Here she is:

V

VIRGIN

And your quaint honour turn to dust
And into ashes all my lust…

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress c.1640s

Virgin has a comparatively straightforward etymology: it derives from the Latin virgo (= ‘maiden’), whence the star-sign Virgo (apparently the sign of the shy, modest and meticulous, with a dash of perfectionism and anxiety). Its first sense (c.1200) is an ecclesiastical one: ‘an unmarried or chaste maiden or women, distinguished for piety or steadfastness in religion, and regarded as having a special place among the members of the Christian church on account of these merits.’

Like a virgin

Saint Lucy, with her eyes, as depicted in 1521

There are innumerable such virgins in Christian hagiography: Saint Ursula had an army of 11,000 virgin handmaids who all had their heads chopped off (in a bit of a pun-fail); Saint Cecilia (patron saint of music) managed not only to persuade her husband to forbear on their wedding night, but also to join the Christian cause along with his brother, and suffer death in consequence.

Saint Lucy consecrated her virginity to God, and, supposedly, tore her own eyes out and gave them to her husband (who had admired them) as a kind of macabre substitute for the marital debt. (Lesson: never admire your girlfriend’s essential organs).

And, of course, there is the arch-virgin much mentioned in these posts – the eponymous Mary, who gets a definition all to herself as virgin‘s fourth meaning.

Mary’s particular achievement – the Virgin Birth – is also considered of some importance in these definitions for virgin. It presumably lies behind the gloss ‘a female insect producing fertile eggs by pathenogenesis [without the input of a male insect]’ (1883), as well as virgin‘s simple equivalence with ‘pathenogenesis’ itself (1849) – a word with its origin in the Greek parthenos, also meaning ‘virgin’ and ‘genesis’ (= ‘creation’).

This – reproduction without fertilisation – though clearly associated with Mary in Christian tradition, is also arguably the origin of Adam, so it doesn’t have to be have an explicit cultural gender-association. Indeed, there is a Middle English citation for virgin that defines it as ‘a youth or man who has remained in a state of chastity’. But this is admittedly an unusual example among the definitions as a whole. 

A woman’s touch

A Vestal Virgin

If we go back to ancient Rome, we meet another sense the religious meaning of virgin can have: the very non-Christian Vestal Virgins, a group of highly respected women whose job it was to guard the ‘sacred fire’ and take care of the rituals and responsibilities that could not be dealt with by male priests.

They were so named because their duties were primarily to Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth and family, and, in consequence, the Vestal Virgins took on a role as kind of symbolic housewives to the whole of Rome.

Though they would be obliged to remain virginal throughout their time as priestesses, in the word’s second sense ‘a woman who is or remains in a state of inviolate chastity’, the vow only lasted thirty years, at the end of which they were free to marry (though most of them seem not to have been all that bothered).

This all said, while these saints and priestesses are all very much virgins in the most common sense of the word, the ecclesiastical meaning does not have to imply the sexual inexperience they normally connote, since ‘chastity’ simply means ‘clean, pure’ (from the Latin castus), and has no intrinsic connection with physical ‘intactness’, though it is frequently used as a synonym. In fact, the fourth definition for the second primary meaning of the word (where it can be used to describe things other than women) highlights ‘purity or freedom from stain’ and being ‘unsullied’.

If you cast your mind back to ‘M is for Marriage‘, you may remember that adultery means ‘pollution of the marriage bed’, suggesting by association that the marriage bed was a sacred – or indeed ‘pure’ – space. And indeed, marriage was widely considered invalid without consummation – something Henry VIII made much use of in his royal divorces – and, in consequence, the virtuous wife who dexterously trod the balance of Pure Marital Sex and Pollution of the Marriage Bed (whether by adultery as we conceive it, or by lusting after her husband) could be as much feted as the unmarried virgin (indeed, more so, if she proved herself skilled in housewifery and produced equally virtuous children).

The ‘sieve portrait’ of Elizabeth I, 1583

That said, a curious and related term first cited in 1644 was virgin widow, meaning a woman whose husband had died before the marriage could be consummated, and whose status was therefore ambiguously poised between virginity (in the sense of being unmarried) and widowhood (being left behind after the death of a husband).

This was Catherine of Aragon‘s position, as argued at her divorce hearing, during the painful period  after Prince Arthur’s death – languishing in a political and social limbo, waiting for something to happen, steadily running out of money and losing points on the marriage market.

Purity is a virtue of the soul

An excellent, though somewhat horrific, example of the noble wife trope is Lucretia, the virtuous spouse of Collatine, whose rape by the royal prince Tarquin so outraged Rome that it led directly to the establishment of the Roman republic. As a wife, Lucretia is not a technical virgin, but she is (as Shakespeare puts it in the oft-forgotten early poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594)) ‘Collatine’s fair love, Lucrece the chaste‘.

Saint Augustine posits that ‘purity is a virtue of the soul‘, and since body and soul are (in this reading) distinct, Lucrece can consummate her marriage while still retaining her essential ‘bodily sanctity’ because she is free of polluting lust in the process.

Unfortunately, Collatine spends so much time bragging about his wife’s chastity to the bros in the camp that he invites trouble:

Haply that name of “chaste” unhapp’ly set
The bateless edge on [Tarquin’s] appetite

Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

Lucretia is so traumatised by Tarquin’s subsequent rape that she stabs herself rather than ‘live impure’, widely considered by the (male) world to be a Noble Decision. This led to her immortalisation in literature and philosophy as a perfect wife, but also prompted Augustine to engage in some terrible rape apologism in the service of his broader argument (‘If she was adulterous, why praise her? if chaste, why slay her?’).

Saints and sieves

It is presumably a version of this chastity-of-the-soul idea so beloved by Augustine that lies behind the story of Tuccia, the Vestal Virgin who proves her virginity by carrying water from the Tiber in a sieve without spilling a drop (here she is depicted in 1555 with the sieve itself, and wearing an outfit that leaves little to the imagination, chaste or otherwise).

I suppose the idea behind the sieve story is that something that would normally flow through the porous surface is maintained ‘intact’, perhaps representing the pure soul within a porous body. At any rate, it became a key symbol of virginity, most notably in the ‘Sieve Portrait’ of the ‘Virgin Queen‘ Elizabeth I, who is also cited in the Dictionary as a definition of virgin in herself.

The last citation given in the dictionary for virgin, with which we will end, is from 1780, as ‘a fortress or city that has never been taken or subdued’. This has an obvious resonance with Lucrece, and the ultimately martial tale her story becomes – another link between feminine ‘closedness’ and men’s military convenience.

It’s hard to find a way to re-appropriate any of these ideas in a positive way. But maybe this transferred definition or fortresses and cities should make us think about Elizabeth I, who at least made them work to her own military and political advantage.

C

CHIVALRY

Chivalry is dead, but you’re still kinda cute.

– Nelly Furtado, Promiscuous (2006)

Chivalry. Not one of feminism’s most pressing issues, but definitely one of its more genteel debates.

Do you, as an attractive female who also happens to be a feminist, deign to take the seat that dude offers you on the crowded tube or laugh hollowly and stick your head back in your neighbour’s armpit? Is chivalry OK?

Personally, my view on this debate is always affected by the point that 99% of the men I’ve met who talk about chivalry with misty-eyed fervour are also the kind of Nice Guys who Really Aren’t Very Nice At All.

But that’s not for here.

What I am interested in is looking at its complex linguistic heritage.

Horses

What’s that sound in the distance?

Why, it’s the sound of clopping hooves – and chivalry‘s etymological root come to join us. Neiiigh.

Animal instincts. Photo by Hodge.

For though chivalry in English means (first definition ahoy!)  ‘the code of behaviour demonstrated by a perfect knight‘, were we French we’d replace ‘knight’ with ‘chevalier‘, or ‘horseman’ – from the root word cheval (= ‘horse’).

The knight, or chevalier, is in origin a nobleman on horseback who goes around rescuing maidens and fighting dragons. He is chivalrous in behaviour, displaying (the word’s second definition) ‘courage, honour, justice and readiness to help the weak’.

Key examples can be found in the legends of King Arthur and his horsebacked Knights of the Round Table – in particular Sir Gawain and the so-good-he-couldn’t-be-gooder Sir Percival (who later becomes Wagner’s Parsifal).

The chivalrous are those on horseback.

But it’s the secondary meaning of chivalry that we best recognise today: ‘courteous behaviour, especially towards women’ (that is, giving up your seat on the tube, which Percival would totally have done if he didn’t travel everywhere by cheval).

Courtly-powered lovin’

Chivalry – and the courtesy that defines it – is also the base idea behind courtly love, which the devoted may remember we addressed separately in the Alphabet Glory Days.

Charles I – Equestrian portrait by Anthony van Dyck

This is what the knights are doing when they’re not out fighting –  sighing for love among rose bushes, swooning at the touch of a ‘lily-white hand’ and definitely giving up their seats for a woman on the medieval commute.

And it was said to have been invented by a woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Before she married Henry II and brought her French customs over to England, Eleanor had a period presiding alone over a predominantly male grouping in Poitiers.It seems inventing an elaborate code of chaste devotion to a single lady – courteous behaviour, if you will – was a good way for Eleanor to bring these bored and potentially restless knights into order – and, I assume, to block potential sexual aggression at the same time (cf. the court of Elizabeth I, which saw a resurgence of ‘courtly’ devotion to ‘Gloriana’, the ‘Virgin Queen‘).

Courtship

With these courtly roots, it’s appropriate that, during the English Civil War, the word chevalier should lend itself so enthusiastically to the Royalist cause in fighting for king (and court).

In this context, the Cavaliers were enemies to the Roundheads and cousins to chevaliers via the Latin source-word ‘cabellarius’ (also meaning ‘horseman’).

The origin of this term is actually pre-war, in the grouping of courtly ‘cavaliers’ at the original Carolingian court (a bit like the courtly lovers at Poitiers).

These included the ‘Cavalier poets‘, a conglomerate of literary courtiers formed by the King himself, including Robert Herrick and Edmund Waller.

The term in this usage is ambiguous, though. On the one hand, cavalier was often used in allusion to the King’s refined (indeed ‘knightly’) sensibilities, which, incidentally, included a famous love of horses – as the many magnificent equestrian portraits of him attest.

But, in a pejorative sense, the cavalier poets were so named because they were famously ‘roistering gallants’ and ‘libertines’. This is cavalier‘s other meaning: ‘haughty, disdainful or supercilious’ or ‘offhand and unceremonious’ (a bit like wearing your hat at a ‘rakish’ angle).

So cavalier is almost a contraction in terms.

The Don

This is the very ambiguity we find in Mozart’s great libertine opera, Don Giovanni, written about 100 years later. The ‘Don’ is a nobleman and serial womaniser. He’s a standard-issue rake, in fact: we learn in the Catalogue Song that he’s seduced 1,003 women in Spain alone.

Sir Charles Grandison

He is throughout referred to in the Italian as a ‘cavalier’, understood (and, for us English-speakers, translated) according to context variously as ‘gentleman’ (nobleman on horseback) and ‘rake’ (careless womaniser) – as in the opera’s subtitle, ‘Il dissoluto punito’ (‘the debauchee punished’).

Thus, when Don Giovanni takes the pretty peasant girl Zerlina away from her finance, Masetto, to show her his castle (no, really), Don Giovanni ‘reassures’ the jealous Masetto by saying he needn’t worry – his fiancee is ‘in the hands of a cavalier‘.Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Masetto is afraid of. “Let the cavaliere make a cavaliera out of you!” he trumpets at the departing Zerlina – he knows what’s going down (this).

Court to City

Back to English climes.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Queen Anne halved the size of the English court and moved it out of central London.

In so doing, she ultimately ended up transferring power from court to city – and courtesy became civility (from the Latin cives (= the city)).

The White Knight accompanies Alice through the forest

This is the age of opening doors, watching your language and standing up when a woman enters the room. Chivalry has gone domestic; men are civil now in Britain. Only the hot-headed Italian Don Giovannis are still cavaliers.

But when Samuel Richardson wanted to depict a perfect (but domestic) Englishman, he still made him an aristocratic knight (Sir Charles Grandison). Jane Austen did too: her paragon of virtue (himself based on Sir Charles), is pointedly named Mr Knightly (Emma).By this point it’s faded away to a name rather than a title, but the gentleman still has a vestigial horse (if you will).

White Knights

Strangely enough, the vestigial horse becomes more literal in the modern age, in the form of the ladies’ proverbial ‘ideal man’ – a chivalrous gentleman. Mr Right is also a ‘knight in shining armour’.

He’s even a  Lewis Carroll-esque ‘White Knight’, a noble rescuer (as in the song ‘My White Knight’ from Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man, where the knight in question will, her mother thinks, ‘save’ Marian the Librarian from Old Maidery).

Remember when Grace first meets Leo – the Great Romance – in Will and Grace? He’s on a horse in Central Park. That’s how you know he’s a Big Deal Romance.

Never trust a man on horseback

And, to conclude very crudely, I suppose this is what happened to chivalry .

It became the polite behaviour of the  gentleman – enshrined in tradition and developed over a couple of hundred years to become our friend offering me a seat on the bustling 21st century commute and sitcom single girls dreaming of their ‘Mr Darcy’.

But I still hear the sound of clopping hooves. The fantasy may be more Sir Gawain than Don Giovanni, but you know what they say – the apple never falls far from the lexical tree.

• For more from the Alphabet of Feminism – a whole series of posts about language, gender and history – visit the Alphabet category. Contains lots of hand-drawn illustrations!

Y

YES

and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

– James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

She asked for one more dance and I’m
Like yeah, how the hell am I supposed to leave? […]
Next thing I knew she was all up on me screaming:
Yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeaah
Yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeaah

– Usher, ‘Yeah’ (2004)

YES! Have finally managed a pretentious appropriation of pop culture as an epigram. Ludacris fill cups like double-Ds.

yes i will yes

Ahem. Yes is the last of our Old English words. It’s gise or gese, meaning ‘so be it’, perhaps from gea, ge (= ‘so’), plus si (=’be it!’), the third person imperative of beon (= ‘to be’). In this form, yes was stronger than its Germanic cognate, yea (much like today) and, apparently, was often used in Shakespeare as an answer to negative questions. We could do with one of them nowadays, no? How many times have you answered a question with yes when you mean no? (‘Doesn’t she….?’ ‘…Yes, she doesn’t’).

The penultimate word in our Alphabet, yes is frequently one of the first words we learn on earth; its meaning is clear and unequivocal, by turns disastrous, passionate, exhilarating, loaded and humdrum – but always positive in the full sense of that word. It is almost invariably repeated, as in Joyce (and Usher) – ‘yes I will, Yes’, the successive affirmations underlining and confirming the first – just like a signature under your printed name, if you listen to Derrida

Sure ‘Nuff n’ Yes I Do

James ‘Awesome Glasses‘ Joyce apparently made much of his novel ‘novel’ Ulysses ending on this, which he considered ‘the female word’. The final chapter, ‘Penelope’, often also referred to as ‘Molly Bloom’s soliloquy’, is 42 pages of just eight sentences, wherein Molly, wife of Leopold Bloom, muses to herself in bed.

For those who have better things to do than wrestle with a modernist doorstop, as the wife of the novel’s ‘Ulysses’, Molly is a counterpart to ‘Penelope‘, wife of Odysseus / Ulysses and conventional model of marital fidelity. The similarity expires fairly quickly, since Joyce’s Penelope is having an affair with ‘Blazes Boylan’, but nonetheless her chapter is often named after Ulysses’ wife. It begins and ends with this yes, and in a letter to Frank Budgen, Joyce explained that ‘Penelope’ rotates around what he considered the four cardinal points of the female  body – ‘breasts, arse, womb and cunt’ – expressed respectively by the words because, bottom, woman and yes. Some of the comparisons are clear – the womb has long been seen as synonymous with ‘woman’ (however reductively); bottom / arse – ok; because / breasts… um?; yes / cunt – hmm.

I suspect this last pairing has a lot to do with the affirmation of sex: interaction with this organ should be one preceded by yes and punctuated with repetitions of this confirmation (yes yes yes). (Why James Joyce, you filthy…). We see a similar thing in Usher (first time for everything): the repeated yeah, yeah, yeah is a sexual affirmation – ‘How the hell am I supposed to leave??‘. This is about a female seduction (‘she’s saying “come get me”!’), but one that we suspect will not end in when-i’m-sixty-four style knitting by the fire. For one thing, we learn that Usher already has a ‘girl‘, who happens to be ‘the best of homies’ with this club seductress; for another, Ludacris announces they will leave after a couple of drinks because they ‘want a lady in the street but a freak in the bed’. So actually, the art of being a lady lies in effectively concealing a consent that, in private, becomes loud, repeated and unstoppable.

Yes Indeed

Coming my way? The 'Easy Girlfriend' Poster, 1943-4

This is a well-trodden path, and all part of the old idea of how consent given too easily (yes yes yes) – or, in some cases, even given at all – is liable to get females into trouble. A less well-trodden example is Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), which devotes several hundred of its thousand or so pages to what happens after the protagonist has proposed to his fiance: though she has accepted the proposal, she fears that to ‘name the day’ herself – or even to consent to a ‘day’ suggested to her – would be to show a forwardness disturbing in a woman. Disturbing perhaps, but probably a relief to the exhausted reader, for she manages to suspend her final consent to ‘thursday a month hence’ for an entire blushing, confused volume of this hefty tome.

We can go further back, of course: in Shakespeare-times, Juliet fears Romeo will think she is ‘too quickly won’. To correct this, she offers to ‘frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay‘ (no no yes), artificially constructing a well-won consent where positive affirmation already exists (history does not record whether or not Juliet was ‘a freak in the bed’). Many would-be Romeos have seized on such fears to assume (or convince themselves) that this is just what their ladies are doing when they give an unequivocal ‘no’, so seduction narratives are littered with lovers assuming their lovers really mean yes when they reply in the negative – examples have spanned Austen’s Mr Collins to modern day Mills & Boon. Apparently, in the latter case, one is supposed to find this irresistible.

Go No More A-Roving

We’re teetering around something rather insidious here, and one aspect of this finds its expression in a 1940s propaganda poster. The ‘Easy Girlfriend’ anti-VD advert placed the blame for the Second World War venereal epidemic squarely with the momento-mori type be-hatted skull (a sexually experienced re-appropriation of the medieval Death and the Maiden trope). ‘The “easy” girlfriend spreads syphilis and gonorrhea’, it blazed – she who says yes too easily is to be shunned by polite society, and will be – naturellement – riddled with disease. Of course, syphilis’ original spread throughout Europe had followed the path of the Grand Tour, but this must have been because Venetian prostitutes were taking expensive package holidays throughout France, Spain, Rome, Switzerland and Turkey, mustn’t it, Lord Byron?

So while you probably disagree with Joyce’s view that yes is an intrinsically female word, it’s certainly one whose utterance is littered with potential problems for women. Yes means yes.

NEXT WEEK: the Alphabet returns for its final installment – Z is for Zone

Regular readers’ll have noticed we’re nearing the end of the Alphabet series – and we’ve had interest from folk asking whether we plan to release any prints.

So here it is, guys: the Alphabet print shop page.

Hodge has taken some nice photos of the prints, which you can see if you click through. This is not one of them.

We hope you like them.¹ I do, anyway.²

1. Why yes, it IS quite a badass teacup. But stop looking at the teacup! It, and my face, are there merely as a SIZE COMPARATOR. For as you see our prints are dinky-charming.
2. That is not Hodge up there. That is me. Why isn’t it Hodge? Why am I hogging the limelight? Well, Hodge is a MYSTERIOUS ENIGMA. Also, she was out. And I was feeling overexcited and drinking tea NEXT TO THE T. Yeah! … so. Yes. Back to the editing tower.