EVELYN BIRGE VITZ
285
primary characters of these poems are a knight and a shepherdess, the
former inevitably propositioning the latter. As to outcome: sometimes the
shepherdess accepts the love or blandishments of the knight. Sometimes
she rudely sends him packing.
In
roughly a fifth of the poems the knight
takes by force the shepherdess - who sometimes thanks him when he is
finished: one such
bergere
declares: "biaus amis dos, tote la joie que j'ai me
vient de vos" ("handsome sweet friend, all the joy that I have comes to
me from you"). The genre is reliably comic, with the knight sometimes
looking like a buffoon or a coward. The maidens often have the witty
lines and the last word. They may roundly and amusingly denounce
knights for their faithlessness in love or their lack of courage.
These
chansons
have occasioned a substantial amount of recent indig–
nation. The
pastourelle
is, we are told, a "celebration of rape" which a
male audience enjoyed - and enjoys. One male scholar who politely
questioned this view was denounced for having
published a textbook illustration of literary criticism that reflects a de–
valorized and idealized concept of the feminine . [His] apology for rape
in medieval literature is grounded in a time-honored misogyny that
claims that literary paradigms of sexuality are wholly unrelated to sex–
ual violence in our rape culture and that readers should simply sit back
and experience their
jouissance
(pleasure/ orgasm).
The message is, I am afraid,
all
too clear: only men from the "amen cor–
ner" may speak up.
But these
bergeres
-
in their charm and beauty, in their wit and in the
refinement of their discourse - bear a striking resemblance to aristocratic
women. These peasant girls are not tanned, muscular, rough-spoken,
smelling faintly of manure. Rather, they are endowed with all the tradi–
tional features of beautiful noble females in epic, romance and lyric. The
shepherdess is typically beautiful and appealing, white and tender, with a
pretty
bouchette
and a bright face. When threatened with forced inter–
course, these girls exclaim things like: "Fair sweet mother of God,
preserve my chastity!" Their expressions of gratitude after the forced sex
also have a courtly ring - as in the passage quoted above. Here is another:
La pasourelle embrassai
Ki
est blanche et tendre;
Desor l'erbe la getai,
Ne s'en pout desfendre.
Lou jeu d'amors sens atendre
