“The Treasure Above All Treasures”: Red Mouths, Medieval Fetishes, and the Limits of Modern Interpretation

Abstract

“The Treasure Above All Treasures”Red Mouths, Medieval Fetishes, and the Limits of Modern Interpretation Olga V. Trokhimenko To say what a thing is, is to say what it is like. —Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” In the dusk of a medieval church, a young woman is praying before the altar. While she is completely absorbed in this pious activity, the mind of the man behind her is clearly occupied with more earthly matters. In fact, it is because of her that he is in church at all. The lady indeed has many charms on which to feast one’s eyes, yet the man’s gaze is fixed only on her beautifully shaped mouth. It is red, so very red that a rose would pale in comparison. As the enamored man continues to stare, he experiences a miracle—he witnesses the redness spread like fire from the lady’s lips to the surrounding objects. First, the black letters of the Psalter in the beauty’s hands turn red, then the parchment, and after that, the church walls and the windows. Finally, as the woman reads the verse “Domine, labia mea aperies [Lord, open my lips],”1 the Psalter begins to glow from cover to cover, inflaming the pristine white cloth used as its wrapper. The “miracle” produces a completely stupefying effect on the man: wherever he looks, he sees the red blaze. He appears to be surrounded by the lady’s red mouth. “Reading amounts to an unconscious decoding of the author’s unconscious fantasies.”2 It may be tempting for a post-Freudian mind to agree with this statement by Henk De Berg, the author of a recent introduction to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and its use in literary studies. The twenty-first-century reader fully anticipates that the text is not revealing everything, that the things unsaid are as important as those on the page, and that, more likely than not, these unsaid things [End Page 227] will have something to do with sexuality. To paraphrase James A. Schultz, one hundred years after Freud we know what things mean.3 Nancy Partner has recently pointed out that regardless of whether one personally accepts or rejects psychoanalysis, its basic language and concepts permeate our culture and are invoked daily in every conceivable context.4 Terms like “repression,” “sublimation,” or “fetish” seem to lend themselves to the interpretation of works with pervasive and repetitive imagery, as, for example, the fourteenth-century German Minnerede, or love treatise, conspicuously called Of the Most Beautiful Lady Called Red Mouth (Von der schonsten frawen genant der rot múnt), whose summary opens this essay.5 The anonymous poem overflows with references to the woman’s attractive orifice, which is admired and worshipped by the male onlooker. This is hardly surprising, for, as any medievalist can confirm, the red-mouth motif is a commonplace throughout the high and late medieval periods; and even though attractive red lips can grace both male and female faces, they come to be associated with the ideal feminine beauty.6 Medieval poets transform the mouth into a truly erotic orifice whose contemplation is just a thought away from far less platonic forms of admiration. When seen against the backdrop of its overall popularity in contemporaneous literature and the male observer’s typical voyeuristic behavior, the frequency and intensity of this image in individual texts seem to beg a psychoanalytic interpretation. Indeed, the pervasiveness of the image has led some prominent scholars to consistently read the red-mouth motif in medieval English, French, Italian, and German texts as a manifestation of the Freudian fetish.7 In this article, I will point to the limits of such an interpretation. It may be difficult for us, as some medievalists caution, not to hear “the overtones of sexuality” in premodern love discourse,8 and there can be no doubt as to the existence of erotic and sexual subtexts that have been the greatest guarantors of the old poems’ charm. Works such as the fourteenth-century Minnerede in question are neither simple nor naïve: there is more to their pervasive evocations of the female mouth than what...