The Cloister Walk (27 page)

And where is Barbara's power in all this? The oddly satisfying logic of hagiographical construction makes her the patron saint not only of stonemasons, architects, and prisoners but of electricians and artillery gunners—anyone, in fact, in danger of sudden death. Here the depth of Barbara's radical subversion is made clear. While she is most commonly depicted holding her tower, she is also one of the very few women saints who is sometimes pictured holding the eucharistic elements, a chalice and host. A person in danger of dying without receiving the last rites from a priest may pray for Barbara's intercession, and it's taken care of; she substitutes for the priest and the sacrament itself.

One would think that Barbara's priestly attributes, or those of Petronilla, a first-century martyr whose “usual emblem,” according to the
Oxford Dictionary of Saints,
is “a set of keys, presumably borrowed from St. Peter,” would make them favorites of Catholic feminists; instead, like the other virgin martyrs, they are largely forgotten, considered an embarrassment by women still smarting from the prayers of the old Roman Missal, which managed to be both sappy and insulting in giving thanks that God “didst bestow the victory of martyrdom on the weaker sex.” But to forget a martyr is to put her through another martyrdom. Eric Partridge's
Origins
gives as the origins of our English word “martyr” both the Latin
memor
(mindfulness) and the Greek
martys
(witness); which suggests that when we are no longer mindful of a martyr, we lose her witness, we render her suffering meaningless.

I believe that the relevance of the virgin martyrs for today may rest in what one scholar of the early church, Francine Cardman, terms their “defiance of the conventions of female behavior,” a defiance that their belief in Christ made possible. Knowing that they were loved by Christ gave them the strength to risk a way of life that was punishable by death (under Roman law, both a soldier's refusal to fight, and a woman's refusal to marry and breed for the Empire, were treasonous offenses). That the virgin martyrs have been in a sense betrayed by the very church that sanctified them may be clearly seen in the fact that, although they were executed for rejecting marriage, by the time of the Victorian Age, when Christianity had long been the dominant religion in the West, a scholar translating stories of the virgin martyrs could label as “unchristian” that which had made them Christian martyrs in the first place.

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. Here are the words of a Benedictine sister, startled to be asked about the power of virginity. “This is something I carry very deep within,” she writes, “that I carry very secretly . . . virginity is centered in the heart and could be named ‘singleness of heart.' ” Now we are far indeed from our dictionary definition, now we are hearing virginity described not in terms of physicality but as a state of being. The sister continues, “Virginity is a state that returns to God in wholeness. This wholeness is not that of having experienced all experiences, but of something reserved, preserved, or reclaimed for what it was made for. Virginity is the ability to stay centered, with oneness of purpose.”

And now I am doing what I've often longed to do, what my education and cultural conditioning have trained me
not
to do: to bring the nun and the whore together, only to find that they agree. The designation might seem brutal: Andrea Dworkin is not a whore, nor am I. But we were both formed sexually in the maelstrom of the 1960s, at Bennington College, and the point I am making is that the great lie (or lay) of sexual liberation expected us, conditioned us, to play the whore. This is not an idle metaphor. I knew a Williams boy—no doubt destined for great things in the corporate world—who regularly solicited at Bennington for his thriving business as a pimp. And a few years ago, when the movie
Pretty Woman
was a hit, a bright and gifted fourteen-year-old girl I know attended a school Halloween party as the “pretty woman” character—a prostitute—and her parents, teachers, and friends considered it cute, not worthy of discussion.

I am grieving now for the girl I was back in the 1960s, who struggled with cultural definitions of a woman as someone attached to a man; who had to contend with a newly “liberated” definition of sexual freedom as that which made me more sexually available to men. My response was to cloister myself—at Bennington, in the mid-1960s, this was no mean feat—to keep to myself and read a lot of books. Some of my friends responded by throwing themselves at men, often throwing themselves away. I grieve for the suicides, and for the girl I knew who survived, but with mutilated genitals. She had cut herself with a razor blade in a desperate attempt to rid herself of an exceptionally cruel and manipulative boyfriend. It took me a long time to see that with the peculiar logic of the mad, she had done something powerful (from the Latin “to be able to do things,” to achieve a desired end). By damaging the only part of herself that was valuable to her boyfriend, she managed to break with him, and also received the psychiatric help she needed to become her own person.

I think of this girl as a virgin martyr, although she was not a virgin by the dictionary's definition. And she did not die, not literally. She may represent another kind of virginity, what Dworkin has termed “the new virginity, a twentieth-century nightmare,” based on the belief that “sex is freedom.” Now, Dworkin writes, the blood demanded of us is “not the blood of the first time [but] the blood of every time,” expressed in increasingly violent images in both pornography and the fashion industry, and in bodily mutilation as fashion, with eleven-year-olds asking their mothers if they can pierce their belly-buttons, a practice that until just a few years ago was one of the more arcane forms of sado-masochism.

What might it mean for a girl today to be as the early virgin martyrs were and defy the conventions of female behavior? She would presume to have a life, a body, an identity apart from male definitions of what constitutes her femininity, or her humanity. Her life would articulate the love of the community (be it a family, a religious tradition, Christian or otherwise) that had formed her, and would continue to strengthen her. And she would be virgin, in the strongest possible sense, the sense Methodius had in mind when he said of St. Agatha: “She was a virgin, for she was born of the divine word.”

What about the virgin martyrs? Do they set women back? Do they make room for the majority of women who are not virgins but mothers? The Benedictine sister spoke of virginity as something “reserved, preserved, or reclaimed for what it was made for.” In reclaiming our virginity, women can reclaim our first selves. We can allow the fierce, holy little girls we were to cast judgment on the ways our adult lives do and do not reflect what we were made for. If the Catholic church chose, for its own purposes, to suggest that a holy woman need be a virgin, preferably a martyr, that is not our concern. As Thomas Merton observed, birds do not tell the time.

We can reclaim our own saints. Wilgefortis (or Uncumber), for example, a virgin martyr who just may be an example of earthy, female humor. To avoid an arranged marriage, she grew a beard, a crime for which her father had her crucified, and now she serves to help married women become unencumbered of evil husbands. All you need is a prayer, and a peck of oats. And there is St. Perpetua, a martyr of early-third-century Carthage, breast-feeding her child in prison before being fed to the lions; and the aged deaconess Apollonia, probably a widow, who is seized by a crowd that beats her, breaks her jaw, and tears out her teeth. Physical virginity is not the issue, and it never was. Reading between the lines of the tortures the virgin martyrs endured, it seems obvious that they were raped. Scholars of the early church now confirm this. The real issue is that these unprotected women dare to make an outrageous claim—that as Christians, they have been made in the image of God—and are thus greatly feared by governing authorities and punished to the full extent of the law.

We can use these stories to remember the extent to which women have always been feared by male authorities, and to better recognize the ways that this fear translates into violence against women. We can remember that no woman is safe, or respectable, once she claims for herself the full psychic power of virginity. The noblewoman Ruhm responds to news of the massacre of her husband and other Christians in her town by walking bareheaded with her daughter and granddaughter into a public square: “She, a woman whose face no one had ever seen outside the gate of her house,” gives a speech so powerful that the king is shaken by it. He wants to execute all the townspeople “for letting her go on at such length and thus lead the town astray.” When Ruhm refuses to deny Christ, the king has her put to death, but not before he has killed her daughter and granddaughter and poured their blood into her mouth.

That story comes from sixth-century Syria; a witness to a horror closer to us may be found in Mark Danner's book about a massacre that occurred in December of 1981 in El Salvador, in the hamlet of El Mozote. Most of the peasants killed were evangelical Christians, and among the stories the soldiers told, years later, was that of a young girl, a story remarkably similar to accounts of the virgin martyrs:

One wonders: will the “usual spring” appear on the site where she died? Will this strange story of a powerless young girl who has the power to make soldiers afraid be embellished over the years, as the soldiers try to live with the horror of what they have done? This nameless girl has made her witness: it began when the soldiers' wonder began to turn to fear, and continued as they argued afterwards about her death. She had brought them to the
point vierge,
where conversion begins in the human heart.