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3. He Speaks/She Speaks: Language in Some Medieval Love Literature
- NYU Press
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He Speaks/She Speaks: Language in Some Medieval Love Literature guage of love, the terms in which it is supposedly revealed, often has little to do with love itself. In fact, that very language has recently been seen—by mutually opposed groups— as proof that love perhaps does not exist at all where it was formerly most recognized. It is not often that classical psychoanalysis and radical feminism join hands. Therefore, it is something of a surprise to find that their basic position on courtly love is the same. They don't like it. In psychoanalytic terms, courtly love represents an intense, neurotic fixation on the mother that has been codified and institutionalized. The analytic condemnation of courtly love turns on men's sexual limitations, the inability to achieve genitality . So too in a way does the feminist reading, which sees at least some of the causes of sexism in sexual fear and inadequacy. But unlike the analysts who view courtly love as destructive to men, feminist theorists, such as Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone, see it as oppressive to women, this time with the carrot instead of the stick. Both sides are perhaps the victims of their own ideology. The feminists forget that many of the ladies sung to had real power, whether off or on their pedestals, often more than the men who sang to them. Some analysts forget that when literary conventions are so widespread, something more than neurosis must be involved. Besides, if the problematic term courtly love is to have 3i 3 iT i s o n e o f t h e i r o n i e s o f l i t e r a t u r e a s o f l i f e t h a t t h e l a n - 32 WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER any veracity, it must be used to cover many types of love popular in the courts of the twelfth century, not just the adulterous or pre-adulterous pattern of unattainable ladies and suffering lovers. This is not to suggest that proponents of love should embrace courtly love with open arms. There was plenty of ambivalence in the troubadour lover, for example, and the traits he attributes to his inspiring lady in the lyrics are not always so desirable. I am not talking merely of her uniformly predictable blond hair and grey eyes. Insofar as she is an elusive ideal, it would perhaps have been wrong to individualize her further. Rather it is her often predictable cruelty that is more problematic. For example Cercamon (fl. 1135-1145) writes in "When the sweet breeze turns bitter" ("Quant l'aura doussa s'amarzis"): I am pleased when she maddens me, When she makes me stand with my mouth open, staring; I am pleased when she laughs at me, or makes a fool of me right to my face or behind my back, for after this bad time the good will come very quickly, if such is her pleasure. Bel m'es quant ilh m'enfolhetis e-m fai badar e-n vau muzan; et es me belh si m'escarnis o m gaba dereir'o denan, qu'aprop lo mal me venra bes ben tost, s'a lieys ven a plazer.1 Although commentators have paid some attention to the male's ostensibly neurotic position vis-à-vis the lady, that is, his fixation on the Oedipal stage, where he plays out the supposedly central drama of his life, not much has been written about the woman's psychology in the conventions of courtly love. While critics often recognize the knight as being in the position of a child in relation to the mother, actually it is the lady whose narcissistic childishness is glorified, at least in the male writings. It is she who is allowed to live out the childhood fantasy of unconditional love; she who gets immediate gratification of demands, no matter how irrational. Many of the lyrics and some of the adulterous ro- [3.238.84.213] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:46 GMT) HE SPEAKS/SHE SPEAKS 33 manees institutionalize the lady's whimsicality, her willfulness, and even sadism. In this sense, the literature refers more to the pre-Oedipal than the Oedipal period. A case in point is Chrétien de Troyes's Chevalier de la Charette (The Knight of the Cart), in which Lancelot is faulted by Queen Guinevere not, as he thinks, for getting into a...