Readers Then and Now: Coerced Consent in Dame Sirith

Readers Then and Now:Coerced Consent in Dame Sirith Alice Raw A major challenge in reading medieval texts about female sexuality is that the discourses we understand to have been dominant in the past can tend to merge with our own current assumptions as literary historians. Our analysis, then, can become a closed feedback loop, hearing only one voice—and then only listening for that voice. I will demonstrate the mechanics of this loop by analyzing Dame Sirith, one text from the "weeping bitch" tradition, which has been treated by scholars exclusively as a confirmation of medieval misogyny.1 In this tale, each plot development rotates on multiple, escalating expressions of coerced consent. I show the ways in which we as modern readers fail to separate ourselves from the medieval audience we purport to treat as distant, and then proceed to demonstrate the readings we have missed as a result of our complicity. Coerced consent names experiences that neither consent nor non-consent fully encompasses: where persistent pressure, guilt, or implied threat creates a sense of obligation or lack of alternative choices. This, of course, is no consent at all, but occupies an ambivalent position in discussions about sexual violence. The concept of coerced consent has been applied to a variety of medieval contexts, but can most readily be examined via marriage litigation. While coercion was recognized as grounds for annulment within canon law, Richard Helmholz and Angeliki E. Laiou have demonstrated the difficulties of proving coerced consent in marriage, in later medieval England and twelfth-century Byzantium respectively.2 More recently, [End Page 307] scholars have used the insights of modern studies of coercion as a form of sexual violence to uncover multidimensional social and cognitive contexts that inform subjects' consent in response to threat, whether explicit or implicit.3 In her work on Middle English "women's songs," Carissa M. Harris carefully discusses how consent after resistance might be a means of "survival as its own resistance."4 The essays collected in Alison Gulley's Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom apply coerced consent to a range of literary genres: saints resist sexual coercion through divine intervention, troubadours manipulate their claims of service to exact sexual reward, and knights are ensnared by women in chivalric romance.5 The "weeping bitch" ploy is a tool for coercing consent in numerous medieval narratives. The basic conceit of the "weeping bitch" tradition is that a priest, rejected in love, seeks vengeful sex by way of a trick with the woman who has rebuffed him. The tricked woman is faced with a predicament: agree to sex with the priest, or face being transformed into a dog. The tale is found in various continental versions, and there is a further tradition beyond Europe.6 The Middle English Alphabet of Tales explicitly uses the word "consent" in connection to this tale to describe refusing sex: "becauce sho wolde not consent vnto a yong man þat luffid hur … þus sho was shapen to be a biche whelpe" (because she would not consent to a young man that loved her … thus she was transformed into a bitch [End Page 308] dog).7 The version of the tale in Dame Sirith, which I focus on here, reads as a script for performance, and is the only widely recognized example of a Middle English fabliau outside Chaucer's well-known corpus.8 Dame Sirith diverges from fabliaux in that it does not seek to impart a moral message at the end of the tale, whether serious or mischievous. Indeed, in Michael Swanton's estimation, Dame Sirith is "pure narrative … stripped of all psychological, situational, or symbolic complexity."9 This apparent simplicity informs much of the existing scholarly work on Dame Sirith, which, as we shall see, too easily takes antifeminism as the default position for interpretation, resulting in readings that consistently gloss coerced consent as successful seduction. In Dame Sirith, a merchant leaves his wife, Margery, to attend a fair at Boston. The implied possessiveness of the husband may mark him as a senex amans (aged lover), such as John in Chaucer's Miller's Tale, or January in The Merchant's Tale.10 Like French fabliaux...