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Constraining the Virgin: The Parthenos in Ancient Narrative
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
In this chapter we consider several ancient narratives that feature virgin protagonists: the Greco-Roman novels Daphnis and Chloe and Leucippe and Clitophon ; the Jewish novel Joseph and Asenath; and the Christian Apocryphal Acts The Acts of Paul and Thecla and The Acts of Peter. Just as the literature surveyed in the previous chapter reveals the multiplicity of images and connotations associated with parthenos and parthenia, ancient narrative also afforded the parthenos signi¤cant complexity. The narratives portray the virgin as both erotic and chaste, wild and socialized. She bears the potential for each characterization, and the tension that results from such possibility ¤gures prominently in ¤ctional representation of the virgin. In portraying the parthenos in terms of both the female body and female subjectivity, ancient narratives exConstraining the Virgin The Parthenos in Ancient Narrative 6DHAA pose not only the multivalence attributed to, but also the ambivalence evoked by, female sexual status. The Ancient Novels Although the narratives with which we are concerned are identi ¤ed as ancient ¤ction, the de¤nition and nature of the genre remain ill-de¤ned. As Tomas Hägg and Bryan P. Reardon have noted, “Antiquity never created a special term for its ‘novels,’” but in the last centuries before the common era, a “new type of prose literature” emerged in the eastern Mediterranean world.1 In contrast to such well-established genres as tragedy and historiography , this new literature neither generated nor inspired a poetics of ¤ction. Rather, the novel “was not born in any context of theory or critical interest, but in spite of theory critics’ interests .”2 Despite its theoretical invisibility, the number of extant papyri attests to the popularity of ancient ¤ction. Although the majority of texts exist in only fragmentary form, ¤ve complete novels have survived. Three of these, including Daphnis and Chloe and Leucippe and Clitophon, were composed during the Roman revival of Greek culture and composition known as the Second Sophistic (50–250 c.e.).3 Though in the midst of a cultural movement that was both conscious and intentional, “not even then did the genre acquire a new name; when works of this kind are sometimes alluded to, either very general terms are used, such as ‘¤ctitious’ or ‘dramatic’ tales ( plasmatika, dramatika ), or they are characterized in more detail for a particular purpose.”4 Modern critics have tried to compensate for the oversight of their ancient predecessors by offering their own theories to explain the genealogy of the ancient novel. Drawing upon genres that are well-established in ancient literary discourse, including historiography, erotic poetry, and travel narratives, interpreters have argued for various origins of the novel.5 As one interpreter declares, “The novel has always been the most polyphonic, heteroglossic of genres. . . . The Greek novels exploit the broadConstraining the Virgin 75 [3.236.145.110] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:21 GMT) est spectrum of intertexts.”6 Despite, or perhaps in light of, a proliferation of exclusive theories concerning the novel’s origins, none is fully persuasive. A now more commonly held view concludes that the novel is “too complex a phenomenon to be reduced to a single impetus.”7 Unlike the sources considered in the previous chapter, the novels were popular reading. Even in a culture where literacy was reserved for the educated, it is likely that a greater number of persons would have read or heard the novels than would have read either the medical writings of Soranus or the disputations of the elder Seneca.8 Indeed, the very accessibility that ¤gured in the novels’ popular appeal may also have contributed to their rather diminished literary status. J. R. Morgan observes that although “people of some sophistication bought and enjoyed novels , they seem to have read them within a frame of cultural values which somehow consigned the pleasures of novel-reading to the categories of the insigni¤cant or in some way ambivalent.”9 Both he and Hägg cite Julian’s recommendation that while history is useful and bene¤cial reading, we must reject all the ¤ctions (plasmata) composed by writers of the past in the form of history (en historias eidei), narratives of love (erotikai hypotheseis) and all that sort of stuff. (Ep. 89.301b)10 Although the novels may not have served as the stuff of “serious” reading, they were indeed read. And, in light of their rather broad reach, these literary equivalents of our modern day “B” ¤lms remain integral to any consideration of popular notions of virginity...