Estreitement bende: Marie de France's Guigemar and the erotics of tight dress

Medium Aevum, Spring-Summer, 2008 by Nicole D. Smith

Clothes need to be more disciplinary. (1) (Pearl, corset designer and tight-lacing enthusiast)

The twelfth century witnessed perhaps the most startling change in the history of women's dress: garments that were once expansive and flowing came to be tightly fitted across the body with belts, knots, and laces. Short hemlines--characteristic of Anglo-Saxon tunics, dresses, and jackets--lengthened, while fitted sleeves and bodices 'revealed and distorted the body by an exaggerated emphasis on length and slenderness' in the early 1100s. (2) Belts and laces tightened loose fabrics closely around the upper body, and dressmakers achieved a fuller skirt by first cutting vertically from the lower hem to halfway below the waist and then placing a triangular 'gore' into each of the slits. (3) The resulting silhouette featured a marked contrast between a fitted bodice and a full skirt, the train of which was often knotted, presumably to avoid dragging costly fabric on the ground. Courtly women in England and France quickly donned the long tunic, known as the bliaut, as their garment of choice, and the dress soon became emblematic of a fashion-savvy noblewoman in the art and literature of the high Middle Ages. (4) According to several fashion historians, this moment in the high Middle Ages marks 'the early, modest beginnings of tight-lacing for women'. (5)

Tight dress, belts, and knots appear as signs of aristocratic beauty, sexual continence, and military prowess in medieval literature generally, but acquire particular historical import when read in light of changing social attitudes toward fashion during the reign of Henry II (1154-89). Henry's court probably witnessed first-hand the transformation of popular dress practices, and, given the monarchy's support of arts and letters, it is also possible that it encouraged the dissemination of sartorial ideals of courtliness in literature throughout the Angevin empire in England and France. (6) Not surprisingly, contemporary works offer various interpretations of what fitted attire means: twelfth-century romance tends to use tight dress as a mark of noble birth or beauty, while histories and sermons authored by various clerics, including Orderic Vitalis, Maurice de Sully, and John of Salisbury, often figure the fashion as a sign of pride or sexual licentiousness because it communicates the individual's investment in worldly goods.

The Lais of Marie de France, a compilation of twelve short Breton romances written in the 1160s and dedicated to a 'noble reis' who was possibly (though not certainly) Henry II, feature lavish costume as a sign of aristocratic magnificence and prowess. (7) The Lai de Guigemar, the first in the collection as it appears in British Library, Harley MS 978, sets the pattern, and adheres to several other generic conventions of romance: the eponymous protagonist falls in love with a seemingly unattainable woman (she is married to a jealous husband who keeps her under lock and key), the two experience love in the typical Ovidian sense (as a constraining malady that affects body and mind), elements of magic infuse the narrative (from a talking hind who curses Guigemar to a magical ship that transports lovers to foreign lands), lovers exchange gifts that affirm their commitment (a knot in Guigemar's shirt and a belt for the lady), and these gifts serve as the means by which the lovers will recognize each other if separated and then reunited. Based on these stock literary motifs, Guigemar and his lady appear at first as quintessential lovers in what seems to be a typical romance. Yet Marie's use of tight dress in this lai is anything but conventional. (8) In this essay, I argue that fitted attire in Guigemar expresses not only noble beauty, but also Marie's pedagogical enterprise for laity and clergy. Rather than espouse the clerical view, which perceives tight-lacing as sexually licentious, Marie uses fitted attire in Guigemar to underscore first the erotic body and then its meritoriously disciplined sexuality.

While Marie carefully uses romance conventions in Guigemar--from the Ovidian notion of love to gift giving as a mark of recognition--she also extends these stock motifs in new and important ways with respect to aristocratic costume. Critics have recently emphasized clothing as a crucial point of entry to literary representations of medieval court culture in Marie's Lais, yet Guigemar has largely gone unnoticed. (9) Instead, scholars have commented on Marie's use of dress as a visual expression of female identity in the collection as a whole. For example, Amelia E. Van Vleck argues that Marie 'use[s] textiles as documents of feminine testimony in questions of sexual contracts'; Gloria Thomas Gilmore understands clothing as a means 'to comment on the theme of subject formation'; and E. Jane Burns asserts that garments 'disrupt stereotypes of femininity' by providing female protagonists with new-found agency. (10) These interpretations demonstrate a specific engagement with dress as it pertains to aristocratic women's subjectivity, but they overlook Marie's use of costume in relation to the historic onset of tight-lacing and knotted attire. (11) The Lai de Guigemar features such fashion in what I call a poetics of restraint that signifies broadly across discourses of fashion, sexuality, and courtly love. Rather than adopt the convention that love, which constricts the body, must be abandoned, Marie suggests that those who remain estreitentent bende (tightly bound) in dress are models of virtuous--and passionate--lovers, in contrast to the churchmen who conceive of fitted attire as morally dangerous to the soul. By positioning Guigemar alongside twelfth-century clerical texts, I seek to extend critical interpretations of Marie's work beyond her own corpus in order to demonstrate how her sartorial strategy potentially transforms clerical perceptions of fitted attire. (12) Furthermore, I suggest that the omnipresence of knots and belts as common folklore motifs or as familiar Christian religious symbols has prevented modern readers from understanding their more local and cultural significances for a contemporary medieval audience.