The Romance of Adultery

Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature

Peggy McCracken

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812202748
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire médiévale et du début des temps modernes

Peggy McCracken offers a feminist historicist reading of Guenevere, Iseut, and other adulterous queens of Old French literature, and situates romance narratives about queens and their lovers within the broader cultural debate about the institution of queenship in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France.Moving among a wide selection of narratives that recount the stories of queens and their lovers, McCracken explores the ways adultery is appropriated into the political structure of romance. McCracken examines the symbolic meanings and uses of the queen's body in both romance and the historical institutions of monarchy and points toward the ways medieval romance contributed to the evolving definition of royal sovereignty as exclusively male.

1

Royal Succession and the Queen’s Two Bodies

In one of the earliest versions of the story of Queen Guenevere, the Anglo-Norman poet Wace notes that “she had many graces and she had a noble bearing, she was very generous and spoke well. Arthur loved and cherished her greatly, but they had no heir and were unable to have any child” (Le roman de Brut, vv. 9653–58).¹ Wace’s reference to Queen Guenevere’s inability to produce children is the only explanation of the queen’s barrenness in medieval literature. It is not found in Wace’s source, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, and the twelfth- and thirteenth-century romances that make Guenevere into a celebrated lover and adulteress do not attempt to explain why the queen has no children.

In around 1155 Wace’s Brut was presented to the new queen of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, a few years after her marriage to Henry II, according to Layamon, who translated the Brut into English.² In a recent biographical study of Eleanor, D. D. R. Owen has suggested that Wace may have been aware of the possible similarities between the lives of Guenevere and Eleanor. Owen further suggests that Wace’s explanation of the queen’s lack of children with Arthur may have been intended to justify her subsequent adultery with Mordred. With reference to the text’s association with Eleanor of Aquitaine he speculates that Guenevere’s relationship with Arthur may remind readers of Eleanor’s relationship with her first husband, Louis VII, with whom she had no sons.³ While Henry might have had some interest in seeing himself represented as a once and future king, it is hard to imagine that Eleanor would have welcomed the association with an adulteress, particularly since only a few years earlier Eleanor herself was rumored to have had an adulterous liaison with her uncle, Raymond of Antioch.

The speculative equation of Guenevere and Eleanor of Aquitaine may demonstrate the difficulty and, ultimately, the futility of the search for nonfictional models behind fictional representations of adulterous queens. This is not to say that there is no relationship between medieval queens and romance representations of queenship; this book attempts to identify just such a relationship. But I will suggest that the relationship between fictional and nonfictional queens is to be discovered not in biographical imitation, but in the representation of the queen’s changing and contested position in the royal court. One important factor in the definition of the status and influence of medieval queens is maternity.

Wace’s explanation of Guenevere’s barrenness leads Owen to suggest that the queen’s lack of children may have provided a partial justification for her adultery.⁴ Lancelot does not appear in this early narrative about King Arthur’s court, but Guenevere has an adulterous liaision with Mordred, who is not identified as Arthur’s illegitimate son in this text.⁵ In the French romance tradition the treasonous adultery with Mordred is displaced by the courtly adultery with Lancelot. Although Guenevere is still barren in later retellings and elaborations of her story, her inability to have children is not explained and it is not cited as a reason or a justification for adultery by romance authors. Owen’s suggestion of a causal link between the queen’s lack of children and her adultery in the Brut cannot be applied to later romance narratives about Queen Guenevere, but Owen identifies a link between barrenness and adultery that finds a persistent representation in French romances.

In almost all twelfth- and thirteenth-century medieval French romances, adulterous queens are barren.⁶ Iseut has no children and Guenevere is usually childless. In one thirteenth-century grail romance Guenevere has a son with Arthur called Loholt, but he appears only briefly and his primary role in the story seems to be to die young.⁷ Moreover, Loholt’s paternity is never disputed within the romance, even though the adulterous relationship of Lancelot and Guenevere is recounted in the story.⁸ Le livre de Caradoc provides the one example in twelfth- and thirteenth-century romance of an adulterous queen who conceives an illegitimate son with her lover. The representation of the relationship between succession and sexual transgression in Caradoc is rather different from the barren courtly adultery that characterizes the liaisons of Queen Guenevere and Queen Iseut, and I will discuss it in detail in Chapter 4. But despite the unusual form that the queen’s adultery takes in this story— her lover is a magician—Caradoc demonstrates that the illegitimate child of an adulterous queen and her lover is a possible subject of romance narratives, and it underscores the repression of reproduction — both legitimate and illegitimate — in other stories about adulterous queens.

Christiane Marchello-Nizia has suggested that the queen’s lack of children with either her lover or her husband figures the sterility of the most important relationship in the adulterous love triangle, the relationship of the knight and the king.⁹ That is, the adulterous queen’s lack of children is a figural representation of the sterile homosocial relationship between the two men who are her lovers. I wish to extend Marchello-Nizia’s reading with a deliberately literal examination of the queen’s lack of children in medieval romances. Within the context of medieval monarchy, what might motivate the representation of the adulterous queen as barren?

One possible reason for the adulterous queen’s lack of children is the threat of illegitimacy. Georges Duby has noted that “adultery, though consummated, was barren. Bastardy was too serious a matter to be treated lightly, even in literature. People were too afraid of it to use it as a subject for a tale.”¹⁰ Duby refers, of course, to “bastardy” located within an aristocratic marriage. Many romances represent kings who father children outside of marriage, but the separation of marriage and childbirth is impossible for the queen. Any child of the queen is a child of her marriage, and an illegitimate child in the royal family subverts the proper succession of the crown and opens the possibility of political chaos.

Illegitimacy is certainly not absent in medieval literature, but children born outside of wedlock are not necessarily conceived in adulterous unions.¹¹ Lancelot’s son, Galahad; Bors’s son, Hélain le Blanc; and the son that Gauvain conceives with the demoiselle de Lis are all illegitimate, but in each case neither parent is married when the child is conceived. Succession and inheritance issues are absent in these stories of illegitimacy, and even in the case of a romance narrative about a king’s son conceived in adultery, illegitimacy is hidden by other kinship ties when succession is at stake. In La mort le roi Artu, Mordred, the son of King Arthur and his sister, gains proximity to the throne and to the queen through his recognized kinship with the king, who is his uncle. His claim to the throne is an usurpation, not an illegitimate succession.

The possibility of uncertain succession is resolutely suppressed in medieval romances about adulterous queens. The adulterous queen has no children, legitimate or illegitimate, and her failure to produce children is not a subject of discussion in the romance that recounts her story. Succession concerns may explain the king’s decision to marry, as in one version of the Tristan story, where Marc’s barons urge him to marry in order to produce an heir, but when Iseut does not have a child, the barons do not again mention their desire for royal progeny.¹² Nor does the queen herself usually acknowledge her own lack of children or the importance of succession in the royal family.

A notable exception to the queen’s silence about reproduction is found in the twelfth-century Cligés by Chrétien de Troyes. In Chrétien’s romance the heroine, Fenice, newly married to the emperor of Constantinople but in love with his nephew, Cligés, wishes to disrupt the succession that she is intended to assure. As long as the emperor has no children, his nephew will be his heir, and the empress claims that she does not want to produce a child who would disinherit Cligés: “Ja de moi ne puisse anfes nestre / Par cui il soit desheritez.” (“May I never be able to bear a child and so bring about his disinheritance.” Cligés, w. 3152–53; Chrétien, 125–26.) Chrétien’s Cligés is the story of a disputed succession that extends over two generations. Roughly the first half of the romance recounts the story of Alexander, eldest son of the emperor of Constantinople. Alexander goes to King Arthur’s court to prove his chivalric skills and marries Arthur’s niece, Soredamors, with whom he has a son named Cligés. When the emperor of Constantinople dies, Alexander’s younger brother, Alis, believes that Alexander is dead and he has himself crowned emperor. Alexander returns to Constantinople to claim his throne, and in order to avoid a civil war the brothers are persuaded to agree on a compromise. Alis will wear the crown, but Alexander will govern. Furthermore, Alis agrees never to marry so that the throne will pass to its rightful heir, Alexander’s son, Cligés. The second half of the romance recounts the emperor’s betrayal of his promise to his brother, his marriage to the daughter of the emperor of Germany, the love of Fenice and Cligés, the ruses they use to deceive the emperor, and finally, the death of the emperor, the reinstatement of the rightful heir, Cligés, and his marriage to Fenice.

In Cligés Chrétien rewrites the celebrated story of Queen Iseut, Tristan, and King Marc. Chrétien does not state that the Tristan stories provided a model for Cligés, but he certainly knew the Tristan romance in some form since in the prologue to Cligés he claims to have written a version of the story, now lost, and his heroine, Fenice, makes explicit references to the adulterous love of Tristan and Iseut.¹³ The parallels between Cligés and Tristan are obvious. Both romances recount the story of a knight who loves his uncle’s wife. In Cligés Alis is an emperor, not a king like Marc, but the imperial throne is clearly hereditary, and the emperor’s relationship with the nobles in his court closely resembles King Marc’s relationship with his barons. The empress Fenice occupies the same position in the royal family as Queen Iseut: she is married to a sovereign and loves his nephew. Unlike the queen and her lover in the Tristan stories, however, Fenice and Cligés do not pursue an adulterous liaison under the eyes of the royal husband. Fenice repeatedly states her desire to avoid the example of Queen Iseut.

Cligés is often called an anti-Tristan story, written to revise and refute the legend of Queen Iseut and her two lovers, which Chrétien and his audience would have found distasteful.¹⁴ In what follows I will question the extent to which Chrétien’s story really rewrites the story of the adulterous queen, but here I wish to emphasize the way in which Cligés acknowledges the succession concerns that are suppressed in the Tristan stories and in other romances about adulterous queens.

When Fenice explicitly speaks her desire not to conceive a child who would displace her lover in the succession of the emperor’s throne (“Ja de moi ne puisse anfes nestre / Par cui il soit desheritez,” vv. 3152–53), the empress recognizes the royal wife’s role in dynastic succession and she acknowledges that pregnancy is a logical result of marriage. Fenice does not dwell on the relationship between sexual intercourse and pregnancy; such a discourse would be out of place in a courtly romance, and the fact that the empress is married to a man she does not love may explain why there is any discussion of pregnancy at all.¹⁵ When Fenice states that she does not want to play a role in the usurpation ...