The Power We Pretend Not To See - 4

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

—“Holy Sonnet XIV,” by John Donne

I first read John Donne’s Sonnet XIV sitting in the front row of twelfth grade AP English. I don’t remember a word of our class discussion, but I have a distinct picture in my head of Mr. Giglio listing all the verbs Donne used, pointing out how violent so many of them were, and then looking away from us when he said the word ravish. “Do you know what that word means when it’s used as a verb?” he asked, clearly unwilling to meet our gaze. Maybe someone answered him, maybe not, I don’t recall, but I’m going to paraphrase his explanation here because even though I am sure you know what the word means, I want you to understand exactly how he framed the poem for us. Ravish, he said, staring at a point in space off to his left, near the classroom door, was an old fashioned word for what happened when a man “sexually possessed a woman.” I don’t remember if he ever used the word rape as he continued to talk about the poem, but he really did say possessed, and a palpable sense of wonder entered his voice as he made sure we understood that Donne’s speaker was asking God, metaphorically of course, to do the same thing to him.

I had a hard time taking the poem seriously. As a Jewish kid who to that point had been attending an Orthodox yeshiva, I frankly found the premise of Donne’s poem—and I mean no disrespect by this; I am reporting what I felt at the time—kind of ridiculous. Nothing like the Devil existed in the universe of my religious education, and so the notion that Donne would experience himself as “betroth’d” to such an entity, and that it would take “real metaphorical” violence on God’s part to free him from that betrothal, felt precisely antithetical to everything I had learned about the relationship between the human and the divine. I did not dismiss the poem out of hand—even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t; we eventually had to write an essay about it—but I found trying to wrap my head around the paradox that fascinated Mr. Giglio, How could being ravished make someone chaste?, both more trouble than it was worth and deeply troubling, though I could not back then have articulated why that was so.

What I could have told you at the time was that Mr. Giglio was a devout Catholic—I found out many years later that he’d left teaching to become a priest—and that Donne’s poem moved him in a way that he was trying and failing to hide from us. It did not occur to me until years later that the homoeroticism I initially did not recognize in the poem might have touched something in Mr. Giglio that he would have preferred not to reveal. I do not know for sure if he was gay, which matters only because he would have had no choice back then but to be in the closet, but, assuming for the moment that he was—there were whispers—I am struck as I write this by the risk he took in teaching that poem. I did not have a lot of respect for Mr. Giglio as a teacher—to explain why would require telling you stories that are at best marginally relevant here—but no one deserves to live with the fear he might very well have been living with, of suffering the consequences of what it would have meant for him to out himself simply because he could not hide the fact that he was moved by a poem.

§§§

According to Lawrence Beaston in Talking To a Silent God: Donne’s Holy Sonnets and The Via Negativa, the Holy Sonnets, which Donne wrote between 1609 and 1610, render a spiritual struggle that many contemporary readers find troubling. For these readers, Beaston asserts, the “note of despair” the poems consistently strike is “out of keeping” with Donne’s position not just as an Anglican priest, but also as the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Given the spiritual leadership Donne was expected to provide, Beaston goes on, these readers expect the Holy Sonnets to arrive at some version of “spiritual health.” Since the poems explicitly do not do that, he argues, since they actively resist such a reading, to find them wanting on this account is to fail read them on their own terms.

Instead, Beaston proposes a reading that places the poems in the “long tradition of Christian mysticism,” known as the via negativa, which “insists upon…the vast difference” between God and humans not as a reason for despair, but as evidence that God “work[s] to effect the salvation of his believers even in their experience of his silence, his apparent absence.” In this view, Donne’s speaker becomes a “penitent individual…beseeching God for some spiritual grace,” despite the fact that he receives “no apparent response;” and God’s silence becomes not an occasion for the speaker’s “despair,” but rather the poet’s way of representing God’s “radical otherness”—the impossibility of rendering God’s presence in words. Read in this context, the homosexual violence the speaker calls down upon himself, metaphorical though it may be, becomes a final, desperate act of abject surrender, offered in full knowledge that God will neither accept nor reject it; and the speaker should be understood as being fine with that, in the sense that God’s response is not his goal. Having arrived at the point where he can surrender himself in this way is.

What makes this surrender an especially rich source of interpretive readings is the paradox Donne crafts into the metaphor he uses: that being ravished by God will somehow make him chaste. Critics have deployed a range of strategies to make sense of this, including those that treat the metaphor as a species of spiritual sublimation, allowing the same-sex dynamic to be both accepted and denied at the same time; those that corral the poem into heteronormative heterosexuality by arguing that the speaker’s expressed desire to be raped by God turns him into a metaphorical woman; and those that use kink as a framing device, seeing Donne’s speaker as having consented to being raped by God, much as a submissive in S&M play consents to acts that would otherwise be considered violations. What all of these readings have in common is that they tend to focus on resolving the first part of the metaphor, the part where Donne’s speaker asks God to ravish him. None, as far as I can tell, ask why the chasteness Donne’s speaker craves—and it’s important to remember that chaste for Donne did not mean sexually untouched or celibate, but rather, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “pure from immoral intercourse”—why that should require an act of sexual violence in the first place, much less one that is generally understood in the real world to be something men perpetrate almost exclusively against women.

§§§

Much of the controversy surrounding Andrea Dworkin’s book Intercourse, first published in the late 1980s, centered around what Dworkin called “the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people—physically occupied inside [as women are in sexual intercourse with men]—be free[?]” Dworkin was not talking about rape. Rather, she was asking about consensual intercourse, an act thoroughly entrenched in our cultural imaginary as being beyond politics, as the natural and therefore ultimate expression of love and commitment between a man and a woman. Given that this act has historically been understood in terms of a woman’s surrendering herself to a man, Dworkin asked, does that understanding not imply that, as Donne might put it, heterosexual intercourse is by definition an act through which a man “enthralls” a woman, making her his in ways that are antithetical to any notion of her own personal freedom?

For Dworkin, one consequence of politicizing consensual sex in this way is that female virginity also becomes politicized. Broadly speaking, Dworkin defines two ways of understanding virginity, “a woman’s framing” of the concept and “the male frame,” which she characterizes as the one in which we now live. As you might expect, the two frames are inversely related to each other. In the woman’s frame, virginity is not about whether a woman has had sex per se, but about the degree to which she is able to control the physical boundaries of her own body and thus remain whole unto herself. In the male frame, on the other hand, a woman who is a virgin is not whole, and what completes her is sex with a man—but not just any sex. Fully to lose her virginity, according to this logic, a woman must experience “sexual desire [powerful] enough to be made sick by it” and a “passion [strong] enough to crave it,” such that she is willing to do whatever is required in order to fulfill it.

As an example of this male-defined virginity, Dworkin offers a reading of how Gustave Flaubert’s character Emma Bovary, despite the fact that she’d had sex with her husband, did not experience that kind of transformative sexual desire until her adulterous affair with Rodolphe. In male terms, in other words, Emma remained ontologically a virgin, incomplete as a woman and as a human being, until that affair. If we understand the Devil to whom Donne’s speaker considers himself betrothed to be analogous to Emma Bovary’s husband, then Donne’s speaker is—at least within Dworkin’s logic—just as virginal as Flaubert’s character. Granted, the desire that Donne’s speaker feels is spiritual in nature, not carnal, but the underlying dynamic is still the same. What he wants is to be forced by God into the kind of surrender that will make him spiritually whole, no differently than Emma wants to be made whole by surrendering herself to a man capable of making her feel the desire to do so. The only difference is that Emma’s pursuit of fulfillment is ultimately self-destructive, while the desire Donne’s speaker feels remains, at least within the fourteen lines of the poem, forever unfulfilled.

§§§

Dworkin offered the experiences of three female saints as exemplars of what she meant by women’s framing of virginity: Joan of Arc, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Margaret of Antioch. St. Catherine provides perhaps the most straightforward example, since she turned down a chance to save her life by becoming the Emperor Maxentius’ mistress, choosing instead to remain faithful to Jesus who, in a vision, had already made her his spouse. The physical boundary Catherine thus maintained, Dworkin wrote, which the other two saints did as well, is fundamental to the kind of “personal freedom and self-determination” without which there can be “no private conscience, no personal relationship to God, no way of life that [is] self-chosen, self-actualized, self-sustained”—in other words, no way to have the sense of self that made her vision of marrying Jesus possible.

In one of the marginal notes I made for myself when I first read Intercourse almost forty years ago, I asked what it would mean if we could redefine male virginity along the same lines, as a boundary meant to protect the integrity of a man’s sexual interior, together with everything that interior might represent in terms of how he lived his life. What if, in other words, we understood male virginity as belonging to the same species of wholeness Dworkin attributes to those female saints, rather than as something a boy must “lose” in order for his transition into manhood to be considered complete?

Dworkin suggests that as long as we remain within the logic of the male frame that question is unanswerable. “Men are rarely ontological virgins,” she wrote, by which I understand her to mean that because patriarchy does not define men’s bodies as sexually contested territory in the way that women’s bodies are, men are not understood to have the kind of emotional and psychological sexual interiority that is taken for granted in women. As a result, male virginity has no intrinsic value in and of itself, not to the man who wants to end it—it is not, for example, understood to be something he should give only to “the right woman”—and not to the woman, whether she is “right” or not, with whom he has the sex that removes his virginity from him.

Looked at this way, the question of male virginity becomes primarily a mechanical one. A man is or is not a virgin; he either has or has not had sex for the first time; and while there may be consequences if he remains a virgin for too long, those consequences no longer apply once he is not a virgin anymore. The ontological question, in other words, is whether he is or is not a man, not whether he is or is not a virgin. Within the logic of patriarchy, then, the kind of intimacy with God that, in Dworkin’s analysis, virginity allowed the female saints to experience would be impossible for a man.

Consider, for example, the tenderness with which St. Catherine’s experience of her marriage to Jesus is described by William Caxton in his 15th century The Life of St. Katherine, Virgin and Martyr.¹

And as soon as she heard [Jesus] name her name, so great a sweetness entered into her soul that she was all ravished, and therewith our Lord gave to her a new strength which passed nature, and said to her: Come my spouse, and give to me your hand. And there our Lord espoused her in joining himself to her by spiritual marriage, promising ever to keep her in all her life in this world, and after this life to reign perpetually in his bliss, and in token of this set a ring on her finger…

As Caxton describes it, Catherine’s soul was capable of being entered spiritually—the way a woman’s body is capable of being entered sexually—before Jesus said her name. If Donne’s speaker experienced his soul in the same way, as something that was always already in a state that could be entered, the last line of Sonnet XIV would not be necessary. He does not, which is why he needs the kind of violation he invites in the poem’s final line to create that interiority for him.

The question I could not articulate back in Mr. Giglio’s twelfth grade English class was why that should be so. At the time, it would never have occurred to me that the answer lay in Donne’s inability to think of himself, in strictly heteronormative terms, as anything other than a man, someone who could not be ontologically virginal in the way that Catherine was. Nor would it have occurred to me that this inability to imagine himself outside the boundaries of those terms might account for the shape of his search for oneness with God. Within those boundaries, however, and within the metaphorical logic set up by the poem, the violation Donne’s speaker invites is inescapable and not paradoxical at all. In heteronormative terms, for a man to be ravished by another man—and Donne’s God is unambiguously understood to be male—whether that ravishment is voluntary or not, is of him to surrender that which makes him a man, that which affirms his humanity, precisely the kind of ultimate surrender Donne’s speaker believes he needs to make in order to achieve the spiritual fulfillment he desires.

1. The difference in spelling notwithstanding, Caxton and Dworkin were writing about the same saint. ↩︎