Rosanne P. Gasse’s Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England is a learned, thoughtful contribution to the studies of premodern difference and alterity. Hybridity, Gasse provocatively contends, “is too hybrid a thought for a single theoretical lens to grasp its nuance in full” (4). Nodding to a diverse range of fields such as postcolonial studies, disability studies, critical race studies, and gender studies, among others, Gasse nonetheless seeks to deploy a methodology that is neither too broad nor too narrow to be useful in her examination of the concept within the confines of Middle English vernacular literature. For Gasse, hybridity is primarily a material, physiological phenomenon that straddles the conceptual extremes of difference and sameness. However, not every instance of mixture or combination of contraries is an articulation of hybridity. Tightening the conceptual framework, Gasse insists that “what is being mixed and how and why it is being mixed matter” (4). Hence, hybridity is not simply or exclusively the same as mixed origin, mixed body, or mixed identity.
Gasse’s methodology is one that can be characterized as symptomatic reading, an interpretive model rooted in symptom detection--coined by Louis Althusser under the influence of Freud and Lacan--that became the dominant mode of literary criticism made popular by Fredric Jameson. [1] The defining symptom of premodern hybridity, Gasse argues, is anxiety. Bodily difference triggers anxiety, the threshold of hybridity. In this sense, Gasse’s study also qualifies as--though it never explicitly acknowledges it as such--a study in premodern affect theories, especially negative affects, what Sianne Ngai would term “ugly feelings.” [2] In terms of hybridity, “a ‘bad’ or ‘unacceptable’ or ‘lesser’ mixed combination...spawns anxiety” (5). Anxiety, in Gasse’s formulation, is two-pronged: the one prong is outward-facing, public, and group-oriented; the other, inward-facing, private, and centered on the self (225). But overlaying the binarism of hybridic anxiety is the recognition that “anxiety itself is chameleon,” as anxiety could be about any topic or political agenda (217). Cultural fears and anxieties shift, as circumstances change across historical periods. And while anxiety is foundational to the emergence of hybridity, it is conjoined to desire, forming what Gasse terms “a desire-and-anxiety paradigm” (224). A circular dialectics is at work at the intersection of--or the looping of, in Gasse’s terms--anxiety and desire, for anxiety “creates the desire for difference” (225). Hybridity, in other words, is self-generative.
Four critical gerunds buttress Gasse’s monograph: grounding, pointing, wedging, and extinguishing. These four words form the mantra that Gasse would repeat throughout her study: “Hybridity is grounded in difference” (5) and “seeks to extinguish itself by pointing to sameness, what is held in common” (9). In Gasse’s conception, difference as the ground of hybridity is inseparable from anxiety. As such, hybridity is deictic and functions as an index of entrenched forms of social biases that frame difference as negative and threatening. Moreover, hybridity operates “as a wedge, separating what is otherwise naturally blending without incident” (217). If hybridity points to sameness, for Gasse, deixis is a self-imbedded movement in hybridity towards the erasure of difference, one that is instrumental to Middle English literature’s narrative strategy of containment and extinguishment of bodies that generate collective fears and anxieties. Hybridity, it turns out, is self-destructive.
Aiming to understand medieval hybridity in “large terms” and approach it from “many general angles” (4), Gasse’s monograph offers four case studies, each of which is made up of a series of rich, close readings of Middle English vernacular texts grouped under four major manifestations of hybridity: mixed ethnic identity, the human-supernatural hybrid, the hybrid human body, and the hybridity of the dead and dying. In short, Gasse’s express goal is “to crack the code by which English vernacular texts in the medieval period...handled the anxieties of their time and culture posed by matters of hybridity” (9). Chapter 2 investigates mixed ethnic or cultural identity across religious and cultural divides, focusing on the offspring of miscegenation and interfaith union between, for instance, Christians and Muslims. Gasse emphasizes “biological miscegenation in which ancestry is mixed, and cultural status complicated, by having parents from two different groups” (18). The primary texts under examination are Middle English romances such as Sir Gowther, Libeaus Desconus, The King of Tars, andRichard Coer de Lyon. Genealogical hybridity, as embodied by children of mixed marriages, triggers collective anxiety of group identity--in this instance, that of Englishness, one that was understood primarily in biopolitical terms. If these texts evince social anxieties, they also offer strategies of hybridic erasure through textual silence or conversion. For instance, in The King of Tars, the formless lump that is the product of the marriage between a Christian princess and a Muslim Sultan transforms into a fair-skinned male child when the Sultan converts to Christianity, thereby erasing the child’s menacing markers of impurity and inhumanity. Chapter 3 turns to a different group of mixed children: those born of the unnatural union of humans and the super/subhumans. Gasse examines the mixed human/supernatural hybridity of two popular romance characters: Merlin and Melusine. Merlin is the son of a demonic father and a human mother, whereas Melusine is the daughter of a human father and a faery mother. Both are blessed with the gifts of prophecy and magic through their divided nature; through their supernatural abilities, they wield considerable political power. But Melusine and Merlin are also cursed by their unnatural hybridity, which condemns them to tragic ends: Merlin is either killed or entrapped for eternity by the Lady of the Lake; and Melusine transforms into a dragon and must remain in the bestial form so long as the world exists.
In Chapter 4, Gasse reads John Gower’s Confessio Amantis as a litmus test to explore the human body itself as a site of hybridity. Gower, a theorist of premodern materialism, conceives of the inherent malleability of the body. That is, “all form, all matter, and all material can change into something else, given the right circumstances and agency” (124). As Gasse argues, the fluidity of the body also means that, for Gower, physical elements “must also be able to recombine through processes natural and unnatural which will create different forms, different versions of that same body to manifest a different expression of the original object” (124). Changing forms, human skin covers chairs and skulls repurposed as goblets. The body’s capacity for shapeshifting both foregrounds the instability of the hybridic body and points to the social anxiety over monstrosity and disability, an anxiety that also paradoxically grounds the hybridic body. Finally, in Chapter 5, Gasse turns towards eschatological literature to examine the hybridity of the dead and the dying. This is perhaps the most surprising and refreshing chapter in the monograph. For Gasse, “being dead is just another way of being human” (214), and how the living treat the dead reveals the framework and limits of social and metaphysical hybridity. Reading didactic religious texts such as Handlynge Synne and the Prick of Conscience, Gasse points to the bodies of the resurrected dead, ghosts, and revenants as the locus of hybridity, for these differently embodied beings dwell in the liminal state between life and death.
Subtending Gasse’s monograph is her engagement with two modern theorists of hybridity: Homi K. Bhabha and Michel Serres throughout the four case studies. Hybridity, for Bhabha, is an ambivalent articulation of the power imbalance between the colonizer and the colonized, as the colonized hybrid subverts the dominant narrative of colonialism. In Gasse’s view, Bhabha’s theory of colonial hybridity is limited by its own narrow temporal focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as its conceptual focus on white European colonialism. The medieval lies “outside of Bhabha’s frame of interest” (3). [3] Serres, on the other hand, offers a more usable theory of hybridity for Gasse’s project. [4] Serres’s theory of hybridity is not rooted in difference or alterity, but in pedagogy that advocates for interdisciplinarity. In Gasse’s assessment, Serres promotes “an intersection of the humanities and the natural sciences (Serres’s binary) whereby the educational experience can become a better crossbreeding exposure to new and innovative ideas” (16). That is, Serres provides Gasse with a reparative methodology through which “hybridity can be a good thing because it is disruptive” (19).
Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England participates in the ongoing debates over the usefulness and appropriateness of critical theory in literary studies. While gesturing towards medieval postcolonial studies and premodern critical race studies, for instance, Gasse’s monograph is nonetheless ambivalent and at times reactionary, if not anxiety-laden, in its evaluations of these subfields. Identity politics is “myopic” (2). The alternative, Gasse suggests, is the recognition that medieval constructs of hybridity “need[s] to be grounded in something less biological, more social and cultural” (11). On Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Gasse claims that while power imbalance is evident in his tales of bodily hybridization, “to look for postcolonial explanations of colonized and colonizer behind all such tales seems a fruitless quest” (215). In her schema, Gasse delineates five major constructs of medieval difference: hybridity, race, ethnicity, class, and alterity. Hybridity overlaps with the other four constructs but differs from them not by fixating on difference but by pointing to sameness (4). In other words, for Gasse, hybridity functions as “a healthy counterbalance” (4) to the “the inflaming effects of race, ethnicity, class, and alterity which heighten and exaggerate the importance of difference” (220).
One could argue that hybridity is as inflammatory as race, ethnicity, class, and alterity. In fact, similar to matters of race, hybridity is threatening and anxiety-inducing precisely because it marks bodies and identities that cannot be analogized, as contemporary critical theorists would argue. [5] Gasse concedes that hybridity “cannot always erase difference, nor should it. Sometimes the pull of race, ethnicity, class, or alterity towards difference prevails” (17). Or, it is not always about erasure and extinguishment but perception and perspective. For example, in her reading of the formless lump in The King of Tars, Gasse argues that “[t]he son’s hybrid identity disappears the moment his father self-declares through conversion, both literal and spiritual” (41). Biology and genealogy do not determine identity in this romance; rather, symbolism and faith drive the narrative logic. The child-lump’s hybridity is extinguished when his parents are of the same faith and skin tone. Yet asKatie L. Walter has pointed out, the text is never really about a literal hybrid or a physical transformation; instead, it is about perception. The text offers “the possibility that the formless lump at its center is not literally a lump but rather something that cannot be made sense of--a human child denied human status because of the exogamous nature of its conception” (129). [6] There is no disappearance or extinguishment because there has never been a hybrid body in the narrative.
Perhaps a different conceptualization of difference would also be productive in studies of medieval hybridity. Patricia Clare Ingham has advocated a “contrapuntal” historicist methodology, one that “understands historical difference as distinction rather than alterity, assessing the complex dynamics of ‘here’ and ‘there,’ ‘then’, and ‘now’...at various moments in time” (48). [7] A contrapuntal hybridity could approach difference as distinction and not as alterity, thereby shifting the framework of analysis. The hybrid lump in The King of Tars--a human child that has always been a human child--marks the religious difference between his parents not as alterity but as distinction, in the sense of perceptual difference and not that of the Other.
Gasse emphatically flags the artificiality of hybridity (217)--or, the constructed nature of difference that grounds hybridity--that allows it to point to sameness. Hybridity, as much as it is anxiety-inducing, is potentially utopic because it is the third space, a la Serres, a “blank space in the middle en route between the two points of departure and arrival...where profound new discoveries are made” (158). In short, Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England is a welcome addition to medieval studies of difference and is appropriate for upper-level undergraduate courses that introduce students to the critical conversation on premodern hybridity, as well as for graduate students and scholars working on relevant fields.
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Notes:
1. See Anne Anlin Cheng, “Psychoanalysis without Symptoms,” Differences 20, no.1 (2009): 87-101.
2. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
3. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
4. Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
5. See, for instance, Frank B. Wilderson III, “Afropessimism and the Ruse of Analogy: Violence, Freedom Struggles, and the Death of Black Desire,” inAntiblackness, ed. by Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), pp. 37-59.
6. Katie L. Walter, “The Form of the Formless: Medieval Taxonomies of Skin, Flesh, and the Human,” in Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture, ed. by Katie L. Walter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 119-39.
7. Patricia Clare Ingham, “Contrapuntal Histories,” in Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern, ed. by Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 47-70.