The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [82]
In a classic case of blame-the-victim, Agnes Smith Lewis, writing in 1900 on the subject of Syrian virgin martyrs, seems shocked by their unladylike behavior, stating that they “made themselves unduly obnoxious to the heathen, and brought upon themselves and their friends a bitter persecution, not only by their steadfastness in the faith of the Christ, but also by their unchristian renunciation of the marriage bond; a teaching which, if successful, would have upset all respectable society, and put an end to civilization.” (Italics mine.) Exactly what the Romans had feared; what most offended their sense of family values. Lewis does express some sympathy for the martyrs, recognizing that “their alternative was to have been forced into loveless marriages with unsympathetic, and perhaps godless men.”
One facet of the psychological realism in these stories that I find compelling is that the virgin martyrs are usually betrayed by those closest to them: fathers, suitors, mothers. And over the centuries they have been betrayed by their biographers, who sneer at the loveliest of their symbols. Take the tale of Juthwara, an English virgin martyr listed in The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. A young girl who becomes gravely ill when her beloved father dies, she is duped by a conniving stepmother who offers a remedy (for some no doubt thoroughly British reason, cheeses applied to the breasts) and then suggests to her son that Juthwara is pregnant. In the telescoped drama typical of these tales, when the young man finds Juthwara’s underclothes moist, he immediately beheads her, and, the narrator notes, dryly, “The usual spring of water then appeared.”
Juthwara patiently carries her head back to the church—the virgin martyrs are nothing if not persistent—shocking the young man into repentance. He eventually founds a monastery on a former battleground. The narrator reports, saucily, that Juthwara’s “usual emblem is a cream cheese or a sword.” Once our laughter subsides, we might ask what message this tale carried to its original audience. We might look beyond the fairy-tale elements to a story of familial betrayal transformed into love, of a witness given that has the power to change lives, to transform a battlefield into a house of prayer.
Ironically, it is often by taking the preposterous virgin martyr stories at face value that we can best see the kernel of meaning that they contain, their wealth of possibility. Once again (or, as usual), a virgin martyr gives witness to a wild power in women that disrupts the power of male authority, of business as usual. Is this a point vierge ? Do we need to speak now about the power of virginity? Current dictionary definitions of “virginity” are of little use in helping us to discover why, in legends of the Christian West, virginity has so consistently been associated with the power to heal, why the virgin spring is a place of healing.
The 1992 American Heritage Dictionary defines a virgin in terms of incompleteness, as “a person who has not experienced sexual intercourse.” The adjective virgin is defined in a more revealing way, as a “pure, natural, unsullied state, unused, uncultivated, unexplored, as in virgin territory,” a definition that allows for, and anticipates, use, exploration, exploitation. In Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin correctly sees such definitions as coming from a male frame of reference, in which “virginity is a state of passive waiting or vulnerability; it precedes and is antithetical to wholeness.” But “in the woman’s frame,” she writes, “virginity is a fuller experience of selfhood and identity. In the male frame, virginity is virtually synonymous with ignorance; in the woman’s frame, it is recovery of the capacity to know by direct experience of the world.”
We so seldom hear virginity defined from a woman’s point of view that it is shocking, and difficult to fathom.