NAKED BEFORE GOD: UNCOVERING THE BODY IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

Breasts and Babies: The Maternal Body of Eve in the Junius 11 Genesis

221 Breasts and Babies: The Maternal Body of Eve in the Junius 11 Genesis Mary Dockray-Miller t is hard to escape the body in the Genesis poem of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11.1 Line drawings of Adam and Eve illustrate many of the first 54 pages of the manuscript, and they are “naked before God” in many of them. Close examination of the interactions between what I will call the “poetic text” and the “illustrated text” reveals the manuscript’s uneasy presentation of the biblical narrative of masculine dominance — the story of the Fall, after all, is our primary codification of traditional, oppositional gender roles. The Junius 11 Genesis reveals an unresolved tension between its poem and its illustrations : while the poetic text continually reinforces an opposition of masculine Subject/feminine Other, the illustrations present a number of conflicting gender performances of dominant feminine, acquiescent masculine, and even active maternal. Initial differentiation between the figures of Adam and Eve in the drawings is done most easily by reference to their breasts, specifically their nipples, rather than to the more standard gender markers of hair, dress, or naked genitalia. In the Junius 11 illustrations, Adam can be quickly identified 1 For detailed descriptions and discussions of the manuscript, see Elzbieta Temple, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts 900-1066 (London, 1976); N.R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957); Thomas Ohlgren, Anglo-Saxon Textual Illustration (Kalamazoo, MI, 1992). I would like to thank both Benjamin Withers and Jonathan Wilcox for their enormously helpful comments and suggestions as I prepared this essay. I would also like to thank Allen Frantzen, for long term direction and mentoring; Daniel Donoghue, who invited me to give a version of the essay as a talk for the Harvard Medieval Doctoral Conference; and Nina RulonMiller , for e-mail encouragement, thoughtful reading, and good wine at Kalamazoo. Any fault that remains is, of course, my own. I Mary Dockray-Miller 222 through the lack of nipples on his naked breasts. In contrast, Eve’s distended and elongated nipples in the illustrations make her easily identifiable while they also mark her as feminine and possibly as maternal, reminding the viewer of the ultimately basic physiological function of female breasts — to feed an infant. In addition, Eve’s body, especially in the illustrations, frustrates the poetic text’s attempts to efface biological maternity and maternal performance. The phrase “maternal performance ” is indebted, of course, to Judith Butler, who described her theory of gender performance in Gender Trouble and elaborated on it in Bodies that Matter.2 Analysis of the place, agency, and action of such maternal performance has begun to appear in Anglo-Saxon studies. Most recently, Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing have discussed a “patristic maternity” that uses the language and concepts of maternity and reproduction in the service of the Anglo-Saxon church.3 Rather than patristic , Eve’s maternity in the Junius 11 Genesis is both biological (she is the biological mother of Cain, Abel, and Seth) and performative: she protects and nurtures her babies. This maternal performance is occluded in the poetic text that defines reproduction as a male process and performance,4 but the illustrations late in the cycle confirm the necessity of her body to the lives of her children. The resulting dissonance colors the seeming finality of the traditional gender roles inscribed in the text of one of western culture’s oldest narratives . In addition, this reading of bodies, of breasts and babies, leads to insights about the use of manuscripts in scholarly practice and to speculation about the identity of the artist of 2 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990) and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York, 1993). 3 Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (Philadelphia, 2001). 4 I borrow the term “occlusion of maternity” from Allyson Newton’s essay, “The Occlusion of Maternity in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale,” in Medieval Mothering , ed. John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler (New York, 1996), pp. 6375 . Breasts and Babies 223 this section of Junius 11, who was certainly and unusually familiar with the way babies look when they rest upon their mothers’ bodies. My argument here attempts to address the drawings (the “illustrated text”) and the poem (the “poetic text”) as one coherent...