"Feminist analyses of rape have only just begun." This is the opening sentence of Elizabeth Robertson and Christine Rose's introduction to their important and encyclopedic collection of essays on rape in medieval and early modern literature. Four hundred pages later, Christopher Cannon concludes the Afterword to the volume with the same sentence: "Feminist analyses of rape have only just begun." Cannon's summary focuses on the question of knowledge and the truth of rape-- "that set of gender hierarchies and male perspectives which describe the truth of rape as not-rape"-- but his principal target is an essay by Evelyn Birge Vitz which appeared in 1996, arguing against the futility of trying to "raise the consciousness of women dead for eight hundred years." Vitz dismisses feminist readings as a version of presentism, but Cannon targets her easy assumption of an empirical difference between rape and non-rape. By contrast, he claims that one of the collection's key concerns is epistemological, an inquiry into the structure of knowledge about rape. Cannon's 'Afterword' thus thematizes the inevitable and crucial afterword of rape: its definition, after the fact, in juridically acceptable terms.
The essays in this volume study texts of English and European literature from Ovid to Spenser. In general, their method is contextual: close and sometimes dizzyingly intricate readings of literary texts are set against a range of literary, historical, political, and juridical contexts, while several essays either foreground or mention in passing the experiences of modern women, by way of politicizing the study of medieval and early modern rape. It is a question that rightly preoccupies a number of contributors and give political point to their inquiries: is rape the same act, whether committed or represented in the fourteenth or sixteenth century, or the present? Analyzing literary representations of rape throws this issue into even sharper focus, in that accounts of rape tend to circle around various archetypal rapes in classical and medieval literature: Helen, Lucretia and Philomela figure repeatedly in this volume. Is the experience of each Philomela the same or different? Accordingly, many essays in this volume tackle the question of intertexuality, while several seek to transform source study into a more political mode, not always without strain. Karen Robertson relates how her detached academic lecture on the sources of Titus Andronicus generated an aggrieved response amongst her students, many of whom were rape victims who felt she was "appropriating their suffering for academic purposes." The class was unable to negotiate the gap between their own experience and the critical study of the play's sources. Robertson argues, unconvincingly in my view, that source analysis and historical contextualization offer "agency" to readers who can find in Lavinia's search for the absent Progne (the sister who might avenge her rape) an "anticipation" of modern feminist challenges to patriarchal legislation and ideology about rape and revenge. Understanding the traditions by which rape is naturalized, and its victims are silenced is a powerful enough strategy; to suggest that this research is authorized or anticipated by Lavinia seems needlessly sentimental.
This is a rare false (and minor) note, however, in a collection whose politics and hermeneutics are both rigorous and impressive. Its historical and disciplinary reach is very broad, and the collection as a whole will be an indispensable reference point for future study in this area.
The inclusion of essays on medieval and early modern texts is a familiar strategy in the current intellectual climate, and in this instance throws up a number of interesting questions. In such a period, and with such a theme, questions of female subjectivity and agency inevitably predominate. But the essays on Spenser and Sidney deflect attention on to masculine subjectivity, expressed as a writerly self-consciousness, especially Amy Greenstadt's essay on Sidney, and Katherine Eggert's on Spenser, essays which both consider writerly "rapture." These essays open up a question that can't be answered by individual contributors: the possibility that rape and its discursive representation might somehow be used to chart the shift from medieval to early modern subjectivity. At one level, rape is an act which refuses the boundaries of periodization. Yet, as a number of these essays argue, the varying juridical, historical, and mythical representations of this act have rich potential for us to mark and measure historical differences. How does the law regard rape? Does it distinguish women's consent from men's? What are the implications for the disposition of property and human rights?
Christine Rose's study of the figuration of rape in a number of poems by Chaucer, "Reading Chaucer Reading Rape," opens the collection's dialectic, presenting a powerful argument for the necessity of continuing to read rape as literal, even visceral, as well as figurative. Demonstrating Chaucer's repeated insistence on displacing rape narratives away from the body or the psyche of the victim, and onto the demands of genre, of homosocial exchange, or of the commodification of women as property, or indeed, onto the ethos of romance or marriage, Rose challenges feminist readers to read against Chaucer's own words in the prologue to the Miller's Tale, suggesting that "(wo)men shal . . . maken ernest of game." Extending Dinshaw's reading of rape in Chaucer's Sexual Poetics, Rose directs attention to the context of the classroom, suggesting that our insistence, there, on the nexus between literal and the figurative readings of rape, will somehow make a difference, may somehow transform social understanding of rape.
Similar arguments are mounted by many essayists, who seek to enact in their writing a kind of active, interventionist response. This is why the figure of Procne is such an important but problematic figure for this study. Is her act one of sisterly support? Or revenge beyond what is measurable? The silencing of Philomela, and her translation of her narrative into a textile that others (women) can read and understand becomes, implicitly, the governing trope of this collection, in the idea that textuality, in the currency of modern critical essays written into a community of feminist readers, can perform some kind of reparation.Mark Amsler, in "Rape and Silence: Ovid's Mythography and Medieval Readers," shows that despite the interest of Ovid's late medieval commentators in ethical questions, they don't engage very deeply with important shifts in legal terminology. Berchorius's fourteenth-century readings of Ovid almost entirely erase raptus as sexual violence, even as he constantly refers to "rapina" and "rapere" in his interpretations of Ovid's narratives. Reading Christine de Pisan and Chaucer, Amsler concludes that "rape narratives in the later middle ages provide a principal textual loci for the fear of poetic affect." He thus anticipates the discussions of Greendstadt and Eggert, later in the volume.
Monica Brzezinksi Potkay illuminatingly shows how the hero of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is objectified and handled as if he were himself a text, in Jerome's sense; "a captive and unwilling object of desire." She reads the poem as insisting on the necessary link between letter and spirit, in a radical recuperation of the allegorical method that is rejected by so many of the contributors to this volume. It comes as some surprise, however, to read that the two women in this poem, the very old and the very beautiful, "are two personae of the same feminine will." Like many essayists in this volume, Potkay is concerned to extract an ethics of reading: "Readers who rape texts, [the poem] cautions, will end up raped by texts."
In the first of four essays on "The Philomel Legacy," E. Jane Burns, in "Raping Men: What's Motherhood Got to Do With It?" shows in the Old French Philomela how Philomela and Progne rework two myths of female nature; the beloved beauty and the loving mother. This is a powerful and disturbing essay that probes a set of underlying assumptions about rape and revenge narratives, uncovering a fitting symbolism in Procne's dismemberment of her own son as revenge against her husband Tereus's rape of her sister Philomena.
Nancy A. Jones contributes the second and more ambitious essay on this text, though she seems torn between two potentially conflicting impulses. Her first gambit is to read the text and its condemnation of Tereus as a form of rebuke to twelfth-century feudal society, arguing that it aestheticizes violence against the women who are so essential to the "sexual economy of patrilocal exogamous cultures." But the heart of the essay lies in its deconstructive word-crunching, its exploration of the poet's puns on the syllables of Philomena's name, and its argument that this semantic destabilization symbolizes the potential of women's textile work to offer its own critique of marriage practices: "the work develops a homology between disrupted language and disrupted family ties." This textual uncertainty is also a feature of Philomena's tapestry, an example of women's discursive textuality, born of a small community of women workers which becomes, in turn, a metaphor for the poem itself and its destabilizing effect upon its listeners. It is a rather more complex conclusion than the idea of a "rebuke." But in spite of its conceptual over-reaching, the essay has some interesting speculations about the world of women's textual work.
Robin Bott, "O, Keep me from their worse than killing lust," compares the legend of Virginia as told by Chaucer's Physician's Tale and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, exploring the broader social implications of both poets' use of the trope of the raped woman as a diseased limb or part of the social body that must be excised. This helps to thicken our understanding of "patriarchal power," a necessary, but rather flat generalization deployed in a number of these essays.
Karen Robertson shows how Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus re-writes the Procne story as a revenge play; that is, as a play about masculine revenge and the marginalization of the feminine or sororal empathy that is such a feature of Ovid's story. Robertson contextualizes this version with a discussion of the increasingly centralized Tudor justice system, which had the effect of discouraging women from making direct appeals to the courts. She suggests that Tudor prescriptive literature directs particular repressive force against the expression of anger in women and inferior classes. The play affirms the masculine responsibility for vengeance, with the effect of further silencing the rape victim, Lavinia.
Anne Howland Schotter, in "Rape in the Medieval Latin Comedies," shows why rape is such an important theme in Latin comedies written for schools, as it dramatizes the issues of will and consent that preoccupied twelfth-century clerics and canon lawyers such as Gratian. In her reading of the Pamphilus, Schotter shows how the girl, Galathea, verbalizes her protest in articulate length and detail, and suggests that the play thus refuses to allow us to aestheticize the act of rape. There are other readings of the play's interest in the articulation of dissent, however: it may have the effect of abstracting the problem into an intellectual dialectic; or worse, demonstrate the ineffectiveness of women's discourse against violence.
Christopher Cannon, in "Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty's Certainties," pursues his important work on the most famous rape in medieval English literary studies, the charge of "raptus" from which Cecily Chaumpaigne releases Chaucer. In this essay Cannon compares modern rape law, with its insistence on determining the victim's lack of consent as the defining attribute of rape as crime, with medieval law's emphasis on consent as if affects the culpability or agency of the woman in the offence, and its implications for the disposal of property. He suggests that medieval definitions of raptus firmly confound rape and abduction so that we can never separate them, and reads a number of instances of rape in Chaucer's fictions (notably, the cases of Helen and Criseyde) as exemplary of Chaucer's interest in the "grayness" of definitions of rape, and his pre-modern interest in the question of consent. Using legal definitions to read fictional texts is always problematic, and comparing medieval and modern legal theory, as Cannon does here, further compounds the difficulties. This essay exemplifies both the risks and benefits of "presentism," in Cannon's concern to show how Chaucer's fictions prefigure modern legal concerns with consent. His method is usefully heuristic, however, rather than programmatic. Its complicated exposition is a necessary condition of its interest in legal theory, but it is a significant step in our relative understanding of medieval and modern theories of rape.
Like Cannon, Elizabeth Robertson, in "Public Bodies and Psychic Domains: Rape, Consent, and Female Subjectivity in Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde,'"emphasizes the complexity of Chaucer's understanding of the problem of female consent, but her concerns are rather with the contradictions in the subjectivity of the rape victim. In this paradox, rape denies subjectivity, while also producing it. Robertson works through the productive dynamics of resistance in the cases to three women: Lucrece, Helen, and Criseyde. Helen's case is particularly complex: "the more complicit she is in her 'raptus,' the more she emerges as a subject." In her reading of Troilus and Criseyde, however, Robertson draws attention to the late medieval preoccupation with female consent both in theological commentaries on marriage and in legal discussions of widows' property rights. She reads Chaucer's poem as a nuanced, almost deliberately ambiguous reading of these inconsistencies.
In the first of three essays linked by their concern with sixteenth-century English poetics, Amy Greenstadt, "'Rapt from Himself:' Rape and the Poetics of Corporeality in Sidney's Old Arcadia," demonstrates the "deeply intertwined problems of the sexual and textual." The essay situates The Old Arcadia in a legal context that was "shifting the meaning of sexual violence towards a definition that centred on the female will." Sidney's fictional trial scene dramatizes some aspects of this version of rape and marriage law. Yet the conventions of Petrarchan poetry, and their implicit invitation to conquest, complicate matters. Greenstadt also writes illuminatingly about the relations between author and reader, suggesting that Sidney seeks to avoid the dominant "poetics of ravishment." This essay is typical of the best in this volume, in its judicious close readings and its careful attentiveness to poetic and legal contexts.
Susan Frye's essay, "Of Chastity and Rape: Edmund Spenser Confronts Elizabeth I in The Faerie Queene," is a revision of an essay published in 1994.This revised version has also been published elsewhere, and it must be doubtful whether an essay collection is best served by this duplication. It is one of only four essays that are published elsewhere, yet as an analysis of Spenser's "poetic rape of Elizabeth," as an act of resistance to Elizabeth's deployment of her chastity as a political stratagem, it does seems to belong to a somewhat earlier phase of feminist criticism.
Katherine Eggert moves beyond this reading mode, to interrogate the metaphoric structures that customarily represent rape, in "Spenser's Ravishment: Rape and Rapture in The Fairie Queene." Rather than reading rape as a symptom of patriarchy, Eggert reads rape as "a mode of worrying over rape's viability as signifying system," especially in contrast to the "rapturous poetic modes" that it replaces. Ultimately, she finds the Faeirie Queene, "uneasily straddles iconoclasm and iconophilia, rape and rapture." Sharing a deconstructive impulse with many of the contributors here, Eggert also reads Spenser's poem in the context of sixteenth-century English Protestantism.
This review cannot do justice to the wealth of research and ideas behind this volume; it constitutes a major intervention into studies of rape, consent, subjectivity, literature, and the law. Perhaps it does not quite achieve a true balance of medieval with early modern, and perhaps it does not quite resolve or answer all the questions it raises by bringing these two historical periods together, but Representing Rape will be seen as a landmark volume for many years to come.