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.

I’ve been weirdly obsessed with romance novels for about the past two years. I read my first one a lot longer ago than that – I abducted and read, over a period of about three weeks, a romance with a name I can’t remember about a Japanese lady falling in love with an American man just after World War II during my breaks in volunteering at a nursing home – but I didn’t really think all that much about them for a while afterwards. Then I stumbled upon Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and started following it because, damn, those ladies are hilarious, and from there started following Dear Author as well, who focus on snark a little less (although they can also be pretty funny) but who are nevertheless thoughtful and insightful in their reviews. For a long time, I was an avid follower of the romance industry without ever actually having picked up more than two romances.

And then I got a Kindle for Christmas.

You guys, for the reluctant obsessive, ebook readers are poison in super-convenient button-clicky packaging. Thanks to its extreme user-friendliness and the large number of freebooks available on the Amazon website (in case anybody is worried that I’m being paid for advertising, the wireless keeps breaking and sometimes the thing refuses to charge) I have something like one hundred romance novels on my Kindle now – a conservative estimate, not taking into account non-category romances and books debatably qualified for the title. I can’t stop reading them, and I can’t stop talking about them; I am fascinated by romance novels, in spite of the fact that more often than not picking one up guarantees that I will spend half the book with my jaw clenched to the point of pain. It’s a guilty pleasure, if by “pleasure” you mean “bafflement-inducing” and “guilty” you mean “thing that I am liable to be judged for”.

So what brings me to all the jaw-clenching? Well, I’ve been a reader ever since I was a kid – I’ve tried pretty much every genre of fiction, from fantasy to crime to sci-fi to sci-fi fantasy crime – and category romance is, without question, the most formulaic genre I have ever come across. It’s baffling. I mean, every genre has its stock characters and tropes, but while there are things that crop up a lot in, say, fantasy, as far as I can see the only thing really required to write a fantasy novel is the strong enough conviction that what you’re writing is fantasy. Write a category romance, and your story is pretty much plotted out for you. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at the submission guidelines for Mills and Boon Modern Romance (the UK version of Harlequin Presents):

Readers are whisked away to exclusive jet-set locations…When the hero strides into the story he’s a powerful, ruthless man who knows exactly what – and who – he wants and he isn’t used to taking no for an answer! Yet he has depth and integrity, and he will do anything to make the heroine his. Though she may be shy and vulnerable, she’s also plucky and determined to challenge his arrogant pursuit.

Modern Romance explores emotional themes that are universal. These should be played out as part of highly-charged conflicts that are underpinned by blistering sexual anticipation and released as passionate lovemaking…

Got that? So, your story has to be somewhere “exclusive and jet-set” (what does “jet-set” actually mean in this context? I sort of expect the entire thing to be set in the Business Class lounge at Stansted) and your hero needs to be a Romance Novel Hero, you know, hot and alpha and, well, willing to be kind of creepy if he thinks it’ll help. (Bonus points if he’s so manly that his manliness bursts out of the cover – for reference, please see the pictured-below edition of The Very Virile Viking, one of the most beautifully alliteratively-titled works of romance that I have ever come across.) And your heroine needs to challenge him but also be vulnerable to him. And they need to clash and eventually express that clash through a lot of hot sex.

Yes, there are a lot of variations you can play out on that theme – which I suspect is why publishers like Mills and Boon are a long way away from getting stale – but ultimately this frame is pretty limiting, and it makes it easier to see why romance novels are stereotyped as all the same. And this moulding of the romance novel storyline doesn’t stop with the publishing guidelines; the romance novel review websites I follow do downgrade books that fail to deliver on agreed-upon “romance trademarks”, although in fairness the only one that seems to need strict adherence is that of the HEA (that’s Happily Ever After, to those of you who use their time much more wisely than I do). Even that strikes me as strange, because while I can understand it as a trend – if, as common theory purports, romance novels are wish fulfilment fantasies, why wouldn’t they have a happy ending? – I can’t wrap my head around it as the thing which makes a romance novel romantic. More on that later.

Which brings me, finally, to this: Why do I think it useful to subject romance novels to feminist analysis? Aren’t they just, as a friend of mine once put it, “granny porn”? Is there any mileage in analysing such an outdated form of trashy entertainment from a feminist perspective?

I obviously think so, or I wouldn’t be writing this. And here’s why: most romance novel writers are women, writing for a female audience. I’ve read some (very good) romance novels written by men geared towards women, but only a very few, and they tend to focus on gay male couplings – in other words, not part of the main body of mainstream romance publishing. (LGBT people in romance novels is a whole ‘nother article.) More troubling is that most of the flaws and foibles of romance tropes that persist even today – virginal women, marriage and babies or nothing, and the time-honoured classic of “forced seduction” – are overwhelmingly shrugged off as “it’s just wish fulfilment”.

Is it?

As a lifelong avid reader, I’m no stranger to escaping into a good book. And I have no doubt that there are people out there who don’t really want a relationship in which the man takes charge, sweeps the lady off her feet, and loves her with a love that’s never been loved before until her resolve melts into baby-making funtimes, but can still get into a traditional romance plotline just for kicks. But is this still (or has it ever been) so overpoweringly The Female Fantasy that it’s the go-to, the default, the only world a romance fan wants to escape into? Why are these elements so built into “women’s” fiction? And what, in the end, does that tell us about the cultural narrative that has been built around us?

Those are the questions I want to answer; they’re the main thing going around in my head every time I pick up a new romance, and they are what keeps me reading whenever I finish one that has made me want to drill a hole through my skull. (Which isn’t all of them! Some are quite good. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about them.)

To get us started, though, over the next few weeks I’ll be doing a rundown of what I think are the five most central tropes or stock characters in romance novels. It’s going to be difficult to whittle the list down that far, but I’ll power through it. Honest. I don’t really need this university education.

Over the course of the series, I’ll look at the trope itself, where, when and how it shows up in different genres, and how I think it’s been adapted for the modern romance novel, because if there’s another thing that seems to be true of romance? It’s that they never throw anything away. I…am no one to judge on that, as anybody who’s seen my living space will be able to attest, but there’s an impressive level of trope-hoarding that goes on around here, and I’m going to show you why. I’ll also be probing a bit into what that means for romance storylines as a whole.

So stay tuned for Instalment One, which is going to be the aforementioned Virginal Heroine! Are you excited? I’m excited.

See you then!

• Rei (not to be confused with Rai, who writes our Gamer Diary!) is a small but strident university student who is from London but primarily based in Cambridgeshire, except for when she lives in Japan. She is reluctantly obsessed with romance novels, and is starting to think that it is they who are addicted to her; she also likes general reading, general writing, martial arts and acting in pantomimes. In her spare time, she tries to come up with things to do in her spare time. She is often spotted hanging around the tea-and-coffee-making facilities, looking impatient. And we are very pleased and proud to welcome her to Team BadRep!

ZONE

Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glittering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.

John Donne, Elegy 20: To His Mistress Going To Bed (c.1654)

Starry Starry Night

All together now: THE LAST ALPHABET POST EVER. And it’s a word with one of the longest definitions I’ve yet come across: zone, first cited in 1500, from the Latin zona and the Greek zone, which originally means ‘girdle’.

Blame him. He stole my clothes. Venus and her cestus, Lucas Cranach the Younger (1540s)

Its complexity is mainly owing to the range of disciplines that have claimed it for their own; these include astrology, astronomy, physical geography, mathematics, poetry, and crystallography. Its immediate practical meaning is geographical: ‘Each of the five ‘belts’ or encircling regions, differing in climate, into which the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and the Arctic and Antarctic circles divide the surface of the earth’ – that is, ‘the torrid (burning) zone between the tropics, the (north and south) temperate zones extending from the tropics to the polar circles, and the frigid (frozen) zones (arctic and antarctic) within the polar circles’.

A zone, then, is a ‘belt’ that marks out space, enclosing and dividing at once, as reflected in its vaguer sense from 1559 as ‘any region extending round the earth and comprised between definite limits’, where it is also applied to ‘a similar region in the heavens or on the surface of a planet’.

Of course, the Ancient Egyptians gave the practical sky-based role of zoning to a woman – Nut, the goddess of the sky, married to the earth god Geb (an unusual gendering). Nut is depicted throughout Egyptian art as a naked woman arched over the earth, balancing on her fingertips and tiptoes, and often covered in stars, from which position she protects the sun god Ra, and the earth below – a zone in its fourth sense (from 1591), as ‘a circumscribing or enclosing ring, band, or line’. Whence it is but a short step to 1608’s contribution to the party, zone as ‘a girdle or belt, as part of a dress’ (chiefly ‘poetical’), which is really the only literal use for the word: before the word’s adoption into English, Ancient Greek women wore a ‘zona‘ under their clothes to accentuate the figure.

Alas! My Girdle!

So we end where we began: with an extra-snazzy belt. Women’s girdles have a long and varied history going back to the cestus or ‘Belt of Venus’, an ill-judged wedding present to the Goddess of Love from her husband Hephaestus which rendered her irresistible to men (and, appropriately, endures on as an astronomy term). Martial refers to the cestus in his Epigrams as ‘a cincture that kindled love in Jupiter’ (planetary theme ftw), and clearly considered it quite hot stuff himself, since it was ‘…still warm from Venus’ fire’.

The Medieval West was not to be left behind in all this sexy-talk: no right-thinking female of the thirteen-hundreds considered herself fully sexed-up without a gipon, a type of corset designed to flatten the breasts and emphasise the stomach. And in case this proved insufficient, she might also pad her belly out for extra effect – well-rounded bellies appear again and again in contemporary art – and, as with the Cranach Venus (above), a decorative zone was the perfect way to emphasise its shape, making this a garment no less sexually charged in the 1340s than the 1940s (when, of course, its job was to hold the belly in). Like a garter, then, a girdle could serve as a fetishistic focal point for erotic (and indeed erogenous) zones, marking them out and keeping them restrained at the same time.

A sixteenth-century German satirical woodcut: the rich old man's wife takes his money but her young lover brings her the key.

The Dictionary seems to have picked up something of this atmospheric heat itself, and brings us all back to earth by citing for this sense of the word Francis Quarles’ Emblem VIII (‘Shall these coarse hands untie / The sacred zone of thy virginity?’ (1635)). Neatly, this citation highlights the flip-side of zone‘s erotic focus – the Roman marriage ceremony famously culminated in the groom untying his wife’s girdle (enduring into the thigh-rubbing Latin slang phrase ‘zonam solvere‘ – ‘to untie the girdle’).

Meanwhile, the chastity belt (which also encompasses the ‘torrid zone between the tropics’, if you want to be vulgar about it) supposedly made its debut in Western society during the Crusades, lest the mice should play while the cats were off murdering Muslims. They may have been a niche market then, but – under the waggish and consistent alias ‘Venus’ belt’ – they were certainly widespread enough by the sixteenth century to become a target for satire. It was not until 1718 that English got the separate word zoned, but its meaning – ‘wearing a zone or girdle, hence, chaste’ – was clearly familiar to Francis Quarles, although he’s not talking about a literal woman, but about the relationship between body and soul.

John Donne plays with this conceit in his Elegy: To His Mistress Going To Bed, which famously describes the ‘mistress’ in question as ‘my America’. Her ‘girdle’ glitters like ‘heaven’s zone‘ (viz.: the celestial sphere), but the woman’s body is itself a ‘world’, a ‘new-found land’, and the speaker’s ‘roving hands’ explorers in a ‘kingdom’ – just as in The Sun Rising, ‘she’s all states, and all princes I’. It’s not just Donne (Thomas Carew did it too): think how many landmarks are claimed for sleeping giantesses, using the female body to map out geographical zones, just as geographical zones can be used to map out a woman (what else is the mons veneris?), and think back to Sir Francis Dashwood, landscaping pudendas in his garden.

Much like the zone itself, this Alphabet has tried to encompass various notions of womanhood. Come back soon and maybe there’ll be a final post mortem-style analysis…