The prevailing masculine psychosadistic insistence that women prove their virtue through extreme feats of saintly self-negation created a multiplicity of responses, but all were related to women’s attempts to make the best out of an intolerable situation, to construct alternatives, to gain a sense of control over the psychological obliteration they were being asked to undergo […] However, as women everywhere tried hard to become the household nuns they were supposed to be, the act of suffering as a defiant, if passive, form of self-identification lost the rebellious element which had been its main attraction for Emily Bronte and became instead a sign of passive compliance with the cultural image of extreme virtue. What better guarantee of purity, after all, than a woman’s pale, consumptive face, fading, in a paroxysm of self-negation, into nothingness?
Excerpt from “Raptures of Submission: The Shopkeeper’s Soul Keeper and The Cult of the Household Nun” from Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture by Bram Dijkstra
