Response to Leah Schwebel and Jennifer Alberghini

Abstract

Response to Leah Schwebel and Jennifer Alberghini Lynn Shutters Leah Schwebel and Jennifer Alberghini demonstrate how consent remains important, even to those who secure it coercively and retroactively. Women want it—or at least the tellers of these stories want women to have wanted it. However offensive, this narrative imperative disrupts present-day perceptions that female consent was utterly foreign to medieval cultures. Yet both authors demonstrate that consent alone does not ensure female empowerment. Their work aligns with Kate Manne's argument distinguishing misogyny from sexism. Sexism, Manne argues, "discriminate[s] between men and women, typically by alleging sexual differences."1 Misogyny, on the other hand, posits men and women's common humanity and potential for virtue, even if that virtue is expressed in gender-specific terms. While sexism assumes women's blanket inferiority, misogyny "differentiate[s] between good women and bad ones, and punishes the latter."2 Consequently misogyny coopts, rather than denies, female interiority: misogyny demands that women yield men "not only their bodies but also their minds, in their capacity for choice, volition, and agency."3 In The Reeve's Tale, Schwebel explains, Aleyn reduces Malyne to a tool for exacting revenge. In Manne's terms, this treatment of Malyne is sexist, a denial of women's humanity, rather than misogynist. Why, then, the need for Malyne's retroactive consent? This vengeance on women is two-pronged: first, the Reeve discounts Malyne's personhood. Second, and contradictorily, the Reeve reinstates Malyne's autonomy through retroactive consent. Schwebel convincingly argues that Malyne's affectionate leave-taking of [End Page 359] Aleyn allows her to reclaim agency and insert herself into a narrative of romance. Additionally, in imagining Malyne as consenting, the Reeve makes her conform to the model of attentive femininity that misogyny demands. Based on his prologue, the Reeve is a man who does not get what he wants from women: we might read The Reeve's Tale as an incel revenge fantasy. The feminist pay-off might be to reframe our questions about consent by considering how an agential act might, paradoxically, be imposed. Alberghini reminds us that narrative impositions of retroactive consent can also come from well-meaning women, such as Eglantine's nurse. The nurse dismisses a non-consensual kiss as "a thynge of nought" and blames Eglantine for rejecting a "gentyl man." Yet she also assures Eglantine that nobody saw the kiss but herself, and she'll never tell. If the kiss of a gentleman can—and should—be accepted, then why is secrecy required? Alberghini suggests that we need not reduce the nurse to an ideological mouthpiece. We might instead see how she articulates the complex negotiations of agency, coercion, and consent that medieval and modern women regularly face. These essays remind us that we cannot historicize consent as a march forward from premodern women who were the dehumanized victims of ideological forces, to modern women who are empowered individuals. As Linda Martín Alcoff argues, our present-day notion of consent "ignores the constrained options within which choices are too often actually made."4 In changing the narrative, we must complicate our understanding of consent and consider additional terms in which sexual violation might be assessed. [End Page 360] Lynn Shutters Colorado State University Footnotes 1. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 79. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 108. 4. Linda Martín Alcoff, Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 127. Copyright © 2022 The New Chaucer Society, University of Miami