I'm troubled...because when push comes to shove, the spurned women of medieval romance often resort to accusations of, well, let's not call it sodomy, but they never (?) select a charge from any of the other medieval ways of being or not being sexual. Is there, in other words, a binary at work?"Yesterday, while teaching "Lanval," I put the same question to my students. Apparently, they had drawn from the same well as JJC (who wrote in the comment thread, "I would wonder a little more about the genre specificity of certain definitions of sexuality"), as this is what they proposed:
- it's part of the definition of a knight to be of sexual service to someone. If he's refusing a woman, especially the presumptively best woman there is (Guinevere), then he must be serving something else, i.e., well-hung/well-dressed young nobles/servants. This answer could be refined somewhat, as the great polarity in romance is not male-female but noble and (the generally unrepresented) ignoble: so why not accuse the knight of loving a
burger'sburgher's daughter? (But on this, see the comment on class, below)
- With that in mind, they arrived at an even better solution: why don't spurned women accuse knights of being secret hermits or monks or otherwise bound to one of the many 12th-13th c. set of sexual codes? Because in a romance or a lai, that would be a compliment. Good answer, and duh (!) for me.
Unfortunately, we didn't get to the question of why the rape accusation (e.g., the Potiphar's wife story) becomes a sodomy accusation (or, as Lanval hears it, a prostitution accusation, that is, an attack on his class rather than an attack on his "sexuality"). But we did determine why Guinevere publicly charges Lanval not with sodomy but with attempting to seduce her and (the worse crime perhaps) dismissing her beauty: most practically, she should go with the charge that's easier to prove; but there's also a sense in which the "Vallez avez bien afeitiez" attacks the homosociality of the Arthurian court itself. The men really do prefer to hang out with other (well-dressed) men: notice the crowds around Gawain and Arthur's irritation when he's compelled to talk to his wife. Thus Lanval isn't the only guilty party here, and it's possible that while the sodomy charge might be privately embarrassing for Lanval, it's not a hanging offense so far as the court itself is concerned. I might have, but didn't, allude to squirrelly way of conservatives with Larry Craig, Jeff Gannon (and his customers), Matt Sanchez (and his customers), or Ted Haggard...