Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and Witches: Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil, 1500-1822

2. The Body of Virtues: The Christian Ideal for Brazilian Women

{ tWo } The Body of Virtues the Christian ideal for Brazilian WoMen I n theearly 1600s, the Jesuit AntônioVieira preached to Catholics in Brazil that the failings ofwomen began with theirancestral mother, Eve. After Eve’s great sin, women had repeatedly abandoned the virtuous life that had been mandated for them, and exemplary women of Scripture were themselves trapped in perversion and ignorance. Vieira insisted that not all of the women named in Jesus’s own genealogy were virtuous, for Tamar, Rahab, Bathsheba, and Ruth had failed to uphold the virtue of chastity. Magdalene, too, had been sexually “dishonest,” bearing seven demons of unchastity before encountering Jesus’s healing exorcism; the women of Brazil were scarcely less blameworthy. Still, he continued, why not introduce and discuss the examples or scandals of men, but only those of women? Because in women, just as this sin is more offensive , so is it more dangerous and pernicious. Consider the harms done in the world by the sin of dishonesty, and you will find that women were the origin and women the cause.1 Vieira in this sermon provided not just a commentary on women’s nature and virtue but also a cornerstone for the ideal of the virtuous Christian woman in colonial Brazil, based in discourse begun in medieval and early modern Europe about feminine honorand its expression through women’s virtues. Male authors of theearly modern era ascribed specific, gendered characteristics to the nature, attributes, virtues, and bodies of women. Drawing on ideas elaborated in the European Middle Ages, they warned ofwomen’s natural tendencies toward wildness and mayhem and recommended extensive social and personal restraint to reduce those tendencies.While the { 56 } Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and Witches first Portuguese reports from Brazil began with speculation that indigenous women might be naturally innocent and unaffected by the shame of original sin, colonial attitudes quickly reverted to the longer-standing understanding that all women were corruptible. The discourse went beyond abstractions to advocate control over women through religious and civil laws, colonial regulations, and familial customs. When male writers insisted that women be kept out of churches and other public places and restricted to domestic service in their own or others’ homes, women then faced physical limitations to their daily movements and barriers to their personal choices. By the end of the colonial era, Brazilian authors had furthered the restrictions so that upper-class women might seem to disappear from the society at large and working women encountered more hazards in their necessary defiance of such restraints. The restrictive ideals constructed by early modern Portuguese and Brazilian authors were neither new nor inconsequential, but rather constituted a complex set of constraints created for women within European Christian society. There the centuries-old concepts of nature and sin in what Mary Douglas termed the “social body” offered further restraints for “the physical body” in the New World as well. Douglas contended that the rules of the social body were impressed upon the physical body such that the body “sustain[ed] a particular viewof society”and expressed social norms in “all the cultural categories in which it [was] perceived.”2 While Douglas first identified bodily conformity as a “natural tendency” within a comprehensive system, she further noted that “bodily control [was] an expression of social control.” Where strong social norms demanded formality , one would find both the demand for “strong bodily control” and increased pressure to reduce independent bodily expression altogether. Social pressures, especially in formal and complex settings, mandated not only extended distances between bodies but also the “pretense” that social interactions “take place between disembodied spirits.” Douglas concluded her theoretical discussion of the “two bodies” by suggesting that enforcement of strong social norms would nearly eliminate bodily presence and rigid social hierarchies would demand purity in social and ritual behaviors.3 While the images of Amazons and cannibals discussed in Chapter 1 reflected the alienation of theobservers from the new Brazilian people and lands,thelaterreactionstothoseimagesalsoreverberatedwithstrongsocial and religious norms, expressed in the expectations that girls and women should tread a narrow path of virtuous behavior from birth through adulthood . A woman’s virtuewas a private attribute, unlike men’s public claim to privilege and prestige, and feminine honor began with an awareness of un- the Body of virtues { 57 } avoidable shame for her very existence. Women were only honored if they first acknowledged that they were in fact not honorable, that their...