'Love and Marriage: Fictional Perspectives'
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
‘Love and Marriage: Fictional Perspectives’ Annelies van Gijsen bron Annelies van Gijsen, ‘Love and Marriage: Fictional Perspectives’ door Annelies van Gijsen, verschenen in Wim Blockmans and Antheun Janse (red.), Showing Status. Representation of Social Positions in the Late Middle Ages. Turnhout, 1999, p. 227-263. Zie voor verantwoording: http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/gijs009love01_01/colofon.htm © 2003 dbnl / Annelies van Gijsen 227 Love and Marriage: Fictional Perspectives Annelies van Gijsen Love, marriage and social position are represented and discussed in many, and varied, literary sources from the medieval Low Countries. For this contribution I have selected a couple of texts from different genres in which love and social position play a part. Ideas about love's causes and the degrees of freedom in choosing a lover, wife or husband are discussed. Narrative fiction and drama will provide fictional material. But first, I will touch upon a crucial question. Can we ever understand the meaning of fiction as seen by its original audience, since we can only observe it through the screen of our own preconceptions and preferences? Cases from fictional sources usually cause problems of interpretation. It is often difficult to decide whether a story is ‘realistic’ or to what extent it should be taken seriously. Sometimes it is not at all clear to us whether the words and actions of a character deserve approval or censure. Especially when love comes into play, our spontaneous reactions may be the very opposite of what the author intended them to be. As Stearns and Stearns observe: ‘We live in a society that places an unusually high value on romantic love. It is proper and illuminating to seek the origins of this attitude. But we must also beware of how our own strong assumptions can obscure our view of the past.’1 As one of these assumptions is the idea that love is a natural phenomenon and is therefore as unalterable as ‘human nature’ itself is supposed to be, it may be wise to consider some of these strong assumptions first: forewarned is forearmed. 1 Peter N. Stearns & Carol Z. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, American Historical Review 90 (1985) 813-36, esp. 823. Annelies van Gijsen, ‘Love and Marriage: Fictional Perspectives’ 228 The preface to the collected contributions to a Louvain colloquium on love and marriage in the twelfth century (1978) opens as follows: ‘Love, the mightiest feeling that can inspirit human beings, and Marriage, the institution which, if not animated by this feeling, loses its sense and its soul, form the topics of this book [...].’2 This solemn statement finds a more popular expression in a song from the fifties: ‘Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.’3 C.S. Lewis even described love stories as ‘stories how a man married, or failed to marry, a woman’.4 Sarsby has drawn attention to the fact that, at present, ‘love is also the almost prescribed condition for marriage in most of Europe and the United States. Any other motive for marrying, such as money, social position or to get an heir, would be regarded as mercenary or calculating, while love is supposedly unmotivated by self-interest’.5 In a comparison of present-day and medieval ideas on love, Trilling points out many differences, but still there is at least this common belief ‘that the lovers must freely choose each other and that their choice has the highest sanctions and must not be interfered with’.6 However objective, liberal or otherwise enlightened we may try to be, these ideas and ideals are so strongly installed in our minds that we often take them for granted. They tend to obscure our interpretation and judgement of medieval fiction. Love, Life and Fiction In western society, love is still a favourite theme in fiction. Representations of erotic love can vary greatly, as they are rooted in very divergent 2 A. Welkenhuysen, ‘Amor tenet omnia; By Way of Preface’, in: W. Van Hoecke & A. Welkenhuyse (eds.), Love and Marriage in the Twelfth Century. Mediaevalia Lovaniensia VIII (Louvain 1981) vii-ix. 3 Quoted in E. Kooper, ‘De vrouw als echtgenote’, in: R.E.V. Stuip & C. Vellekoop (eds.), Middeleeuwers over vrouwen I (Utrecht 1985) 40-55, esp. 42. 4 C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (London 1936; reprint Oxford 1975) 9. Though possibly unintentionally, this ‘gendered’ definition fits many medieval texts in which love is defined as a feeling of a male lover toward a female beloved; see my ‘Pygmalion, or the Image of Women in Medieval Literature’, in: A. Angerman et al. (eds.), Current Issues in Women's History (London 1989) 221-9. 5 Jacqueline Sarsby, Romantic Love and Society (Harmondsworth 1983) 6. 6 Lionel Trilling, ‘The Last Lover; Vladimir Nabokov's “Lolita”‘, Encounter XI (1958) 9-19, esp. 16. Annelies van Gijsen, ‘Love and Marriage: Fictional Perspectives’ 229 traditions. ‘There is happy, socially acceptable love [...] which leads to marriage and families, and there is unhappy, unattainable love, coupled in literature with suffering or death, the antisocial, engulfing passion, which sets people at odds with the world and their own social interests.’7 In medieval fiction, both variants occur; this illuminates how the Great Passion and the Perfect Idyll both became indispensable for True Love, so that nowadays the ideal love relationship would require both, either at the same time, or successively. To complicate things further, literary tastes have changed to the extent that happy-ending love stories have gradually become ‘gesunkenes Kulturgut’, limited to, and flourishing in, trivial and popular forms of fiction. Authors with serious literary aspirations generally shun them. This development has influenced our perception and aesthetic judgement of medieval fiction. ‘The prose romances of the Middle Ages are closely related to earlier heroic literature. Some [...] are retellings of heroic legend in terms of the romantic chivalry of the early Renaissance, a combination of barbaric, medieval, and Renaissance sensibility which, in the tales of Tristran and Iseult and Launcelot and Guinevere, produced something not unlike modern novels of tragic love.’8 For this very reason, Tristran and Lancelot are at present considered paragons of the perfect lover of medieval fiction. Romantic preferences for Great Passion and Tragedy have made their stories, though successful enough in the Middle Ages, more popular than they ever were in the past.9 Yet, these stories were once considered controversial and provocative. The story of Tristran and Iseult is ‘a desperate tale of forbidden love in which much that is dubious was excused’; in Gottfried's version, ‘the characters of Tristran and Isolde [...] oscillate between the ideal, if judged by amatory standards, and the criminal, if judged by others.’10 The theme inspired a whole body of literature that comprises both ‘neo-’ and ‘anti-Tristrans’. Chrétien de Troyes, whose version of the tale of 7 Sarsby, Romantic Love, 5. 8 Kenneth Rexroth, ‘Literature as a Collection of Genres’, in: Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 15th ed. (1993) vol. 23, 84-5. 9 M.-J. Heijkant, ‘Tristran & Isoude’, in: W.P. Gerritsen & A.G. van Melle (eds.), Van Aiol tot de Zwaanridder; Personages uit de middeleeuwse verhaalkunst en hun voortleven in literatuur, theater en beeldende kunst (Nijmegen 1993) 320-31; F. Brandsma, ‘Lancelot’, in: ibid., 201-17. 10 A.T. Hatto (introd./transl.), Gottfried von Strassburg['s] Tristran (Harmondsworth 1960) Introduction, 7, 25. Annelies van Gijsen, ‘Love and Marriage: Fictional Perspectives’ 230 Tristran is lost, not only wrote a ‘neo-Tristran’ (Le chevalier de la charrette, c. 1180, in which Lancelot is first pictured as Queen Guinevere's lover), but also an ‘anti-Tristran’ (Cligès). This great innovator also contributed substantially to the ‘mise en roman’ of marriage,11 by presenting, in his Erec and Yvain, the new concept of ‘amour courtois conjugal’, in which love and social obligations, passion and domestic happiness eventually attain a perfect harmony. Chrétien's Charrette gave a flying start to Lancelot's literary career; it was adapted in the ‘Lancelot-propre’ part of the so-called Lancelot en prose. This cycle shows a ‘double esprit’; ‘at first it would seem that love of a woman, even when it involved adultery, deceit and disloyalty, was the source of all good [...]. This attitude gives way more and more to the doctrine that adulterous love is sin and the cause of calamity, but until we reach the Queste [del Saint Graal] there is ambiguity.’12 The main issue in question was not, I think, the acceptability of adultery, but the acceptability of ‘immoral’ fiction.13 ‘Le Tristran de Gottfried contribue à la discussion littéraire sur minne et mariage dans le roman courtois de son époque’ (my italics).14 So did the disseminations of Lancelot. In a famous scene in his Inferno (c. 1308), Dante describes a conversation with Francesca da Rimini who is in hell with her brother-in-law and lover Paolo. Their adultery was inspired by their reading of the episode in the story of Lancelot and the queen where Galeotto acted as a pander - as the book does to Paolo and Francesca.15 Dante apparently thinks this kind of literature morally dangerous,16 possibly especially for young people. 11 J. Ch. Payen, ‘La “mise en roman” du mariage dans la littérature francaise des XIIe et XIIIe siècles: de l'évolution idéologique à la typologie des genres’, in: Van Hoecke & Welkenhuysen (eds.), Love and Marriage, 219-35. 12 J. Frappier, ‘The Vulgate Cycle’, in: R.S. Loomis (ed.), Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History (London 1969) 295-318, esp. 302. 13 It is still under discussion whether or not violence, pornography and crime in books or movies inspire undesirable behaviour.