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

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

Whereas Ovid and select clerics encourage either abandoning love for its constrictive hold (as in Remedia amoris) or identifying tight dress as a sign of illicit pleasures (Maurice de Sully), Marie adopts the knotted shirt for her courtly protagonist as a visible manifestation of virtuous, albeit sometimes painful, love. The Lai de Guigemar presents its sophisticated lesson of male socialization by using fitted garments to precipitate Guigemar's tutelage in virtuous arts of love. His re-education begins after he fatally wounds a marvellous hind, takes an arrow in his own leg, and receives a curse from the dying animal: unless Guigemar finds a woman who will love him as much as he loves her, his leg injury will not heal. (45) The knight therefore makes a tourniquet with his shirt and 'De sa chemise estreitement / Sa plaie bende fermement' (lines 139f.; 'binds his wound tightly') so that he can mount his horse, board a magical ship, and find a lover. Once Guigemar's physical injury transforms into a psychological love-wound, Marie departs from convention by suggesting fitted attire as a remedy for lovesickness. Only through a mutual expression of love and subsequent exchange of tightened garments do Guigemar and his lady find relief from love's pains.

In order to show that constricting garments have the potential to contain the body in positive ways, Marie expands the popular motifs in romance of recognition and gift-giving, which tend to indicate loyalty in either familial or erotic love. (46) While Guigemar's initial inability to make love was first physically evident in the form of a 'plaie' (line 140; 'wound') in his thigh, his lovesickness has since transformed into a 'plait' (line 559; 'knot') that his beloved makes in his shirt. Noting the homonymic play between 'plaie' and 'plait', Sun Hee Gertz sees Guigemar's wound, his knot, and the belt he gives his lady as tokens 'of recognition that should remind [Guigemar] (and Marie's readers) of the wounded hind and its prophecy, of how they met, and of how they are "bound" to one another in love'. (47) Here Marie engages not only gift-giving as the recognition motif that Gertz highlights, but also the popular medieval belief that associates belts and knots with the supernatural. (48) Marie's strategy of knotting draws upon a tradition of folklore and magic that is at least as old as Virgil's Eclogues and evident in later medieval texts, like Albert the Great's thirteenth-century De animalibus (c. 1250) and the Pearl-poet's fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (49) Just as Virgil and Albert the Great write of magical knots that can promote either success or impotence in love, so does Marie's Guigemar demonstrate that those who exchange knots and belts remain loyal and continent. (50) Moreover, Guigemar's knots--the tourniquet and the shirt--affect his bodily powers, much as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight's pentangle and girdle--the former called an 'endeles knot' (line 630) and the latter 'loken vnder [Gawain's] lyfte arme ... with a knot' (line 2487)--impact on Gawain's chivalric exploits. (51) Marie, however, ultimately modifies conventional understanding of knots in significant ways.