Abstract
The antifeminism of many medieval fabliaux presents women as shrewish, deceptive, and unfaithful, and often women are bodily punished for their misdeeds, especially when their social and sexual behaviors exceed gendered standards.1 For an example, the Anglo-Norman Chevalier a la Corbeille, which is found in Harley 2253, a manuscript celebrated for containing the largest surviving collection of Middle English lyrics, features a young, adulterous couple who wishes harm the wife’s mother-in-law in the form of physical impairments. When the mother-in-law gets in the way of the couple’s illicit sexual escapades, the young lover tells the wife that he would like to cripple, render mute, deafen, and blind his mother. Although the lover does not act on his threats, the threats are made manifest at the end of the tale in the form of bodily harm the mother-in-law receives when she topples from a window, lands in the lovers’ basket (the vehicle the lover uses to enter the wife’s bedchamber), and crashes to the ground.2
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Notes
For more on antifeminism in fabliaux, see Joseph Bédier, Les Fabliaux (Paris: Emile Bouillon, 1893)
Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1957); Phillippe Ménard, Les Fabliaux: Contes á rire du moyen âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983). Ménard directly counters Bédier’s claim that all medieval fabliaux portray women negatively, but he does concede that the texts demonstrate particular disdain for especially sexual women.
Phillippe Ménard, Les Fabliaux: Contes á rire du moyen âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983). Ménard directly counters Bédier’s claim that all medieval fabliaux portray women
For the text and translation, see Carter Revard, “Four Fabliaux from London, British Library Ms Harley 2253, Translated into English Verse,” Chaucer Review 40.2 (2005): p. 118 [111–40]. For more on this particular fabliau, see Barbara Nolan, “Anthologizing Ribaldry: Five Anglo-Norman Fabliaux,” in Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253 (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2000), pp. 289–327; and Thomas Corbin Kennedy, Anglo-Norman Poems About Love, Women, and Sex from British Museum MS Harley 2253, doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1973.
For more on this particular fabliau, see Barbara Nolan, “Anthologizing Ribaldry: Five Anglo-Norman Fabliaux,” in Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253 (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2000), pp. 289–327; and Thomas Corbin Kennedy, Anglo-Norman Poems About Love, Women, and Sex from British Museum MS Harley 2253, doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1973.
Thomas Corbin Kennedy, Anglo-Norman Poems About Love, Women, and Sex from British Museum MS Harley 2253, doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1973.
Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 21.
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 53.
David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). See also Mitchell and Snyder, pp. 7–8, 53.
David T. Mitchell, “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: MLA, 2002), p. 24 [15–29].
Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c.1100-c.1400 (New York: Routledge, 2006). Metzler dismisses literary representations of characters with physical impairments as simply “parod[ies] of the courtly beauty ideal” and not comments on those with physical impairments (p. 53). I argue, however, that we cannot divorce social commentary from such literary representations, for the satire inherent in parody is social commentary.
See Edward Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics of Marginalization in Medieval Europe,” Exemplaria 14.2 (October 2001): 351–82.
Karma Lochrie, Heterosynchrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 24. Lochrie notes that scholars of sexuality after Foucault consider the Middle Ages as a monolithic model against which the “modern” is measured (pp. 1–2).
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2006), p. 17.
Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 70–1.
Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 77.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).
Disability scholars like Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine have already noted that contemporary disabled women often face blatant discrimination in regards to their status as sexual beings and mothers. Doctors may refuse to prescribe birth control or educate disabled women on sexually transmitted diseases, while legal and child care authorities frequently prevent or hinder disabled women in the process of adoption, child custody cases, and applications for foster care (p. 248). Moreover, as Tanya Titchkosky has shown, medical discourse can construct mothers who knowingly give birth to disabled children as “not only derelict in their duty, but monstrously mistaken in their choices.” While these contemporary concerns for disabled women are indeed valid and should be investigated further, my focus here remains on the literary construction of women’s reproduction in medieval fabliaux. See Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine, “Nurturance, Sexuality and Women with Disabilities: The Example of Women and Literature,” The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 241–59
Tanya Titchkosky, “Clenched Subjectivity: Disability, Women, and Medical Discourse,” Disability Studies Quarterly 25.3 (2005), Education Research Complete, March 23, 2007, http://search.ebscohost.com.
Rosi Braidotti, “Mothers, Monsters, and Machines,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 64 [59–79], emphasis in original.
Margaret Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London: Sage, 2002) p. 31.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968) p. 25, 26.
Arthur Lindley, Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse: Studies in Carnivalesque Subversion (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996) p. 20.
Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 131 [124–42].
Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 325 [318–59].
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 38.
“Dame Sirith,” in The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002) p. 35, l. 190 [29–52]. All subsequent citations will come from this edition and will be cited by line number.
Eve Salisbury, “Introduction,” in The Trials and Joys of Marriage, p. 11. The “weeping bitch” motif dates back to such classical sources as Aesop’s Fables. See Eldegard DuBruck, “Aesop’s Weeping Puppy: Late-Medieval Migrations of a Narrative Motif,” The Early Drama, Art, and Music Review 22.1 (1999): 1–10 for a study of the motif’s uses in late-medieval dramas.
Jill Mann’s Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973) details the rich tradition of anticlerical satire available to writers in Middle English. This anticlerical satire often depicts clergymen as gluttonous, greedy, and excessively sexual.
Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews,” pp. 363–5. For more on faked disabilities, see Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 62–3.
William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, 2nd edn, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Everyman 1995), p. 2, l. 22, p. 100, ll. 121–2.
P. H. Cullum, “Spiritual and Bodily Works of Mercy,” in A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe, eds. John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004), p. 180 [177–93].
Janet Price and Margaret Shildrick, Vital Signs: Feminist Reconfigurations of the Bio/Logical Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 236.
Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries, trans. Helen Rodnite Lemay (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 129.
Lovesickness as a physical illness dates back to antiquity. Its symptoms include physical wasting, paleness, lack of appetite, and insomnia. See Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The “Viaticum” and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990) for a cultural history of the disease.
Thomas Hahn, “Introduction to The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle,” originally published in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1995) March 26, 2007, http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/ragintro.htm. For more information on the performance of the loathly lady, see Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 252–4.
see Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 252–4.
Bettina Bildhauer, “Bloodsuckers: The Construction of Female Sexuality in Medieval Science and Fiction,” in Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, eds. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Teresa Walters (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), p. 106 [104–15].
Juliette Dor, “The Sheela-na-Gig: An Incongruous Sign of Sexual Purity,” in Medieval Virginities, ed. Anke Bernau, et. al (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 33–55, notes that the image may have been used to encourage virginity by eliciting fear of the female body. For more on the vagina dentata
see David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster In Mediaeval Thought and Literature, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1996), pp. 164–8.
While scholars have noted the links between January’s wealth and lecherousness and his status as a Lombard, none has directly connected his Lombard origins to marginalization and disability. Of course, January would not have been marginalized in his home country where the tale takes place; however, to Chaucer’s English audience, January would assume the status of the marginal. The Lombard connection to disability—particularly blindness—stems from the association of Jews with blindness and the subsequent linkage of Lombards to Jews. Chaucer draws deliberate attention to January’s Lombard roots by clearly demonstrating January’s age and wealth, two qualities that his probable source text, an account of the fruit-tree deception in the late-thirteenth to early-fourteenth-century Italian Novellino tales, omits. See “The Merchant’s Tale,” Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (New York: Humanities Press, 1958), pp. 341–52.
For more on the link between Jews and blindness, see Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews.” For January as Lombard, see Paul Olson, “The Merchant’s Lombard Knight,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature III (1961): 263
Emerson Brown, Jr., “The Merchant’s Tale: Why Was January Born ‘Of Pavye’?” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71.4 (1970): 654–58.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Merchant’s Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) l. 1245. All subsequent citations from this text will come from this edition and will be cited parenthetically by line number.
Carole Everest, “Sight and Sexual Performance in the Merchant’s Tale,” in Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter G. Beidler (Woodbridge, England: D.S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 91–103.
Cynthia Kraman writes, “[The tale] takes up the received idea that the body of woman is possessable and available, that it can be secured and shut away for personal enjoyment as one does to flowers by building a garden with a wall, a door, a lock, and inevitable ‘clycket.’ “ See “Communities of Otherness in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale,” in Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 40 [138–54].
For more on pica in the “Merchant’s Tale,” see Carol Everest, “Pears and Pregnancy in Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale,’ “ in Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Melitta Weiss Adamson (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 161–75.
See Milton Miller, “The Heir in the Merchant’s Tale,” Philological Quarterly 29 (1950): 439, and Carol Everest, “ ‘Paradys or Helle’: Pleasure and Procreation in Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale,’ “ in Sovereign Lady: Essays on Medieval Women in Middle English Literature, ed. Muriel Whitaker (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 63–84.
Carol Everest, “ ‘Paradys or Helle’: Pleasure and Procreation in Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale,’ “ in Sovereign Lady: Essays on Medieval Women in Middle English Literature, ed. Muriel Whitaker (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 63–84.
Emerson Brown finds that conception cannot occur because of January’s sudden disruption of their activity. Peter Beidler, though he admits that Brown’s essay calls readers to question their quick assumption that the affair results in May’s pregnancy, finds Brown’s conclusions ultimately unconvincing, citing that it is too difficult to determine whether the union was completed or interrupted. Everest, whose study focuses on the “two seed” theory of medieval medical texts, concludes that the union must be fruitful due to the fertility of both Damian and May. See Emerson Brown, “Hortus Inclonclusus: The Significance of Priapus and Pyramus and Thisbe in the Merchant’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 4 (1970): 33
Peter G. Biedler, “The Climax in the Merchant’s Tale, The Chaucer Review 6 (1971): 39; and Everest, “Paradys or Helle.”
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© 2010 Tory Vandeventer Pearman
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Pearman, T.V. (2010). (Dis)Pleasure and (Dis)Ability: The Topos of Reproduction in Dame Sirith and the “Merchant’s Tale”. In: Women and Disability in Medieval Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117563_2
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