Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (53 page)

The New Testament contains no explicit statement about Mary’s virgin- ity after the birth of Christ, but the natural inference from the reference to brothers and sisters is that she did not remain a virgin. . . . There is lit- tle or no evidence that anything like the Mary cult existed during the first four centuries of the Christian Church.
20

Yet by the fifth century theologians began defining the mechanics of Mary’s relationship to her son as means of defining who and what Christ was, and thus what Christianity was. In short, “Defence of Christ’s full humanity, on the one hand, and his divinity, on the other, in opposition to both Gnosti- cism and Judaism, led to a stress on the reality of his birth from Mary and on her virginity
ante partum
.”
21

As the worship of Mary gained ground steadily throughout the medieval period, the body of Mary became the body of the Church—a body that need- ed to be defended against the attacks of Jews and other non-Christians. So Hygeburg, an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon nun, can tell the following story:

When the eleven Apostles were bearing the body of Holy Mary away from Jerusalem the Jews tried to snatch it away as soon as they reached the gate of the city. But as soon as they stretched out their hands towards

the bier and endeavoured to take her their arms became fixed, stuck as it were to the bier, and they were unable to move until, by the grace of God and the prayers of the Apostles, they were released and then they let them go. . . . Finally the angels came and took her away from the hands of the Apostles and carried her to paradise.
22

Even in its last moments on earth, the bodily integrity of the Virgin is threat- ened by a collective assault by the corrupting hands of Jews. But they fail in their struggle with the Apostles to gain control over the body of Mary, and she escapes Jerusalem, being carried away to paradise and permanent tran- scendence over physical corruption and locality.

The opposition between the Virgin Mary and the Jews becomes a conven- tional one in later Christian polemics. In fact, many of the verse versions of the ritual murder of little St. Hugh were indeed printed and circulated in popular collections of “Miracles of the Virgin.” Typically, these were tales of Mary’s su- pernatural intervention to preserve the physical wholeness of saintly Christians with whom Mary has a special bond. The “Prioress’s Tale” is of this genre.
23

As discussed above, the enemies of Christianity are not only the enemies of the Virgin Mary—in medieval sources non-Christians are commonly de- picted as enemies of virginity itself. Indeed, the early medieval lives of female saints are often framed around a virgin’s heroically resisted attempt at rape.
24
The tenth-century German nun Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim is best known for her narratives in this vein—“My object being to glorify the laudable chastity of Christian virgins.”
25
Hrotsvitha’s writings are especially interesting in this context because, among her tales of heroic virgins who triumph over the sexual debauchery of unchristian men, there happens to be a story of the boy, Pelagius: “He barely had completed the years of his boyhood / And had just now reached the first blossoms of youth” (33). He was “the most beauti- ful of men.” And Pelagius becomes a martyr rather than submit to the sexual advances of his captor, the Caliph of Cordoba, “Abderrahman”—“a pagan . . . stained by lechery.”
26

he held the martyr’s face

Embracing with his left the martyr’s sacred neck, So that thus he may place at last a single kiss.

But the martyr thwarted the king’s shrewd playful act And swung at the king’s lips promptly with his fist.
27

In punishment Pelagius is catapulted out of the city against a wall of rock. “Nevertheless Christ’s friend stayed totally unharmed,”
28
so he is decapitated and thrown in the sea—but Christians find his remains and, upon replacing

his head on his shoulders, immediately recognize “the handsome face” and give Pelagius a saint’s burial.
29
Signifi here is not only the unremarked upon ease with which Hrotsvitha places a beautiful boy in the company of female virgins as possessing physical charms that must be defended against male sexual ag- gression, not only the boy’s uncorruptible bodily integrity as a sign and reward of Christian virtue but also the articulation of a sodomitical anti-Christianity poised at the contested border—underside?—of Christian Europe.
30

The violent tale of Pelagius the boy martyr, especially when juxtaposed with the horror-filled narratives of Jewish ritual boy murder, foregrounds an apparently conventional construction of the Christian boy as possessed of a virginal purity analogous to that of maidens. But a closer examination of me- dieval sources can only reveal that the reverent equation of “boyhood” with “innocence” produced by and central to these stories is itself fraught with an eroticized violence.
31

It is well known that neither Greek nor Roman culture had particular rev- erence for the stage of life that precedes adulthood. Arustuppus argued that what a man did with his children was a purely private affair, for “do we not cast away from us our spittle, lice, and such like, as things unprofitable, which nevertheless are engendered and bred even out of our own selves.”
32
The scat- ological view of childhood can be seen through linguistic archaelogy as well: “newborn infants were called
ecrême
, and the Latin
merda
, excrement, was the source of the French
merdeux
, little child.”
33
Augustine’s view, solidly found- ed upon the doctrine of original sin, is that children are sinfully unrestrained in obeying bodily drives. Indeed, a direct conflict between higher spiritual vo- cations and parental sentimentality can be seen in a common convention of saints’ lives: Margaret of Cortona, for instance, is said to have been a woman of such laudable spiritual remove that she failed to feed her only son and, in- deed, scarcely spoke to him—finally sending him away and forgetting about him entirely.
34

It is not difficult to conclude that by and large there is a notable lack of interest in the status of children within the Christian cosmogony—up to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when there is a sudden explosion in senti- mental representations of “innocent” childhood, especially in juxtaposition with nurturing motherhood.
35
The proliferating reverent constructions of childhood in the late Middle Ages are rarely far removed from invocations of the newly notable innocence of this stage of life.
36
This is evident not only in the iconography of the Virgin Mother and the infant Christ but also in an in- creasing interest in such previously relatively neglected New Testament inci- dents as the dramatic spectacle of children being torn away from their moth- ers implicit in the “Massacre of the Innocents,” Herod’s failed attempt to

murder the baby Jesus by conducting a mass slaughter of Jewish male chil- dren.
37
Innocent becomes a synonym for
child.
Bartholomew of England of- fers an instructive etymology of the very word for “little boys”—
pueri
—who, he suggests, are so called as a consequence of their “purity”—after all, he writes, their sexual organs are not yet developed and so they are incapable of sexual activity.
38
Gilbert of Nogent (1053–ca. 1124) makes precisely the same point: “How great is the joy in the ignorance of little children! Being pro- tected by absence of lust, it enjoys the security of the angels.”
39
The newly ide- alizing view of childhood thus took as its most central tenet an innocence that was defined as an absence of sexuality. The walls are built up around an emerging construction of Christian boyhood as virginity—a realm emptied out of and defended against carnality.
40
The dependence of the concept of childhood innocence upon a societal consensus to accept such an arbitrary convention is expressed in the following early modern caption, attached to an engraving depicting a child’s toys:

This is the age of innocence, to which we must all return in order to enjoy the happiness to come which is our hope on earth; the age when one can forgive anything, the age when hatred is unknown, when noth- ing can cause distress; the golden age of human life, the age which defies Hell, the age when life is easy and death holds no terrors, the age to which the heavens are open.
Let tender and gentle respect be shown to these young plants of the Church, Heaven is full of anger for whomsoever scandal- izes them
(emphasis added).
41

The explosion of idealized images of childhood, in particular in the later mid- dle ages, is thus simultaneously an explosion of images of its precariously be- seiged nature. As James Kincaid argues of Victorian culture, “Purity, it turns out, provides just the opening a sexualizing tendency requires; it is the neces- sary condition for the erotic operations our cultures have made central.”
42
In- nocents are born at the scene of their own slaughter.

Relative to other Canterbury tales, the Prioress’s has not attracted much at- tention from late twentieth-century critics. The majority of those who have committed their readings to writing see their critical task as a moral one, sit- ting in judgment of both the Prioress and Chaucer himself. My goodness, the scholars exclaim, what
are
we to make of a cleric who revels in this blood libel? Some say she is meant to be bad, in which case Chaucer is good: in close read- ings such scholars stress the ironic incoherence of the Prioress’s conjunction of supposed religiosity, exaggerated femininity, and violent “prejudice,” especial- ly in the larger context of the writings of Chaucer the Humanist.
43
Others say

the Prioress is meant to be good but that the verdict on Chaucer himself should be withheld: on a historicist grounding they insist that the tale can only be read as straightforward parable, arguing that antisemitic sentiment as such was unreadable and thus unsatirizable in Chaucer’s day—something for which the poet surely cannot be held “responsible.”
44
I have no interest in joining this debate on a question that is more biographical than literary. Why take a piece of writing of such gorgeous complexity and ask of it only what it reveals about its author? One would have thought that Chaucer’s decision to tell his tales through ventriloquized voices might have rendered such investigations trans- parently futile from the get-go.

Alternative approaches have been few, but two do stand out. Sherman Hawkins, in “Chaucer’s Prioress and the Sacrifice of Praise,” brings extraordi- nary erudition to an elaborate situation of this tale in theological context: “The Prioress’s tale dramatizes one of the oldest and most familiar antinomies of Christian thought and symbolism, the opposition of Ecclesia and Syna- goga, the new and old testaments, grace and law.”
45
More than a generation later Louise Fradenburg engaged with Hawkins: inspired by the structural an- thropology of Mary Douglas and discomfited by the ethical implications of Hawkins’s ability to read around what looks like violent antisemitism and feels like violent antisemitism, Fradenburg maps this tale’s projection of Christian anxieties onto the threatening Jewish outsider who challenges dis- cursive stasis.
46
The following draws on both Hawkins and Fradenburg, inte- grating their readings while voicing the centrality of specifically sexual—and even more specifically “homosexual”—concerns that structure this tale.
47
On the literal level this is a story of ritual murder; on the allegorical level it is the spiritual biography of a queer boy, a hermeneutic deviant—told in the tragic mode. Theological controversy, semiotic theory, and violent antisemitism are figural tools for the dissection—or rather, vivisection—of a queer little saint. Having concluded her prologue—but still addressing the Virgin Moth- er—the Prioress begins her tale, setting it in an unnamed city in Asia, where a small school for the education of Christian children is located within the “Jewerye.” There is a “widwes sone, / A litel clergeoun, seven yeer of age” (68–69) who attends this school daily. This fatherless boy displays an ex-

traordinary devotion to the Virgin Mother:

where as he saugh th’ymage

of Christes moder, hadde he in usage, As him was taught, to knele and seye His
Ave Marie
, as he goth by the weye.

(71–74)

[whenever he saw the image

Of Christ’s dear mother, it was his practice, As he’d been taught, to kneel down and to say An ‘Ave Maria’ and go on his way]

The perfectly obedient boy enthusiastically falls upon his knees before the spectacle of divine motherhood, singing its praises. The Prioress stresses that while this devotion is “taught” its source is not to be found in the school- master: “Thus hath this widwe hir litel sone y-taught” (75). Instruction in adoration of the mother of God is provided by the mother of the boy.

But the boy
is
in school now—he is seven years old. The semiotic crisis provoked by this fact is central to the tale. In the second stanza it has already been explained that children

lerned in that scole yeer by yere

Swich manere doctrine as men used there— This is to seyn, to singen and to rede.

(64–66)

[in that school were given year by year Such teaching as was customary there,

That’s to say, they were taught to sing and read]

The clergeon, characterized up to now by an unruptured affiliation with the maternal, is in the process of undergoing a dual initiation: into the homoso- cial world of the school, a world of male peers and superiors, and into the masculine world of performance and rhetoric, the self-conscious training of the body to manipulate and produce linguistic units according to convention. The age of seven was widely recognized by medieval writers as a crucial point of transition between the innocence of “infancy”—literally a prelingual stage—and properly gendered “boyhood.” Isidore of Seville gives us the essen- tial facts: “The first age of man is infancy, the second boyhood. . . . Infancy ends at the seventh year.”
48
This new stage of life was often marked by a for- mal removal of the young boy from feminine surroundings: Gottfried of Strassburg’s
Tristan
, the richest surviving literary evocation of late medieval childhood, depicts an idealized sentimental bond between a young boy and his mother—but when the child turns seven his father intervenes and sends his son away to begin schooling in languages and “riding with shield and lance.”
49
We are not in unexplored psychological territory here: Lacan placed the birth of language in the trauma of separation from the mother and affiliation with