The Black Maddona

The Black Madonna by Muriel Spark

Brief summary

Lou and Raymond Parker are a Catholic working-class couple with middle-class aspirations
(D.: Bestrebungen) . They flaunt /display (D.: zur Schau stellen) their progressiveness and tolerance by befriending two newly arrived Jamaicans, Henry Pierce and Oxford St.John and they also introduce them to their friends. As Lou is jealous of her neighbours` and her sister`s children, Lou prays to the newly installed and consecrated Black Madonna – a statue with apparent miraculous power of granting the wishes to those who pray to her – for a child. To her and her husband`s horror, Lou gives birth to a black baby. Although tests prove that Oxford St. John is not the father of the baby, Lou imagines the neighbours`gossip when she brings the child home.Elizabeth, Lou`s sister , informs her that a distant relative descended from a black person, but this does not improve the situation. Neither Lou nor Raymond can feel any affection for their daughter, and give her up for adoption.

Structure of the plot

Exposition p.142-143 The story begins with a classical exposition. In the first part the reader is introduced to the congregation (D.: Kirchengemeinde) of the Church of the Sacred Heart. There is disagreement whether the new statue is contemporary art or old-fashioned. The Black Madonna is compared to the Madonna at Lourdes and is found as not as nice.People claim to know what they are talking about, but in actual fact they are ignorant (D: unwissend).
Spark wants to prepare her readers that not everything is to be taken at its face value. Quite the contrary , the reader must be prepared to read between the lines. In the second part of the exposition (p.143-146/19) Spark gives a detailed account of the Parkers`way of life. The fact that the author states one thing,but implies the exact opposite (p.146/ll.4-6) is also called irony.
The reader is constantly busy reading the text and goes hunting for signs which

Links: to other stories Attitudes towards blackness The way Carlier and Kayerts in “An Outpost of Progress” patronize the natives is similar to the way Lou treats Oxford nad Henry, and when Raymond “thought of the tiny black hands of the baby with their pink fingernails he did not regret smashing the cot” he expresses feelings similar to Doris`s in “The Force of Circumstance”when she says to her husband “I think of those thin black arms of hers round you and it fills me with a physical nausea” The author Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918 to a Jewish father and Protestant mother. At the age of nine she began to write poetry. In 1937 she sailed to Africa and married Sydney Spark,who was working as a school teacher in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Her marriage was a disaster. She left him in 1944. On her return to England she found a post with M16 (the British secret service) .After the war she became the editor of the “Poetry Review” and continued writing. In 1954, she converted to Catholicism. In the early 1960s,she moved to New York, where she was offered a job with the prestigious mgazine the “New Yorker” After that she moved to Rome and later Tuscany where she lived and worked until her death in 2006. She is praised for her unique blend of realism,satire and allegory.