Seductive violence and three Chaucerian women

College Literature, Spring 2001 by O'Brien, Timothy D

I bar hym on honde he hadde enchanted me--

My dame taughte me that soutiltee--

And eek I seyde I mette of hym al nyght,

He wolde han slayn me as I lay upright,

And al my bed was ful of verray blood;

`But yet I hope that ye shal do me good,

For blood bitokeneth gold, as me was taught.'

And al was fats; I dremed of it right naught,

But as I folwed ay my dames loore,

As wel of this as of othere thynges moore. (III.575-84) 2

By telling Jankyn she dreamed of him, Alison not as subtly as she thinks lets him know that he occupies her thoughts; and more strongly, that an intimate marital relationship between them is predicted by the dream-world. But why the violence-the apparent stabbing and the vivid image of a bed full of blood?

Alison's reading of the blood is characteristically econometric: it means gold; it suggests prosperity. And to an extent her focus on the value of blood fits nicely with Caroline Walker Bynum's analysis of how medieval women were represented in art. According to Bynum women were depicted in the late Middle Ages in terms of breaches of boundaries, "openings, exudings, spilling forths" (1991, 109). As penetrable, as incapable of maintaining the border between inside and outside, women represented pollution; but at the same time their identification with fluids from the inside connected them with mystery and holiness. Though menstruation was pollution, breast milk was blood twice cooked (1991, 214). Both women and Jesus bled; both yielded nutritive fluids. Girard, too, emphasizes the dual role of menstrual blood, as the sign of undifferentiated, mimetic violence on the one hand and the sacrificial, "civilizing" way of allaying that violence, of establishing difference and order on the other hand (33-36). According to Girard (1997) "mimetic desire," the desire of one person to be the other and to have what the other possesses, is at the root of barbarism and culture. The basis of culture, though, is the establishment of ritualistic substitutes for the original victim murdered as a result of total outbreak of mimetic violence. That original victim becomes a taboo and holy object precisely because of the original recognition-itself produced by mimesis-that any member of the original hoard could just as well have been the victim.The scapegoat itself is turned into the cultural brake to the violence produced by mimetic desire. Woman's association with blood identifies her with the taboo, making her both the reminder of original violence and the imagined cause of it. Such symbolization of woman, according to Girard, emerges from some "half-suppressed desire to place the blame for all forms of violence on women. By means of this taboo a transfer of violence has been effected and a monopoly established that is clearly detrimental to the female sex" (1997, 36). However startling and grotesque, then, the image of Alison spilling blood into her bed is designed to appeal to Jankyn because it reestablishes her at the most basic, conventional level as woman, as distinct from man because of her porousness and as nutritive to him.3 This imagined dream's suggestions of the sexual act are undeniable: the slaying takes place as Alison lies in her bed and she seems to have been penetrated by some weapon. But its violence is seductive not because, or just because, it simulates sex, but because in these more elemental ways it reestablishes the essential terms of sexual difference.4