“Holy Woman” (1957)
Updated: 4 days ago
G. K. Chesterton once wrote:
“It is the partisans of divorce, not the defenders of marriage, who attach a stiff and senseless sanctity to a mere ceremony, apart from the meaning of the ceremony.”
These words from The Superstition of Divorce (1920) shed light on an interpretive crux in Lafferty’s “Holy Woman,” one that hinges on the difference between the outward form of a commitment and its sacredness, as well as on how both relate to human will. The distinction matters because it shapes how readers interpret one of Lafferty’s trickiest Sour John stories, the first he wrote.
In “Holy Woman,” Sour John recounts how he was briefly kidnapped in the free port of Jebel Shah by Jack McCabe, a “charming” but shiftless bum. Jack’s devoted wife, Martha, was raised in an orphanage and later won by Jack in a card game. She stands by her difficult marriage despite Jack’s failures, lack of character, and harebrained schemes. When Jack one day mistakes Sour John for a millionaire, he abducts and tries to ransom him. Martha loyally goes along with the plan; she doesn’t want Jack to look like a fool. The story has a cute ending, and Sour John deems Martha a “holy woman” who suffers her fool of a husband but never abandons him.
In his invaluable blog Continued on Next Rock, Andrew Ferguson writes:
“Framed within Sour John’s narration is the story of a desperate woman surviving by whatever means are at her disposal. Given the Arabian Nights setting (and with it the narrative occasion of the original Scheherazade), a euphemistic reading of ‘gin rummy’ seems encouraged by the text, though not explicit within it. Whether or not she is forced to prostitute herself, though, the virtue of this holy woman is such that she is never debased by her surroundings, never brought down to the level of any of the rogues around her.”
This reading initially appeals because it acknowledges the harsh realities Martha faces, grounding Lafferty’s story in human vulnerability and social critique. But the possibility of coercion does not establish that gin rummy is a euphemism. That question has to be answered from the card-playing scenes themselves. Sour John explicitly calls her a holy woman, and I read that praise in the story’s comic spirit. The Laffertian logic of “Holy Woman”—from the Little Sisters’ role in shaping Martha’s character to Martha’s unyielding belief in sacramental marriage—undercuts the euphemistic reading and, I think, makes it unsupportable.
Coercion would not by itself destroy Martha’s holiness, as Augustine’s argument below makes clear. The case for a literal reading must rest on how the story presents her escape.
I read Martha as saved by something improbable, absurd, and ultimately graceful. Her skill at cards gives that grace a concrete form.
This raises the central interpretive issue: Is gin rummy a veiled euphemism for sex? The argument here is that it isn’t; this is a moment when we should read Lafferty literally.
Dante’s distinction between absolute and conditional will helps clarify the question of consent. In Paradiso (Canto IV), Beatrice distinguishes the will that refuses evil from the will that yields through fear of something worse. Canto V then considers the binding force of vows freely made. Medieval scholasticism 101.
Sexual violence would not in itself destroy Martha’s holiness. Augustine makes this distinction in his discussion of Lucretia:
“We maintain that when a woman is violated while her soul admits no consent to the iniquity, but remains inviolably chaste, the sin is not hers, but his who violates her.”— Augustine, City of God, Book I, Chapter 19
Martha’s earlier enslavement makes consent a real question. Sour John does not describe her consent, but presents the marriage as honorable:
“This odd little man married her honorably.”
On this reading, she regards her marriage as binding. Her sanctity, then, is not a product of mere endurance. She chooses to uphold the marriage as a sacred obligation, not as a fate imposed upon her.
Sacramental marriage anchors the story’s moral structure, just beneath the hijinks of Jack and Sour John. The Catholic Church defines sacramental marriage as a lifelong, exclusive, and indissoluble covenant between a baptized man and a baptized woman, instituted by God and elevated by Christ to a sacrament. It is a sacred bond reflecting Christ’s love for the Church, rooted in fidelity, permanence, and openness to life.
A valid sacramental marriage requires free and full consent; this is a crucial distinction in Martha’s case. If coercion deprived her of free consent, the marriage would be invalid. My reading takes her continuing fidelity as a willing commitment, though the story does not describe the wedding itself.
A more coherent reading, then, is that gin rummy is precisely the means by which Martha wins her freedom. Her skill at cards is not a euphemism but the literal means through which she upholds her virtue.
This interpretation preserves both the sanctity of her sacramental commitments and the spiritual integrity of the story’s inner logic. It carries forward the grace she received from the Little Sisters in childhood into the grace she sustains within her difficult marriage. Lafferty’s humor and paradox often reveal deeper truths, and here, the absurdity of Martha’s situation is not a veiled tragedy but a testament to improbable grace.
One of the story’s recurring devices is Jack gambling Martha away at poker, only for her to reclaim herself through gin rummy. Martha, as it turns out, is the best gin rummy player in Jebel Shah. In one pivotal scene, when a “purple-faced plutocrat” wins her, the text reads:
“He wanted to possess her at once but fortunately she kept her presence of mind. ‘As long as the cards are out we might just go one hand of gin rummy,’ she said.”
The story loses too much if this is a sexual transaction, though such a reading might deepen it as a social critique. The problem is that this would not be the kind of social critique Lafferty was making. The story is set in a world of vice, and in such a real-world scenario, a woman in Martha’s position might have no real recourse other than trading her body for freedom. The plutocrat’s intent is clear; he wants to possess Martha. In a more cynical reading, the card game becomes a sly way of describing what actually happens.
But this reading fails on multiple levels because Jebel Shah is not the real world. It is a Sour John story.
Lafferty resolves a dire situation with an improbable solution. Just as Jack’s kidnapping scheme collapses into a laughable thirteen-dollar ransom, Martha’s card-playing gambit fits with tall-tale logic. If the gin rummy games were a euphemism, the entire story would shift in tone from comedy to something grimly ironic.
Martha wins these games, and the story draws attention to her skill rather than implying any underlying compromise. The humor hinges on the absurdity of a woman in her situation repeatedly outplaying men who cannot resist another bet. At one point, Jack even complains that she quits mid-hot streak:
“Billah, she quit in the middle of a hot streak!”
Later, Martha offers to play Sour John for a piastre. He refuses because he believes she is too good at the game: “She was good in all things but I had the feeling that she was a little too good in this.” His fear of losing money gives her skill a second appearance in the story.
So, let’s make a case for the other side. One could argue that this is the comedy of a truncated sexual encounter or that Holy in the title really means Holey; but to do so would be a tonal violation. If the card games conceal sexual encounters, the story takes on a darker tone than I think its comic treatment supports.
One’s critical assessment of all this will profoundly shape how one interprets the story’s closing phrase:
Sha‘ Allah.
I take it as a shortened form of In shā’ Allāh (إن شاء الله), the Arabic phrase meaning “If God wills” or “God willing.”
Sour John says this after his listener predicts that the adventure will be remembered as the story of Sour John and the girl with the cornflower eyes. The reply entrusts that future retelling to God’s will. I read it as carrying forward the trust in providence that governs Martha’s improbable victories at gin rummy.
Current notes:
Bibliographical Note
Lafferty’s work-history card is headed “The Holy Woman” and dates the writing to fall 1957. It records circulation during 1958–60 and bears the annotation “With numbered Dotty.”
First published with the special edition of Dotty (United Mythologies Press, 1990); reprinted in Strange Plasma, no. 7 (1994).
Sources: R. A. Lafferty, work-history card for “Holy Woman,” R. A. Lafferty papers, 1979-002, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa; Internet Speculative Fiction Database, “Holy Woman,” https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?44421.
