EVELYN BIRGE VITZ
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though the only act of violence that the poet perpetrates on the girl in the
field is to "rape" her song and turn it into a poem:
his
poem.
A major thrust of the current scholarship is to find rape scenes where
none appeared to be. Many literary scenes that are clearly not rape - or
are rape only if anything and everything is - are now called rape: stolen
kisses, kidnappings, and forced marriages are troped into rape. If "Euro–
American literary traditions" are denounced because in them rape is ever
"systematically erased, elided, displaced, naturalized, and rationalized,"
one might reply that today rape scenes are all too often multiplied, mag–
nified, amplified, and just plain fabricated.
Examples: there is a scene early in Chretien de Troyes's
Perceval
where a youthful hero (misunderstanding the good advice his mother has
given him; he is rather a dodo) kisses a woman several times against her
will. Perceval causes her all manner of grief by this act (she has a jealous
lover), but he does
not
rape her, as has been claimed. Or let's look at the
various scenes in Chretien's
Cliges:
here too, we do have women (mostly
Fenice, the heroine) being carried off repeatedly, but there is no rape
whatsoever, and part of the time , getting carried off is her own idea. So
though we are told that "Chretien spins a tale in which the heroine's
body is pulled from leader to leader," only in the scenes of her fake death
does Fecine actually suffer anything, and that pain results from the at–
tempts of the doctors to revive her. The doctors are, admittedly, cruel
and repulsive - but women come and throw them out the window!
It
is instructive and disturbing (I wish it were surprising) to note that,
despite all the current blurring of distinctions between rape and other acts
of force, no one ever mentions indignantly the scene in
Yvain
where the
hero, naked and mad, is discovered asleep in the forest by some women.
In a comic scene, a young servant girl, instead of rubbing magic ointment
only on Yvain's temples, gets carried away and rubs it all over the naked,
unconscious knight. He is then apparently sexually fondled against his
will
- and as a deeply honorable, and apparently chaste, knight, he would
presumably have been mortified. Perhaps this is yet another scene pro–
duced by a male poet for a smirking male audience? But do only males
smirk?
Distinguishing between real rape and other kinds of sexual inter–
course is not always easy, either.
The Romance of the Rose
by Jean de
Meung points out the problems. Is the final scene, in which the lover
enters the shrine and plucks the rose, a scene of rape or not? These days,
it tends to be treated as though it unquestionably were. But the central
theme of this work is courtship, and the characters represent the different
allegorical figures that a lover must meet and win over to gain the favor(s)
of a woman. The text is ambiguous. There is force, but the obstacle
