Competencia discursiva

Critics and historians have long acknowledged that medieval French romances helped to promulgate ideals of chivalry and love throughout European courtly society and that those ideals held men and women to different standards of conduct. Notions of idealized “masculine” and “feminine” comportment were so forcefully articulated in medieval romances and didactic literature that their outlines survived well beyond the Victorian age: well-bred men should exercise courage and prudence in the public domains of government and war; ladies should devote themselves to the private sphere and cultivate the arts of adorn-ment, sentimental refineadorn-ment, and mothering. Scholars and critics today are quick to question such cultural constructions and to seek to discern the social realities that lie behind them, as do Richard Kaeuper and Sarah Kay in this volume, for example.

But critical reflection is not the exclusive purview of modern readers.

Although many of the more than 200 extant French romances seem to uphold traditional gender roles without questioning them, others provide more complex, critical views of relations between men and women. Beginning with the earliest instances of romans d’antiquité, lais, and Arthurian romances, many courtly fictions opened up a discursive space where gender roles were scrutinized and where underlying social and sexual tensions were explored. After looking briefly at the historical context in which aristocratic gender roles evolved, this essay will take the intriguing thirteenth-century Roman de Silence as a guidepost for some of the questions of gender raised by selected earlier and contempora-neous courtly fictions.

That Old French courtly romances portray gender relations as fraught with tension is not surprising. Courtly literature flourished as emerging elites attempted to construct an ethos of moral superiority, grounded simultaneously in sanctioned violence by men against outsiders or transgressors and in senti-mental refinement toward members of the group, especially women. In different and sometimes opposing ways, aristocratic families and the Church attempted to shape the practices and behavior that constituted social life. After a period of

relative autonomy for religious women, controversies raged in the Church over clerical marriages, double monasteries, and the place of sexuality in men’s and women’s lives.¹Noblewomen were vital to the reproduction of aristocratic heirs and their sexuality was closely guarded; despite the Church’s doctrine of consen-sual marriage, women’s desires were often secondary to political expediency.² The intellectual renaissance of the twelfth century, the expansion of administra-tive clerical culture, and the growth of universities in the thirteenth century extended the franchise of learning for many men of means, but educational opportunities were restricted for all but the most privileged women, who were themselves excluded from higher learning.³

There is ample evidence that elite women were literate as readers and less often as writers throughout the Middle Ages.⁴The extant record of women’s corre-spondence, lyric and narrative poetry, and devotional writing in Latin and in French is especially strong in Anglo-Norman and French culture, where exam-ples of female patronage abound.⁵Yet the vast majority of extant medieval texts are the products of male clerics, many of whom viewed women’s social agency with caution, if not hostility.⁶Opportunities for female literacy and for women’s production of culture only gradually extended to a broader population through-out the Middle Ages. The flowering of vernacular culture in courts and wealthy households occurred within the context of a dynamic social tapestry, in which women’s voices were inextricably woven, sometimes as silent participants, less frequently as powerful agents, and, more rarely but significantly, as protesters.

Against this evolving backdrop, Old French romances frequently portray gender relations as open to interrogation.

The Roman de Silence, written around the mid thirteenth century by Heldris de Cornuälle, offers a striking example of how romance presents debate about gender within a courtly frame. The romance tells how the eponymous heroine Silence, sole heir of Count Cador and Eufemie, daughter of Count Renaut, has been raised as a boy so that she may preserve her birthright in the face of King Ebains’s interdiction on female inheritance. Silence learns to ride and joust better than all “his” male peers. But at the age of twelve, a biological awakening for the young woman takes the form of a spirited debate between Nature, who reproaches Silence for betraying her “natural” femininity, and Nurture and Reason, who remind Silence of the social advantages men enjoy over women (Silence, 2500–656). After Nature has urged Silence to go to her room to sew –

“Va en la cambre a la costure” (2528) – Reason reminds the confused adolescent that a man’s life is better than a woman’s “miols valt li us d’om / que l’us de feme / c’est la some” (2636–37). The narrator’s inclusion of a mock-philosophical debate, possibly modeled on Alain of Lille’s De Planctu Naturae, seems to invite his audience’s reflection about the nature of gender roles.

After weighing the pros and cons, Silence concludes that a man’s life is easier

than a woman’s and continues to excel in masculine pursuits, fighting valiantly for the Kings of Cornwall and France, and attracting the attentions of the lasciv-ious Queen Eufeme. The central episodes in this romance thus relate how a woman who represses her feminine “nature” can successfully act like a knight and enjoy all the privileges and risks of masculinity. In the end, however, Silence’s secret is finally disclosed by Merlin, who can only be captured by a woman.

Silence’s female sex is revealed when she is forced to strip before the King’s court.

Evil Queen Eufeme is shown to have consorted with a man cross-dressed as priest. Having opened up a fictive space where gender roles were transgressed, the romance reimposes traditional notions of sexual identity and social roles.

King Ebains marries Silence after killing his wicked, adulterous wife. In his Epilogue, the narrator apologizes to his “good” women readers for having treated Eufeme so harshly and urges them to attend to his praise of Silence, whose positive example they should strive hard to emulate:

Se j’ai jehi blasmee Eufeme Ne s’en doit irier bone feme.

Se j’ai Eufeme moult blasmee Jo ai Silence plus loëe.

Ne s’en doit irier bone fame, Ne sor li prendre altrui blasme,

Mais efforcier plus de bien faire. (6695–98) [If today I have blamed Eufeme, the good woman should not be angry. If I have greatly blamed Eufeme, I have praised Silence even more. The good woman should not be angry, nor take the other’s blame upon herself, but should strive all the harder to do good.]

The author/narrator of this adventurous yet solemn tale has been variously hailed by modern critics as proto-feminist, misogynist, homophobic, and even possibly female.⁷That such opposing interpretations can be offered for Silence suggests that the medieval narrator sought to stimulate debate and reflection in the audience.

The Roman de Silence comes down to us in a single manuscript; we know nothing about its author. With a plot that strikingly reverses the traditional knight-pursues-lady plot of many biographical romances, and its complex min-gling of literary genres, the romance may seem an anomaly. However, the issues that Silence addresses so explicitly are presented openly or indirectly in French verse romance from its inception.

F E M A L E R E A D E R S A N D PAT RO N S O F RO M A N C E The “bone feme,” those good women readers, whom Heldris addresses in his Epilogue are anonymous, but their appearance reflects the prominence of

noble-women and their importance as an audience in Anglo-Norman and northern French courts from the twelfth century onward. Numerous dedications to histor-ical women and to unidentified “dames” grace the Prologues and Epilogues of romances and other vernacular texts.⁸One of the earliest and most influential of female patrons was Eleanor of Aquitaine, grand-daughter of Guillaume IX of Aquitaine, the first troubadour.⁹After producing two daughters in her marriage to Louis VII of France, Eleanor divorced Louis and married Henry II Plantagenet of England, at whose court she helped to foster the vogue for literary produc-tions “en romanz.” Both the Roman de Brut and the Roman de Troie show evi-dence of having been dedicated to her; some scholars associate her with the Roman d’Eneas and the Tristan of Thomas as well. Some time later in northern France, Chrétien de Troyes wrote the Chevalier de la Charrette at the

“command” of Eleanor’s daughter, Marie, Countess of Champagne. Other his-torical dedicatees include Marie of Ponthieu, for whom Gerbert de Montreuil wrote Le Roman de la Violette; Eleanor of Castile, named as the dedicatee of Girart d’Amiens’s Escanor;^.Marie of Brabant, Queen of France, and Blanche of Castille, daughter of St. Louis, to whom Adenet le roi dedicated Cleomadés;

Marie, Duchess of Bar, who was named as recipient of Jean d’Arras’ Mélusine along with her brother, Jean, Duke of Berry. These dedications, as well as notices in library inventories and wills, prove that noblewomen in France and England prized their association with romances and that they bequeathed them to their daughters and sons.

To be sure, pious works and didactic texts comprised the greatest portion of books associated with medieval women, even in the case of women not renowned for their piety, such as the late medieval Queen Isabeau de Bavière, whose library consisted principally of devotional works.¹⁰But romances comprise the second largest genre owned and/or transmitted by women.¹¹After her castle was sacked, Mahaut d’Artois demanded restitution from Parliament in 1316 of a list of books that included three Tristan romances and the Roman de la Violette, among other secular works.¹²The widespread female readership of Arthurian romance in England can be seen in records of female ownership of romances variously about Tristan, Lancelot, Arthur, and Merlin in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen-turies.¹³Women’s possession and readership of romances extended well beyond the period of their composition. A 1507 inventory of the library at Moulins, at the end of this period, includes a great number of medieval romances which would have been enjoyed by men and women in the Bourbon court, including Anne de France, daughter of Louis XI who wrote a conduct book for her daugh-ter.¹⁴ Moralists may have warned against the dangers of reading books that described the delights of love, as they did repeatedly throughout the Middle Ages, but their warnings were evidently not heeded: noble and bourgeois women constituted an important audience for all forms of courtly fiction.

8.1 Opening initial of Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot) depicting Countess Marie de Champagne, to whom Chrétien dedicates his romance.

T H E T RO U B L E W I T H WO M E N : A M B I G U O U S AG E N T S O F RO M A N C E

The indisputable fact of female patronage, ownership, and reception tells us little about how the fictional portrayals of female characters either reflected or shaped the lives of their readers. If we turn to examine the representation of women’s roles within romance, we find complex and often ambiguous portray-als of female subjectivity that seem to mirror women’s paradoxical position in courtly culture, where they were both privileged centers of attention, and mar-ginal players in a game whose rules were written by men. Although women figure more prominently in romances than in most contemporaneous chansons de gestes, those same romances cast women more often as desired objects rather than as active subjects in chivalric adventures or quests – a point that has been emphasized in feminist re-readings of courtly fiction. One of the most sobering reassessments is the claim that many Arthurian romances “aestheticize” or romanticize women’s role as helpless victims of rape or male violence and thus make crimes against women a seemingly “normal” aspect of the fabric of chiv-alric life.¹⁵

Yet, as we have seen in Silence, female characters in romance often play roles that challenge social conventions or disrupt traditional codes. Many romancers portray women in a way that highlights their troublesome sexuality, their disrup-tive agency, or their resistant voices. In many courtly fictions, women’s transgres-sive acts or disruptive speech make readers question chivalric ideals and courtly conventions.¹⁶

Evidence of women’s extraordinary and problematic role is found among the earliest romans d’antiquité. When Lavinia writes a love-letter to Eneas and fires it with an arrow into the Trojan camp, thereby nearly rekindling the war (Eneas, 8775ff.), her action combines female literacy, passion, and resourceful intrusion into a sphere usually reserved for men. This scene does not appear in Virgil’s Aeneid; its innovative blending of Ovidian and chivalric elements, its surprising marriage of erotic and military impulses and reversal of gender roles might seem to signal the entrance of cultivated, resourceful women who wield authority in the courtly domain by their association with letters and by their clever, circui-tous manipulation of culture. Yet Lavinia’s gesture responds to an earlier argu-ment with her mother, in which the latter tries to dissuade her daughter from loving a man she brandishes as a “sodomite” (8583); the future matron of Rome thus acts as a focal point for the narrator’s anxiety about sexual identity within a romance that examines a range of sexual roles.¹⁷Even as she acts as an agent of sexual provocation, Lavinia is no less a founding mother whose reproductive sexuality is vital to imperial aims. Like Silence, Lavinia compels readers to wonder how women “fit” in courtly culture – as welcome agents of cultural

change, or as troublesome forces of nature who must be domesticated as wives and mothers?

Following the lead of the Eneas, early French romancers take up the “question of women” and the debate about gender as one of the fundamental concerns of their narratives. All the works of Chrétien de Troyes, author of the first full-fledged Arthurian romance who set his successors’ critical agenda for several generations, portray a woman or women as a catalyst for questions that pro-foundly trouble the courtly world. When Enide in Erec et Enide laments that her husband’s excessive love for her has led to charges of recreantise, or lazy knight-hood, among his peers, Erec leads her on a series of adventures where she repeat-edly defies his interdiction to speak in order to ensure his safety. Her disruptive speech evokes the threat of women to undermine the chivalric enterprise, a threat enacted by Enide’s cousin, who has entrapped her lover in a “courtly” garden.¹⁸ Rather than spell out just why Erec set out to test his wife, the narrator tells his audience that he has already told them about the knight’s motivations (Erec, 6420–29) – a rhetorical device that encourages readers to reflect on the romance’s portrayal of gender relations.

In Cligés, Yvain, the Chevalier de la Charrette, and the Conte du Graal, Chrétien continues to represent women paradoxically both as objects of mascu-line exchange and as potentially troubling subjects whose desires can thwart the projects of empire, impose restrictions upon a knight’s freedom or obstacles to his yearnings, or divert him from his spiritual quest, as well as engender in men a more “noble” heart. One of Chrétien’s most memorable female characters, the clever servant Lunete, who resolves tensions by means of verbal tricks in Yvain, is a prototype of the resourceful female go-between (and ingenious narratorial agent) in later romances. Arthurian fictions and other courtly adventure stories long after Chrétien continued to cast women as alternately dependent and spell-binding figures whose elusive presence was crucial to the knight’s quest for honor – yet who sometimes acted as disruptive forces or as catalysts for the author’s and reader’s critique.

Another strain of romances situated women closer to the heart of the story.

We can trace the origins of femino-centric romance to Marie de France, who probably wrote in England in the 1170s. Marie states in the Prologue to her Lais that she will not translate from Latin texts, as so many of her (male) contempo-raries have done; her aesthetic choices and her narrative voice establish her fem-inine difference within masculine courtly discourse.¹⁹ Marie’s collection of twelve lais (short tales that are not full-blown romances) feature women who speak and act according to their desires as they attempt to surmount the obsta-cles that limit their lives. Young and unhappily married women, or mal mariées, populate half the lais; the others recount stories of maidens who undergo crises of identity on the cusp of adulthood. Marie often deploys marvelous

interven-tions or extraordinary acts or encounters that allow her heroines to explore alter-nate realities, to transform their lives, or to amend the moral vision of those around them. An orphaned maiden in Fresne generously bestows the beautiful coverlet, in which she was abandoned at birth, upon her beloved, who has just married another woman; her gesture sets off a chain of events in which she is revealed to be the bride’s twin sister, the first marriage is annulled, and the epon-ymous heroine marries the knight she desires. After the damsel in Milun has a child out of wedlock with a lover whom she cannot marry, the couple arranges adoption and she submits to an arranged marriage; the lady maintains contact with her ami by means of an extraordinary swan for twenty years, until finally mother, father and son are united as a legitimate family. The generous wife in Eliduc does not react with jealousy (as does Iseut of the White Hands in the Tristan legend) when she discovers her husband’s mistress in a coma; instead, Guildeluec revives the maiden, Guiliadon, with a magic herb and joins a nunnery so her husband may marry the maiden. Years later, this couple also rejects secular love and enters religious orders.

Precisely because Marie’s fictions imagine unusual answers to ordinary, yet intractable problems, they highlight the constraints and tensions faced by men and women in “real” life, where no ideal solutions can be found. By assembling twelve diverse stories that fail to converge around a simple moral truth, Marie invites her audience to add their own “surplus de . . . sens” (“reservoir of meaning”) and to ponder the ethical dimensions of sexual and social relations, which are inevitably thorny. Marie, like Chrétien, inaugurates debate and reflec-tion about gender issues. She also develops the type of resourceful heroine who will flourish in later romans réalistes, some of which draw inspiration directly from her (such as Galeran de Bretagne, which derives from Fresne) or which emerge from independent sources, such as Silence.²⁰

M A I D E N S, W I V E S, FA I R I E S, QU E E N S : T H E PAT H S O F RO M A N C E WO M E N

The three principal female characters in Silence suggest the broad range of roles enacted by women in romance. The clever, virtuous maiden is framed by two contrasting women: her mother Eufemie, the good mother whose love for her

The three principal female characters in Silence suggest the broad range of roles enacted by women in romance. The clever, virtuous maiden is framed by two contrasting women: her mother Eufemie, the good mother whose love for her