The Hymen and Its Discontents: Medical Discourses on Virginity

Abstract

If both the beginning and end of my story find the virgin idealized—sanctified under Catholicism and immortalized as the virtuous protagonist of sentimental fiction—the majority of her experience is marked more by peril than by admiration. Throughout this book, we find her exposed to depredation by theology, pornography, and satire. In this chapter, it is science that endeavors to deflate—and appropriate—her iconic power via the dual methods of objectification and pathologization. In what follows, I trace representations of virginity through three different kinds of medical discourse: the early modern midwife manuals whose immersion in humoural medicine mark them as old-fashioned almost as soon as they appear; the anatomy texts that, beginning in the seventeenth century, represent the vanguard of the new science; and the eighteenth-century midwife manuals that bear the stamp of this new science. Humoural medicine, which dominated medical discourse on women in the sixteenth and throughout most of the seventeenth centuries, treated prolonged virginity as pathological and thus de-sanctified it. Later, the new science, with its empirical epistemology, subjected the hymen to the same objectification as other body parts, contributing to the demystification of virginity.