Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature

by William Burgwinkle

  The problem that unmarried men present to their societies is at the center of several other Celtic lais as well, but nowhere figures more prominently than in the Tristan legends.59 When King Marc, under pressure from his barons, sends out word that he will marry only the woman to whom a mysterious golden hair belongs, he does so expecting that the quest will lead nowhere.60 His plan is a subterfuge, designed to allow him to remain single, in the exclusive company of his beloved nephew, Tristan. Marc says so explicitly in Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan: “While Tristan lives, know it once and for all: there will never be a Queen and lady here at court” (151). In like fashion, Guigemar probably does not expect much when he sets down his conditions about untying the magic knot. His “refusal to love” statement could be seen as part of a topos which always points toward queer readings. Back from his fantasy, Guigemar may believe that this ruse will grant him peace. But we know that it is already too late. His resolve to defy his culture’s norms is now part of the larger frame of initiation. Already interpellated, only he can still think that his will is free.61

  Troubled Desires

  Marriage and sexuality dominate many of the other lais as well:

  In Frˆene, we meet another young lord forced to marry against his will. This time the issue is less about normative sexual orientation than class. All is resolved when the young woman his advisors force him tomarry turns out to be the sister of his beautiful and supposedly orphaned concubine. Once the ancestry of his true love is revealed, they are free to marry.

  Yonec is a form-changing bird who consoles a lady held prisoner by her jealous husband. The bird can become a man, as he does when the lady’s fantasy calls for a knight. He can also become a woman, as he does when he takes the form of the lady herself in order to receive Communion and proclaim his Christian credentials. When he fathers her child, the story takes a decidedly queer, if heterosexual, turn.

  Chaitivel tells the story of an impotent and invalid knight who meets his demise through incessant competition with other men and his lady’s indecisive nature. When finally his rivals have been killed off and he could take up the role as exclusive lover of his lady, it turns out that he has been rendered impotent through wounds received in the same battle. This Lai serves as the ultimate critique of chivalry for promoting a gender system within which men reach the status of sanctioned masculinity only through public heterosexual display and competition with other men.

  Chevrefeuille tells of the meeting between the adulterous lovers, Tristan and Yseut, prevented from marrying by the forced marriage of King Marc with the previously unknown and unseen daughter of the Irish king, Yseut herself. Les Deux amants end their quest in death when the young man insists on segregating male and female spheres of knowledge. Instead of drinking a magic herbal potion prepared by women, he perseveres against all odds in carrying his lover, unaided, to the top of a mountain and expires before he gets there. Eliduc involves a love triangle in which an unfaithful husband brings his young lover to Brittany without telling her he is married. When she swoons at the news and fails to regain consciousness, he presumes she is dead and leaves her body in a chapel deep in the forest. His wife follows him there one day, revives the girl using ancient magic, and when the wife asks only that he found for her a new convent, Eliduc and the girl marry while his wife takes the veil. Years later, however, the women are reunited in the convent and Eliduc dedicates his remaining years to God.

  Even this brief survey gives some idea of how integral gender and sexuality conflicts are to Marie’s project, but two of the Lais in partic- ular, both previously referred to as “supernatural,” deserve a bit more attention.In Lanval, the eponymous hero is a less than well-to-do foreigner who is made to feel his difference. As the tale opens, King Arthur is distributing gifts to his assembled court. Only one knight is left out, Lanval. The narrator explains that this is because Arthur simply for- got him (“ne l’en sovint” [134, 19]) but the text contradicts itself in the very next line. Apparently no one has bothered to call attention to the slight or to defend Lanval because they are all so jealous of his looks and prowess. It is clear that Lanval has been excluded not as an oversight but because he is not one of them. Though the son of a king, he is far from the source of his wealth (“luin ert de son heritage” [134, 28]). Isolated from the others, Lanval wanders off alone one day into the forest. There he is invited to the bed of a lovely fairy who offers him, in return for secrecy, her body whenever he desires it and unlimited riches. Though he now has more success at court, distributing his new- found wealth amongst his peers, he meets his doom in the person of Guinevere, who, ever observant, chooses him as a perfect candidate for adultery and sacrifice. Disposable, without family or allies, unlikely to make too many demands or be believed by the King and court, Lanval is her man. One day, when, as is his wont, he wanders off from a group of knights enjoying themselves beneath the castle windows, Guinevere descends to make her offer.62 When Lanval refuses her advances, plead- ing loyalty to the King, she accuses him of being a lover of boys.63 In his defense, Lanval tells her, in anger and indignation, of his trysts with the fairy. For this, he finds himself accused not only of dishonoring the Queen with unwanted advances but also of having insulted her by finding someone else more attractive.64 For having defied her order of silence and secrecy, the fairy cuts him off from her favors. Only after a trial at which the fairy appears as his last-minute savior, is he exoner- ated; but his penance is that he must leave with her, never to be seen again.

  Clearly Narcisus, Guigemar, and Lanval have a lot in common. Let us try to imagine them as a viewer might who does not benefit from the omniscient point of view of the narrator. All three prefer to be alone; they all declare their indifference to love; and they develop fantasy relationships in response to the strong pressure exerted upon them to make love to women and, presumably, procreate. Guinevere’s charges against Lanval could apply to all of them:

  “Lanval,” fet ele, “bien le quit, / vus n’amez guaires tel deduit. / Asez le m’a hum dit sovent, / Que de femme n’avez talent. / Vaslez amez bien afaitiez, / Ensemble od els vus deduiez. / Vileins cuarz, malvais failliz, / Mult est mis sire malbailliz, / Ki pres de lui vus a sufert, / Mun escient que Deu en pert!” (148, 279–288)

  [Lanval, she said, I know what it is: you don’t really go for this kind of pleasure. It’s often been said about you that you have no interest in women. What you like is a well-built valet; that’s who you like to make it with. You filthy coward, you weak little scoundrel. What a disgrace you are to my lord who has kept you on (in spite of everything). Because of his association with you I know he has also lost God’s favor.]

  Clearly indebted to the Queen’s tirade in Eneas, Guinevere’s remarks are interesting in their own right. Once again, the charge is spoken by a woman who feels wronged and slighted and, as in most of the homophobic diatribes from the twelfth century, Guinevere thinks only in terms of binaries. If Lanval does not want her, he does not want women; and if he does not want women, then he must want men. From this illogical chain of reasoning she draws the equally illogical conclusion that Lanval is therefore not a man or a knight. Though he is never explicitly feminized, as in the case of Alain de Lille or Orderic Vitalis’ sodomites, he is a substandard male. Never mind that the text has already told us that he is the finest knight and one of the most beautiful, an object of envy for the other men. As far as Guinevere is concerned, his sexual orientation immediately disqualifies him from excellence in masculinity or masculine impersonation. He becomes, in her eyes, a coward; he loses his noble status and resembles that despised category, the weak or ineffectual man.

  One has to wonder at this point if this accusation would ever have been made amongst men, or if it would have occasioned the same outburst from Lanval. Fellow knights might be more tolerant, or even indifferent, perhaps because they do not necessarily see themselves as the objects of his desire. Men seem to like and admire Lanval, especially once he is rich. Guinevere, on the other han
d, feels personally implicated in Lanval’s desire, and she therefore strikes back at him as best she can. Why then does she not use the accusation of boy loving when she denounces him to Arthur? She clearly knows, or thinks she knows, alot about men who prefer boys. Does she think Arthur does not? Is she afraid that this one “flaw” would not be enough to provoke a trial and public disgrace? Had Lanval been less than beautiful, not quite so noble and accomplished, would anyone really have cared about his sex life? Guinevere does care, however, and the accusation, coupled with the charge of cowardice, succeeds in enraging Lanval. His response to Guinevere’s charge is an indication of his outrage and the language used recalls similar formulae in other accusations of sodomy: “‘Dame’, dist il, ‘de ce mestier / ne me sai jeo nient aidier’” (My Lady, he said, I don’t know a thing about that sort of profession or how it works [148,

  293–294]). “Mestier” again implies some sort of exchange of services for goods.65 Even for Lanval, sodomy, or sex with boys, is associated with the purchasing of services. Whatever it is that he feels or does, with partners of either sex, he seems not to recognize himself in the broad strokes of Guinevere’s calumny.

  Like so many other young knight/victims unhappy in love, Lanval is first tempted by suicide (“c’est merveille qu’il ne s’ocit” [150, 348]) but he follows Narcisus’ example instead and consents to wasting away (“Molt fu pensis, taisanz e muz; / de grant dolur mustre semblant” [152,

  362–364]). Again like Narcisus, he is blamed by his fellow knights and the narrator for having given way to a “fole amur” (154, 412) and his status as foreigner continues to weigh against him. Even his judges at the trial refer to him as that “franc hume d’altre pais” (noble man from another country [154, 431]). He is only saved by the last-minute appear- ance of his fairy lady, but even his salvation is set in very ambiguous terms. His only victory is to leave this court that has betrayed him, to disappear from sight in death or into the other world. As he is exon- erated of wrongdoing, his fairy apparition beckons.66 Lanval jumps up behind her on the horse and together they travel to Avalon.67 This flight from his oppressors is both a victory and a defeat.68 He may never see them again, and in this sense, the ending is positive; but as often occurs in Marie de France, there is a hint of trouble. The nar- rator describes him in flight as “raviz” (kidnapped, raped), the same word used to describe Guigemar’s voyage to the other world. The con- nection between death, disappearance, and heterosexuality is ominous and alerts us once again to the signs of a persecutory mentality at work.69Bisclavret, the last Lai I will discuss, stands apart from the others, though male sexuality continues to play a central role in the narrative. For one thing, it does not really concern the supernatural in the same sense as Guigemar, Lanval, and Yonec. There are certainly queer goings- on but they do not involve the intrusion of death into life or the passage between this life and the other that figures in many Celtic tales.70 Instead, the queer nature of Bisclavret is ascribed to a natural phenomenon. In the past, the prologue tells us, men often turned into werewolves, and all feared the forest because these hybrids were known to devour men (“humes devure” [116, 11]). Bisclavret, the subject of this Lai, is a nobleman, an upstanding baron who loves his wife and is the favorite of his lord as well (“de sun seignur esteit privez” [116, 19]). His problems only begin when his wife demands information on where he goes and what he does during his weekly three-day disappearances. At first he declines to answer, as he fears the loss of her love and, more significantly, the loss of his own self: “Mals m’en vendra, se jol vus di;/ Kar de m’amur vus partirai/e mei meismes en perdrai” (Harm will come to me if I tell you; for I will leave behind you and my love [or: I will send you away from my love] and [I] will lose my very self [118, 54–56]).71

  The baron clearly foresees the consequences of revealing what is best left an open secret. The issue of his disappearance is also explicitly eroti- cized from the beginning. The interrogation scene begins as a kind of seduction and is inter-cut continually with illustrations of how both wife and husband use affection to tease out information and calm one other (“acola e baisa” [hug and kiss] [118, 37–38]). The wife’s first reac- tions upon learning that her husband is a werewolf and lives off prey in the forest are surprisingly practical. First, she must know whether he continues to wear his clothing in his beastly state, to which he responds that he goes naked (“jeo vois tuz nuz” [120, 70]). Her next, unspoken reaction is marked only by a change in her coloring. She is greatly afraid of her husband, wishes to stay away from him and wonders how she can avoid sleeping with him ever again. The plan she arrives at involves enlisting the aid of another knight/admirer. Together they will steal the husband’s clothing from his forest lair, even as they know that their action will condemn him forever to a life in the wild. Without the phys- ical markers of his class and identity in this hierarchical, feudal society, Bisclavret loses wife, home, protector, and status.Once the deed has been done, Bisclavret the man ceases to exist. Speechless, naked, and betrayed, he retains some sense of his former identity but, as with other knightly figures we have seen in the Lais, this identity is his private secret.72 To outside observers he is just a beast. Along with his loss of social identity comes also a symbolic castration, something of a paradox when we consider that the sexual side of man was traditionally considered his bestial, dangerous nature.73 Without the attributes of masculinity afforded by his clothing and their con- notations, Bisclavret also loses in banishment his access to the phallic function. As he ceases to be dangerous – no devouring of men that we know of – his wife appears ever more treacherous. Unless devouring is meant in a sexual sense, an interpretation that would not after all be inconsistent with Bisclavret’s association with transgression, he ceases to appear phallic at all, despite his associations with nature and the bestial, while his wife takes on that function.74 It is she who is identi- fied with mastery, exercising agency within the restrictive terms of the symbolic order. As she emerges as the phallic prosecutor of difference, Bisclavret is victimized, imprisoned, capable of signs but not of speech (a` la Philomena), decidedly queer.

  The queerest feature of all is his goodness. Where is the werewolf

  who devours men in his “rage” and does great damage to everything around him, as promised by the prologue? Either Marie is inconsistent or Bisclavret, looking as he does, is being blamed for all sorts of damage that may not be of his doing. According to Claude Seignolle, werewolf stories were most popular during periods of harsh famine and great polit- ical and religious persecution.75 If so, Bisclavret begins to look set up, another communal victim. His difference makes him an object of fear, but needlessly so. Here is a werewolf who harms no one, has excellent manners, and is beloved by his lord. We assume that his appearance and exclusion from discourse are what mark him as abnormal and therefore frightening; but, in fact, Marie never actually describes how he looks as a werewolf or whether he speaks in some language that no one can understand.76

  The meeting with the King during the hunt in the forest is the decisive moment in the tale. After one year of living as a beast, Bisclavret has been scented by the King’s hounds. Chased in hot pursuit, the beast runs straight to his supposed persecutor, the King, and genuflects before him.The King is moved by his sentience and brings him back to court, where he soon acquires a certain status as the Lord’s favorite. Now, we know already from the opening of the tale that he enjoyed this same status in human form, prior to his metamorphosis (“De sun seignur esteit privez” [116, 19]) and that he was generally beloved by the community (“de tuz ses veisins amez” [116, 20]). His beastliness just lets him return, unattached, to the all-male ambience of knighthood. He can now spend his day at court and sleep among the other knights, close to his Lord. In fact, it is evident to all how deeply these two love one other. Only when he attacks the conspirators, his wife and her new husband, does he show any signs of “rage” and that is immediately explained away. The King maintains his innocence, and the narrator
also intervenes to justify his hatred and thirst for justice. When the King’s inquisitors inform him that the woman the beast has attacked is the wife of the knight he once loved so much (“Ceo est la femme al chevalier / que tant suliez aveir chier” [128, 251–252]), she is subjected to torture and subsequently reveals her part in the dastardly plan to deprive her husband of every vestige of his humanity. She is forced to return his purloined clothing to the King, who then presents it to Bisclavret.

  But the Beast shows no interest in clothing. Only when an attendant explains to the King that he is shy about dressing in public does the King think to shut him alone with his clothing in the bedroom, just to see what will happen. When the King returns a few moments later with his attendants, they find Bisclavret asleep on the King’s bed. In a gender reversal that recalls Guigemar on his magic bed, the sleeping knight is awakened by the kiss of the handsome King: “Sur le demeine lit al rei / truevent dormant le chevalier. / Li reis le curut enbracier; / plus de cent feiz l’acole et baise” (On the King’s very own bed they find the knight sleeping. The King ran to embrace him; he kisses and caresses him more than a hundred times [130, 298–301]).