Death and the Virgin Martyr: Re-Writing Hagiography IN Dulce dueño

Abstract

A ccording to the logic of virginity evident in medieval hagiography, “the only good virgin – that is, the only true virgin – is a dead virgin” (Bloch, p. 120). The relentless drive of every virgin-martyr legend towards the death of its heroine provokes a variety of critical responses in current hagiographical scholarship. Proponents of what has been called the “rape-pornography reading” (Mills, p. 137), such as Kathryn Gravdal and Simon Gaunt, interpret the tortured female martyr as a passive object for the sadistic male gaze of the author and readership (Gravdal, pp. 21–41; Gaunt, pp. 180–233). Other critics, such as Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Katherine Lewis, argue that in many texts it is possible to read the virgin martyr as controlling the sequence of events which lead to her torture and death, “scripting” the action and the interpretation of her own martyrdom. 1 In this reading, the martyr's choice of death confers meaning upon her life, in a move similar to the female suicide described by Elisabeth Bronfen as implying “an authorship with one's own life, a form of writing the self and writing death that is ambivalently poised between self-construction and self-destruction” (Bronfen, p. 142). See e.g. Wogan-Browne (1994) and Lewis.