Female Martyrdom or Female vs. Martyrdom?

I have come to the realization that I have yet to post my favorite piece of art on this blog! It's an oil painting titled The Young Martyr by Paul Delaroche, depicting a a martyr who was tragically killed for keeping her faith. 

Martyrdom, in its rawest form, is a conscious surrender, or even a transaction, for a higher cause and is a final act of defiance that affirms one's beliefs beyond the body's limits. Yet when martyrdom is applied to the feminine, it is often stripped of the notion of choice and defiance. Female martyrdom isn't merely a matter of personal sacrifice, but I think it's an inherited burden passed from one generation to the next. Women give to serve — for religion, for family, for love, or for the abstract ideal of virtue, but their suffering is rarely recognized as an assertion of will, rather it's folded into expectation.

The female martyr is rarely ever depicted in active resistance in art, literature, poetry, etc. but instead she's often rendered as an object and subject of beauty and passivity. Her suffering is romanticized and her pain is always softened into something aesthetic rather than radical. The Young Martyr is not just a woman who has died for a cause—she is a figure sculpted for contemplation, her final moments framed as serene and untroubled, and that's what she's known for with this piece. 

To be female VS. martyr is to recognize the ways in which suffering has been coded into womanhood. Women are often expected to endure, to be patient, and to sacrifice — not in the singular, defiant act of martyrdom, but in the daily, grinding expectations of submission itself. The female martyr, as she is often portrayed, does not rage or resist. I never liked how she's remembered for her passivity, her suffering becoming a symbol rather than an assertion of agency. Male martyrdom is heralded as an act of conviction, dying for a cause, standing for something greater than oneself whereas I think female martyrdom is too often a cause in and of itself. A man dies for what he believes; a woman (it seems) is expected to believe in the necessity of her own suffering. 

To separate the female from the martyr is to begin with that acknowledgement and challenge the notion that suffering is inherent to womanhood. It is to reject the thought that endurance is a virtue when it is only expected of some. It is to ask: what remains of womanhood when it is no longer defined by sacrifice?

I recently picked up Deborah Levy's "The Cost of Living" and remembered in it a quote: 

"The phantom of femininity is an illusion, a delusion, a societal hallucination. She is a very tricky character to play and it is a role that has made some women go mad" 

If femininity itself is an illusion, the so too is the female martyr — an archetype shaped not by the will of the woman herself, but by the expectations imposed on her. The suffering woman, exalted yet silenced, is a figure of contradiction who is admired for her endurance, yet her endurance is the very thing that keeps her powerless. 

And still the conflict remains. The problem with the separation of female martyrdom as it's often framed is that it doesn't empower, but rather it erases. It renders sacrifice not as a choice, but as an inevitability, as if to be a woman is to be destined for suffering. So does rejecting martyrdom mean rejecting an aspect of femininity? Or does it reclaim it? If history has tied womanhood to suffering, then to separate the two feels like an act of resistance in of itself... 

Perhaps the challenge isn't to reject martyrdom entirely. 

I won't even get into the visual analysis of this piece, I think I should save that for another blog post or it'll be too long — this was kind of written as a stream-of-consciousness. So sorry for the incoherency lol :D