Families Rejected
In early Christian martyrdom literature, Perpetua stands both as one of the most discussed and beloved accounts of Christian martyrdom and as the quintessential example of family abandonment.
The account is extant in two versions, Greek and Latin - the latter being preserved as both a short acta and longer passio.[565] The earliest account was written in Latin in three parts, each of which can be attributed to Perpetua, Saturus, and an editor.[566] Perpetua’s relationship with her father, mother, brothers, and child dominate the beginning of her “diary,” which makes up the first half of the account. The aristocratic Perpetua not only shuns the advice of her father, but in dying leaves her infant son behind. Throughout the narrative, Perpetua is unusually concerned for the fate of her family members. Her father repeatedly attempts to persuade her to renounce Christianity, first with aggression, then with appeals to emotion and familial duty (3.1-3, 5.1-6, 6.2). He implores her, saying, “think of your brothers, think of your mother, think of your aunt, think of your child, who will not be able to live once you are gone” (5.2). As she ascended to the dock to be tried he implored her twice more to take pity (supplicare) on her baby and his old age (6.23). In his economy of familial responsibility the old and the young carried extra weight. It is noteworthy that Perpetua did feel pity for her father, but only when he is beaten at the instructions of Hilarianus. She declared that she feels as if she herself has been beaten.Perpetua’s relationship to her family and her son, especially, has been the subject of exhaustive debate and dissection.[567] Her ambiguous relationship with her child, in particular, has garnered considerable attention. At times Perpetua expresses anxiety about her son (6.7).
After initially giving her child into the care of her family (3.8), she asks for her child to stay with her in prison. Once he has arrived her anxiety is eased and her prison becomes a “palace, so that I wanted to be there rather than anywhere else” (3.9). At the same time, however, Perpetua is not persuaded by her father’s appeals to her maternal impulses (5.2) or the presence of the child at her trial. By the end of the diary God weans the child from Perpetua’s breast, an action that symbolically distances the child from the martyr and the martyr from the world. In the words of Elizabeth Castelli, “The physical and psychological bonds between mother and infant are divinely severed, and Perpetua’s renunciation of the world is complete.”[568]The ambiguous presentation of Perpetua as mother demands interpretation: what is its purpose? One possible solution is that it serves to connect Perpetua to biblical models of motherhood. At the opening of the account, the author of Perpetua explicitly links the deaths of its protagonists to the heroes of the past whose deeds were recounted “through the written word” (1.1). The reference to written authoritative traditions suggests that the author of Perpetua intends to link Perpetua’s martyrs to biblical heroes, endowing these later own martyrs with authority and drawing the Carthaginian church into the scriptural world.[569] Indeed, within scriptural tradition, Perpetua’s actions have some antecedents. As in Perpetua, the story of the deaths of the seven Maccabean brothers, relayed in 2 and 4 Maccabees and considered by many scholars to be the earliest example of martyrdom within the Judeo-Christian tradition, also revolves around a martyred mother.[570] According to 4 Maccabees (first century C.E.), the mother dies following the deaths of her seven sons. Rather than attempting to persuade her sons to eat forbidden food, the mother is instrumental in facilitating their martyrdom.
She “urged them on, each child singly and all together, to death for the sake of religion” (4 Macc 15:12). While we cannot say with any certainty that the author of Perpetua was familiar with the stories about the Maccabees, there is some evidence to suggest that this was the case.[571] The Martyrdom of Montanus and Lucius and the Martyrdom of Marian and James, two North African martyrdom accounts composed in the aftermath of the Decian persecution (c. 250 C.E.) and literarily dependent upon Per- petua, both refer to the mother of the Maccabees as a positive model of motherhood.[572] Both accounts compare Christian mothers who encourage their sons to be martyred to the mother of the Maccabees and to Mary the mother of Jesus. The clear implication of these references is that the mother of the Maccabees was highly regarded as an example of motherhood. If the community that produced Perpetua was, like the authors of Montanus and Lucius and Marian and James, familiar with the Maccabean traditions it seems likely that Perpetua’s portrayal places her in line with a scriptural model of motherhood. The allusion would serve to further ground the death of Perpetua and the life of the Carthaginian church in the biblical world. It draws together scripture and society in such a way that the scriptural narrative flowed continuously into the life of the church.At the same time, however, the allusion to the Maccabees and Perpetua’s preference for martyrdom over motherhood serves an exhortatory function. As many have discussed, the presentation of the female martyr serves to create for the audience an image of the ideal Christian woman. Recent studies focusing on gender in the ancient world have demonstrated the extent to which Perpetua’s abandonment of her family was typical of female martyrs and ascetics. Mary Lefkowitz notes that there are a number of women in these sources who stand “in noticeable isolation from their families, in defiance of, rather than loyalty to, their husbands and fa- thers.”[573] Lefkowitz psychologically interprets the female martyr’s rejection of her family as a subversion of the norms of Roman society and a rejection of traditional roles and sexual relations.
Perpetua’s desire to foster asexual “fraternal” relationships in the apparent absence of her husband is, for Lefkowitz, a political act against her environment.[574] Lefkowitz’s argument may be criticized for its somewhat naive approach to the historical character and representation of Perpetua herself. Her psycho-historical reading of Perpetua’s motivations seems grounded in the assumption that a historical Perpetua can be retrieved from this account and invited to the psychoanalyst’s couch. Despite the shortcomings in her argument, however, Lefkowitz can be credited with drawing scholarly attention to a literary topos in early Christian literature - the female Christian’s abandonment of her family as rejection of societal values.Perpetua’s perceived lack of interest in her family is amplified or - for some - explained by her masculine presentation. On the day that Perpetua is scheduled to be “thrown to the lions,” she has a final dream-vision of fighting an Egyptian in the arena.[575] She describes the removal of her clothes and her transformation into a man (et expoliata sum et facta sum masculus 10.7). It is in this guise that she defeats the Egyptian, a thinly disguised body double for the Devil. Even as she is masculinized, however, Perpetua is also ambiguously feminized. She is careful to retie her hair when it comes down, covering her nakedness (20.4), and she is addressed as a woman of power - domina (4.1; 5.5) - by her father and brother. The elevated position that domina would seem to indicate should not be read as a permanent status marker. As the narrative progresses, Perpetua and Felicitas are demoted to puellae (20.1), stripped of their clothing and exposed as delicate young girls, and spend their time in the arena focused on their modesty. Before her death, with her scream, Perpetua is refeminized, and the narrative remains, in the words of Maureen A. Tilley, “a story about women and their bodies.”[576]
Perpetua exhibits both elements of “motherly” or “daughterly” concern and elements of rejection and indifference.
The former is seen by many as embodying the appropriate womanly response and the latter as part of a trope in which female martyrs reject their families.[577] Stephanie Cobb locates these two seemingly contradictory elements within separate authorial traditions. Perpetua’s rejection of family is connected to the masculinization of the female martyr, a literary and ideological topos clearly anticipated in the Maccabean mother. Perpetua’s concern for her family is connected to the editor’s attempt to “feminize” the masculine Perpetua and present her as a model of female chastity. This attempt is clearly seen elsewhere in the account, when Perpetua ties up her loosened hair and attempts to cover her naked body - an appropriate womanly concern with modesty. In these instances Perpetua exemplifies the good quiet womanly virtue of modesty. The feminization of Perpetua and Felicity is, in Cobb’s deftly handled argument, an attempt to domesticate and regulate the otherwise threatening images of these powerful, masculine women.[578]The socially transgressive act of abandoning one’s family - usually a fiance or husband - is also explored in articles by Gail Corrington Streete and Gillian Cloke. Streete examines the parallel example of Thecla, the disciple of Paul who abandoned her fiance and family to follow the Apostle.[579] Cloke’s argument focuses on Pre-Constantinian examples of willful women. She discusses the female martyrs of the Martyrdom of Agape, Irene, and Chione and the Spanish martyr Eulalia who rejects the governor’s appeals to “think of her family,” spitting in his eyes and overturning the sacrificial altar.[580] For both these authors the rejection of family and the futile efforts of a Roman governor to appeal to the martyr’s duty to her family is linked to the masculinization of the female martyr.
An extraordinary aspect of scholarly debate surrounding Perpetua is the tendency to psychoanalyze Perpetua and to discuss - with no sense of irony - the extent to which she loves or is emotionally detached from her relations.[581] The mere act of summarizing the events in her “diary” that pertain to her father and son has proven difficult.
She is variously portrayed as “clinical [and] almost cold blooded,”[582] heroic, pained to leave her father and child, and as an adolescent striving to carve out an individual identity for herself.[583] Even in the case of those scholars who have a sense of their own historical distance from the world of ancient female martyrs, there is still a difficulty in suspending judgment of Perpetua. Lefkowitz writes, “To celibate male scholars this behavior [abandoning one’s child] may appear less remarkable (or perhaps more commendable) than it does to us.” While it’s not especially clear who the “us” is in Lefkowitz’s statement, we may reasonably infer she means mothers.[584] Her statement discloses the widespread discomfort that Perpetua’s behavior elicits in modern readers.[585]The scandal of Perpetua’s rejection of her child, like the perceived callousness of the mother of Maccabees, is a particularly gendered affair. Conversations about whether or not Socrates loves his children do not take place in scholarly analyses of his trial and death. His philosophical, not his parenting, skills are the issue. His abandonment of his biological and pedagogical children is hardly important. The mother of Maccabees and the figure of Mary offer strong literary precedents for a mother preferring death (albeit that of her children) to a sustained earthly relationship with her child. Given the impact and status of these exempla in the early church, it is interesting that Perpetua’s behavior is viewed as extraordinary. Per- petua’s own salvation is at stake, yet her treatment of her child continues to be dissected and measured against modern standards of motherhood.[586]
This scandal highlights the importance of gender in scholarly readings of Perpetua. Gender, rather than class, ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, or ecclesiastical rank, is perceived to be the defining aspect of Perpetua’s identity. With respect to family, Stephanie Cobb summarizes the difference in the following way:
We saw in the Martyrdom of Polycarp, as well as in some of the other martyrologies, that men are usually asked to have pity on themselves and to save their lives. Christians must not be persuaded by the offers of life given by their persecutors.... In the stories of female martyrs, it is not persuasion by Jews or pagans that is central, rather, persuasion by and in reference to family poses the most significant risk for Christian women.[587]
The contrast drawn by Cobb is highly nuanced. Her conclusion, however, should be tested against more than just the Martyrdom of Polycarp. The presentation of female martyrs is correctly assumed to be fundamentally different from these writings’ presentation of men. This does not mean, however, that there are not elements shared by the presentations of both male and female martyrs. Perhaps, in addition to evaluating Perpetua’s presentation against the standards of mother and woman, we should consider the manner in which her behavior is part of a larger trope.
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