Virago

The semantic deterioration of this extraordinary term encapsulates the influence of negative stereotypical notions of woman deriving from chauvinist prejudices. Having originally been a personal name of status, virago has steadily lost neutrality, becoming first a term for a heroic female warrior or amazon, before acquiring the dominant modern sense of “a bold impudent termagant or scold.” Virago was in biblical tradition the original name given by Adam to Eve: in the Latin Vulgate version of Genesis 2:23, Adam coins the name from the Latin root vir meaning “man,” indicating that Eve was “manlike” in the sense of “taken from man,” intending no doubt a chauvinist compliment. In the Vulgate the Latin root is obvious: " Haec vocabitur virago, quoniam de viro sumpta est ," but this semantic link is lost in the English translation: “She shall be called Virago since she is taken from man.” The glossings by Ælfric in Anglo-Saxon about 1000, through John Wycliffe (1388) and William Caxton (1483) up to the Renaissance, show the same problem, so that later translations replaced virago with woman . However the comment by George Gascoigne in 1576 is significant: “Before she sinned Eva was called Virago, and after she sinned she deserved to be called Eva” ( Droome Doomes Day , I para. 6).

The positive sense of a female warrior is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, including this quotation from 1641: “She so ruled as Queen eight years and better; a manlike virago of a stout and noble spirit” (Bishop R. Montagu, Acts & Monuments , 361). The negative modern sense has as long a history, being first recorded in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale when the teller launches into a xenophobic and misogynist denunciation:

O Sowdanesse [sultaness], roote of iniquitee!
Virago, thou Semyrame the secounde!
O serpent under femynynytee,
Lik to the serpent depe in helle ybound!
(ll. 358-61)

Semiramis was a quasi-legendary Assyrian queen epitomizing ambition, treachery, and sexual rapacity. The symbolism of the serpent is also significant, drawing on the ancient prejudicial stereotype of Eve and the Devil as co-deceivers of Adam in the Garden of Eden. In some depictions of the Fall, notably that by the Limbourg brothers in the Tres Riche Heures of the Duc du Berry (ca. 1350), Eve is painted as a serpent with a woman’s face.

All the quotations in the OED come from male authors, and most show clear hostility to the notion of a powerful, manlike woman. They include William Cowper’s comment in a letter of 1781: “I really think the Russian virago [Catherine the Great] an impertinent puss for meddling with us” (March 5) and Edmund Burke’s ironic observation that “No heroine from Billingsgate can go beyond the patriotic scolding of our republican virago” (1770, Correspondence I, 230). The most extreme instance is from Jeremy Taylor’s comment from 1621: “Like shameless double-sexed Hermaphrodites , Virago Roaring Girls” ( Superb Flagellum C vi). ( Roaring previously had a special sense.) Virago could, rarely, be used of a man, though the instance in Twelfth Night is probably a theatrical in-joke: Sir Toby Belch mischievously describes Viola, actually the unwilling participant in a duel, as “a very devil,… a firago” (III iv 300). The dramatic irony is that Viola is a male actor in disguise. Virago , like shrew , now encapsulates all the negative and threatening stereotypes of an aggressive, turbulent woman.