The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [79]
What we resist seeing in late-twentieth-century America—where we are conditioned, relentlessly, by images of girls’ and women’s bodies as available—is the depth of that soul, and how fierce a young girl’s sense of bodily and spiritual integrity can be. Prepubescent and adolescent girls often express, as Robert Bolt says of St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, “an adamantine sense of self.” This is not necessarily a sure sense of who they are—in girls, this is still developing—but rather a solid respect for their physical boundaries. In the early Christian martyrs, this expressed itself as an unshakable faith in Jesus Christ, which enabled them to defy worldly authority. And, as Andrea Dworkin states in a chapter on virginity in her book Intercourse, each of the virgin martyrs “viewed the integrity of her physical body as synonymous with the purity of her faith, her purpose, her self-determination, her honor.”
The virgin martyrs make me wonder if the very idea of girls having honor is a scandal, and if this is a key to the power that their stories still have to shock us, and even more important, to subvert authority, which now, as in the ancient world, rests largely in the hands of males. The genocidal excesses of our century have not dulled our capacity to be appalled by the brutality of the tortures inflicted on these young women. If anything, our era has made us more fully aware of the psychological dynamic of sexual violence against women that these stories express so unconsciously, in raw form.
The story of the fourth-century martyr St. Lucy of Syracuse is typical of the genre. At the age of fourteen (the median age for marriage in a culture that expected women to bear five children on average and die young, often in childbirth), Lucy was betrothed to a young pagan nobleman. Inspired by an earlier virgin martyr, St. Agatha, Lucy refused him and gave her goods to the poor. Both acts marked her as a Christian, and as Agnes Dunbar’s A Dictionary of Saintly Women recounts: “The young man to whom she was betrothed denounced her as a Christian before the governor, Pascasius, who spoke insultingly to her. As she openly defied him, he ordered her to be dragged away [to a brothel, that she might be raped there], but it was found that neither strong men with ropes nor magicians with their spells could move her an inch; so Pascasius had a fire lighted to burn her where she stood; but as the flames had no power against her, one of the servants killed her by plunging a dagger into her throat.”
Other versions of Lucy’s story, like so many of these tales, provide detailed accounts of the verbal give-and-take between the martyr and the governing authorities, who are both enraged and frightened by the claim of the martyrs to an inviolable, divinely grounded sense of self. Saints Barbara, Catherine, Irene, and Margaret, among others, give speeches so replete with scriptural allusions that they amount to a form of preaching. Here is Mahya again, as Sebastian Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey describe her in Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, “castigating her torturers with a mighty freedom in the Spirit . . . Publically stripped naked at the orders of the king, Mahya yet holds to her dignity, boldly stating, ‘It is to your shame . . . that you have done this; I am not ashamed myself . . . for I am a woman—such as created by God.’ Had she finished her scriptural allusion,” the authors note, “Mahya would have added, ‘created by God in his