Yes and No Means Yes and No: Sexual Consent in Yvain ou le Chevalier au lion

Abstract

Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain does not seem too preoccupied with sexual consent. Indeed, as feminist critics have notably underscored, Yvain's wife is twice pressured and tricked into accepting his pretensions. Yet by looking to points of confluence between this romance and reflections on consent in both medieval learned culture—in particular, canon law and Abelardian philosophy—and modern theory, this article counters that the romance is not so much uninterested in consent as it is interrogating the concept, exploring its limitations and contradictions in powerful ways that even prove instructive for modern theory. The article proceeds in three movements. First, it wades into the heated critical debate over the literary and ethical satisfactoriness of the romance's abrupt conclusion. I suggest that we can read the romance's dénouement as treating the problem of how well the concept of consent can distinguish legally or morally tolerable relations from intolerable ones. Second, it backs up this counterintuitive notion that the romance is concerned with the concept of consent by showing how different adventures intersect with important issues in medieval and modern thinking on the subject. Finally, it focuses on the romance's most profound, and profoundly ambivalent, representation of consent: the elaborate episode in which Yvain chases a mortally wounded Esclados into his castle and comes out married to his wife. I argue that this scene is calling attention to the complex and contradictory relationship of consent to compulsion; it casts consent as the meaningful alternative to the injustice of physical force but simultaneously shows that consent is complicit with force. By so doing, Yvain invites the modern critic to confront, not to dodge, the intractable ambivalence of consent's relationship to sexual justice.