Abstract
This chapter examines the implicit and explicit threats of sexual violence that problematize issues of sexual consent between lovers in three twelfth-century Komnenian novels: Theodore Prodromos’ Rhodanthe and Dosikles, Eustathios Makrembolites’ Hysmine and Hysminias, and Niketas Eugenianos’ Drosilla and Charikles. The application of an ecofeminist narratology can demonstrate the ways in which the aesthetics and rhetorical practices of romance prioritize male voices and experiences while simultaneously silencing those of women, non-human animals, plants, and the other marginalized objects of male violence. By contrast, Christine de Pizan’s Old French anti-romance The Tale of the Shepherdess reveals the often terrifying and violent romantic encounters from the perspective of a woman, thus demonstrating how standpoint criticism can reveal patriarchal ideologies from perspectives of alterity.
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Notes
- 1.
R&D 1.10–11. For the dating and manuscript tradition of each of the novels, see the introduction to each in Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels.
- 2.
“Ἄλλου κεφαλὴν ἐξέκοπτεν ἡ σπάθη, | ἄλλος διχῇ τέτμητο πανθήκτῳ ξίφει” (One man’s head was hewn off by a sword, | another was split apart by a whetted blade) (R&D 1.15–16).
- 3.
See, for instance, Burton, “Abduction and Elopement,” in which Burton argues that “Prodromos ’ remarkable innovation of a non-consensual abduction of the heroine by the hero seems to have escaped notice” (377), and 377 n.1 and n.2 for a summary of the previous scholarship. Burton may not be entirely correct in this, since Jouanno had already pointed to such possibilities in “Les barbares dans le roman byzantin.”
- 4.
Herrin, Unrivalled Influence, 262.
- 5.
For which, see for instance, Angold, Church and Society; Laiou, Consent and Coercion; Evans-Grubbs, “Abduction Marriage”; Burton, “Elopement and Abduction”; and Karlin-Hayter, “Further Notes on Byzantine Marriage.”
- 6.
Garland, “Be Amorous but Be Chaste,” 73. Garland lists no fewer than twelve separate acts in Rhodanthe and Dosikles alone in which both men and women reject unwanted advances, most often those of slaves toward their masters or other social superiors (73 n.43).
- 7.
Jouanno, “Women in Byzantine Novels,” 143.
- 8.
Jouanno, “Women in Byzantine Novels,” 152.
- 9.
Burton, “Elopement and Abduction,” 387 and following for her discussion of previous scholarship. Anthony Littlewood describes the garden in both the ancient novel and the Byzantine romance as the “frequent […] scene for erotic action” and notes that “seven gardens are used for love-making and one, chronologically the first in the series, for rape,” a reference to Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon of the first or second century ce, which became a major source for Hysmine and Hysminias .
- 10.
R&D 1.102–111.
- 11.
Burton, “Abduction and Elopement,” 387.
- 12.
R&D 2.284–287.
- 13.
R&D 2.288–290.
- 14.
R&D 2.295.
- 15.
The scene is also discussed in Burton, “Abduction and Elopement,” 387.
- 16.
R&D 1.190–196.
- 17.
R&D 1.220.
- 18.
R&D 1.235, 245.
- 19.
R&D 2.120–123.
- 20.
R&D 2.385–391.
- 21.
R&D 2.400.
- 22.
Burton, “Abduction and Elopement,” 383.
- 23.
R&D 3.22. The scene is discussed in MacAlister, Dreams and Suicides, 141. The peaceful contentment of Nausikrates seen in this flashback is starkly at odds with his initial presentation in the novel, during which he gives a brave speech before he is executed by Gobryas in the immediate aftermath of the sack of Rhodes . Indeed, as he prepares for his execution, he seems to recall the symposium that, though it happens three books later in the narrative, had occurred only the day before, announcing boldly as he faces Gobryas ’ sword:
χαίροιτε, δεῖπνα καὶ πότοι τῶν ἐν βίῳ
καὶ τῶν τραπεζῶν ἡ πολυτελεστέρα.
πλησθεὶς γὰρ ὑμῶν εἰς κόρον Ναυσικράτης
κάτεισιν εἰς Ἄιδος ἄσμενος δόμον,
ἐπόψεται δὲ νεκρικὰς εὐωχίας
Greetings, banquets and symposia of this life
and the delicacies of the table.
Nausikrates has had his fill of you
and goes gladly to the abode of Hades,
and will investigate the symposia of the dead. (R&D 1.488–492)
The full resonance of Nausikrates ’ speech at the moment of his death only becomes clear in light of the subsequent description of his contented drunken sleep at the symposium narrated here. For an analysis of this passage in light of the broader context of dreams and death in the novels, see MacAlister, Dreams and Suicides, 134.
- 24.
R&D 3.47–67.
- 25.
For an analysis of the way food and visual art in this scene draw from contemporary imperial practice and from Byzantine literary history (i.e. the Satyricon), see Dauterman Maguire and Maguire, Other Icons, 37–41.
- 26.
R&D 3.151–155.
- 27.
R&D 3.173.
- 28.
R&D 3.217–227.
- 29.
R&D 3.265–270.
- 30.
In a further similarity, Gobryas has also built his career through killing and city-sacking, predicating his demand that Mistylos award him Rhodanthe as his share of the spoils because
τὸν σὸν γινώσκεις σατράπην τὸν Γωβρύαν
πολλαῖς ἐναθλήσαντα πολλάκις μάχαις,
πολλάς κατασκάψαντα δυσμενῶν πόλεις,
πολλὰς λαταστρέψαντα ναῦς ἀντιπλόους
καὶ τοὺς ἐν αὐταῖς ἀνελόντα ναυμάχους.
καὶ τοὺς ἐν αὐταῖς ἀνελόντα ναυμάχους.
you know that your satrap Gobryas
has striven often in many battles,
has razed many unlucky cities to the ground,
has destroyed many ships that sailed against us
and killed the crews in them. (R&D 3.1603–1604)
Dosikles ’ backstory is itself unnarrated; he claims to be “ἀνὴρ γάρ εἰμι καὶ μάχαις συετράφην” (a man reared in battles) (R&D 1.116), though it is unclear if these were purely defensive battles or if Dosikles , too, has a history as a city-sacker and slaver.
- 31.
R&D 3.285. The scene is discussed in MacAlister, Dreams and Suicides, 143.
- 32.
R&D 3.284, 286.
- 33.
Burton, “Abduction and Elopement,” notes that “Rhodanthe’s first sight of Dosikles is in the course of a violent abduction, performed with armed accomplices. There is no mutual love, no reciprocity, no collaboration in the abduction as Dosikles describes it (R&D 2.443–454)” (386). This is true, but the issue of consent is more complicated than this, because Rhodanthe , as she sails away, jeers her former captors and praises her new ones for rescuing her.
- 34.
Burton, “Abduction and Elopement,” discusses how, by using the rhetoric of hunting and battling, Dosikles “refigure[s] the love project [to] help rationalize the violence” (387). His friends, however, in speaking of attacking like pirates, “lay bare the criminal nature of such a violent attack” (387).
- 35.
R&D 4.344.
- 36.
R&D 1.11.
- 37.
R&D 6.291–302.
- 38.
R&D 8.471–475.
- 39.
R&D 9.316–339. The passage is the subject of extensive analysis in Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, 54–57, citing also relevant bibliography, which focuses mostly on the distinction between visual and literary arts. Roilos examines the passage in light of Byzantine rhetorical tropes and ekphrastic technique and self-referential discourse (“Prodromos makes real life, as depicted in his literary art, imitate pictorial art,” 56). And though Roilos connects “a metanarrative metaphor” about weaving that had been scattered throughout the work (57), he does not connect the weaving of the fabric into a new creature with the various other forms of weaving and twining in the natural world and among the human characters throughout the text (as in the example of the interwoven hands under the interwoven vines ).
- 40.
D&C 1.23–29.
- 41.
D&C 1.30–32.
- 42.
D&C 1.36–39.
- 43.
Burton, “Abduction and Elopement,” suggests that Charikles , like Dosikles , had also “contemplate[d] a forcible, non-consensual abduction of the heroine” and so knows something about rape as well (391).
- 44.
D&C 1.236–242.
- 45.
D&C 1.323–329. This is, incidentally, nearly the exact language that Kleandros uses as he describes the letters with which he wooed Kalligone:
Ἐξ ἡλίου φλέγοντος ὡς ὁδοιπόρος,
ὡς σκιερόν τι δένδρον ἐξεύρηκα σε.
ὡς κισσὸς εἰς δρῦν συμπλακείην παννύχως.
Like a wayfarer in the burning sun,
I have found you, my shady tree;
would that I could be entwined around you all night like ivyround an oak. (D&C 2.296–298)
Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, addresses this passage at length (214–215), with particular emphasis on the textual allusions to the Song of Songs and allegorical readings in light of Christian theology (213–221).
- 46.
Εἰ γὰρ σε περκάζουσαν ἄμπελον βλέπω,
τὸ στέρνον ἐκθλίψει τίς ὡς γλυκὺν βότρυν,
ἢ γλεῦκος ῾δὺ νεκταρῶδες ἐκχύσει;
For if I look on you as a ripening cluster of grapes ,
should one press your chest like a sweet grape
or pour out a nectar-like flow of a pleasant new vintage? (D&C 4.121–123)
and again later:
τὸ χρῶμα τερπνὸν οἷον αὐτοῦ ναρκίσου,
ἄνθος παρειπων ὡς ἐρυθρόχρουν ῥόδον,
[…]
οἱ βοστρυχοί σου κισσὸς ἐμπεπλεγμένος.
Your delightful complexion is that of a narcissus,
the bloom of your cheeks is that of a red-hued rose
[…]
your curling locks are entwined ivy . (D&C 4.127–128, 30)
- 47.
ἐρωμένης ἐρῶντος. ὢ ξένη σχέσις.
Ἐρᾷ δὲ φυτοῦ φυτὸν ἄλλο πολλάκις
φοῖνιξ δὲ πρὸς γῆν οὐδὲ ῥιζοῦσαι θέλει,
εἰ μὴ τὸ ηήλυ συμφυτεύσειας πέλας.
Τhe lover and the beloved; oh, strange relationship.
One plant often loves another;
a palm tree is unwilling to take root in the earth
unless you plant its mate close by. (D&C 4.141–144)
- 48.
D&C 4.145–148.
- 49.
D&C 4.234–238.
- 50.
D&C 4.246.
- 51.
D&C 4.274–288.
- 52.
“Καὶ συμπλακέντες τῷ μεταξὺ τῶν λόγον | ὡς κισσὸς εἰς δρῦν ἀντεφίλουν ἀσμένος” (And embracing in the pause of her speech | like ivy clinging to an oak , they kissed each other gladly) (D&C 7.229).
- 53.
D&C 8.138–143.
- 54.
D&C 8.144–146.
- 55.
D&C 9.293.
- 56.
D&C 8.218–20.
- 57.
D&C 9.47–53. Roilos also analyzes this lament, and D&C 9.50–51 in particular, with regard to the ways in which the lament as a whole follows the “tripartite chronological structure that adheres to the corresponding rhetorical rule of progymnasmata and monody,” but without reference to the particular subject matter of the lament, that is, its evocation of the natural world through the life cycles of crops and trees (95–96).
- 58.
D&C 6.25–26.
- 59.
D&C 6.19–20.
- 60.
Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels, 417. See also Jouanno, who argues “Eugenianos similarly emphasises Drosilla’s modesty. […] When she arrives at a village she dare not come closer, for she is ashamed ‘to enter by herself’ (D&C 6.196)” (“Women in Byzantine Novels,” 146).
- 61.
D&C 6.570–573.
- 62.
D&C 6.654–656.
- 63.
D&C 7.59–66.
- 64.
D&C 7.144–149.
- 65.
D&C 7.221–224.
- 66.
D&C 7.230.
- 67.
D&C 8.84–91.
- 68.
H&H 1.4.1. Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels, 217. Of particular note in this regard are the “suggestions of sensuality” and that “wine is served at the dinners, wine which is a product of one of the erotic plants” (Nilsson, Erotic Pathos, 99).
- 69.
Jeffreys notes the parallel between Hysmine and the garden : “The garden with its protective walls and abundant fertility can perhaps be taken to stand for the protected chastity of its maiden owner” (Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels, 179), with citations for relevant literature. I would only quibble that the garden does not represent the maiden’s chastity, but rather the maiden herself. Nilsson suggests that “Hysmine is connected with the garden both explicitly and in interlocking words or imagery” (Erotic Pathos, 99).
- 70.
H&H 1.10.1.
- 71.
H&H 1.10.2.
- 72.
H&H 3.5.2.
- 73.
H&H 3.5.7. The scene is discussed in MacAlister, Dreams and Suicides, 138.
- 74.
H&H 3.7.1.
- 75.
H&H 3.7.3.
- 76.
H&H 3.7.3.
- 77.
H&H 3.7.5.
- 78.
For this scene in the context of Hysminias’ other dreams, see Nilsson, Erotic Pathos, 107 and, more recently, Nilsson, “To Touch or Not to Touch,” 248–255.
- 79.
H&H 3.7.7.
- 80.
H&H 4.3.2.
- 81.
H&H 4.3.4.
- 82.
H&H 4.22.3.
- 83.
H&H 4.23.2.
- 84.
H&H 4.23.3.
- 85.
H&H 5.3.2.
- 86.
H&H 5.3.5.
- 87.
H&H 5.16.3.
- 88.
H&H 5.17.1. For a discussion of this passage, see Nilsson, Erotic Pathos, 115 and 114–117 for a broader discussion of Hysmine and flower imagery.
- 89.
H&H 5.17.2.
- 90.
Hysmine again rebuffs Hysminias ’ advances later, and when she does, he asks: “Τί γοῦν μὴ τὸν βότρυν τρυγῶ πεπανθέντα καὶ ὅλον ὑπερπερκάσαντα; Τί μὴ τὸν στάχυν θερίζω κεκυφότα πρὸς γῆν;” (So why do I not pluck the grape that is ripe and brimming with juice? Why do I not harvest the corn that is bowed down to the ground?) (H&H 7.4.1).
- 91.
H&H 7.15.1.
- 92.
H&H 8.2.1.
- 93.
H&H 8.3.2.
- 94.
“Οὕτω τοίνυν τὰ μὲν περί τὰς γυναῖκας αἰσχρως” (While these shameful things were happening to the women) (H&H 8.4.1); “αἱ δέ γε γυναῖκς αἰσχρῶς τοῖς βαρβαροῖς συνανεκλίθησαν. καὶ ἦν ἡ τριήρης πανδοχεῖον πλῆρες αἰσχρότητος καὶ συμπόσιον αὅματος” (the women lay shamelessly with the barbarians , and the trireme became a brothel full of turpitude and a symposium of blood) (H&H 8.4.3). Hysmine then again references “ὅσα ταῖς γυναιξίν ἠναιδεύετο” (all their disgraceful behaviour towards the women) (H&H 8.6.1). Three days later, they put in to shore again and after “καὶ τἆλλα ὁπόσα βαρβαρικῶς ἀσμένως ταῖς γυναιξὶ κατεχρήσατο, σὺν αὐταῖς γυναιξὶ πρὸς ὕπνον ἐτράπη τὸ βάρβαρον, ὅλαις ἡδοναῖς καταβαπτισθὲν τὴν ψυχὴν καὶ ὅλοις καταμεθύσαν τοῖς ἔρωσιν” (all the other disgraceful activities to which they subjected the women, the barbarians disposed themselves for sleep with the women, immersing their souls completely in pleasure and entirely intoxicated with their passions) (8.8.2). Such is the extent to which Makrembolites is unable to narrate from a female perspective that even rape is narrated from the perspective of barbarian men: the focus is on their pleasure and passions, not on the terror and agony of the women.
- 95.
H&H 8.7.6.
- 96.
Burton, “Abduction and Elopement,” 392.
- 97.
Moore, Exchanges in Exoticism, 37.
- 98.
Moore, Exchanges in Exoticism, 38–39.
- 99.
Moore herself stresses that “women are constantly the subject of rape and physical violence throughout Digenis” (Moore, Exchanges in Exoticism, 39).
- 100.
Caroline Dinshaw’s Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, and in particular the chapter “Reading Like a Man,” complicates this picture. While agreeing with the general principle that male narrators and male readers marginalize women’s experiences and voices in texts, Dinshaw nevertheless sees Chaucer as an exception to this rule, suggesting that “the very denaturalization of the masculine perspective becomes something of a structural principle in Chaucer’s later poetic projects. In the Canterbury Tales […] he speaks in the voices of others, in the voices of sometimes ostentatiously gendered characters, and, further, he shows the costs, the risks, the personal and political stakes involved in the deliberate assumption of a gendered voice” (29). The debate over Chaucer’s dissident sympathies and progressive politics has been heated and inconclusive; nevertheless, the narratological principle of silencing female voices remains a fundamental aspect of medieval literature, even if Chaucer may be exceptional in this regard.
- 101.
Friedman, “Between Boccaccio and Chaucer ,” 203.
- 102.
Friedman, “Between Boccaccio and Chaucer ,” 204.
- 103.
Cohen, “Posthuman Environs,” 39.
- 104.
Cohen, “Posthuman Environs,” 39.
- 105.
Challenging the reading of rape as a purely literary or symbolic function in texts, Dinshaw argues that the real-life rape accusations against Chaucer “reminds us that there are not only figurative rapes—the writer’s intent raped by the scribe’s pen, the text as woman’s body violated by the interpenetrations of literary and exegetical tradition—and there are not only fictional rapes […] but there are real rapes as well. It forces us, first of all, to face the literal reality that such a metaphorical identification can obscure, and it keeps in front of us the difference between literary activity and sexual violation. To equate reading with rape would be to underestimate drastically the transgressive reality of rape [… and] to consider causal relationships between gendered representation and actual social relations between men and women” (Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 11).
- 106.
Armstrong, “The Postcolonial Animal,” 417.
- 107.
Katharine Haynes discusses similar issues in the ancient novel. She explores the limits of Elaine Showalter’s argument that “any focus on male images of women ignores […] what women have actually felt and experienced” (Fashioning the Feminine, 11). For Haynes, the problem with conceiving of “male-authored texts [as] useless for identifying a ‘female experience’” is that “for the Classical world, the majority of accounts that we possess which may relate to the female experience are male authored,” and thus a rejection of them “dismisses most of Classical literature at one stroke” (12). She positions Alice Jardine’s work on “gynesis” as an oppositional model that “focus[es] on what has been left out of, or denied emphasis in, the great Western master narratives” (12). This method of criticism “demands a sensitivity in reading male authored texts, encouraging the critic to focus on language and its ambiguity […] Marginalized characters must be allowed to speak; the throwaway lines and throwaway characters examined for their implicit assumptions” (Fashioning the Feminine, 13).
- 108.
Jouanno, “Women in Byzantine Novels,” 145.
- 109.
Jouanno, “Women in Byzantine Novels,” 145.
- 110.
Moore notes that “the mothers are active letter writers” (Exchanges in Exoticism, 38).
- 111.
Barber, “Reading the Garden ,” 16. About the elaborate ekphrases that often depict women as statues or paintings, he writes: “The comparison to a work of art effectively silences them” (17).
- 112.
Barber notes that “in Digenes the object of the hero’s attention is simply referred to as The Girl” (“Reading the Garden ,” 17). See, too, the ways in which women’s names are narrated in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes , as, for instance, in the Knight of the Cart , wherein Lancelot’s name is withheld for purposes of narrative suspense, while Meleagant’s sister—who plays a crucial role in the romance—is never named at all.
- 113.
R&D 9.486; D&C 9.299–300.
- 114.
Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 19. Beaton adds much to his discussion of these subjects in the afterword to the second edition. For more recent discussions of the relationship between Byzantium and the West, see, for instance, Yiavis, “Adaptations of Western Sources” and Yiavis, “‘Originals’ and ‘Adaptations’: Revisiting Categories in Late Byzantine Romance.” For an account of the rise of romance as the result of cultural contact between Byzantium and the Latin West during the Crusades, see Heng, Empire of Magic, among numerous others.
- 115.
And, indeed, is reshaping the definition of East–West, which once referred to Byzantium and Western Europe, but is now being reconfigured with Byzantium as the West and the Arab and Turkish states as the East, as, for instance, in Rubanovich, “In the Mood of Love,” Rubanovich, “A Hero Without Borders,” and Krönung, “The Wisdom of the Beasts.”
- 116.
See, for instance, Markopoulos, “Linguistic Contacts in the Late Byzantine Romances.”
- 117.
“Throughout the dream Rodamni remains silent and her reactions are not recorded—she is only presented as the object of desire, Eros ’ gift to Livistros. This comes as no surprise since this is Livistros ’ dream, which he saw before meeting with Rodamni in his waking life.” Priki, “Eros the Executioner,” n.p. (forthcoming).
- 118.
Priki, “Eros the Executioner,” n.p. (forthcoming).
- 119.
Priki, “Eros the Executioner,” n.p. (forthcoming).
- 120.
Priki, “Eros the Executioner,” n.p. (forthcoming).
- 121.
4676–4687. All citations from the French from Chrétien, Oeuvres Complètes.
- 122.
Chrétien, Complete Romance, 227.
- 123.
4745–4747; Chrétien, Complete Works, 228.
- 124.
6420–6422; Chrétien, Complete Works, 248.
- 125.
6424–6425; Chrétien, Complete Works, 248.
- 126.
409–419. All quotations from McWebb, Debating the Romance of the Rose.
- 127.
648–652.
- 128.
675–679.
- 129.
723–733.
- 130.
754–763.
- 131.
Pisan, Oeuvres Complètes, 485–497.
- 132.
Pizan, Selected Writings, 48.
- 133.
Pisan, Oeuvres Complètes, 541–542.
- 134.
Pizan, Selected Writings, 49.
- 135.
Pisan, Oeuvres Complètes, 568–570.
- 136.
Pizan, Selected Writings, 49.
- 137.
Pisan, Oeuvres Complètes, 582–584; 602–606.
- 138.
Pizan, Selected Writings, 49.
- 139.
Weil, Thinking Animals, 2.
- 140.
Andrianova, “Narrating Animal Trauma,” 1.
- 141.
Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 203. Donovan quotes Cary Wolfe’s assertion that “we are forced to make the same kind of shift in the ethics of reading and interpretation that attended taking sexual difference seriously in the 1990s (in the form of queer theory) or race and gender seriously in the 1970s and 1980s” (Wolfe, “Human, All Too Human,” 567–568; quoted in Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 203). The origins of this method of analysis can be found in Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” which argues that marginal voices—in her case with specific reference to postcolonial literature of the Indian subcontinent—are necessarily silenced in the dominant discourses of the colonizer: the postcolonial subject cannot speak, she argues, except through the mediating voice of their own oppressors.
- 142.
Laist, Plants and Literature, 10.
- 143.
Laist, Plants and Literature, 11.
- 144.
Marder, Plant Thinking, 3.
- 145.
For a perspective from medieval studies, see Steel, How to Make a Human: “Critical animal theory stresses that the categories ‘human’ and ‘animal,’ as well as the assumption of any absolute limit between humans and animals, must be radically rethought; it argues, furthermore, that the category of ‘human’ is best understood by examining its dependent relation on the category ‘animal’” (4).
- 146.
D&C 7.229.
- 147.
Thus, the ecofeminist Marti Kheel finds earlier generations of environmentalists “wanting primarily because of their inability to value animals as distinct individuals in their own right. Each has marked preferences for thinking of ‘nature’ in terms of large abstractions—a species, ecosystems, even the cosmos—rather than rooting their concern in real empathy for living and often suffering fellow ‘other-than-human animals’ […] There is also a strong tendency to value ‘nature’ in the abstract primarily for its beneficial effect on the human psyche, rather than really being concerned with the quality of life of particular ‘nonhumans’ in their own right” (Kheel, Nature Ethics, x).
- 148.
Steel, How to Make a Human, 6.
- 149.
Steel, How to Make a Human, 5.
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Goldwyn, A.J. (2018). Rape, Consent, and Ecofeminist Narratology in the Komnenian Novels. In: Byzantine Ecocriticism. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69203-6_3
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