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The passion of Perpetua - Christian woman martyred in Carthage in A.D. 203
Past & Present, May, 1993 by Brent D. Shaw
The proconsul said: |What's his rank?' Felicitas replied, |Plebeian'.
The proconsul said: |Do you have any parents?' Felicitas replied: |I don't.
Revocatus is my cousin. The truth is that I am not able to have more
important relatives than these persons with me here'.
The proconsul said: |Girl, have pity on your own and make the sacrifice
so that you can continue to live. Especially since I see that you have
an unborn child in your womb'.
The proconsul then turned to Perpetua and said: Do you have any
parents?' Perpetua replied: |I do'.
[Indeed her parents, her mother and father, as well as her brothers and
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husband, were listening and present, along with her new-born child, who
was still being breast-fed.]
The proconsul said to her: The tears of your parents should move you
and rouse your sense of pity, and especially the cries of your little one'.
[Her father makes a final protest, and asks her to pity them.]
Shoving away her infant and pushing her parents away, she said: |Get
away from me you workers of evil, since I no longer know you'.(75) The writer of the Acts then quickly ends the court proceeding with the final sentencing and deaths of Perpetua and Felicitas. The question must be, why had the author fashioned his account in the way he did by adding the new creative material he has? Clearly it is a matter of gender that troubles him. He imposes a clear separation of males and females in the trial scene in order that the issue can be made distinct and clear in the minds of those who read or heard his version. The proconsul faces the women alone (though second in order) and the questions he puts to them are obviously ones of the type that the redactor thinks must most concern his potential audience. The first matter that arises, oddly enough with respect to Felicitas (has the author made another one of his characteristic confusions?) and which we must also understand to apply to Perpetua, is "Where are the husbands in all of this?" To this question Felicitas is able to offer no satisfactory answer. The author does not put this obvious question in the case of Perpetua. He merely asserts, rather lamely, that her husband was amongst the relatives who came to the court to hear the proceedings (for which there is no supporting evidence from any other account). The proconsul's words reflect a great concern not only with "Where are the husbands?", but also on the proper relationship of these women to their other relatives, above all their parents. The troubling matter is the way in which these particular women feel free to move away from the normal constraints imposed by husbands, fathers and others.
In his rewriting of Perpetua's experiences, the redactor of the Acta seems to be pushed mentally first this way and that. He is constrained to end contradictorily, in a rather schizoid manner: the women are to be praised -- after all they were martyrs to the Christian faith. On the other hand, their actions are so unnatural, from the standpoint of male cultural expectations, that they are portrayed in an extreme and rather unlikeable manner. Perpetua is shown to reject her own baby, and harshly to dismiss her own parents in a way that would be bound to elicit a negative reaction from (at least) the male listeners to the Acta. Perpetua's experience is totally "reread" in a manner that simultaneously concedes the technical value of her martyrdom, but removes any sense that these actions were innately good or could be made to coincide with "natural" passions (as, for example, a mother's concern for her new-born infant). Of course, it hardly needs pointing out that all of this wholly contradicts Perpetua's own view of her relationship to her baby (as expressed in her own words) and to her father (the fine nuances of her own contradictory emotions are wholly absent from the Acta) or her own views of her relations with her mother or brothers. The purpose of producing the Acta version must have been twofold: to provide a shorter abbreviated "passion" account that would be more readily usable for liturgical purposes, but in the very process of abbreviation to excise its dangerous content -- Perpetua's own words -- which, as we shall see, bishops were coming to fear greatly since such narratives were coming to be regarded by ordinary parishioners as "canonical scripture".
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