Guigemar, the hero of Marie’s twelfth-century Breton
lai of the same name,
1 I refer to the author of Guigemar as ‘Marie’ in accordance with the reference to ‘Marie’ as the writer of Guigemar in London, British Library, MS Harley 978. Although most editions and critical discussions refer to the author of the Lais as ‘Marie de France’, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has argued that both the canon and the figure of ‘Marie de France’ are modern constructions: ‘Recovery and Loss: Women’s Writing around Marie de France’, in Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages, ed. by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, and John Van Engen (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), pp. 169–89. For a more moderate view, see Keith Busby, ‘The Manuscripts of Marie de France’, in A Companion to Marie de France, pp. 303–17 (pp. 303–4). has attracted significant scholarly attention for his a(nti)pathy towards love.
2 For example, see Logan E. Whalen, ‘A Matter of Life and Death: Fecundity and Sterility in Marie de France’s Guigemar’, in Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, ed. by Daniel E. O’Sullivan and Laurie Shepard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), pp. 139–50; Sharon Kinoshita and Peggy McCracken, Marie de France: A Critical Companion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), p. 119; Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 188; Tracy Adams, ‘“Arte Regendus Amor”: Suffering and Sexuality in Marie de France’s Lai de Guigemar’, Exemplaria, 17.2 (2005), 285–315; Rupert T. Pickens, ‘En bien parler and mesparler: Fecundity and Sterility in the Works of Marie de France’, Le Cygne, n. s., 3 (2005), 7–22 (pp. 11–12). However, Guigemar has not received any extensive discussion in terms of asexuality or aromanticism, although the correlation here is clearer than perhaps any other example considered in this book.
3 An exception – outside of medieval studies – is Gwendolyn Osterwald, ‘Contradictions in the Representation of Asexuality: Fiction and Reality’, IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities, 4.1 (2017), 36–44 (pp. 38–9). ‘Asexual’ is occasionally used casually with reference to Guigemar, but discussions are not expanded or interrogated beyond this: Sally A. Livingston, Marriage, Property, and Women’s Narratives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 49; Adams, ‘Suffering and Sexuality’, p. 301; Sarah Spence, Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 129; Rupert T. Pickens, ‘Thematic Structure in Marie de France’s Guigemar’, Romania, 95.2–3 (1974), 328–41 (p. 331). Guigemar’s attitude towards love is not prideful refusal but simply a lack of interest:
De tant i out mespris nature
Kë unc de nul’ amur n’out cure.
Suz ciel n’out dame ne pucele
Ki tant par fust noble ne bele,
Së il de amer la requeïst,
Ke volentiers nel retenist.
Plusurs le requistrent suvent,
Mais il n’aveit de ceo talent;
Nuls ne se pout aparceveir
Kë il volsist amur aveir.
Pur ceo le tienent a peri
E li estrange e si ami.
4 Marie de France, ‘Guigemar’, in Marie de France: Lais, ed. by Alfred Ewert (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1995), pp. 3–25 (lines 57–68, my emphasis). ‘Nature had done him such a grievous wrong that he never displayed the slightest interest in love. There was no lady or maiden on earth, however noble or beautiful, who would not have been happy to accept him as her lover, if he had sought her love. Women frequently made advances to him, but he was indifferent to them. He showed no visible interest in love and was thus considered a lost cause by stranger and friend alike’: Marie de France, ‘Guigemar’, in The Lais of Marie de France, ed. & trans. by Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 43–55 (p. 44).The second line indicates that Guigemar is sexually and romantically attracted to no-one, though the passage subsequently emphasises his lack of interest in women specifically. Despite the particular focus on women, this passage, and the lai more broadly, can illuminate the history of asexuality. Although it is overtly love that Guigemar is said to be uninterested in, the passage seems to imply that this entails a rejection of sex, too; Guigemar could be considered both aromantic and asexual, and I employ ‘asexual’ in this section as a broader term denoting both possibilities.
That Guigemar is considered ‘peri’ [lost, or in danger] because of his apathy towards love suggests that this state is expected to endure, though it also presents asexuality negatively.
5 On ‘a peri’ as ‘in danger’, see William E. Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 147. This negative assessment is also evident in the labelling of his lack of interest in love as a ‘mespris’ [wrong] and in the attempts to ‘convert’ Guigemar to (hetero)sexuality, illustrating the co-presence of asexuality and prejudice against it in the premodern era.
6 The ‘mespris’ Guigemar suffers may instead refer to a wrong or scorn he does to nature: see Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law, p. 141. Attempts to convert asexual people to heterosexuality remain an issue today: see Julie Sondra Decker, The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality (New York: Skyhorse, 2014), pp. 13, 102, 120–1. While virginity was celebrated in religious contexts, noblemen like Guigemar were expected to feel sexual and romantic desire. The focus seems to be on resistance to sex and love rather than marriage here, suggesting that Guigemar’s transgression is not – initially – his refusal to marry but his disengagement from love and desire more generally. The concern with sexual and romantic rather than marital norms seems appropriate to the courtly context of this twelfth-century
lai, written at a time when elite marriages were arranged for political rather than romantic reasons, and when romances often celebrated pre-, non-, or extra-marital love.
7 See Elisabeth van Houts, Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 218. However, the focus does shift to marriage later in the
lai, as Guigemar’s friends ‘femme voleient qu’il preisist’ (645) [‘wanted him to take a wife’, p. 51], but
Ja ne prendra femme a nul jur,
Ne pur aveir ne pur amur.
8 ‘Guigemar’, lines 647–8. ‘Never would he take a wife, for love or money’: trans. by Burgess and Busby, p. 51. Although ‘femme’ could mean ‘woman’ as well as ‘wife’, the Anglo-Norman Dictionary translates ‘prendre a femme’ and ‘aver a femme’ as referring specifically to marriage; in Guigemar, the following lines seem to establish that the reference here is to marriage: ‘Femme’, Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND2 Online Edition), ed. by Geert De Wilde et al. (Aberystwyth University, 2021) <https://anglo-norman.net/entry/femme> [accessed 18 October 2021]. Modern translations of Guigemar agree fairly unanimously on the marital focus here.Guigemar’s apathy towards love does affect his dynastic duty, but the fact that the lady he loves is (apparently) still married to someone else at the end of the lai is no barrier to its happy ending. This suggests that love and desire are the primary priorities, and Guigemar is seen as transgressive and unusual because he does not experience these feelings – because he is, or could today be considered, asexual.
The kinds of love and desire Guigemar does not experience are identified as love and desire for women, leaving open the possibility that he is uninterested in women specifically. Interpretations of Guigemar as gay, or queer where queer is used solely to mean gay (as it has been in some scholarship on
Guigemar),
9 See, most prominently, William E. Burgwinkle, ‘Queering the Celtic: Marie de France and the men who don’t marry’, in Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law, pp. 138–69. have served important purposes and may reflect contemporaneous associations between unmarried men and sodomy.
10 Katherine Harvey, The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages (London: Reakton, 2021), p. 125. However, the assumption that a man must be gay if he is uninterested in women, a common myth in perceptions of asexuality today, rests upon a binary in which opposition to relationships with women suggests a desire for relationships with men.
11 Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (Boston: Beacon, 2020), p. 8; Decker, The Invisible Orientation, pp. 13, 102, 116–19. This binary is (to state the obvious) not the sum total of human sexual orientations. Moreover, while ‘queer’ avoids the imposition of sexual binaries, it does not sufficiently express the specificity of Guigemar’s sexuality. Guigemar certainly can be read as gay or queer, but to read Guigemar
solely as gay is to contribute to the ongoing erasure of asexual identity. In this case, it is important to call an ace an ace.
While using the term asexuality holds political and affective value, given the lack of representation of ace experience even in modern media, reading Guigemar as asexual also impacts how we understand the subsequent development of the
lai. So far, I have suggested that in
Guigemar asexuality is co-present with prejudice against it. The narrative trajectory of the
lai may seem to come down on the side of prejudice, reasserting norms as Guigemar eventually desires the lady whom he meets after boarding a mysterious unmanned ship. In this light, the
lai endorses the overcoming of asexuality and the formation of romantic relationships, according with the early priorities of the romance genre.
Guigemar may even be seen as erasing the possibility of asexuality by associating it with adolescence and implying that it is just a phase – a myth often levelled at LGBTQ+ people but which aces are perhaps particularly vulnerable to because asexuality ‘is indistinguishable from “not yet” on the outside. It’s impossible to prove a negative [i.e. a sexual orientation to no-one]’.
12 Decker, The Invisible Orientation, p. 21. See further Chen, Ace, pp. 98–9. Yet could we not also read
Guigemar in the other direction: rather than Guigemar’s acceptance of love effectively straightening his initial asexuality, couldn’t his asexuality queer his acceptance of love?
Guigemar seems to function in a way comparable to Angela Chen’s conception of asexual people as able to ‘draw attention to sexual assumptions and sexual scripts […] that are often hidden and interrogate the ways that these norms make our lives smaller’.
13 Chen, Ace, pp. 6–7. Marie may not be writing Guigemar as an asexual character, but she does seem to be using him to unpick the construction of love and desire in the romance genre, as sexual dissidence blends into generic dissonance. Although Donald Maddox suggests identifying ‘instances of deliberate “ironic play” with convention’ in the
Lais is ‘perceiv[ing] them anachronistically’, this seems to me to underestimate the
Lais.
14 Donald Maddox, Fictions of Identity in Medieval France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 32. As Andrew Taylor argues, the
Lais ‘encourage interpretation that is both attentive and daring […] licensing us to read beyond the surface meaning’.
15 Andrew Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 104. Marie’s account of how Guigemar comes to accept love is a strange and disjointed one that may invite us to question romantic norms. Where other romances depict a knight falling in love at the sight of ‘the right woman’, Marie introduces the antlered hind and its curse upon Guigemar to initiate his acceptance of love. Love is often externalised in medieval writing, but this more usually occurs through the image of Cupid’s arrow striking the lover, emphasising the sudden, embodied quality of love and desire in response to the beloved.
16 See further Corinne Saunders, ‘Love and the Making of the Self: Troilus and Criseyde’, in A Concise Companion to Chaucer, ed. by Corinne Saunders (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 134–55 (p. 140). This image is echoed but crucially differentiated when the antlered hind is struck by Guigemar’s arrow. The antlered hind, as others have argued, is itself a queer figure in terms of gender, and its queerness may impact our understanding of Guigemar.
17 See H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., ‘The Voice of the Hind: The Emergence of Feminine Discontent in the Lais of Marie de France’, in Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning, ed. by Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 132–69 (p. 134); Burgwinkle, ‘Queering the Celtic’, pp. 154–6; Pickens, ‘Thematic Structure’, pp. 335–6. It is the encounter with the antlered hind that causes Guigemar’s attitude to love to change, which is portrayed as a deliberate decision rather than a shift in feeling over time. When it tells Guigemar of his fate, Guigemar is
esmaiez.
Començat sei a purpenser
En quel tere purrat aler
Pur sa plaie faire guarir;
Kar ne se volt laissier murir.
Il set assez e bien le dit
Ke unke femme nule ne vit
A ki il aturnast s’amur
Ne kil guaresist de dolur.
18 Guigemar, lines 124–32. ‘Dismayed […]. He wondered where he could go to find a cure for his wound, for he did not intend to allow himself to die. He knew full well, and said to himself, that he had never seen any woman whom he could love or who could cure him of his suffering’: trans. by Burgess and Busby, pp. 44–5.Because he does not intend to accept death, Guigemar wants to find a cure for his wound: in a sense, his lack of interest in love has already been overcome, as he now
wants to find love, has acquired ‘the desire for desire’, to borrow R. Howard Bloch’s words, without actually experiencing love or even being sure that he would be able to do so.
19 R. Howard Bloch, ‘The Medieval Text – “Guigemar” – as a Provocation to the Discipline of Medieval Studies’, Romanic Review, 79.1 (1988), 63–73 (p. 70). Guigemar’s practical course of action demonstrates this wish to find love and save his life: he knows that he has never seen anyone whom he could love in his own country, and sends his squire away, for
Ne volt ke nul des suens i vienge,
Kil desturbast ne kil retienge.
20 ‘Guigemar’, lines 143–4. ‘He did not want any of his followers to come and hinder him, or attempt to detain him’: trans. by Burgess and Busby, p. 45.Through his desire to find a woman to love in order to heal his wound, Guigemar begins a quest for an objectless love that conforms to the antlered hind’s imperative, perhaps reflecting on the drive to adhere to sexual norms even when they do not match internal desires.
The importance of the antlered hind also denaturalises the experience of love as a spontaneous response to another individual. In contrast to the usual point at which Cupid may strike down a lover, the antlered hind appears before the introduction of the beloved, unsettling her primacy. This denaturalisation of love is furthered by the inclusion of dissonant moments at the end of the
lai, such as the scene in which Guigemar is unable to recognise the lady, declaring ‘femmes se resemblent asez’ [‘women look very much alike’].
21 ‘Guigemar’, line 779; trans. by Burgess and Busby, p. 53. Burgwinkle also comments on this: Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law, p. 160. The lady’s individuality and beauty are unmarked here: the important thing is that she is like other women. This may open up a reading in which she represents a means for Guigemar to conform to expectations rather than being an individual he desires, perhaps reflecting on the predictable and thus potentially unindividuated drive for a happy ending in romance.
Other aspects of the lai’s ending further develop Marie’s subtle questioning of romantic and gendered norms, particularly through the violence it posits as necessary to romantic love and chivalric masculinity. When Meriaduc, who has taken the lady for himself after she escapes from her husband, refuses to ‘rende’ (842) [‘restore’, p. 54] the lady to Guigemar, Guigemar gathers all the men who have come to Meriaduc’s aid in war and rides to his enemy, offering him their service. Then
Guigemar ad la vile assise;
[…]
tuz les affamat dedenz.
Le chastel ad destruit e pris
E le seignur dedenz ocis.
A grant joie s’amie en meine.
22 Guigemar, lines 875–81. ‘Guigemar besieged the town […] he starved all those inside. He captured and destroyed the castle and killed the lord within. With great joy he took away his beloved’: trans. by Burgess and Busby, pp. 54–5.As Sharon Kinoshita and Peggy McCracken suggest, ‘the lovers’ reunion is bought at the cost of a scandalous breach of feudal honor’, as ‘Guigemar and Meriaduc are not mere acquaintances but “friends and companions”’, and ‘Guigemar is called upon to pay up an obligation […] the
gueredun owed in repayment of an unspecified debt of honor’.
23 Kinoshita and McCracken, Marie de France: A Critical Companion, pp. 74, 75. Leicester briefly notes the ‘more realistic political violence that start[s] to push through the surface of a happy ending’: ‘The Voice of the Hind’, p. 139. Guigemar and his lady’s ‘joie’ also seems ‘astonishingly incongruous’ with the devastation Guigemar unleashes upon Meriaduc’s people.
24 Kinoshita and McCracken, Marie de France: A Critical Companion, p. 75. Kinoshita and McCracken argue that this violence is ‘occluded, first, by the intense compression of these events into a mere three lines and, secondly, by the exigencies of the love story, fulfilled in the narrator’s quick cut to the long-deferred happy ending’, suggesting that ‘all narrative threads are wrapped up with a rapidity that allows no second thoughts on Guigemar’s course of action to surface’.
25 Ibid. However, if we read Guigemar’s initial apathy towards love as a disruption of romance’s priorities, its presence at the start of the
lai may encourage rather than silence
interrogation and critique in the later episodes, enabling acknowledgement of the violence that can be associated with love in romance writing and indeed the violence of normative models of love and sexuality. Even at this early stage of romance writing, Marie is capable of interrogating the tropes upon which the genre depends.
Guigemar thus invites a double reading. On the surface, the
lai conforms to generic expectations, restoring love and desire as norms. But dissonant moments, to which Guigemar’s initial indifference to love may attune us, allow Marie to question these norms and to reflect on whom adherence to them serves. Both of these layers of reading have implications for understanding the history and role of asexuality: on the surface,
Guigemar may imply that asexuality is a temporary state of sexual immaturity, but the hero’s initial asexuality may also enable us to question his subsequent narrative trajectory. In this light,
Guigemar aligns with the double potentiality of asexuality and adolescence that Simone Chess has identified in early modern drama, where ‘staging disinterest in sex and romance through adolescent and child characters’ allows playwrights to ‘explore the limits and possibilities of asexuality without overtly suggesting it as a life-long option or orientation’, offering possibilities for ‘queer subversion and containment’.
26 Simone Chess, ‘Asexuality, Queer Chastity, and Adolescence in Early Modern Literature’, in Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture, ed. by Jennifer Higginbotham and Mark Albert Johnston (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 31–55 (p. 32). Yet
Guigemar may offer further potential here, not only depicting the way asexuality is contained but perhaps enabling us to dissect this containment and examine how norms are restored. Rather than endorsing the trajectory from romantic a(nti)pathy to love, the generic dissonance in
Guigemar may enable us to register the effects of pressure to form romantic and sexual relationships. As Julie Sondra Decker points out, the association of asexuality with adolescence may hold some truth not because asexuality is exclusively an adolescent experience (it is not), but because this is the time at which many people realise they may be asexual, just as it is the time at which many people of any orientation start to understand whom and what they desire.
27 Decker, The Invisible Orientation, pp. 16, 77–8. Marie’s description of Guigemar’s lack of interest in love certainly seems to suggest that he has reached a point where he is expected to feel love and desire rather than associating him with the childhood state of presexuality. There also seems to be some acknowledgement (albeit not of a positive kind) that this state may endure, so Marie does not seem to suggest that it is something out of which Guigemar will eventually grow. That he does eventually fall in love thus perhaps not so much implies that this was inevitable but reveals the impact of consistent pressure to conform to sexual and romantic norms. Decker has written movingly of how ‘the average asexual person spends too many of their formative years hearing explicit and implicit negative messages about lack of sexual attraction and interest. It doesn’t take much to severely warp an impressionable, still-forming young mind’: ‘if everyone treats you like you’re broken, you may eventually crack’.
28 Ibid., pp. 16, 14. We may be able to read Guigemar’s normative ending as illustrating the power of this pressure to conform.
The internalisation of sexual norms may also be hinted at in the way the lai briefly doubles its portrayal of romantic a(nti)pathy, anticipating how this motif will develop in later romances. When Guigemar asks the lady for her love, she initially demurs, but Guigemar somewhat hypocritically tells her that
la dame de bon purpens,
Ki en sei eit valur ne sens,
S’ele treve hume a sa manere,
Ne se ferat vers lui trop fiere.
29 Guigemar, lines 519–22. ‘The well-intentioned lady, who is worthy and wise, should not be too harsh towards a man, if she finds him to her liking’: trans. by Burgess and Busby, p. 50.No stranger himself to alienation from desire, Guigemar now appears to have internalised the compulsion towards love and sexuality and to ventriloquise it to others. This is also a gendered expression of norms, as Guigemar’s warning to the lady not to be ‘trop fiere’ could refer to pride as well as harshness (as it is translated by Glyn Burgess and Keith Busby).
30 ‘Fer2’, Anglo-Norman Dictionary <https://anglo-norman.net/entry/fer_2> [accessed 7 March 2021]. This may indicate that the association between pride and women’s resistance to love, the subject of the next chapter, is extant even in early romances and
lais, as Guigemar himself is never said to be proud. As the lady immediately accepts Guigemar’s love in response, this aligns her resistance with the idea of
dangier, where women are supposed to reject a lover as the first step in courtship. Her momentary reluctance is a stark contrast to Guigemar’s, as well as to the more extreme, revealing, and enduring instances of resistance to love that are the subject of this book. However, this brief pairing together of men’s and women’s romantic a(nti)pathy offers a preview of a pattern discussed in the next few sections of this chapter. Marie seems to pick up on and influence generic norms, restoring expectations on the surface but allowing dissonant voices to continue to emerge throughout her work.