Chastity

Chastity, or maidenhood, is not treated merely as sexual inexperience but as a chosen condition that organizes identity, devotion, and moral action. In the prayer of a young maiden to Diana, it is a life she actively desires; in Dorigen’s later reflection, it is a standard of bodily integrity and marital faithfulness so absolute that she places suicide above submission to rape. The state therefore carries both religious and ethical force, though the two scenes also reveal how women’s autonomy is expressed within a world that measures honor through sexual purity.

Chastity as a Chosen Identity

A maiden addressing Diana declares that she wishes to remain a maiden all her life, never becoming either a lover or a wife. The wording makes chastity an intention rather than a condition passively imposed upon her. She does not simply lack a husband; she defines her future by refusing the conventional sequence that would lead from maidenhood to erotic attachment and marriage.

Her desire is connected to Diana’s company and to a life spent in the wild woods. She identifies herself as a maiden who loves venery, a term that joins the pleasures of the hunt with the goddess’s woodland sphere. Chastity thus accompanies an alternative mode of life: movement through nature, fellowship with a chaste goddess, and freedom from the domestic and sexual roles represented by being a lover or wife. The maiden’s request is consequently a request for the preservation of an entire identity, not only for protection from a single danger.

Sacred Protection and Service

The maiden places her virginity under Diana’s guardianship. She calls Diana a maiden and the keeper of all maidens, then asks the goddess to preserve and conserve her maidenhood. The repeated appeal to keeping suggests that chastity is vulnerable to forces outside the speaker’s control, while the act of prayer gives that vulnerability a formal language of petition and trust.

The relationship is reciprocal as well as devotional. The maiden promises that, while she remains a maiden, she will serve Diana. Chastity therefore becomes a covenant: divine protection is sought, and service is offered in return. The fires burning clearly upon the altar immediately after the prayer reinforce the ritual setting, presenting the maiden’s wish within an act of worship rather than as a private preference detached from religious authority.

Chastity Under Coercion

The later discussion turns chastity from a desired vocation into a principle tested by violence. The speaker recalls maidens who felt such intense hatred for men who would defile them for pleasure that they chose death in the temple rather than endure violation. Their example is presented as an argument about what a wife ought to do when faced with sexual assault: suicide is described as preferable to being defiled.

This reasoning reaches its starkest formulation when the speaker states that suicide would be the better course before being ravished. The value at stake shifts from the preservation of a voluntarily chosen maidenhood to the defense of bodily dignity under coercion. Chastity here is no longer simply the condition of an unmarried woman; it is the imagined boundary that violence must not be allowed to cross. The extremity of the proposed response also exposes the brutal social logic surrounding female honor, in which a woman’s violated body is treated as a profound moral catastrophe.

Chastity and Marital Fidelity

Dorigen’s conclusion joins chastity to marriage rather than opposing the two states entirely. After declaring that she would rather kill herself than be raped, she adds that she will remain true to Arveragus. Her fidelity is therefore not presented as a generalized fear of sexuality but as a commitment to the marital bond and to the personal promise embodied by her husband.

The contrast with the maiden’s prayer is significant. The maiden wants never to become a lover or wife, whereas Dorigen speaks as a wife whose ethical identity includes loyalty to Arveragus. Chastity can therefore signify different forms of sexual integrity: permanent maidenhood for the devotee of Diana, and constancy within marriage for Dorigen. In both cases, however, the woman claims a will of her own and treats sexual status as something bound to an obligation she has consciously recognized.

Moral and Narrative Significance

These episodes make chastity a form of resistance to the assumption that women’s bodies are available for male desire. The maiden’s prayer gives her a direct voice before Diana: she names the life she wants, asks for its protection, and promises service on her own terms. Dorigen’s speech likewise frames fidelity as her decision, even though the threat confronting her is coercive and the available choices are terrifyingly narrow.

At the same time, the ideal is shaped by religious and patriarchal language. The maiden’s independence is secured through service to a goddess, while Dorigen’s resistance is articulated through loyalty to Arveragus and through the preservation of honor. Chastity thus functions both as protection and as constraint. It offers a vocabulary in which female desire, refusal, and fidelity can be asserted, yet it also shows how strongly that assertion is tied to the preservation of sexual purity. The recurring image of maidenhood being kept and conserved finally gives the concept its central force: chastity is an identity maintained against change, intrusion, and the violence of possession.