Gender and power

The creation and exertion of power is always a key recurring theme in literature.
Considering the relationship between power and gender means thinking about whether
power can be exerted in specifically male or female ways and / or places. In both
medieval and modern worlds, power is often closely connected with masculinity and this
leaves open the question of whether a man can be masculine when he has no power, and
whether a powerful woman is still feminine. Throughout the medieval period, and for a
long time thereafter, the general rule was that men held power in the public sphere and
women in the private. This leads to a strange dichotomy, where a woman who has all of
the control over relationships and domestic organisation loses all authority when in
public; vice versa, a publically powerful man often has little control within his own
household.

Almost all of the core texts explore power, and often in gendered ways. Beowulf is full
of powerful male and female figures, some positive and some negative examples of how
to behave. The extract seems to suggest a potentially contradictory model of masculine
power, founded on external aggression and internal friendship. Gawain and the Green
Knight shows some of the same features, primarily of male exertions of public power, but
from a different period and with very different ideas about gender and power. Marie de
France’s Laüstic, Dame Sirith, and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue show power games
between men and women. The Book of Margery Kempe forces consideration of the
relative powerlessness of Margery's gendered position and her wrestle with that status.
The York Crucifixion invites consideration of some quite different forms of power:
Christ's passive authority and the more traditionally masculine power of the soldiers who
are presented as absurd.

This substrand invites you to ask questions about who has power in medieval
literature and how that is shaped by, or how it in turn shapes, their gendered identities.
These are difficult questions, because power is exerted in specific contexts and literary
representations of both gender and power are written for different audiences and with
very different agendas.
 Performing gender

A key aspect of being gendered is the external performance of that gender. That is, being
masculine or feminine is mostly about how we choose to present that gender to the people
around us. Ways of performing both genders vary significantly across different times and
places. Literary texts often show us figures who seek to perform their gender, effectively
or inadequately. Literature can also be seen in itself as a performance of an author's
gendered identity. In the medieval world, as today, performing one's gender includes
choices of vocabulary, clothing and decoration, physical behaviours, or the relationships
kept public or private.

The medieval world was profoundly concerned with performance. Individuals'

appearance and public behaviour shaped how they were seen and enabled judgements
about their inner life and thoughts. Almost any work of medieval literature is concerned
with how people behave in public, and this is often tied into their conventional or
troubling presentation of gender. As two contrasting examples, the Wife of Bath is very
publically performing her femininity through her storytelling; Scyld Scefing and his son
are seen as demonstrating their masculinity through their behaviour towards others. Both
are being used by their respective authors and texts to show how gender can be
performed.

Engaging with how gender is performed demands consideration of what is done but
also with how it is perceived. This means thinking about texts’ intended audiences – who
the author was trying to reach and how – and about internal audiences – the responses and
relationships shown within a text. In works such as The Book of Margery Kempe and The
York Crucifixion there are multiple internal audiences with quite different perceptions of
what is being performed and whether or not it is acceptable. This complicates the question
of how the text as a whole was expected to be read, and in turn how it suggests gender can
and should be performed – let alone the question of how to be a ‘good’ man or woman.
 Gendered monstrosity

The characteristics attributed to monsters tell us a great deal about what is seen as
unacceptable in a given place, period, or text. Monsters are often contrasted with heroes
to provide both positive and negative role models in the same work. Gender is a key
aspect of communal life, so both monsters and heroes are often explicitly gendered to
make an argument about what being male or female should – and should not – look like.

Being monstrous does not mean not being human. Indeed, a common technique used
in medieval texts is to give a person monstrous characteristics as an easy way of
exaggerating and condemning their actions. The threatening partially-human figure
recurs regularly in medieval narrative. As with the Danes in The Life of St Edmund, this
is often done by comparing people with animals, a threat played with in Dame Sirith. A
more explicitly gendered monster is Grendel’s Mother in Beowulf, whose similarities
with and differences from Judith (both appearing in the same manuscript) are worth
exploring. In the strand anthology, different female monsters are presented in Wonders
of the East. In that text, some are confronted by Alexander, who straddles the divide
between male heroism and monstrosity in challenging ways.

Studying monstrosity means thinking about what a given text identifies as

unacceptable human behaviour. Bringing gender into the same equation means thinking
about what is defined as unacceptable for male or female persons. Often the dividing
line between ‘unacceptable’ and ‘outstanding’ is very thin: there is often little difference
between heroism and monstrosity other than the perspective of the one making
judgements. These divisions – between gendered monsters and heroes – can be
revealing: sometimes it is the case that a man taking certain actions is monstrous, where
a woman taking the same actions would be normative (and vice versa). The Wife of
Bath is a classic example of this: is her behaviour outrageous in a positive or a negative
way (i.e. is she a monster or a hero?); would her character be noteworthy or interesting
at all if she were male, or younger?
 Queering gender

Queer theory explores the extent to which social ideas about gender form a part of
individual identities. It is particularly interested in individuals, texts, and situations where
what happens is not socially normative, especially where it goes against standard binary
definitions. This can be about individuals behaving in ways contradictory to the widely
socially accepted idea of their gender. It can particularly focus on sexual activity or
desire, but it can be just about any social expectation. ‘Queerness’ in this sense is about
destabilising, undermining, and questioning what is taken for granted; it is interested in
ambiguity and uncertainty. That means it requires a stable system against which to define
itself, which is usually social norms, but can also be a specific institution, or a powerful
individual, or a system (including language). Such systems can also exist within texts,
where an author / narrator is often (posing as) a fixed figure of authority and in which
expectations (such as those generated by genre) are also often fixed.

Working on this substrand invites you to identify both a fixed system and something
that undermines it. This could mean thinking about how an author establishes clear
expectations within a text in order to undermine them. So, for instance, in Gawain and the
Green Knight, Arthur’s ideas about ‘fun’, in which the whole of his court is forced to
participate, are arguably shown to be ridiculous and counter-productive. Is his authority
undermined, and, if so, what undermines them? Or you might prefer to look at specific
institutional and social expectations. The Wife of Bath is an obvious example. In late
fourteenth-century England, the kind of book she gets very angry with was common, as
was the attitude that women are all sex-hungry troublemakers. Is she a queer figure –
undermining this institutionalised misogyny – or, by ‘behaving badly’, does she support
that official presentation of women as a problem to be contained?

You could also think about ways in which relationships between individuals are
‘queered’ or ‘normalised’. In Laüstic and Dame Sirith, heterosexual marital relationships
do not seem to be based on mutual consent, but on coercion and bullying. Are the texts
themselves ‘queer’, undermining the idea of marriage? Is Margery Kempe’s close
relationship with Christ a queer one, threatening and destabilising normative ideas about
gender and public expression of feelings? You should be thinking about what happens
inside texts and how narrators expect us to respond to what they show us. Are readers
invited to resist binary systems, or to become part of them?
 Gender and desire

Societies, texts and individuals usually have very clear and sometimes quite unexpected
ideas about appropriate objects and expressions of desire which are often closely tied in to
gender. Medieval literature, particularly in the later period, was fascinated by desire. Love
of God and especially of Christ is often expressed in extremely intimate and erotic terms.
The problem of human sexual desire and how it can be expressed within the confines of a
conventional marriage concern many texts, and can be dealt with comically or seriously as
an author prefers. The flipside of desire is revulsion, and a great deal of medieval literature
is engaged with the disgusting. This can be out of a genuine moral drive to push readers
away from wrong behaviours, or it can be a prurient fascination with that which horrifies.

Many of the anthology texts explicitly consider desire in a range of ways. Female sexual
desire is considered in quite different ways in Läustic and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and
it is worth considering how the different women (and their lovers) are expected to be
received as well as exploring how their desires are experienced and expressed. Dame Sirith
explores desire in potentially quite a troubling way, challenging our ideas about how desire
is aroused and whose desires should be privileged. Margery Kempe’s desire is for the
object of devotion, and is found both disgusting and desirable by those around her. In
Beowulf, Scyld Scefing seems to desire control and domination, and Arthur in Gawain and
the Green Knight desires only fun. Is this because they are male? Does it make them good
or bad rulers? Does the author / narrator think their desires are productive or problematic?
What do the readers desire? To see Arthur’s ‘fun’ come to life and Scyld killing everyone
he meets, or to see calm and mature governance? Are our own disturbing desires for trouble
and sex and death encouraged or managed by these texts? Authorial use of desire and reader
response to it is, then, another important area to consider in these texts.

Examining how gender affects desire, or the representation thereof, is a broad area. This
substrand invites you to think about how male and female figures experience and express
their desires, what authors sought to achieve by representing them in that way, and how
readers of different genders are expected to respond. Studies could also consider readers’
own desires and how they are manipulated, fulfilled, or frustrated by engagement with these
texts, or set the problem of desire in a wider context of social and religious expectations at
specific points during the medieval period.
 Gendering of emotion

As with writers from any period, medieval authors are very interested in their subjects’
internal lives and the consequences of those internal lives on external actions. Both the
types of emotion felt and the actions taken as a result of emotions are frequently
gendered. That is, a man and a woman might be expected to feel different things in the
same situation; they might also be expected to take different actions when they
experience similar emotions. Many medieval texts are interested in the difficulty of
knowing what’s happening inside someone else’s mind. We can often see what someone
does, but (unlike in the modern novel) are very rarely told why they do something or
what they are thinking and feeling; we have to guess from what we see.

Emotional experience is expressed frequently in the core texts, from Edmund’s

empathy to Scyld Scefing’s aggression; the comically high emotion of Dame Sirith to
the refined joy in Camelot shown in Gawain and the Green Knight. Perhaps the most
intense emotional conflict comes in Marie de France’s Läustic where the lovers’
restrained and elegant relationship contrasts with the cruel husband. Work on this
substrand invites you to look at how texts present emotions, and at what emotions we
are expected to feel as we experience the texts. How do we feel during the York
Crucifixion and how does the text try to control and focus our emotional experience?
Dame Sirith is horrible, but also funny, so how are we supposed to react to its
characters? Are we encouraged to feel, or just to sit back and laugh?

The challenge in this substrand is focusing on how emotions are experienced and
expressed, and engaging with texts’ ideas about how appropriate, normal, or unusual
different emotional responses are for male and female figures. How should we react to
Margery Kempe experience of male attempts to restrict feminine emotion? Is her
weeping something we admire, or despise? Why? When the husband in Läustic takes
crazed, violent, emotional action to control his wife’s behaviour, is he actually in
control, or just like a two-year-old having a tantrum? Is it necessary for male figures
who feel sadness to behave aggressively, or are other options open to them? It is not
easy to analyse emotion, but emotional restrictions and expectations placed on the
different genders can be very revealing of cultural and individual attitudes.
 Spirituality and gender

Spirituality includes, but goes far beyond, religion. It is about the relationship between
humans and that which is more than human. This means it can relate to human
connections with God, with gods, with spirits or demons, with creatures of the fairy
world (both good and bad), and with nature. It can be about how those relationships
work, or it can be about how (from a medieval perspective) humans manage the
challenge of existing as a spiritual being trapped inside a physical body. It can also be
about struggles with the institutions of religion and other systems that seek to control
and manage spiritual experience. Relating to both body and mind, and to the tensions
between individual and communal priorities, this is a strongly gendered area.

There are a number of spiritual figures in the core anthology texts. Saint Edmund
chooses the spiritual over the earthly and receives spiritual reward for it. Margery
Kempe has an intense spiritual existence that seems to conflict with the expectations of
her social role. Dame Sirith and the speaker of ‘For the nightemare’ both seek to use
shady spiritual means to exert control. Christ himself appears in the York Crucifixion,
where his spirituality seems to place him in a different world from the dull and purely
physical soldiers. Gawain’s courtly world and physical prowess do not seem to have any
value against the magical powers arrayed against him. Does any of this have anything to
do with their genders? Would they have experienced things differently, or be presented
differently by their texts, if they belonged to a different gender?

There is nothing particularly interesting about pointing out a conflict between the
spiritual and physical in this period; the challenge in this substrand is in trying to define
where the respective limits of the physical and spiritual are and exactly how they
interact. You could be asking whether someone like the Wife of Bath, who has such a
strong sense of her physical self, can also have a spiritual life. Or is it a straight choice
between the two? And is gender tied fundamentally to your physical, embodied
experience, or do masculinity and femininity have different spiriutual experiences and
expressions? It can also be interesting to try to see how a writer tries to show spiritual
ideas. Can magic, or the soul, or God, be captured in words and images, or is it
something that always lies just out of reach?