Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature (review)

In contrast to his focus on the disruptive and radical potential of queer identities in Queering Medieval Genres, Tison Pugh’s new study explores how ‘restrictive ideologies [...] bear obfuscatory powers to wield queerness in furtherance of their own ends’ (13). After a brisk introduction that defends the value of terms such as ‘heteronormative,’ ‘heterosexual,’ and ‘homosexual’ while stating caveats against the dangers of their anachronistic use, Pugh turns his attention to the narrator of Pearl, Harry Bailey, Walter of the ‘Clerk’s Tale,’ and the eponymous protagonists of Amis and Amiloun and Eger and Grime. His argument proceeds by showing how normative masculinities are produced through acts of queering in each of these cases.

Pugh’s book is strongest when it takes up well-worn concepts of queer theory, places them in an interesting context, and shows how they can be used to complicate notions of medieval masculinity. The chapter on Pearl, for instance, takes the ubiquitous erotic triangles of queer theory and then asks an inventive question: What happens when one of the homosocial competitors for the loved object’s affection is God himself? In Pugh’s analysis, while the Dreamer ends up abandoning his desires to God and attains normative Christian masculinity, it occurs by ‘experiencing the instructive lessons of compulsory queerness along the Christian path to spiritual normativity and sexual subservience as a Bride of Christ’ (28). His chapters on Pearl and the Chaucerian material also emphasize the way these texts queer the audience through sensitive readings of how the narratives are framed. For example, after observing that the Clerk makes an apostrophic plea to ‘noble wyves’ despite his overwhelmingly male audience, Pugh argues that a hermaphroditic reader is constructed as a result: ‘To whom is this repetitive direct address speaking, then, if not to the male pilgrims of the pilgrimage, now hermaphroditically created in the image of women they seek to control?’ (95). By showing that queer identities operate at the textual and meta-textual levels, Pugh makes a strong case for queer theory complicating our understanding of medieval ideas of reception and interpretation.

Of particular interest to readers of Arthuriana would be Pugh’s chapters on the romances Amis and Amiloun and Eger and Grime. However, these chapters could have been developed in a more satisfying manner. The reading of Amis and Amiloun, for instance, rushes the protagonists through a host of queered identities—queered fraternal bonds, hermaphroditism in marriage, and eunuch-like asexuality—without excavating and developing the significance and differences of each position. Pugh’s tendency to emphasize that narrative structures create queer identities is certainly a strength of his approach, but this occasionally limits the argument. For instance, he rightly observes that the experience of compromised masculinity oscillates between Amis and Amiloun through bodily effects: Amis is victimized by predatory female desire because of his good looks, and Amiloun is mocked by his wife when he is stricken by leprosy. However, the argument does not explore the fact that beauty and abjection queer masculinity in different, and perhaps even incommensurable ways.

Still, Pugh’s vision of queerness in the Middle English literature is a much needed one. Not only does he show how queer moments are present in the most normative of religious and social arrangements, he demonstrates that queer identities are often conscripted to the production of normative masculinities. Further, his approach is a productive counterpart to other notable works on the queer Middle Ages. In contrast to the intricately historicized readings found in Karma Locherie’s Heterosyncracies and Glenn Burger’s Chaucer’s Queer Nation, Pugh concentrates on how queer interstices emerge from the narrative structures of the texts under consideration. This makes it a valuable addition to the expanding range of approaches to the queer Middle Ages.