chastity as autonomy & ascetic renunciation {4 us}

THE
RABBI'S DAUGHTER
[AND SON] COULDN'T,
THEREFORE, DIE
"A VIRGIN".

Although there are,
of course, stories within the Jewish
and even the rabbinic traditions of youths and maidens
who commit suicide rather than sacrifice their chastity to Gentile oppressors,
the point about reproductive families is, in fact,
strengthened by that very narrative
because the fact that they die unmarried
is considered to add to the tragedy
of the situation, not as, in itself,
a religious triumph.

Similarly,
already in the Bible,
the girls gather yearly to cry over the virginity
of the Daughter of Jephta, that is, to mourn the fact
that she died a virgin.

Chrysostom
knew what he was talking about. The theme,
of mass suicide to avoid sexual humiliation goes back at least
to the Danaids in Aeschylus, who sought death
to avoid marriage.

Once again,
the contrasts, as well as the comparisons
between various forms of the motif
are what make cultural difference
and cultural history.

Another extraordinary story
has a large group of married Jewish couples
who have been separated for purposes of sexual exploitation
and die bloodily rather than violate
their marriage vows.

In the story,
the blood of the husbands and the blood of the wives
joins into one stream.

Thus,
even though we don't literally
have the end of the story, by all normative rabbinic traditions,
the Rabbi's daughter in the story we have been reading will have to end up a bride.
In a similar thematic vein, Christian stories of reformed prostitutes all end with the repentant a nun
[or sometimes a monk, as Pelagia/Pelagius], while such stories among the Rabbis
end in a marriage.

Were this all there were to say
about the issue, we would simply have two exactly violent systems of oppression of women:
one dictating marriage for all, and one dictating universal virginity.

Indeed, one could argue that the very longuer
of the Ambrosian narrative is generated by its necessity to transform a trickster-escape tale
into a tale of a virgin martyr, just as we have seen
in the narratives of Peter and Cyprian.

By the time of Ambrose's writing, however,
the Christian girl could choose to be a virgin or a bride,
for all that the virgin remained more honored.

As Ambrose emphasizes over and over in the letter to his sister Marcellina
that constitutes his tractate On Virgins, he is not condemning marrige.
"From the time of Jovinian Catholic writers had to acknowledge the good of marriage
or face a charge of heresy!"

Thus, although the Rabbi's daughter cannot die a virgin
because she must end up a bride, the Christian girl has two choices open to her:
bride or virgin.

In this respect,
early Christianity, even in its post-Constantinian phase,
reflects a much more radical revision of Greco-Roman mores
than does rabbinic Judaism.

"The romance of late antiquity takes [among Christians] the form of a saint's life,
in which the chaste desire of the legitimately married hero and heroine has metamorphosed
into the otherworldly passion by which a Christian saint
embraces a childless death!"

If we accept the current view
that one major function of the Greek novels
was to reinforce marriage and the reproductive family as the foundation of civic society,
as has been argued by some, and that the apocryphal Acts, including especially
the Acts of Paul and Thecla, were about parodying and reisting
that romantic ideology, then the rabbinic text
- even this rabbinic martyrology - is
ideologically closer to those
Hellenistic novels than it is
to the apocryphal Acts.

The
'suffering self'
thrives on 'acts of love'.
Not all, to be sure, read the novels in quite this way.
One recent scholar would see in these works precisely
what would praise "the idea of young people - teenagers - standing up for what they wanted"
and even suggests that "this was not Roman, but it was what the young Perpetua did
when she defied her family
to follow Christ."

Or as some others have described them,
they "create a world in sharp conflict with contemporary social structures,
rejecting marriage and family life, anticipating and valuing suffering
and death."

One would hardly describe rabbinic culture in these terms.
Several other feminist scholars, have emphasized that the "otherworldly passion"
represented a real, if also direly compromised avenue of autonomy
for early Christian girls and women.

"In a tradition
where self-representation is a virtual impossibility for women,
[Blandina's martyrdom] stands as a remarkable moment of spiritual assertion
and refusel to be fully defined by the terms
she did not accept!"

Tragic deaths
of women in this way seem
to me the same as equally useless deaths of men in battle and brolls
by hormonal & political stress or criminal situations & powerful pushers like that
either by inside urges or social conflict.

"With its solid bolts
that have to be forced back
for the dead woman to be reached -
or rather the dead body from which the woman has already fled -
this room reveals the narrow space
to which they belong."

Certainly
the topos continues
to these very days of ours.
Of these too, it could be said,
that "women's glory in tragedy was [always] a very ambiguous glory!"
Even this sort of highly compromised option did not exist for our talmudic virgin,
however. Her escape is not only an escape from oppression but also,
an oppressive escape, signified in that she
has to pass a chastity test before
even being deemed worthy
of rescue by Rabbi Me'ir.
Her escape is
not a sign of
her freedom.

She
is constrained
to escape precisely
because her virginity is
being preserved, like
that of Leucippe,
for her husband,
while the Antioch virgin's,
like Agnes's, is being preserved
from her husband, or rather
for her true
chosen husband,
Christ!

Kortom:
't kan verkeren!
't Tragikomisch lot
van mannen en vrouwen
lijkt nog steeds hoofdzakelijk
te worden bepaald door tijdelijke
maatschappelijk sociale conventies en de
{te} strakke [of veel te losse] regels die
'ergens' heersen op
'n bepaald
moment?

Geen
wonder dat
men er de voorkeur aan gaf
om als man geboren te worden
& liever niet als een eeuwig
achtervolgd vrouwelijk
wezen [in utter]
distress for a
variety of
reasons!

Wat
dat betreft
heeft "G d" 't
wat makkelijker daar 'hij'
tegelijk 'zij' is en volgens de oudste tradities
'n 'eigen' plaats zoekt in en onder 'de
mensen' van alle tijden
en plaatsen [naar
zij {& wij?}
menen]!