The Subjects of Mary Mackillop

Most accounts of the life of Mary MacKillop (1842-1909), co-founder of the Australian religious Institute of the Sisters of St Joseph, are generated by Catholic historians, keen to promote the cause for her canonization. In such a master narrative, the question 'who was MacKillop?' is answered unequivocally. She is simply portrayed as a unified subject - Australia's first saint. MacKillop believed that 'becoming a saint' was the desired outcome of living a religious life. But what she meant by 'saint' is historically specific and thus can be separated from the institutional process of becoming a saint decreed by the Church. This raises a problem for cultural historians: how to take archival evidence from a subject from the past and bring it to life with complexity and verisimilitude. Diana Solano argues for a more hermeneutic approach to the subject. Her method generates a radical new reading of the life of MacKillop as a carrier of competing, multiple subjecthoods, and suggests that agency, textuality and intersubjectivity cannot be ignored when portraying cultural life in history.