The hymen, which medical descriptions depict as nothing more than a lunule or crescent-shaped membrane bordering the labia minora, is among the most meaningful of body parts. For much of history and in many parts of the world, the hymen has been valued as the sign and seal of a woman's virginity, even though medical authorities define it as merely a partial covering that many women are born without and that many others lose in the course of everyday activities. Nevertheless, the medical description and symbolic status of the hymen continue side by side. The OED, for example, defines the hymen as a mere fold or partial cover, but at the same time terms it ‘the virginal membrane’. In her 1976 study of mariology (Alone of All her sex), Marina Warner described how convent schoolgirls are taught that, because the hymen closes the vagina, using tampons will irreparably damage their virginity. Moreover, hymen construction through plastic surgery is popular in Japan and India, among other places, where a high value is placed on female virginity in spite of changes in sexual mores.
Although the word ‘hymen’ is derived from the Greek term for membrane, ancient anatomy did not recognize a membrane covering the vagina as part of the normal female body. Nor did the Greeks associate the anatomical term ‘hymen’ with the hymenaios or wedding song, or with the god of marriage. As Sissa notes in her essential study Greek virginity, ‘hymen’ described a particular type of tissue, a membrane or light film that wrapped all vital organs and bones and was in no way specific to the virgin. Hippocratic nosography viewed a membrane over the vagina as an abnormality, classing it with membranes that harmfully covered other orifices — the anus or the penis, for example.
Although classic Greek medicine did not recognize a virginal membrane, evidence suggests a concept of the hymen as vaginal seal had developed at least by the second century ad. Sissa points out that such a belief was mentioned and contradicted by the Greek doctor Soranus, who taught medicine in Rome. In his Gynaikeia Soranus cited as an ‘error’ the opinion that a thin membrane grew in the middle of the vagina. We do not know the source of this ‘error’ or when belief in it began. However, we can be certain that by the fourth century a vision of the female body with a natural seal or hymen was central to Christian beliefs about the birth of Jesus and the status of Mary.
For Christians, the miracle of a virgin birth fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy: ‘Behold a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel’ (Isaiah 7: 14). Ambrose, writing in the fourth century, found the hymen necessary for a correct interpretation of Scriptures; it is the physical detail that makes miraculous the virgin birth and places it outside of all natural occurrence. Physical virginity was central to the Marian cult from its official beginnings in Byzantium, and the Church proclaimed Mary's ‘seal’ as intact before, during, and after the birth of Christ. The second Council of Constantinople in 381 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451 affirmed Mary's perpetual virginity. Moreover, the importance of physical virginity as a model for all women was reiterated throughout the Middle Ages in writings like Peter Damian's ‘Letter on Divine Omnipotence’ (c.1067). In arguing against Jerome's alleged remark that although God can do anything, He cannot restore a woman's virginity, Damian responded that God was capable of such a feat, but abstained from doing it because repairing the virgin seal, as he terms it, was not justifiable. For undervaluing a precious treasure God imposed a penalty, a lasting sign (the broken hymen) that would forever recall the transgression. Mary's virginity remained a model for Christian women, and during the sixteenth century the Council of Trent reaffirmed the doctrines surrounding the Blessed Mother's status as virgo intacta.
Literal interpretations of purity as physical virginity gave onto images of Mary as the enclosed garden, a sealed fountain, a ‘porta clausa’. Her unbroken hymen was likened to a pane of glass that the sun passed through without piercing. Paintings representing scenes from Mary's life, and in particular the Annunciation, often drew on these metaphors. They were especially popular with Northern painters of the fifteenth century, as, for example in Jan van Eyck's Annunciation in a Church (c.1428; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) or in Roger Campin's Mérode Altarpiece (c.1426; Cloisters Collection, New York). In each of these works the artist shows the Virgin placed near light rays, depicted as golden shafts, passing through a glass window pane. Also represented was a story from the Apocryphal Gospels in which the midwife Salome, who does not believe in Mary's virginity, examines her manually to ascertain if the hymen is intact. For her incredulity Salome is punished with a withered hand, and we see her so represented in Roger Campin's Nativity (c.1420; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon).
The unbelieving midwife who must physically touch Mary's hymen reminds us that midwives from the early Christian period through the Enlightenment laid claim to this procedure for testing virginity. These midwives were targets for doctors who disputed their ability, and (perhaps surprisingly) for the Church fathers who, despite their insistence on Mary's intact body, themselves doubted that the hymen provided incontrovertible proof. Ambrose, for example, sent an indignant letter to the bishop of Verona who allowed a midwife to examine a Christian virgin manually. Not only might such contact provoke the very catastrophe it pretended to determine, but, Ambrose noted, most learned physicians said physical inspections were not entirely reliable. Thus Ambrose, like Augustine and Cyprian after him, presses his belief in the hymen as the signaculum of woman's (and Mary's) virginity, and at the same time admits that medical science has shown the hymen an unreliable sign at best.
In the matter of the hymen, midwives were a particular target for the sixteenth-century physician Ambroise Paré who was disgusted that judges often relied on their untrustworthy testimony. He noted that although midwives will swear they can distinguish a virgin from a deflowered woman, their testimony is suspect since they cannot decide where the hymen is located: one says at the entry to the vagina; another in the neck of the womb; and a third in the womb itself. Against this ambiguous testimony Paré places the results of his practice; after examining girls between the ages of three and twelve under his care at the Hospital of Paris, he found no evidence of the alleged virginal seal. Paré, however, admits that some colleagues also believe in the hymen, as do entire peoples, such as the Africans of Mauritania who display the soiled bed linen after a nuptial defloration. Paré attributed the blood associated with first intercourse not to breaking the hymen, but to tearing little veins spread over the woman's reproductive organs.
By the eighteenth century many physicians such as Buffon rejected both the word ‘hymen’ and the image of a membrane stretched across the vagina. Buffon, instead, recognized a whole series of possibilities including the idea that a half-moon of skin grew around the vagina. Like Paré, he offered alternative explanations for phenomena (such as the shedding of blood on first intercourse) associated with the hymen. But perhaps more importantly, Buffon suggests a socio-cultural origin for the hymen. Men, he argued, have always made much of whatever they believed their exclusive possession and this madness has made a real entity of the maiden's virginity. Buffon goes on to say that virginity, which is a virtue, has been transformed into a physical object and made a concern for all men.
As an object of concern for men, the hymen found itself in many places: religious treatises, court rooms, medical texts, and erotic novels like those of the Marquis de Sade in which the deflowering of a virgin — whose status is guaranteed by an intact hymen — produces an extra frisson of excitement. Paintings symbolized Mary's hymen as an unbroken pane of glass, and poems like Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1712-14) figured the maiden's maidenhead as fine, breakable porcelain. Although midwives could not precisely say in what part of the female body the hymen was located, it could be found in the Encyclopédie's (published 1751-65) entry on virginity: ‘Anatomy leaves the existence of the membrane known as the hymen totally in doubt.’
If a fantasy of the hymen had its uses for Christian theology, it has also been helpful to psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud, whose theories of femininity remain influential today, argued in The Taboo of Virginity (1917) that the first penetration of a woman's genitalia destroyed an organ. Belief in the hymen-organ allowed Freud to depict woman's first act of sexual intercourse as leaving a physical wound, which then translated in her mental life as a blow to narcissism. The double wound produces the hostility that every woman, according to Freud, feels toward her first lover. That hostility he associates with penis envy, which in Freud's theory of femininity stands as a defining feature of woman's mental life. As in the case of the Church fathers, the hymen here operates as verification of some deeply held belief necessary to the workings of a system. Indeed, the history of the hymen points not to the physical actuality of an organ, but to the social and theoretical utility of a sign imagined as truly present in the female body.
— Mary D. Sheriff
Bibliography
- Sissa, G. (1990). Greek virginity (trans. A. Goldhammer). Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
- Warner, M. (1983). Alone of all her sex. The myth and cult of the Virgin Mary. Vintage Books, New York
See also virginity; virginity tests.
