“Charlotte, we’re Jewish” says Cher in the opening scene of Mermaids, as she
passes her adolescent daughter, Wynona Ryder genuflecting ecstatically at her
private shrine to St. Perpetua.
Charlotte abandons her worship of the martyr with a rather dramatic effect on
her nascent sex life. What might it be about a young Christian woman tortured to
death in the arena in third century North Africa that would so attract an American
Jewish teenager as a model and ego ideal? In this lecture, I will investigate the figure
of the virgin girl in both traditions, first as an ego-ideal for men and then as one for
women, with startlingly different conclusions to the two analyses
