The Chastity Plot by Lisabeth During (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Chastity Plot by Lisabeth During Robyn McAuliffe Lisabeth During, The Chastity Plot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 391 pp. The title of this book draws attention to a device or, as During reveals, a preoccupation of the media we consume. The “chastity plot” forms central narratives in contemporary books, films, and television shows (for example, Jane the Virgin and the American Pie franchise). The sociologist Laura Carpenter has written extensively on the stigmatization of virginity and virginity-loss within the United States in particular. Lisabeth During’s The Chastity Plot, however, is a much-needed and important new addition to the conversation surrounding chastity, covering a multitude of literary and cross-cultural traditions to identify and explicate the cultural preoccupation with chastity and virginity that has endured since antiquity. Drawing on examples from many literary genres, During uses each chapter to chart the glorification and downfall of the chastity ideal. She begins first with a brief introduction to the concept of chastity, its prevalence within contemporary evangelical and conservative Christian teachings, and its links with morality, before moving in chapter 1 to an elucidation of the differences between “the eunuch’s plot” favored by Church writings, specifically within saints’ lives, and “[c]hastity plots,” which “stage a struggle against the social insistence on marriage and reproduction” (30). From her analysis of the female saint Thecla, [End Page 223] known for her chastity and allegiance to the teachings of St. Paul, and the eighteenth-century advocate of chastity, Pamela, from Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, During moves on to an analysis in chapter 2 of the tragic hero Hippolytus, whose devout allegiance to the chaste state in Euripides’s classical Greek tragedy Hippolytus ends in turmoil. This is a particularly effective chapter for its exploration of male chastity, its links with misogyny within the play, and the dangers of an unchecked and uncontrolled male chastity. Chapter 3 focuses on the “antimarriage plot” and the issue of reconciling chastity with marriage (87). During’s analysis focuses predominantly on female characters who resent prescriptive marriage and seek a life of asexual independence; specifically, she looks to those in Aeschylus’s The Suppliants, the myth of the misandrist Chinese princess Turandot in various literary forms, including Gozzi’s Turandot, before turning to the twentieth-century antimarriage narrative of The Philadelphia Story. Chapters 4 and 5 take a more religious turn, focusing on the “radical sexual renunciation” of Christianity and the difficulty of aligning chastity with conjugality (132). Both chapters focus on the ascetic’s desire to return to a prelapsarian condition of sexual innocence, a sentiment that flavors many ecclesiastical diatribes advocating the spiritual benefits of virginity. Chapters 6 and 7 explore both the early modern admiration of the chaste state and also the anxieties it occasions when such a state is maintained by a monarch, using England’s Queen Elizabeth I as a case study. Chapter 6 draws attention to the admiration her virginity elicited during the period, while chapter 7 focuses on the negative impact of her virginity, namely how her lack of an heir called into question monarchical inheritance and caused widespread dynastic anxiety. Chapter 8, the concluding chapter, focuses on contemporary examples of the chastity plot and its reception in the twenty-first century. The analysis in chapter 8 includes Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady, written a number of years after Pamela in the eighteenth century, which tells the story of the violent rape of the eponymous heroine whose chastity cannot outlast the erotic impulses her virtue stirs up in the villain, Lovelace. During’s analyses, the final chapter notwithstanding, reinforce a link between the predominantly gendered nature of virginity as a feminine attribute and its highly sexualized and eroticized nature; a purity that from antiquity until the present day seemingly stimulates sexual desire that, once rebuffed, brings about sexually violent assault or threats of assault. One of the most fascinating case studies in the book is that of Queen Elizabeth I’s renowned virginity and the impact this had on both her reign and her contemporaries. Contemporaries, including Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, extolled the virtues...