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67 Mapping the New World Order | Bailey’s Café Rewriting the Virgin-Whore Dichotomy: A Tale of Two Marys In rewriting the antecedent sources out of which Bailey’s Café evolves, Naylor seeks to dismantle the negative images that delimit female identity and achievement. Issues relevant to female sexuality assume center stage with the antithetical representations of virgin and whore. “Mary: Take Two,” a reworking of the Virgin Birth, is based upon the Mariology of Judeo-Christian biblical history. The use of the name Mary with regard to both the sexually alluring Peaches and the Ethiopian-born virgin Mariam, whose name is a Hebrew variation of Mary, raises important questions regarding proscriptions of women’s sexuality. In The Virgin Mary in the Perceptions of Women, Joelle Mellon traces the contradictory images of passive virgin and repentant whore throughout pre-Christian and Christian history. A juxtaposition of the two fictional characters and their unique histories serves a fertile site for an examination of the universal dimensions of oppression and efforts to redefine the terms of black female identity. While Peaches’s burgeoning sexuality serves as an occasion to indulge the passions of the men who view her as an object of desire, Mariam is the untouched virgin whose clitoridectomy will ensure that she remains pure until marriage. The Kansas-born Peaches is a light-skinned beauty who is “a cocoa-butter dream” (101); Mariam, a fourteen-year-old displaced citizen of Addis Ababa, is an outcast among orthodox Jews and is too dim-witted to be able to tell her own story. Despite the apparent differences between the two women, they are subjugated in a world that defines them as a passive , subservient other. For Peaches, it is the miscellaneous men intent on sexual exploitation and her well-intentioned father who set the terms for her existence. Mariam is no less entrapped than her American-born counterpart, but Naylor’s rendering of the young woman’s journey to Bailey’s Café underscores not only the role of Scripture in perpetuating female oppression but also the ways that 68 Mapping the New World Order | Bailey’s Café women serve as agents of masculine domination. Repetition of “No man has ever touched men” serves as a refrain highlighting women’s complicity in patriarchal rule (143, 44, 45, 46). Peaches’s journey to Eve’s place reveals the dynamics of the young woman’s attempts to distance herself from the harmful, controlling images present in the larger society. The stages involved in her evolutionary move toward self-identity reveal her conscious rejection of the objectified self that her well-intentioned father and other men project. At first she tries to suppress her sexualized self. Later, escapades with men become her way of exercising autonomy apart from the restrictions of her domineering father. The mirrors that Peaches encounters chart her path toward self-identity. Envisioning herself through the false image that others ascribe to her allows her to stand back from artificial designations of the female persona in ways that signal her shift toward independence from an oppressive social order. As if to signal the new self that Peaches realizes , she refers to herself using the third person. Peachesformsanalternateidentitythatexistsinoppositionto the one that the larger society prescribes. Much of her narrative involves her symbolic journey to the place that Cocoa arrives at after her ritual healing as a result of Mama Day’s maternal influence. An act of self-mutilation signals Peaches’s rejection of the image patriarchal society ascribes and her willingness to embrace the redemptive circle of female sisters at Eve’s place. The young woman uses a beer can opener to cut her face, and by so doing, she disassociates herself from false self-image that has delimited her achievement: I walked out of the hospital free do whatever I wanted. And since he had started me on the railroads going east, I kept going east. It gave me pleasure to sit on the right side of the train aisle to watch through the window’s reflection as one of them moved hopefully toward the empty seat beside me. I’d show off my good left dimple when he asked if the seat was free. Yes, I’d answer, and so am I. (111) ...

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