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Medieval romances are rich in what Donald Maddox has termed ‘fictions of identity’: “texts that at some critical juncture(s) accord particular emphasis to matters of identity”[1] In some of these romances, the mutable body of the hero/ine raises questions about the relationship of the body to human identity.
While bodies in romance literature experience sometimes fantastic changes, medieval philosophy also “understood ‘body’ to mean ‘changeable thing,’[2] at once both the unruly body tainted by the Fall and liable to sin, and the source of salvation via Christ’s Incarnation, where “only through the body could perfection be attained; and, once attained, that perfection was made visible through the flesh.”[3]
There was no single “view of the body in the [medieval] period that could be said to be definitive,”[4] and by the thirteenth-century, the classical and patristic thought which associated women with the flesh, and men with the mind, became more nuanced, leading to a more complex view of women in romance literature.[5] While men are described in terms of their “abstract qualities”[6] (such as bravery, honour, and skill), and “women never entirely escape definition by their physical beauty”[7] the older assumption that exterior beauty reflects inward nobility[8] is troubled by trends showing women “making active decisions about the corporeal image they project.”[9] While the idea of exterior female flesh as a guide to interior identity became more complex, even the categories of male and female were less fixed than might be supposed. Medieval people believed “that men and women comprised one sex, but two genders,”[10] and the prospect of mutability of gender emerges in romance literature.[11]
In this essay, I shall evaluate the relationship between the interior and the exterior, the body, and identity in three French romances: Bisclavret from the Lais of Marie de France; Mélusine, by Jean d’Arras, and the Roman de Silence by Heldris de Cornuälle.
Bisclavret tells the story of a nobleman who, every week, mysteriously disappears for three days. His wife persuades him to tell her what he does on those days, and he confesses that he becomes a werewolf. He also divulges that his transformation requires him to remove his clothes, and should he be deprived of them, he would be unable to change back into a man. In fear, his wife proceeds to send “a knight of that region/who had loved her a long time”[12] to steal her husband’s clothes, trapping him in werewolf form. She then marries the knight, and a year passes. One day the king went hunting, and he and his men chase a werewolf who, quite unexpectedly, runs to the king and “kisses his leg and his foot.”[13] By this the king knows that the werewolf “has human understanding,”[14] and he adopts it as a sort of pet, looking after it, and having it sleep amongst his knights. Later, the werewolf attacks first his wife’s new husband, and then his wife herself, tearing off her nose. This is so unusual that the court decide there must be a reason behind it, and a wise man advises forcing the wife to explain. Accordingly, she is put to torture, confesses what has happened, and Bisclavret has his clothes returned to him. He returns to his human state, is restored to his lands, and the wife and her new husband are banished and cursed to have noseless daughters.
At the beginning of the lay, Bisclavret has a body which is fluid, shifting between man and werewolf, and which later becomes fixed first as werewolf and then as man, in fact, he “might be said to suffer from a kind of madness or amnesia of the body, which has forgotten its human identity.”[15] Bisclavret’s body may have forgotten, but his mind has not, and it is his memory which provides the clue to his identity, because, “despite his form, Bisclavret is still governed by social relations, remaining the king’s ‘man’ even when his shape is that of a ‘beast’”.[16] Bisclavret’s actions with the king confirm the humanity beneath the animal exterior, so that when he behaves in a more ‘bestial’ way in attacking his wife’s new husband, the response of the court is “surely it is not doing this without a reason: the knight must have somehow done it wrong”[17] and when he tears the nose off his wife’s face, a wise man tells them “it has never touched anyone/nor shown any wickedness, except to the lady I see here…it has some cause for anger against her”.[18]
In the story of Bisclavret, “bodies and appearance may deceive, and…actions can matter more than appearances,”[19] both in the case of Bisclavret himself, and also of his wife. While the king is able to see the human beneath the wolf, and describes him in admiring tones as a “wonder” (merveille),[20] the wife is simply frightened at the merveille[21] of her husband’s transformation. Frightened by the mention of his werewolf appearance, Bisclavret’s wife betrays him, and causes him to lose his exterior human identity. While he is courtly even as a wolf, his wife is marked by her “duplicitous behaviour”.[22] In the end, she is more bestial than he, and, as Miranda Griffin writes, “women do not need to metamorphose to embody the animal, since their stereotyped duplicity inevitably casts them as subhuman, the interior beings against which courtly society defines itself.”[23]
The Roman de Mélusine tells the tale of the eponymous Mélusine, a half-fairy, half-mortal woman. It begins with the story of her parents, King Elinas of Scotland, and Presine, a beautiful fairy woman he encounters in the forest. She agrees to marry him on condition that he never see her in childbed, and later gives birth to triplet daughters. Eager to see them, Elinas enters the room where Presine has given birth, with the result that she leaves, taking her daughters with her. The daughters grow up in Avalon, and learn the story of their mother’s betrayal by Elinas. Mélusine and her sisters then trap their father in a mountain, drawing punishment from Presine. Mélusine is told that she would have become mortal, like her father, but now will “become a serpent from the navel down”[24] every Saturday. If, however, she marries a man who promises never to look at her on a Saturday, or ever talk about it, then she will live out a natural life. She then meets Raymondin, who has accidentally killed his uncle while hunting, offering to help him evade punishment if he will make her his wife. She ensures he becomes rich, building castles (including that of Lusignan), and bears him ten sons, eight of whom have different kinds of deformities. Then, Raymondin is taunted by his brother, who suggests that, when she disappears on Saturdays, Mélusine is committing adultery. Raymondin follows her, and through a peephole he has made in a door, observes Mélusine in the bath, her serpent’s tail clearly visible. He does not mention what he has seen, until one of his sons murders another, whereupon he calls Mélusine a “deceitful serpent”[25] and blames her for their son’s sin. She changes into a dragon and leaves, returning occasionally, though always in dragon form.
Jean d’Arras’ story provides a founding myth for his patrons[26] in which the hybrid body of Mélusine gives “prestige and authority”[27] to both the original landowners and to their successors. Bodies are foundational to the tale, which centres on “taboos concerning the body”[28] in the conditions placed on marriage with fairies, investigates bodily difference in the sons of Mélusine and Raymondin, and which has at its heart the mutable body of Mélusine herself.
Mélusine, as a half-fairy, half-mortal, is a hybrid from birth, and, as Kevin Brownlee points out, during the tale she reveals three bodies: “1) a woman’s body; 2) a mixed body, half-woman and half- snake; and 3) the body of a flying snake.”[29] When Raymondin first encounters Mélusine, he seems to see the perfect woman, with “beauty the likes of which he had never before beheld,”[30] and who is “on God’s side…believ[ing] everything a true Catholic must believe.”[31] She tells him she plans to “devote myself entirely to thinking how best to increase your personal worth and your estate,”[32] and arranges an “elaborate and noble”[33] wedding, impressing Raymondin’s overlord and peers.[34] This, Mélusine’s first body, shows an idealised courtly lady who causes Raymondin to marvel at their first meeting; her second body is marvellous, in that it induces the same “horror of the abject”[35] as experienced by Bisclavret’s wife.
When Raymondin looks, voyeuristically, through the peephole he has made at his wife in the bath, he sees her combing her hair, now “a woman who from the navel down took the form of a massive serpent’s tail, extremely long and as thick as a herring keg, and splashing the water so hard that it splattered the vaulting of the chamber.”[36] While Brownlee sees this incident as comic,[37] for Griffin, this incident invokes disgust, and an “unfettered animality”[38] in the beating of the serpent’s tail. While Raymondin initially laments his wife, describing her as “the best, the most loyal lady ever born,”[39] he later, in anger, identifies her as a serpent, causing her abrupt departure.
For most of the tale, it is Raymondin’s understanding of Mélusine’s identity which is at the forefront. We see Mélusine through his eyes as courtly lady, and as hybrid serpent-woman. It is he who wields inadvertent control over Mélusine bodily identity, for it is when he breaks their agreement that she “is doomed to embody the animal for ever more.”[40] Only at the end of Mélusine’s part of the tale do we learn anything of her own sense of identity, when, just before she completes her final metamorphosis, she announces: “I want you to know who I am and who my father was, so that my children will not be stigmatized as sons of a bad mother, a serpent, or a fairy. For I am the daughter of King Elinas of Scotland and Queen Presine, his wife.”[41] Here, she places her identity in her human lineage, and in her motherhood, rather than in her fairy or hybrid identities, but, as Brownlee notes, “this affirmation of Mélusine’s human status is simultaneously (for the reader) a reminder of her fundamentally hybrid nature: the daughter of a human father and a fairy mother, both of whom are explicitly named in her genealogical self-description,”[42] and, of course, her disavowal of her fairy identity is immediately negated by her transformation into a serpent.
The question of the relation of Mélusine’s body to her sense of identity seems unresolved by the end of her tale. The three bodies she inhabits during the tale, along with her identification with her human patrimony but not her fairy inheritance leaves her actual sense of identity unclear, and perhaps unfixed.
A second tale which problematizes the concept of identity is the story of the Roman de Silence which has been summarised by Peter Allen as: “because of a quarrel between two counts, King Ebain of England decrees that no woman shall inherit property during his reign. Ebain marries one of his retainers, Cador, to the daughter of the Count of Cornwall, Eufemie (whose name recalls that of Ebain’s queen, Eufeme). When the Count dies, Cador accedes to his position, and, when the couple gives birth to a daughter, the question of inheritance arises. The parents decide to conceal the child’s sex by naming her Silence, reasoning that if she ever realizes that she is female, “Silentius” can always be changed to “Silentia.” Silence is brought up as a boy, but when she reaches the age of puberty Nature and Nurture debate over her gender. She runs away from home with a troupe of jongleurs; her father, overcome with grief, kills all jongleurs who come to Cornwall. Silence, meanwhile, has mastered the art of poetry even better than her masters, who threaten to kill her. She returns to Cornwall and escapes death there because she is recognized as the count’s ‘son’. Queen Eufeme, ignorant of Silence’s sex, tries to seduce him (her), and, when Silence refuses, claims to have been his (her) victim. King Ebain exiles Silence to France; Eufeme substitutes for Ebain’s laissez-passer a letter asking for the King of France to execute the bearer; the fraud is revealed; and Silence is recalled. Eufeme repeats her accusation, and Ebain assigns Silence the penitential task of finding Merlin – a task only a woman can accomplish. Silence, of course, succeeds, and brings Merlin back to court, where he reveals such secrets as the heroine’s true gender and the fact that Eufeme has a lover she disguises as a nun. Eufeme is executed; Silence is established as a woman; and Ebain makes her his queen.”[43]
The Roman de Silence is an extended reflection on gender identity where “the body is represented as a malleable surface on which gender is inscribed by social forces.”[44] Throughout the tale, Silence’s identity is fluid, as she is presented as male, female, and perhaps both and neither at different times, in part through the use of mixed pronouns,[45] challenging the bodily grounding of gender, and emphasising “the social construction of identity.”[46]
Throughout the tale, Heldris de Cornuälle Silence’s exemplarism; whether as a man or a woman, she is superlative. At her conception, Nature takes great pains to make her the perfect woman, and Heldris says that, “truly no fairer woman than she ever lived in this world, or was born,” his only criticism is that she is “too lovely.”[47] In fact, she is so feminine that “nothing in Nature’s creation of Silence hints that she has the potential to lead a successful male existence.”[48] Later, Silence becomes the perfect man, more skilled at masculine play than his peers,[49] becoming “stern, and fair, and valiant, generous, courtly, loved by everyone,”[50] and “a fine and valiant knight.”[51]
Silence’s transformation from female to male begins with her name. Cador declares that “He will be named Silentius, and if it happens by chance that his true nature is discovered, we will change the –us to –a, and she will be named Silentia,”[52] though the Roman actually calls her Silence, “which makes her name an ambiguous signifier of gender,”[53] presaging further ambiguities to come. Silence’s appearance must conform to the gender identity her parents have chosen for her, something which begins at her baptism, when Cador “tied a cloth around her loins…so that the priest might not accidentally perceive the child’s sex.”[54] Her parents continue this by “dress[ing] her all in man’s fashion,”[55] and having her spend time in the sun, “to make him look more like a boy” so that “what could be seen of him was entirely male.”[56] Silence’s masculine appearance means that she is perceived by others as male,[57] as was common in medieval transvestite romances.[58]
While other people invariably perceive Silence as male, the question of his/her self-identity is more complex. In an extended passage, Nature and Nurture argue over which takes precedence, gender performance, or anatomy. Silence’s initial response to Nature’s exhortation to return to her “real nature” is a strong assertion of her male identity, declaring that “I am Silentius, it seems to me, or I am no one.”[59] Immediately after this, her self-identification wavers, and she declares that “no woman of my lineage ever led such a life as this, nor will I lead it any longer” further stating that she will not “live like a boy any more.”[60] Silence’s self-identity wavers again, when Nurture appears to chase Nature away, saying that she has “denatured” Silence.[61] Silence then declares a male identity once more, saying that “a man’s life is better than a woman’s, all things considered,”[62] and describing his strength, roughness, and masculine ways, agreeing with Nurture’s argument that “Silence’s gender performance is the true location of her identity: Silence dresses like a boy, Silence acts like a boy, Silence is a boy.”[63] The argument between Nature and Nurture is “a debate about the relationship of body and performance. Nature claims that Silence’s gender identity is located in her female anatomy, while Nurture claims that Silence’s masculine appearance and performance determine his gender.”[64]
While Nature and Nurture provide opposing views of the relationship of the body and identity, Silence’s own understanding of her identity remains variable. Although Nurture appears to have won the argument, Silence performs another change of identity when, in disquiet about her lack of feminine skills, she joins a troupe of jongleurs, disguising herself so that she is “altogether different-looking.”[65] Silence assumes a significant name, calling herself “Malductus, for he considered himself very ill-guided, very ill-taught for his nature.”[66] Silence’s sense of her identity remains fluid, and for the majority of the Roman she is “neither uniquely female or male, [but] embodies both.”[67]
The resolution of Silence’s mutable identity comes, in the end, not from Silence but from King Ebain. When her biological sex is revealed by Merlin, and confirmed by visual inspection by the king, he proclaims her a “good woman,”[68] and marries her. The instability of Silence’s gender identity is resolved when Ebain chooses her identity for her, and it seems that “Heldris deliberately problematizes gender and posits a view of sexual difference that is culturally rather than biologically determined, only to conclude that the problem is not a problem.”[69] Silence becomes silent after Ebain restores the right of females to inherit, and “makes no indication of whether he/she concurs with King Ebain’s pronouncement”[70] of her gender, but Heldris’ apparent restoration of the status quo still leaves questions over Silence’s true identity. As Erika Hess points out, “if three days elapsed before Nature removed the masculine features from Silence’s body, one has to wonder just what King Ebain and his court saw when Silence undressed before them.”[71] The reader is left with an uncomfortable suspicion that body and identity do not always correlate, something enhanced by the treatment in the text of Queen Eufeme.
While the focus of the Roman de Silence[72] is on Silence’s identity, Queen Eufeme’s bodily appearance only dubiously matches her inward identity. At the beginning of the Roman, Heldris says that “there was no fairer gem in all the world”[73] than Eufeme, but her beautiful exterior does not mean she has an equally beautiful interior. She is “shown to be lustful, deceitful, and thirsty for vengeance to soothe her injured pride”.[74] Rather than acting as a courtly Queen, she “spends much of the romance acting against type, exhibiting such great disloyalty and anger that Ebain cannot hide his outrage.”[75] While Silence’s body both hides a female biology and expresses a male identity, Eufeme uses her self-harm of her own body to “author her own corporeal text”[76] and “attempts to use her flesh to rewrite social codes”[77] in order to portray herself as an innocent victim of Silence’s uncourtly sexual aggression. In this mismatch between perception and true identity revealed in behaviour, Eufeme is similar to Bisclavret’s wife.
As Erika Hess has noted, “the narrator of the Roman de Silence creates a distinction between exterior and interior appearance,”[78] and the same could be said of Bisclavret and Mélusine. In all three texts, onlookers make assumptions about identity based on their bodies and outward appearances, assumptions which are revealed to be fundamentally unstable. Bisclavret’s body appears to be bestial, and he is assumed to be a beast by those who encounter him, but his identity is revealed in his memory and in his behaviour based on that memory. Mélusine’s identity is complex and fluid, reflecting the fluidity of her three bodies. She appears to be the ideal courtly lady, and then in Raymondin’s act of voyeurism seems to be a hybrid monster. Finally she appears to be a beast, but with the memory of her human self. Her ‘true’ identity is left unresolved, and is perhaps as fluid as her bodily appearance. The relationship between Silence’s body and her identity is also complex, as she appears to be male, and superlative at masculine pursuits, but, as Heldris repeatedly tells us, underneath her clothes she is a woman. Her own sense of her identity is changeable, and both her initial cross-gendered body, and the final resolution to her shifting identity are provided by someone else. While the identity of Bisclavret appears clear, both Silence and Mélusine reflect “the hybrid’s complex, composite, and ultimately undecidable identity.”[79]
The three texts this essay has
covered reveal that the medieval body is a mutable ground of identity, where the
exterior appearance may not reflect an interior identity, and all three tales
may reflect anxiety over whether things really are as they appear to be.
Bibliography
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- Mason, Eugene. French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie De France. Everyman’s Library ; No. 557. London: Dent, 1911.
- France, Marie de, and Claire M. Waters. The Lais of Marie de France: Text and Translation. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2018.
- D’Arras, Jean, Maddox, Donald, and Sara Sturm-Maddox. Melusine, Or, The Noble History of Lusignan. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012.
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- Burgess, Glyn S., and Robert A. Taylor. The Spirit of the Court : Selected Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (Toronto 1983). Woodbridge: Brewer, 1985.
- Burns, E. Jane. Bodytalk : When Women Speak in Old French Literature. New Cultural Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
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Footnotes
[1] Maddox, Donald. Fictions of Identity in Medieval France. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature ; No. 43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p20
[2] Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality : An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone Books, 2011, p36
[3] Burgwinkle, Bill. “Medieval Somatics” in Hillman, David, and Ulrika Maude (eds). The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature. Cambridge Companions to Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p12
[4] Ibid., p10
[5] Burr, Kristin. Corporeal Creations: The Female Body and Identity Construction in Old French Epigonal Romance, 2000, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, pp26-27
[6] Ibid., p25
[7] Ibid., p13
[8] Ibid., p15
[9] Ibid., p27
[10] Ibid., p36
[11] Ibid., p40
[12] France, Marie de. “Bisclavret” in The Lais of Marie de France: Text and Translation by Marie de France and Claire M. Waters. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2018, p149. Abbreviated hereafter as Bisclavret.
[13] Ibid., p153
[14] Ibid.
[15] Huot, Sylvia. “Madness and the Body” in Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2010. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199252121.003.0007, p188
[16] Kinoshita, Sharon, and Peggy McCracken. Marie De France : A Critical Companion. Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2012, p71
[17] Bisclavret, p155
[18] Ibid., p157
[19] Kinoshita, Sharon, and Peggy McCracken, p164
[20] Bisclavret, p152-3
[21] Ibid., p148-9
[22] Griffin, Miranda. Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature. Oxford University Press, 2015, p139
[23] Ibid., p139
[24] D’Arras, Jean, Maddox, Donald, and Sara Sturm-Maddox. Melusine, Or, The Noble History of Lusignan. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012, p25. Abbreviated hereafter as Mélusine.
[25] Mélusine, p191
[26] Though his book was not commissioned by the Lusignan family but those who now held their lands (McCracken, Peggy. The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero : Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, p79)
[27] Brownlee, Kevin. “Mélusine’s Hybrid Body and the Poetics of Metamorphosis.” Yale French Studies, no. 86 (1994): 18-38, p18
[28] McCracken, Peggy, (2003), p80
[29] Brownlee, Kevin, p19
[30] Mélusine, p32
[31] Ibid., p33
[32] Ibid., p34
[33] Ibid., p41
[34] Ibid., p42
[35] Huot, Sylvia, p196
[36] Mélusine, p181
[37] Brownlee, Kevin, p25
[38] Griffin, Miranda, p155
[39] Mélusine, p182
[40] Griffin, Miranda, p157
[41] Mélusine, p194
[42] Brownlee, Kevin, p34
[43] Allen, Peter, quoted in Psaki, Regina. Introduction to Le Roman De Silence by Cornuälle, Heldris de, and Regina Psaki. Garland Library of Medieval Literature ; v. 63. New York: Garland, 1991, pp xi-xii. Hereafter abbreviated as Silence.
[44] McCracken, Peggy. “”The Boy Who Was a Girl”: Reading Gender in the Roman De Silence.” Romanic Review 85, no. 4 (1994): 517, p523
[45] Ringer, Loren. “Exchange, Identity and Transvestism in Le Roman De Silence.” Dalhousie French Studies 28 (1994): 3-13, p9
[46] Burr, Kristin, p261
[47] Silence, p54
[48] Burr, Kristen, p179
[49] Ibid., p68
[50] Ibid., p73
[51] Ibid., p140
[52] Ibid., p57
[53] Ringer, Loren, p8
[54] Silence, p58
[55] Ibid., p65
[56] Ibid., p68
[57] Gaunt, Simon. “The Significance of Silence.” Paragraph 13, no. 2 (1990): 202-16, p206
[58] McCracken, Peggy, (1994), p520
[59] Silence, p70
[60] Ibid.
[61] Silence, p71
[62] Ibid., p72
[63] McCracken, Peggy (1994) p528
[64] Ibid., p530
[65] Silence, p80
[66] Ibid., p87
[67] Hess, Erika, p133
[68] Silence, p178
[69] Gaunt, Simon, p210
[70] Hess, Erika, p180
[71] Hess, Erika, p186
[72] As Loren Ringer points out, the given title “Roman de Silence” is modern. (Ringer, Loren, p5)
[73] Silence, p7
[74] Brahney, Kathleen J. “When Silence was Golden: Female Personae in the Roman de Silence” in Burgess, Glyn S., and Robert A. Taylor. The Spirit of the Court : Selected Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (Toronto 1983). Woodbridge: Brewer, 1985, p59
[75] Burr, Kristen, p55
[76] Ibid., p57
[77] Ibid., p58
[78] Hess, Erika, p90
[79] Ibid., p244