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4. The Game of Rape: Sexual Violence and Social Class in the Pastourelle How can we account for persistent associations of masculinity with power, for the higher value placed on manhood than on womanhood, . . . without some attention to symbolic systems, that is to the ways societies represent gender, use it to articulate the rules of social relationships, or construct the meaning of experience. —Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," 1063 Just as the trial scenes in Le Roman de Renart create an imaginary place in which rape can become comic, so too does the medieval pastourelle con­ stitute a discursive space in which one can laugh at the spectacle of rape. The pastourelle further resembles the branches of the Renart discussed in the previous chapter in that its levity does not preclude a degree of se­ riousness. The pastourelle uses the representation of sexual violence as a symbolic system which functions as a locus of political thought, inscribing its reflection on law, power, and social class on the body of the female character. The pastourelle tropes rape as the inevitable encounter between the members of two different socialmilieus. The existence of an indigenous pastoral poetry in the French Middle Ages is in itself hardly surprising, especiallysince the poetry of Virgil was known, translated, and studied in medieval schools.1 This new pastoral genre, a lyricform called the pastourelle (pastoure is the Old French term for "shepherdess") appeared in the European twelfth century.2 The songs were first composed in the Provencal language of southern France, then flour­ ished in Old French in northern France.' The medieval pastourelle displays predictable differences from the par­ adigm established in Virgil's Eclogues: the love celebrated is heterosexual, never homosexual; the poet­narrator takes on not the voice of the rustic shepherd but that of the knight. The genre presents several possible The Game of Rape 105 variants. The "classical" type tells of a knight's encounter with a young shepherdess in a secluded rural setting. The text uses both narrative and dialogue to relate how the knight attempts to seduce the country girl (whether with words of love, promises of marriage, gifts of clothing or jewels). This type usually ends with the departure of the knight, of his own accord or at the insistence of the shepherdess, who sends him on his way. Sometimes the seduction scene is interrupted by the arrivalof one or more shepherds, who rescue the female character by turning their violence against the poet­observer. In the tableau type, or bergerie, shepherds and shepherdesses play bucolic games and sing songs, as the knight simply ob­ serves their rustic celebrations. In one variant of this type, the knight wit­ nesses a quarrel between the shepherd and shepherdess. In another, the knight converses alone with the shepherd. One medieval innovation is radically discontinuous with the pastoral tradition. In a variant of the classical"encounter" type, the songs become lyric variations on the themes of gender, power, and sexualviolence. This type repeatedly narrates the same event: a knight is riding down the road when he sees a comely shepherdess alone in a meadow. The bucolic mode is interrupted by the spectre of a potential act of violence that is anomalous in the context of the pastoral tradition: rape. In approximately 18 percent of the extant Old French pastourelles (thirty­eight of the one hundred and sixty texts included in my count), the shepherdess is raped by the medieval knight.* In two centuries of literary criticism,the sanguine representation ofsex­ ual violence in these songs has eluded analysis.In W.T.H. Jackson's classic 1954 article on satire in the pastourelle, he wrote of the "love passages" in which the knight "consorts with the members of a despised classto gratify sensual desires."5 Gaston Paris hurried by the category of pastourelles in which the knight "a raison de la bergere," reasoning that they are merely "le recit d'une bonne fortune sans consequence et qui ne laisse pas de sou­ venir."6 In the pastourelle, fictional seduction and rape are staged as a struggle between the powerful (the male knight) and the powerless (the female peasant), in order to give expression to conflict between social classes. As Joan Scott has written of texts in general, "concepts of power, though they may build on gender, are not always literally about gender itself."7 Our survey of contemporary pastourelle criticism reveals that the most effective rationalization or "naturalization" of rape...

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