Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law

Introduction: The Archeology of Rape in Medieval Literature and Law

Introduction: The Archeology of Rape in Medieval Literature and Law Between the image of a Middle Ages in which men are so brutal they see nothing wrong with sexualviolence and that of a Middle Ages dominated by powerful women who enjoy sexual freedom, this book traces the con­ tours of something less sensational, perhaps less appealing, but more complex. It studies the naturalization of the subordination of women in medieval French culture by examining representations of rape in different discursive genres, both literary and legal. This book is not a history of rape. Its first purpose is to scrutinize the cultural ideology that supports rape as a stock narrative device in various medieval genres. In the course of that examination, it explores the relations between signifier and signified, between text and society, from a new van­ tage. My initial question was not whether medievalpoets were proponents of sexual violence, but that of the relation between rape and literary genre: how does it happen that the representation of sexualviolence is built into a variety of medieval genres and what purpose does it serve? Literary critics from various fields are today engaged in a polemic over the function and meaning of rape in its textual representation.1 Depicting, narrating, or representing rape certainly does not constitute an unambig­ uous gesture of endorsement.2 But it is crucial to ask of a historical period whose literature is enthusiastically given over to the idea of Woman: why then is rape a stock device in so many genres and what is the relation genre bears to gender? Annette Kolodny describes a critical position that corre­ sponds to my point of departure in the following chapters: "The power relations inscribed in the form of conventions within our literary inheri­ tance . . . reify the encodings of those same power relations in the culture at large."' Medieval culture itself is anything but silent on the topic of rape.4 The absence of a literaryhistory of rapein medievalistcriticism may reveal more 2 The Archeology of Rape about modern attitudes toward sexual violence than it does about the sup­ posed medieval indifference to it. It definitely reveals that certain ambigu­ ous ways of discoursing on rape, forged in the Middle Ages, still function effectively (and invisibly) today. What is rape? Its signification in written discourse is not a given. The idea of rape bears many meanings. The discursive field around the topic of rape still needs to be constituted, whether in literature, philosophy, or bi­ ology, whether in ancient Greece or modern popular culture: Each usage of the term seems to capture some relevant aspect of the problem even if none encompasses them all. To favour any particular usage or usages would therefore foreclose insights into the question of rape and force us to come down on one side or the other of the issue before we have actually settled its nature.5 By the same token, the word "rape" bears many linguistic meanings in a broad semantic field. One of the hallmarks of medieval studies is the im­ portance it assigns to philology. Medieval vernacular languages were in constant flux; and no modern scholar can safely assume that any medieval signifier refers to the same signified, or signifies in the same way, as its modern "translation." The importance of language studies to medievalists in no way conflicts with the importance of linguistics for feminists, who seek to study "language as a symbolic system closely tied to a patriarchal social structure."6 Philology can show how language founds and grounds an asymmetrical relationship between women and men, coding sexual vi­ olence in ways that make it culturally acceptable. Or, in the well­known formulation of Helene Cixous, "Language conceals an invincible adversary because it is the language of men and their grammar. We mustn't leave them a single place that's any more theirs alone than we are."7 Is it possible that Old French is a language of men? In Old French there is no word that corresponds to the modern French viol to designate rape. Medieval culture does not search to find one term to denote forced coitus. The Old French language favors periphrasis, metaphor, and slippery lexe­ matic exchanges, as opposed to a clear and unambiguous signifier of sexual assault. Such periphrastic expressions include fame esforcer (to force a woman), faire so. volonte (to do as one wi\l),faire sonplnisir (to take one's pleasure), orfaire son buen (to do as one sees fit). The interpretive...