|
...can define membership in a group. Shared secrets can also become gossip, which, as Patricia Meyer Spacks postulates, "incorporates the possibility that people utterly lacking in public power may affect the views of figures who make things happen in the public sphere." (2) Gossip can spread damaging information, undermining individuals' public personae. It can even affect individuals' views of themselves.
Gossip, the sharing of secrets, and their combined ability to affect hierarchies of power are frequent concerns in the late-medieval Scottish poet William Dunbar's works. For example, Dunbar reveals his awareness of the potency of gossip in the didactic poem beginning "How sowld I rewill me or in quhat wys" [How should I rule me or in what way]. (3) The poem describes a man's frustration with public condemnation of his actions. He complains that however he conducts his life, someone will despise his manners: "I can not leif in no degre / Bot sum my maneris will dispyis" [I cannot live in any manner, but someone will despise my behavior]. (4) Later stanzas make clear that what distresses him is gossip, or "backbiting," an aspect of envy as medieval preachers categorized it. (5) For example, stanza six reads:
Gif I be sene in court ouirlang, Than will thay mvrmour thame ammang, My freyndis ar not worth a fle, That I sa lang but gwerdon gang. Lord God, how sall I governe me? (6)
[If I am seen in too long in court, then will they murmur among themselves that my friends are not worth a fly, since I go so long without a reward. Lord God, how shall I govern myself?]
The poem's impetus derives from the narrator's inability to please those that murmur, whom he identifies as "baith man and lad" and "twa and twa." (7) As a whole, the poem laments these whisperers' tendency to interpret every action and aspect of his appearance in the worst terms. The narrator's desire to please the gossips is implicit in the repeated final line of each stanza when he asks God to help him discover how he ought to behave ("Lord God, how sail I governe me?"). In this poem, Dunbar describes how gossip impels an individual to behave in contradictory ways--whether happy or sad, liberal or conservative--in order to gain public approval, only to be continually foiled.
A concern about the danger posed by women's gossip lies at the heart of one of Dunbar's most frequently discussed works, The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. (8) The poem depicts three women who meet on Midsummer Eve to gossip about their husbands and lovers and to share secrets about the best ways to control men. Michael G. Cornelius has described the resulting conversation as something that "would clearly horrify medieval men and indeed men of any era." (9) In associating gossip with women, the poem affirms Karma Lochrie's observation that medieval texts persistently depict "the dangers of gossip as a corrosive discourse associated almost exclusively with women." (10) Yet, in the end the poem's frame structure undercuts the potentially corrosive effects of the women's conversation on the patriarchal social hierarchy by identifying the narrator as a male eavesdropper who reveals the women's conversation to a male audience (the poem ends when the narrator asks his listeners or "auditoris" which they would choose for a wife, if they had to marry one). (11) By inscribing male auditors and sharing the women's secret strategies with them, the narrator alerts men to their own vulnerabilities, enabling them to thwart the women's designs and bolstering patriarchal power. The frame structure converts female secrets into male secrets, corroborating Lochrie's theory that throughout medieval literature "masculine secrecy functions rhetorically to define and contain the feminine, to frame crucial power relationships and the notions of the medieval subject, and to foster masculine textual community, authority, and intimacy." (12) In this article, I argue that Dunbar's poem depicts the "horrifying" exchange of knowledge between the women, not only as a warning to men but also as a means for men to penetrate women's exchange, to gain an understanding of women's strategies, to use that knowledge to recuperate the power women might appropriate, and to forge a community among the men who share that knowledge. In fact, The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo is an authoritative, literate, masculine effort to define and control women.
In many ways, Dunbar's poem participates in a long tradition of medieval misogynist literature. In 1944, Francis Lee Utley noted that "Dunbar was influenced equally by the popular chanson de mal marine and by Chaucer's Marriage Group." (13) More recently, Roy J. Pearcy has suggested that the poem shares many characteristics of a sub-genre of French fabliaux that he calls the jugement, Michael G. Cornelius has drawn connections between Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Prologue and the Tretis, and A. C. Spearing has made suggestive comparisons with Chaucer's The Merchant's Tale. (14) Indeed, as Spearing points out, "Most of the similarities go little beyond what can be accounted for by a long tradition of clerical writing about women, especially widows, who challenge orthodox notions of feminine submissiveness and propriety." (15)
Dunbar's poem is striking within the conventional anti-feminist material, however, because of the way he dramatically separates the sexes. Although the poem consists almost entirely of dialogue, there is no conversation between the sexes. The women speak to other women; the man to other men. Within the poem, men and women exist in separate spaces. The women's dialogue occurs on Midsummer's Eve, which the first-person narrator calls the merriest of nights in an isolated arbor protected by thorns (1), while the narrator wanders alone in the forest seeking "mirthis" or revelry (9). They have diametrically opposed goals: the women want to dominate men, while the male narrator, like Cornelius, finds the women horrifying and wants to subjugate them by sharing his knowledge with his male friends back at court. This separation of audiences then allows the poem to distinguish between male and female modes of discourse. The women share their secrets orally while the male exchange occurs both orally and through writing, beginning when the narrator shares his secrets with his "auditors" and eventually circulating more widely as a written text--a more efficient form of transmission, furthering the narrator's goal. Dunbar employs misogynist material to divide women and men into isolated camps.
The poem dramatically enacts a male fantasy of female speech by providing two layers of narration: first, the male narrator offers a first-person account of his experiences outside an enclosed garden, eavesdropping on three women; and second, the three women's conversation is related, purportedly in their own words. Thus, the majority of the poem is presented as the women's direct discourse. As Lochrie has observed, "Trifling with men, normative values, and gender hierarchy is part of the performance and ceremony of women's gossip, at least according to masculine fantasies of it." (16) In this case, the women's discourse is threatening because they prioritize their own sexuality and pleasure, which their husbands are unable to satisfy, overturn their husbands' authority, and, thus, seek to undermine the patriarchal hierarchy.
In The Tretis, the threat that the women pose to the patriarchal hierarchy is amplified by their desirability. The two married women and the widow are initially described as idealized courtly women who might be taken to represent the best of womankind. The narrator gives a detailed account of the three women's appearance, including their elaborate coiffures:
I saw thre gay ladeis sit in ane grein arbeir, All grathit in to garlandis of fresche gudlie flouris. So glitterit as the gold wer thair glorius gilt tressis, Quhill all the gressis did gleme of the glaid hewis. Kemmit was thair clier hair and curiouslie sched, Attour thair schulderis doun schyre schyning full bricht, With curches cassin thair abone of kirsp cleir and thin. (17-23)
[I saw three gay ladies sitting in a green arbor, all adorned with garlands of choice fresh flowers; their glorious golden tresses were shining like gold itself while all the grasses were glittering with the cheerful colours; their brilliant hair was combed out and elegantly disposed clear down over their shoulders and shining very brightly, with head-dresses of delicate and transparent fabric arranged above.] (17)
They are arrayed in rich fabrics and their faces shine like "flouris in Iune" (27). The quality of their attire and the fairness of their hair and faces attract the narrator. Though, as Spearing notes, the narrator does betray some disapproval of the women, describing the widow, for instance, as of wanton habits in line 37, (18) he repeatedly refers to them in elevated terms, calling them seemly, amiable, and fair creatures in narrative interjections whenever the speaker changes.
The elite status of the women in The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo is interesting for another reason as well. The gendered division of the narrative voices in Dunbar's poem resembles divisions found in the Minnerede, a major genre of late-medieval German love poetry. In an article on gender and eavesdropping in Minnereden, Ann Marie Rasmussen divides the poems into two kinds of narrative: in one, which she calls "urban," male narrators eavesdrop on older women instructing young women on how to exploit their power to arouse men for their own gain, implying an ongoing conflict between the sexes; in the other, "gallant" narratives, men overhear, and eventually join, conversations between women that reinforce courtly values shared by both men and women, positing a "reassuring solidarity between gentle-born men and women." (19) While I do not wish to argue that Dunbar was familiar with these German poems, they do offer an interesting point of comparison. Although the women in The Tretis are described as noble in the courtliest terms, the poem has more in common...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
More articles from Philological Quarterly
The last days of Lord Peterborough: the Earl, the opera singer, and a ..., June 22, 2004
Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.
Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication
name or publication date.
About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company
analysis or best practices in managing your organization,
Goliath can help you meet your business needs.
Our extensive business information databases empower business
professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible,
authoritative information they need to support their business
goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting,
company research or defining management best practices -
Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.
|
%20%20&position=1)