5
‘What deyntee sholde a man han in his lyf / For to go love another mannes wyf’? Resisting Adultery, Resisting Rape Culture
1 Quotation from Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 178–89 (lines 1003–4).Resisting adultery or infidelity appears to be the least transgressive form of resistance to love – or, more specifically, resistance to sex – discussed in this book.
2 I generally use the term ‘adultery’ in this chapter, except for when discussing Launcelot’s relationships with women other than Guenevere, where I use ‘infidelity’ to indicate the distinction between extra-marital affairs and being unfaithful to a non-marital relationship. Romances in which adultery is rejected conform to the priorities of monogamous Christian society, upholding the importance of fidelity within marriage and working in opposition to romances where adultery is endorsed. They therefore function as exemplary narratives, offering models of behaviour that sometimes display subtle nuances of appropriate conduct. Whether an example of perfect fidelity or acknowledging the difficulty of resisting adulterous temptations, exemplary figures invite empathy when viewed through the eyes of the dominant culture whose values they embody. This empathy is further elicited when such figures are subjected to coercion, violence, or revenge – as they are in each example discussed here. In the context of adultery, coercion and vengeance are associated with negative characters who are condemned both for their attempted violence and for its threat to marital fidelity. These portrayals operate in tension with the use of coercive practices to enforce normative desires, discussed in the earlier chapters of this book. At times this tension invites or permits the dominance of medieval rape culture and assumptions of the obligation of love to be questioned, although the focus on empathy for exemplary characters also upholds the idea of the perfect victim, itself a tenet of medieval and modern rape culture.
3 On the harm caused by the idea of the perfect victim and a singular narrative of what rape is, see Sarah Baechle, Carissa M. Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov, ‘Introduction: Recovering the Pastourelle’, in Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature, ed. by Baechle, Harris, and Strakhov (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), pp. 1–14 (p. 3); Baechle, Harris, and Strakhov, ‘Reassessing the Pastourelle: Rape Culture, #MeToo, and the Literature of Survival’, in Rape Culture and Female Resistance, pp. 17–28 (p. 26). This chapter therefore uses portrayals of rejecting adultery to trace their potential to enable resistance to, as well as partial alignment with, medieval rape culture, illuminating the more subversive possibilities of this motif.
In its discussion of medieval rape culture, this chapter joins and builds upon the work of Carissa Harris in
Obscene Pedagogies and Harris, Sarah Baechle, and Elizaveta Strakhov’s recent volume
Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature. As discussed in the introduction, rape culture can be defined as ‘a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women’.
4 Emilie Buchwald, Pamela R. Fletcher, and Martha Roth, ‘Preamble’, in Transforming a Rape Culture, ed. by Buchwald, Fletcher, and Roth, rev. edn (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2005), pp. i–xii (p. xi). As Harris outlines, these beliefs ‘allow sexual violence to continue by blaming victims and failing to hold perpetrators accountable’; involve the ‘erasure of cisgender male and transgender victim-survivors’; and include rape myths like ‘she asked for it’, ‘he didn’t mean to’, and ‘she wanted it’.
5 Carissa M. Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), p. 10. While such beliefs are evident throughout medieval literature and culture, including in romance writing, the works discussed in this chapter offer a different perspective. They do not tend to blame their victims, they often do hold perpetrators accountable, they expose rape myths as myths, and they depict cisgender men’s experiences of sexual violation and victimisation. They do all of this within the framework of resisting adulterous sex, which reduces its radical implications by casting each victim as a model victim. In this respect, my chapter departs from the work of Harris, Baechle, and Strakhov, as while their focus on the
pastourelle allows them to ‘center marginalized women’s voices and illuminate the intersecting inequalities that enable sexual violation’, the romances I discuss portray the most privileged victim-survivors: high-status, often royal or at least noble, women and men.
6 Baechle, Harris, and Strakhov, ‘Introduction: Recovering the Pastourelle’, p. 3. Yet the alignments between their experiences and those of other victim-survivors of coercion and violence in romance acknowledge the harmful effects of medieval rape culture and challenge some of the ideas upon which it depends.
Rejections of adultery are a particularly common form of resistance to love in medieval romance, perhaps because of their exemplary potential. Resistance to adultery frequently occurs in the accused queen romances, such as
Syr Tryamowre,
The Erle of Tolous,
Le Bone Florence of Rome,
and
Valentine and Orson; in the
Lanval stories; in Geoffrey Chaucer’s
Franklin’s Tale; in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and
The Greene Knight; and several times in Thomas Malory’s
Morte Darthur (and its sources), although here the motif sometimes takes the form of trying to preserve fidelity to a relationship that is itself adulterous (as with the love of Launcelot and Guenevere or Tristram and Isode).
7 In addition to resisting infidelity, Isode’s rejection of Palomydes could also have been discussed in Chapter 4, as another example of how religious race can impact constructions of desirability. Palomydes is an accomplished knight, but has no romantic success with Isode, largely because of her commitment to Tristram but potentially also because of Palomydes’s racialised identity. The examples discussed in this chapter are drawn from different kinds of romances and reflect the varied forms that rejecting adultery can take. From the accused queen group, I focus on
Syr Tryamowre and
The Erle of Tolous. These romances appear together in Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.38, facilitating direct comparisons that may have shaped medieval readers’ experiences of these works. While
Le Bone Florence and the Northern
Octavian also appear in this manuscript,
Syr Tryamowre and
The Erle of Tolous offer a closer point of comparison and raise more searching questions about medieval rape culture through their deployment of narratives akin to the Biblical story of ‘Susanna and the Elders’ (Chapter 13 of the Vulgate Book of Daniel).
8 This is associated with the ‘accused queen’ motif surprisingly rarely, even though Jonathan Stavsky notes that the story of Susanna circulated widely in the Middle Ages, including in sources like prayers, suggesting illiterate people would also have known it: Jonathan Stavsky, ‘“Gode in all thynge”: The Erle of Tolous, Susanna and the Elders, and Other Narratives of Righteous Women on Trial’, Anglia, 131.4 (2013), 538–61 (p. 542 n. 18). As in the story of Susanna, they include accusations of adultery that are made by characters the women rejected and that are initially accepted as true, positioning these accusations as a form of punishment or revenge for sexual rejection. They therefore offer greater potential for exploring how such accusations align with but also expose the operations of medieval rape culture, as they depict men responding violently to rejection and mobilising misogynistic stereotypes in order to present their point of view as the truth. The accusers are always eventually revealed to be lying, however, and this trajectory, as Alcuin Blamires and Helen Cooper have pointed out, positions these romances as challenging antifeminist stereotypes.
9 Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 162–4; Helen Cooper, ‘Women on trial’, in The English Romance in Time: Transforming motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 269–323. The first section of this chapter builds on their arguments, focusing on the exemplary and empathetic role of the heroines in
Syr Tryamowre and
The Erle of Tolous, and placing the coercion they experience in dialogue with other romance representations of resistance to love.
The Erle of Tolous stands out within the accused queen tradition because it includes a secondary element to the story, the Empress Beulybon’s relationship with the titular Earl. But the Empress’s ambiguous relationship with a man who is not her husband finds a parallel in Chaucer’s
Franklin’s Tale. These two works are not often compared but have many similarities.
10 Some isolated similarities between the two tales, but no sustained attempts to compare them, are included in Shearle Furnish, ‘The Modernity of The Erle of Tolous and the Decay of the Breton Lai’, Medieval Perspectives, 8 (1993), 69–77. Both identify themselves as Breton lays;
11 See ‘The Erle of Tolous’, in Of Love and Chivalry: An Anthology of Middle English Romance, ed. by Jennifer Fellows (London: Dent, 1993), pp. 231–65 (line 1214); Chaucer, ‘The Franklin’s Prologue’, in The Riverside Chaucer, p. 178 (lines 709–15). both were probably written in the later fourteenth century; both (arguably) take as their theme ‘the sanctity of the marriage bond’, as Carol Meale notes of
The Erle of Tolous;
12 Carol M. Meale, ‘“Prenes: engre”: an early sixteenth-century presentation copy of The Erle of Tolous’, in Romance reading on the book: Essays on Medieval Narrative presented to Maldwyn Mills, ed. by Jennifer Fellows et al. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), pp. 221–36 (p. 231). they are alone amongst the Middle English lays in ‘focus[ing] alternatively and equally on two central characters’; in both cases the lady’s (mis)adventures occur in the absence of her husband.
13 Shearle Furnish identifies the last two commonalities listed: ‘The Modernity of The Erle of Tolous’, p. 71. They also share in common the isolation of their female protagonist, who is the sole woman upon whom each work focuses: in
The Erle of Tolous, no female friends of the Empress are mentioned, while
The Franklin’s Tale leaves Dorigen’s ‘freendes’ (822) curiously and perhaps deliberately ungendered. Finally, both narratives offer more ambiguous portrayals of desire and morality than works like
Syr Tryamowre. Given these similarities, I discuss
The Franklin’s Tale alongside
The Erle of Tolous and
Syr Tryamowre, exploring how all three works interrogate cultural formations of exemplarity, fantasy, and blame.
The other two romances discussed in this chapter involve men who resist infidelity. In
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain resists the lady’s adulterous seduction; in Malory’s
Morte Darthur, Launcelot rejects or tries to reject many different women in order to remain faithful to his love for Guenevere – a love that is itself adulterous.
14 The lady is not named in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Although she is often referred to as ‘Lady Bertilak’, I refer to her simply as ‘the lady’. These two examples reflect different concerns to the other works discussed not only because they involve men rejecting adultery but because they configure infidelity differently. Gawain’s rejection of the lady does not ensure his own fidelity but the lady’s commitment to her husband, Bertilak. Launcelot is already committing adultery with Guenevere, and so Malory’s
Morte itself is not a rejection of infidelity to marriage. However, within the bounds of this adulterous relationship, Launcelot tries to be faithful. These narratives therefore explore slightly different issues, revealing the variety possible within the motif of rejecting adultery, while also opening up possibilities for incorporating male victimhood and vulnerability in discussions of medieval coercion and rape.
Most of the romances discussed in this chapter date from the late fourteenth century, with Malory’s Morte Darthur a later outlier (though one based upon earlier French sources). By this time, the romance genre was well established, enabling the works I discuss to create a dialogue with romances that include adultery as well as those that portray different forms of resistance to love. These connections illuminate the workings of rape culture but can also pave the way for challenging the punitive depiction of romantic a(nti)pathy. The motif of rejecting adultery therefore offers the opportunity to cast new light upon the arguments advanced in this book so far.