THE VIRGIN
Since, according to the grammar, adjectives may be either masculine or
feminine, it consequently follows that man also can be virgin; but
between his and woman's virginity there is an abyss which we in vain try
to sound. A virgin male is a man who does not know the mysteries of the
embrace; but of this innocence, or of this ignorance, he bears no trace
in his body and often neither in his heart nor in his mind, since vice
with its thousand subterfuges and Nature with her thousand pitfalls may
have made him more impure than a courtesan, although he may boast of
having never violated a vow made to a caste, to a prejudice, or to any
of the many tyrannies of the will. The virgin female, on the contrary,
is an entire world; she is a temple to which peoples from all parts of
the world bear the tribute of their religion, their follies and their
adoration; so that to write its story is to write the greater part of
the ethnography of love. In this book, however, we will confine
ourselves to consider the virgin, just as nature has carved her in the
secrets of the maternal bosom, and as the civilization of our times
sacrifices her on the altars of greed, of love, or of lust.
Nature, in creating the human virgin, has left to the torment of our
meditations one of the most obscure and tremendous problems. It was not
enough that sixteen long years should be required to turn a child into a
woman; not enough that all moral bulwarks which keep us far from the
temple of love should fall only through long and cruel battles; strategy
and tactics of defense, the impenetrable veils of modesty, were deemed
insufficient to push to folly the impatience of desire. All this still
seemed little to avaricious and cruel nature; and when your "yes" is
answered by another "yes," when barricades and bulwarks fall, when the
long coquetry of refusal is wearied and modesty blushingly withdraws to
a corner to relish the delights of an anxiously hoped for
defeat,--there, just there, at the doors of the sacred temple, a
terrible angel with a sword of fire bars the entrance and says to you:
"There is a virgin here!" The rose is near to your lips, closed, it is
true, but beautiful and fragrant as the dawn of spring, all collected in
the chaste involutions of its hundred small leaves; but to impress a
kiss on it, you must let your lips bleed, because _the virgin is the
thorn of a rose_. Profound mystery! There, at that threshold, two
natures widely different, and yet so ardently enamored, have arrived
through a thousand obstacles and a thousand battles: there was their
rendezvous, for them to empty together the cup of voluptuousness; but
there, on that very threshold, they find the angel of sorrow, and
through a wound, through a torture, they must attain joy. Cruel mystery!
The poor creature who shall be a mother and the nurse and vestal of the
temple of the family, the woman who in the long sleepless nights of
adolescence had imagined love as the most fragrant flower, as the
sweetest fruit in the orchards of life, must reach the goal of her
desires through pain, as though nature from the first kiss had reminded
her: "Daughter of Eve, you will love and be a mother with great pain!"
And happy because she belongs to one man, happy because she is possessed
and does possess, she must behold in her bleeding hands the delicate
petals of the first flower which she picked in the garden of
voluptuousness.
And yet there, among those torn petals, warm with innocent blood, man
has erected a temple where the three most formidable passions of the
human heart receive adoration, and there he has accumulated as many
elements of idolatry, passion, fury, virtue, as his brain could
comprehend. There self-pride, love and the sense of ownership have found
themselves bound together to conspire against human happiness and at the
same time to prepare the most ardent voluptuousness. "Mine!--mine for
the first time!--mine forever!" Three cries, one more formidable than
the other, which love, pride and the sense of ownership utter in unison,
in the apotheosis of delirium and in the quivering of the flesh.
There is a unit for all the series, there is a virgin for all human
things: to be the first means to be vastly different from being the
second. Now, nature wished to consecrate anatomically the first kiss,
the first embrace; to incarnate in a physical fact that tremendous unit
which is called the first love. And civilized man, suspicious, jealous,
avaricious, gives thanks to Nature for having come and borne testimony
to the purity of a woman, and blesses her for having known how to bind a
covenant of faith which no one can ever violate with impunity. The
Longobards used to give the _morgincap_ to the bride immediately after
the first night of matrimony; and this famous gift, the prize of
virginity, often equaled the fourth part of the husband's estate. Some
shrewd spouses (adds the malicious historian) had the good sense of
stipulating beforehand the conditions of a gift which they were too sure
of not deserving. However, although we are not Longobards, we promise to
all our young girls a _morgincap_ to induce them to guard intact, until
the supreme day of the official first love, the sacred will. This
_morgincap_ is a husband; it is the esteem, the veneration, the
adoration of all. With that veil intact, you are a saint, a virgin, an
angel; the goal of all desires; you may entertain the most foolish
ambitions; you may become a queen tomorrow. If that flimsy veil is rent,
you are young, beautiful, perhaps, as pure as you were yesterday, but
you are nothing more than a human female. The temple has been violated,
the idol overthrown, the priests have fled, hurling anathemas and
invoking the vengeance of their god upon the head of the victim. What a
tangle of mysteries and injustices! I really feel as if I were in the
world of exorcism and necromancy!
The poet finds not one, but a thousand theories to explain the virgin.
The thorn beside the rose, the temple guarded by the wings of an angel,
the first voluptuousness consecrated by a first pain, the destinies of
the lives of future beings marked from the first kiss, all spasm and
sweetness; and an infinite mystery which covers with its crepuscules one
of the grandest and most beautiful scenes of the human world: such is
the virgin of the poet.
And the moralist, too, finds in his theological theories a hundred
reasons for the explanation of the virgin. The protection of virtue
consecrated by a material defense, a kind admonition that love will lead
us to a thousand sorrows, a sure guarantee of the honesty of the bride
given to the bridegroom in the most solemn manner, a precious pledge of
future faith, of everlasting domestic happiness,--there is the virgin of
the theologian.
But the naturalist shakes his head and rejects the virgin of the poet
and scoffs at the virgin of the theologian. Every organ must have its
function; every effect must have its cause; every "why" must be answered
by a "because." The virgin is for me an inceptive angel; she is the
first shadow of a future separation of two things which are still
brutally coupled in us: the organs of love and the organs of a bodily
function. The more the living beings elevate themselves, the more they
subdivide their labors; and in a creature higher than we, love will
certainly have a determined and reserved ground. From the "cloaca
maxima" we have arrived at two smaller ones; a step further, and we
shall have three organs and three apparatus; one of the greatest
physical disgraces of our body will be eliminated.
A virgin is a creature who does a great deal more of good than evil, and
very few among the men, if asked to vote for or against her, would
blackball her. I do not know whether all women would vote with us, but I
believe that the best, the most virtuous, the most beautiful, the most
poetical of them would side with us. Open temples are always less sacred
than closed ones, and a mystery and a _sanctum sanctorum_ help to
elevate and revive idolatry. And is not love the greatest of idolatries?
A virgin is ours a thousand times more than any other woman; she must
love us much, or at least she must desire an embrace much, to descend
from the pedestal of the idol and come to us; to descend from the altar
and tread the vulgar ground of earthly life. And the mystery of the
unknown, and the fascination of primitiæ, and of being the first teacher
of the art of love, centuplicate for us the sweet joys of a first
embrace. Even the dreadful trepidation of finding the temple violated
holds us suspended over the abysses of desperation and voluptuousness,
of which, at very short intervals, we sound the somber sorrows, the
ineffable delights. And a woman, too, who knows that she is a virgin
will fathom the immensity of her sacrifice, and if she has the fortune
of finding it equal to the immensity of her affection she feels one of
the greatest ecstasies that can vibrate simultaneously nerves and
thoughts, senses and sentiments. She had already given her heart and all
her affections to her god; today she gives him the seal which attests
the possession of her entire self; and divides with her companion all
that she has, all that she feels, all that she desires. An angel
yesterday, she allows her lover to tear away her wings and becomes again
a woman in order to be a wife, a friend, a mother. Priestess of a
temple, she burns on the altar of love the niveous robe of the vestal
and cries, sobbing with joy and sorrow: "I am thine, all thine! Is there
anything more that I can give thee? Tell me and I will give it to thee.
I have clipped my wings, that thou mayst carry me aloft on the wings of
thy genius; I have burned my temple, that I may live only in the temple
of thy heart; I have forsworn the religion of my dreams, that I may be
nothing but thy companion. Do not deceive me; I was thy virgin, and I
shall be only thy wife. Have an immense love, an immense sympathy for
me!"
And yet, we must say it to cause some one who will read these pages to
turn pale with animosity, there are men who dare accept the sacrifice of
the virgin without any right to be priests of love. And there are men
who bite and defile her with the slime of the viper. Miserable, a
hundred times miserable wretches! Amidst tears of shame and humiliation,
may the woman dream of an infinite adultery; may human dignity,
insulted, avenge itself by making the man a cuckold a thousand times;
may the profaned virgin reascend to heaven, hurling anathema at the
sacrilegious profaner of the temple; may the jury of entire humanity
rise with the full majesty of its omnipotence and spit in the face of
the enervated who has dared to ask of heaven an angel and of man a
virgin, and may a horde of sneering demons scourge him, tie him to the
great pillory of ridicule and, in the loudest voice, proclaim him the
most dastardly, the last among men!
The anatomical fact which constitutes virginity has, however, the great
inconvenience of being understood by all, so that the mass of the
people, proud and happy to be able to solve a question of virtue with
the eyes and with the hands, brutally throw upon the most delicate
scales of the world the sword of Brennus. Let philosophers and
sentimentalists prattle at will about purity of heart and the frontiers
of virtue; for the common people there are but virgin women or violated
women; and physics, with its resistances of elasticity, and geometry
with its diameters, solve a problem over which the minds of many
thinkers were hard at work. And from this point of view, a large part of
civilized men are common people, and many who weep through tenderness of
heart and soar very high, stop wondering in the presence of the
brutality of a fact, acknowledge defeat and empoison their own lives,
thinking that the woman whom they have chosen for their companion had
already sacrificed at the altar of love.
Science openly affirms that virginity, even anatomically, has many
varied forms, and may be lacking in women who never felt the breath of
man. In my medical capacity, I have myself seen, with my own eyes, some
little girls who were lacking that seal with which nature seems to
consecrate the virgin; and as I contemplated the little creatures I was
distressed by the thought that, though having kept virtuous and
innocent, virtue would some day be unavailing for them in the presence
of an ignorant and brutal man. In vain these poor girls will some day be
as pure as an angel. And even when anatomy does not practise such an
imposition upon a woman, a fall, a blow, a contortion may, in the most
innocent way, break the fragile seal which for many is the only and
secure guarantee of virtue and purity. Nor is this all. Often, in early
childhood, when vice and libertinism are words unknown in the dictionary
of a little girl, the lascivious jest of a too precocious boy, or the
posthumous lechery of a wretched old man, may violate the palladium of
anatomical virginity without dimming in the slightest degree the mirror
of the heart; and later, when the mysteries of love shall be unveiled,
the still chaste maiden may feel pure and proud of herself and raise her
head high, not knowing that she does not possess the star of physical
purity. How many domestic misfortunes have happened in this way! How
many first nights of love have become infernal nights, and how many ties
have been dissolved by a prejudice, a suspicion, a calumny, when they
should have been a garland of the purest and most sublime joys!
How many existences have been cruelly empoisoned through the elasticity
of a veil more fleeting than the cloudlet that dissolves under the first
rays of the sun!
And all of you, jurors of feminine honesty, who with so much assurance
and brutality pass your judgment upon hearts and virginity, have you
ever thought of the thousand and one aggressions which a young,
beautiful and courted woman must pass through, and that, before becoming
a bride, she must struggle with her own ignorance and others' lechery,
with the surprises of the senses and with the cunning artifices of lust?
A moment of weakness, an instant of morbid curiosity, may dim but not
stain the virtue of a woman who can be, before and after, as pure as
rock-crystal. No; virginity is a great thing, it is the largest diamond
in the crown of youthful virtue; but it is not all the woman, it is not
all the virtue.
How many wretched women were never pure except in the maternal womb, and
yet with studied lasciviousness and infinite art preserved intact the
physical seal of virtue, through the lechery of a hundred lovers, and,
full of profound wisdom and prudent libertinage and weary of carnal
lust, carried their virginity to the altar of the official first love!
Beautiful treasure, indeed! A diamond fallen a hundred times into the
mud and a hundred times picked up and washed! Beautiful gem! A piece of
flesh preserved pure in a prostituted body; a flower grown on a clod of
earth in the midst of a fetid marsh! And men often picked that flower
with sacred devotion and kissed it and adored it, perhaps after having
hurled an insult at the pure and virtuous girl who lacked only a seal,
like a registered letter refused by the post-office clerk because it
lacked a drop of sealing-wax. How often have I wept in wrath, listening
to mothers teaching their daughters this one dogma of virtue: "Preserve
physical virginity!" How often have I cursed modern morals which teach
the bride: "Above all, no scandal!" These, then, are the morals of this
hypocritical century: "Virgin first, prudent afterward." There is the
virtue of woman! An eye on the seal first, an eye to the keyhole later
on: such is the perfect woman of our times!
The excessive, brutal and bestial importance given to virginity by
modern society has created the infamous art of manufacturing virgins;
and many times virginity has had two, five, ten different editions, not
all improved, but always correct and revised, while the idiotic mass of
husbands and lovers have been tricked into applauding the new virtue,
the purest virtue, heaven knows how acquired!
The debasement of this hypocritical time could not be more cynically
avenged. Of the virtue of a woman you have an idea utterly physical and
chemical. Now, this advanced civilization is all at your service; it
manufactures a chemical and physical virginity for your convenience, and
calls to its aid some acrobatism, hocus-pocus and natural magic. _Mundus
vult decipi, ergo decipiatur._ Curse, then, the pure and holy woman
whose heart is virgin, who never has loved, but to whom the Longobards
could never have awarded the prize of the _morgincap_!
Virginity exists; it exists in the physical nature of the human female,
it exists in the sanctuary of civil morals, but it does not begin and
end with an anatomical condition: it is also virtue. The anatomical fact
must be accompanied by the moral fact; with the purity of which the
senses are the judges, we want purity of heart, the adamantine
transparency of character. The human virgin, the virgin of the civilized
man, is not the virgin of the savage, an oyster that can be opened only
with a knife. She is a creature whom no social mud has ever soiled; she
is a woman who was loved, perhaps, and desired by many, but who never
belonged to any man. She knows no lasciviousness, no art of hiding vice
under a shining varnish of virtue; she blushes at an impure word, at a
too ardent gesture, at an impertinent pressure of the hand. The virgin
knows that she is all intact, because she, too, has had longings and
desires, but has never given her heart to any man; she knows that she is
pure, because no profane hand has ever penetrated into the sanctuary of
her purity. She has not opened any part of her robe, any fissure of her
heart, any tabernacle of her treasures. She is white as the snow of the
Alps, on which no foot of marten and no wing of insect have ever rested;
she is pure as the water which spouts from the granite in a cave never
explored by human foot; she knows everything, or is ignorant of
everything, but she blushes for wisdom as well as for ignorance, if only
her heart pulsates faster at the sight of a man. She is a virgin because
she is modest; she is modest because she is a virgin; she is a virgin
and modest because she is a woman.
And you, mothers, who were virgins, when you teach your daughters what a
treasure virginal purity is, give them, together with a lesson of
anatomy and physiology, which perhaps they need, a lesson of high
morals. Tell them that to the man they love they should give everything;
to the man they do not love, nothing; tell them that a woman can be
physically a virgin and a prostitute morally; tell them that to the
first kiss they owe all their treasures untouched, not one gem only, and
that the future of their love will depend on the preservation of the
centuple virginity enclosed in the one virgin as the masses conceive
her. If nature, with a sad mystery, has prescribed that woman should
love her first love with much pain, it is incumbent on us to crown the
virgin with so many flowers of virtue, to scent her with so many
perfumes of grace, as to turn a martyr into a happy spouse. It is our
task to elevate the physical virgin to a very high region of purity and
grandeur, so that she may appear to us like an angel of Beato Angelico,
all illumined by the iridescent light of the rainbow, where, amidst
tears of a first defeat, should shine the light of the sun of love; and
that after the hurricane of conquest there may be announced the bright
calm of a day all beauty and delight. The Christian religion, in
offering to man a virgin-mother to worship, wished, perhaps, to
consecrate the purity of the virgin with the affections of the bride; to
create an ideal of perfection in which the two chief virtues of woman
should shine; to suggest, perhaps, that one can be a virgin and a
mother, as another can be a virgin and a courtesan. That this ideal
creature has been a sublime creation of the human mind, and not a riddle
or a myth, will be clearly proved by the influence which she has
exercised upon Christian art, by gazing at the Madonnas of Raphael, of
Murillo and of Correggio.