virile virgins vreselijke vraatzucht & verlossing?


't Blijft dus 'n zaak van wisselvalligheden, natuurrampen, menselijke ondernemingen & hun invloeden?!

Some
effectively contrast
the martyrdom on the first-century or second-century Jewish 4 Maccabees
with that of Perpetua: in 4 Maccabees, the martyred woman is martyred as a mother, and
"this martyrdom was about preserving family identity and piety in the face of oppression!"
In the martyrdom of Perpetua,
after some ambivalence, the milk in Perpetua's breasts dries up,
and
"the baby
had no further desire
for the breast!"

This seeming evidence
of divine approval in the text reinforced the notion
that martyrdom was incompatible with maternity.

The time of the Maccabean mothers was over;
martyrdom was a matter
of private conscience,
not family ties
anymore?!

In the second century,
we thus find Perpetua, who is marked as the Christian resister to the Roman culture of gender through

"her ability to stare directly back into the face of her persecutors,
not with the elusive demeanour of a proper
matrona,"
but with a returned gaze that,
"broke with the normative body language in a way that sinalles an aggressiveness
that was not one of conventional femininity!"

Slightly before her
there is Blandina, whose
"fortitude and endurance were compared to those of a victorious male athlete!"
In that same text,
we can note the transformation of the female slave, Biblis, first thought
"unmanly and easily broken,"
who then
"comes to her senses"
and is martyred.

Torture
& hard slave~
travail were common in those days
and common people were not supposed to gaze into their Master's Eyes
or disregard their Master's Voice
at any time in any way!
For others,
this represents the
"pride of a Roman matron"
On the whole
these different interpretations of gazing eyes,
physical postures, polite words & behaviour seems to be of utmost importance,
but to some more convincing than to others?

Roman honor:
referring to her dismissal of her father's entreaties
as exemplary of Roman
virtus,
a virtus, that,
as some make clear,
was available in the early Roman culture
to both men and women?!
In contrast to these virile,
masculinized aggressivity of the female martyrs of the second century,
in the fourth century, we have a much more complex structure of gender
in which both the masculinized aggressivity of the female martyr as
virago
and an almost contradictory feminized passivity as
virgo
are produced simultaneously.

According to one argument,
the shift is part and parcel of a shift in Roman culture,
even apart from its [further] Christianization,
as also others indicate.

They show how this martyrdom itself
is rather slippery with respect to its complicated dialectics of defiance and passivity.
But, in a sense, this is the intertextual transformation of a much earlier textual practice,
for some mark also that
"women in tragedy died violently! More precisely,
it was in this violence that a woman mastered her death,
a death that was not simply the end
of an exemplary life
as a spouse.

It was a death
that belonged to her totally!"
Indeed, we should not forget that this is a death
that robs her of a life that would belong to her, if only partially.
It is the constant transformation of the intertext, the transgression
and remaking of
the signifying
practices,
that constitutes cultural history,
and our work here does equip us
with exemplary cases of such processes.
One could say, perhaps, that the most strikingly new thing
about the signifying practice [commonly] called
"Christianity"
was that within it, virgins were [much] more autonomous than wives, while in
"classical"
culture, and rabbinic Judaism within that,
"[virgins] have less autonomy
than wives!"
Anyway,
all these
stories do continue
up till these very days of ours:
onder invloed van omstandigheden verandert menselijk
gedrag soms van 't ene uiterste in 't andere? Voor en na bepaalde oorlogen,
zich ontwikkelende industrie, conservatieve/progressieve tijdperken en
revolutionaire tendenzen, sommige elites
van [toevallig] welgestelden
en vrijgevochten
jeugdigen!

't Enige
wat je ervan kan zeggen is:
't kan verkeren?
Dat betekent voor sommigen chaos
& voor andere al met al 'bekering',
'inkeer', 'bevrijding', 'verlossing',
emancipatie of zelfs
eeuwenlange
vrijheids~
strijd?

blozen
15 aug 2008 - bewerkt op 15 aug 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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Asih, man, 80 jaar
   
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