Vers une autre temporalité de la "parthénos" : entre mythe, littérature et disciplines du corps

This thesis traces a genealogy of the girl in Western culture by focusing on key moments in time, the most significant of which I argue is the idea – the expectation – of her becoming a heteronormative woman. Virginity loss has historically served as a symbolic mark capable of determining this passage into a temporality, which is productive for the polis. My objective is to produce a cultural analysis that draws on a map of multiple notions and discourses of female adolescence so as to explore the potentialities of another temporality, different from that of virginity. To do so, I have chosen to use the Ancient Greek word “parthenos” because it does not systematically refer to the oft-conventional connotations related to the “girl” (“jeune fille”). In the first part titled “Virginity, a girl thing”, I analyze the concept of the parthenos through a nexus of discourses: law, medicine, and myth. I read the Hippocratic treaty pertaining to the maladies of virgins, in order to uncover the entwined relationship between puberty, considered a pathology, and coitus and pregnancy, prescribed as an erotic cure. A paradigmatic shift occurs in the 19th Century with the birth of legal medicine: the hymen – absent in the Hippocratic doxa, becomes the sine qua non material sign to determine the girl’s status of purity. I produce a close reading of treaties (brothers Beck, Ambroise Tardieu, Paulier and Hétet) in order to reveal an ideological pattern in these medical and legal practices. I show here that the configuration of virginity is contingent on that of rape, so that older women (oftentimes married women) are refused the right to legally claim that they have been raped. In the last section, I offer a contemporary reading of Aeschylus’ Orestia and Sophocles’ Antigone where I show that Electra and Antigone are telling symbols of the tragic fate that awaits the mortal parthenos who cannot comply with the rules of the polis. A brief portrayal of Artemis and the Furies allows me to show, however, the regenerative potential inherent in the idea of the divine parthenos, as well as the temporary power of chosen parthenia. In the second part titled “The liminary. Rethinking the becomings of adolescence”, I draw on Girlhood Studies, social psychoanalysis and Elizabeth Grosz’s feminist theories on the body so as to deploy a contextualized map of the concept of the parthenos. I read recent theories on adolescence in Cultural Studies (Henry A. Giroux) and social psychoanalysis (Anne Bourgain, Olivier Douville, and Edmond Ortigues) in order to identify what determines the passage between adolescence and adulthood: I discover that it is the tension between the fear of disappearing and the fantasy of autogenesis. These two movements are then seen through the lens of material philosophies of the body, specifically Michel Foucault’s and Judith Butler’s work on the disciplines of the body. My aim is to explore the possibilities and the limitations of a teleological temporality in order to capture the effects and the ramifications of a discourse on materiality. Ultimately, I show that in all the discourses analyzed, the consequence for the girl who does not fit the ideal has always been exclusion for the realm of intelligibility, and from the polis. The third part titled “Temporalities of the parthenos as a liminary subject” is concerned with particular modalities of disincarnated parthenia in contemporary literature. The main objective of this part is to prove that virginity has more often than not inscribed the girl in a specific temporality, that of invisibility and political expropriation. I propose a range of five texts through a genealogical approach to explore how literature can – although it often fails – express another temporality for the parthenos as a liminary subject. Christine Angot’s Vu du ciel shows that ascension to the realm of seraphic metamorphosis only concerns very young girls who have not yet reached puberty. The true victim, Séverine, is prepubescent and sexually unaware, and remains so as an angel, whereas the false victim, Ch., is a younger woman who survived abuse as an adolescent. Ch. must then suffer a terrible fate, since Séverine is charged with the responsibility of slowly and painfully killing her off. On the other hand, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones shows the possibility of a girls’ community although it excludes lesbian relationships. Rape remains a central question, but it is read through the importance of Susan being able to produce a cohesive narrative so as to move to another, more acceptable realm. Literature becomes a hospitable space for the parthenos’ survival, since she is allowed to eventually live her first sexual experience by temporarily being reincarnated through her friend Ruth’s body. Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides shows the intimate relationship between suicide, viral pathology and virginity allowing for a contemporary revival of Hippocratic discourse. I read the novel here as an interwoven medical and erotic text where the Lisbon sisters rarely speak, and if they do, their speech is always appropriated by the anonymous polyphonic narrator, who simultaneously perceives himself as a healer, a detective, and a tantalized voyeur at the edge of orgasmic release. Drames de princesses by Elfriede Jelinek allows me to show how Snow White is a parthenos who succeeds in confronting her aggressor, which was never the case in the previous texts. Although her speech animates a tragic cycle of death, it also produces a discursive historicity, which allows the reader to perceive the dangers of a societal superstructure composed of images and discourses where the girl is a passive accessory at the behest of men’s pleasure. Finally, contrary to these sacred and disincarnated parthenoi, Virginie Despentes’ Apocalypse bébé draws on a figure, a sister of all those parthenoi who prefer suicide and terror to domestication. The novel proposes a radical temporality, that of the end of the “jeune fille.”  My aim is therefore to underline the necessity of thinking of the epistemological, intimate and political merits of a temporality, which is tied to the importance of claimed plural and subjective sexualities experienced beyond the scope of the loss of virginity.

Keyphrases: liminary subject, virginity, law and medicine, myth, contemporary literature, disciplines of the body, rape, disincarnation