Heldris de Cornuälle
Auteur de Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance (Medieval Texts and Studies)
A propos de l'auteur
Œuvres de Heldris de Cornuälle
Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance (Medieval Texts and Studies) (1972) — Auteur — 266 exemplaires
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom légal
- Heldris de Cornuälle
- Date de décès
- 13th c. CE
- Sexe
- unknown
Membres
Critiques
Listes
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 2
- Membres
- 267
- Popularité
- #86,454
- Évaluation
- 4.0
- Critiques
- 3
- ISBN
- 8
- Langues
- 2
This is a 13th century poem about a count and countess who have a daughter in an England where women can't inherit, and so raise her as a boy. S/he learns to fight and play music and travels all over, runs afoul of the Queen who tries to have him killed, and is eventually unmasked by Merlin. But it's all ok because she ends up marrying the King (after he puts the Queen to death for her treachery).
It's a good story. Even knowing what happens (all of the above is discussed on the covers and in the introduction), I found myself reading quickly to see how it would come out. None of the characters are really characters in the modern sense; as the introduction describes, all of the names are indicative of roles (translating as "Silence" or "Woman" etc.). Nature and Nurture battling it out to decide who a person ultimately becomes was pretty fun.
My experience reading it was a lot like reading The Book of the City of Ladies (insert link function is not working; sorry): it was radical and revolutionary for its time, it was gender essentialist in a way modern feminism doesn't condone, and it was absolutely maddeningly tragic how contemporary much of the sexism in the book still is.
Radical and Revolutionary: this girl raised as a boy becomes the best knight in two countries. She's strong, skilled, brave, loyal, honest, and honourable.
Gender Essentialist: She is portrayed as an exception, often bemoans how awful it is not to know any of the things that women should in her society. The narrator makes it very clear that women as a whole are not like this, that Nature-the-character does not approve: Silence isn't "natural."
Same Shit Different Century: Take Eufeme, the Queen. She's beautiful, manipulative, extremely promiscuous, deceitful, and weak. When she doesn't get her way, she makes up rape accusations. The King patronizes her and pretends to believe them, while thinking about how awful women are and how they just make this shit up to ruin men's lives. And of course, after a lifetime of adventure, once Merlin unmasks her, Silence is happy and grateful to become the woman she was obviously supposed to be, marry the King, and spend the rest of her life embroidering on a divan somewhere.
It was amazing, in a terrible way. You could take the parts of Silence discussing Eufeme's false rape allegations and stick them in any #metoo article today and they would sound right at home. In 800 years, apparently the only progress we've made is that if 30-60 women make the same rape allegations, we'll reluctantly agree they might be true, and then about a year later start talking about the poor guy whose life is over and when can he get his job back exactly?
Yes, I know that in the story, they were really false accusations; the point is that the construction of her entire character and the discussion of women and what rape is and whether or not to believe women sounds exactly like the talking points on Fox news in October 2018. 800 years and we can't even invent some new ways of being misogynistic, apparently.… (plus d'informations)