Role-playing in the Letters of Heloise and Abelard

Role-playing in the Letters of Heloise and Abelard Readings of the correspondence between Heloise and Abelard Widely differing readings of the Letters of Heloise to Abelard have been offered over the years, principally because the attitudes Heloise expresses appear to be inconsistent even contradictory, from one letter to another. This paper attempts to show that the disjunctures perceived are evidence of role-playing by Heloise. It is m y contention that she adopts different roles in order to bend Abelard to her will, pragmatically taking up, modifying, or abandoning roles as the situation and Abelard's response demand. Four strategies have so far been proposed for reading the divergences in and between Heloise's letters. The first strategy reads the erotic disjunctures as revelatory of Heloise's true state of mind, with the sudden monastic orientation of her third letter an adoption only of the outward signs of piety demanded by Abelard.1 The second strategy sees Heloise's erotic disjunctures as inappropriate to a well-respected abbess and therefore the work of an editor or a forger.2 The third strategy reads the disjunctures not as problematic breaks in Heloise's continuity of thought but as evidence of her development from eroticism to spirituality, and the correspondence is then read as an exemplum of conversion produced by an editor or a forger.3 The fourth strategy, like the third, reads through the divergences, but unlike the third, it presupposes the veracity of the correspondence, and finds coherence not in artificial monastic example but in authentic spiritual growth.4 Linda Georgianna, for example, reads Heloise's works 'as a coherent and imaginative whole' rather than 'a disjointed series of documents, explicable only in terms of forgery, interpolation, or repression'.5 This paper approaches the problem from a quite different point of view, based on an essential distinction between the textual and the historical nature of 1 The most famous proponent of this reading is Etienne Gilson, in Heloise and Abelard, trans. L. K. Shook, Ann Arbor, MI, 1960 (first published Paris 1938, translation from 2nd rev.edn 1948); see especially pp. 101-02. This position has been restated by Peggy Kamuf in Fictions ofFeminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise, Lincoln, NE, 1982, p. 8. 2 See, for example, J. T. Muckle, 'The Personal Letters Between Abelard and Heloise', Medieval Studies 15 (1953), 47-94 (p. 67). 3 See, for example, D. W . Robertson, Jr, Abelard and Heloise, Millington and London, 1974 (first published New York, 1972), p. 134. 4 See, for example, Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (f203) to Marguerite Porete (fl310), Cambridge, 1984 ch. 5: 'Heloise', 107-39 (p. 139). 5 'Any Corner of Heaven: Heloise's Critique of Monasticism', Medieval Studies 49 (1987), 221-53 (pp. 225, 226). P A R E R G O N ns 11.1, June 1993 54 /. F. Ruys the protagonists. In the words of Claire Nouvet 'les noms d'"AbeTard" et "H61oi'se" ne se referent plus aux deux corps historiques qui les porterent mais au "corpus" de lettres auquel ils sont d6sormais chacun attachds' ('the names "Abelard" and "Heloise" refer no longer to the two historical bodies who bore them buttothe "body" of letterstowhich they have both since been attached').6 The divergences in the Letters are not read here as truthful utterances, as signs of unwilling obedience, nor as evidence of editing or forgery, and there is no attempt to read through the divergences by imposing cohesion upon the Letters. Instead, they are read as a contest between Heloise and Abelard, played out via shifting roles assumed by each in turn, in a pattern where one chooses a role, which is negotiated by the other and then reprised. These roles present a particular view of the relationship and, consequently, of the obligations pertaining between them. The disjunctures in Heloise's Letters occur when she alters or abandons one role in favour of another. Each attitude she expresses is that which is proper to the role she is playing at the time. The key to this interpretation lies in the concept of the homo rhetoricus, as explained, for example, by Richard...