Ma, Sati, and Rand: (Midnight) Reflections on Femininity and Chastity

Femininity and chastity: I think our understanding of one is informed from the other. Our attitudes are formed around some median point involving chastity. Chaste constructions of femininity and degrees of variance from it. Deconstruction is a huge thing. I am not even pretending to do one here, but some segues came my way. Observations really. Thought, I would cull out some images, a sort of an iconographic tale of femininity through the construction of the ‘chaste woman’.

Continence, abstinence, reticence, (religious) piety..are some of the tropes which detail chastity. I am going to start with the most commonplace (!!) of icons of femininity –the housewife. The degrees of freedom (as it is understood in physics) available to this category of femininity is limited by the socially ascribed role(s) it is required to perform. Hence, the tropes are countable, finite..from an iconographic history point of view.

A housewife comes to be through a particular process of role-acclimation. It is a patriarchal thing. The classic tale of a domineering phallus. One of gradually showing her “her place”. This happens right in the beginning of the ‘conjugal’ (!!) role assumption, which mostly covers the ritual space from marriage to first few 'days' of marriage, the “Taming of the Shrew Phase”.


Segue-1

Taming of the Shrew
I was reading on the hoary bard of Avon. William Shakespeare lived in the Elizabethan era (mid-sixteenth to early seventeenth century). The Taming of the Shrew is a tale of (double-blind {!!}) deceptions, which finally resolves in the capitulation of Katherina (the willful and thus wild) to Petruchio with the (quoted) words describing the duties of a virtuous woman (gushed at the bidding of her husband, to the bemusement/horror of ‘the widow’ and Bianca, the ingénue, but about the “ingénues” later on):


And place your hands below your husband's foot;
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready, may it do him ease.

And Petruchio rewards the ‘wench’ with “come on ..you can.. kiss me now” (italics mine).