Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature by E. Jane Burns (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS The other essays in the collection strike me as conrent merely to point out that at work in the Middle Ages was a two-gender system, a binary regime which often severely constrained masculine subjectivity. John Coakley's essay is exemplary in this regard. His reading of the gendered differences between male and female saints in the mendicant vitae does little more than spell out those differences: the inner lives ofwomen saints were open to male inspection, while those of men saints remained hidden, their full subjective significance obscured. Implications ofthis very suggestive characterization of the religious meanings of the two genders are never developed. The fact that the discourses used to articulate those meanings are rhemselves part of a cultural operation that is gendered from its inception is ignored. Rather than reduce gender difference to the terms resulting from this operation, we might see, for example, that hagiographie discourse manifests its misogynistic ideology across these differences. Ironically, a vigorous critique of critical projects which acquire their insights 'at the price ofremaining firmly tied to gendered binary assumptions' (138) is located in Lees's contribution to herown collection. Lockinggender into abinarism, she implies, seriously vitiates the heuristic force needed for analyzing the larger implications of gender difference, domination, and dissension. The least transformative essays in the collection, exemplified byVern Bullough's treatment ofthe physiology ofmaleness or Louise Mirrer's study ofMuslim andJewish masculine identity, seem so detetmined to view gender as an equal and opposite binary that the cultural and psychological operations, themselves the conditions oípossibility in a structure of difference, are entirely elided. Binaristic thinking, because it fails to account for the process of becomingdifference, tends to create generalities thatsquash difference, thus enervating dialogue. Bullough, for example, concludes his essay with a lame affirmation ofthe similarity of medieval men and modern men, both 'plagued by the same fears and anxieties' (43). Thevast majorityofessays inMedievalMasculinitiesfall shortofadvancingdialogue with contemporaneity, especially as it is shaped by the insights of identity politics, theories ofmasculinity (for example, the important work ofDollimore, Mercer, Dyer, D.A. Miller, Silverman, Bersani, Goldberggoes unmentioned), and ofcultural studies. But perhaps the most striking breakdown of dialogue is the one interior to the collection. Not a single essay genuinely responds to the Introduction's urgent call for arevision ofthe methods ofgender analysis as currentlypracticed byeither medievalists or nonmedievalists. MICHAEL UEBEL University ofVirginia E.jane burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in OUFrench Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). Pp. xvii, 277. isbn:o-8i22-3i83-x, 0-81221405 -6. In this provocative study that seeks to bridge the gap between medieval literature and contemporary (mainly French) feminist theory, E. Jane Burns examines female speaking bodies in misogynous Old French texts as an analogue to 'the problematic positioning ofthe historical bodies and voices of contemporary feminist academics 112ARTHURIANA working in the field of medieval studies' (p. xi). Just as academic women feminists speak within the Academy with double voices—simultaneously constructed by institutions traditionally patriarchal—so also heroines in Old French texts of the twelfth to the fifteenth century resist social and rhetorical configurations offemininity in their 'bodytalk,' their bawdy talk, their speaking the body. From these examples Burns argues for a female subjectivity that allows for the acceptance of the body within the paradigm ofWestern thought, as a means ofdisrupting the structures of authority. Drawing on the feminist psychoanalytic theories ofthe female body byJane Gallop and Susan Suleiman, Burns divides her study into two parts, on knowing women and desiring ladies. The two chapters on knowing women examine the carnal knowledge ofthe lascivious 'headless women'—talkingvaginas—offarce and fabliau and the epistemology of the knowing Eve in the twelfth-century mystery play Jeu d'Adam. According to Burns the women in fabliaux and thevernacular Eve, stereotypes ofwomen irrational, lascivious, corporeal.drawn from Plato, Aristotle, and the Church Fathers, 'also challenge, through their speech, that very image ofthe philosophically silenced and metaphorically decapitated woman' (p. 241). The three chapters on desiring ladies focus on Philomena in the anonymous Old French version of the Ovidian myth from the Metamorphoses, Enide in the romance of Erec et Enide by Chrétien de Troyes, and Iseut in Béroul's romance of...