Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern Drama (review)

In Pure Resistance, Theodora A. Jankowski has assembled a compelling weight of dramatic evidence to demonstrate that virgin women were objects of both fascination and anxiety on the English Renaissance stage, as they were repeatedly accorded patterns of conduct and character that contrasted strikingly with the early modern expectation of what a virgin should be: namely, chaste, silent, and obedient. Arguing that these stage virgins enjoy a startlingly contradictory relationship to the domestic and social structures of Protestant society, Jankowski shows how the several Shakespearean plays that foreground the complicated status of virgins—most notably, Measure for Measure, Pericles, and 1 Henry VI—are in fact participating in a wide-ranging dramatic debate that had a distinctive religious as well as social significance. This dramatic genealogy of early modern virgins begins with Appius and Virginia (1575); finds its strangest and most compelling expression in plays such as John Lyly's Gallathea (1592), Thomas Dekker's The Virgin Martyr (c. 1620-1622), and Francis Quarles's The Virgin Widow (c. 1640); and even extends into the second half of the seventeenth century, when Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, wrote her putatively unperformed play, The Convent of Pleasure (c. 1645-1668).

Jankowski contends that these early modern stage virgins can be classified according to three different categories: dutiful virgins, who mostly see their virginity as a transitional state to be ended by marriage; challenging virgins, who marry yet question their roles within marriage; and resistant virgins, who reject both marriage and the patriarchal sexual economy. Drawing on recent developments in queer theory, Jankowski defines the position of most of these virgins within the Protestant sex/gender system as decidedly "queer." Building on redefinitions of the term by Teresa de Lauretis, Ellen Case, and Eve Sedgwick, Jankowski uses the word to signify not a sexual preference per se but rather a resistance to cultural homogenization that frequently involves a transgression of the conventional boundaries of desire: "The queer is the taboo-breaker, the monstrous, the uncanny" (7). Her aim is to recover "(specifically early modern) non-normative gender positions for women in order to disrupt the regime of heterosexuality. . . . opening up the restrictive male/female binary of the early modern Protestant sex/gender system to the possibility of multiple sexual/erotic combinations" (10). Placing her resistant virgins in what she terms "the 'queer' middle"—or "the 'queer' end"—of this early modern and Protestant context, Jankowski argues that they retain key aspects of the power formerly accorded to virgins within the Roman Catholic discourse of virginity (11). Thus her study begins with a detailed survey of virginity within Christian doctrine, in which she explores the central differences between Catholic and Protestant attitudes. Thus, in contrast to Luther's contention that a virgin was "neither a man nor a woman" (174) and the Reformers' explicit preference for the married state, the privileged status of the virgin was emphatically restated by the Council of Trent (1545-1563): "if anyone says that the married state excels the state of virginity or celibacy, and that it is better and happier to be united in matrimony than to remain in virginity or celibacy, let him be anathema" (81).

Jankowski acknowledges the difficulty of deciphering the precise meaning of the phenomenon of virginal resistance within a Protestant cultural context. The question is complicated, she recognizes, not simply by an early modern fetishization of premarital virginity that enabled property to be transferred to heirs without question but also by the exemplary yet anomalous position occupied within late-sixteenth-century English society by Elizabeth I; curiously, however, Jankowski exempts the queen from her category of "queer" or "resistant" virgins because of her singular social position, suggesting instead that "By accepting that there was only one Virgin Queen, Elizabeth's courtiers and subjects were perhaps able to ignore the threat posed by her virginity" (144). Jankowski stresses that even...