Chapter 6
The Virgin

Since in grammar it is written that adjectives may be either masculine or feminine, it follows that man too can be virginal; but between his virginity and that of the woman there is an abyss which it is impossible to sound. A male virgin is a man who knows not the mysteries of the embrace; but of this innocence or of this ignorance he bears no trace in his body and often neither in his heart nor mind; since vice with its thousand subterfuges and nature with its thousand pitfalls can have made him more impure than a courtesan, although he can boast of never having violated a vow made to a chaste woman, to a prejudice, or to any of the many tyrannies of the will. The female virgin, on the contrary, is an entire world; she is a temple to which the people of all nations bear the tribute of their homage, their folly, and their adoration; so that to write the story is to write the greater part of the ethnography of love. In this book, however, we will confine ourselves to our European virgin, just as nature chiselled her in the secrets of the maternal womb, and as the civilization of our times sacrifices her on the altars of Mammon, of love, or of lechery.

Nature, creating the human virgin, has left to the torment of our meditations one of the most obscure and tremendous problems. It was not enough that sixteen long years were required to make a child a woman; it was not enough that only through long and cruel struggles all the moral bulwarks would fall which keep us far from the temple of love; neither the strategy and tactics of defence nor the impenetrable veils of modesty sufficed to carry the impatience of desire to folly. All this seemed yet little to avaricious and cruel nature; and when to your yes another yes responded, when barricades and bulwarks fell, when the long coquetry of refusal is tired and modesty blushingly retires in a corner to relish the delights of an ardently sighed-for defeat, then, just there, at the doors of the sacred temple, a terrible angel with a flaming sword forbids you to enter, saying, ‘There is a virgin here.’ The rose is pressed to your lips, closed of course, but beautiful and fragrant as the dawn of spring, all compact in the chaste confusion of its hundred leaves; but to imprint thereon a kiss your lips must bleed, for the virgin is the thorn of a rose. Profound mystery!

There on that threshold, two natures widely different, and yet so ardently enamoured, have arrived through a thousand obstacles and a thousand battles: that was the rendezvous where they were to empty together the bowl of voluptuousness; but there, on that threshold, is the angel of pain, and through a wound, through a butchery you must attain bliss. Cruel mystery! The poor creature who is to be mother, nurse, and vestal of the family, the woman who in the long sleepless nights of youth has pictured love as the most fragrant flower, the sweetest fruit in the gardens of life, must reap the goal through pain, nature reminding her from the first kiss, ‘O daughter of Eve, you will love and bring forth children but with much pain!’ And happy to belong to one alone, happy to be possessed and to possess, she must see in the bleeding hands the delicate petals of the first flower which she culled in the garden of voluptuousness.

And yet, among those petals lacerated and heated with innocent blood, man has erected a temple where the three most formidable passions of the human heart receive adoration, and there he has crowded as many elements of idolatry, of passion, of fury, of virtue as his brain can comprehend. There, upon a rosy piece of flesh finer and smaller than the lips of a newborn, selfishness, love, and the sense of ownership find themselves pressed together to conspire against human happiness, as also to prepare the most ardent voluptuousness. ‘Mine! – mine for the first time! – mine forever!’ Three cries, one more formidable than the other, which love, pride, and the sense of ownership exclaim in chorus in the apotheosis of delirium and the shuddering of the flesh.

There is a first term for all series, there is a virgin for all things human: to be first is vastly different from being second. Now nature wished to consecrate anatomically the first kiss, the first embrace; to incarnate in a physical action that tremendous union called first love. And civilized man, suspicious, jealous, avaricious, thanks nature for condescending to bear testimony to the purity of a woman, and blesses it for having known how to bind fast a compact of faith, which no one can ever violate with impunity. The Lombards presented the morgincap35 immediately after the first night of matrimony; and this famous gift, prize of virginity, often equalled the fourth part of the husband’s wealth. Some shrewd spouses – adds malicious history – had the good sense to stipulate a gift beforehand, because they were too sure of not meriting it. Although we are not Lombards, still we promise to all our young girls a morgincap, provided they know how to guard intact until the supreme day of official first love the sacred veil which is the closed door of the temple wherein men are born. This morgincap is a husband; it is the esteem, veneration, adoration of everybody. With that veil intact you are a saint, a virgin, an angel, the goal of all desires; you may dream of the most foolish ambitions, you may become a queen tomorrow. But should that very fragile veil be rent, you are young, you are beautiful, you are, perhaps, as pure as you were yesterday, but you are nothing more than a human female. The temple is violated, the idol is overthrown, the priests have fled crying anathemas and invoking upon the head of the victim the vengeance of their god. What mysteries and injustices! I seem really to be in the world of exorcism and magic.

The poet finds not only one, but a thousand theories to explain the virgin. The thorn beside the rose, the temple guarded by the wings of an angel, the first voluptuousness consecrated by a first pain, and the destinies of future beings marked from the first kiss, all spasms and sweetness; and an infinite mystery which covers with its dawn one of the grandest and most beautiful scenes of the human world; such is the virgin of the poet.

And the moralist also finds in his theological theories a hundred reasons for the explanation of the virgin. The guardian of virtue consecrated by a material defence, a gentle admonition that love will bring us a thousand sorrows, a sure guarantee of the honesty of the spouse given to the bridegroom in the most solemn manner, a precious ‘earnest’ of future faith, of lasting domestic felicity; behold the virgin of the theologian.

But the naturalist shakes his head and rejects the virgin of the poet, and laughs at the virgin of the theologian. Every organ wants its function, every effect must have its cause; to every why must respond wherefore. For me the virgin is a novice angel; she is the first shadow of a future separation of two things which are still brutally united in us: the organs of love and the organs of one of the basest secretions. The more living creatures elevate themselves, the more they subdivide their labours, and in a creature higher than we, love will certainly have a special and reserved territory. From the greater sewer we have arrived at two lesser ones; a step further on and we will have three organs and three apparati; one of the greatest physical embarrassments of the body will be cancelled. If my Darwinian theory does not satisfy you, then nothing remains but the following fable of mine, which I especially recommend to you because, if it does not give you the scientific why and wherefore of the virgin, it gives you, however, almost the entire physiology.

One day pride, love, and the sense of possession were called before God to give an account of the continued and bloody wars which they waged with one another, never according to the poor sons of Adam one moment of peace or joy. The Eternal Father was in a very bad humour that day, and, having given the gentlemen a violent scolding, concluded thus: ‘In a word, if you do not cease to torment men with your interminable discords, and if you do not give me here, today, a proof of your reconciliation, I will expel you from earth and hurl you into the eternal flames of hell.’ The three sentiments proffered many excuses in their defence, but there was no alternative: it was either make peace, or go to hell. After a long and protracted discussion, they decided to make a work in common, in which each should take part, and returning to the presence of God, they presented to Him the virgin, a most beautiful and precious creature, in whom it is difficult to decide which of the three accomplices took the lead in the invention. They say that God laughed heartily and dismissed in peace those three architects, saying, ‘In my infinite wisdom I would never have imagined a similar folly.’

Now I think that if I were to ask God if – after so many centuries of the existence of the virgin – he felt contented to have let her live, he would certainly answer yes. She is a creature who does a great deal more good than evil, and were there a question of trust or mistrust, very few men would vote against her. I do not know whether all women would vote with us, but I believe that the best, the most virtuous, the most beautiful, the most poetical would be on our side. Open temples are always less sacred than closed ones, and a mystery, and, still more, a sanctum sanctorum helps to elevate and inflame idolatry. And is not love the greatest idolatry?

A virgin is ours a thousand times more than any other woman; she must love much, or at least she must desire intensely to be caressed, to descend from the pedestal of the idol to come to us; to descend from the altar and tread the common evil of earthly life. And the mystery of the unknown, the fascination of primacy, and being the first teacher of the art of love centuplicate for us the sweet joys of a first embrace. Then again the dreadful fear of finding the temple violated holds us suspended over the abysses of desperation and voluptuousness, of which we sound at very short intervals the depths of pain, the ineffable delights. And woman too, who knows she is a virgin, measures the greatness of the sacrifice, and if she has the good fortune to find it equal to the immensity of affection in her heart, experiences the greatest voluptuousness that can vibrate in one moment alone nerves and thoughts, senses and sentiments. She has already given her heart with all its affections to her god; today she gives the seal which confirms the possession of her entire self; and after having divided with a companion all that she has, all that she feels, all that she desires, she gives him also her blood, and in blood perpetuates the most sacred oath a human creature could take. She confides herself naked, weak, weaponless to a powerful, armed, invulnerable man! What passion, what abnegation, what voluptuousness! An angel yesterday, she permits her lover to tear away her wings, and becomes again a woman in order to be wife, friend, mother. Priestess of a temple, she burns upon the altar of love the white garments of the vestal and says, sobbing with joy and sorrow: ‘I am thine, all thine: is there anything I can still offer thee? Tell me and I will give it thee; I have clipped my wings so that thou couldst raise me on the pinions of thy genius; I have burned my temple in order to live only in the temple of thy heart; I have renounced the religion of my dreams to be nothing but thy companion; do not betray me; I was thy virgin, and now I am only thy wife. Have for me an immense love, an immense pity!’

And yet it must be said, in order to cause some to pale with rancour who will read these pages, that there are men who dare to accept the sacrifice of the virgin albeit they are not priests of love; there are those who receive the victim without having received from nature the sacrificial knife; there are those who dare to accomplish it with the coarse knife of the surgeon; there are those who for the lightning of love dare to substitute a mechanical artifice; there are those still who prostitute the virgin without making her a woman! And there are men who rail at the angel with the drivel of the viper. Miserable wretches: amid the tears of shame and humiliation, the wife can dream of an infinite adultery, offended human dignity can avenge itself, the profaned virgin can betray a thousand times, and soar to heaven crying anathema against the sacrilegious profaner of the temple; the grand jury of all humanity can rise in the majesty of its omnipotence and spit in the face of the impotent man, who has dared to ask of heaven an angel and of man a virgin, and a chorus of sneering demons flagellate him, bind him to the great pillory of ridicule, and proclaim him in the loudest voice the vilest, the last among men!

The anatomical fact which constitutes virginity has, however, the gravest inconvenience of being generally understood, so that the masses, proud and happy to be able to solve the question of virtue with the eyes and with the hands, throw brutally upon the most delicate scales of the world the sword of Brennus.36 Let philosophers and sentimentalists prattle as they will about purity of heart and the frontiers of virtues; for the common people there are only virgin women or the violated: and physics with its resistances of elasticity, and geometry with its diameters solve a problem over which the minds of many thinkers work hard. And in this respect the greater part of civilized man is vulgar, and many who know how to weep with tenderness and to soar very high, come to a standstill in the presence of the brutality of an action, acknowledge themselves conquered, and embitter life, thinking that the woman whom they have chosen for a life companion did not shed her blood upon the altar of the first kiss.

Science stoutly affirms that virginity, even anatomically, has many varied forms, and can be lacking in women who have never felt the breath of man. I myself, in a medical capacity, have seen with my own eyes some very young children who were without the famous seal with which nature seems to enclose and consecrate the virgin; and I sighed as I contemplated the little ones, thinking that for them virtue and innocence would some day be of no avail in the presence of an ignorant and brutal man. And then, even when anatomy does not betray woman in this way, a fall, a shock can without crime cancel the fragile seal, which is for many the only and secure guarantee of virtue and purity. Nor does this suffice; often, in early childhood, when vice and libertinism are unknown words in the dictionary of a little girl, the lascivious trifling of a too precocious youth, or the posthumous lechery of a wretched old man, can violate the palladium of anatomical virginity, although the mirror of the heart may not be exactly dimmed; and later, when the mysteries of love appear clear to the still chaste maiden, she may feel pure and proud of herself, and carry her head high, not knowing that she has not the star of physical purity. How many domestic misfortunes this has caused! How many first nights of love have become infernal nights, how many ties have been dissolved by a prejudice, a suspicion, a calumny, which would have been a garland of the purest and most sublime joys! How many lives cruelly embittered by the brutal elasticity of a veil more fleeting than the remnant of a cloud that melts away in the first rays of the sun!

And you, jurors of feminine honesty, who with so much assurance and brutality pass sentence upon hearts and virginity, have you never thought of the thousand and one compulsions through which a young, beautiful, and courted woman must pass, and that before becoming a spouse she must struggle with her own ignorance and the lust of others, with the surprises of the senses and with the studied artifices of lechery? A moment of weakness, an instant of inordinate curiosity, can dim but not stain the virtue of a woman, who can be before and after as pure as rock crystal. No; virginity is a great thing, it is the most brilliant diamond in the crown of youthful virtue; but it is not all of woman, it is not all of virtue.

How many wretches who were never pure save in the maternal womb, and who with studied lust and infinite art preserve intact the physical veil of virtue through the lasciviousness of a hundred lovers, and full of profound wisdom and prudent libertinage, weary of lechery, bring to the altar of official first love their virginity! Beautiful treasure indeed; a diamond fallen a hundred times in the mire and a hundred times picked up and washed! Beautiful gem – a piece of flesh preserved pure in a prostituted body! A flower grown up on a lump of clay in the midst of a stinking marsh! And men often cull this flower with holy devotion, and they kiss it, adore it, perhaps after having hurled an insult at the pure and virtuous girl who had all but a seal, like the registered letter sent back by the postal clerk because it lacked a drop of sealing wax. How often have I wept with rancour, listening to mothers teaching their daughters this one dogma of virtue: ‘Preserve physical virginity!’ How often have I cursed modern morals which teach the spouse: ‘Above all, no scandal!’ These, then, are the morals of this century of hypocrisy: ‘Virgin first, prudent afterward’; behold the virtue of woman! An eye to the seal first, an eye to the keyhole later on: behold the perfect woman of the nineteenth century.

The excessive, brutal, and bestial worth given to virginity by modern society has created the infamous art of manufacturing virgins; how many times has virginity two, five, ten different editions, not all improved but always correct and revised; and the idiot husbands and lovers have applauded the new virtue, the purest virtue, baptized in the apocryphal blood of who knows what mammal, tempered in the astringent juice of who knows what bark! The prostitution of the century of hypocrisy could not be more cynically avenged. You have an entirely physical and chemical idea of the virtue of a woman; now then, advanced civilization gives you what you desire; it makes for you a chemical and physical virginity, and calls to its aid also some gymnastics, dice-boxes, and natural magic.Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.37 You curse the pure and holy woman who is a virgin at heart, who has never loved, but on whom the Lombards could not have bestowed the prize of the morgincap.

Virginity exists: it exists in the physical nature of the human female, it exists in the sanctuary of civil morals, but it does not begin and end in a piece of flesh more or less intact; in us it is anatomy and it is the physical; together with the purity which is tried virtue. The moral fact must be found together with the purity which is tried by the criterion of the senses if we want purity of heart, the adamantine transparency of character. The human virgin, the virgin of civilized man, is not the virgin of the savage, an oyster that can be opened only with a knife; she is a creature on whom the social mire has not thrown a drop of its splash; she is a woman who was loved, perhaps, and desired by many, but who never belonged to any man. She is ignorant of lasciviousness, ignorant of the art of hiding vice under the brilliant varnish of virtue; she blushes at an impure word, a too ardent gesture, an impertinent pressure of the hand. The virgin woman knows that she is intact, because she too has sighed and desired, but has never given her heart to any man; she knows that she is pure, because into the sanctuary of her purity no profane hand has ever penetrated. She has not half opened any part of her garments, any fissure of her heart, any tabernacle of her treasures. She is white as the snow that caps the summits of the Alps, where foot of marten nor wing of insect has ever rested; she is pure as the spring which gushes from the granite in a grotto never explored by human foot; she knows everything or knows nothing, but she blushes with wisdom as with ignorance, only her heart beats faster at the sight of a man. She is a virgin because she is modest; she is modest because she is a virgin; she is a virgin and modest because she is a woman.

The female virgin was seen naked twice; the day of her birth, but by her mother alone; the day when she became a woman, and she alone saw herself, blushed with shame, and wept, and asked of nature the why of the sad mystery. No one will ever see her naked again but one man, and then only after she will have given him her heart; she will blush then also more than ever, and the entire virgin, physical and moral, will fall fainting at the feet of love and will become a spouse, perhaps also a mother.

And you, O mothers, who were virgins, when you teach your daughters what a treasure is virginal purity, give them together with a lesson in anatomy and physiology – which perhaps they do not need – a lesson in high morality. Tell them that to the man they love they must concede everything; to the man they do not love, nothing; tell them that one can be physically a virgin and morally a prostitute; tell them that to the first kiss they owe untarnished all their treasures, not one gem only, and that the future of their love consists in preserving the centuple virginity existing in one virgin. If nature with sad mystery has decreed that woman should love the first time with much pain, it is our duty to crown the virgin with many flowers of virtue, to perfume her with many odours of grace, to make the martyr a happy spouse; it is our duty to elevate the physical virgin to the highest region of purity and grandeur, so that she may appear to us, like an angel of Beato Angelico, all illumined with the light of the rainbow, where amid the tears of a first defeat shines the light of the sun of love; and that after the hurricane of conquest there may be announced the serenity of a beautiful day of delights. The religion of Christ, in presenting to man the worship of a virgin mother, wished perhaps to consecrate the purity of the virgin with the affections of the spouse; to create an ideal of perfection in which would shine the two chief virtues of woman; to imagine perhaps that one can be a virgin and a mother, as one can be a virgin and a prostitute. To gaze at the Madonnas of Raphael, Murillo, and Correggio: the influence which she has exercised upon Christian arts suffices to prove that this ideal creature has been a sublime creation of the human mind, and not a riddle or a myth.