Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs

Martha Graham, that connoisseur of bodies, and therefore someone who ought to know, is reported to have remarked that "the body never lies."¹ But in that case, what truth does it speak? Let us begin with two stories. Both involve a woman and bodily resistance. One is pagan and "fictitious." The other Christian and "true."

Two Scenes

The first is a scenario from the popular milieu of the novel—more precisely from the second-century Greek romance entitled Leukippê.² The heroine of the novel, Leukippê, had once been a free woman, but at this point in the story has been reduced, by a series of conventional misfortunes (shipwreck, seizure by pirates), to the status of a slave. Her new owner, a vulgar brute bearing the appropriate name of Thersandros, falls in love with her. In order to have his imaginary dream of romantic love fulfilled, he requires her to respond to him as if she were a free person, one whose freely willed and volitional feelings for him will compliment the sentiments he has for her. He advances to her beginning with words, but then proceeds to physical touching: "As he talked with her, he placed his hand on her shoulder . . . he began to embrace her, moving forward to kiss her." Leukippê reacts physically by assuming a posture of bodily rejection: "seeing the course his hand was going to take, moving over her body, she bent her head forcefully downwards, resting it against her chest." She manipulates the longing gaze. By forcibly looking downwards and away from him, and by refusing to look into his eyes, she implicitly rejects the connecting moment when lovers' eyes meet and the most powerful emotional responses are set in motion. Thersandros, meeting resistance, responds with more forceful physical moves: "he encircles her neck even more with his arm, trying to compel her to lift up her face." But in response "she continues to hold her head bent down and tries to avoid his kisses . . . and some time is consumed in wrestling against the force of his hand." Thersandros then becomes more violent, escalating his use of physical force: "he puts his left hand beneath her face, while with the right he takes hold of her hair—jerking her head backward with the one, and pushing up under her chin with the other, he forces her to lift her head." But at the point where he is about to kiss her, the futility of what he is doing dawns on him. Which is to say that Leukippê's microphysical resistances have succeeded in transforming the scene from one of seduction to one of rape. With his volitional scenario effectively destroyed, Thersandros is forced to retreat in exasperation and to begin again afresh with a different script that will work. As this first series of physical confrontations is closed, Leukippê can resort, once again, to words. She can label the situation so as to make clear that the free action and the identification of autonomous self necessary to romantic love is absent from this relationship. "You are acting neither as a free man nor as a noble one" (oute hôs eleutheros poieis, oute hôs eugenês).

Thersandros' response is to redefine the relationship as one where he will no longer approach her within the frame of romantic love, but rather one of forced sex. She is his slave; he is her master. She will simply have to do what he requires. "Damned slave" he shouts at her and strikes her directly on the face. He shouts out that she should consider it a considerable piece of good fortune merely to be able to kiss him. Since she will not accept his wish scenario of free desire, she is therefore to have another forced on her: "Since you will not receive me as a lover, you will experience me as master." Leukippê herself then redefines Thersandros' new relationship to her as that of the illegitimate domination of a totalitarian ruler: "If you choose to be a tyrant, then I must be tyrannized by you—but you...