When, after all, is a kiss ever just a kiss?
—Carolyn Dinshaw
The presuppositions we make about sexed bodies . . . are suddenly and significantly upset by those examples that fail to comply with the categories that naturalize and stabilize that field of bodies for us within the terms of cultural conventions. Hence, the strange, the incoherent, that which falls “outside,” gives us a way of understanding the taken-for-granted world of sexual categorization as a constructed one, indeed, as one that might be constructed differently.
—Judith Butler
IN COMPARISON TO the explicitness that characterizes accounts of lesbian sexual practices in the Arabic tradition, very few French medieval literary texts explicitly treat lesbianism or lesbian sexuality.1 Much more frequently, the medieval French literary tradition addresses the question of homosexuality and lesbianism via cross-dressing, a phenomenon that Michèle Perret has dubbed second-degree homosexuality.2 My goal in this chapter will be to investigate these indirect manifestations of same-sex desire between women in medieval writings. By focusing on instances of cross-dressing in a selection of Old French texts, we will see that female transvestism functioned as a textual/sexual strategy that permitted the exploration of same-sex desire between women. We will also see that crossing sartorial lines gave medieval French authors license to put into question (safely) the “naturalness” of gender roles and conventional paradigms of heterosexuality. Our reading will be complemented and enriched by an investigation of the complex web of intertextual resonances that medieval French works of cross-dressed heroines weave with Arabic tales of female transvestites. As we explore the ways in which some French narrators adapted, recast, and molded Arabic tales of cross-dressing to reflect the cultural milieu in which they lived and to suit the tastes of their largely aristocratic and Christian audience, we will uncover the censorship that some of the most explicit and ultimately threatening aspects of Arabic lesbianism underwent in the process. More significant than the parallels, the differences between the French and Arabic texts will be considered at the end of this chapter, as they reveal the divergent attitudes toward female same-sex love and unions in the two literary and cultural traditions.
If women cross-dressers were generally viewed with suspicion in both medieval Arabic and French history and chronicles,3 the situation is more ambiguous in literary depictions of transvestism, where instances of cross-dressing are abundant. French fabliaux, miracle plays, and hagiographic literature offer striking examples of female to male cross-dressers.4 In addition, the hero(ine) of several thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French romances is a woman disguised as a knight. The best-known examples include the character of Silence in Le Roman de Silence, the story of Blanchandine in Tristan de Nanteuil, and the story of Grisandole in L’Estoire de Merlin.5
Similarly, the Near Eastern tradition has an important history of female cross-dressers that dates back at least to the pre-Islamic era. The survival of some hadiths (sayings of the Prophet Mohammed) condemning effeminate men and masculinized women and of the names of famous cross-dressed women from the sixth and seventh centuries are all testimony to the fact that transvestites were prevalent from the early days of Islam.6 Unfortunately, much of the poetry and literature written about these early transvestites has not been preserved. In fact, it is not until the Abbasid period (ca. 750) that the term ghulamiyya (pl. ghulamiyyat) is coined, a feminized form of the word ghulam (boy, slave, eunuch). The eighth-century poetry by Abu Nuwas (763–814) remains the most famous example of an entire literary genre (ghulamiyyat) in which the beloved is a woman (a female entertainer) dressed as a man.7 Moreover, the tales of Alf layla wa layla (One Thousand and One Nights) and the Islamic and pre-Islamic Arabic folk romances (siyar sha`biya) offer countless examples of women warriors and Amazons. The story of Ibriza and Sharkan (embedded in the tale of King Umar al-Nu`man) in the One Thousand and One Nights; Princess `Ain al-Hayat in Qissat Firuz Shah; the characters of Queen al-Rabab, al-Ghayda’, Gamra, and Nitra in the Romance of `Antar, Princess Fatima and Aluf in Dhat al-Himma; Princess Turban in Hamza al-Bahlawan; and the female army of Munyat al-Huda in the Sirat Sayf ben Dhi Yazan are just some of the most celebrated examples.8
The presence of one (or more) cross-dressed heroine(s) in both French and Arabic texts gives rise to a multitude of ambiguous situations and invites an exploration and an interrogation of gender, sexual hierarchy, and power relations. In these literary works, homosexuality is indeed represented “in the second degree” (to use the phrase coined by Michèle Perret) in the sense that it is usually only suggested, never truly actualized or addressed directly.
In this chapter, I focus on a subcategory of French and Arabic works on cross-dressing, more specifically on texts that combine female cross-dressing with same-sex marriage and that describe how a cross-dressed woman marries another woman. This particular combination (cross-dressing and female same-sex marriage) occurs in a small corpus of Old French texts, most notably in three works from three successive time periods that retell the same narrative, specifically the story of Yde and Olive:9 (1) one of the mid-thirteenth-century sequels of the verse epic poem Huon de Bordeaux, known as La Chanson d’Yde et Olive;10 (2) its late fourteenth-century dramatic adaptation known as the Miracle de la fille d’un roy;11 and (3) its fifteenth-century French prose epic adaptation preserved in Les prouesses et faicts du trespreux noble et vaillant Huon de Bordeaux, pair de France et Duc de Guyenne.12
While some critics have traced the genealogy of these three French texts to the myth of Iphis and Ianthe in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,13 I propose to compare the three French Yde and Olive narratives (verse, play, and prose) to what I consider to be their main Arabic literary and cultural intertext, namely, one of the tales from Alf layla wa layla (One Thousand and One Nights), known as The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour. Although the earliest extant manuscript of Alf layla wa layla dates to the early fourteenth century (Paris, BN 3609–3611), thus later than the earliest Yde and Olive text, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that some of its tales circulated much earlier in the East and in the West, both orally and in writing. Nabia Abbott for instance has uncovered the existence of a written version of the Arabian Nights in the ninth century.14 Similarly, al-Qurti (1160–71) writes about a famous collection of stories, known as the One Thousand and One Nights, at the end of the twelfth century; this collection is said to have circulated in Fatimid Egypt in the twelfth century.15 And as scholars have now demonstrated, some of the tales from Alf layla wa layla were known in Europe as early as the first quarter of the twelfth century, translated into Latin, and woven into Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis (1120s).16
While the current state of scholarship does not provide us with any information concerning the transmission history of the tale of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour which is of interest here, it is possible to assume nevertheless that it must have been familiar to both Eastern and Western audiences, as it is one of the eleven stories that made up the original nucleus of Alf layla wa layla.17 In the absence of a written manuscript of this tale dating earlier than the fourteenth century, we may assume that its circulation was oral, like that of many tales of the Arabic storytelling tradition. In fact, because of the framed narrative structure of Alf layla wa layla, because it is a storytelling tradition, and because of its use of the dialect (instead of the high register of Arabic), the tales it contained often enjoyed a parallel oral circulation. As we will see, the tale of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour offers numerous striking resonances with the French Yde and Olive narratives (as well as with Jean Renart’s Escoufle which we will examine in the next two chapters) and invites us thus to expand our understanding of the literary encounters between the Arabic and French traditions. Tales from the Orient crossed the borders into Europe not necessarily written down and bound in a manuscript, but more often as oral stories heard in the Middle East, in Sicily or al-Andalus and repeated in multiple ways by different travelers. Their traces are more marked in some Old French texts than in others; but, as we will see, they can always be detected through cross-cultural comparative analysis.
Despite some key differences to which I will return shortly, the French Yde and Olive texts (verse, play, and prose) all tell a very similar story.18 Yde’s parents, King Florent of Aragon and Queen Esclarmonde, after many prayers to God and the Virgin Mary, finally conceive a daughter named Yde in the verse epic (Ysabel in the miracle play; Ide in the prose narrative). Yde’s mother dies in childbirth and her father, still grieving some fifteen years later, decides to marry his own daughter since she alone among all women resembles her mother perfectly.19 Yde, horrified at this incestuous plan, runs away dressed as man, and adopts the name of Ydé,20 in order to avoid being recognized. The text then recounts the various adventures and challenges that the cross-dressed Ydé/Ysabel/Ide faces and overcomes, the details of which differ somewhat in the epic, play, and prose renditions. In the verse and prose epic versions, the cross-dressed heroine finally arrives in Rome where s/he successfully leads the king’s army against the Spaniards who attacked his lands.21 After one year, King Oton of Rome22 decides to compensate Ydé/Ysabel/Ide by making her/him his heir and marrying her/him to his daughter (Olive) who, we are told, loves the cross-dressed knight. Ydé/Ysabel/Ide laments her fate but seeing no alternative, puts herself in God’s hands. The wedding is celebrated. While in the play, Ysabel confesses her true sex to her wife on their wedding night, in the verse and prose texts, Ydé/Ide feigns at first an illness, but some fifteen days later, not able to think of any other pretext, confides her true identity to Olive who promises to keep her secret. Their conversation is overheard,23 however, and both women are denounced to the king. In order to ascertain the truth of this revelation and before rushing to burn them both at the stake as his advisors recommend, the king sends for the two women and orders a ritual bath in which Ydé/Ysabel/Ide must bathe naked. At this point in the epic, an angel descends from heaven and announces that God has transformed Ydé/Ysabel/Ide into a man. The angel also predicts the king’s imminent death, and the birth of Croissant, the son of Ydé/Ide and Olive.
In the play, the ending is more convoluted: God himself, who had already personally intervened on various occasions earlier in the text on behalf of Ysabel, sends Saint Michael disguised as a white stag to divert the witnesses from the bath. The angel reassures Ysabel about disrobing for the bath, revealing to her that God will reward her faith in him. The emperor, seeing that Ysabel indeed has the requisite male sexual organs, blesses the union of the couple. He also does not punish the monk who had revealed to him the same-sex marriage, thanks to the timely and combined intervention of God and the Virgin Mary. Ysabel’s sexual transformation is not permanent in the miracle play, however, since the story ends with Ysabel’s return to her former biological sex and with the double wedding of Ysabel to the emperor of Constantinople and of the emperor’s daughter to Ysabel’s father.
Several critics have noted the obvious interrogation of gender roles and of sexual identities that the three versions of the Yde and Olive narratives invite.24 Obviously, they all destabilize the foundation of heteronormativity and challenge the notion of a stable binary sexuality. This effect is not achieved through cross-dressing alone, but by adding one transgression to another: cross-dressing, same-sex marriage, and transsexual (transgender) transformation. The impact of each of these disruptive elements is greatly intensified by their simultaneous presence in the text and is a manifestation of what Marjorie Garber has dubbed “the third term,” which is not a term, much less a “sex,” but rather “a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility. Three puts into question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge.”25 Sexual identity is here expanded beyond the heteronormative binary.
I will add that the Yde and Olive narratives (in the verse and prose epic versions, more so than in the dramatic adaptation) also disrupt social norms and class hierarchy.26 With each gender/sexual transgression, social and class categories are subverted. When Yde cross-dresses in order to escape from her father’s incestuous desires and plans, she introduces a “category crisis,” thus exposing “a failure of definitional distinction.”27 By cross-dressing and leaving home, Yde must put aside both her gender and her social standing as daughter of the king. In the verse and prose texts, and in contrast to the miracle play, Yde is often described as hungry, she associates with lower socioeconomic classes (the thieves in particular), and she even works as a squire for a German soldier.28 Yde’s social descent is powerfully articulated by the narrator of the thirteenth-century verse epic: “On l’a servie, mais ore servira” (“She used to serve; but now she herself will serve”).29 The symmetrical rhythm of this sentence (which has no equivalent in the miracle play), combined with the opposition between the past tense and passive voice on the one hand (“on l’a servie”) and the future and active voice on the other (“servira”) highlight Yde’s social transformation from a princess who was waited on and respected to a lowly servant, completely dependent upon others’ good wishes.
It is also interesting to note that in the thirteenth-century verse epic, like in the fifteenth-century prose rendition, social decline is accompanied by linguistic transformation, if not decay. Once cross-dressed, Yde uses a linguistic register that is becoming to her new and lower social status, utterly discordant with her previous princely state. When she fights the Saracen army, Yde yells: “A mort, chiennaille, / A mort, a mort!” (“die, pack of dogs, / die, die”).30 Even as it functions as a rallying cry to her army reminiscent of the epic genre, the use of the word “chiennaille” shocks the reader in the context of an epic where the hero(ine) had been described only lines earlier as “Damoiselle Yde” (“the maiden Yde”) and “la bele” (“the fair one”).31 This radical change in linguistic registers, of which there is no evidence in the miracle play, becomes even more pronounced in the prose epic version, composed two centuries later. There, once Ide faces alone the thirty thieves in the midst of the forest, she yells to her opponents: “Fils de putains” (“Sons of bitches”).32 Such terminology, common in the Middle Ages in the context of aggressive male confrontations and in literary encounters between Christians and Saracens,33 sounds discordant when placed in the mouth of a heroine whom the narrator continues to describe through feminine characteristics (“damoiselle,” “la bele,” “noble pucelle”). Nevertheless, such dissonance underscores the fact that as Yde/Ide transgresses one set of boundaries (by adopting male garb), she transgresses her socioeconomic class as well, with its attending linguistic decorum. She thereby reconfigures social, linguistic, and sexual identities previously conceived of as stable and unchallengeable and calls into question their inviolability.34
Furthermore, throughout the Yde and Olive texts, and in the verse and prose epic versions especially, cross-dressing gives rise to ambiguous situations in which the expression of female homoeroticism becomes possible. Staging a cross-dressed Yde/Ide allows the narrator to depict (safely) Olive’s emotional attachment and erotic attraction.35 In fact, in the fifteenth-century prose text, as soon as she lays eyes on Ide, Olive is immediately attracted to her/him: “moult volontiers la demoiselle Olive la regardoit si la print en son Coeur moult fort à aimer” (“Lady Olive enjoyed looking at her so much that she began to love her very much in her heart”).36 The use of the feminine direct object pronoun “la” in this sentence renders explicit the lesbian erotic attraction, even if the latter is evident only to the reader, not to Olive herself. The association of seeing and loving repeats the conventional rhetoric of love, familiar in the West at least since Andreas Capellanus’s twelfth-century De amore (The Art of Courtly Love), and in the East with Ibn Da’ud’s (ca. 868–910) Kitab al-zahra (The Book of the Flower) and Ibn Hazm’s (994–1064) Tauq al-hamama fi al-ulfa wa al-ullaf (The Ring of the Dove).37 As such, it may be considered part of an effort to portray the nascent same-sex desire between women (for which no readily available language existed) on the same model as that of the more familiar heterosexual courtly love.
While the thirteenth-century verse epic does not explicitly portray Olive’s love at first sight for the cross-dressed Yde, it too underscores Olive’s pleasurable gaze and suggests that it may well be an erotic one:
Olive l’a volentiers esgardee. |
Olive enjoyed looking at her.38 |
Et Yde proie a la Vierge honoree |
Yde prays to the blessed Virgin |
Qu’ele le gart que ne soit acusee, |
To protect him from being accused, |
U se ce non, elle iert a mort livree. |
For if she were, she would be put to death. |
(vv. 6910–13) |
In these lines, it is impossible to discern with certainty what causes Yde’s fears: Is she anxious over the discovery of her cross-dressing and its likely punishment? Or is her fear linked to Olive’s pleasurable gaze? The anxiety described here is so great that it leads to grammatical confusion: The use of the direct object pronoun “le” where one expects “la” in Yde’s prayer to the Virgin (v. 6912) reveals the extent to which same-sex desire shakes the very foundation of language. The juxtaposition of Olive’s gaze and Yde’s fear of being incriminated suggests that the reader might in fact be witnessing a nascent attraction of one woman toward another. If Yde is scared, it may well be because she has seen Olive’s gaze on her, she has sensed Olive’s desire, a desire that she perhaps also shares. Therefore, even though these verses do not explicitly state that Olive is attracted to Yde (as the fifteenth-century prose text will do), we are permitted nevertheless to interpret them as suggesting precisely that.
The intimate link between seeing and loving is reiterated, both in the thirteenth-century verse text and its fifteenth-century rendition a few pages later, when after witnessing Yde/Ide’s prowess against the Spanish army firsthand from her window, Olive’s initial attraction becomes full-fledged love. This is how this scene is described in the thirteenth-century verse text:
Yde fu mout resgardee et coisie, |
Yde was much looked at and noticed, |
Car des crestiax l’avoit veüe Olive. |
For Olive had seen her from the windows. |
Trestous li cors de joie li fourmie |
Her entire body throbbed with pleasure |
Et dist em bas, c’on nel e[n]tendi mie: |
And she said in a low voice, so that no one could hear |
“Mes amis iert. Ains demain li voel dire. |
“He will be my friend. I want to tell him so tomorrow. |
Ains mais ne fui d’omme si entreprise, |
I have never been so taken by a man, |
S’est bien raisons et drois que je li die.” |
It is right and fair that I tell him.” |
(vv. 7024–30) |
This scene, which will be repeated almost verbatim two centuries later in the fifteenth-century prose version, uncovers Olive’s mounting desire for Yde and her plans to effect their union.39 Olive’s love is especially interesting to note because of its physical portrayal: “Trestous li cors de joie li fourmie” (“Her entire body throbbed with pleasure”) (v. 7026).40 The term “joie” (“pleasure”) combined with the verb “fourmie” (“throb”) exposes the very sensual, if not sexual dimension of Olive’s desire.41 Her desire is not simply homoerotic; it is sexual, in fact orgasmic. In addition, Olive’s desire in the verse epic gives rise to an enterprising spirit, an active stance, and a deliberate mind. Olive never considers keeping her feelings secret; she does not envision being, like so many troubadours before her, a lover from afar. Rather, she deliberately plans on sharing her thoughts and her love with the worthy knight (Yde).
Olive’s gaze from the window and her placement as a witness to Yde/Ide’s chivalric deeds are significant because they portray the nascent same-sex love and desire between women on the same model as conventional heterosexual courtly scenarios. As a matter of fact, if Yde/Ide had been a biological male, Olive’s gaze from the window, her admiration of her/his chivalrous deeds, and her ensuing love, as depicted here, would have been nothing more than another instance of the conventional courtly love that a princess feels for a worthy warrior. They would only be repeating multiple other scenes from well-known medieval romances in which fair maidens pine away for victorious knights and long to be united with them.42 Such is the case, for instance, of Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot where Queen Guenevere and her maidens marvel at the prowess of he who “carried the red shield” (“qui porte l’escu vermeil”), namely, Lancelot.43 This is how the narrator describes the scene:
Et lor volentez est commune |
They all had the same wish |
Si qu’avoir le voldroit chascune; |
Which is to have him each for herself; |
Et l’une est de l’autre jalouse |
And each is jealous of the other |
Si con s’ele fust ja s’espouse, |
As if she was already married to him. |
Por ce que si adroit le voient |
This is because they find him so skilled |
Qu’eles ne pansent ne ne croient |
That they do not believe |
Que nus d’armes, tant lor pleisoit, |
That anyone could do in arms |
Poïst ce feire qu’il fesoit. |
What this one did, so much did he please them. |
(vv. 6025–32) |
Such a scenario is likely to have been familiar to the fifteenth-century audience of the Yde and Olive prose text, just as it would have been to its late thirteenth-century verse epic public. Both audiences are likely to have perceived the parallel that the scene of female erotic attraction in Yde and Olive draws with conventional courtly romance episodes in which maidens extol the extraordinary deeds of knights and are smitten with love for them. Olive’s admiration and growing love for Yde/Ide is clearly aligned with heterosexual courtly conventions such as these.
However, and at the same time, Olive’s attachment is utterly unsettling for it is not directed toward a man, as one would have expected, but rather toward another woman. Of course, Olive does not know that the man she loves is a woman, nor is she aware of the fact that the feelings she expresses transform her unwittingly into a lesbian.44 Nevertheless, and notwithstanding Olive’s ignorance, this scene demonstrates how in the medieval West, same-sex desire between women was constructed on the heterosexual model as courtly love. Equally important, Olive’s homoerotic attraction questions the very idea that courtly love is necessarily or even exclusively heterosexual. Her example raises the very intriguing possibility that courtly love may not have always been commensurable with heterosexuality, and, therefore, that it might more fruitfully be understood as an androcentric system of structuring gender relations. As such, courtly love could function at times as an unsuspected system for the expression of same-sex desire between women in medieval Europe.
In addition to depicting Olive’s desire in sensual, if not sexual, terms, and in addition to portraying her as an active, enterprising character, the thirteenth-century verse epic goes one step further in its account of same-sex love. It calls into question the presumed heterosexuality of marital unions. If Ysabel in the miracle play and Ide in the fifteenth-century prose text both agree to marry Olive without raising any objections other than their supposedly lower socioeconomic class, Yde in the thirteenth-century epic poses yet another condition before agreeing to conclude the marriage:
Ains le prendrai volentiers et de gré |
I will marry him happily and willingly |
Se il li plaist et il li vient en gré. |
If it pleases him/her, and if s/he is willing. |
(vv. 7074–75) |
Yde’s request to obtain Olive’s consent before concluding the marriage is striking not least because of the confusion in grammatical gender it entails. Even though it is Yde, and not Olive, who is the cross-dressed character, Olive is the one in the above lines who is depicted as grammatically male (v. 7074). Yde’s appeal to receive Olive’s (depicted as male) consent thus bespeaks the effort made to construct the same-sex marriage as a relation between a masculine pronoun (Olive) and a female character (Yde). The confusion over the main characters’ genders is further reflected in the grammatical inconsistency that is highlighted in the following line where Olive is mentioned as both male and female. Continuing the tradition of Alain de Lille’s Natura, same-sex desire is clearly associated here with grammatical perversion.45
Furthermore, the mere invocation of Olive’s consent ineluctably situates the entire discussion of the same-sex union within the important marriage debate that raged throughout the twelfth century. This controversy, which pitted the church against the aristocracy, ended with the official establishment of the spouses’ consent as the sine qua non for a valid Christian marriage.46 Ironically, the significant changes that marriage underwent in the twelfth century from an aristocratic, family, and economic affair to a private, consensual association between spouses opened up an unsuspected space for the expression of same-sex unions, validated automatically when they are freely accepted. That Yde should solicit (and receive) Olive’s consent to the proposed marriage thus places the same-sex union between women within the parameters of church legislation, validates their homosexual relation, and transforms it into a sacrament. In the Yde et Olive verse epic, just as homosexual desire is modeled on courtly love, same-sex union is modeled on church-sanctioned marriage.
Even though Ide in the fifteenth-century prose text does not require Olive’s consent to finalize the same-sex union, the narrator highlights the irony of a lesbian marriage cloaked in aristocratic ceremonials, typical of heterosexual marriage: “depuis que Rome avoit esté premierement fondee ne fut sçeu que si grande feste y fu faicte, comme elle fut à l’assemblee des deux pucelles, dont on cuidoit que Ide fu homme” (“Ever since Rome was founded, there was never as great a celebration as there was for the wedding of the two maidens, for it was believed that Ide was a man”).47 Such an account of the marriage festivities cannot fail to elicit the reader’s smile, for, here, the wedding celebration–the sign par excellence of official, social, public, and spiritual endorsement of heterosexuality–is precisely the very moment that irrevocably sanctions the lesbian relationship. That this should occur in Rome, the very seat of the church, and at the wedding of the daughter of the emperor himself, adds an even greater level of irony and playfulness to the entire scene.
Cross-dressing is not the only strategy that permits the exploration of same-sex desire in the Yde and Olive narratives. Religious sentiments become an equally fruitful space for the expression of female homoeroticism. While the heavy emphasis on religious concerns in the three versions of the story works on the one hand to deflect one’s attention from the significant female homoerotic subtext that is expressed therein, it also serves to highlight it.48
In the fourteenth-century dramatic adaptation, Miracle de la fille d’un roy, the interweaving of the religious with the homoerotic is perhaps best illustrated when God in person intervenes to give Ysabel permission to marry and share her legally wedded wife’s bed. God’s validation of the same-sex marriage and of bed sharing is repeated three times in the play. First by God himself who charges Saint Michael to transmit the following message to Ysabel:
Et de par moy tu li diras |
And you will tell him/her this from me |
Que plus ne s’esmaie ne doubte, |
That s/he should not fear nor doubt, |
Mais dedans sa chambre se boute |
But that s/he should enter into his/her room |
Et se cousche avec s’espousée. |
And sleep/lie down with her wife. |
(vv. 2438–41) |
The same message will be repeated a few lines later by Saint Michael to Ysabel (vv. 2452–53), and again by Ysabel herself to her faithful servant Anne (vv. 2478–79). Even though this message is intended to reassure Ysabel, it could have unsettled members of the medieval audience who may not have been familiar with the end of the narrative and who may not yet have known that the play would revert ultimately to heteronormativity. The grammatical gender ambiguity in God’s own mouth is indeed striking. Since Old French (like modern French) does not distinguish between the masculine and feminine indirect object pronouns and uses li in both cases, and considering the fact that the play recounts a same-sex relationship, God’s message may not have been reassuring after all. Could his words be interpreted to sanction the same-sex relationship between the two women? Even as God’s advice to Ysabel was intended to teach people to trust in God’s mysterious ways, it must have also appeared for some members of the audience as an unexpected and threatening validation of same-sex love, if not of same-sex unions.
Similarly, in the thirteenth-century verse epic, Yde’s reaction to the idea of the same-sex marriage imposed upon her weaves together religious sentiments and homoerotic attraction:
Nostre Seignour a sovent reclamé: |
She called often onto our Lord: |
“Glorious Dix, qui mains en Trinité, |
“Glorious God, who lives in Trinity, |
De ceste lasse cor vous prengne pités, |
Take pity on this weary body/heart, |
Cui il convient par force marïer.” |
Who has to get married by force.” |
(vv. 7105–8) |
These lines certainly imply that were she allowed to choose, Yde would not intentionally engage in the same-sex relationship that is about to take place. The adverb “par force” in line 7108 underscores the fact that Yde, as a dutiful Christian woman, would not knowingly uphold homoeroticism but would actively champion heterosexuality. After all, Yde is forced into this marriage; she is forced into an alternative sexual relation; she is forced into actions she herself decries.
At the same time, it is not possible to deny the overall ambiguity of religious sentiments over the status of lesbianism in this passage. In line 7107 above, the term “cor,” meaning both heart and body, leads the reader to question Yde’s emotional stance: Is Yde really forced into marriage with Olive as the adverb “par force” suggests? Or is she experiencing erotic feelings towards her soon-to-be legally wedded wife and is thus seeking God’s succor?49 The recourse to the religious motif here underscores, rather than eliminates the subversive sexual element. Such an interpretation corroborates recent scholarly findings about the insertion of erotic expression in the midst of the most spiritually charged discursive moments both in Christianity and Islam (especially in sufi literature).50
Yet, these textual spaces that invite an interrogation of gender roles and of sociosexual identities must be seen as only a temporary interlude within the economy of a text that ultimately affirms heterosexual norms and traditional gender hierarchy (and social relations). As a matter of fact, even though the Yde and Olive stories describe a same-sex union, that is a disruption of the “normalcy” of heterosexual marriage, and despite the mental transgressive “residue” that the text may leave in the mind of the audience,51 binary heterosexual relations are ultimately upheld and validated.
The interlacing of the erotic and the religious in the fourteenth-century dramatic adaptation, Miracle de la fille d’un roy, in contrast to the verse and prose epic versions of Yde and Olive, abruptly comes to an end on the wedding night which resolutely splits both discourses and subordinates the sexual to the religious. After praying with Anne and after being reassured by Saint Michael about the ultimate preservation of her honor (vv. 2472–85), Ysabel is only temporarily comforted. Distressed a few moments later, she turns to the Virgin Mary seeking guidance: “Doulce mére Dieu, que feray?” (“Sweet Mother of Jesus, what shall I do?”) (v. 2562). Then, as though to preclude any sexually jeopardizing encounter with her newly wedded wife, and to avoid any potentially ambiguous and theologically compromising situation, Ysabel does not wait for fifteen days, like her homologue in the verse and prose epic versions, to reveal the truth of her sex. She opts rather for immediate disclosure:
Dame, en vostre mercy me met. |
Lady, I place myself in your mercy. |
Pour le confort que m’avez fait, |
For the comfort you showed me, |
Vous vueil descouvrir tout mon fait |
I want to reveal to you my entire story |
Et ce pour quoy j’ay tel annuy. |
And the reason why I feel such discomfort. |
Sachiez conme vous femme suy, |
Know that I am a woman like you, |
Fille de roy et de royne. |
Daughter of a king and a queen. |
. . . . |
. . . . |
Et pour moy garder de diffame |
And in order to protect myself from dishonor |
Ne me sui point monstrée fame, |
I did not show myself as a woman, |
Mais conme homme m’ay maintenu, |
But have dressed (or acted/appeared) as a man, |
And God has helped me so much |
|
Et donné de sa grace tant |
And given me so much of his grace |
Qu’en lieu n’ay esté combatant |
That in no place have I fought |
Dont je n’aye eu la victoire, |
Where I was not successful. |
Dont je ly rens loenge et gloire. |
For this I give him thanks and glory. |
Or savez conment il m’est, dame, |
Now you know how it is with me, my Lady, |
Puis que je sui conme vous femme |
That I am a woman, like you |
Et que j’ai mamelles: tastez. |
And that I have breasts: Feel them. |
Pour Dieu mercy, . . . |
Have mercy on me, for God’s sake, . . . |
(vv. 2581–608) |
In these lines, gender and social class are once again linked, though they are now in inverse relation to what we saw earlier: Ysabel’s confession of her biological sex (“femme suy”) is intimately associated with the revelation of her high social status (“Fille de roy et de royne”). This double exposure eliminates all suspense from the play, as the heroine is shielded henceforth from any social fall and sexual or carnal temptation. At this moment, and despite the preceding textual spaces devoted to cross-dressing, the text sides with the promotion of heteronormativity. Ysabel punctuates her entire confession with references to her infinite faith in God, her submission to his will, and her undeviating preoccupation with honor and reputation. Her proposition to her wife to touch her breasts (“mamelles”) to ascertain the truth of the fact that her husband is in fact a woman (v. 2607), while suggestive, shifts the reader/viewer’s attention from the visual to the tactile, all the while highlighting the deceptive nature of sight.52 Gender as established by sight is revealed no longer to be historia, but fabula, a lie, a discursive construction.
The move from seeing to touching in an effort to reach some measure of “truth,” or gender stability, is not taken up by the emperor’s daughter. The proposition to touch the “mamelles” remains at the level of rhetorical, intellectual subversion of gender construction; it is not permitted to become a potentially intimate moment between the spouses. The emperor’s daughter’s response is interesting in this respect:
De ce ne convient plus parler. |
There is no need to speak further of this. |
Or vous mettez hors de soussi, |
Put yourself at ease, |
Car tout ce que m’avez dit cy |
Because everything you have told me here |
Je vous promet bien celeray, |
I promise to conceal, |
Et tel honneur vous porteray |
And I will show you such honor |
Con doit faire a son mari femme. |
As a woman must show her husband. |
En touz cas, ce vous jur par m’ame, |
In all matters, I swear this upon my soul, |
Ne ne vous aray ja mains chier. |
Nor will I ever hold you less dear.53 |
(vv. 2612–19) |
It is certainly possible to interpret these lines as an endorsement of severely condemned forms of sexuality, as Robert Clark and Claire Sponsler have suggested.54 After all, the emperor’s daughter indicates that biological sex does not matter and that she is ready to uphold the sacrament of marriage despite the new information provided. I will add, however, that the emperor’s daughter’s response also works to maintain the ideology of phallocentrism and heterosexuality. The promise to continue to “honor” Ysabel as she would have, had Ysabel indeed been a man, maintains the emperor’s daughter in a subordinate position not only in relation to biological masculinity, but also, and more importantly here, to any socially constructed or outward manifestation of masculinity.
The wedding night scene is markedly different in the thirteenth-century verse and fifteenth-century prose renditions of the story, where the reader senses the narrator’s struggle between conformity to religious and social norms and the titillating temptation to describe the sexual proximity (if not promiscuity) of two women in bed. In the Yde and Olive verse and prose epics, the wedding night is not devoid of sexual content. First, and despite her understandable distress, Yde/Ide begins by “securely locking the door” (“la cambre a bien veroullié et fermee”).55 She then pretends to be ill, thus incapable of consummating their marriage that night. As Yde/Ide tells Olive of her sickness, she accompanies her words with hugs: “With these words, Olive was hugged” (“A ices mos fu Olive accollee”).56 The verb “accollee” (to hug) is repeated twice more in that same scene (for a total of three times), the next time by Olive. Let us note here that it is Olive, and not Yde/Ide, who pleads to have their wedding consummation put off for fifteen days after all the guests have left, saying that she is looking forward to “doing more” later; for now, she will be satisfied with kisses and with being “accolee”:
Fors du baisier bien voel estre accolee, |
Besides kissing, I don’t mind hugs |
Mais de l’amour c’on dist qui est privee |
But as to the love that is said to be intimate |
Vous requier jou que soie deportee. |
I request to be exempt from it. |
(vv. 7185–87) |
Relieved, Yde/Ide agrees, and the narrator adds that the two women kiss and hug: “They kissed and hugged each other” (“Dont ont l’un l’autre baisie et accollee”).57 Because nothing in the verse or prose epic specifies the kind of kiss or hug exchanged between the two women (sisterly? compassionate? respectful?), the reader must wonder what meaning to accord these affective acts: Do they represent conventional cultural practices in the Middle Ages, as often occurred between men to denote courtesy, peace, hospitality, or affirmation of feudal relations?58 Or do these hugs and kisses between the two women have a sexual valence and are charged with an erotic subtext? In order to understand the meaning of “baisier” and “accoller” in this scene, we must compare them to their usage earlier in the text, where they had been invoked at several key moments to describe Yde’s father’s incestuous love for his daughter: “Mout souvent l’a accollee et baisie” (“he hugged and kissed her often”).59 At that time, the words “baisie” and “accollee” had been glossed by the narrator when reporting the barons’ concern over their king’s illegitimate behavior:
S’il le tenoit en sa cambre a celee, |
If he had held her in a private room, |
Ja ne seroit de Florent deportee |
Florent would not have delayed |
Qu’il nel eüst tantost despucelee. |
He would have deflowered her immediately. |
(vv. 6429–31) |
In these lines, the narrator points out the implicit sexual meaning of the king’s actions.60 If outwardly he hugs and kisses his daughter, his true wish is to enjoy her sexually, if not deflower her (“despucelee”). In other words, and from the very beginning of Yde et Olive, the reader has been warned that a kiss is not always just a kiss. Armed with this wider semantic range of meanings of affective acts, the reader must wonder whether the hidden, sexual connotations of “hugging” and “kissing” apply to Yde and Olive’s encounters. Are their hugs and kisses to be read as an implicit affirmation of their sexual union?
This is what Diane Watt has suggested.61 Without going as far, it is crucial to recognize nevertheless the sexual undercurrent of the words “baisier” and “accollee” for they may well have been key signifiers of lesbian sexuality in medieval Western literature. Far from being vaginal or focused on penetration, the expression of erotic encounters between women in the European Middle Ages appropriated and subverted the conventional terminology of affective relations.62
The likely sexual meaning of the signifiers “baisier” and “accollee” to depict Yde and Olive’s encounter during their wedding night is supported by the following two lines from the thirteenth-century verse epic that appear to have disturbed some (medieval) scribes or readers. They are indeed partly (purposely?) effaced and are supplied by other manuscript readings:63
En cele nuit n’i [ot] cri ne mellee. |
That night, there were no screams or fights. |
La nu[i]s passa, si revint la journee. |
The night ended, and the day shone. |
(vv. 7191–92) |
The silence over the details of the wedding night of the female couple is a textual strategy that speaks eloquently of the efforts made to keep the sexual and the titillating representation of lesbianism bracketed. The homoerotic is not entirely silenced, however, as is evident in the use of the demonstrative “that night” to point to the lack of violence of the lesbian wedding night in which there were no screams or fights, in contrast perhaps to the heterosexual wedding night in which there may have been screams and fights. Not least, the (possibly) consummated lovemaking of Yde and Olive is implied in the use of battle metaphors (“cri ne mellee”) that, as shown in Chapter 2, may well refer to the homosexual (military) language borrowed from the Arabic tradition. Finally, when King Oton asks his daughter about her wedding night, Olive’s answer is conveniently ambiguous:
“Fille,” fait il, “comment iés marïee?” |
“Daughter,” he said, “How is it to be married?” |
“Sire,” dist ele, “ensi com moi agree.” |
“Sire,” she said, “the way I like it” (or “the way it pleases me.”) |
(vv. 7198–99)64 |
But ultimately, Yde (just like Ide two centuries later) reveals her biological sex to Olive in the midst of apologies and prayers for mercy.65 The affective transgressive dimension that had been present, however timidly and metaphorically, is henceforth banned altogether from the text. The text appropriates the cross-dresser as female, and erases completely the “third term” that had been introduced earlier in the epic.
In the thirteenth-century verse epic, like in its fifteenth-century prose rendition, but in contrast to the fourteenth-century miracle play, the recuperation of the potential lesbian and her integration into heterosexuality begins with Olive’s initial reaction to the revelation that her husband is in fact a woman:
Olive l’ot, s’en fu espoëntee. |
Olive listened, she was horrified. |
(v. 7216) |
In the prose text, the narrator writes, “Quant Olive entendit Ide: elle fust moult dolente” (“When Olive heard Ide, she was very miserable”).66 Curiously, Olive’s distress has been greatly de-emphasized by critics. Yet, it echoes the Deuteronomic injunction against transvestism (Deut. 22:5) and reveals social anxiety about the dissolution of boundaries. Yde’s/Ide’s cross-dressing, which was threatening because it blurred or obliterated legible gender distinctions, is henceforth annihilated by Olive’s reaction. Olive’s normative voice utterly silences the transgressive preceding section and signals the return to sanctioned sexual and grammatical categories.67
The restoration of the normative is also heralded by the daring act of naming the same-sex love between women that had been portrayed. For indeed, and only in the fifteenth-century prose text, the narrator alludes to Yde and Olive’s relation as “bougrerie,” the early modern appellation for sodomy.68 The usage of this term is especially noteworthy because it is one of its earliest occurrences in French. It is used already here in a legal and penal sense, and is associated with capital punishment.69 Labeling the silent sin “bougrerie” in the fifteenth-century French text is thus tantamount to proclaiming Yde and Olive’s death sentence, indeed the classic penalty for lesbians under the lex foedissimam (edict of Roman law) of 1400.70
Furthermore, the return to heteronormativity is ushered in through the appearance of an angel who reveals God’s personal intervention in Yde’s/Ide’s affairs, and her timely sexual transformation into a man.71 But perhaps even more important, the return to heteronormativity is affirmed by the angel’s announcement that Yde/Ide and Olive successfully conceive a son named Croissant that very night:
Et en cel jour fu Croissans engenrés. |
On this day, Croissant was conceived. |
(v. 7283)72 |
Clearly, not only does Yde/Ide receive a penis to reward her for her unswerving belief in God and her submission to his will, but it is a well functioning one too, we are swiftly reassured, as is evident in the efficiency with which the conception of the child occurs. The angel’s statement is not simply a premonition; it is a speech act. Revealing the miracle is accompanied by its accomplishment. Croissant’s conception is so significant that it takes narrative precedence over any information the audience may have hoped for about Yde’s/Ide’s successful sexual transformation. The transsexual miracle is far less amazing than it may appear at first sight however, for according to Western Galenic medical theories, it was believed that women’s sexual organs were identical to men’s, except they were inverted (the vagina was thought to be an inverted penis).73 However, from the perspective of the audience of the epic or drama, most of whom were probably not familiar with premodern theories of medicine, it can be argued that an explicit depiction of the transsexual transformation might have been desired, if not expected. Such a description, in contrast to its Ovidian textual precursor, is absent however from all the stories that have preserved the Yde/Ide and Olive tale.74 We do not see the growth of the penis on Yde’s/Ide’s body, which is especially surprising in the narrative economy of the epic, where the narrator had not shied away from elaborately describing Yde’s/Ide’s female body.75 We do not hear Yde’s/Ide’s reaction to the unexpected “gift” of the penis. Is she shocked? Relieved? Surprised at least? Did she even want to be a man?76 The question of gender identity is subsumed under that of sex; it is unproblematized as though it did not matter, or rather as if it was expected that Yde/Ide of course would have wanted to be a man if given a choice. After all, according to the theological and scientific teachings of the time, if given a choice, any woman would have wished to be a man.
In both the epic and prose versions of Yde et Olive, perhaps because they are concerned primarily with the question of lineage and with the foregrounding of marriage and procreation, there is a lingering presumption that male is better, that to wish to be a man (however unexplicitly or unconsciously since Yde/Ide never verbalizes such a longing), is perfectly “normal” and, culturally speaking, perfectly logical. Obviously, these assumptions undermine whatever disruption of, and challenge to, easy notions of binarism that transvestism may have invited at first reading. Underlying this assumption of male supremacy, women are scapegoated. The challenge or threat posed by cross-dressing is henceforth contained, as the epic moves unproblematically to the continuation of the Huon de Bordeaux family line. Diane Watt points out the advantages of such a narrative resolution for the male characters and in the context of an epic; in effect, such a resolution “provides not just Oton but also Florent [Yde’s father] with a direct male descendant and thus enables the transmission of both their property according to the rules of patrilineage.”77 For the female characters however, the very possibility of alternative sexualities is scapegoated. The symbolic function of “transvestism as a powerful agent of destabilization and change, the sign of the ungroundedness of identities on which social structures and hierarchies depend” is conveniently set aside and subordinated to genealogy and social heteronormativity.78
Finally, it is important to note the narrative construction of the epic and the way the story of Croissant is embedded within two sections both dealing with Yde/Ide and Olive (known in contemporary scholarship as Yde et Olive I and Yde et Olive II). The choice of ending the first part of Yde and Olive precisely at the moment of the sexual transformation and the birth of Croissant, and of returning to that story only about four hundred lines later is significant because it points to the narrator’s effort to divert the audience’s attention from sexuality to social normativity and sexual legitimacy. Just as the narrative had moved swiftly over the momentarily erotic behavior of the newlyweds, we note that immediately following Yde’s/Ide’s successful and rewarding sexual transformation, and immediately after Croissant’s birth and his reaching his twelfth birthday (summarized in one line), the heterosexual couple leaves Rome to visit Yde’s father, King Florent: “Congié ont pris, n’i ont plus atendu” (“They took leave, they waited no longer”).79 The reader’s attention is hence deflected from the sexual transformation onto lineage and the successful continuation of the Huon de Bordeaux family line. The very space that could have been used by the audience to imagine the specifics of the sexual transformation (the erotic encounter between Olive and the now officially transsexual Yde/Ide) is replaced by a story that emphasizes family lineage (Croissant’s life) and thus heteronormativity. And yet, one could have easily imagined a narrative that binds the two sections of the Yde/Ide and Olive stories before turning to their son. This order would have probably been more appropriate in the context of an epic cycle where narrative development is typically chronological and historically linear. During the Croissant episode, the transsexual Yde/Ide disappears from the text, and to some extent perhaps also from the reader’s mind, and remains invisible until her lineage has been firmly established. In fact when s/he returns in Yde et Olive II, Yde/Ide has now fathered four sons and three daughters.80 The displacement from the axis of sex and gender to that of lineage and social continuity reflects an anxiety over genealogy, fatherhood, and patriarchy. At the end of the epic, one fully measures the extent to which transvestism has been in fact only a temporary interlude within the economy of the text, and the extent to which questions about gender ambiguity have become displaced onto a sociopolitical axis.
In the miracle play, the reestablishment of the heterosexual status quo is manifested in the final double marriage that ends the play: Ysabel marries the emperor of Constantinople, while the emperor’s daughter marries Ysabel’s father.81 Hence, it becomes clear that the erasure of gender and sociocultural distinctions that had initiated the entire play were temporary; at the end, the audience returns to the safety of the religiously and socially sanctioned happy heterosexual union. This drama supports Michelle Szkilnik’s view that by the end of the fourteenth century, transsexual transformation in Old French literature is no longer allowed to remain permanent.82 All possible gender ambiguity is effaced both from the textual remains, as well as from the audience’s imagination.
But it is especially in comparison to the Arabic literary tradition on cross-dressing and female same-sex marriage that the extent of the heteronormativity of the medieval French texts can be fully appreciated. The comparative cross-cultural approach, in effect, allows us to grasp nuances in each text that remain hidden when one cultural discourse is examined alone, or is divorced from its multicultural context. While it is difficult, if not impossible, to trace the precise Arabic genealogy of the Yde and Olive narratives, it appears undeniable that the “author(s)” of these French texts were familiar with the Arabic literary tradition of homosexuality, as well as with a number of tales from Alf layla wa layla, or the One Thousand and One Nights (also known as the Arabian Nights).83 In particular, they seem to be familiar with The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour which, as I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, constitutes one of the main, heretofore unacknowledged, intertexts of the French Yde and Olive tales. There are important resonances between the two literary traditions that are apparent as soon as we compare the basic storyline of the Arabic text with its French rewriting.
The early part of the Arabic tale describes a story that is strikingly reminiscent of that of Yde and Olive, as it too combines cross-dressing and same-sex marriage. While cross-dressing was the solution to a father’s incestuous desires in the French epic, it is a safety measure adopted by Boudour in the Arabic tale when she discovers that her husband has mysteriously disappeared from her side. In order to find her husband and to protect herself, and thanks to her resemblance to her lost husband, Boudour cross-dresses as him, and adopts his name, Qamar al-Zaman. She arrives at the Isle of Ebony where King Armanos abdicates in her favor and forces her to marry his daughter named Hayat al-Nefous or the Life of Souls. Qamar al-Zaman, who has worked as a gardener during his separation from Boudour, is finally discovered through his sale of vats full of olives, a condiment that, we are told, Boudour loves. She reveals the truth to King Armanos, and all ends seemingly in the most heteronormative and polygamous way: Boudour is reunited with Qamar al-Zaman, abdicates in his favor, and in addition gives him Hayat al-Nefous as a second wife. And the three of them live happily ever after.
The thematic echoes between the French narratives of Yde and Olive and the Arabic tale of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour are obvious: cross-dressing, forced same-sex marriage, homoerotic encounters between two young women, and the return to heteronormativity in the end. In addition to this intertextuality at the level of themes, both traditions display intriguing resonances at the level of character names. In this respect, Francesca Canadé Sautman has observed that the place/people names and the geographic location of the Yde and Olive verse epic all point to the Islamicate world. She writes: “Many clusters around the same-sex change are centered in Spain and Italy, which is consonant with the mention of Aragon, Castille, and Barcelona in Yde and Olive and the use of the southern name Olive.”84 I would like to explore further Sautman’s observation and show how the names of the main characters in the French Yde and Olive texts, while unusual in the French literary tradition, weave indeed an intriguing (and revealing) intertext with character names from tales of Arabian Nights.85
The name of Yde and Olive’s son, Croissant, whose story had interrupted the epic at the moment of the sexual transformation, as we saw earlier, merits consideration. The first name Croissant (meaning “moon crescent”) is atypical in French;86 it is however quite common in Arabic and is used with great regularity throughout the Arabic literary tradition. In the One Thousand and One Nights, “Moon” (with its multiple synonyms and variations) is an androgynous name and, despite its grammatically masculine gender in Arabic, is given with equal frequency to male and female characters. In The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour, each of the title characters’ names evokes the moon: Qamar al-Zaman (male) means “the Moon of the century,” while Boudour (female) means “the Moon of Moons.”87 If the name “Moon” (and its derivatives) is androgynous throughout Alf layla wa layla, it is associated specifically with lesbianism in the earliest extant erotic treatise in Arabic, namely, Ibn Nasr’s tenth-century Encyclopedia of Pleasure. This text reports indeed that lesbians prefer to “have intercourse with a woman . . . with a vulva . . . like a full moon.”88 It may thus be possible to argue that in Arabic literature, the name “Moon” was used at times as a symbolic code word for (homo)eroticism. The choice in the French verse and prose epics of naming Yde and Olive’s son “Croissant” becomes of course significant and invites a cross-cultural (French/Arabic) reading of the narrative and of the expression of alternative sexuality therein.
A second intriguing resonance between the French and Arabic narratives is the name of the female character “Olive.” Once again, the name “Olive,” like Croissant and Yde which we will examine in a moment, is unusual in French literary history. In the Arabic Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour, even though we do not encounter the name “Olive” per se, the olive motif is important at a key moment in the text as olives literally insure the reunification of the title characters at the end of the tale.89 The choice of naming one of the French female characters Olive invites us therefore to consider the Arabic intertextual resonances of Yde et Olive, hinted at by Sautman. By naming Yde’s wife Olive, French narrators are implicitly giving voice to another story, written (or recited) in a different language and belonging to another tradition. Garber’s notion of the function of proper names as signifiers that “encode a whole story below the line, below the surface” is fundamental here.90 It allows us to posit that the other story that stands “below the surface” of the French text is the Arabic Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour. The name of Olive (or Croissant, or Yde as we will see) may hence be considered a narrative gesture that urges the reader to read “below the surface” of the text, “below the line,” and to cross the borders between what is visible on the pages of the text (French, heterosexuality), and what is invisible, yet implicit (Arabic, female homoeroticism).
The power of signification of the name of the third main character of the French Yde and Olive, namely, of Yde herself, must also not be overlooked. Like the names of Croissant and Olive, that of Yde is highly unusual in the French medieval literary tradition. It is evocative however of the name of the first lesbian known to the Arabs according to Ibn Nasr’s Encyclopedia of Pleasure, Hind Bint al-Khuss al-Iyadiyyah.91 It is possible that the French character Yde/Ide was named after her Arabic homologue, “Iyadiyyah” (the final two syllables “iyyah” represent a diminutive suffix in Arabic).
Not only does Yde’s name act as a powerful indicator of cross-cultural exchange, but the function that she occupies in the French epics also weaves an intertext with the Arabic tradition of Alf layla wa layla, and bears striking parallels to that of its main narrator, Scheherazade. Let us indeed recall that Scheherazade, through her tricks and wisdom (marrying Shahrayar and telling him tales), succeeds in saving both herself and all the other women of her city, condemned to die one by one the day after their wedding. Her wisdom and self-sacrifice lead to the liberation of all women (and ultimately the entire realm) from the endless wrath and jealousy of the all-powerful Shahrayar.
In striking parallel to Scheherazade, Yde also sacrifices herself in order to save both herself and at least one other woman (Olive) from the deadly desires of men. Yde flees to escape from her father’s incestuous desires, and in the process, she rescues Olive from the violent desires of another man, the king of Spain (the narrator specifies that the latter had come to attack Rome precisely because Olive’s father had refused to give him his daughter in marriage).92 Yde therefore might be thought of as a Western Scheherazade who, like her Eastern counterpart, stands as a prime example of female empowerment achieved though sexual knowledge. Not least, Yde might also be considered a storyteller in her own right, as is evident in the new biography and genealogy she invents at least three times to escape from the threatening situations she encounters. As a matter of fact, once cross-dressed, Yde gives three different versions of her identity and familial background, successively to the Germans (v. 6615), the thieves (v. 6740), and the king of Rome (v. 6833 and vv. 6856–62). In this regard, Yde’s empowerment, her reversal of established social and sexual hierarchies and the multiple identities she adopts strongly evoke Scheherazade’s own storytelling. As such, Yde’s cross-dressing and same-sex adventures are part and parcel of the transmission of the One Thousand and One Nights from the East to the West. As one of the first medieval Western lesbians, Yde stands as an eloquent voice that embodies the transfer of Arabic cultural practices and alternative female voices from the Islamicate world to medieval Europe.93
There is a reiteration of significant Arabic details in the French stories of Yde and Olive: the adoption of Arabic (or Arabic-like) names and the striking similarity in the functions of Yde and Scheherazade. Taken together, they weave a web of intertextual and intercultural resonances with The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour and invite our cross-cultural reading. At the same time, these resonances should not obscure the key differences in attitudes toward homosexuality, cross-dressing, and same-sex marriage that also distinguish the two traditions. It is these differences that will be our primary focus in the remainder of this chapter. We will see that all the while offering French narrators tales and thematic motifs that permitted them to broach taboo subject matters (same-sex marriage, female homoeroticism, lesbian sexuality), the Arabic tradition of The Arabian Nights was not rendered mimetically in French. In fact, far from faithfully translating The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour, medieval French narrators adapted the Arabic text, changed the emphases of key erotic scenes, and silenced its open ending in order to render it more suitable to their European, Christian audience. Just as I proceeded with the French text, I propose to examine three crucial moments of the Arabic tale: the cross-dressing, the wedding night, and the return to the culturally sanctioned polygamy at the end (which, it must be pointed out, does not involve a transsexual transformation).
In contrast to the function of cross-dressing in the French narratives of Yde and Olive, cross-dressing in Alf layla wa layla does not introduce a “category crisis,” nor does it lead to Boudour’s social and linguistic fall. In fact, even after she adopts male clothing and her husband’s name, Boudour continues to occupy the same social position as she did earlier in the tale, that of the off-spring of a king. This is indeed how she introduces herself to King Armanos’s messenger: “The messenger returned to king Armanos and informed him that this was a king’s son.”94 It is also as the son of a king that her host, King Armanos, welcomes her to his city. More importantly, it is because of his/her high social class that he invites her/him to marry his own daughter, Hayat al-Nefous:
My son, know that I have become very old and I was not blessed with a male child, but only a daughter. She is, thanks be to God, of your age and beauty. I have become too old to reign. So if you [agree to] live in our lands and settle in our realm, I will marry you to my daughter and I will give you my realm, while I rest. (591)
The stability in Boudour’s social identity means that this character will not need to prove herself a worthy knight or accomplish extraordinary deeds in order to recover a social standing lost to cross-dressing, as Yde does. It also means that cross-dressing in The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour is not a transgressive social act, as it will become in the process of translation into French. Rather, in the Arabic text, cross-dressing functions as a key narrative strategy that permits the storyteller to focus directly and explicitly on the erotic, if not sexual, ambiguities which encounters with a cross-dressed heroine necessarily elicit. In other words, cross-dressing in the Arabic text does not lead to a depiction of homosexuality in the second degree as is the case in the French tradition but becomes yet another instance of Arabic literary practice that consists in treating homosexuality openly and freely.
In contrast to the French miracle play in which Ysabel reveals her true sex to her wife immediately in order to avoid any sexually jeopardizing encounter, and to the French verse and prose epics in which the wedding night is spent feigning illness in order to avoid (lesbian) sex between Yde and Olive, the Arabic tale focuses from the outset on the two young women’s sexual relation. This is how their wedding night is depicted:
They [the servants] made Hayat al-Nefous enter into the room where Boudour, daughter of king Ghouyour, was [sitting], and they closed the door on them. They lit candles and lights for them and spread their bed with silk [sheets]. Boudour entered into Hayat al-Nefous.95
The explicitness of the sexual encounter between the two girls is not evident in the English translation, for it rests on the use of the Arabic verb “dakhala” (to enter) twice in the above quote, first with the preposition “`ala” (“they made Hayat al-Nefous enter into the room where Boudour was”) and then with the preposition “ila” (“Boudour entered into Hayat al-Nefous”). What must first be noted is the fact that the Arabic verb “dakhala”–meaning to enter, to penetrate–does not require the use of any preposition. The fact that the redactor chose to add not one, but two different prepositions with this verb must therefore make us pause.96 In its first occurrence with the preposition “`ala,” the audience is led to understand that Boudour is already in the room into which Hayat al-Nefous is led. The second use of the verb “dakhala” with “ila” comes therefore as a surprise since such a combination can only mean to penetrate into a physical space, or to penetrate sexually, to have intercourse. In the context of this scene, only the second meaning of “dakhala ila” is possible, leading us to conclude that Boudour and Hayat al-Nefous’s initial encounter is utterly sexual.
While the redactor of the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript of Alf layla wa layla does not further depict the lesbian wedding night, the power of such nondescription ought not to be overlooked. For it is indeed in its very “indescribability” that the impact of lesbian sexuality lies.97 In the oral performance of the tale of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour, the sexual encounter between Hayat al-Nefous and Boudour is likely to have been one of those key moments that would have invited further elaboration by the storyteller, or at the very least, stirred the imagination of the audience.98 In contrast to the destiny of Yde and Olive’s sexuality in the French thirteenth-century epic, which will be effaced by scribes or readers as we saw earlier, Boudour and Hayat al-Nefous’s sexual relation will be expanded and amplified throughout the following centuries, leading to the detailed portrayal of lesbianism in Burton’s English (1885–88) and Mardrus’s French (1899–1904) translations.99
After their initial, overt sexual encounter, Boudour and Hayat al-Nefous spend the next two nights “kissing” and “caressing.” This is how the redactor of the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript depicts their intimacy:
Boudour sat down next to Hayat al-Nefous and kissed her (qabbalat-ha). (592)
And on the following night:
When [Boudour] saw Hayat al-Nefous sitting, she sat besides her, patted/caressed her (taqtaqat) and kissed her (qabbalat-ha) between the eyes. (593)
The verbs “patted/caressed” (taqtaqat) and “kissed” (qabbalat) used in the Arabic tale evoke certainly the way Yde and Olive’s encounter had been depicted by the Old French narrators of the verse and prose epics (kissing and hugging). We must note however that the meaning of the Arabic “kissing” differs from its French counterpart in that in the Arabic erotic tradition, “kissing” has a specific and overtly sexual connotation. This is indeed how “kissing” is defined in the Encyclopedia of Pleasure. “Kissing is a means by which sexual desire is aroused. . . . Kissing becomes more effective when it is accompanied by biting, pinching, sucking, sighing, and hugging. It is then that both the man and the woman burn with sexual desire simultaneously. . . . Kissing is the penis’s messenger to the vulva. It is also said that kissing is an essential part of sexual union. . . . Kissing, like lubrication, facilitates sexual union. . . . Coition without kissing is imperfect.”100
Kissing is here heralded as a key component of (heterosexual) foreplay, as a recommended accompaniment to sexual union, possibly as a euphemism for it. In fact, in the Encyclopedia of Pleasure kissing is considered one of five techniques to speed a woman’s slow orgasm: “There are five ways of quickening a woman’s slow orgasm. These ways are: kissing, smelling, biting, rubbing, beating.”101 Moreover, the Arabic erotic tradition enjoins the lover to apply the kiss on, or between the eyes, as a strategy aimed at speeding a woman’s orgasm: “The areas to be kissed are: the cheeks, the lips, the eyes, the forehead, the area behind the ears, the bosom and the breasts.”102
Seen in this light, Boudour’s kiss and its placement between Hayat al-Nefous’s eyes should be interpreted as an unambiguous reference to their foreplay, sexual relation, perhaps even orgasm. We are hence permitted to conclude that while the Arabic and French texts under consideration use the same semantic field and linguistic terms (kissing, hugging/patting/caressing) to portray female same-sex relations, the Arabic text is anchored in a sociocultural context where such conduct holds a very precise sexual connotation. In this light, Boudour and Hayat al-Nefous’s kisses, much more clearly than those between Yde and Olive, are to be interpreted as foreplay, sexual intimacy, intercourse.
It is on the third night that Boudour reveals her biological sex to her wedded wife. This scene is important because it represents the moment at which the French Yde and Olive narratives differ markedly from the Arabic tale that provided their main storyline. An investigation of the key differences between the two traditions illustrates the extent to which medieval French narrators silenced some of the most daring homosexual features of the Arabic tale; it also exhibits the very divergent attitudes held by each of these traditions toward female homosexuality.
We must note from the outset that Boudour’s revelation is not made by an apologetic or repenting cross-dresser as was the case with Yde/Ide in the French epics. It takes place instead in the midst of an erotic and sexually charged scene. This is how the scene is depicted in Mahdi’s edition:
[Boudour] spoke [to Hayat al-Nefous] in a soft, feminine voice, and this was her true, natural voice, and she unveiled the truth about her situation. . . . She told her what had happened to her and her beloved husband Qamar al-Zaman, and she showed her genitals and said to her [I am] a woman who has genitals (vulva) and breasts. (595)
While in the Miracle de la fille d’un roy, Ysabel suggests that her wife touch her “mamelles” (“breasts”) as proof that she is indeed a woman, the Arabic text goes farther in the proofs that Boudour is willing to give. As a matter of fact, Boudour does not simply offer to show her female sexual characteristics; she actually shows them. She does not just show her breasts (nuhud); she also uncovers her genitals (faraj). In fact, it is that which she exhibits first. The unveiling of Boudour’s private parts is repeated twice in this scene, as though the redactor wished to highlight the sexual moment, as well as to encourage the audience’s (male, and undoubtedly also female) imagination concerning the implications of such a sexual exposition. As the text remains silent over Hayat al-Nefous’s response to Boudour’s stripping, the reader is permitted to conclude that she may not have been displeased by what she saw. Staging a female character who willingly (and titillatingly) uncovers her private parts and breasts thus becomes another step in the process of deepening the intimate contact between the two female spouses.
While in Yde et Olive, the revelation was overheard and rapidly divulged to the king, in the Arabic tale, Boudour’s secret remains for the greater part of the tale known only to Hayat al-Nefous. The limited disclosure of Boudour’s biological sex allows the sexual transgression by the two women to continue undisturbed. In fact, the greater permissiveness of the Arabic text (in comparison to the French narratives) toward lesbianism becomes even more pronounced in the scenes that follow, rather than precede, Boudour’s revelation of her biological sex. Whereas in the Yde and Olive epics, the confession became the space of panic and the beginning of the return to heteronormativity, it is not accompanied by any anxiety about cross-dressing in the Arabic story or about the lesbian sexuality that had taken place. There is no anxiety either about the necessity of maintaining visible, legible gender distinctions or enforcing social hierarchy. There is no divinely ordained injunction against lesbianism to worry about, no impending capital punishment and, as we will see, no divine intervention to reestablish order in the midst of what must have appeared as sociocultural and moral chaos to the medieval West.
In fact, in the Arabic tale, Boudour’s revelation gives rise to an alternative female space in which both women become equal and hence enjoy mutual support and reciprocal intimacy. Boudour’s revelation is met with mere surprise on the part of Hayat al-Nefous, not with panic or distress: Hayat al-Nefous is “surprised at her story” (ta`ajjabat) writes the redactor of the tale (595). More important perhaps, the revelation of Boudour’s womanhood is also met with pleasure: Hayat al-Nefous “was pleased (farahat) with the news” (595). The fact that Boudour is a woman, not a man, puts Hayat al-Nefous more at ease. The presence of the cross-dresser in the Arabic text, rather than heightening anxiety as it did in the French tradition, opens up a space for dialogue between the two girls and ultimately increases their intimacy and pleasure. Immediately following the news about Boudour’s biological sex, the redactor writes that both women
spoke, played, laughed with each other, and slept. (595)
We must note here in particular the morphological choice of the verb “tadahaku” (“to laugh with each other”), which in Arabic is a reciprocal verb form that signals actions performed with others. The choice of this form lends the entire passage a reciprocal tone, and thus for the first time in the homoerotic interlude of this tale, the redactor signals Boudour’s and Hayat al-Nefous’s sexual play, laughter, conversation, and overall pleasure in each other’s company. It is as though while Boudour performed a male role, the redactor was compelled to depict her in the conventionally male active position of kissing and caressing Hayat al-Nefous. After Boudour’s revelation, however, Hayat al-Nefous becomes an equal partner in the relationship, both active giver and passive recipient of the same-sex intimacy. The reciprocity inherent in the lesbian encounter stands thus in contrast to conventional portrayals of heterosexuality or even male homosexuality which often pit an active (male) partner against a passive (female) one. Some might argue that the very fact that Boudour’s biological sex must remain a secret to everyone but Hayat al-Nefous and the reader indicates that medieval Arab Islamicate society, just like French culture, did not condone lesbianism. If this may be true at a legal level, it is not so at a narrative and literary level. To the reader or listener, especially to the medieval lesbian in the audience, this tale must have provided a validation (albeit an imaginative one) for a way of life that differed radically from legally sanctioned sexual encounters.
Not only is Boudour and Hayat al-Nefous’s intimacy highlighted after Boudour’s revelation of her biological sex, but their marriage is finally consummated. Of course, it is not consummated in a heterosexual mode, but rather by destabilizing the association of heterosexual marriage with virginal blood. As a matter of fact, Hayat al-Nefous, in order to assuage her father’s mounting concern over her prolonged virginity, stages her own defloration. She kills a chicken and spreads its blood over her own thighs and handkerchief. She also screams, repeating thereby the expected association of heterosexuality with violence and pain:103
Hayat al-Nefous woke up before the morning call to prayer. She took a chicken, took off her pants, screamed after killing it and spreading its blood over herself and her handkerchief. She then hid the chicken, put her pants back on and called. So her family entered the room. (596)
As Hayat al-Nefous expected, the stained handkerchief is taken by King Armanos and his wife (and society at large) to be definitive proof of the consummation of their daughter’s marriage. The proud parents rush to exhibit the bloody cloth, without worrying about the provenance of the blood. Ironically, the very moment that the two lovers are portrayed as maintaining heteronormativity is also the very space where binary sexual relations are exposed and where the very notion of stable identities is challenged. Judith Butler’s analysis of homosexual marriage is particularly pertinent to this discussion: “The replication of this heterosexual tradition in a non-heterosexual context brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original. Thus, gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of `the original,’ . . . reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original.”104
In the Arabic tale, the exhibition of the bloody cloth in the context of a homosexual marriage reveals that heterosexuality is critiqued, denaturalized, animalized. After all, marriage is legitimized here not by the virginal blood of a bride, but by that of a lowly farm animal, the chicken. Meanwhile, Boudour and Hayat al-Nefous are allowed to continue their intimate lives with each other, inadvertently blessed this time by the entire social system.
Nothing disturbs the lesbian relation–neither Hayat al-Nefous’s sexual maturity, nor Boudour’s revelation of her biological sex to her partner and to the reader. Whereas in the French epic, the revelation of Yde’s sex is closely followed by the threat of capital punishment and by the divine miracle (the transsexual transformation), in the Arabic tale, the revelation contributes to the development of the intimate relationship between the two women. As a matter of fact, each night thereafter, Boudour and Hayat al-Nefous live in the same bliss, tending to their emotional, intimate relationship, while awaiting the eventual return of Qamar al-Zaman:
At night, [Boudour] penetrates into Hayat al-Nefous. They speak to each other and she tells her about her worry and her love for Qamar al-Zaman. (596)
In this quote, the verb “dakhala” (to enter, to penetrate) is used again with the preposition “ila” that we discussed earlier, hence emphasizing the endurance of the sexual encounter between the two women, even after the revelation of Boudour’s biological sex. Although the lesbian relationship is presented here as an ersatz for heterosexual relations (the two women’s intimacy occurs seemingly only because they are waiting for Qamar al-Zaman’s return), it seems clear nevertheless that a space is opened up for alternative emotional, if not sexual, satisfaction. In the Arabic tale, lesbianism is allowed to exist, is fostered even, within a frame of heterosexuality, while in the French texts we examined earlier, lesbianism is placed at the other extreme of heterosexuality.
It is only when Boudour recognizes Qamar al-Zaman as the vendor of olives that the lesbian sexual relation comes to a halt. At first reading, the end of the Arabic tale may be seen as a return not only to the androcentric model of marriage (Qamar al-Zaman and Boudour are reunited), but also, and in keeping with the cultural background of the One Thousand and One Nights, to polygamy: Hayat al-Nefous is given as second wife to Qamar al-Zaman. Moreover, the end of the text seems to herald the victory of patriarchy since, once reunited with her husband, Boudour abdicates in favor of the “true” man of the story, Qamar al-Zaman. The ultimate triumph of patriarchy is further manifested in the fact that Hayat al-Nefous is never consulted about becoming a second wife. However, once again, heterosexuality in the Arabic text is only a temporary interlude as lesbianism is never conveniently bracketed or completely and utterly contained and silenced. For when King Armanos asks Qamar al-Zaman to marry his daughter, Hayat al-Nefous, Boudour is the one who answers:
So Boudour replied: By God, for me like for her; a night for me and a night for her. And I will live together with her in one house because I have gotten used to her [literally: I have returned to her repeatedly]. (609)
While, on the surface, these lines suggest that Boudour generously accepts the sharing of her husband with Hayat al-Nefous, they also hint at the fact that the women’s relationship is far from coming to a halt at the end of the tale. Even as she adheres to the basic legal principles of polygamy (“one night for me and one night for her”), Boudour introduces an important departure from its conventions when she states her desire to live in the same house as Hayat al-Nefous. Her use of the verb “ta`awwad-tu,” which means both “to get used to” and “to return repeatedly to,” reveals that the main reason for refusing the very common practice of the separation of households may well be her desire to continue “returning repeatedly to Hayat al-Nefous.” Boudour’s desire to continue sharing Hayat al-Nefous’s house thus has significant implications for their same-sex relations. Not surprisingly, the survival of the lesbian relationship beyond the polygamous ending is the way Mardrus (the celebrated nineteenth-century French translator of Alf layla wa layla) will render the end of The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour.“Qamar al-Zaman governed his kingdom as perfectly as he contented his two wives, with whom he passed alternate evenings. Boudour and Hayat lived together in harmony, allowing the nights to their husband, but reserving the days for each other.”105
Mardrus restates here explicitly what was depicted implicitly in the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript that Mahdi edited. We must not disregard his translation out of hand, claiming it merely constitutes nineteenth-century Orientalist presuppositions and in no way reflects medieval viewpoints.106 Such an end is in fact quite consistent with the double meaning of “ta`awwad-tu” in the Syrian manuscript and resonates very strongly with medieval Arabic erotic treatises which consider lesbianism as one form of sexual practice, alongside many others. The Arabic Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour, in contrast to the French narratives of Yde and Olive, thus permits the survival of Boudour and Hayat al-Nefous’s relationship, even as it places it within the parameters of heterosexuality and polygamy.107 Whereas the French epic recuperates the cross-dressed Yde and silences the transgressive voice of the “third term,” the Arabic tale does not interrupt the workings of this “third term,” and allows a move toward a new structure where heterosexuality is viewed as only one possibility in a larger chain. The Arabic text thus, until the very end, permits border crossings, and reveals the intrinsic weakness of definitional distinctions. One may say that while her French sister, because of her transsexual transformation, is forced ultimately to embrace heterosexuality, the Arab lesbian, despite her heterosexual and polygamous marriage, is allowed to maintain her commitment and unfaltering faithfulness to her female partner.
This chapter has investigated instances of textual/sexual interconnections between medieval French and Arabic narratives of female cross-dressing. Our cross-cultural reading of the lesbian interlude in the three renditions of the Yde and Olive stories and the tale of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour from Alf layla wa layla has revealed the extent to which French narrators, all the while giving voice to female homoeroticism in ways strikingly reminiscent of the Arabic tradition, end up silencing the more disruptive sexual elements and revert ultimately to heteronormativity. This does not mean that the French Yde and Olive narratives are not subversive within their own literary and historical context or that cross-cultural research is equivalent to competitive cultural evaluation. It means rather that a cross-cultural, comparative intertextual analysis of Arabic and French renditions of the same story is valuable in providing a more nuanced reading of same-sex desire between women in the medieval East and West. By allowing us to ask new questions or to ask old questions in new ways, cross-cultural scholarship inevitably forces us to adjust our analysis of one cultural discourse taken singly. As they reveal the historical and ideological power structures that construct discursive representations of sexualities, cross-cultural sexuality studies give us a glimpse of what else could have been there in the French text, how else sexuality and homosexuality could have been described. Such an approach allows us to discover and decipher those blank spaces in medieval French textuality, those places where same-sex desire could have been inscribed but, in the process of border crossings, were rendered ambiguous or were simply effaced. Ultimately, such an investigation is valuable for the insight it affords us into the medieval creative (and censoring) process more generally.