She is half delighted and half afraid. It is as if a strange being has invaded the body she has been so familiar with. She has a faint awareness of her infinite potential. The metamorphosis will ease her into adulthood and she can begin to fulfil her female role as completely as she chooses. This budding beauty might one day have the world at her feet.
Virginity is paradoxically erotic.
Every harlot was a virgin once', maintained William Blake, the poet and visionary. The novice who becomes a 'Bride of Christ' is curiously maiden and wife at the same time. The notions of the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth, of Mary as mother yet virgo intacta are all contradictory. Virginity is trauma. Young girls arrive at adolescence, a time which can be irrespressibly joyful or tragically sorrowful, and find they are hemmed in by so many taboos that they become bewildered and completely overcome by their mental and physical metamorphosis.