When a Knight Meets a Dragon Maiden: Human Identity and the Monstrous Animal Other
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When a Knight meets a Dragon Maiden: Human Identity and the Monstrous Animal Other (Detail of ‘Mélusine in the Bath’, illustration to Thüring von Ringoltingen’s Mélusine, 14771) Research Master Thesis Name: Lydia Zeldenrust Student Number: 3440346 Date: 11 July 2011 Supervisor: dr. Katell Lavéant Second Reader: dr. Jelle Koopmans 1 Taken from Françoise Clier-Colombani, La Fée Mélusine au Moyen Age: Images, Mythes et Symboles (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1991), front page and image 15 of the appendix. Acknowledgements I would like to thank several people who have all played a different part in my process of writing this Thesis. Firstly, of course, I would like to thank my supervisor, dr. Katell Lavéant, for all she has done. I would like to express my gratitude and admiration for her daring to take on this topic with me, for her useful feedback, and for all the time she has bestowed upon me. I would naturally also like to thank the second reader, dr. Jelle Koopmans, for being so kind to take on the task. Secondly, I wish to thank dr. Bart Besamusca, not only for being my tutor, but also for being a constant source of support over the past two years. I am happy that he is always willing to listen to my passionate, though perhaps at times somewhat strange, plans and ideas. Finally, I would like to thank several people from outside Utrecht University; dr. Karen Olsen, prof. Simon Gaunt, prof. Karen Pratt, and dr. Sarah Salih, for having helped me with several queries into the world of (medieval) academia, and for allowing me to sit in on their wonderful classes. Generally, I am very grateful for all that I have learned over the past two years, and can merely conclude that I have enjoyed my studies. Furthermore, I hope people will enjoy reading this study as much as I have enjoyed writing it. On a more personal note, I would like to thank Dimitri for his unequivocal support and absolute unending patience. Surely it is not easy to live with someone who, most of the time, either has her face buried deep in a book or pressed up against a computer screen. I also wish to thank my parents for their continued support and inspiration. I can only hope that none of them has felt neglected. Lastly, I would like to thank Alice for those opportunities for sharing our love of medieval literature. “You spoke of men and other animals as two classes—the second of which you comprehended under the general name of Beasts. This is the sort of division which an intelligent crane would make: he would put cranes into a class by themselves for their special glory, and jumble together all others, including Man, in the class of Beasts.” Plato – Statesman “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.” George Orwell – Animal Farm “Maybe we’re just beasts with big brains.” Fox Mulder – The X Files, ‘Jersey Devil’ 2 Contents Part 1: Introduction, Method, and Sources 5 1 – Of Monsters and Dragon Maidens: An Introduction 5 1.1 Introduction 5 1.2 Approach 7 1.3 Main Questions 9 2 – Introducing the Dragon Maiden 10 2.1 What is a ‘Dragon Maiden’? 10 2.2 Where is the Dragon Maiden Found? 11 2.3 The Dragon Maiden in Medieval Literature 13 3 – Method 16 3.1 Introduction 16 3.2 Anxiety and Identity: Monster Theory 16 3.2.1 Note on Terminology 17 3.2.2 The Monster Challenges Boundaries 18 3.2.3 Monster Questions Man-Made Classifications of Order 19 3.2.4 The Monster Creates Anxiety 20 3.2.5 The Monster’s Role in Identity Formations 21 3.2.6 It is All About the Human 22 3.3 The Human and the Non-Human Other: Animal Theory 24 3.3.1 Man’s Identity and the Animal Other 24 3.3.2 Objectification of Animals 26 3.3.3 Right of Access to the Animal Body 27 3.3.4 Degrees of Animality 28 3.4 Combining Monster Theory and Animal Theory 29 4 – Sources and Corpus 32 4.1 Introduction 32 4.2 Confusions and Oral Traditions 32 4.3 Group 1: The Perilous Kiss and a Return to the Human 34 4.3.1 Le Bel Inconnu 34 4.3.2 Lybeaus Desconus 36 4.3.3 Carduino 36 4.3.4 Other Texts Belonging to the Fair Unknown Group 37 4.3.5 Lanzelet 38 4.3.6 Ponzela Gaia 39 4.3.7 Orlando Innamorato 39 4.3.8 Mandeville’s Travels 40 4.3.9 Tirant lo Blanc 41 4.3.10 Notabilia Temporum and the Thirteenth Book of Amadis de Gaule 42 4.4 Group 2: A Wife’s Warning and a Return to the Animal 43 4.4.1 Medieval Traditions of the Legend of Mélusine 43 4.4.2 Jean d’Arras’ Mélusine 44 4.4.3 Coudrette’s Mélusine and Other Rewritings 45 4.5 Selection of Texts and Episodes 46 3 Part 2: The Medieval Background, The Literary Background, The Monster 49 5 – Human Exclusion and Denigration of the Animal Other: Discussions in Medieval Philosophical and Theological Discourse 50 5.1 Introduction 50 5.2 Defining Man Through Use of the Animal 51 5.3 Souls and Hierarchy 52 5.4 Why the Human is Better 55 5.5 If a Man Were to Act Like A Beast… 58 6 – The Norm(al) versus the Monster 60 6.1 Degrees of Animality in the Medieval Literary Chivalric World 60 6.2 The ‘Animalized’ Animal 61 6.3 The ‘Humanized’ Animal 64 6.4 The ‘Animalized’ Human 66 6.5 The ‘Humanized’ Human 70 6.6 Creatures that Dwell at the Boundaries 71 6.7 The Dragon Maiden as a Special Case of Interest 72 6.7.1 Two Common Enemies: The Dragon Maiden and The Giant 73 6.7.2 Dragon Maiden versus the Werewolf 78 Part 3: Case Study of Dragon Maiden Encounter 83 7 – The Encounter between the Knight and the Dragon Maiden 84 7.1 Introduction 84 7.2 Status before the Encounter and First Sight of the Monster 87 7.2.1 Group 1 87 7.2.2 Group 2 96 7.3 Status during the Encounter 100 7.3.1 Group 1 100 7.3.2 Group 2 107 7.4 Status after the Encounter 112 7.4.1 Group 1 112 7.4.2 Group 2 120 8 – Conclusion 125 9 – Bibliography 132 Appendices: Appendix A - Images Appendix B - Comparison of Dragon Maiden Encounters in the Different Versions of Mélusine 4 Part 1: Introduction, Method, and Sources 1- Of Monsters and Dragon Maidens: An Introduction 1.1 Introduction The amount of research into the field of medieval monsters has been growing within the past few decades, but the monster has not always been accepted as a worthwhile topic of serious study. Although Prof. Tolkien made his famous appeal for the centrality of the monsters in Beowulf as early as 19362, it still took several decades before other scholars decided to undertake any serious studies of monsters. Incidentally, by choosing the word ‘serious’ I mean to refer to a type of study that does not brush aside all medieval monsters and label them as simply ornamental or the result of some strange joke. Nor does a ‘serious’ study view the medieval monster as some kind of unfortunate accident or a silly misinterpretation of strange phenomenon occurring in nature3. These interpretations of the medieval monster lack any kind of examination of, for instance, the psychological need of the medieval mind to create such monsters, and they certainly downplay the medieval imagination that allows these monsters space to roam within its world. No, a serious study of the medieval monster takes its central topic seriously and realises that the monster has meaning and that the medieval monster in particular is to be treasured and understood. Passionate arguments aside, medieval monsters occur across a wide variety of sources and they are also extremely varied, ranging from shape shifting demons to dog-headed cynocephali. The topic of medieval monsters, therefore, is quite broad and too large for this study and needs to be specified even further. According to Isidore of Seville, one of the 2 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and The Critics’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 22 (1936), pp. 245-295. 3 See John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge (MA): Harvard UP, 1981), p. 24-25, for a short overview of monsters considered by scholars as misinterpretations. It is possible that the legends of a few monsters were indeed the result of errors in observations of unfamiliar phenomenon, but assuming that all monsters have such a basis ignores “errors that were wilful, poetic, and imaginative” (p. 25). 5 earliest authors writing about monsters, monstrosity takes the following forms and can be classified accordingly: (I) hypertrophy of the body, (2) atrophy of the body, (3) excrescence of bodily parts, (4) superfluity of bodily parts, (5) deprivation of parts, (6) mixture of human and animal parts, (7) animal births by human women, (8) mislocation of organs or parts in the body, (9) disturbed growth (being born old), (10) composite beings, (11) hermaphrodites, (12) monstrous races4 The focus of this study will be on one of these specific kinds of monsters: Isidore’s number six, or the monster with a mixture of animal and human body parts.