View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by eGrove (Univ. of Mississippi) University of Mississippi eGrove Honors College (Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors Theses Honors College) 2016 The aM donna, The Whore, The yM th: Deconstructing the Madonna/Whore Dichotomy in the Scarlet Letter, the Awakening, and the Virgin Suicides Whitney Greer University of Mississippi. Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis Part of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons Recommended Citation Greer, Whitney, "The aM donna, The Whore, The yM th: Deconstructing the Madonna/Whore Dichotomy in the Scarlet Letter, the Awakening, and the Virgin Suicides" (2016). Honors Theses. 943. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/943 This Undergraduate Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Honors College (Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College) at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE MADONNA, THE WHORE, THE MYTH: DECONSTRUCTING THE MADONNA/WHORE DICHOTOMY IN THE SCARLET LETTER, THE AWAKENING, AND THE VIRGIN SUICIDES By Whitney Greer A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Mississippi in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College Oxford May 2016 Approved by: _________________________________ Advisor Dr. Theresa Starkey _________________________________ Reader Dr. Jaime Harker _________________________________ Reader Dr. Debra Young © 2016 Whitney Elizabeth Greer ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to my family for supporting me, I could not have done this without you. Thank you to my grandfather, Charles, for your unfaltering love and support—you have made the world available to me. Thank you to my mother and sister, for showing me what strong women are. Thank you to my mother for her friendship and inspiration. Thank you to my boyfriend, Austin, for not only listening to me talk about my research, but for actually engaging in discussions on it with me from day one, for keeping me balanced, and for supporting me. Thank you to Dr. Starkey, were it not for your encouragement and direction I would not have begun my research or pursued it into my thesis. You have been the most important academic figure of my college career, and I cannot thank you enough for suggesting I submit my work to the Sarah Isom Center Student Gender Conference when I was just a student in your class three years ago. Thank you to the Honors College for providing me with educational opportunities and for asking more of me as a student. You have all changed the trajectory of my life for the better and aided in the creation of this thesis. Thank you. iii My thesis is dedicated to all of the women who have been made to feel as if their worth lies in their bodies. If you have been called a prude, slut, whore, or any variation of those; if you have experienced anxiety over the status of your virginity; if you have been sent out of an educational environment because your body was deemed a distraction; if you have struggled to feel worthy after sexual assault or even consensual sexual activity because you were taught sex can make you damaged goods; if you have been shamed for seeking reproductive health: this is for you. You are more. Your worth is not in a hymen or a bare mid-riff or how much sexual agency you take. Your worth is in the compassion you have for others, the love you have for yourself, the good you do for your community, the thoughts you have about things as light as romantic comedies or as heavy as the wage gap and its disproportionate impact on minority women, the way you dance with abandon to Taylor Swift, how you get up and go to class or run a marathon even when you are on your period and in pain, how you explore the world, and countless other things that you make you human and you. Your worth cannot be quantified. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction…5 Chapter 1: The Scarlet Letter: Hester as the Patron Saint of the Fallen Woman…..20 1.1 Historical Context of The Scarlet Letter….21 1.2 Geographical Context of The Scarlet Letter….24 1.2.1 Hester’s home as the Anti-Eden….25 1.3 Hester as the Madonna and Magna Mater….29 1.4 Rejecting Hester as a Whore….34 1.5 Dissolving the Binary: Hester as Whore and Madonna to Dimmesdale…35 1.6 Death by Madonna: Dimmesdale’s Death…40 1.7 Reappropriating The Scarlet Letter & Blending the Madonna/Whore Binary…42 1.8 Conclusion…43 Chapter 2: The Madonna Archetype as Deadly in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening…45 1.1 Geographical Context of The Awakening…46 1.2 Historical Context of The Awakening…49 1.3 An Example of the Ideal Woman: The Madonna Archetype in The Awakening as seen in Adele Ratignolle…53 1.4 Deviating from the Madonna: Edna’s Awakening and its Destabilization of the Madonna Archetype…61 1.4.1 The Sensual Awakening of Edna…62 1.4.2 The Sexual Awakening of Edna…71 Chapter 3: The Virgin Suicides…78 1.1 Historical Context of The Virgin Suicides…79 1.2 Geograpical Context of The Virgin Suicides…81 1.3 The Male Gaze: Projecting the Madonna onto the Woman…82 1.4 The Lisbon Girls: Mythologizing the Female…86 1.5 Making a Madonna of the Whore: Lux Lisbon and the Sexualized Madonna…92 1.6 Unraveling and Confronting the Fantasy of the Lisbon Girls and the Madonna Archetype…101 1.7 Conclusion…107 Thesis Conclusion…110 v Abstract This thesis works to answer several questions as well as raise questions regarding the Madonna/Whore dichotomy, what is actually is, and why it is still a judgment standard used in American society. This is addressed in a series of chapters that look at the origin of the dichotomy, female literary characters to whom it has been applied, and what those applications say about American, and more broadly Judeo-Christian, society at that time. Throughout an examination of The Scarlett Letter, The Awakening, and The Virgin Suicides, the way in which women are presented and the extent to which their identities are manipulated into or expected to align with the Madonna/Whore dichotomy is analyzed. Central to this analysis of the application of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy is an evaluation of the archetypes1 it embodies, specifically their origin, their evolving and/or static properties, and their power within Judeo-Christian society. 1 I define archetype as it is defined in the Cambridge Dictionary, that being “a typical example of something, or the original model of something from which others are copied”. 1 INTRODUCTION “If women had but written stories; As have these clerks within their oratories, They would have written of men more wickedness Than all the race of Adam could redress” -Wife of Bath, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales In my thesis I attempt to answer several questions as well as raise questions regarding the Madonna/Whore dichotomy, what is actually is, and why it is still a judgment standard used in American society. To fully address this, I’ve written a series of chapters that look at the origin of the dichotomy, female literary characters to whom it has been applied, and what those applications say about American, and more broadly Judeo-Christian, society at that time. Throughout my examination of The Scarlett Letter, The Awakening, and The Virgin Suicides, I analyze the way in which women are presented and the extent to which their identities are manipulated into or expected to align with the Madonna/Whore dichotomy. Central to my analysis of the application of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy is an evaluation of the archetypes2 it embodies, specifically their origin, their evolving and/or static properties, and their power within Judeo-Christian society. The Madonna/Whore binary is a product of mind/body dualism, specifically the Judeo- Christian version of mind/body dualism. The concept of mind/body dualism became gendered when it associated the woman, due to her ability to give birth, as more connected to the life cycle and thus the weak body than man was. This lead to the conceptualization of men as superior to women due to the female body representing the lower ‘body’ and men representing the higher ‘mind’. This was the beginning of a woman’s body serving as the contested, censored, and 2 I define archetype as it is defined in the Cambridge Dictionary, that being “a typical example of something, or the original model of something from which others are copied”. 2 politically inscribed site of her identity. With woman as body, as Susan Bordo notes in Unbearable Weight, “whatever the specific content of the duality, the body is the negative term, and if women is the body, then women are that negativity, whatever it may be: distraction from knowledge, seduction away from God, capitulation to sexual desire, violence or aggression, failure of will, even death”3. The gendered version of mind/body dualism was adopted in Judeo- Christian culture and beliefs, thus establishing it within an ideological framework that would come to be the chief influence on Western civilization. The Madonna/Whore dichotomy is a fundamental example of how the dualism played out at the intersection of Western and Judeo- Christian culture. This can be seen in analyzing the original Madonna and Whore dichotomy originating from Eve and the Virgin Mary, and the evolution of how they are portrayed within both cultures.