Interruptions, it talks about how the grave of the baby has been messed with. The cross pulled out of the ground, the stones flung in random directions. Each time, Sister Aillenn increases her negativity to the main character, Gwynneve, to the point where she calls Gwynneve a demon and blames her for everything. At the same time, Gwynn is constantly seeing Sister Aillenn run around outside her tiny cell of a home naked, in the cold, with small wounds on her body.

Later on, the reader finds out about Aillenn's past. She had lived in a Pagan tribe, a tuath, but her father, the chieftan, had wanted her to be Christian. He treated her horribly, and murdered her beloved horse in front of her. She became ill with grief. Then, a group of monks came to the tuath and one of them fell in love with her. Of course, he wanted to stay pure, so instead of just not having sex with her, he had the blacksmith make an iron thing that they put around her private area. It gave her deep wounds. Then he left her. So she travels near and far to find him and finally, when she does find him, he commands her to stay away from him so that he can still be Godly.

So she went insane. After she tells Gwynn of this story, at a time when they'd been embracing each other, "She separated from me then and struck me hard across the face, and she said that I had seduced the story from her and was a demon myself."

Yes, I do believe that she's insane.

Confessions- Review

     So I've been reading Confessions of a Pagan Nun by Kate Horsley. It's about a woman named Gwynneve who lives in sixth-century Ireland. She started out living a Celtic pagan life, but throughout the story she explains that at present time she is a Christian nun.

     I find it to be a very good book so far. It touches on many social issues from that time and gives great insight on what the people of today consider 'minor' historical events. But that's not what really interests me about the book. Gwynneve talks a lot about her ability to write and read, something that she says very few people know how to do other than druids and important religious figures. She says that words are equal to freedom, and when a man or woman has words, he will always be free.

"Even a man in a cage can speak words, or if his tongue be cut, hear them, or if his ears be filled with dirt, have them in his mind. In words he is free at least until he dies, and I do not know, nor did my mother, if a man has words after he is dead, other than what he has left behind in his writing, if he were literate," (Page 9, Paragraph 2).

She goes on to say that being able to write and read is like some sort of magical thing that she finds positively amazing. This written freedom comes up a lot, as the only reason why the story exists is because she was writing it down in between the translating of the bible.

    It's actually fairly inspiring. Words really are freedom, because they're the only thing that people can't take from you, the only thing that people can't completely control. Unless you let them, and that's you taking your own freedom away.

     I really like this book so far. :)

The Return of the Vignettes

So I looked through other peoples' vignettes and looked for parallels between theirs and mine. For example, in Mercedes' vignettes, she speaks, at one point, about losing family pets.

"We lost a lot of pets that year too... it seemed like they all got old suddenly and at the same time..." 

In my own vignettes, I also talk about losing a lot of pets while living at one certain house. This is in my vignette titled 'Bees'. For both of us, this death of animals has a great impact on the lives that we portray in our vignettes.


Elizabeth shows a different kind of fear in her vignettes. In her last vignette she talks about a monster that her and two boys are afraid of. In reality, there was no monster, nothing to be afraid of, kind of like how bees are nothing to be afraid of.


In Constance's vignettes, the fear that I'm finding is much more subdued, much more beneath the surface. Her character Feliciano is secretly a very shy person. He conceals his secret by acting like other people, which he is comfortable with. But when he begins wearing this amazing vest, his confidence plummets.

"In his ordinary, inconspicuous dress, it was easy to impose the pretend Felicianos over the real one. The vest, though, in its aggressive fanciness, was powerful enough to dispel the illusion. It couldn't be hidden by an assumed identity, and exposed the person beneath."

Feliciano is terrified of having his own personality, his shyness, 'exposed'. Just as someone might be afraid of bees, of losing beloved pets, or of monsters, someone may also be afraid of just being themselves.