Notes on: Woman as Image in Medieval Literature, from the Twelfth Century to Dante
by Joan M. Ferrante
In 12th Century literature, females were utilized as “symbols, aspects of philosophical and physiological problem that trouble the male world” (1) rather than independent, real people. In the male minds of literary inventors, “women personify cosmological forces that govern men’s life… they represent his ideals, his aspirations, the values of his society life.” (1) Women, though considered the least important of people, are invested with the most significance and importance because of men’s considerations of them. This was reflected in literature through women’s domination of the twelfth century hero for good or evil. Even “biblical women, if they are good or potentially redeemable, are said to represent the church; if bad they stand for the lower or weaker parts of “man, for carnal desires, or for inconsistency of mind.” (2) Something about this male desire for women almost seems an inherent (or sinful?) need for women; I would be interested in a man’s perspective on this, as I am only speaking from appearances as a woman. Male justification for this opinion states, “woman, as the most obvious object of male concupiscence, is made to represent lust and is thus held responsible for it; the object of temptation becomes the cause.” (2)
Since women are men’s ways of expressing themselves—their eternal delight or unending sorrow, I think maybe male emotions are tied up with female figures. Women are limited as much as men really limit themselves—maybe to dominate a woman before of a need for her seems equivalent to domination of self. Negative symbolism of women is more prevalent in twelfth century religious writing and positive symbolism of women is more prevalent in philosophical writing. Neo-platonic “marriage of male/female elements requires the cooperation (rather than compulsion) of female elements to preserve and maintain order. This is more positive than the religious consideration of marriage, because the love of women was considered comparable to idolatry or heresy. “In the battle between vices and virtues, which is central to the Christian morality, both groups are female; inner conflict is seen in terms of women pulling in opposite directions towards good or evil.” (2) So man’s highest and lowest impulses gravitate towards women?
Courtly literature uses female imagery to probe men’s emotions; as a lady represents the force of love to a man, “love awakens man to a new sense of himself, to higher aspirations, but sometimes he is drawn away from his love by worldly desires, which in romance, are often other women.” (2) Thus man seeks to embed his highest and lowest impulses in the figure of a woman. I wonder, could man think of himself apart from a woman? He seems to find so much of himself in her… do we women feel we can embody those values as men desire us to? How do we picture and understand our own feelings and virtues? In thirteenth century literature, “the romance quest becomes a religious quest, a personal one, which can be achieved only when the individual alienates himself from his society.” (3) This change, “the rejection of the courtly ethic” causes women as symbols to become “a temptation rather than an inspiration.” (3) Thirteenth century literature evidences the strong influence of two anti-feminist views; the Aristotelian, of women as defective men, creatures lacking in reason and useful only to bear children, and that of the moralist—of woman as a threat to man’s salvation. I wonder how we women were supposed to get salvation, or are we incapable of redemption?
I am sure I never knew more how a man deemed me as un-human than in the two who I most invested myself in and who perhaps thought too much of me, beyond my comprehension: I will call them A and B. A started off telling me all his views on women which my rebellious mind was not OK with: no discussion of spiritual or intellectual matters, no mutual sharing though I was expected to remain open; woman in the home, almost commune-like in its “protectiveness.” I remember the phone call in which that relationship shattered when I heard all these new guidelines for friendship… I remember crying and whispering, “what can I talk to you about then?” My soul would have been starved. B, on the other hand, wanted to keep me all to himself and for me to go nowhere by myself. I was expected not to engage in discussions with other males, witnessing a jealousy that scared me. For a while, I thought of the jealous as a desire to protect, and thus I submitted myself more. But the relationship grew more and more controlling as I submitted more: my sin, my sin, my terrible sin. Was that capable of redemption as I continued to encourage the unhealthy dominance through my behavior?
Women retained positive place in poetic and mystical writings, but now “man’s goal is not union with her, but union with God through her” (3) because she became separate from man, no longer symbolizing something within him. Dante’s writing yearned “for harmony, and the harmony he presents as the ideal for himself and all mankind is possible only through women.” (3) Dante’s writing on union with women in order to reach God is spoken through the perspective of his love for Beatrice, who figures Mary, and thus Christ, in Dante’s Comedy. I speculate on the figure of the Virgin Mary: did men manufacture the ideal associated with her historical personhood in order to identify with Jesus? Back to Dante, he was one of the few (though significant) writers of the thirteenth century who wrote encouraging the female side of human nature. I wonder, Jesus; how can I marry a man when I am married to You? I do not understand, when You are all I need, why would I a woman consider allowing that unity to change to be joined with a man? I suppose this was not so much a question in the medieval ages, where the alternative to marriage was a convent, for women posed the possibility of threat to the male ideals: am I still considered a threat to anyone (I am unmarried)?
The female side of human nature seems to find its legitimacy in its ability to embody and personify, that which is within men. 12th Century art and literature fuses male and female characteristics that may be mere gender stereotypicized tendencies, resulting in “a confusion of male and female characteristics in literature and art” (4): heroes and heroines as well as angels are often interchangeable in their gender roles. Jesus, too is not spared from this transgendering tendency, for “Christ is both Logos of the New Testament (masculine) and the Wisdom of the Old Testament (feminine.” (5) “Anima Mundi is another figure of sexual ambiguity; an orthodox concept at best, the Neo-Platonic world soul, always female, was sometimes identified with the Holy Spirit, normally male.” (5) I think figuring the soul as ambiguous gender allows for personal interpretation… maybe our souls mirror or balance our own particular gender: mirroring our own gender or refracting the opposite gender (if any gender at all). “The fact that a human quality or a divine attribute was represented as a woman meant that it must have female characteristics like giving birth or milk, that there was something essentially female.” (6)
Twelfth century men theorized on women in terms of sexual desire (which is a factor far too focused on within all of humanity, I believe)—deeming her more “cold and wet” (signifying a lessened and dampened presence of desire than man) according to Abelard of Bath and Guillame de Conches (6-7). “Since a woman is cold and wet, the fire is hard to start, but burns longer,” (7) Guillame declared, adding to the perceived danger of women to men, trapping him in persistent “sin.” “Guillame insists that the woman produces a seed toward the conception of the child just as a man does,” which seems to me an attempt to redirect the biblical concept of sin traits passed on from the father’s seed. The woman’s “seed is converted blood” (7), whose presence cannot be denied in women, emitted in the onset of desire, but whose presence is supposedly proved through boys’ display of their mother’s traits. This suggests that weakness in women produces sexual desire, even in rape situations, resulting in conception (Guillame makes desire an imperative aspect for conception). Because women were viewed as always giving way to desire, men feared and distrusted them, because desire inevitably resulted in conception.
“Women were often mistrusted by church establishment for their religious fervor as well as seductions, and they were rarely permitted to play important roles after the middle ages.” (8) Thus sects and heresies did appeal to and draw many women by allowing them to have voice, fueling the misconception of women as inherently sinful. Women did, however, have opportunity to play important roles in social life of the middle ages. By the thirteenth century, “a pervasive intellectual constraint” (11) led to decline of positive symbolism of women. “When men cling to orthodoxy and defend the status quo against all attack from outside or from within, they begin to look on all identifiable groups as suspect and dangerous,” (11-12) which I guess targets women and Jesus. Women as a threat were targeted in the late medieval witch-hunt, which “was the product of ‘a world made schizophrenic by masculine anxieties and masculine fears.’” (12) Men already feared the desire of women—because they identified us with lust and sin, but wouldn’t they be some, rather than no, desire? What are men afraid of in us?
The religious shift between 12th and 13th centuries included adopting Gothic rather than Romanesque cathedrals, and changing from symbolism to realistic human figure-representations (12). The figure of Mary and male obsession with her comes to mind. Ferrante says that “it is when men think of desirable qualities as female, even as female impulses within themselves, that they exalt female figures in literature.” (13) Women again picture polar opposites… nuns figuring virtues and townswomen, common women, picturing worldly distractions of men. How can women only be “child-bearers or temptresses” (13)? “In literature before Dante, it is only women writers, as far as I know, who seem to believe that a man can inspire a woman through love in the same way a woman can inspire a man.” (14) Even those who assert “that man and woman can attain divinity through each other’s love” make the female a symbol of and embodiment “for her love the fountain of Wisdom.” (14) From male literary descriptions of females, I am inclined to see more man in men’s presentation of woman than of the woman herself.
Women’s danger “to men’s moral state is introduced into Judeo-Christian tradition with Eve’s temptation of Adam.” (17) Religious writers thought physical beauty allowed women to seduce men from the perfection of thought to the sin of physical matter. Therefore, they viewed women extolled by the Bible as “divested of their human nature by commentators and are made to represent impersonal abstractions like the church.” (17) Male authors found it impossible to deny “the connection of women with the flesh, with matter… partly based on her biological function, her ability to give birth.” (19) I find it interesting that Ferrance compares flesh to the act of circumcision as “a physical feature which denotes a moral state,” (19) the cutting off of which signifies a denial of lust. Salvation was linked to the salvation of men, but women were considered still capable of salvation in spite of being unable to be circumcised. (19) However, eunuchs and virgins were still most highly extolled in religious though because marriage includes “the act of intercourse, which involves the sinful impulse of lust, (and) is morally dangerous to man.” (20) Mary’s perpetual virginity was championed as a glory, enabling her to “be the mother of a living son without intercourse.” (20) Religious literature tended to prefer the idea of immaculate conception because no “sin” was involved propelling to “fleshly” acts.
The common belief of the time, “the mind is the door-keeper of the soul; if it is female, that is given to carnal thoughts, it allows evil to enter,” evidenced male projection of sin tendencies onto women. I wonder when weakness came to mean prone to vice? If women were categorized as such, I would argue that in the weakness, we are more prone to permit solicited vice because it is harder for us to reject sin than sinful tendencies involving men. As base and the fountain of all evil desires, women were viewed as “whores… connected with heresy as well as carnal lust.” (21) As the objects of temptations because of man’s own sinful tendencies, women were made unclean in man’s thoughts because he projected his own weakness upon them. This continues to mystify me, because no matter how purely I have tried to act, how much I have covered myself, the unwanted attention seems inevitable. Being the focus of male attention to my physicality makes me feel unclean. There is no way I can hide from being implicated in fornication within a man’s own thoughts, no matter how much I hide myself; does this mean there is something wrong with me? At list this genre of writing would say so.
Religious writing attempted to trace seduction “to the nature of women, to her tendency to lewd movement and the resulting flowing of her robes.” (21) I almost laughed at this: so does every move a girl makes with an element of grace or in a skirt/dress have to be considered lewd and unclean? Alanus obviously thought so in deeming women “the objects of hedonism.” (22) Even stories of biblical women were twisted to point guilt to women, evidencing them as the root of sin—flesh without intellect. Of the twelfth century religious authors, Abelard had an unusually positive view of women, “emphasizing the greatness of their virtue when it asserts itself despite the weakness.” (24) This perspective continued to advocate the origin of sin as female, but indicated more to her personhood than simply failure. Religious opinion was reflected in rationalizations, such as the teaching that “Christ showed that the female sex is essential to salvation when He chose to assume human body through a woman.” (25) Hence the belief that women truly do achieve eternal salvation through childbearing? I continue to wonder why a male couldn’t be involved in Christ’s conception to result in the sinless savior. The biblical women who are chosen as examples of virtue, are either redeemed from lasciviousness or ever-virgin, like the figure of Mary, representing the Church.
In the same line of thinking, the love of women is always viewed as a secondary sort of love, for “woman is imperfect, hence not the safest object for love.” (27) The biblical bride metaphor of a man completely enraptured with the love of a woman, then, represents the Church’s relationship to Christ. Maybe men created the ideal of the Virgin Mary to express emotion and their own selves in a female figure who is strong and constant against perhaps men’s greatest weakness… opposite of other women, whom men saw as “completely languid, soft, feminine.” (28) “Bernard’s devotion to the Virgin is such that he can identify himself, through her, with a woman’s role and speak of himself as a mother to his monks.” (29) Men have never been able to understand the sense of belonging, which exists between a mother and child—doesn’t God express the same womb-love, sense of belonging for us, as a mother to child? In Song of Songs, “the man’s soul is identified with a woman in its love for God.” (30) This creates a contradiction in imagery, as “Eve was the first woman to fall, but she is also the first to be led out of Hell by Christ: she was guilty of original sin, but she is also a symbol of the church.” (30)
Sin is pictured in conception as the destruction of a woman’s virginity both physically and metaphysically. According to Augustine, in pre-fall conception, “male semen would have entered the woman’s womb without destroying her virginity, as the menses come out.” (31) Marriage does have merits beyond procreation, church fathers advocated, because of the human “need for love, and mutual self esteem.” (31) Yet Augustine and others believed this complementary relationship of the genders improved as sexuality decreased. I wonder if men continue to busy their feelings and desires in women; male friends have told me and other young women that if we intend to never marry, we will break hearts. Do male still see aspiring women as potential embodiments of virtue that they themselves with they could embody? Marriage is far too commonly spiritualized as “the sacrament and image of God to the soul,” (34) first seen in Adam and Eve. So “Eve represents a part of Adam that he must learn to control and use properly, not to reject; he is to achieve the reintegration of the human being and he must accomplish that before he can achieve union with God, the reunion with his creator which is his ultimate goal.” (34-5) Thus to blame women alone for sin is to abdicate man’s role of reflecting God to her. Thus religious through viewed woman as both of part of man, an outward embodiment of himself, as well as a tool to benefit his ascent to God.
The difference between exegetic and allegorical tradition is that exegetic contains stories from which meaning must be derived and in allegory the meaning/form is given and must be constructed into the story (38). The meaning of allegorical stories is found in the degree to which a man allows himself to be controlled by a vice and virtue: “the vices and virtues have a real existence for medieval man and the figures that personify these concepts in literature have more than a metaphoric relation to them.” (39) Have we lost a “belief in the extramental reality of universal concepts persists through the middle ages” (39)? Christians use Neo-Platonism to demonstrate that “matter is the mother who receives the species; providence, the sphere of divine ideas, is the father who supplies the image.” (40) Matter as the prime locus is feminine and passive, receiving the formed-given image by the male. “Creation itself is the wedding of opposites, of matter and idea, body and soul.” (41) Figures in allegory/personifications have female gender “because of an inherent femaleness in the concepts they embody,” (42) thus “in allegory, then, women can be forces for good as well as for evil, they can protect and nourish, not just seduce and destroy.” (42)
In allegory, “marriage… (is) a metaphor for the reconciliation of opposites, as well as the means by which God’s plan is carried out within the moral order.” (43) Man’s goal is “the presence of wisdom, of Christ, in the individual mind, which man can achieve by overcoming the evil in his heart.” (44) Prudentius reverses roles expected of the female virtues and vices “to make a moral point about the relative strength and weakness of vices and virtues.” (45) Human vices, it seems, are more vulnerable than expected. Men continue to puzzle me with Mary. What do men envy about women so as to want to imagine to be as her? “After Mary, all flesh is divine which conceives God, which builds the temple to wisdom in the soul. That is, by overcoming vice, man can bear Christ with his soul; he can become Mary and achieve the highest feat—union with God.” (46)
In allegory, Philosophy teaches “that the soul is imprisoned within the body and can only free itself through learning, that is made in the image of God and can only fulfill itself when it is concerned not with things but with causes.” (49-50) Following in this tradition of masculinizing the women, as seen in Athena as “a masculine goddess, born of a father without a mother.” (52) Interesting that wisdom must bear a sword, but be a woman, a fundamental contradiction. “Through Philosophy, we are told, Jupiter permits anyone to ascend into the heavens.” (53) Bernard equates the quests for knowledge and goodness as the same thing, “but his concern is less with this quest and the union that is its goal, than with the union that produces life.” (54) Through the sexual act, man becomes part of the process of creation, reflecting the image he bears of God in the conception of life (54). Man must maintain his involvement with creation, because “all the agencies of creation in this work (of life) except God the Father, are female.” (55) So is how women achieve salvation through the procreation of life, childbearing? If women are to achieve salvation in a male way, are we to become men to get their same salvation? If we can’t bear children, what is our worth, how do we achieve the working part of salvation?
a beautiful picture of the two-way street of God’s gift of graceful love… He gifts the grace of love, and entrusts ” us with the task of travelling the path of development with all our heart and all our intelligence[7], that is to say with the ardour of charity and the wisdom of truth.” I think our greatest enemies in this love-quest are definitely ourselves and the despair we can conjure up… our own realization of unworthiness which is the most present and obvious weight and presence in all Christianity I’ve experienced… even to the point of where we shed our own blood to try and pay rather than accept Christ’s. Guilty.
