"Even if one takes into account the combination of the evidence listed above and the inexplicable ways of popular religion, Dympna’s association with mental illness still appears perplexing at irst, since nothing in her original legend seemingly points in that direction. Yet, a more careful consideration reveals that the three traits uniquely interwoven in her legend – the virgin martyr outcast child, and holy fool – are all connected with insanity or foolery. In discussing the often unaccountable for hatred of fathers for their virgin martyr daughters, several scholars have noted the men’s underlying incestuous desire for their own daughters. Unspeakable in a piece of conventional hagiography, it appears openly in fairy tales of the Cinderella-cycle, and the ‘outcast child’ and ‘light from incestuous father’ groups and their derivatives, when the ‘unnatural father’ (in folklorists’ terms) wants to marry his own daughter – often on account of her striking similarity to his late wife – and, having been rejected, he makes her lee and/or attempts to persecute her. The light or persecution often takes the form of setting the female protagonist adrift in a boat, which is echoed in Dympna’s sea voyage to the Continent. The heroine often requests or is given rich garments before escaping (which may subsequently attract welcomed or unwanted attention) and uses cross-dressing to disappear unnoticed. Both of these motifs are featured in our saint’s story.
In the classic virgin-martyr legends the roles of the pursuer and of the persecutor are almost always divided between the saint’s father and her suitor. The legend of St Dympna, however, written down much later and almost on the periphery of the oficial church, daringly brings incest forward in this striking conjunction of a virgin-martyr legend and a Cinderella-type fairy tale by combining the two roles.
The best-known ‘secular’ story about an ‘unnatural father’ is the late classical tale of Apollonius of Tyre, widely read in the Middle Ages, in which the king of Antioch secretly cohabited with his daughter. Already in the prototype narrative his lust is referred to as madness (furor), and the scene of rape is described in strikingly similar terms to his daughter’s martyrdom. Chaucer alludes to the story in the Man of Law’s prologue, and it is retold in Book VIII of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, which includes stories about Antiochius’ fallen daughter and Apollonius’ pious one, the subject later employed by Shakespeare in his Pericles.
Another development of the motif is visible in what eventually became Shakespeare’s King Lear, through a medieval collection of popular stories, the Gesta Romanorum, which contained a story from the Cinderella-cycle of an outcast daughter and her tyrannical father, whose name is recorded in different versions as either Theodosius or Leyre. Within the ‘unnatural father’ group, a frequent theme is the heroine’s self-mutilation in order to avoid the incestuous marriage. The thirteenth-century French romance La Manikene provides the earliest variation on this subject.
Another variation of the ‘hand-less maiden’ theme is found in the unabridged versions of the Donkey Skin sub-cycle, where the heroine chops her hand off. In the earliest version of this story, the heroine’s refusal to marry her father results in his later instigation of her mutilating torture: in a forged letter he commands that her hands and feet should be cut off; however, this does not happen to her (although her children do get mutilated only to be miraculously restored to health). In all later variations, the loss of a limb always results from the female protagonist’s own initiative.
Christian literature, however, tends to replace the ungodly practices of self-mutilation with injuries and death inlicted upon the saintly girls from the outside, although St Lucy, who gouged out her eyes, is an acceptable example of such self-mutilation. As noted above, in hagiography the unnatural desire for the virgin saint is transferred from her father onto her suitor; however, tellingly, her parent is often much more eager to punish her for her refusal. For instance, the father of another legendary virgin martyr, St Christine, encloses his daughter in a tower and would let no man approach her, very much like the king of Antioch who is all too eager to execute any failed suitor to his daughter and secret lover. When he discovers that Christine became Christian in her solitude through the prompting of the Holy Spirit and committed herself entirely to Christ, which he perceives as a betrayal, her father subjects her to numerous tortures of incredible cruelty. Yet, Christine then took part of her lesh and threw it in the visage of her father saying: O tyrant, take the lesh, which thou hast gotten, and eat it . . . Then he commanded that she should be put in prison, and on the morn to be beheaded. And that same night Urban her father was found dead. It is not clear whether he was killed by God for his impiety, or if he died of a broken heart.
Of all ‘pre-historic’ virgin martyrs, St Margaret of Antioch is the most relevant to St Dympna; indeed, it appears that in the early modern period the cult of the Flemish saint was inluenced by, if not modelled on, St Margaret’s, and this explains much of its peculiarity. First of all, there is a strong connection between the saint’s legend and the motif of the outcast child: Margaret is rejected by her urban parents and raised by her Christian nurse in the countryside. In addition, Margaret’s life story unwraps in Antioch, the same location as that of the original incestuous couple, the king of Antioch and his daughter. Similarly, Margaret’s father is called Theodosius, which, as mentioned above, was also the name of the tyrannical father of the Gesta Romanorum.
In the legend, Margaret’s aggressively confessional behaviour solicits mutilating tortures so that the saint could avoid the sexual advances of Olibrius, the ruler of Antioch, who appears on her father’s throne without any explanation of what happened to Theodosius. Thus, he either stands for or replaces her father in his pagan, unnatural desire for her, his incestuous love-hatred of his own child."
-- Juliana Dresvina, "An Uncanny Saint: St. Dymphna of Geel"
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