Monstrous Bodies and Transformation in Marie de France’s ‘Bisclavret’ and Chaucer’s ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale.’ (original) (raw)
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While Old English literature rarely represents sexualized bodies, and just as rarely represents monsters, Middle English literature teems with bodies that are both sexualized and monstrous. In Old English, sexualized bodies appear in overlooked genres like bestiaries or travel narratives-the homes of monsters. Thus, monsters possess some of the only explicitly sexualized forms present in Old English texts. But it is not only the difference between paucity and abundance that marks the change from Old to Middle English monsters; it is also the shift from permanence to mutability. The bodies of Old English monsters are permanent and unchanging; many Middle English monsters, however, are capable of transformation.
THE SYMBOLIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE MONSTROUS – THE ELIZABETH BATHORY STORY
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This article analyzes several kinds of monsters in western popular culture today: werewolves, vampires, morlaks, the blood-countess and other creatures of the underworld. By utilizing the notion of the monstrous, it seeks to return to the most fundamental misconception of ethnocentrism: the prevailing nodes of western superiority in which tropes seem to satisfy curiosities and fantasies of citizens who should know better but in fact they do not. The monstrous became staples in western popular cultural production and not only there if we take into account the extremely fashionable Japanese and Chinese vampire and werewolf fantasy genre as well. In the history of East European monstrosities, the story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory has a prominent place. Proclaimed to be the most prolific murderess of mankind, she is accused of torturing young virgins, tearing the flesh from their living bodies with her teeth and bathing in their blood in her quest for eternal youth. The rise and popularity of the Blood Countess (Blutgräfin), one of the most famous of all historical vampires, is described in detail. In the concluding section, examples are provided how biology also uses vampirism and the monstrous in taxonomy and classification.
Monsters, the Feminine, and the Diabolical in Medieval Culture
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In the Middle Ages, it was believed that women were inferior to men intellectually, spiritually, and physically to the point where they were seen as a dangerous threat to men. Texts such as De Secretis Mulierum, the Decretum of Burchard of Worms, the legend of the fairy bride Mélusine, and the Malleus Maleficarum illustrate this point, showing that women were viewed as potential monsters. Through this study, I will show how these texts illustrate medieval anxieties about women that painted them as monstrous and inhuman, an attitude that helped create the late medieval and Early Modern witchcraft moral panic. By comparing the accusations made in these texts to female monsters of the Middle Ages, I will show how medieval popular culture thought of women as a monstrous group that was threatening to men.
Monstrous Bodies, Female Prowess, and Power
Inkwell Symposium of Medieval and Renaissance, 2019
Bodies are used to express political statements and the monstrous bodies of Old and Middle English are no exception. Amongst the religious homilies and epic battle poetry longing for a heroic time gone by are the incredible monsters that decorate prose texts like The Wonders of the East. While some of the Exeter Riddles joke about feminine sexuality in a seemingly acceptable manner, poems like the famous Beowulf feature outwardly monstrous, feminine characters. Moving into Middle English, much poetry debates the discourse surrounding expressions of free, feminine sexuality, including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the infamous adaptation by Robert Henryson. Also seen in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Arthur is the destruction of legendary society via adulterous feminine acts. Free expression of feminine sexuality is seemingly destructive on an initial reading of some texts and this assumption is often taken for granted on an initial sweep of the Medieval Period. Why was this such a prominent feature in so many now-famous poems from the later medieval period? Can we find a conclusion in this back and forth debate between opposing discourses? How is the monstrous body used to fight free feminine sexualities?
Metamorphosis, transformation, and yet, why not, shapeshifting, have captivated all kinds of audiences for more than four thousand years. A recurrent theme visible in ancient art and literature, shapeshifting involves necessarily a person or a creature who can change shape through inner magic, a concrete magical object, or the ingestion of a liquid. Although tales of metamorphosis focus on physical change, they carry, intrinsically, the discourse of immutability of identity, by paradoxically contrasting the transitivity aspect of the body and the endurance of personal identity. If, in more generic lines, metamorphosis in literature hopes to blur distinctions and break the boundaries between what is human and what is animal-like; in a deeper sense, it mirrors human anxieties regarding identity, what it means to be human, and our intrinsic relationship with change. All very interesting, but another yet more instigating question persists: which gender, historically in literature, is experiencing metamorphosis as stated above? In other words, what does metamorphosis in literature communicate about the social identity of, distinctively, men and women?
Taking its theoretical cue from the work of Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler, the paper explores some examples of the construction of the body of the racially and sexually 'other' as monstrous, abject and 'de-formed', with particular reference to early modern medical treatises and Shakespeare's Othello. Yet, the paper argues, the demonisation of these bodies does not fail to reveal the anxiety about boundaries of gender and race at the heart of the 'dominant'.
Bisclavret and Sir Gowther document the metamorphoses of their protagonists from animal/human hybrids into fully realised humans, via a state of symbolic or literal animality. This narrative progress assumes some distinction between the human and animal. However, the nature of this boundary is fraught and ambiguous. Furthermore, it’s unclear whether we should understand ‘human’ as a category of individuals, grounded in some feature of the body or mind, or rather as a social, civilisational category. In this essay, I explore how the monstrous hybridity of both protagonists defies attempts to clearly parse the distinction between their animal and human selves along a framework of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ natures. I argue that their metamorphoses consist in them navigating a symbolic field that defines ‘human’ as civilisational category ‘within’, opposed to an ‘animal’ natural realm ‘without’ its borders. I then examine the complicating role of voice and language. It both underlines the essential hybridity of the protagonists, and gives us a key to understanding where the texts locate these hybrid bodies – ‘within’ or ‘without’ human civilisation.
It's a Woman's World: Undermining Gender Representation in "The Wife of Bath"
In literary history, two opposing stereotypes have determined women’s role: the angel-woman and the monster-woman. Unwilling to be defined by these constricting categories, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath sets out on a pilgrimage against male oppression. The following paper aims to analyze and explore the controversial and innovative figure of the Wife of Bath. The main focus will be on the various instances through which this character undermines gender representation and secures female autonomy. A detailed analysis of her prologue and tale will showcase how the Wife of Bath becomes the author of her own tale, subsequently appropriates male roles, and takes control of male weapons’ of domination in order to reveal women’s oppression.