virginal purity sexual violation martyrs & mothers


Invoking a potential tale of liberation only to subvert that narrative,
the poet compromises Agnes' rescue from sexual violation and indeed undermines her very resistance through his spectacular scripting of her climatic speech.

There is no escape offered from male domination.

At the same time, however, the power of the virgin martyr never can be completely eclipsed:
"Only by explicitly problematizing female audacity can the tale of the virgin martyr attempt to restrain the heroism of women. And bacause the tale most therefore become engaged in the construction and contemplation of the heroic virago, its message of virginal docility always carries with it the potential for its own subversion."

If, moreover, we remember that medieval Christianity
did offer intellectual and spiritual vocations for religious women,
however much under the hierarchical superiority of males, while medieval Judaism offered none,
then we can see this as an incompletely subverted potential tale of liberation
(or a partially subverted tale of virginal docility),
and not one that is unequivocally compromised and undermined.

[Agnes] is not after all audacious virago but docile virgo,
but insofar as she is an ego ideal for Christian girls, she presents the possibility of choosing a life path, however compromised, however limited, that rabbinic society had shut down completely.

Only a naieve, highly apologetic,
or triumphalist voice - or which there are unfortunately meny -
would claim that Christianity bears a feminist message vis-a-vis a misogynist Judaism.
To be sure, it is a caricature that regards the lives of Jewish wives in antuquity as peculiarly worse than those of their Christian or traditionalist Greco-Roman sisters, or that sees early Christianity as a "feminist"
movement, or ignores the "patriarchal" control of even religious women in the Church.

"We have to ask whether in a discourse which builds up an elite of sexual renunciation,
in which women are allowed or even encouraged to participate, married women might perhaps fare worse than in a culture in which everybody is required to marry."

Because of its focus on doctrinal questions on the one hand, and on sexual askesis primarely for the Christian leadership, on the other, early Christian discourse often neglected to consider the everyday life of those who failed to rise to prominance as hailed ascetics, that is, to produce a Christian sexual ethic for them.

Observance of "Jewish" menstrual-purity rules
provided an avenue of spiritual fulfillment, of askesis,
analogous to virginity for the Christian married women of the community
of the Didascalia.

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23 dec 2008 - bewerkt op 23 dec 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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