1. Introduction: Too Close for Comfort
Linda Marie Rouillard1
(1)
The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA
Linda Marie Rouillard
Why in the twenty- irst century write a book about twelfth-and thirteenthcentury medieval French poems preoccupied with incest, marriage, and penance? Can literary narratives from eight and nine centuries ago possibly enlighten us about current issues related to sexual abuse in particular, or to marriage and social relationships in general? For centuries, we have turned to stories and metaphors from literature to grapple with and understand the con licts, suffering, and trauma of our lives: the Oedipal story in particular has shaped our views of parent–child relationships and of the destinies we feel doomed to live out. Biblical stories (such as the incest story from the Old Testament about Lot and his daughters) are common currency even in the world outside of religious practice. Fairy tales and folktales amuse us and instruct us. Poetry in particular consoles us and seduces us as it transforms reality at the most basic level: the linguistic level in which ordinary speech and syntax are “reformed” into an extra-ordinary language that allows us a new perspective on our lives. Indeed, it is sometimes only in this poetic language that we can address those experiences for which we have no words in everyday language.
This book starts from the premise that medieval musings on social institutions and medieval de initions of human relationships remain pertinent to modern society, and can provide valuable insights into the manner of categorizing and prescribing human interactions and perceptions; insights into the anxiety related to contemporary changing
de initions of legally recognized relationships; and insights into modern customs of reconciliation for fractured social connections.
In the modern era, we typically study incest to better understand the trauma experienced by victims, to develop treatment and support systems, and to ind ways of preventing the abuse. For the twenty- irst century, incest is a devastating reality of greater frequency than previously understood, but there is no reason to assume that incest did not occur with great frequency as well in the Middle Ages. This book will reference a long tradition of stories of incest, but a tradition that typically uses the motif as a metaphor for broader discussions of social relationships. It is also important to remember in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when the majority of our referenced works were written, incest had a much more extensive de inition, referring not only to interdicted consanguineous relationships, but also to marriage between those with spiritual connections—speci ically, between godparent and godchild—and between those with af ine connections, meaning relatives of relatives by marriage, or even relatives of a previous sexual partner. Because of these interdictions, many potential marriage partners, even though distant relatives by our standards, fell into the category of still “too close for comfort.”
Chapters 2 and 3 of this book study numerous medieval examples of this classical metaphor, that of an incestuous relationship. While a modern reader is more likely accustomed to learn about incest in the form of survivor narratives, psychological analyses, and newspaper articles, it is unlikely that medieval readers interpreted medieval poems using the incest motif as exposes of sexual abuse or of potential sexual abuse in the Middle Ages. As twenty- irst century readers, however, informed by modern incest survivor narratives, we can interpret such stories on multiple levels, from the psychological experience of trauma to a symbolic parable about the potential positive or negative consequences of social change.
As we study incest narratives against the ideological background of the medieval Churchʼs evolving de inition of marriage, the institution that positioned itself to regulate sexual behavior, among other behaviors, often in competition with familial material interests, we will connect the themes of medieval texts to modern preoccupations and con licts over the nature of matrimony in Chapter 4. During the High Middle Ages, the institution of marriage was being rede ined by the Church, which now insisted that a valid marriage required the individual consent of both spouses to the
union; a legitimate marriage, in theory then, could not be the result of parental coercion, though arranged and forced marriages nonetheless continued well beyond the Middle Ages. By the thirteenth century, however, the Church had come to exercise much more control over marital relationships that had historically been the purview of the male heads of households. The pronouncements of the 1215 Fourth Lateran Council reduced the Church’s previous extensive consanguinity regulations that had greatly limited potential marriage partners and had caused many headaches for noble families longing to consolidate lands and power through the arranged marriages of their children. The Church’s insistence on verifying the individual consent of the marriage partners certainly diluted some paternal authority in the matter of marriage, and thus could frustrate to a certain degree the conglomeration of dynastic wealth.
The sacrament of penance had also undergone numerous changes by the mid-thirteenth century, evolving from a “tariff” system of formulaic punishments to an emphasis on the emotion of contrition, and to a renewed emphasis on the ef icacy of absolution by the priest.
The depiction of individualized repentance and public forgiveness in medieval narratives also resonates with our need for a modern form of public confession in order to reestablish faith and trust between the general public and those in power who abuse that faith, the subject of Chapter 5. One need only evoke the political careers of Bill Clinton or Andrew Weiner to understand the general public’s need and the media’s obsession for broadcasts of admission of personal failure by the famous and the powerful. The calls for public accountability and a televised day of reckoning make for good religious theater as well as for increased viewer ratings, just as medieval public performances of penance provided interesting occasions for the congregation to be reminded of God’s in inite mercy.
In conjunction with the Churchʼs ever-increasing authority over human relationships through its changes of perspective on marriage and penance, Chapter 6 considers bodily fragmentation and miraculous grafts, in particular as related to the tradition of relics, another way of maintaining relationships severed by death, enabling the faithful to establish a connection with the saintly and the divine. Once again, the Church insists it has the ultimate authority to determine authentic relics and prevent abuse of such sacred objects by both the clergy and the laity.
Because marriage and penance are sacramental traditions in which words play an important role, we consider the relationship between
women and men with language itself in Chapter 7: rash boons, deceptive obedience, and forged missives produce a tension between the letter of the text and the spirit of the text. How are we to interpret “narratives” or declarations: is a knight really obliged to kill his sister because he blindly promised a rash boon to a seemingly innocent maiden? Is it disloyal for a vassal to save a maidenʼs life by creating the appearance of obeying a written royal order to execute her?
The early twentieth-century psychoanalyst Otto Rank studied a corpus of incest narratives with the goal of better understanding the imprint of an author’s psyche on his or her literary creation, insisting more speci ically that “the incest fantasy is of primary importance in the psychic life of the author.”1 The purpose of this book, however, is not to better understand the life of medieval poets who wrote about incest, authors for whom we typically have limited knowledge; rather it is to use medieval narratives to better understand social and cultural mentalities of some twelfth- and thirteenth-century western European societies, as well as some of their beliefs and attitudes toward religious practices. In addition, such a study can help us to better understand our own twenty- irst-century anxieties about social change to accepted forms of marriage, and even new anxieties about inadvertent incest resulting from technological advances such as assisted reproductive procedures, some of the topics in our concluding chapter. Just as in the Middle Ages, publicly rede ining what constitutes accepted and acceptable relationships in the twenty- irst century has important consequences and often triggers strong reactive stances in religious and legal arenas. For instance, the modern debate over the de inition of marriage asks whether a valid marriage is limited only to a man and a woman, or will we recognize same-sex unions? The modern social fears and political con lict resulting from this question, along with the consequences for such issues as shared property, medical decisions, and adoption, are front-page news on a regular basis. While the June 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges made same-sex marriage legal in the U.S., the topic remains a rhetorical battleground for debates on state versus federal authority to de ine and “protect” the institution of marriage. The process of asserting the authority to de ine a legal marriage is just one of many issues that connect us to the medieval past.
We conclude this work with some modern uses of the incest motif in a variety of genres, including ilms, novels, memoirs, and popular and sensational media accounts. As a narrative motif and metaphor used to discuss social changes, class con lict, and culture wars, the incest theme
has a place in modern re lections on broad social problems as well. Gillian Harkins in her book Everybodyʼ s Family Romance: Incest in Neoliberal America, observes, for instance, that the epidemic of incest and sexual abuse so prevalent in the popular media in the 1990s was racialized by the popular media. “Black women were positioned once again as the insigni icant real of sexual violence, while white women were the hyperreal of narcissistic sex panic and self-aggrandizement. Privileged (coded as white) women took over the more legitimate stories of child sexual abuse among the poor and populations of color (where it really happens but doesnʼt really matter) and used them to theatricalize their own middle-class angst on the stage of world historical suffering.”2 In Harkinsʼs assessment, modern popular media in the U.S. have used the incest motif to conduct their version of class and race warfare as they pit white women against black women, and upper classes against lower classes, portraying the latter as “the source of incestuous pathology,” sometimes to distract us “[from] a culture turning in on itself, more willing to hear stories of sexual scandal than social inequality.”3
Incest as a metaphor remains common currency in modern media that use the image to characterize a wide range of competing issues, including political and inancial con licts of interests, as evidenced by the following sample of news article titles: “Incestuous County Boards Preside over Rising Texas Tax Bills.” “The Incestuous Relationship Between Media and Politics.” “Incestuous Relationship between MTR and the Government is at Root of Hong Kong’s High-Speed Rail Woes.” “Liberal Media Continues Incestuous Relationship with Obama, Washes over Scandals.” “Inside Dallas’ Incestuous Mayoral Race.” “Rush Limbaugh: Sean Hannity is ʻThree Timesʼ as Honest as ʻIncestuousʼ Washington Media.”4 Such examples demonstrate the relevance of the incest metaphor to modern social critiques, and also raise a troubling philosophic question about such rhetoric: what does it mean to describe everyday politics by appropriating as a metaphor such a traumatic experience? While creating eye-catching headlines, do such uses trivialize psychological pain?
Television and the sensational press have often exploited incest accounts for their shock value and potential pro it. A quick internet search with the entry “incest” results in hundreds of current or recent citations from newspapers and the sensational press worldwide, suggesting modern societyʼs concomitant prurient curiosity and horror: “ʻI love incestʼ: Sick comments of accounting irm executive, 25, who lured children into
sexually assaulting their siblings via social media.” “Teens in Trouble over Incest.” “Fired Alabama police chief indicted on rape, incest charges.”
“Widow, Son Sentenced for Incest.” “The State has a Place in this Bedroom; Some Suggest Incest Between Consenting Adults is a Personal Choice.”
“Thatʼs Life; Had She Been a Man She Would Have Gone Down for Goodbut Because Sheʼs a Woman Evil Incest Mum gets just 7 Years.” “The Last Taboo; Shocking Case Forces Britain to Confront the Reality of Incest.”5 Sensationalized titles only add to the tragedy of such stories; lest anyone think that incest lives merely in the long-distant, shadowy past of humans, these titles and thousands of others like them remind us otherwise. The truth that lies behind the lurid titles reminds us that humans are as capable of great, destructive behavior as they are of great, compassionate acts. We are no less brutish than our ancestors who were also no less human than their modern counterparts.
While literary works focused on incest do not constitute documentation of systematic sexual abuse experienced by individuals, any historical, social survey of the subject of incest should also include an overview of the literary manifestations of incest as a narrative motif over time, for those literary occurrences can depict and explain anxieties, implications, and consequences for a given society at a given point in history. Is incest considered a sin, a crime, or both? Is it a private issue to be resolved within the family, or is it a public crisis requiring government intervention? Who de ines incest? Who grants exemptions from interdictions? Anthropological and sociological research has cataloged some of the variances according to culture and history; literary depictions can help us to understand better the immediate implications of those differences.
A useful point of reference and point of departure in this work is Philippe de Remiʼs thirteenth-century poem La Manekine. The protagonist in this work is so horri ied by her father’s incestuous proposal that she cuts off her own hand in an attempt to make herself ineligible for a royal marriage. Her virtue is af irmed in the denouement by the miraculous reattachment of her hand, which had been protected in a container described as a reliquary, a particularity not found in other medieval incest stories. While La Manekine may contain some classic motifs such as the sorely tried, ever loyal wife, and a happily-ever-after ending, its fantastic plot weaves a narrative focused on incest, marriage, and penance with: a proposed father–daughter marriage, self-amputation, death sentences, unbelievable sea voyages, a fairy-tale marriage, a wicked mother-in-law, a
helpful sturgeon, a miraculous graft of a severed hand, the reunion of a long-separated husband and wife, and public forgiveness of a kingʼs sins by his victim. Behind the fantasy of this medieval poem are re lections on basic human emotions: anger, fear, courage, compassion, love, jealousy, idelity, and hope. Its plot is motivated by family con licts, destructive desires, institutional power struggles, and social anxiety over changing norms and institutions.
While the actions and reactions of Philippe de Remi’s protagonist, for instance, to potential incest are entirely believable to modern readers, we note that the incest motif as developed in this poem also functions as a metaphor for competing societal interests: that is, the Churchʼs apparent efforts to prioritize the individualʼs desires or needs over the familyʼs collective interests ultimately pits Church authority against paternal authority.
In La Manekine it is resistance to incest that leads to examples of virtuous laity, validated by the appearance of a living relic, an amputated hand, reattached to our heroine in the form of a miraculous graft.
Epics, chronicles, histories, poems, prose, hagiography, founding myths, drama, romance, lais, whatever the genre or era, there abound numerous examples of stories of incest initiated, implied, assumed, or even unknowing. A bibliographic search of monographs will result in thousands of items related to this topic. Modern survivor narratives have rightly sensitized readers to the trauma and pain resulting from incest threatened and experienced, but medieval writers were no less able to depict the horror, the emotional, and physical consequences of such relationships, as exempli ied in Philippe de Remiʼs protagonist who chops off her left hand to avoid someone else’s sin of incestuous desire.
Medieval writers advised the use of shocking images as memory devices.6 The use of the most shocking example of a forbidden relationship, parent–child incest, would certainly have hooked listeners and readers in the Middle Ages, even as that example would subsequently later illustrate a particular dogma, for instance, Godʼs willingness to forgive even the most heinous of sins, as Jean-Charles Payen and Elizabeth Archibald have previously so well explained.7 In addition, medieval literary depictions of forbidden consanguineous relationships lead to larger discussions and explanations of how a society is organized and how it de ines itself. Which relationships are deemed appropriate for bearing and rearing children; for inheriting property and wealth, and for ruling realms?
What constitutes a family; a nation? And as we shall see, incest can be used as the rhetorical dividing line between virtue and evil, between humanity and divinity, between clerical culture and lay culture, or between civilization and barbary.
In addition to medievalists in general, students of such topics as images of woman and gender issues, sacramental history, Church history, and the history of family structures will ind much of interest in the medieval literary narratives cited here as we study them alongside historical documents, ecclesiastical pronouncements, and modern iction, memoirs, and current events. The challenge for the twenty- irst-century reader is to construct interpretations of medieval texts about incest, texts grounded in foundational classical works, without applying anachronistic analysis, and yet still appreciate the poetsʼ psychological insights, and recognize the relevance of these tales to our modern society. While the Middle Ages are generally assumed to be a period that typically marginalizes women and uses offspring as political pawns in strategic marriages, many of the texts considered here will provide us with episodes that challenge our beliefs about medieval customs, beliefs, strictures, and politics. In our survey, we will see that some of the laity can be more virtuous than ecclesiastics; children sometimes know better than their parents; servants can outwit their lords, and a woman can even pre-empt the pope.
Notes
1. Otto Rank, The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend: Fundamentals of a Psychology of Literary Creation, trans. Gregory C. Richter (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 12.
2. Gillian Harkins, Everybodyʼs Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 91.
3. Harkins, Everybodyʼs Family Romance, 3; 57.
4. Kenric Ward, “Incestuous County Boards Preside over Rising Texas Tax Bills,” Foxnews, December 12, 2016, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/incestuous-county-boardspreside-over-rising-texas-tax-bills, accessed February 21, 2019. Ginevra Marengo, “The Incestuous Relationship Between Media
and Politics,” The Global Critical Media Literacy Project, October 20, 2016, /http://gcml.org/incestuous-relationship-media-politicsginevra-marengo, accessed May 26, 2017. Alex Lo, “Incestuous Relationship Between MTR and the Government Is at Root of Hong Kong’s High-Speed Rail Woes,” South China Morning Post, December 1, 2015, https://www.scmp.com/comment/insightopinion/article/1885582/incestuous-relationship-between-mtrand-government-root-hong, accessed May 26, 2017. Andrea Grimes, “Inside Dallas’s Incestuous Mayoral Race,” D Magazine, May 2011, https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/dmagazine/2011/may/inside-dallas-incestuous-mayoral-race/, accessed May 26, 2017. Douglas Ernst, “Rush Limbaugh: Sean Hannity Is ʻThree Timesʼ as Honest as ʻIncestuousʼ Washington Media,” Washington Times, April 17, 2018, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/apr/17/rushlimbaugh-sean-hannity-is-three-times-as-hones/, accessed February 21, 2019.
5. Alex Chapman, “ʻI Love Incestʼ: Sick Comments of Accounting Firm Executive, 25, Who Lured Children into Sexually Assaulting Their Siblings via Social Media,” Daily Mail (Australia), February 9, 2019, https://advance-lexiscom.proxy.ohiolink.edu:9100/api/document?
collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:5VCR-W9D1-JCJY-G46G00000-00&context=1516831, accessed March 7, 2019. Bridgette Moyo, “Teens in Trouble for Incest,” The Chronicle, February 14, 2019, https://advance-lexiscom.proxy.ohiolink.edu:9100/api/document?
collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:5VF1-W9D1-JCH9-G1DF00000-00&context=1516831, accessed March 7, 2019. Associated Press, “Fired Alabama Police Chief Indicted on Rape, Incest Charges,” APNews, January 2, 2019, https://www.apnews.com/b3467cbf41d6426fad26423cf0936110, accessed March 7, 2019. Editorial, “Widow, Son Sentenced for Incest,” The Herald-Harare, December 1, 2016, https://allafrica.com/stories/201612010150.html, accessed February 21, 2019. Margaret Somerville, “The State Has a Place in this Bedroom,” The Globe and Mail, April 20, 2009, https://advance-lexiscom.proxy.ohiolink.edu:9100/api/document?
collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:7VGY-B0P1-2RKY-72JF00000-00&context=1516831, accessed March 7, 2019. Laura Lynott, “Thatʼs Life; Had She Been a Man She Would Have Gone Down for Good—But Because Sheʼs a Woman Evil Incest Mum Gets Just 7 Years,” The Sun, January 23, 2009, https://advance-lexiscom.proxy.ohiolink.edu:9100/api/document?
collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:4VFC-C640-TX5B-90N900000-00&context=1516831, accessed March 7, 2019. Ross Clark, “The Last Taboo; Shocking Case Forces Britain to Confront the Reality of Incest,” The Express, November 27, 2008, https://advance-lexiscom.proxy.ohiolink.edu:9100/api/document?
collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:4V17-51J0-TX33-B10D00000-00&context=1516831, accessed March 7, 2019.
6. See for instance, Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 130–137, and her comments on a fourteenth-century ars memorativa by Thomas Bradwardine. In this text, Bradwardine provides a sample narrative for the memorization of the zodiac signs, using a sequence of violent interactions among the igures.
7. Jean-Charles Payen, Le Motif du repentir dans la littérature française médiévale (des origines à 1230) (Geneve: Librairie Droz, 1968), 522. Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 6–7.
References
Archibald, Elizabeth. Incest and the Medieval Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.
Associated Press “Fired Alabama Police Chief Indicted on Rape, Incest Charges” APNews, January 2, 2019, https://advance-lexiscom.proxy.ohiolink.edu:9100/api/document? collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:5V3N-WRT1-DY9S-T09H-0000000&context=1516831. Accessed March 7, 2019.
Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Chapman, Alex “ʻI Love Incestʼ: Sick Comments of Accounting Firm Executive, 25, Who Lured Children into Sexually Assaulting Their Siblings via Social Media” Daily Mail (Australia), February 9, 2019, https://advance-lexiscom.proxy.ohiolink.edu:9100/api/document?
collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:5VCR-W9D1-JCJY-G46G-0000000&context=1516831. Accessed March 7, 2019.
Clark, Ross. “The Last Taboo; Shocking Case Forces Britain to Confront the Reality of Incest.” The Express, November 27, 2008, https://advance-lexiscom.proxy.ohiolink.edu:9100/api/document?
collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:4V17-51J0-TX33-B10D-0000000&context=1516831. Accessed March 7, 2019.
Ernst, Douglas. “Rush Limbaugh: Sean Hannity Is ʻThree Timesʼ as Honest as ʻIncestuousʼ Washington Media.” Washington Post, April 17, 2018, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/apr/17/rush-limbaugh-seanhannity-is-three-times-as-hones/. Accessed February 21, 2019.
Grimes, Andrea. “Inside Dallas’s Incestuous Mayoral Race.” D Magazine, May 2011, https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2011/may/inside-dallasincestuous-mayoral-race/. Accessed May 26, 2017.
Harkins, Gillian Everybodyʼs Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Lo, Alex. “Incestuous Relationship Between MTR and the Government Is at Root of Hong Kong’s High-Speed Rail Woes.” South China Morning Post, December 1, 2015, https://wwwscmp com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1885582/incestuousrelationship-between-mtr-and-government-root-hong Accessed May 26, 2017
Lynott, Laura. “Thatʼs Life; Had She Been a Man She Would Have Gone Down for Good But Because Sheʼs a Woman Evil Incest Mum Gets Just 7 Years.” The Sun, January 23, 2009, https://advance-lexiscom proxyohiolink edu:9100/api/document? collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:4VFC-C640-TX5B-90N9-0000000&context=1516831. Accessed March 7, 2019.
Marengo, Ginevra “The Incestuous Relationship Between Media and Politics” The Global Critical Media Literacy Project, October 20, 2016, /http://gcml org/incestuous-relationship-media-politics-ginevra-marengo Accessed May 26, 2017.
Moyo, Bridgette. “Teens in Trouble for Incest.” The Chronicle, February 14, 2019, https://advance-lexis-com proxyohiolink edu:9100/api/document?
collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:5VF1-W9D1-JCH9-G1DF-0000000&context=1516831. Accessed March 7, 2019.
Payen, Jean-Charles. Le Motif du repentir dans la littérature française médiévale (des origines à 1230). Geneve: Librairie Droz, 1968.
Philippe de Remi Le Roman de la Manekine Edited and translated by Barbara Sargent-Baur Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999
Rank, Otto. The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend: Fundamentals of a Psychology of Literary Creation. Translated by Gregory C. Richter. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992
Somerville, Margaret. “The State Has a Place in this Bedroom.” The Globe and Mail, April 20, 2009, https://advance-lexis-com.proxy.ohiolink.edu:9100/api/document? collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:7VGY-B0P1-2RKY-72JF-0000000&context=1516831. Accessed March 7, 2019.
Ward, Kenric. “Incestuous County Boards Preside over Rising Texas Tax Bills.” December 12, 2016, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/incestuous-countyboards-preside-over-rising-texas-tax-bills. Accessed February 21, 2019.
“Widow, Son Sentenced for Incest.” The Herald-Harare, December 1, 2016, https://allafrica.com/stories/201612010150.html. Accessed February 21, 2019.
© The Author(s) 2020
L. M. Rouillard, Medieval Considerations of Incest, Marriage, and Penance, The New Middle Ages
https://doi org/10 1007/978-3-030-35602-6 2
2. Kinship Matters: An Immodest
Proposal
Linda Marie Rouillard1
(1)
The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA
Linda Marie Rouillard
Email: linda.rouillard@utoledo.edu
In Philippe de Remiʼs thirteenth-century verse romance entitled La Manekine, the main character Joıe (later named Manekine), the only child of the King of Hungary, is confronted with the incestuous advances of her widowed father. The father is constrained by an oath he has sworn to his dying wife, that he will remarry only with a woman who resembles her exactly. A long, worldwide search for such a woman is futile. Nervous barons, anxious for a male heir, irst pressure cowardly clerics to validate a marriage with the only candidate who its that description: the king’s own daughter. The King of Hungary, in his turn, is convinced by his retinue that only by taking his own child in marriage can he be faithful to his late wife and to the needs of his kingdom. Joıe expresses her horror of this marriage proposal in an act of self-mutilation and chops off her left hand rather than commit the sin of incest. Her refusal to obey leads the king to condemn her to death, although she is secretly put out to sea by the kingʼs seneschal and arrives upon the shores of Scotland. Here she marries the king of that country, against the wishes of his mother who plots against Joıe. During the King of Scotlandʼs absence, Joıe gives birth to a son and, through two falsi ied letters, the mother-in-law has Joıe condemned to death.
Once again she is saved by another seneschal who consigns her yet again to the perils of the sea along with her infant son Jehan. This time she arrives in Rome and remains in the home of a kindly senator until fate reunites her with her husband and with her father who has come to Rome to confess his sin to the Pope. These reconciliations are followed by a miracle in which Joıeʼs severed hand, regurgitated by a ish, is reattached to her arm by the pontiff. No less miraculous is the King of Hungaryʼs recognition of Joıeʼs right to her inheritance: she inally receives the Kingdom of Armenia through her late mother, and Hungary through her father. At the conclusion of the romance, Joıe arranges the marriages of the senatorʼs two daughters with the two kindly seneschals, and she gives birth to more children, all of whom go on to contract royal marriages.
In La Manekine, incest, or more precisely attempted incest by means of a marriage proposal clearly within forbidden degrees of consanguinity, functions as the fulcrum of the romance, allowing for both philosophical and practical discussions of marriage and penance as social, political, and spiritual institutions. Both marriage and penance are recognized as religious sacraments by this time, and both function as rituals for the restoration and maintenance of social stability in general. La Manekine belongs to a long history of incest stories that teach about the power of God to forgive one of the most horrible sins: incest.1 Philippeʼs narrative in particular depicts a sacrament of penance capable of reconciling man with God and with his human family through the compassion of a virtuous woman, and through a sacrament of marriage capable of producing social stability and virtuous spouses. Marriage and penance as envisaged by Philippe are able to resolve some of the eternal power struggles between clerics and the laity, between men and women, as well as some of the generational con licts between young royals and established dynasties that seek ever more power, or at least seek to remain in power.
Philippe de Remi (or Remy) who lived from approximately 1205–1210 to 1265 or 1266, was a bailiff in Gatinais for Count Robert of Artois (brother of King Louis IX), and most likely composed his poem La Manekine between 1225 and 1250.2 Since his family held land in ief from the Abbey of Saint-Denis, Philippe likely understood both the common interests and con licts between the laity and the clergy. And as
an administrator for an aristocrat, he was also cognizant of the dynastic consequences of the stewardship of royal realms.
Philippe de Remiʼs use of incest becomes a lens through which to view medieval class and culture con licts. Inheritance of the kingdom by a female is considered unacceptable by the monarchʼs retinue who believe that the lack of a male heir threatens collapse for the King of Hungaryʼs dynasty. Says one of the barons: “ʻSeignour,’ fait il,ʻescoutés moi. / En cest païs avons un roy / Qui ot feme mout boine et sage; / En se mort avons grant damage. / De cele femme n’a nul hoir / Fors une ille, au dire voir, / Qui est mout boine et mout courtoise. / Et nonpourquant en briquetoize / Ert li roialmes de Hongrie / Se feme l’avoit en baillie. / Pour c’est il bon que nous alons / Au roi, et de cuer li prions / Qu’il pregne feme a nostre los” (ll. 205–217). “ʻSirs,’ he said, ‘hear me. / In this land we have a king / Who had a very good and wise wife. / In her death we have a great loss. / Of that wife he has no heir / Except for a daughter, to tell the truth, / Who is very good and courteous. / Nevertheless the kingdom of Hungary / Will be in peril / If a woman had it in her power. / Therefore it is good that we go / To the king and beg him earnestly / That he take a wife by our advice.’”3 One of the barons then explains the situation of “li prelat qui ci sont, / Qui en grant orfenté seront / Se malvais sires vient sour aus” (ll. 325–327), “the prelates who are here, / Who will be in a dif icult position / If a bad ruler comes over them.” The proposed solution of incest not only promises a solution to the lack of a male heir, but it also portends a downward spiral of social degradation as that dynasty metaphorically feeds on its young. La Manekine pits the younger, virtuous female laity in the person of Joıe against corrupt clergymen who understand that their interests align with those of the barons of the kingdom, hence the clerical complicity in arguing for a forbidden union. Joıeʼs righteousness contrasts with the immorality of prelates who will support a suspension of Church law in order to protect their material well-being in the service of their monarch. And, as an innocent young woman, Joıeʼs unwavering morality only highlights the deviousness of the kingʼs retinue who will sacri ice anyone, even an innocent young woman, to protect their own selfinterests. Philippe depicts the competing interests between men and women, between parents and children; the laity and the Church; the wealthy and the poor; the powerful and the powerless; and between
lords and servants. Indeed, Joıe is twice saved by wise seneschals who know how to give the appearance of obedience to the king or queenʼs order while protecting the innocent protagonist with whom the common people identify and sympathize when they hear of the execution order: “Meïsmement les povres gens, / Cui elle donnoit vestimens, / Furent plain de dolour et dʼire” (ll. 865–867). “Especially the poor people, / To whom she used to give clothes, / Were full of grief and sadness.” Joıe is able to move between the noble class and the peasant class; she is brave enough to defy her monarch and father; and she will even speak out at St. Peter’s in Rome to generously forgive her father, even before the Pope can utter his absolution.
De ining and discussing incest in La Manekine then become ways of re-visioning the relationships and con licts of interest between medieval social groups. La Manekine pits generational groups against each other, as exempli ied in the con lict between parent and child; and it pits politically powerful lay members against vulnerable lay members, as in the instance of a vengeful monarch and the kind seneschals who secretly disobey him. The King of Hungary and his household consider incest permissible if it will protect their political and dynastic interests; they believe the clerics and the Church should bend the rules in light of the lack of a male heir and the potential ensuing turmoil for the kingdom, should it fall into foreign hands through marriage. The clergy closest to the king also clearly understand that they may not fare as well under another royal dynasty, but as Joıe sees it, the incestuous marriage proposal made by the kingʼs men betrays their very cultural identity as de ined by their own systems of law: “A ce ne me porroi[t] plaisier / Nus: que ce me san[l]ast droiture / Quʼuns hom peüst sʼ[en]genreüre / Espouser, selonc nostre loy; / Et tuit cil sont plai[n] de derroy / Qui contre Deu conse[l] vous dounent / Et de tel cose vous s[em]ounent” (ll. 550–556). “For by no-one could I be bent to this: / That it could seem right to me / That a man might marry / His own child according to our law; / And they are full of wickedness, all those / Who give you advice contrary to God / And exhort you to do such a thing.” More than an infraction against human law, this proposed marriage positions the King of Hungary as an authority competing with God himself. In Joıe’s estimation, the incestuous proposal functions as a declaration of war upon another king: “Mais miex ameroie morte estre, /
Car cʼest contre le Roy Celestre” (ll. 601–602); “But I would rather be dead, / For it is against the Heavenly King,” muses Joıe to herself, as she prepares to ally herself with the divine king against the incestuous proposal of an all-too-fallible human king.
Joıe stands behind Godʼs law even when the clerics will not. Indeed, in this lay authorʼs depiction of both sacraments marriage and penance—the clerics do not live up to their responsibilities as spiritual guides, but instead are depicted as submissive and subordinate. In response to the baron who articulates both the problem and the solution, provoking the clerics’ eventual complicity after signi icant disputing among themselves, the narrator tells us: “De tex [i a] qui s’i acordent / Et de tex [qu]i molt s’en descordent. / Long[u]e[me]nt entr’eus desputerent. / En l[a in] li clerc s’acorderent / Que il le r[oy] en prieroient / et su a[us] le pecié penroient. / A l’Apo[stol]e monterront / Le gra[nt] prou it pour quoi fait l’ont” (ll. 333–340). “There are those who agree / And those who disagree strongly. / For a long time they argued among themselves. / At last the clerics agreed / That they would entreat the king to do it / And would take the responsibility upon themselves. / They will show the Pope / The great bene it for which they have done it.” While one might understandably expect the barons to push aside laws and commandments in favor of their material wellbeing, one expects a higher standard of behavior from the clergy. While they do debate the issue, their ensuing self-interested decisions are clearly inferior to some lay peopleʼs behavior, intentions, and spiritual experience, such as the conduct of the kindly seneschals who bravely defy royal orders and protect Joıe from execution.
While the royal father debates within himself the morality of this plan, as a monarch, he also is seduced by idea, which he justi ies by evoking the nexus of intricate social connections in his kingdom as he hides behind the wishes of his nobles and “proposes” to his daughter: “Et mi baron ne voelen[t m]i.e. / Que li roialmes de Hong[rie] / Demeurt sans hoir [ma]lle aprés moi. / Pour ce ai du clergié lʼot[roi] / Que de moi soiés espous[ee]; / Roïne serés couroun[ee]. / …Et jʼai or bien consel d[u fa]ire, / Mais quë il a vous v[oei]lle plaire”(ll. 531–542). “And my barons do not at all want / The kingdom of Hungary / To remain without a male heir after me. / Therefore I have the leave of the clergy / That you be wedded by me; / You will be crowned queen. / …And now I am
indeed of a mind to do it, / Provided that it might be pleasing to you. ” The king understands that he needs his baronsʼ goodwill as much as they need a male heir from him; the clergy understands that the baronsʼ interests are their interests as well. Joıeʼs initial acceptance of her ilial subjection before she learns the exact nature of her father’s plan (“Car ma vol[e]ntés me requiert, / De tout quanq[u]e ille doit faire / Pour pere, ne so[i.e.] contraire,” [ll. 516–518] “For my will requires me / In anything that a daughter should do / For a father, not to refuse”), however, turns to brave de iance when she learns the exact details of her fatherʼs immodest proposal. The King of Hungaryʼs evolving lust for his daughter contrasts with Joıeʼ s modest blush as she is caught by her father during her toilette: “La damoisiele se pino[it]; / Ele se regarde, si voit / Son pere qui est dalés [li]. / De la honte quʼele, r[ou]g[i]” (ll. 383–386). “The young lady was combing her hair; / She looks around, and sees / Her father, who is close beside her. / Out of embarrassment, she blushes.” While some critics read Joıeʼs crimson face as proof of her unconscious desire for her father,4 one could just as easily interpret the young girlʼs blush to signal embarassment at having her father discover her in an act that traditionally depicts female vanity, the seriousness of which pales in comparison to the fatherʼs sin. Joıe refuses to acquiesce to social needs and compromises that defy her Christian morals. She refuses to take her place in the social network of concession: “Pour riens ne mʼi ac[or]deroie; / La mort avant en [s]oufferroie. / Ne sui mie tenue a [fa]ire / Ce quʼa mʼame seroit [c]ontraire. / …Car qui sʼame pert, trop compere” (ll. 557–572). “Not for anything should I agree to do it; / I should die irst. / I am not obliged to do / What would be perilous to my soul. / …For the one who loses her soul, pays too dearly.”5 Joıe knows, however, that her refusal to consent will not suf ice to save her from what she perceives to be a monstrous marriage. A declaration stating “no” does not mean that her decision will be respected, no matter Church doctrine about the need for individual consent, but a demonstration of her ineligibility for royal marriage might put an end to the proposal: “Bien pens faire le me feront; / Ja pour mon dit ne le lairont, / Sʼaucune cose en moi ne voient / Par quoi de ce voloir recroient” (ll. 605–608). “I do indeed think that they will make me; / They will not leave off for anything I say, / Unless they see in me something / For which they give up this intention.” That “something” is horri ic: backed
into a corner, Joıe recognizes her only option is to maim herself by slicing off her left hand. Then she can appeal to a traditional expectation that requires ruling persons to be physically whole: “Mais roïne ne doi pas estre, / Car je nʼai point de main senestre, / Et rois ne doit pas penre fame / Qui nʼait tous ses membres, par mʼame!” (ll. 795–798). “But I may not be a queen, / For I do not have a left hand, / And a king may not take a wife / Who does not have all her members, upon my soul!”6 Upon seeing her recent in irmity and hearing her articulate her ineligibility for a royal marriage, her father becomes enraged at her calculated de iance and charges his senechal to burn her to death, threatening the latter as well should he not comply: “Et se nel faites a estrous, / Saciés, je le ferai de vous; / Ne mar mʼi atendrés jamais, / Nʼomme de vo lignage aprés” (ll. 831–834). “And if you do not do it promptly, / Know that I shall have the same done to you; / If ever I ind you it will be the worse for you / And for any man of your lineage afterwards.” The price of de iance to an incestuous command or to an order of execution is death. In Joıeʼs act of self-amputation and the seneschalʼs cloaked de iance of the execution order, La Manekine presents models of resistance to immoral parents, to self-interested clergy, and to cruel monarchs, all the while protecting the purity of lineage. Nonetheless, the protagonist pays with her own body the price of agency and morality.
2.1 Medieval De initions and Examples of Incest
The King of Hungary’s immodest proposal focuses on the closest of possible incestuous pairings, that between a parent and a child. However, that was only one example of countless forbidden unions. The Middle Ages de ined incest as forbidden sexual relationships between blood relatives within certain degrees, but in addition to bans against marriage with a blood relative, the Church also forbade marriage with an adopted child; or with a godchild, or with the godparent of oneʼs child, considered to be “spiritual” incest, for the act of baptism creates another level of family.7 In fact, according to the Council of Estinnes of 743 C.E., should a parent attempt to serve as godparent to his or her own child, this spiritual incest would invalidate the marriage.8 The 813 C.E. council of Chalon, however, merely required the parent who
presented himself/herself as godparent to his or her own child to do penance, refusing to sever the bonds of marriage over this.9 Just as incest taboos and regulations could pit one social class against another, they could also become the battleground on which to work out disputes over the nature of marriage as indissoluble or soluble. Finally, the Church also forbade marriage to relatives of in-laws, such as between a widower and his sonʼs sister-in-law, or even marriage to a relative of a former sexual partner, both of these instances qualifying as incest by af inity.10 Such a case was considered by Hincmar of Reims in the ninth century: a certain Stephen from the region of Aquitaine married but refused to have sex with his bride, claiming that it would be incestuous since, prior to this marriage, he had had intercourse with one of her relatives. In Hincmarʼs view, the marriage had to be dissolved since the couple could not consummate the union without committing incest.11 The intricate details of all these types of prohibited unions are scrupulously described by Robert Grosseteste in his 1235 Templum Dei which contains explanatory diagrams.12
With the exception of incest by af inity, King Robert the Pious (972–1031), for instance, appears to have violated the interdictions related to both spiritual incest and consanguineous incest in varying degrees, starting even before marriage: he fornicated with a woman (never identi ied by name) to whom he was related and who was a cogodparent; for these acts he did penance. Robert repudiated his irst wife Rozala, purportedly because she was a cousin related to him in the sixth degree, but more likely because the marriage produced no son. He repudiated his second wife Berthe, with some insinuation by the monk Odorannus of Sens that it was due to the fact that she was related to him in the third degree. His third wife Constance was also a distant cousin; but once Constance engendered sons, Robert attempted to revert back to Berthe, with no success.
Similarly, Count Geoffroi Martel, Count of Anjou (1006–1060), remained married for eighteen years to Agnes in incestuous af inity: she was a widow of Geoffroiʼs cousin in the third degree. His third wife, Adele was a cousin in the fourth degree, a fact that allowed him to eventually set her aside, to remarry his second wife Grecie. Geoffroi even managed a ifth marriage, but through all these unions, incestuous
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She drew Freda, who was shivering now, over on the couch, then turned to Gregory.
“Good night, Gregory—again. You bring adventure with you.”
There was a smile in her eyes which he seemed to answer by a look in his own. Then he looked past her to Freda.
“Good night, little wanderer. I’ll see you to-morrow.”
Freda saw him fully now. He was tall and thin and ugly. His dark eyes seemed to flash from caverns above his high cheekbones. But he had a wide Irish mouth and it smiled very tenderly at them both as he softly went out.
Freda would not take Margaret’s little couch bed for herself so Margaret had to improvise a bed on the floor for her guest, a bed of blankets and coats and Freda slept in Margaret’s warm bath robe. Oddly, she slept far better than did Margaret, who, for a long while, held herself stiffly on one side that her turning might not disturb Freda.
II
They both wakened early. Freda found the taste of stale adventure in her mind a little flat and disagreeable. There were a number of things to be done. Margaret telephoned briefly to the Brownley house, left word with a servant that Miss Thorstad had spent the night with her.
“I’ll go up there after we have some breakfast,” she said to Freda, “and get you some clothes. Then I think you’d better stay here with me. I’ll ask the landlady to put an extra cot in here and we can be comfortable for a few days. And please don’t talk of inconvenience”—she forestalled Freda’s objections with her smile—“I’ll love to have company. If you stay in town we’ll see if you can’t get a place of your own in the building here. Lots of apartments have a vacant room to let.”
She was preparing breakfast with Freda’s help and the younger girl’s spirits were rising steadily even though the thought of an interview with Barbara remained dragging. It was great fun for Freda—the freedom of this tiny apartment with its bed already made into a daytime couch, the eggs cooking over a little electric grill on the table and the table set with a scanty supply of dishes—two tall glasses of milk, rolls and marmalade.
“It’s so nice, living like this,” she exclaimed. Margaret laughed.
“Then the Brownley luxury hasn’t quite seduced you?”
“I was excited by it. I’m afraid it did seduce me temporarily. But for the last week something’s been wrong with me. And this was it. I wanted to get out of the machinery. They leave you alone and all that—but it’s so ordered —so planned. Everything’s planned from the menus to the social life. They try to do novel things by standing on their heads sometimes in their own grooves—at least the girls do—but really they get no freshness or freedom, do they?”
“I should say that particular crowd didn’t. Of course you mustn’t confound all wealthy people with them. They’re better than some but a great deal less interesting than the best of the wealthy. And of course just because their life doesn’t happen to appeal to your temperament—or mine —”
“Are you always so perfectly balanced?” asked Freda, so admiringly as to escape impertinence.
“I wish I were ever balanced,” answered Margaret. “And now suppose you tell me a little more about what happened so I’ll be sure how I had better take things up with the Brownley girls.”
Freda had been thinking.
“It really began with me,” she said. “Ted Smillie was Barbara’s man and I was flattered when he noticed me. And of course I liked him—then—so I let it go on and she hated me for that.”
“Stop me if I pry—but do you care for the young man now?”
“Oh—no!” cried Freda. “I’m just mortally ashamed of myself for letting myself in as much as I did.”
“Everybody does.”
Margaret’s remark brought other ideas into Freda’s mind. She remembered Gregory Macmillan and his apparent intimacy with Margaret. But she asked nothing, going on, under Margaret’s questioning, with her tale of the night before, and as they came to the part of Gregory’s intervention, Margaret vouchsafed no information.
An hour later, she came back from the Brownley house, with Freda’s suitcase beside her in a taxi.
“You did give them a bad night,” she said to Freda, “Bob Brownley looks a wreck. It appears that later they went out to search the park—scared
stiff for you. And you had gone. They saw some men and were terrified.”
“Are they very angry?”
“Barbara tried to stay on her high horse. Said that although it was possible she had misunderstood the situation it looked very compromising and she thought it her duty in her mother’s absence—. Of course, she said, she was sorry that matters had developed as they had. Poor Allie’d evidently been thinking you’d been sewed up in a bag and dropped in the river. They both want to let the thing drop quickly and I said they could say that you were staying with me for the remainder of your visit. I also told Barbara a few home truths about herself, and advised her to be very careful what she said to her mother or I might take it up with her parents.”
“All this trouble for me!” cried Freda. “I am ashamed!”
“Nonsense. But I must go along quickly now. I’ve a meeting. Your trunk will be along sometime this morning. Put it wherever you like and the landlady will send the janitor up with a cot. And—by the way—if Gregory Macmillan drops in, tell him I’m engaged for lunch, will you? You might have lunch with him, if you don’t mind.”
“I feel aghast at meeting him.”
“Don’t let any lack of conventions bother you with Gregory. The lack of them is the best recommendation in his eyes. He’s a wild Irish poet. I’ll tell you about him to-night. I think you’ll like him, Freda. He’s the kindest person I know—and as truthful as his imagination will let him be.”
“What is he in St. Pierre for?”
“Oh, ask him—” said Margaret, departing.
CHAPTER IX
WORK FOR FREDA
IT was on that morning that Gage Flandon made his last appeal to his wife not to let herself be named as a candidate for Chicago at the State Convention. He had been somewhat grim since the district convention. As Margaret had realized would happen, certain men had approached him, thinking to please him by sounding the rumor about sending his wife to the National Convention. Many of them felt and Gage knew they felt that he had started, or arranged to have started, a rumor that his wife would be a candidate and that he meant to capitalize the entrance of women into politics by placing his own wife at the head of the woman’s group in the State. It was a natural enough conclusion and its very naturalness made Gage burn with a slow, violent anger that was becoming an obsession. It began of course with the revolt against that suspicion of baseness that he could capitalize the position of his wife—that he could use a relation, which was to him so sacred, to strengthen his own position. Yet, when these men came with their flattery he could not cry down Helen without seeming to insult her. There was only one way, he saw, and that was for Helen herself to withdraw. If she did not, it was clear that she would be sent.
So he had besought and seemed to always beseech her with the wrong arguments. He knew he had said trite things, things about women staying out of politics, the unsuitability of her nature for such things, but he had felt their triteness infused with such painful conviction in his own mind that it continually amazed him to see how little response he awoke in her.
She had said to him, “You exaggerate it so, Gage. Why make such a mountain out of a molehole? I’m not going to neglect you or the children. I’ll probably not be elected anyhow. But why not regard it as a privilege and an honor and let me try?”
“But why do you want to try?”
She looked as if she too were trying vainly to make him understand.
“I’d like to do something myself, Gage—something as myself.”
“You were content without politics two months ago.”
“I’ve changed—why begrudge me my enthusiasm?”
“Because I can’t bear to see you a waster like the rest of the women. Because you’re so different. Everything about you is true and sound, dear, and when you start deliberately using yourself for political effect, don’t you see how you become untrue? There’s nothing in it, I tell you. The whole thing’s cut and dried. There’s no big issue. If the women want to send some one, let them choose some other figurehead!”
He had not meant it so but of course he seemed disparaging her.
“Perhaps,” she said rather frigidly, “perhaps I’ll not be such a figurehead as you think.”
“But I didn’t mean to say that to hurt you.”
“I’m not sure what you do mean. It seems to me we’re actually childish. You’ve chosen, quite deliberately, to be a reactionary in all this woman’s progress movement. I’m sorry. But there is a loyalty one has to women, Gage, beside the loyalty one has to a husband and I really cannot share your prejudice against progress, as it applies to women.”
The unexpressed things in Gage’s mind fairly tore at him.
“If you really had one sensible objection, Gage—”
“There’s just one objection,” he said, doggedly, “you desecrate yourself. Not by entering politics particularly. But by using yourself that way. You mutilate your sex.”
She did not get angry. But she put one hand on his shoulder and they looked at each other helplessly.
“Don’t you see,” said Helen, “that I want, like these other women, to once in a while do something that’s clean of sex? That’s just me—without sex?”
His eyes grew very hard. She struck almost mortally at the very thing he loved most. And he moved away, as if to remove himself definitely.
“I’m sorry you feel so. It’s a pleasant remark for a man’s wife to fling at him.”
Irony was so unusual in Gage that Helen stood looking after him after he went out of the room. Her mind ached with the struggle, ached from the assertion of this new determination of hers. Never had she wanted so to give him comfort and be comforted herself. She saw the weeks ahead—
weeks of estrangement—possibly a permanent estrangement. Yet she knew she would go on. It wasn’t just wanting to go on. She had to go on. There was a principle involved even if he could not see it. Clearer and clearer she had seen her necessity in these past two weeks. She had to waken her own individuality. She had to live to herself alone for a little. She had to begin to build defences against sex.
Gage was right. Margaret had sown the seed in his wife. Helen had not watched her for nothing. She had seen the way that Margaret made no concessions to herself as a woman, fiercely as she was working for the establishment of woman’s position. It seemed paradoxical but there it was. If you were truly to work for woman’s welfare you had to abandon all the cushions of woman’s protected position, thought Helen—you couldn’t rest back on either wifehood or motherhood. You couldn’t be lazy. You had to make yourself fully yourself.
Here was her chance. She hadn’t wanted it but they had insisted. The women wanted her to go to Chicago—not because she was Mrs. Flandon but because she was Helen Flandon, herself. A little quiver of delight ran through Helen as she thought of it. She would see it through. Gage would surely not persist in his feeling. Surely he would change. He would be glad when she proved more than just his wife.
She had a strange feeling of having doffed all the years which had passed since she had left college, a feeling of youth and energy which had often dominated her then but which had changed in the seven years of her marriage. Since her marriage she had walked only with Gage and the children—shared life with them very completely. Now it was not that she cared less for them (she kept making that very clear to herself) but there was none the less a new independence and new vigor about her. She felt with them but she felt without them too.
It hurt her that Gage should feel so injured. But her exhilaration was greater even than the hurt, because she could not sound the depths of her husband’s suffering.
Gage went out of the house with no more words. He managed to focus his mind on the work of the day which was before him but the basic feeling of pain and anger persisted.
In the middle of the morning Helen called him, reminding him of his promise to see if Freda Thorstad could be placed. She ignored, as she had a
way of doing, any difference between them.
“Are you going to drag that child in too?” he asked, ungraciously, and then conscious of his unfairness for he knew quite well that the object was to place Freda so she could earn her own living, he capitulated.
“Drummond gets back this afternoon. Send Miss Thorstad in about four and I’ll take her to see him.”
“You’re a dear, Gage,” Helen rang off.
Gage tried to figure out whether something had been put over him or not. There he let it go and sat in at the club with a chosen crowd before lunch. It pleased him immensely to see Harry Harris stuck for the lunch. He kidded him, his great laugh rising and falling.
II
At four Freda came and at her, “You’re sure I’m not too early, Mr. Flandon?” Gage felt further ashamed of his ungraciousness. Freda was a little pale, after her difficult night, and it made her rather more attractive than ever to Gage. He thought she might be worrying over the chance of getting the new work and was eager to make it easy for her.
“So you want to get into politics like all the rest?” he asked, but smilingly.
“I want some work to do,” said Freda, “I’d just as soon do anything else. But I really will have to work or go back to Mohawk and there isn’t anything for me to do in Mohawk. I don’t much care what I do, to tell you the truth, Mr. Flandon, so it is work. And I’ve a theory that I might be better at washing windows than doing anything else.”
“This isn’t much of a job, you know.”
“Probably it’s all I could handle. I’m really a little nervous. Will they ask for all kinds of qualifications?”
“There’s no ‘they’ There’s only one man and I think all he is looking for is some one who is discreet and pleasant and can do ordinary secretarial work.”
“I’m going to learn typewriting evenings,” said Freda.
It was so pleasant to be free from controversial conversation, or from conversation which glossed over controversy that Gage found himself feeling much warmer and more cheerful than he had for days. Together they
walked over to the office of the man who had the district chairmanship. Mr. Drummond was embarrassed. Clearly he was embarrassed by the necessity of refusing a favor Flandon asked. But he was put to it.
They left the office and at the street corner Freda stopped and held out her hand.
“Pretty lucky for them that young Whitelaw got there first, I fancy.”
“Have you something else in mind?”
“I’ll try to find something. Maybe I can get a place as somebody’s companion. Or maybe Miss Duffield will know—”
A tight little line came around Gage’s mouth. He didn’t want Margaret Duffield running this girl. His dislike was becoming an obsession.
“I wonder,” he said slowly, “if you’d like to come into my office. I could use another clerk, as a matter of fact. I’m away a great deal and I find that since my assistant has been handling more law work he is too busy to do things around the office—handling clients, sorting correspondence and such things. The ordinary stenographer just messes up everything except a sheet of carbon paper, and the last good one I had got married, of course. There wouldn’t be much in it—maybe sixty a month, say—but if you’d like to try —”
Freda looked at him straightly.
“If you’re just trying to find a job for me, I’d rather not, Mr. Flandon.”
He liked that, and gave her back honesty.
“Of course I would like to see you fixed. I thought this other thing would work out better. But in all seriousness I could use another clerk in my office and I’ve been wondering whom I could get. What do you say to trying it for a month—”
“Let me try it for two weeks and then if I fail, fire me then. Only you’ll surely fire me if I don’t earn my money?”
“Surely.”
Gage went home that night more cheerful than he had been for some time. He had a mischievous sensation of having rescued a brand from Margaret Duffield. At dinner Helen asked him if he had attended to Freda’s case.
“Drummond had other arrangements already.”
“What a shame,” she said, “I wonder where we can place that girl. She is too good to go back and do nothing in Mohawk. And she really wants to earn money badly.”
“I placed her,” said Gage, hugging his mischief to himself.
“You did? Where?”
“I took her into my office.”
Helen looked at him in surprise.
“You know that she can’t typewrite?”
“I know. But I can use her. She has a good head and—a nice influence. I think I’ll like to have her around. Since she has to work she’d be better there than grubbing in politics.”
“As if your office wasn’t full of politics!”
“Well they’re not Duffield-politics.”
“Whatever you mean by that is obscure,” said Helen, “but don’t eat the child’s head off, will you?”
CHAPTER X
THE CLEAN WIND
FREDA felt that night that all her dreams, all her vague anticipations of doing were suddenly translated into activity and reality. In the strangest way in the world, it seemed to her, so naïve was she about the obscure ways of most things, she had a room of her own and a job in St. Pierre. Margaret Duffield had smiled a little at the news of her job but at Freda’s quick challenge as to whether she were really imposing on Mr. Flandon, Margaret insisted that she merely found Gage himself humorous. She did not say why that was so. Together she and Freda went to see the landlady about a room for Freda. There was one, it appeared, in an apartment on the third floor. Freda could have it, if she took it at once, and so it was arranged.
It was a plain little room with one window, long and thin like the shape of the room, furnished sparsely and without grace, but Freda stood in the midst of it with her head high and a look of wondering delight in her eyes, fingering her door key.
Later she went down to Margaret’s apartment to carry up her suitcase. She found Gregory there. He had not come for lunch as Margaret had warned her. Seeing him now more clearly than she had the night before, Freda saw how cadaverous his face was, how little color there was in his cheeks. She thought he looked almost ill.
They did not hear her come in. Gregory was sitting with his eyes on Margaret, telling her something and she was listening in a protesting way. It occurred to Freda that of course they were in love. She had suspected it vaguely from their attitude. Now she was sure.
She coughed and they looked up.
“It’s my damsel in distress,” said Gregory, rising, “did everything clear up? Is the ogress destroyed?”
“If she is, poor Miss Duffield had to do it.”
“She wouldn’t mind. She likes cruelties. She’s the most cruel person—”
“Hush, Gregory, don’t reveal all my soul on the spot.”
“Cruel—and over modest. As if a soul isn’t always better revealed—”
“You can go as far as you like later. Just now you might carry Freda’s suitcase upstairs.”
He took the suitcase and followed them, entering Freda’s little room which he seemed to fill and crowd.
“So this is where you take refuge from the ogress?”
“It’s more than a refuge—it’s a tower of independence.”
He looked at her appreciatively.
“We’ll agree on many things.”
Margaret asked Freda to come down with them and she went, a little reluctantly wondering if she were not crowding their kindness. But Gregory insisted as well as Margaret.
Margaret sat beside a vase of roses on her table and Gregory and Freda faced her, sitting on the couch-bed. The roses were yellow, pink—delicate, aloof, like Margaret herself and she made a lovely picture. Gregory’s eyes rested on her a little wearily as if he had failed to find what he sought for in the picture. He was silent at first—then, deftly, Margaret drew him out little by little about the Irish Republic, and he became different, a man on fire with an idea. Fascinated, stirred, Freda watched him, broke into eager questioning here and there and was answered as eagerly. They were hot in discussion when Walter Carpenter came.
There was a moment of embarrassment as if each of the men studied the other to find out his purpose. Then Margaret spoke lightly.
“Do you want to hear about the Irish question from an expert, Walter?”
“Is Mr. Macmillan an expert?”
“He’s to lecture about it on Friday night.”
“It’s a dangerous subject for a lecture.”
“It’s a dangerous subject to live with,” answered Gregory a little defiantly.
“Are you a Sinn Feiner, Macmillan?”
“I’m an Irish Republican.”
There was a dignity in his tone which made Walter feel his halfbantering tone ill judged. He changed at once.
“We’re very ignorant of the whole question over here,” he said, “all we have to judge from is partisan literature. We never get both sides.”
“There is only one side fit to be heard.”
Freda gave a little gasp of joy at that statement. It brushed away all the conventions of polite discussion in its unequivocal clearness of conviction.
“I was sure of it,” she said.
Gregory turned and smiled at her. The four of them stood, as they had stood to greet Walter, Margaret by the side of her last guest, looking somehow fitting there, Gregory and Freda together as if in alliance against the others. Then conversation, civilities enveloped them all again. But the alliances remained. Freda made no secret of her admiration for Gregory. The openness of his mind, the way his convictions flashed through the talk seemed to her to demand an answer as fair. Her mind leapt to meet his.
Gregory Macmillan was Irish born, of a stock which was not pure Irish for his mother was an Englishwoman. It had been her people who were responsible for Gregory’s education, his public school and early Oxford life. But in his later years at Oxford his restlessness and discontents had become extreme. Ireland with its tangle of desires, its heating patriotism, heating on the old altars already holy with martyrs, had captured his imagination and ambition. He had gone to Ireland and interested himself entirely in the study of Celtic literature and the Celtic language, living in Connacht and helping edit a Gaelic Weekly. Then had come the war, and conflict for Gregory. The fight for Irish freedom, try as he did to make it his only end, had become smaller beside the great world confusion and, conquering his revulsion at fighting with English forces he had enlisted.
Before the war Gregory’s verse had had much favorable comment. He came out of the war to find himself notable among the younger poets, acclaimed even in the United States. It seemed preposterous to him. The machinations of the Irish Republican party absorbed him. Intrigue, plotting, all the melodrama, all the tragedy of the Sinn Fein policy was known to him, fostered by him. He had been in prison and after his release had fallen ill. They had sent him to convalesce in Wales. It was while he was there that there had come an offer from an American lecture bureau to go on tour in the States telling of Irish literature and reading his own verse. He laughed at the idea but others who heard the offer had not laughed. He was to come to the States, lecture on poetry and incidentally see and talk to various
important Americans who might have Irish sympathies. The Republic needed friends.
He came reluctantly and yet, once in New York, he had found so many young literati to welcome him, to give him sympathy and hearing if not counsel that his spirits had risen. And he had met Margaret Duffield and drawn by her mental beauty, her curious cold virginity, he had fallen in love with her and told her he loved her. For a few ardent weeks he wooed her, she explaining away his love, denying it. Then she had come West and he had sought his lecture bureau, making them include a lecture in this city which held her. He had come and found her colder, more aloof than ever, and now sitting in this room of hers he found a quiet, controlled, cultivated, middle-aged man who seemed to be on terms of easy and intimate friendship such as he had not attained.
After a little they divided their conversation. Margaret wanted to talk to Walter about some complication in local politics—something affecting Helen’s election. And Freda wanted to hear Gregory talk.
He told her about Ireland, of the men and women who plotted secretly and constantly to throw off every yoke of sovereignty. He told of the beauty of the Gaelic tongue, translating a phrase or two for her—talked of the Irish poets and his friends and she responded, finding use now for all the thoughts that had filled her mind, the poems she had read and loved. The light in his deep set eyes grew brighter as he looked at the face turned to his, meeting his own enthusiasm so unquestioningly. Once he looked at Margaret curiously. She was deep in her discussion and with a glimmer of a smile in his eyes he turned again to Freda.
At eleven he took her to her room. They went up the stairs to the door of her apartment.
“Shall I see you between now and Friday night?”
“I’m going to work to-morrow.” Freda came back to that thought with a jolt. “I don’t know.”
“To-morrow night? Just remember that I’m alone here—I don’t know any one but you and Miss Duffield and I don’t want the people in charge of my lecture to lay hands on me until it’s necessary. You’ve no idea what they do to visiting lecturers in the provinces?”
“But hasn’t Miss Duffield plans for you?”
“I hoped she might have. But she’s busy, as you see.” His tone had many implications. “So I really am lonely and you made me feel warm and welcome to-night. You aren’t full of foolish ideas about friendships that progress like flights of stairs—step by step, are you?”
“Friendships are—or they aren’t,” said Freda.
“And this one is, I hope?”
They heard a sigh within the apartment as if a weary soul on the other side of the partition were at the end of its patience. Gregory held out his hand and turned to go.
But Freda could not let him go. She was swept by a sense of the cruel loneliness of this strange beautiful soul, in a country he did not know, pursuing a woman he did not win. She felt unbearably pent up.
Catching his hand in both of hers, she held it against her breast, lifted her face to his and suddenly surprisingly kissed him. And, turning, she marched into her room with her cheeks aflame and her head held high. Groping for the unfamiliar switch she turned on her light and began mechanically to undress. It seemed to her that she was walking in one of her own storied imaginings. So many things had happened in the last twenty-four hours which she had often dreamed would happen to her. Adventures, romantic moments, meetings of strange intimate congeniality like this with Gregory Macmillan. She thought of him as Gregory.
Gregory went down the stairs quickly, pausing at Margaret’s door to say good night. The other man was leaving too and they walked together as far as Gregory’s hotel. They were a little constrained and kept their conversation on the most general of subjects. Gregory was absent minded in his comments but as he entered the hotel lobby he was smiling a little, the immensely cheered smile of the person who has found what he thought was lost.
Freda reported for work at the office of Sable and Flandon at half past eight the next morning. She had not been sure at what time a lawyer’s office began operations and thought it best to be early so she had to wait a full hour before Mr. Flandon came in. The offices were a large, well-furnished suite of rooms. There were three young lawyers in the office, associated with Mr. Sable and Mr. Flandon, and three stenographers, in addition to a young woman, with an air of attainment, who had a desk in Mr. Sable’s office and was known as Mr. Sable’s personal secretary. Freda got some
idea of the organization, watching the girls come in and take up their work. She became a little dubious as to where she could fit into this extremely well-oiled machinery and wondering more and more as to the quixotic whim which had made Mr. Flandon employ her, was almost ready to get up and go out when Gage came in.
He saw her in a minute and showed no surprise. Instead he seemed to be anxious to cover up any ambiguity in the position by making it very clear what her duties were to be. He introduced her to the rest of the office force as my “personal secretary” at which the Miss Brewster who held a like position in Mr. Sable’s employ lifted her eyebrows a little. She was given a desk in a little ante-room outside of Gage’s own office and Gage, with a stenographer who had done most of his work, went over her duties. She was to relieve the stenographer of all the sorting of his correspondence, take all his telephone messages, familiarize herself with all of his affairs and interests in so far as she could do so by consulting current files and be ready to relieve him of any routine business she could, correcting and signing his letters as soon as possible.
At five o’clock she hurried back to her little room to find a letter in her mail box. It was from her father and at the sight of it she was saddened by the sense of separation between them. Every word in it, counsel, affection, humor breathed his love and thought for her. She was still poring over it when Gregory came to take her to dinner, and forgot to be embarrassed about the night before.
Gregory had never intended to be embarrassed evidently. He considered that they were on a footing of delightful intimacy. His voice had more exuberance in it to-night than she had previously heard. As they went past Margaret’s door they looked up at her transom. It was dark.
“I hoped she was coming with us,” said Freda.
“She doesn’t want to come with me,” answered Gregory, “and that has hurt me for a long time, it seems to me, although perhaps it is only weeks. But it may be just as well. For I could never make her happy.”
“Would it be so hard?”
“I could never make any woman happy,” said Gregory with extraordinary violence. “Happiness is a state of sloth. But I could live through ecstasy and through pain with some one who was not afraid. For
this serene stagnancy which seems to be the end-all of most people, I’m no good. I couldn’t do it, that’s all.”
His head was in the air and he looked, thought Freda, as if he would be extremely likely to forget about any woman or anything else and go sailing off in some fantasy of his own, at any time. She remembered him as he had been, despondent, when she had first met him, last night full of blazing enthusiasms, to-night blithely independent. It delighted her. She had never before met a person who adjusted to no routine.
“Let’s walk in peace and watch the clouds and I’ll tell you what an old Irish poet said of them.”
He could see her chin lift as she listened.
“To have in your mind such a wealth of beauty—what it must mean—to feel that things do not starve within you for lack of utterance—” Her voice was blurred into appreciations.
“Why let them starve?” asked Gregory.
“Perhaps because practical meat-and-drink body needs always claim the nourishment the things of your mind need—and you let the mind go hungry.”
“That’s it—that’s what people do—but you won’t. I hear it in your voice —see it in your face. The things in you are too vital to be starved. You can cripple them but you can’t kill them.”
“I do not know.”
“You must set yourself free.”
Freda smiled ruefully.
“That’s what women are always talking about and what they mean is a washing machine.”
“That’s no freedom—that’s just being given the run of the prison. Don’t you see that what I mean is to keep yourself free from all the petty desires —the little peeping conventions—free for the great desires and pains that will rush through you some day? You have to be strong to do that. You can put up wind breaks for emotion so easily. And you don’t want them.”
“It means being very fearless.”
“I have never yet met anything worth fearing except cowardice.”
He stopped. They were in the middle of some sidewalk, neither of them noticed where.
“Why did you kiss me last night?”
“I wanted to. I’ve not been sorry,” answered Freda. “By all the rules I’ve learned I ought to be abashed, but you don’t live by rules, so why waste them on you?”
Her smile was faintly tremulous. His strange, unfamiliar eyes looked into hers and rested there.
“And we won’t have to spend time talking about love,” he said, half to himself, “we shan’t wear it threadbare with trying to test its fabric. It comes like the wind—like God.”
Again they breasted the wind and her hand was fast in his. It was a clean, cool clasp. Freda felt oddly that she had saved her soul, that she had met an ultimate.
CHAPTER XI
NEWSPAPER CUTS
TIHE State Convention was imminent. In the vast barrenness of the Auditorium rows upon rows of ticketed chairs were filling up with delegates, sectional banners waved in the various parts of the big hall, flags made the background for the speakers, chairs and table.
“The machinery for creating a government is in progress,” said Margaret, “what do you think of it?”
Helen shook her head.
“Inadequate. When you think why they have come, how they have come, what destinies they hold in their hands. Would women do it better I wonder, Margaret?”
“Women are more serious. Perhaps. Anyway we must try it. If we don’t like that machinery we’ll have to invent another kind.”
“Funny male gathering. Think they all have their women—and their feeling towards their own women must influence their feeling towards all of us. Their own women to treat cruelly or kindly—or possessively.”
“They’re on the last lap of their possession,” answered Margaret.
The gallery was filling with women, reporters, spectators with one interest or another. The men were taking their places, formality settling on the assembly. The temporary chairman was on the platform, welcoming them, bowing grandiloquently with a compliment that was inevitable to the ladies in the gallery. Nominations for a chairman were in order. The temporary chairman retained his place as he had expected. The committees on credentials, resolutions, organization, retired and the delegation heard with some restlessness further exhortation as to the duties which lay before them and the splendor of opportunity awaiting the party in the immediate future.
The platform was read. Cheers, a little too well organized and not too freely spontaneous, punctuated it. The women listened to it attentively,
Margaret frowning now and then at some of its clauses.
It was a long task. On its consummation the convention adjourned for lunch.
It was mid-afternoon before the business of electing the delegates at large to the National Convention had been reached. Helen felt her face grow hot and her heart go a little faster even while she mocked at herself for those signs of nervousness. Margaret watched as if her finger was on the pulse of a patient.
Hedley’s name went through nomination as every one had expected. Then Jensen was on his feet.
He was good. The women admitted that after his first words. He dwelt upon the fact of suffrage, on the practical differences it made in the electorate. He spoke of the recognition of women as a privilege. Then with a reference which Helen had feared must come he spoke of the one woman whose name is “familiar to us through the fine party loyalty of her husband” and who is herself “the unspoken choice of hundreds and thousands of women of this State” as their delegate. Helen heard her name come forth unfamiliarly, heard the burst of clapping, faced the barricade of glances with a smile.
There was little doubt about it from the start. What opposition there was must have decided it unsafe to show its teeth. An hour later a discomfited man, pushed off the party slate by a woman, edged his way out of the back of the gallery and the woman was surrounded by a group of men and women, all anxious to be early in their congratulations, some from sheer enthusiasm, others from motives more questionable.
“And where is Gage passing the cigars?” asked one man jocularly.
Helen looked around as if in surprise that he was not there.
“He isn’t here, is he?”
She knew he wasn’t. She had known he wouldn’t come, even while she could not quite kill the hope that he would.
At the door were photographers, even a moving picture man waiting for the new woman delegates. Margaret dropped Helen’s hand and Helen, on Mrs. Brownley’s arm, moved past the range of picture-takers with an air of complete composure. In a moment she was in her car and moving out of
sight. Margaret turned to walk back to her own apartment, complete satisfaction on her face.
II
Helen entered the house quietly and leaving her gloves and wrap on the hall bench, went into the kitchen to see how things were going there. There was a pleasant air of competence about it. The maids were busy and the dinner in active preparation. Upstairs the nurse had the children. She played with them a little, a warm sense of satisfaction at her heart. It was so absurd to choose—to fake a choice. This other work, this other business could be done without sacrificing anything. Gage was absurd. She was no less a mother, not a bit less good a housewife because she was a delegate to the Republican Convention. It took a bit of management, that was all. If she was treating Gage badly she would feel different.
But there was a guilty feeling which she could not control. He was unhappy and she the cause. They had been too close for that not to hurt.
At seven o’clock, a little late for dinner, came Gage, a guarded courtesy in his manner. He asked her pardon for not dressing and handed her a sheaf of evening papers. She was thankful that they had been issued too early to contain the news of her triumph. It postponed certain altercations. She thought suddenly of her barrage of photographers and of what she had completely forgotten, Gage’s tremendous dislike of having her picture in the papers.
“I can’t bear the thought of your picture tossed about the country— looked at casually for an hour and then used as old newspapers are used—to wrap a package—line a stair-rug—heaven knows what!”
Of course it had appeared occasionally for all of that but Helen had made the occasions infrequent. She had always liked that prejudice of his. As she looked at him to-night she thought he looked tired. There were strained lines around his eyes, and he was very silent.
She said several little things and then, because avoidance of the big topic seemed impossible, joined him in his silence. He looked at her at last, smiling a little. It was not the smile of a rancorous man but rather a hurt smile, a forced smile of one who is going to go through pain wearing it.
“I have been congratulated all the way home on your account, Helen. It seems to have been a landslide for you.”
