Marking Maternity in Middle English Romance

Mothers, Identity, and Contamination

A. Florschuetz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137343482
• eBook ISBN: 9781137343499
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: Literature

Working at the intersection of medical, theological, cultural, and literary studies, this book offers an innovative approach to understanding maternity, genealogy and social identity as they are represented in popular literature in late-medieval England.

CHAPTER 1

WOMEN’S SECRETS AND MEN’S INTERESTS: RITUALS OF CHILDBIRTH AND NORTHERN OCTAVIAN

The motivating crisis of the mid-fourteenth-century tail-rhyme romance Octavian is caused by the violent intrusion of the eponymous emperor into his wife’s birth-chamber, or lying-in room.¹ He intrudes at the instigation of his conniving mother, who has bribed a kitchen servant to join the delirious and exhausted new mother in her bed—nude. Upon his entrance, Octavian jumps to the obvious though erroneous conclusion that his wife is an adulteress. He deals with the situation with considerable dispatch, immediately beheading the terrified servant and tossing the severed head at his awakening wife. The slandered empress thus emerges from a premonitory nightmare only to enter a far more horrifying reality of violence, blood, and disgrace. This intrusion precipitates the central crisis of the plot, the scattering of the royal family and consequent endangering of the patrilineal line due to the violation and misrepresentation of the empress’ lying-in room. Octavian’s entrance into his wife’s lying-in room breaks the codes through which births, particularly aristocratic births, were culturally constructed and represented in late medieval culture. Aristocratic births were configured within a matrix of gendered and political beliefs concerning the significance of the work performed within the lying-in room, work that could not be authorized or recognized if the crucial integrity of the space allotted for childbearing was broken. The poem does not allow this primal crisis to disappear; violent male intruders repeatedly disrupt this traditionally female zone at key moments throughout the romance. These repetitions reconstruct the violated area of the lying-in room and the ambivalent interpretations of the place of women in both religion and the state played out in this contested space, a space both endangering and endangered that is adversely marked by discourses of contamination and sexual threat that ultimately threaten the integrity of the state. In its exploration of the legitimacy and consequences of ambivalent and ultimately self-contradictory sacred and secular discourses concerning the status of the lying-in room, Octavian explicates the complexities of identity available to the medieval aristocratic mother, as well as the resultant equivocality of her political and spiritual status within her community. Ultimately, by staging an unjust violation of the lying-in room that takes to extremes the cultural suspicions centering on female sexuality in general and the reproductive body in particular, Octavian challenges both secular and sacred discursive and ritual practices that malign or undermine the validity of the lying-in room and the bodies and collectivities that occupy and define it. The redramatizations of this first violent intrusion that are enacted later in the romance continue to interrogate aristocratic and ecclesiastic discourses that constructed the pregnant and postpartum body as the site of sexual, and thus, lineal contamination.

Octavian shares its concerns with the intersection of family, gender, and political stability through the production of heirs with a larger category of romances that focus on women and children, and often feature the estrangement or separation of aristocratic families and the consequent problem of recognizing true heirs. As such, this romance includes the common themes of the falsely accused aristocratic wife, the exile (through exposure to the sea or wilderness) of wife and or heirs, the unwitting reunion of father and heirs, and the eventual production of physical, magical, or divine proof of the heir’s legitimacy—all elements that would be familiar to the audience of late-medieval English romance. Geraldine Heng has suggested that this subgenre of romance be called “family romance,” “to stretch and complicate” Freud’s use of the same term. ² Helen Cooper notes the fourteenth-century “flurry” of English-language romances and the overall “concern of the genre with true inheritance, the rightful passing on of land and power underwritten by Providence,” and links this literary shift with the rise of primogeniture in Western Europe, suggesting that both the literary genre and the legal practice attempt to posit that there is always one “rightful” heir in succession.³ These romances, critics have suggested, often feature women more prominently than martial or chivalric romances, though their representation of women typically prioritizes conventional female behavior and virtues, virtues ultimately necessary to the preservation of male dominance, bloodlines, and reputations.⁴ David Salter has identified Octavian as a “representative” and “typical” example of Middle English popular romance, “particularly in its treatment of women within its highly conventional narrative form.”⁵ I do not disagree with this point, as the romance’s rendition of familial crisis and resolution clearly seems to follow a recognizable pattern of convention that is well-established. I would argue, however, that Octavian’s repeated attention to social rituals of reproduction and political legitimation takes these familiar concerns and tropes and focuses attention specifically on the tensions inherent in contemporary representations and treatments of childbirth and the rituals through which late medieval people and institutions, both secular and religious, experienced, constructed, and understood the significance of women’s bodies and childbirth. These tensions in particular, the romance suggests, endanger the project of reproduction and thus political stability.

Octavian seems to offer a sort of catalogue of the potential difficulties and trials attendant upon patrilineality as a system of aristocratic male reproduction. Infertility, infidelity, slander and deception, murder, misrecognition, abduction, abandonment, and, later, death in battle are each options that the poem offers as potential barriers to the smooth and unambiguous transmission of patrilineage. The romance begins with the quandary of the eponymous emperor, whose wife has failed to conceive after several years of marriage. At his wife’s suggestion, he erects an abbey and dedicates it to the Virgin Mary, with the desired result of a speedy pregnancy. However, Mary’s apparent intercession on behalf of the empress’ conception does not ensure the smooth arrival and legitimation of the newborn heirs. The empress’ delivery is very difficult, leaving not only the exhausted mother, but also her companions, swooning and unconscious. This provides an opportunity for Octavian’s mother to trick her son into believing her slander regarding his wife’s infidelity, which results in the murder of the servant and banishment of the empress and her twin sons. Both children are abducted by wild animals in the wilderness. Octavian, the elder son, is soon reunited with his mother, while Florent, the younger, is eventually adopted by Clement, a Parisian merchant, and predictably shows frequent signs of his inherently noble nature. After defeating a Saracen giant menacing Paris, Florent is brought to the attention of his father, Octavian, and they go to war against the Saracens together. Soon, however, both are captured, and from their safe haven in Jerusalem, the empress and the younger Octavian learn of the captivity of their long estranged family members. With the lion who first abducted and then nurtured him, as well as Jerusalem’s armies, Octavian’s heir rides to his father and brother’s rescue, bringing his calumniated mother in his retinue. Upon the emperor Octavian’s release, his son reintroduces his parents, and the empress fortuitously recognizes in the mysterious young Florent her infant son carried away long ago by an ape. Reunited, the family travels to Rome to find along the way that the emperor’s mother, learning that her deception was revealed, has cut her throat and died in shame. All enjoy a hearty laugh at this turn of events and the romance ends with the triumphant entrance of the reconstituted royal family into Rome.

The particular concern of Northern Octavian with the problems of perpetuating a continuous patriline results in an unusual amount of representation and scrutiny of the domestic and public events and mechanics surrounding medieval aristocratic childbirth. The various stages of lying-in and birth, churching (ritual purification and thanksgiving a month after birth), postchurching, feasting, and revelry are all noted and represented, generally as they go horribly awry, destabilizing the continuity and security that each attempts to enact within its communal context. In particular, the practices of lying-in and of churching feasts are represented as being subverted and sabotaged, virtually guaranteeing the derailment of primogeniture, if not patrilineage itself. By presenting these scenes of botched rituals of social legitimation surrounding childbirth and the catastrophic results of their disruption, Northern Octavian emphasizes the crucial role these practices—some obscured from sight, others ostentatiously performed before the community—played in the communal production of political and social stability, as well as the anxieties about this stability that these practices both undermine and enact. Thus, this chapter examines first the domestic and then the ecclesiastic practices through which medieval families and communities experienced and interpreted childbirth (lying-in, gossiping, churching, and feasting in particular) and then juxtaposes these normative rites with their disruption in Northern Octavian. In its rendering of a Roman dynastic crisis, Octavian not only repeats familiar conventions and tropes of the family romance and other genres, but also draws attention to specific anxieties the particular treatment of these tropes illuminate in this romance: the ambivalent and sometimes contradictory political, scientific, and religious meanings of the pregnant and postpartum body as constructed by public and private rituals and representations of childbirth and its aftermath, the role of the birthing community in producing an heir, and the vulnerability to individuals, bloodlines, and social structures that these various medieval birthing practices often attempted to minimize, but which were paradoxically made evident by the insistence upon the very need for those practices.

Secular Rituals of Aristocratic Childbirth

The emperor Octavian’s intrusion into the lying-in chamber where his wife has just given birth is bloody and violent, framed by both horror and nightmare. The poem juxtaposes his entrance and subsequent decapitation of the servant with his unconscious wife’s “dolefull swevenynge,” delirious nightmares of her sons’ abduction by a dragon, foreshadowing their eventual abductions by an ape, a lioness, and a griffin (57). Much emphasis is placed at this moment in the text upon the blood that splashes from the servant and his severed head onto the bed and the sleeping empress. After the killing of the servant, “Alle was beblede with blode,” a recasting of royal blood as contamination, staining everything within the area, literally and metaphorically (159). Soon thereafter, as the empress awakens, the first thing she sees is “þe clothes all byblede,” rather than her husband or the decapitated corpse of the servant (179). The repeated references to the bloodiness of the scene, particularly the blood on the sheets, emphasize not only the terror of childbed in general, but also and more importantly the peculiar horror arising from the double contamination of the lying-in room by out-of-place men who transform the site from one of domestic and civil reproduction to one of violent and terrifyingly gruesome death and disorder. The transformation of “the richese that scho [the empress] in lay” into “the clothes all bybledde” signals a dramatic reversal from honor and potential into a nightmare of disgrace, death, and catastrophe centered specifically in the lying-in room (146, 179). The abject tableau of the prostrate body of the exhausted and now suicidal empress with her enraged husband standing over her, decapitated head of the kitchen boy in hand, is abruptly closed off with the announcement of the uneasy, yet total silence that follows: “Wordis of this were spoken no mo” (184).

While the repeated attention to the bloody sheets of the birthing bed might suggest the trauma of childbirth, the excessiveness of the violence perpetrated there, as well as its source, points to the violation of a culturally imposed site of female privacy, through Octavian’s deviant and violent entrance, an intrusion that seems to parallel the even more transgressive presence of the kitchen servant within the empress’ bed. The very presence of these men in the lying-in room functions not only as a violation of propriety, but also as the violation of the social codes forbidding both their presence and their acceptability as witnesses to what occurs within the lying-in room. The scene of derangement and dismemberment that ensues represents the similar state of the space of the invaded lying-in room, culturally defined by the containment of the female child-bearing body in a space of enclosed and inviolate femininity, a space doubly violated in Octavian, with disastrous results.

Late in her pregnancy, an aristocratic woman’s bedchamber (also that of her husband) would be converted into the lying-in room, a space characterized by the ritualized separation of the pregnant woman from the outside world.⁶ During the lying-in period, which consisted of the last 4–6 weeks of pregnancy and the period leading up to churching, men, including the woman’s husband, were forbidden entry into the enclosed lying-in room.⁷ The contained nature of the space was emphasized by its conversion and redefinition of boundaries through strategies of decoration and of gendered exclusion. Household expenditure records as well as letters and other documents reveal that new furniture was purchased often in the construction of the lying-in room and that the room was lavishly decorated in coordinated curtains, hangings, and rugs, which were used to cover the floors, walls, and even the ceiling.⁸ The effect of these fabric boundaries was to create an enclosed and insulated space of reproduction located within the household, yet clearly considered a special site of isolation from it, sealed off from the normal functions of both household and state. The importance of the enclosure of this space and its protection from outside intrusion was emphasized by the recommended measure of stuffing keyholes with fabric or other substances to prevent violation of the lying-in room’s integrity through peeping.⁹ This practice clearly suggests not only the desire to keep the space inviolate and private, but also the assumption that such a space will invite curiosity and the desire to witness what is being marked as secret and off-limits. Strategies to police and control this space, as well as the knowledge of the lying-in room and its practices, construct the lying in chamber as a site of privileged knowledge that outsiders in general and men in particular, are ineligible to share.

Secrecy is a practice that presumes and moreover demands speculation and curiosity about what is being concealed, particularly when that concealment is lavishly, and sometimes ostentatiously performed by those included in the secret. In these cases, knowledge becomes associated with a privileged few, and the rituals surrounding the enclosure of the pregnant woman simultaneously close off and titillate, reminding those closed out that there is indeed something occurring in the forbidden space that is both desirable and important to know, yet inaccessible. If, as Karma Lochrie argues, secrecy is a practice that works to exclude others from knowledge in order to construct those in the know as more powerful (within that venue) than those shut out, the separation of the lying-in room not only reiterates sexual difference in the hidden spectacle of childbirth, but also works to redefine the meaning of that difference through access to that spectacle. These practices thus transform the meaning of the pregnant body from a representation of a husband’s masculine dominance over the female body to a mysterious ritual that he is responsible to finance, but not permitted to observe.¹⁰ This dynamic of male ignorance and blindness is shockingly reversed in one of the few significant deviations of the Cambridge manuscript of Octavian, as, in this version “The lady slept and wyste hyt noght:/ Hur comfort was the mare” (C.179–180). Here, the ignorance and blindness regarding the goings-on in the lying-in room is projected upon the empress: she is completely (and apparently fortunately) ignorant of the events that have taken place there, but nevertheless subject to its consequences upon her emergence from confinement. While she presumably awakens later to find a severed head in the bed with her and “the ryche clothys . . . all bybledd,/ of redd golde there they ware,” this rude awakening is not represented in this text and her knowledge of events is left completely unexplained (C.176–177). This inversion resonates with Lochrie’s argument that the revelation of women’s secrets to men in the know reve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1.   Women’s Secrets and Men’s Interests: Rituals of Childbirth and Northern Octavian
• 2.   “That Moder Ever Hym Fed”: Nursing and Other Anthropophagies in Sir Gowther
• 3.   “Youre Owene Thyng”: The Clerk’s Tale and Fantasies of Autonomous Male Reproduction
• 4.   “A Mooder He Hath, But Fader Hath He Noon”: Maternal Transmission and Fatherless Sons: The Man of Law’s Tale
• 5.   Forgetting Eleanor: Richard Coer de Lyon and England’s Maternal Aporia
• 6.   Monstrous Maternity and the Mother-Mark: Melusine as Genealogical Phantom
• Afterword: Abjection and the Mother at the End of this Book
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index