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Chapter 2 Dying for a Life: Martyrdom, Masochism, and Female (Auto)Biography Masochism is proscribedfor women even as it is understood, indeed precisely because it is understood, as the ontological condition of femininity. Despite the numerous testimonials of women who describe their masochistic experience as performative, the presumption remains, among many theorists, that masochism can only be performed by men. —Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism Against all appearances, the pleasure of pain and restraint is the joyful triumph of the body. —Karmen MacKendrick, Counterpleasures Loosing her tongue, Ambrose's Agnes gives shameless witness to her desire for the executioner's sword: by such violent proxy is she made Christ's bride (Ambrose, On Virgins 2).' In contrast, Jerome's unnamed youth (subjected to a still stranger persecution) bites his tongue, thereby excising his shameful desire for the torturess who has him bound and mounted: thus he becomes a hermit (Life of Paul 3). The virgin martyr surges toward an erotic consummation, joyfully impaling herself on the steely blade that may be exchanged for a heavenly husband. (She is something of a literalist as well as a sensualist.) The masochistic boy practices a different art of deferral, sublimating the witness of death by transposing it into a (way of) Life. His story, which introduces the Life of Paul, is the harbinger of Hieronymian hagiography. But is the genre thereby gendered? Will the woman also get a Life? Many years after penning the tale of the tongue-biting youth, Jerome addresses Eustochium on the occasion of her mother's death: "If all the members of my body were to be converted into tongues, and if each of my limbs were to be gifted with a human voice, I could still do no justice to the virtues of the holy and venerable Paula" (Ep. 108). Having made a career of hard-bitten renunciation (as well as biting critique), Jerome now imagines himself all tongue. Yet even this does not satisfy his desire, which must be ever again multiplied, displaced, and diffused within the witnessing body of Jerome's ascetic invention. Indeed, however skilled in the arts of sublimation , the mature monk seems strangely at a loss, replaying a youthful fantasy of lingual excess and inadequacy when faced with the task of praising a woman. How many tongues would it take to do justice to a female Life? he wonders (perhaps licking his own lipsnervously). Credited with authorship of three canonical Vitae—those of Paul, Malchus, and Hilarion—Jerome appears to have remained tongue-tied after all, when it comes to female subjects. Then again, the canon of Hieronymian hagiography should not be closed too swiftly: it may yet be possible to supplement it so as to accommodate a sexual difference. "I think first of all that it would be necessary to link another writing, 'hagiographical' in certain respects, with these three Vitae" muses Yves-Marie Duval. The work he has in mind is not the epistolary encomium of Paula (for which Jeromeinitially fears himself linguistically inadequate) but rather "Jerome's first letter, about the woman of Vercellae."2 This letter, written circa 370, concludes with an admiring reference to Evagrius (Ep. 1.15), author of the Latin translation of the Antonine Life with which Jerome's Life of Paul, written shortly thereafter, directly competes. The woman of Vercellae is thus not only the subject of Jerome's earliest surviving text—a work, as Jacques Fontaine puts it, of "youthful romanticism."3 She is also the pretext for his entry into the game of literary one-upmanship that soon results in his first "proper" hagiography. The heroine of this initial epistolary romance has been brought to trial for the crime of adultery. Cruelly tortured in the hope that she will confess her guilt, she insists steadfastly that she has been falsely accused. When she invokes Jesus as witness to the injustice of her threatened execution, her suffering and anticipated death become, in turn, a witness to Christ. (It is difficult to remember that this is not, strictly speaking, an account of persecution .) Echoing the language of the virgin martyrs who eschew earthly marriage in order to remain faithful brides of Christ,4 the woman proclaims : "I desire to put off this hated body, but not as an adulteress. I offer my neck; I welcome the shining sword without fear; yet I will take my innocence with me. The one who is slain in order to live does not die...

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