Woo Ree Heor (Seoul National University)
Cligés by Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1176) and Bevis of Hampton by an anonymous poet (c. 1300) imbue the power structure in chivalric romance that controls the relationship between the knight and the lady, male and female, with the conscious effort to differentiate the religious and cultural other from the Christian, Western self.[i] Although these two works were composed in different historical eras and languages, both display keen interest in the intersection of marriage and conquest narratives as it pertains to the military, cultural, and sexual triumph of the West over the East. The two romances, both a sort of exile-and-return story of a disinherited knight, utilize marriage not only to reestablish political stability but to assimilate the East into the Western culture. The Greek prince Cligés and the English knight Bevis respectively marry the German princess Fenice and the Armenian princess Josian as a means to complete such assimilation. However, Fenice and Josian are repeatedly threatened with sexual violence and disgrace by the contending suitors, highlighting the romances’ fixation with their virtue and/or value as royal virgin brides. Although the marriage narrative in each work outlines noble love leading to honorable marriage, it paradoxically attempts to prove the union’s integrity through violent attempts to undermine the female virtue.
Curiously, the eventual triumph of the lovers is often rendered questionable due to the narrative elements that disrupt the triumphant tone of the marriage narrative. This is especially so when the women’s identity as desirable, marriageable ladies of romance is considered. Cligés ends with an anecdote that details how the harem of Constantinople was developed as a response to Fenice’s deception of her husband, which serves to cement the Western fantasy of superiority over the East through the triumph of a westernized knight and his European lover. However, the emphasis on the lingering anxiety over feminine treachery implies that the love of Cligés and Fenice cannot successfully differentiate itself from the problematic precedent of Tristan and Iseult. On the other hand, Bevis of Hampton maps the nuanced dynamics between female sexuality, constancy, and autonomy on the figure of Josian, the converted Saracen princess. Often faced with severe hardships and multiple attempts on her virtue, Josian frequently resorts to unconventional actions in order to prove her desirability to her often distant lover Bevis. The justification required for the adulterous courtly love and the intermarriage with Saracen royalty, while contributing to reclaiming Bevis’s rightful succession and legitimate rule, ultimately testifies to the failure of the romance narrative as it confines Josian’s sexuality within its frameworks. Consequently, the attempt to perfectly control over female sexuality in the two romances only results in unexpected disturbance in the fantasy of the Western-courtly-masculine dominance over the East and the feminine.[ii]
Critical discourse on Cligés and Bevis of Hampton on the self-making of the Western chivalric subject has been fruitful during the last few decades. The articles by Leslie Dunton-Downer, Douglas Kelly, and Bonnie J. Erwin are some of the illuminating examples that explore this issue. Additionally, the collection, Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, edited by Corinne Saunders provides insightful readings with a concentration on the conversation between cultures rooted in divergent categories such as nationality, language, and class. However, even as these studies shed light on the conflicts of the chivalric self and the Other, the interactions between the polymorphous markers constructing said Other has often been neglected.[iii] Specifically, the East and the feminine often merge into one category to become the object of desire, anxiety, and hostility for the male chivalric subject. I argue that the Eastern/feminine Other in these two romances, while contributing to legitimizing narrative, testifies to the latent paranoia of the Western/masculine self over its conquest. Even as the eponymous knights of these works successfully subjugate the feminized and objectified realms of the East, they inadvertently showcase the fragile nature of their victory.
Cligés: Legitimacy and the Virgin Bride
Chrétien’s attempt to establish a firm demarcation between the Western self and the Eastern Other in Cligés starts with the reimagination of Greece and Rome as the direct successors of the Arthurian chivalry. His hope, as it is disclosed at the very start of the romance, is that “God grant that [chivalry and learning] be sustained here and their stay be so pleasing that the honor that has stopped here in France never depart” (87).[iv] Not only is France imagined to be the legitimate successor of the classical world, but it is also stated to be the core of Western courtly culture with, unlike its waning precursors, no end in sight for its flowering chivalry. This is in accordance with Dunton-Downer’s observation that the European romances contemporary to Cligés capture “a period of notable transformation in representations of the self, society, the past, and other worlds” (368), instigating the incessant need to acknowledge and reaffirm what counts as “the self” and what does not. Yet the West and the East do not simply separate themselves from one another and keep their distance; when Alexander, Cligés’s father and legitimate heir of Constantinople, becomes a knight at the court of King Arthur and marries Gawain’s sister Soredamor, the Greek empire and Arthurian court merge into one homogeneous chivalric landscape with the former becoming the subordinate to the latter. As Dunton-Downer notes, “a cultural rebeginning through which Alexander’s Greece and Arthur’s Brittany form one large family epitomizing chivalric glory and collapsing distinctions contesting the priority and centrality of Chrétien’s mythology of Arthurian culture” (375) becomes possible through the union of Cligés’s parents. Alexander’s very resolution to specifically seek out the court of King Arthur as the place to be knighted affirms Britain’s primacy over Constantinople, legitimizing “the priority and centrality” of Western European courtly culture.
As mentioned in the beginning of this article, the assimilation of Constantinople into the Western chivalric world becomes possible through the transnational marriage of Alexander and Soredamor, which the text traces meticulously. Cligés himself, as a child of this union, must follow the footsteps of his parents by securing his marriage to the German princess Fenice. However, the courtships in both generations face the need to conform to strict codes of behavior since the marriage narrative requires the lovers to assert their nobility and virtue before they are finally united. Thus Soredamor, feeling the pangs of love for the first time, refrains from confessing her love for Alexander. The lovesick maiden tells herself: “When the man learned of my words, I believe he would consider me the cheaper for them and reproach me for first asking him” (99). The man is to initiate the courtship first while the woman is to give consent or reject his advances. This creates a curious impasse in the courtship because Alexander himself is hesitant to be more assertive. Although he considers asking Soredamor’s hand in marriage as a reward for his feats or arms, he is stated to be “so afraid of displeasing her, who would have been delighted, that he would rather suffer than have her against her will” (114). The deadlock is finally resolved through the intervention of Queen Guinevere, who rather forcefully orders the lovers to confess their affections for each other and consent to marriage in one setting. The love and marriage of Cligés’s parents ultimately establish a pattern for their son to follow, in which heterosexual courtship between two unmarried persons must follow a strict code of honor and eventually results in marriage. Their union proves to be an ideal one especially because it serves to provide a much-needed political stability for the Constantinople-Britain alliance, cementing the uneven power relations between the two; the Eastern prince, transformed into a knight serving a Western king, marries the lady from the Western court to solidify his assimilation.
Unlike Alexander and Soredamor, however, the courtship of Cligés and Fenice as a new generation of royal couple is problematized by the fact that it starts as an adulterous relationship. Cligés’s uncle Alis, who first claimed the throne of Constantinople in the absence of his brother Alexander, takes Fenice as his wife in spite of his pledge to never marry in order to ensure the rightful succession of Cligés. The bond of marriage, initially meant to unite the legitimate bloodlines of the two courts, is unexpectedly used to support a usurper’s reign. Douglas Kelly argues that Cligés repeatedly comes back to the question of what is honorable and what one should do to preserve honor, reading the affair of Cligés and Fenice in similar terms; namely, that “by falling in love Cligés and Fenice introduce a potential affair with serious consequences following on lèse-majesté if they commit adultery” (37). Not only is the love of Cligés and Fenice an adulterous affair, but it will also be an active treason against Alis. To be sure, Alis is the one who first broke the promise of celibacy, and the German Emperor in his turn breaks his promise to the Duke of Saxony, the original fiancé of Fenice, by marrying her off to Alis. Yet their dishonorable deeds do not necessarily warrant or justify the lovers’ act of adultery that also doubles as treason. Unlike his parents who enjoyed a relatively favorable courtship, marriage, and accession to the throne, Cligés faces the conundrum of keeping an apparent distance from treasonous actions while actively participating in one. His journey to reclaim his rightful inheritance must steer clear of the public disgrace that such an act will implicitly entail.
In a romance of marriage such as Cligés, where noble love and political practicality are fused together to construct a harmonious narrative of desirable marriage, it is absolutely imperative that a virgin bride promised to the knight stay a virgin until the consummation can take place. For the disenfranchised knight, the sexual integrity of his lady signals the legal and political stability that he will need when he recuperates what is rightfully his. The precondition of virginity thus places Fenice in a precarious situation, where she must remain true to her deferred marriage to Cligés and avoid the suspicions of her current husband Alis. Fenice, lacking any sort of means to resolve the situation without putting her honor in jeopardy, proceeds to deceive her husband through the supernatural help of her nurse Thessala, who is well versed in magic and potion-making; to quote Kelly, “private morality” and “public morality” (43) are both at play here. For the lovers, the question of virginity is intrinsically tied to the quest for the sexual and political legitimization they seek.
To justify her actions and perhaps to gain motivation to continue the deception, Fenice often becomes a staunch advocate of female virginity as a sexual virtue. What is interesting in her rhetoric is the fact that, although being prominent precursors of an illicit love between a king’s wife and his nephew, Tristan and Iseult are invoked not to be followed as role models, but to signify a bad example that must be admonished and rejected. Specifically, Fenice criticizes the actions of her counterpart Iseult, who—in spite of her love for Tristan—continues to be sexually intimate with both Tristan and King Mark, her husband.
I could never reconcile myself to the life Iseult led. Love debased himself too much in her, for her heart belonged to one man and her body was the property of two lords. Thus she passed all her life, never refusing the two. Unreasonable was that love. But mine will always be stable, for under no circumstance will my heart and my body ever be divided. My body will never be prostituted. It will never be possessed by two partners. The man who has the heart has the body too; I exclude all others. (125)
In Fenice’s diagram of physical and psychological love, the body and the heart go hand in hand; if one person does not possess the two simultaneously, that is, if the body and the heart are distributed among disparate persons, love is “debased” and the body is “prostituted.” She later repeats this sentiment in telling Cligés that they should never become the second Tristan and Iseult, “for then the love would be not honorable but base and subject to reproach” (151). The body, especially a female body, must follow the heart and belong to the same lover to ensure that love remains a noble and honorable experience. To divide the ownership of the lady, body and mind, among multiple men would contaminate the love to become “base and subject to reproach.” Fenice’s main objective in the romance, then, would be preserving Cligés’s right over her virginal body to ensure the single ownership of her body and heart, to actively reject the precedent of Iseult.
While the precedent of Tristan and Iseult is rejected as a disgraceful version of extramarital love, another example of illicit union is brought into the lovers’ mind and similarly rejected, only that the participants are not aunt and nephew in this case. Paris and Helen, the original adulterous pair that signifies treachery and unfaithfulness, are suddenly invoked when Cligés plans to seek military support from Arthur to overthrow Alis outright. “Throughout the land of my uncle the king,” he assures Fenice, “there will be greater joy over your coming, over you and me, than the joyous welcome Helen received when Paris brought her to Troy” (151). Yet Fenice remains unconvinced by her lover’s plan for elopement and possible war, her reasoning being that “for then the entire world would talk of us the way people do of the blonde Iseult and Tristan” (151). Curiously enough, Fenice understands elopement as a public acknowledgement of disgrace that she and Cligés both participate in, especially stressing that no one would believe her struggles to preserve her virginity, transforming herself into another Iseult. To the public eye, the lady would be a “most shameless and dissolute” woman, while her knight would be considered “a fool” (152); Tristan and Iseult, Paris and Helen, and Cligés and Fenice would be one and the same. Yet despite this objection, the romance forces the lovers to elope to Britain after their affair has been exposed, setting into motion Arthur’s declaration of support for Cligés’s claim to the throne of Constantinople and, implicitly, Fenice. The dispute between the two men over the ownership of Fenice is simultaneous with, or actually becomes, their dispute over the troubled royal succession. Although a large-scale military conflict between the two nations never takes place due to the abrupt and fortuitous death of Alis, Fenice comes dangerously close to transforming into a second Iseult, and, perhaps in a more shocking turn, a second Helen.
It is perhaps worth noting that the responsibility of purging the affair of the dishonor of adultery, along with the danger and pain entailing that kind of duty, seems to singly fall on Fenice. When Fenice enlists Thessala’s help to retreat to a tower belonging to John, a vassal of Cligés, her potion-induced apparent death is examined by three physicians from Salerno. The physicians, suspecting that the queen is not truly dead, employ “extraordinary measures never before inflicted on the body of any unfortunate woman” (159) to make her confess her deception. In a sequence as extraordinary as it is macabre, Fenice’s body undergoes torture including flogging and hot lead being poured on the hands, but she never screams or speaks even once until a group of angry women led by Thessala come to her rescue.[v] Robert Levine argues that “Fenice who has not yet slept with Cligés, seems to pay merely for desiring extramarital pleasures” (212) in this incident, leading to Chrétien’s attempt at “a Tristan moralise” (220) that betrays Oedipal or otherwise twisted sexual fantasies. However, Cligés does not stop at becoming a mere anti-Tristan or Tristan moralisé; rather, it examines and ultimately enforces the political implications of a courtly love narrative with lawful marriage as its end goal. Fenice’s body, which is constantly objectified as a property of Cligés, an accessory that follows her heart’s decision, and a factor for the reestablishment of legitimate rule, finally experiences an extreme case of abjection as a bleeding, burning (dead) body. Even though Fenice is granted a strange sort of heroic status by going through severe tortures reminiscent of medieval hagiography, her pseudo-martyrdom for love reveals the complete and utter objectification of the romance lady’s body through “extraordinary measures.”
The triumph and marriage of the lovers at the end of Cligés seemingly consolidate the fantasy of assimilation in which the West absorbs the East. However, the birth of the harem at Constantinople, triggered by Fenice’s deception of her husband, testifies to the superficial and fragile nature of that very fantasy. The narrator, apparently not content with ending the romance with the marital bliss of Cligés and Feince, leaves the reader with a dry observation that “every empress, no matter who she was, no matter how highborn or noble, was guarded in Constantinople as though imprisoned” (169) due to the lingering trauma of the lovers’ elopement. Although the union of Cligés and Fenice is crucial to the restoration of legitimate succession, female treachery remains as a source of anxiety and paranoia for the patriarchal genealogy of the royal bloodline, a scar that the French-British cultural system of courtly love left on the history of Constantinople. Dunton-Downer reads this ending as “a vivid example of the generating of cultural differences for the sake of preserving the mythology of a specific culture’s distinction,” since “the exoticized, Eastern institution of the harem is made to be a direct and reactionary response to the Arthurian practice” (376). The ending of Cligés, then, realizes a double fantasy in which not only the assimilation of the East by the West ends with a triumphant success, but the East falls into a state of cultural inferiority devoid of the noble traditions of chivalry and courtly love after the fatal contact with the West.
However, the courtships of Alexander-Soredamor and Cligés-Fenice all but testify to a specifically Western version of the confinement and control of women distinct from the Eastern harem. Regarding the ending of Cligés, Levine contends that the romance proves to be “an awkward attempt to provide a fantasy solution to the problem of a bad marriage, as opposed to the Tristan-story, which merely articulates, without attempting to resolve the problem” (219). Still, the problem inherent in Cligés and the “fantasy solution” it offers for the dilemma of Tristan and Iseult, are something more than a failed attempt. The marriage narrative of Cligés, while fulfilling the Western fantasy of assimilation and conquest through the figure of a virgin bride, ultimately reveals that the love of Cligés and Fenice can never serve as a perfect anti-Tristan story.
Bevis of Hampton: Troubled Autonomy of the Saracen Lady
While Cligés imagines the assimilation of the East completed through two generations of transnational marriage, Bevis of Hampton attempts to assimilate the East that is conceived to be not only a cultural but religious other through the union of an English knight and a Saracen lady. Since the prime objective for the exiled and disenfranchised Bevis is avenging his usurped father and reclaiming his inheritance, his adventures are mainly a means to gain political and military strength. The Eastern domain, along with the Armenian princess Josian, legitimizes the desire of reclamation and conquests that he pursues. Rosalind Field, reading Bevis of Hampton as an Exile-and-Return romance in which the exiled son wins back his father’s inheritance, observes that “the land is gendered feminine in relationship with the male protagonist, a relationship that mirrors, and even competes with, that with the heroine” in the genre (48). It therefore stands to reason that the narrative of patrilineal succession from Guy to Bevis requires a conquest of land-woman, the feminized land being equal to, or even prioritized over, the marriageable woman it is attached to. Furthermore, the conquest of the Saracen land and the marriage to a formerly Saracen woman require a conversion narrative, sanctioning the religious and military conquest of the East by the Western, Christian knight. According to Erwin, “the West maintains the masculinity predicated upon military solidarity, yet still has its wish for unification with its religious Other answered by desire from the East. Christendom is validated by this desire, and this validation justifies fantasies of territorial expansion” (370). Embodying the cultural, religious, and sexual Other, the Eastern-Saracen land and Josian are one and the same, yet the feminized land becomes the object of Western desire with a significantly larger and more tangible appeal compared to the physical, yet symbolic, bride.
Somewhat surprisingly, however, Bevis himself remains stubbornly passive and negative about the courtship and marriage crucial to the conquest narrative. His reluctance can be traced back to the trauma of a desiring and thus monstrous woman, who also happens to be the first woman he encounters in his life—his own mother. Bevis’s mother, who is unwillingly wed to the aged Guy, the Count of Hampton, does not hide her unhappiness with her marriage when she is first introduced: “My husband is old and cannot act like a man, he prefers to stay at church all day rather than in my chamber” (Me lord is olde and may nought werche, / Al dai him is lever at cherche, / Than in me bour; 58-60), she complains, blaming the old age and pious nature of her husband for her sexual frustration. She eventually instigates the German Emperor, her lover, to kill her husband and proceeds to sell her own son Bevis into slavery. According to Ivana Djordjevic, Bevis’s mother was initially a figure who reflected “powerful contemporary anxieties” (18) regarding aristocratic marriages in the original Anglo-Norman romance, then simplified into “a conventional literary device” (19) when she was translated into a late medieval English romance. Bevis’s mother, who actively becomes an accomplice in treason by killing off the lord and exiling the legitimate heir, is a nightmarish figure who realizes the anxiety over an extramarital affair implied in Cligés in the worst possible way. She is contemptible because of her unchecked lust, “a typical representative of womanhood, her excessive and destructive libidinousness perfectly understandable in terms of the commonplaces of medieval . . . misogyny” (22), as Djordjevic suggests.
Bevis’s mother’s betrayal of his father proves to be a defining, traumatic incident which affects the way he views women and heterosexual relations. Abandoned and disenfranchised, the young man denounces his mother as a whore and the German Emperor as a usurper who “took his mother and his property from him” (Tak me me moder and mi fe; 430). The connection between his father’s stolen wife and his physical possessions thus established, Bevis is outraged that a wife would pursue her own desires so unashamedly, dismantling the familial and political order in the process. When Bevis tells of his mother’s treachery before King Ermin, Josian’s father, testifying that “many women are found out to be wicked” (Wikked beth fele wimmen to fonde; 548), his invective betrays the lasting effect of the maternal trauma on his view of women. It is not just his mother who is wicked; many, and possibly all, women are, explaining Bevis’s reluctance to engage in an intimate relationship with one.
The text thus replaces Bevis with Josian for the role of an assertive lover needed for the marriage narrative, and in doing so, validates her actions through her otherness as a Saracen woman. Although Josian is expected to comply with the courtship plot as a marriageable lady of romance, her unrelenting assertion of her desire for Bevis can often be seen as verging on unladylike or even threatening, especially considering the ominous shadow of Bevis’s lustful mother. Her passionate confession of love causes Bevis to recoil from her advances, doubly exclaiming that he will do no such thing (For Gode, that ich do nelle!; 1098, For Gode, that I do nelle!; 1110), requiring another step to reconcile the two before they officially become lovers. “The figure of Josian dramatizes the paradoxical position of women in chivalric culture as both central and marginal,” Erwin argues since “women are needed to confirm the value of knightly masculinity, as well as to stabilize political systems that rest upon dynastic alliances and hereditary succession; at the same time, they are marginalized by their exclusion from power in a patriarchal society” (386). Indeed, Josian intermixes her troublingly assertive desire with a willingness to become a vehicle for Bevis’s conquest, which is succinctly expressed when she declares: “if I had the whole world as my possession, I would give it to him to make him wed me” (Al this world yif ich it hedde, / Ich him yeve me to wedde; 893-94). Yet Josian’s active courtship must be validated in the absence of initiative from her lover’s side, requiring some sort of narrative device to explain and legitimize her behavior. Myra Seaman, reading Josian as a romance lady who acts more like a male protagonist in effect, contends that “[h]er foreignness allows the writer both to suggest something quite radical and at the same time reduce any potential panic in his audience, which had the option of rationalizing her assertiveness as resulting from her inherent difference as well as her ‘less civilized’ upbringing and surroundings” (72-73). As a Saracen woman with a non-Christian and “less civilized” upbringing, Josian displays certain qualities that a Christian lady would never be allowed to possess. The apparent freedom of movement allowed to Josian, then, is a prerogative supported on the account of the courtship and marriage plot and the fantasy of conquest the plot ultimately serves.
For Bevis, Josian’s love for him is primarily a means to an end, that is to say, a crucial step in his objective to conquer new lands and regain his father’s domain. Even after they officially become lovers, Josian does not seem to be given prominence over Arondel (a horse) or Morgelai (a sword) in Bevis’s psyche. In Bevis of Hampton, noble marriage is perceived primarily as a political device rather than a concept of affective union pertaining to so-called courtly love. This is implied when King Ermin suggests a marriage alliance to Bevis even before the courtship plot between his daughter and Bevis begins. “If you forsake your god and worship my lord Apollo, I shall give her as wife and all of my land after I die” (And thow wile thee god forsake / And to Apolyn, me lord, take, / Hire I schel thee yeve to wive / And al me lond after me live; 557-60), the king promises his prospective son-in-law, foreseeing the assimilation realized through the union of Bevis and Josian—only with the East taking precedence instead of the West. Although unacceptable for the Christian Bevis, Ermin’s offer of political marriage solidifies the relationship between aristocratic men as a sociopolitical bond that takes precedence over heterosexual love. Bevis’s bond with other men, such as his loyal ally Saber or the English King Edgar, equally takes priority over his relationship with Josian. Josian’s freedom within the courtship narrative, it seems, is strictly circumscribed by the network of alliance between men.
Josian’s potentially transgressive sexual audacity thus curiously coexists with her acceptance and support of the values of the chivalric male society. At times, she even comes close to dismantling the economy of marriage so crucial to the patriarchal order, seeking out Bevis’s love when she is formally courted by other men. While still being a marriageable, virgin daughter of a king, she emphatically professes to Bevis: “I would rather have you take me as your lover and possess your body with only your shirts on than all the gold that Christ has made, and have you do whatever you wish with me” (Ichavede thee lever to me lemman, / Thee bodi in thee scherte naked, / Than al the gold, that Crist hath maked, / And thow wost with me do thee wille; 1106-9). However, Josian’s desire for premarital intimacy is followed by her desire to eventually become a lawfully wedded wife to Bevis, not to remain his lover. Erwin observes that “[b]y removing herself from the marriage economy, Josian circumvents any plans her father may have for ensuring his dynastic interests through her, even though her desire simultaneously reinforces Ermin’s own alliance with Bevis by reasserting Bevis’s value to the Armenian community” (376). While Erwin’s phrasing seems to emphasize Josian’s ability to disrupt the marriage economy rather than her complicity in it, I see the two as almost equal forces that work in tandem to complicate her actions. When Bevis is imprisoned by King Brademond, a rival suitor, on a charge of deflowering Josian, it is decided that Josian will be given to King Ivor, another rival. Faced with a seemingly hopeless situation, Josian manages to preserve her virginity with “a ring . . . that had such virtue in its jewel” (a ring . . . / That of swiche vertu is the ston; 1469-70), an item reminiscent of Fenice’s magical ring used for exactly the same purpose. The narrator’s own assertion that “even though Josian knew that she would be a queen, it was not in accordance with what she wished. I believe that she would rather have something less and become Bevis’s countess” (Tho Josian wiste, she scholde be quen, / Hit was nought be hire wille; I wen / Hire were lever have had lasse / And have be Beves is contasse; 1457-60) places Josian’s desire, and accordingly her actions, firmly within the context of the marriage narrative.
The competition between men over the ownership of Josian causes the anxiety, and obsession, over female virginity that looms large in Bevis of Hampton, as it did in Cligés. Similar to Fenice’s conundrum of maintaining her marriage to Alis while preserving herself for Cligés, Josian experiences multiple instances of forced marriage and kidnapping by the contending suitors, putting her virtue under suspicion in the eyes of her lover/husband Bevis. When Bevis, freshly out of imprisonment after seven years, learns that both Josian and his horse Arondel have been in Ivor’s possession during his absence, the former as his wife and the latter chained within a stable, he immediately proclaims: “if Josian was as loyal to me as my steed Arondel have been, I will still be able to come out of hardship” (Wer Josiane, . . . ase lele, / Alse is me stede Arondel, / Yet scholde ich come out of wo!; 2033-35). This is where his sudden oath to never take a woman as wife unless she is a virgin, suggested to him by a patriarch in Jerusalem, comes into play. Refusing to believe that a woman who has been married for seven years could still be a virgin, Bevis concludes that “if [he] loved [her] before, that was wrong!” (Yif ich thee lovede, hit were wrong!; 2194), giving voice to the hostility and paranoia surrounding female sexuality that permeates the romance. Even Josian’s promise that Bevis can “send [her] to [her] enemies again, stripped to only [her] undergarments” (Send me aghen to me fon / Al naked in me smok alon!; 2205-6) should he find her to be impeachable offers no real solace since there is no subsequent account in which her virginity is indeed proven to be intact. If “Josian’s ability to serve the Christian community” (381) is being questioned through these accusations, as Erwin suggests, it continues to be challenged even after her Saracen identity is allegedly stripped off since her forced marriage to Miles and return to Ivor happen after her conversion to Christianity. As with Cligés, the royal bride is once again proven to be simultaneously crucial and dangerous to the sexual and political stability integral to her partner’s quest.
Yet while the paranoia over Josian’s chastity controls her very existence in the romance, it interacts with her own otherness at the same time, paradoxically allowing her the kind of mobility and autonomy unavailable for a Christian, Western lady. Similar to how Josian’s assertive desire was sanctioned for the marriage plot, her assertive and unconventional actions are sanctioned in multiple instances in order to preserve her virginity and allow her to overcome the hardships thrown in her way. Josian, for instance, offers to physically hold down a lion Bevis is fighting to help him (2470-73), and strangles Miles to death when she faces the consummation of a forced marriage with him (3219-24). Still, her tendencies to forgo conventionality does not stop at her physical aggression. The skills Josian employs for self-defense and survival are attested to be echoes of her former Saracen life, the remnants of her education received as the princess of Armenia. Through her knowledge of certain herbs and medicine, she takes up the appearance of a leper to escape Ivor’s lust when she is captured, about which the narrator explains: “When she was in Armenia, she had learned both physic and medicine, and herbs, from great masters of Bologna and Toledo, so that she knew of various herbs to make both good and bad” (While she was in Ermonie, / Bothe fysik and sirgirie / She hadde lerned of meisters grete / Of Boloyne the gras and of Tulete, / That she knew erbes mani and fale, / To make bothe boute and bale; 3671-76). Later on, her minstrelsy proves to be useful when she is faced with a need to earn a living, about which the narrator testifies again: “when Josian was in Armenia, she had learned of minstrelsy, to play a fiddle, dances, notes, and gay flourishes” (While Josian was in Ermonie, / She hadde lerned of minstralcie, / Upon a fithele for to play / Staumpes, notes, garibles gay; 3905-8). Josian’s Saracen, Eastern identity equips her with skills and knowledge necessary for her survival, both as a virgin bride and a human being, with the narrative approving and even endorsing the same kind of assertiveness expressed in her desire.[vi]
Josian’s otherness, then, is what makes her so disturbingly different from Christian, Western ladies of courtly romance including Fenice, lingering even after her conversion and complete assimilation into Bevis’s masculine-chivalric world. Initially a tool for the reestablishment of legitimate rule and the conquest of the Saracen East, she often transcends what is expected of her role through her assertive desires and foreign abilities even if those moments are legitimized by narrative necessity. Seaman notes that “[Josian] uses her abilities to fulfill her own desires, but because those desires are socially productive rather than selfish . . . she can be presented throughout as an ideal woman in spite of them, or even because of them” (71), underlining the complicity inherent in her seemingly transgressive actions. Yet the Saracen virgin bride, destined to become a dutiful Christian wife, becomes something more than a conventional lady of romance “in spite of, or even because of” her alien traits. Although the romance signals the successful conquest and integration of the East in its ending, where it is reported that Bevis and his allies ruled over vast regions including England and Armenia, Josian as the desiring Other remains to be an incomprehensible and indeed unimaginable figure for a traditional marriage-and-conquest romance.
Cligés and Bevis of Hampton attempt to differentiate the Western self from the Eastern Other in fundamentally similar ways, utilizing the plot of courtship and marriage as a means to assimilate the East and establish Western superiority. Their fantasies of conquest and assimilation, however, are frequently disrupted through their own fixation on the desirable qualities of the bride. Cligés imagines the triumph of Western chivalry and courtly love through the unions of Alexander-Soredamor and Cligés-Fenice, fashioning itself into an anti-Tristan story in which the legitimization of adulterous love coincides with the political and cultural subjugation of the East. Bevis of Hampton, on the other hand, foregrounds a lady who is distinct in her identity as a cultural, religious Other, sanctioning her transgressive desires in the name of her marriage to a Western, Christian knight. Although both Fenice and Josian present the attempts to preserve their virginity as acts of their own will, their sexual autonomy is ultimately controlled by the narrative necessity to keep them desirable for their lovers. Yet the paranoia surrounding female sexuality is never resolved despite various plot devices employed to mitigate it. Fenice’s adulterous affair results in the birth of harem in Constantinople, bespeaking an explicit realization of Western fantasy while simultaneously destroying the anti-Tristan framework that the narrative constructed for itself. Josian, while not an active instigator of trauma for patriarchal society, gains surprising mobility and autonomy through her supposedly discarded Saracen, Armenian identity. The romance text succeeds in securing and controlling the sexuality of the royal bride, but its devices, meant to cement the triumph of the Western-chivalric-masculine self, unexpectedly betray the intrinsic instability of the control over the Eastern-feminine Other. The fantasy of conquest and assimilation through political marriage is only superficially realized as long as the disturbing possibility of out-of-control desire and sexuality, emerging through troubling instances in the quest for legitimization, persists. The East/Woman of Cligés and Bevis of Hampton continue to haunt their conqueror’s intimate fantasies even after their domination is seemingly complete.
Works Cited
Bevis of Hampton. Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston. Ed. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999, 200-321.
Brown, Amy. “Female Homosociality and the Marriage Plot: Women and Marriage Negotiation in Cligés and Le Chevalier Au Lion.” Parergon 33.1 (2016): 49-68.
Chrétien de Troyes. Cligés. The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Trans. David Staines. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990, 87-169.
Djordjevic, Ivana. “Original and Translation: Bevis’s Mother in Anglo-Norman and Middle English.” Saunders 11-26.
Dunton-Downer, Leslie. “The Horror of Culture: East West Incest in Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligés.” New Literary History 28 (1997): 367-81.
Erwin, Bonnie J. “A Good Woman Is Hard to Find: Conversion and the Power of Feminine Desire in Bevis of Hampton.” Exemplaria 23.4 (2011): 368-89.
Field, Rosalind. “The King over the Water: Exile-and-Return Revisited.” Saunders 41-54.
Ganim, John M. Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.
Kelly, Douglas. “Honor, Debate, and Translatio imperii in Cligés.” Arthuriana 18.3 (2008): 33-47.
Levine, Robert. “Repression in Cligés.” SubStance 5.15 (1976): 209-21.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Saunders, Corinne, ed. Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005.
Seaman, Myra. “Engendering Genre in Middle English Romance: Performing the Feminine in Sir Beves of Hamtoun.” Studies in Philology 98.1 (2001): 49-75.
Waugh, Robin. “Josian and the Heroism of Patience in Bevis of Hampton.” English Studies 99.6 (2018): 609–23.
Fantasies of Conquest:
Political Marriage and the Assimilation of the East in Cligés and Bevis of Hampton
Abstract
Cligés by Chrétien de Troyes and Bevis of Hampton by an anonymous poet maintain the fantasy of Western conquest of the East through the marriage narrative. In both works, a disenfranchised knight’s quest to reclaim his birthright coincides with his marriage to a desirable lady, which ultimately serves to cement the subjugation of the East by the West. However, the inherent fragility of the Western superiority is betrayed by the persistent anxiety surrounding the courtship and marriage plot, especially the element of female sexuality and virginity. In Cligés, the unsettling presence of Tristan and Iseult as ominous precedents of Cligés and Fenice, combined with the final anecdote on the harem of Constantinople established as a response to Fenice’s adultery, dismantles the very narrative of Western triumph over the East as the cultural superior by emphasizing the illicit nature of Cligés’s love. On the other hand, Bevis of Hampton complicates the conventional gender dynamics of courtly romances by presenting Josian as an assertive and thus potentially transgressive figure, which is explained to be rooted in her Otherness as a Saracen woman. Although these women are complicit in their own subjugation by their prospective husbands, the courtship and marriage narrative surrounding them expose the unresolved paranoia about the feminine and the Eastern.
Key Words
Cligés, Bevis of Hampton, Fenice, Josian, conquest, Otherness, virginity
논문 투고 일자: 2024. 4. 21.
심사 완료 일자: 2024. 5. 28.
게재 확정 일자: 2024. 6. 2.
허우리
서울대학교 영어영문학과 강사
[i] An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference “Channeling Relations in Medieval England and France”, hosted by CUNY Graduate Center, on May 4, 2018.
[ii] The concept of Orientalism as a concept of Western, politically motivated understanding of the East is useful in this regard. Although Orientalism as argued by Edward Said mostly concerns the eighteenth century and onwards, medieval studies focusing on the postcolonial reading of Western European texts have often benefited from the concept. This paper does not delve into the definition of Orientalism per se, but my discussion of the Western desire for the assimilation and subjugation of the East aligns closely with its key points.
[iii] Geraldine Heng’s Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy has been especially influential in this regard. Heng concentrates on the development of nationhood, with the topic of women mostly contained within her reading of The Man of Law’s Tale as a hybrid of family romance and hagiography. Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity by John M. Ganim is another insightful work that explores the concept of Orientalism as it pertains to the medieval Europe.
[iv] English translation of Cligés follows Staines’s version.
[v] The active role of Thessala in aiding Fenice on multiple, crucial occasions, when considered in conjunction with Guinevere’s assistance in bringing Cligés’s parents together, suggests a persistent narrative interest on the potency of female alliance and companionship. For a discussion on the relationship between female friendship and feminine autonomy in marriage narratives, see Amy Brown’s article on Cligés and Le Chevalier au Lion.
[vi] Critical attempts to read Josian’s assertive and capable nature as a proto-feminist instance of an autonomous heroine have been made before. Robin Waugh, for instance, argues that Josian’s adventures mirror that of Bevis, establishing her as his equal who can match his martial prowess with patience and skills. However, I focus more on its curious complicity with the conservative plot in which the lady is ultimately a vehicle for her lover’s conquest and reclamation of his birthright.
영미문학연구
Journal of English Studies in Korea
46 (2024): -85
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