EVELYN BIRGE VITZ
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tween compulsion and consent cannot, without anachronism, be applied
to the medieval period.
(It
may be unrealistic even today.)
Let me now set these medieval works and issues into the context of
the contemporary debate on rape. We live in an era that is enormously
preoccupied with free choice, and we are shocked when people's ability
to control their bodies or their lives is seriously infringed. But in the me–
dieval period, people had far different - and by our standards lower -
expectations of control. They expected to be forced to do all manner of
things, at least some of which they nonetheless managed to enjoy. We
should be wary of projecting our understanding of human reality back
onto them.
It
is true that, over the centuries, women have been much
put upon by men - and
real
rape is, without question, a terrible thing. But
it is surely worth reminding ourselves that all human beings have caused
pain to members of their own and the opposite sex. To inflict suffering
on others, possession of or even ready access to a - the - phallus is not
necessary. Nor are women the only ones to have suffered; so have chil–
dren, the poor, the old - even men. Moreover, terrible as it assuredly is,
can rape really be said to be the
worst
thing that women have had to en–
dure? What about murder, famine, slavery, and other catastrophes?
And let's put this current obsession with victimhood under brief
scrutiny: this is the latest American pseudo-psychological discovery. We
have all been abused and mistreated by others and need recovery groups.
(In this expanded framework, women have no monopoly on suffering.)
It
is astonishing that we today who are so fortunate should think of our–
selves as archetypal victims, projecting our sense of victimhood - our
poetics and our hermeneutics of resentment and self-pity - back onto
other, arguably less happy, eras, and trying to raise the consciousness of
women dead for eight hundred years to the fact that they were oppressed!
The indignation which so often suffuses scholarly discourse about the
literary theme of rape - represented most commonly, in fact, by fantasies
of forced sex and unexecuted threats of sexual violence - is unfortunate.
Much feminist scholarship anachronistically applies modern distinctions
and a modern sensibility to medieval works.
It
is also unsophisticated in
its understanding of the nature of literature and of the pleasures - some–
times morally dubious, it is true - that fiction has provided to men and
women over the centuries. Finally, this scholarship, with its simplistic
ideological unpinnings, appears to forget just how complex - and myste–
rious! - a part oflife sex is.
If
we must keep talking about rape, might we commit ourselves to
discussing it in a more fair-minded and historically informed fashion?
