Kathleen Coyne Kelly - Menacing Virgins : Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

A potential opposition between "virginity" and "chastity" also appears in texts overtly or covertly concerned with Queen Elizabeth of England; if a "maiden"like Queen Elizabeth or Hermia in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, with its central if enigmatic figure of a "fairy queen" who resists husbandly controlshould refuse to become or stay a wife, the society may be threatened by "disorder." In Hermia's case, a maidenly willfulness threatens both the father's and the king's authority; in refusing to be like the wax tablet upon which the father "imprints" his wishes, Hermia risks becoming an overly militant or "menacing" virgin, like the classical Amazons or like the "barren" nun evoked by Shakespeare's Theseus in his (failed) effort to make Hermia obey her father's command to marry Demetrius. The specter of an active virginity, which entails a repudiation of a husband's or father's "ownership" of a woman's sexuality, haunted English Protestant discourses on the household and its theoretically analogous sphere, the state; the idea of the "active virgin," whether represented by Lysistrata or implied by the complaints about marriage articulated from a female perspective in the Middle English poem Mali MeiShad or in the anonymous seventeenth-century poem "Advice to Virgins" (both texts discussed in the editors' introduction), involves a potential threat to the household regime. No wonder, as Richard Halpern has remarked, that the "active virgin" is often depicted as wandering rather than remaining quietly in the enclosure of the patriarchal domus.3 "in excess," Halpern states, "both virginity and sexuality overturn domestic rule," and when this happens, or is imagined as happening, virginity becomes a menace to the ideal of "married chastity."

The ambiguity upon which the title of this book plays highlights the historical lability of concepts of virginity/chastity: the qualities connoted by those terms can be seen as infinitely valuable and hence in need of vigilant protection; but the signified qualities can also be construed as threatening to various vested interests, as the Catholic institution of the convent was sometimes seen as threatening to the secular system of aristocratic inheritance, and as the virgin saints depicted in Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies (1405) were seen as threats by various figures of patriarchal authority protectively coded as "pagan" but with attributes strikingly similar to those possessed by male authoritiessacred and secular both during Christine's own era.

As the editors of this book remark in their introduction, the historical lability of the concepts of virginity and chastity requires us to analyze the process of their cultural construction; if "virginity" in particular seems ostensibly to be a biological concept, the bizarre history of virginity "tests" provides support for Kirsten Hastrup's argument that "biological categories are always transformed into meaningful categories which are defined by their relationship to, and interaction with, other categories of society."4

Certain metaphors for female virginity seem especially tightly correlated with socioeconomic changes of great import: the metaphor of the "virgin land," for instance, authorizes and rationalizes a drive for colonial possession in the early modern era, and during that same period (which Marx saw not as the "Renaissance" but as a period of uneven "transition" from feudal to capitalist social formations), a positive trope of virginity as a "treasure" sometimes and significantly shifted, in certain Protestant discourses, into a negative image of "hoarding." The shift occurred under the pressure of the Protestant denigration of monasticism and a correlative (and highly overdetermined) revaluation of the institution of marriage as a higher (and more profitable) state than it was held to be in the patristic tradition descending from St. Paul's dictum, "Better to marry than to burn."