Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature

by William Burgwinkle

  1986).

  19. Even in 1160 a fifteen-year-old male was considered too young for marriage. Though knighting would take place at approximately this age, the average marriage age for men was in the early to mid-twenties. Young women, on the other hand, were generally betrothed by the age of fifteen and married by seventeen, at least in aristocratic families. It would not, therefore, be unusual that a fifteen-year- old would be sexually inexperienced or would show some reluctance to give up hunting for a tryst with someone who first appears to be a somewhat mad fairy. See Georges Duby, Le chevalier, la femme et le prˆetre (Paris: Hachette, 1981), and Love and Marriage on marriage practices.

  20. This scene is often taken as a sign of the immense influence of the Eneas romance on contemporary authors. Dane´’s first sighting of Narcisus does recall in many ways the parallel scene in which Lavine first sees Eneas.

  21. Narcisus actually explains that they are too young, that he does not want to experi- ence love, and that, being inexperienced, he cannot help her with her pain. When she exposes herself to him, he turns and leaves without another word. The narrator locates his crime in not caring about her pain when he sees her in such distress: “Dequanqu’ele li dit n’a cure, / Tort a, de rien ne l’aseu re” (126, 527–528). The refusal to recognize and empathize with the other’s pain is also the accusation levelled against Perceval in Chre´tien’s Conte du graal (see chapter 3).

  22. “Cuide que soit fee de mer / Qui la fontaine ait a garder” (132, 647–648).

  23. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism,” cited in Rivkin and Ryan, eds., Literary Theory, p. 151.

  24. Ibid., p. 152.

  25. Brahm, Narcissus, Reflecting, p. 14.

  26. Harf-Lancner, Lais, p. 28;I have actually translated Harf-Lancner’s translation from the original modern French: “Et ce refus lui e´tait reproche´ comme une tare par les e´trangers comme par ses propres amis” (29, 67–68).

  27. Hanning and Ferrante, eds., Lais, p. 32; Nancy Vine Durling, “The Knot, the Belt

  and the Making of Gulgemar,” Assaus 6 (1991), p. 29.

  28. I discuss these questions more fully in “Knighting, the Classical Hero”.

  29. Thomas Aquinas defines natural law as “participation in eternal law by rational creatures” (Paul E. Sigmund, ed., St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics [New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1988], p. 46), calling it elsewhere “what nature has taught all animals, such as the union of man and woman, the education of children” (50). But he also admits that natural law is not the same for all men since they are “naturally inclined to different things – some to a desire for pleasure, others to a desire for honor and other men to other things” (50); and that natural law can be changed, either by having something added or taken away. It is on this basis that one could argue that if sexual relations fulfill more than one purpose (i.e., not just reproduction but also pleasure and a sense of well-being), as they surely do in the Lais, then sexual relations which follow from a natural inclination toward well-being should be included within the category of natural law.

  30. Guigemar, for example, has been shown to have links with the first and third branches of the Mabinogion, as well as with the romance of Brut (Eva Rosenn, “The Sexual and Textual Politics of Marie’s Poetics,” in Chantal Mare´chal, ed., In Quest of Marie de France, a Twelfth-Century Poet [Lewiston, Me.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992], p. 231).

  31. Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC, observed that Celtic men gener- ally preferred their own sex to women and that they had no shame about offering themselves to other men. His source of information was Posidonius, a Greek histo- rian who had traveled throughout southern Gaul and reported on his observations. The Roman Strabo wrote in the first century AD that young Celts were shame- lessly generous in offering their charms. Though such material can clearly be read as propaganda, the absence of religious overtones or attacks on any one individual indicate that though its purpose may have been to establish the Celts’ reputation as savage, the authors are at least attempting to present it as historical and based on observation. Of course there is no indication that these accounts were known to twelfth-century scholars but, given Gerald of Wales’ contemporary accounts of sodomy amongst the Welsh, it is not altogether unlikely that either classical accounts or folk traditions could have preserved some of the material to whichboth Diodorus and Gerald were referring. See Hamish Henderson, “The Women of the Glen: Some Thoughts on Highland History,” in Robert O’Driscoll, ed., The Celtic Consciousness (New York: George Brazilier, 1981), p. 258.

  32. Pierre-Yves Badel is one critic who asserts that in Harley manuscript 978, which contains all twelve lais, the stories answer, echo, and correct each other. It is standard medieval practice, according to Badel, that short narratives be seen as part of larger collections and approached that way by readers and listeners. See “La Brie`vete´ comme esthe´tique et comme e´thique dans les Lais de Marie de France,” in Jean Dufournet, ed., Amour et merveille: les lais de Marie de France (Paris: Champion,

  1995), p. 39.

  33. Simon Gaunt provides an excellent discussion of how C. S. Lewis’s idealization is often at the expense of textual readings in his essay on allegory in the Roman de la rose (“Bel Acueil”). Many of the Jungian readings of chivalric literature fall into this same trap. See Joseph Campbell, Myth, for a very influential example.

  34. I realize that to imply that a twelfth-century text is “conservative” is problematic.

  While courtly literature can no doubt be seen as transgressive from any num- ber of points of view, I am arguing that its insistence on heterosexual pairing as the culmination of adventure and the implicit investment of female characters in the performance of hypermasculinity, was a force which narrowed considerably the parameters of masculinity. See also Gaunt, “From Epic to Romance.”

  35. Stephen Guy-Bray gave a brilliant and convincing reading of Eliduc at Kalamazoo in 2002 that I hope will be published some time soon.

  36. See Nora Cottille-Foley’s fine analysis of feminine empowerment (“The Structuring of Feminine Empowerment: Gender and Triangular Relationships in Marie de France,” in Taylor, ed., Transgressions, pp. 153–180) for more on this topic, and Michelle A. Freeman’s “Marie de France’s Poetics of Silence: The Implications for a Feminine Translatio,” PMLA 99 (1984), pp. 860–883.

  37. In this respect, the endings to the Lais are significant. At the close of Equitan, she tells us that anyone who wants to contemplate reason or ethics might profitably choose to consider the example of this Lai (“Ki bien voldreit raisun entenfre, / ici purreit ensample prendre” [86, 313–315]); Yonec and Milun were written to remind people of its protagonists’ suffering (“Cil ki ceste aventure oirent / lunc tens apres un lai en firent / de la peine et de la dolur / que cil sufrirent pur amur” [Yonec,

  208, 559–562]); Eliduc to remind us of things that should never be forgotten (“De l’aventure de cez treis / li ancien Bretun curteis / firent le lai pur remembrer, / qu’um nel deu st pas oblier” [326, 1181–1184]).

  38. S. Foster Damon, in his suggested grouping of the Lais, links Guigemar, Bisclavret,

  Lanval, and Yonec under the title of “supernatural.” Though such groupings can be rather arbitrary, and many other such groupings have been suggested, I would concur that these lais do stand apart, though not so much for their insistence on the supernatural per se as for their protagonists’ abilities to conjure alternate realities. What Damon calls supernatural could also be seen from another perspective as a more conscious rejection of societal norms and expectations on the part of the author. The struggles with identity that mark this grouping quite logically invitequeer readings. See S. Foster Damon, “Marie de France, Psychologist of Courtly

  Love,” PMLA 44 (1929), pp. 968–996.

  39. Gaunt’s influential statement: “I am interested in examining how representations of transgressive sexualities define and produce the limits of heterosexual norms” (“Straight Minds ‘Queer’ Wishes,�
� p. 441.

  40. Sedgwick, Epistemology.

  41. Tanya Luhrmann, The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial

  Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

  42. By urban myth I mean a story which has extraordinary resonance within a commu- nity and that is largely taken to be true but whose roots are untraceable and whose veracity can never be established. This untraceability adds to the stature of the story, suggesting that it is something that could have happened to almost anyone; indeed, it is recounted each time as if it had happened not to the storyteller himself but to someone associated with an acquaintance.

  43. In this respect, I am in sympathy with Jo Ann McNamara’s analysis of what she calls the Herrenfrage, the crisis set off by the application of rules destined to keep women from power in the twelfth century. In her study of the effects of celibacy and all-male spaces, she claims that this institutional move raised the following questions: “Can a man be a man without deploying the most obvious biological attributes of manhood? If a person does not act like a man, is he a man? And what does it mean to ‘act like a man,’ except to dominate women?” (“The Herrenfrage,” p. 5). Packs of knights, vying for women’s attention, but left largely to themselves, could be seen as another of these male groupings to which her questions would be applicable.

  44. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making.

  45. Emanuel J. Mickel, Jr. claims that many of these supposedly traditional elements actually had their source in the classically inspired romans d’antiquit´e composed at the Plantagenet courts rather than in traditional Celtic mythology. See Mickel’s article, “Antiquities in Marie’s Lais,” in Mare´chal, ed., In Quest, pp. 123–137, and the article by Eve Rosenn (“Sexual and Textual”) in the same volume, pp. 225–242.

  46. Marie might have known of classical associations between hunting and queer desires. In Ovid’s tale of Hippolytus (son of Theseus and the Amazon Hippolyte), for example, the young man spurns his step-mother (Phedre) when she expresses her passion. She then denounces him to his father in a scene reminiscent of Lanval. In several versions of the myth he is said to have been asexual or anti-sexual, a motif also associated with the female figure of Diana the hunter. See N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

  47. SunHee Kim Gertz (“Echoes,” p. 380) sees the lady whom Guigemar will meet rather than the doe/stag (hind) as occupying the position of “other self.” This latter she compares to the roles played by the rejected male suitor and Tiresias in Ovid’s Narcissus, i.e., the pretext for the hero’s suffering.

  48. Yet, as Matilda Bruckner points out, Guigemar could be read as “the mascu- line equivalent of the lady and her qualities” (Shaping Romance: Interpretation,Truth, and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fictions [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993], p. 165), thus suggesting that the cutting from the imaginary identification is not in the interest of absolute difference but rather, paradoxically, of the substitution of one (masculine) identification for another, which is feminine. Guigemar could then be seen not as taking on a heterosexual, masculine identity in his pairing with the lady but as accepting a predominantly feminine identity in which he, like the stag, is made up of a self and his feminine double. In the same piece, Bruckner catalogues other examples of these “parallel characterizations” or “twinnings” as she called them in a recent paper (Kalamazoo

  2002), in the Lais (167).

  49. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the phallus is the empty signifier which nonetheless structures the patriarchal order. While it is largely taken up by men, males can refuse it and women can gain access to it (Jacques Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–

  1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink [New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999]; originally published as S´eminaire XX: Encore, 1972–1973 [Paris: Seuil,

  1975]).

  50. “Ne par herbe ne par racine, / ne par mire ne par poisun / n’avras tu ja mes guarisun / de la plaie qu’as en la quisse, / de si que cele te guarisse, / ki suffera pur tue amur / si grant peine e si gant dolur, / qu’unkes femme tant ne sufert; / e tu referas tant pur li . . .” (32, 110–118). (Never by herb or root, medicine or potion will your thigh wound be cured; not until a woman suffers for your love pain and sorrow like no woman has ever suffered before, and you suffer as much for her.)

  51. In sacrificial rituals it is essential that no one person can be blamed for the sacrifice.

  The choice of victim must appear to be directed by fate (e.g., the victim conforms to prophesied signs or is chosen at random) and the killing must seem to be no more the result of one person’s efforts than another’s. This explains why early Greek rituals are said to have involved chasing a victim off a cliff, setting him/her adrift, or abandoning him/her to the elements, situations which will result in death without allowing for blame to be attributed to any one persecutor from whom retribution could be exacted. See Rene´ Girard, La violence et le sacr´e (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1972). The question of the comparative suffering of the lovers has also been debated since the story explicitly states that the woman must suffer like none before her. Gertz (“Echoes,” p. 380) notes that Marie devotes much more space to Guigemar’s suffering, while Joan Brumlik (“Thematic Irony in Marie de France’s Guigemar,” French Forum 13 [1988], p. 9) sees Guigemar as having suffered less.

  52. A straight Lacanian reading might emphasize that Guigemar’s victimization is a metaphor for obligatory entry into the Symbolic order. The youth is induced to cast off imaginary identification with the maternal phallus and his shooting of the hermaphrodite mother is an unconscious rejection of that figure and role. The sub- sequent disappearance of the fawn from the tale figures the symbolic disappearance of the boy who once aspired to be the phallus for the mother.53. “Ravi” has the sense both of physical violation and abduction and can be used for both sexes. See Henry A. Kelly, “Meanings and Uses of Raptus in Chaucer’s Time,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998), pp. 101–165; Kolve, “Ganymede,” p. 1045; and Gravdal, Ravishing, Maidens.

  54. Ferrante and Hanning (Lais, 45, 534): “I hope they also enjoy whatever else others do on such occasions”; “As for the rest, what other lovers do on such occasions, that’s their business” (Harf Lancner, Lais, 53, 534–535).

  55. As Althusser (“Ideology,” p. 168) puts it, before getting to the “act,” one must first pass through the ideological apparatuses, then through the ritual practices that shape the beliefs and ideas with which the act is invested or within which it is imbedded. Only then can the act be recognized as an act.

  56. “Ceo m’est a vis, an e demi / Guigemar ensemble od li” (52, 535–536).

  57. According to Nancy Vine Durling (“Knot,” p. 46), there are four levels of play on the word plait: wound, discussion, knot, and love relationship. Furthermore, she relates it to writing. Marie is said to “exploit[s] the possibilities enclosed within the plait in order to create a finely woven lai” (47). See also R. Howard Bloch’s (“The Medieval Text”) discussion of Guigemar and Bruckner, Shaping Romance, chapter 5.

  58. It is interesting to note that male impotence was often seen as a result of witchcraft and knot tying in the Middle Ages. Maleficent female spirits were thought to be able to tie the seminal vessels in knots, invisible to the human eye. Potency only returned when these knots were discovered and repaired or when the witch lifted her spell (Vern L. Bullough, “On Being a Male in the Middle Ages,” in Lees, ed., Medieval Masculinities, p. 45; citing H. C. Lea, History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, 3 vols. (New York: S. A. Russell, 1955), pp. 162–170.

  59. The Lai of M´elion offers an interesting twist on this same theme of reluctance to marry. Me´lion announces that he will only marry a woman who has never loved or spoken of another man (“Ja n’ameroit pucele / que tant seroit gentil ne bele, / que nul autre home eu st ame´, /
ne que de nul eu st parle´” [19–22]), i.e., it must be a woman who is not part of a male network, who will be incapable of assuring his bond with other men. Though the editor of the lai, Alexandre Micha, dismisses this vow as a gab (an extravagant boast or challenge, a joke or riddle), he admits that its author was influenced by Marie’s portrait of Guigemar, the “orgueilleux” who disdains love, and that Me´lion displays “une intransigeance absolue” (Micha, ed., Lais, p. 259). His dismissal strikes me as too easy, never considering that there might be legitimate reasons why the protagonist wishes to abstain from heterosexual pairing. Even if Me´lion’s stand is an indication of a heterosexual identity, it is the wrong type of heterosexuality, since it does not strengthen homosocial bonds and potentially transgresses systems of exchange.

  60. This incident is recounted in Eilhart von Oberg’s Tristrant (ed. D. Buschinger and

  W. Spiewok [Paris: 10/18, 1986], ll. 1381–1418, dated to 1170–1190.