Virginity and Violence Theme Analysis

“I have heard it compared to a virginity cult, our mothers’ obsession with keeping us pure and chaste.” So says Sophie Caco at a crucial point in the novel as she reckons with the legacy of violence that defines the lives of Haitian women. Throughout Breath, Eyes, Memory, the loss of virginity is seen not as a rite of passage or an entry into womanhood, but as an act of theft, violence, and disgrace. As Edwidge Danticat explores the link between virginity and violence, she argues that in an effort to save their daughters from the violence of men—and the world more largely—mothers who “test” their daughters’ virginities actually end up inflicting a larger, more insidious type of physical, emotional, and sexual violence upon their daughters.

In a society where purity is seen as a mandate, where sex is hardly ever spoken of, and where religion, tradition, and a history marked by colonial violence permeate all facets of life, an “obsession” with virginity emerges. Sophie’s estimation of her family’s culture as a “virginity cult” is extreme, but not inaccurate: there is a singular, obsessive focus on a girl’s virginity or lack thereof; there is a code of silence and shame which makes speaking out against testing impossible; and there is the fact that the very perpetrators of testing’s violence—mothers—are themselves victims of the same trauma. Throughout the novel, Danticat unleashes both deep empathy and wild rage against the cycle of abuse that maintains the violent practice of testing, ultimately showing how the physical and emotional scars of testing are equal to those of rape—and the trauma that follows victims of testing throughout their lives is destructive and inescapable.

Shortly after her mother begins testing her, Sophie, unable to take the humiliation and pain, decides to put an end to things by mutilating herself with a pestle from the kitchen, breaking her hymen and severing her relationship with her mother Martine, who believes Sophie has lost her virginity. Sophie’s reclamation of her own freedom is much more violent than the act of losing one’s virginity through intercourse, but Sophie feels that in order to truly get free of the violence of testing, she has to commit an even greater act of violence against herself—one that leaves no doubt that Sophie has been forever changed, whether or not it happened at the hands of a man. The climactic act of violence Sophie inflicts upon herself forever alters her body, leaving her with chronic pain that makes actual intercourse with her husband, Joseph, physically difficult—multiplying and compounding the emotional difficulty that sex carries after so many months of her mother’s tests. Later on in the novel, when Martine becomes pregnant with another baby, she feels so betrayed by her own body—and so unable to accept the willing conception of a child through loving sex, given the violent conception of her first child—that she commits suicide by stabbing herself in the stomach 17 times. Martine’s violent act against herself parallels, albeit more intensely, Sophie’s own mutilation of herself earlier in the novel. Both women’s acts center around a sense of self-hatred—and a fear of sex and all things associated with it—which mirrors the violence and violation of the testing they were submitted to as girls.

Danticat shows how Sophie, a victim of testing, and Martine, a victim of both testing and rape, each struggle with trauma, shame, and self-hatred. After meeting in Haiti for the first time in several years, Sophie and Martine decide to give their relationship a new start. As the two talk more than they ever have, they find a set of startling similarities in their own experiences of pain, trauma, and self-inflicted violence—all stemming back, Danticat suggests, to the rhetoric around virginity and violence with which they were both raised. Both Sophie and Martine suffer disordered eating—both women are described as bony and rail-thin, and Sophie confesses to her mother that she is bulimic. Both women find that they must “double,” or dissociate, during sex with their respective partners—they feel a duty to submit to the act, but they are totally disconnected from sexual pleasure due to the violence of their pasts and the “virginity cult” that defined their childhoods.

Though the book never explicitly touches upon it, it is also worth examining the unspoken connection between the compulsive ritual of testing among the Haitian women in the novel and the lingering violence of colonialism. Colonizers throughout history have used the rape of a colonized society’s female members as a method of controlling both men and women within that society. It is possible, then, that the compulsive need to “test” girls was born of the oppressed society’s desire for some semblance of control in the face of colonialist violence. “If a child dies, you do not die. But if your child is disgraced, you are disgraced.” Granmè Ifé uses this as her explanation when Sophie asks her why generations of mothers test their daughters, creating an endless cycle of pain. The “disgrace” and injustice of colonialism is pain enough—in testing their children, perhaps Haitian mothers, throughout the generations, have been attempting to exert some control over the disgraces inflicted upon their families.

“You must know that everything a mother does,” Granmè Ifé tells Sophie, “she does for her child’s own good.” Though testing is intended as an act of care and protection, Danticat shows how placing such an intense, unyielding focus on virginity—along with the physical violation of the tests themselves—actually leaves the same violent imprint on the lives of girls who are tested as those who are raped. In making parallel the self-harm, anxiety, and depression that Martine and Sophie experience, Danticat suggests that testing is equivalent to rape—and that a mother’s compulsive monitoring of a girl’s virginity is an act just as violent as having one’s virginity stolen by someone else.