Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (75 page)

Agnes remains the patron saint of bodily purity in the religious instruction of Catholic schoolgirls but in 1950 she acquired a modern and controversial sister. With the canonization of Maria Goretti ( 1890-1902 ) , the Church of Rome put a stunning update on its concept of the virgin martyr. Maria Goretti was no legendary victim of dimly remembered religious persecutions-she was mur dered in twentieth-century Italy during an attempted rape.

A peasant girl of eleven, Maria Goretti suffered fourteen stab

.
wounds inflicted by a twenty-year-old farm hand, Alessandro Sere nelli, while insisting, "No, no, Alessandro, it is against God's wishes." Proof of her saintliness in the eyes of the Church was that Maria did not raise a hand to resist Serenelli's blows but directed all her effort toward protecting her virtue. Furthermore, she for gave her attacker before she died, as did her grieving mother.

Maria Goretti was raised to sainthood on the basis of her resistance to sin. In canonical terms, she died in defense of Chris tian
.
precept as opposed to a general defense of the faith. This was an unprecedented development in the history of martyrology, steeped in political mysteries as well as divine. When the apostolic inquiry into Maria's sanctity began, a Bavarian girl murdered in similar circumstances a century earlier was being promoted by some German Catholics, but she was swif tly displaced by Maria. Italian chauvinism was one factor in Maria's favor, but there were other factors, too. Unlike the original virgin martyrs, Maria Goretti was a poverty-stricken child of the soil, a matter of some impor tance in the Vatican's effort to renew the faith of the laboring classes in postwar, politically turbulent Europe. But the key factor,

curiously enough, was the exemplary behavior of her would-be rapist.

Had Alessandro Serenelli gone through with his intentions, Maria's death would have amounted to a futile gesture, canonically speaking. But Serenelli did more than desist. He confessed at his trial and later to the apostolic investigation that he had given his victim every opportunity to submit before he killed her. Six years into his jail sentence the unremorseful murderer saw a vision of Maria in his cell (she came to him dressed in white and carrying flowers ) and became a penitent. Af ter his release-he served twenty-seven years-Serenelli went to Maria's mother to give his apologies. He lived out his days as a lay brother and gardener at a Capuchin monastery, humbly devoted to Maria's saintly cause. Newspaper accounts even placed him in St. Peter's on the occasion of her beatification, a fact that later was
·
sternly denied.

Thousands of women had been raped impartially by invading armies throughout the long years of World War II, but if this experience had anything to do with the popularity of Maria Goretti as a candidate for sainthood, it remained unexpressed. When Pope Pius XII declared her Blessed in
194
7 he gave other reasons for this unprecedented Church interest in a virgin victim of attempted rape. Calling Maria Goretti a second Saint Agnes, he took the occasion to lament the corruption of female chastity by movies, press, fashion styles and Communist youth organizations. "In our day," he intoned with appropriate vagueness, "women have even been thrown into military service, with grave consequences." Against the dissolution of female morality stood the shining ex ample of little Maria Goretti, who defended her Christian virtue by death and made a penitent of her attacker. Could there be a
·
more perfect expression of woman's role?

Maria Goretti was declared a saint in three years' time. Hers was the speediest canonization in the annals of modern Church history, witnessed in St. Peter's Square by the largest crowd ever to gather for such an event.

No photograph was ever taken during the short life of the sturdy, robust little peasant girl-her widowed mother was too poor for such an extravagance-but the iconographers have not been deterred. Saint Maria Goretti has been idealized in death as a fragile, delicate beauty clutching lilies of the valley to her breast.

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Typically, she is inscribed in Coulson's book of saints as "excep tionally beautiful."*

The Catholic Church has not been alone in promoting as role model the chaste female martyr who dies on the cross of male sin. The rape of women in the 1648 Chmelnitzky pogroms (see page

121) comes down to us in the legends of "beautiful Jewish girls,, who threw themselves off bridges or courted slaughter to escape the fate worse than death. A popular Greek legend, celebrated in song, tells of an entire village of women who threw themselves off a cliff to escape certain rape by invading Turks.

World War II (see pages 48-78) spawned an entire new pantheon of dramatized virgin martyrs, even in atheistic Russia. A popular piece of Soviet war propaganda, printed in book form, tells the story of Comrade Genia Demianova, a virgin schoolteacher engaged to a young American
(I)
engineer named Jimmy. Genia was raped and tortured by invading Nazi soldiers but supposedly lived long enough-"in the mental ward of the Third Garrison Hospital in Moscow"-to write down her story. Published in Lon don, the title page of Comrade Genia bears the inscription, "This is the documentary of the rape of a young schoolmistress-no, of an entire Russian village-by the Germans, August, 1941." A short introduction exhorts, "Get into your tank, Jimmy, you and all the other Jimmys, Tommys and Ivans-and let those tanks never stop until you have exterminated those Teutonic beasts to the last, so that horrors like this shall never again happen on this earth."

More sorrowful than Comrade Genia through the strength of sheer numbers was a suicide poem that appeared in an American Jewish magazine in 1943, supposedly the last testament from ninety-three girls of the Beth Jakob Seminary in Krakow who took their own lives af ter being informed that the Nazis intended to turn their seminary into a brothel.

Did ninety-three Jewish girls in Krakow take their own lives to avoid prostitution? Was there a Comrade Genia engaged to an American Jimmy? Evidence of rape and forcible prostitution dur-

* There has lately been some indication that Maria Goretti will not remain the only saint in her special category.
In
1972
Pope Paul VI beatified Agos tina Pietrantoni, a thirty-year-old nun who worked as a nurse in a hospital just outside the Vatican. Sister Pietrantoni was stabbed to death in
1894
af ter an attempted rape by a former patient.

ing World War II as a routine fact of life exists in scattered documents that most historians have chosen to ignore, an imbal ance I have tried to correct. Far more compelling than the male atrocity has been the legend of virgin martyr whose inspirational value rests on being beautiful, chaste and dead.

THE BEAUTIFUL
VICTIM

The psychic burden under which women function is weighted by a deep belief, borne out by ample evidence, that our attractive ness to men, our sexual desirability, is in direct proportion to our ability to play the victim. This is no mere game that women must play in order to catch and keep a man; this is a lifetime practice in living the part of the walking wounded.

Playing the beautiful victim goes further than clicbes like "You're adorable when you cry" or a pretended incompetence amid things technical that many men profess to find so feminine and appealing. It goes to the very core of our sexuality. I used the phrase "catch and keep" in the above paragraph quite deliberately because it implies deceit. Men do not catch women; they win them, and a woman's ultimate appeal lies in her ability to be a prize that
is
won. Her value is as captured trophy.

A lot of preparation goes into playing a capturable trophy, and a lot of schooling is provided for us along the way, in case we have missed the many signposts. There was a custom some years ago, but I think it may be going out of fashion, for dog owners to teach their pets to roll over and play dead. No doubt such total mastery over an animal with the ability to bark and bite brought immense ego satisfaction to some humans, and for the dog's part, perhaps it was just a temporary inconvenience in return for the favors
·
of love and food. I have always felt that the Freudian warning, a strong woman is a castrating woman, springs from the same ego need as that of the master of the docile pet. And is it unfair to say that the woman who responds to this warning by playing up her weakness is also "rolling over" for love and food?

I once read an interview with the movie director Alfred Hitch cock, who was asked to describe what qualities he looked for in his leading ladies. He replied that all of them possessed one quality in common, a certain vulnerability. When I first read this interview I

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was surprised, because vulnerability would not spring to my mind in appraising such diverse stars as Janet Leigh and Grace Kelly, but then, as a woman appraising other women, vulnerability would not be a huge plus mark for me.

The poet Adrienne Rich wrote the line "This is the oppres sor's language." I borrow her phrase now for a small digression into male semantics. The dictionary definition of "vulnerable" is "sus ceptible to being wounded or hurt, or open to attack or assault." The opposite of "vulnerable" would be "impregnable" or "im penetrable." The sex act, which can result in pregnancy, has as its modus operandi something men call "penetration." "Penetration," however, describes what the man does. The feminist Barbara Mehrhof has suggested that if women were in charge of sex and the language, the same act could well be called "enclosure"-a revolu tionary concept I'm afraid the world is not yet ready for. (To further digress, in the Latin of Augustine's day pudenda, meaning "parts of shame," referred to male and female genitalia alike. In modern usage the term refers only to female genitalia.)

So Hitchcock was on to something, I have concluded. His leading ladies did not have a certain "sensitivity" in common: what they had was vulnerability. They managed to project the feeling that they could be wounded or "had." And I think Hitchcock was speaking for most of his profession. The grand masters of the Hollywood· dream machine chose their heroines to fit their own sexual fantasies, and their fantasies became important lessons in our female reality. In the nineteen fif ties and sixties the celluloid vision of the desirable female increasingly became the child-woman who was beautiful and vulnerable. Strength, heroism, invincibility and mature middle age were qualities reserved for the men as they rode off into the sunset. For the women, vulnerability was inextri cably tied in with being sexy, from the moody Ava Gardner to the wispy Mia Farrow.* The few grandes
dames
who did not fit the stereotype, survivors from the spirited forties like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, got little work besides the unpleasant character part of "superbitch."