Genesis however, is the subsequent sexualization of Eve to which the modern sexualization or Whore labeling of women can be attributed. Just as mind/body dualism was adapted from Greek society into Judeo-Christian culture, “the Greek theme of women being universally and inherently alluring, but disastrous, infiltrated Jewish thought when Palestine came under Hellenistic influence”. Phipps argues that there was actually a blending of the Pandora and Eve myth within Judaism in the time between the Hebrew Bible’s creation and the founding of Christianity. It is at this point that the sexualization of Eve enters into the Judeo, and soon Christian, conceptualization of Eve. An explicit reference to Eve as corrupting is found in I Timothy 2:13-14, “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became the transgressor”. This vilification of Eve was setting the stage within early Christianity for the redemptive character of the Virgin Mary and the “Eve-Mary typology” which can be extrapolated as the Madonna/Whore dichotomy. It would be male theologians in the following centuries who would develop this image of Eve as a temptress far beyond what the biblical text describes, referring to her as “beguiling the man by means of pleasure” to where “it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman”, with Chrystostom stating “what happened to the first woman [Eve] occasioned the subjection of the whole sex” so that “a body is merely a whitewashed tomb; the parts within are full of filth”. It is this vilified Eve that is remembered and summoned by any reference to or use of Eve, Edenic, or Fall of Man imagery. This is of particular interest in the perpetuation of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy considering Shelly Colette’s claim that “the Genesis/Fall myth informs our understandings of who we are and our roles in the world” when referenced within culture. Applying this reasoning, by tracing Eve’s evolution from a villain to a temptress to the original Whore, the power of considering women against Eve’s Whore archetype can be uncovered and thereby delegitimized. shaped
social standards governing female sexuality. That is, until the publication of Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) in 1487. If the binary of the and Madonna/Whore was to survive however, just as the Church needed proof of the devil for legitimization, society needed proof of the Whore or deviant ‘bad’ woman to further exalt the Virgin Mary. The Church would quickly come to support the Witch Hunts as outlined in Malleus, as Pope Innocent XVIII issued the Papal Bull Summis desiderantes in 1484. He lamented the “many persons [who]…have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi” and gave the Inquisitors free reign under the “zeal of religion” to “exercise against all persons, of whatsoever condition and rank, the said office of inquisition, correcting, imprisoning, punishing and chastising, according to their deserts, those persons whom they shall find guilty as aforesaid”. This papal bull would be printed as an introduction to Malleus, launching the Church into a crusade that has been referred to as “genderized mass murder” as roughly 80 percent of an estimated 60,000 killed over the Witch Hunt’s several centuries were women. The Salem Witch Trials have become an aspect of the American historical memory that is infamous for its cruelty and fascinating as an example of the dangers of unchecked mass anxiety, particularly when that anxiety centers on one division of society. Nearly twenty women were killed and several hundred were accused of being witches, a drastically lower mortality rate than the European Witch Hunts. This is central for two reasons: firstly, the Puritan tradition was more concerned with individuals being equal before God than the Catholic Church, and secondly the American colonies purported purpose of establishing a democratic nation allowed for more rational trials that resorted in less convictions. Nonetheless, the sexualized and violent nature of the Trials left an indelible scar upon the American consciousness, one that Nathanial Hawthorne would revisit in 1850 when he published The Scarlet Letter.
Chapter 1 The Scarlet Letter: Hester as the Patron Saint of the Fallen Woman “What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology”. –Eagleton, Idealogy XIII Hester Prynne is a character generated by a blending of the Madonna and the Whore archetypes, a process that has created one of the most memorable and powerful figures in American literary history. Driven by the guilt of his ancestor’s involvement in the Salem Witch
something such as forcing a woman to wear a symbolic red A at all times to alert and remind the community of her transgressions. Hester transcends these distinctions however, into a personhood and spirituality that subverts the Cartesian and thus Puritan view of the body and of women. It is her complete rejection of, not only what it is to be a woman of worth in Puritan society, but to be a woman and spiritual being within Christian society that has propelled her from merely being a literary figure to a figure of enduring womanhood. She has created a new standard, a prism through which women can be viewed as either deviant or as transcending their deviance. This standard sits apart from the limited mind-body dualism that established the Madonna/Whore dichotomy and is offered by Hawthorne within The Scarlet Letter along with passage espousing feminist views as an attempt to rectify or atone for his ancestral involvement in the Salem Witch Trials, and more broadly with the gendered judgment and prosecution of women. The Scarlet Letter can be read as at once a rebuttal and act of atonement for the Salem Witch Trials, as Hawthorne felt a strong sense of guilt regarding his ancestor’s involvement with the Trials. In the novels’ introduction, The Custom House, Hawthorne speaks about his Puritan Salem ancestors stating, The figure of that [my] first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remember…I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them…may be now and henceforth removed.
Here Chopin is repeatedly infusing the description of these mother-women with religious terms such as “idolized”, “worshiped” and “holy”, drawing a clear connection from the “ministering angels” of the mother-woman to the Madonna. In describing these women as having effaced themselves in order to become an angelic Madonna figure, she is stating that a woman cannot be the Madonna archetype without losing her humanity. There is no space within the Madonna role for a woman to be an individual or furthermore to be a mortal human, and therefore Chopin is highlighting this “holy privilege” as a sacrifice of identity and on a deeper level, a sacrifice of a woman’s humanity. This juxtaposition of competing ideals is represented in David Long’s statement that “there are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them”. Chopin will assert throughout the novel this idea of the Madonna role as being dehumanizing, as the mother-woman is not someone whom she recognizes as having a true identity or being socially recognized as having an independent humanity with needs apart from those of the family. Having established the Madonnaesque mother-woman as the societal norm, Chopin then develops the archetype more fully in Adele Ratignolle. Adele is initially described in terms that establish her as otherworldly or fantastical, further reinforcing Chopin’s previous suggestion that to truly be a mother-woman and therefore act as a Madonna a woman cannot be real or human. Chopin begins by stating, Many of [the women] were delicious in the role; one of them was the embodiment of every womanly grace and charm…. Her name was Adele Ratignolle. There are no words to describe her save the old ones that have served so often to picture the bygone heroine of romance and the fair lady of our dreams. This introductory description of Adele is coded with terms such as “bygone” and “of our dreams” to impress upon the reader that there are not even real words to describe something as
To ensure that the comparisons between the mother-women, specifically Adele, and the Madonna are not lost on the reader, Chopin describes Adele as a Madonna multiple times. Initially this occurs when the narrator notes, “Mrs. Pontellier liked to sit and gaze at her fair companion as she might look upon a faultless Madonna”, her companion being Adele. Adele’s identity is one entirely subject to the wants and needs of her children and husband, a feature fundamental to the mother-women and to the Madonna archetype. Chopin does not allow any scene with Adele to pass without establishing the obligations and character limitations imposed by her maternal role, however Adele is always noted to enjoy and gain a strong sense of identity from these outward responsibilities. The first scene in which the reader views Adele as inseparable from her maternal role is when Adele and Edna “went away one morning to the beach together….Edna had prevailed upon Madame Ratignolle to leave the children behind, though she could not induce her to relinquish a diminutive roll of needlework, which Adele begged to be allowed to slip into the depths of her pocket”. Later it is noted that Adele “played [piano] very well” however “she was keeping up her music on account of the children, she said; because she and her husband both considered it a means of brightening the home and making it attractive”. Adele only develops herself in ways that will allow her to further fulfill her role as a mother and homemaker. Edna expresses to Adele her feelings of dissatisfaction regarding her maternal and domestic role, a conversation in which Adele can be interpreted as serving as a representation of the way in which society would respond to such remarks, further reinforcing her as the Madonna or ideal woman of the society in the novel. The conversation that takes places is a pivotal one where Edna details for the reader her understanding of an independent self, as
discussed in the introduction, Eve’s character is not determined in the biblical text of Genesis but rather in the subsequent theological interpretations of that text that have built her character far beyond what the text says. Similarly, the narrators’ conceptions of the Lisbon girls extend far beyond their objective understanding of the girls. In both instances, rather than accept a lack of understanding or access to a woman’s identity, men have narrated the story of women in a way that fits with their agenda and fantasies to create a Whore or a Madonna. This narration has been maintained throughout Judeo-Christian society by the male gaze, as evidenced in The Virgin Suicides, the last and most modern novel on the historical timeline of my thesis. The Male Gaze: Projecting the Madonna onto the Woman The male gaze within the novel can be understood specifically as a gaze that seeks to normalize, objectify, and control the object at which the gaze is directed under the confines of a patriarchal society. Laura Mulvey coined the term ‘the male gaze’ in her 1975 article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema where she claimed, “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly…A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator [audience] and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined”. This is particularly evident in The Virgin Suicides, as the reader is forced to participate in the narrators’ voyeurism and styling of the girls into erotic and mythologized figures. It is the male narrators that actively construct the girls identity, however at the end of the novel they manipulate this gaze to reject their passive role within it. Up to that point however, it is clear through the voyeuristic gaze of the narrators and their repeated consideration of the five girls as doubles of one another and a singular object rather than individual persons, that the employment
the words of Helene Cixous, “We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. Inscribe the breath of the whole woman”. Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter, Chaucer, Geoffrey and Bantock, Nick. 2009. The Canterbury tales. London: Penguin Classics. Augustine, “Letters”, 242,10. As quoted in William Phillips, “Eve and Pandora Contrasted,” Theology Today 45, no. 1: 34-48. April 1988. 43. Baldung, Hans Eve, the Serpent, and Adam as Death, c. 1510-15, oil on wood, 64 x 32.5 cm. National Gallery of Canada Boetticher, Budd quoted in Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert Dale Parker (Oxford University Press, 2012). Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, 10th Anniversary Edition (London, University of California Press, 2003), 5. Castro, Amanda Lee, “Storm Warnings: The Eternally Recurring Apocalypse in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening”, The Southern Literary Journal, XLVII, no. 1 (2014). Chopin, Kate. The Awakening, (New York: Dover Publications, 1899), 8. Chrysostom, John. “Sermons on Timothy”, 9. as quoted in William Phillips, “Eve and Pandora Contrasted,” Theology Today 45, no. 1: 34-48. April 1988. 43. Cixous, Hélène, Cohen, Keith and Cohen, Paula. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa”. Signs 1 (4). University of Chicago Press: 875–93.