The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature (review)

McCracken, Peggy. The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Pp. xiii + 224.

Medieval romance has traditionally been understood by literary critics as the narrative expression of utopian longings, and therefore as an attempt to escape history through strategies of idealization. Indeed, romance plots typically move from the articulation of a desire, lack, or defect toward an end-point of fulfillment, completion, or perfection. To give merely the most famous examples, Arthur, the once and future king, is in some sense removed from time altogether, especially in that his prophesied return from Avalon is perpetually deferred; Camelot is a place of immaculate beauty and pure social cohesion, even under the threat of attack from the outside; and the Round Table figures a continuity without beginning or end and a community without dissent. However, while romance may be fundamentally escapist in nature, it is clear that it is never actually divorced from the social, political, and historical matrices in which it was produced—and, for that matter, in which it continues to be consumed. Writing in 1945, Erich Auerbach describes romance as eschewing a “penetrating view of contemporary reality,” but nonetheless using its fantastic imaginary in order to produce a “class ethics which as such claimed and indeed attained acceptance and validity in this real and earthly world” (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Princeton, 1963, 136-37). In other words, while romance may not seek to imitate the reality of its feudal audience, it nonetheless serves as a ritual of community formation that pertains directly to how the actual nobility [End Page 306] was organized and hierarchized. According to Auerbach, romance not only represents an absolute, utopian community, “raised above all earthly contingencies,” but it also “gives those who submit to its dictates the feeling that they belong to a community of the elect, a circle of solidarity . . . set apart from the common herd” (ibid.). Romance signifies its historical and ideological embeddedness primarily through these gestures of transcendence and exclusion—gestures that serve to shape the ethics and politics of feudal audiences. As an ideological structure, romance is not an evasion of history, but rather a mediation of historical forces that generates meaning within the parameters of specific political forces.