SOURCE: Finke, Laurie, and Martin Shichtman. “The Mont St. Michel Giant: Sexual Violence and Imperialism in the Chronicles of Wace and Laȝamon.” In Violence against Women in Medieval Texts, edited by Anna Roberts, pp. 56-74. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Finke and Shlichtman contrast the ways Wace and Layamon present rape in their narrations of the Arthurian legend.]

We could find no better means to illustrate in popular culture the ways in which sexual violence—especially rape—is generically encoded in our cultural narratives than that incredibly bad “B” science fiction film of 1968, Mars Needs Women. In this film, which Leonard Maltin calls “strangely sincere but extremely silly and distended,” Tommy Kirk plays a Martian sent along with four other Martians to collect five earth women to take back to Mars to repopulate a barren and sterile planet. What is striking about the film is the horror and absolute resistance with which earth authorities greet the Martians' request. The Martians' tactics run the gamut from seduction to out-and-out rape and abduction. They manage to convince at least one woman to return with them voluntarily; however, earth officials—particularly the military—are willing to go to any lengths (including, of course, atomic annihilation) to see that the Martians do not get even one earth woman.

When we watched the film we were struck by this extreme fear of alien contamination; why was the preservation of five women more important than the lives of the billions of people on the planet? Why were the men responsible for the defense of the planet willing to go to any lengths—including self-destruction—to save five women from contamination by aliens? It isn't that the Martians are repulsive aliens—Tommy Kirk, as both star and head Martian, provides leading-man good looks that work against the audience's horror at this grotesque violation of the purity of earth women. It is simply not possible to read this film as a narrative about the rescue of damsels in distress. Rather, the extremity of earth's reaction seems to stem from the threat the Martians' superior technology poses to earthlings' sense of control over geographical and hence political and ideological space. The fear that earth's territorial boundaries could be violated by technologically superior aliens gets displaced into fantasies about the violation of women's bodies.

We do not intend to sort out all the contradictions in this truly dreadful movie, but it does raise questions that we want to pursue in this essay. What are the circumstances under which the sexual exchange of women between strangers (exogamy) is seen as an acceptable means of establishing political alliances, and what are the conditions under which such exchanges are constituted as involuntary and hence as rape? If all margins are a threat to the integrity of the social body, how does the social body manage anxieties about what lies beyond its borders? The physical body, as Mary Douglas has argued, can be a model for any bounded system, and we must be prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, “to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body” (Douglas, Purity and Danger, 115). We are particularly interested in how rape—the violation of the intact physical body—can figure the violation of political boundaries by an other that is represented as grotesque and monstrous. Like Kathryn Gravdal, we attempt to understand rape as a generic device of narrative (Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, 1-20). What is at stake in our analysis of Wace's and Laȝamon's accounts of the Mont St. Michel giant's rape of Arthur's kinswoman Eleine is not simply the representation of coercive sexual intercourse in historical narratives, as one of many stock episodes that might be used to fill out the contents of a story, but rather the structural function of rape in constituting historical writing as a genre. Following Slavoj Žižek's analysis of ideology, we want to understand rape as a symptom, “a particular, ‘pathological’ feature, signifying formation, a binding of enjoyment, an inert stain resisting communication and interpretation, a stain which cannot be included in the circuit of discourse, of social bond network, but is at the same time a positive condition of it, … a terrifying bodily mark which is merely a mute attestation bearing witness to a disgusting enjoyment” (Sublime Object, 75-76). We are less concerned, then, with the specific history of rape in twelfth-century England—the laws, trials, and punishments of actual rapists—than with its imaginative construction in the writing of history as a symptom or trope that functions as a “quilting point” (point de capiton), binding together the floating elements that make up ideological space, thereby creating and sustaining a particular ideological formation (Žižek, Sublime Object, 87). What anxieties about boundaries—political as well as bodily—about exogamy and purity are being enacted in such narratives? What is the generic function of rape narratives in historical writing?

While twelfth- and thirteenth-century vernacular histories of King Arthur, such as those produced by Wace and Laȝamon, are generally understood by twentieth-century literary critics as fiction, not history, and are reassigned to the genre of romance, we have to consider the possibility that their medieval aristocratic audiences understood and used these narratives primarily as histories, drawing upon the distant past to shape their understanding of the world around them and thereby to legitimate their political control (see Blacker, Faces of Time, 1-52, and Spiegel, Romancing the Past, 1-10). Stephen Greenblatt has reminded us that genres are not timeless categories but always “received collected practice[s],” which are shaped by the social conditions that make the genre possible and which create the objects it represents (Learning to Curse, 101). The earliest accounts of Arthur encoded as history are written in Latin. This means that the Norman patrons of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum britanniæ would almost certainly not have been able to read it. However learned someone like Robert of Gloucester (to whom several of the manuscripts are dedicated) may have been, his education probably would not have included much Latin. For these patrons, Geoffrey's book was an artifact, a symbol of prestige (for an account of Geoffrey's patrons see Shichtman and Finke, “Profiting from the Past,” 18-21). It could, if necessary, be used as documentation of political legitimacy, but such a use would require the mediation of a third party, of a cleric who was capable of reading and interpreting the Latin.

Within one generation, the consumers of such works—the Norman aristocracy—demanded histories written in their own vernaculars, in languages they could read for themselves or at the very least have read to them. Though Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first to record the narrative of the Mont St. Michel giant, Wace and Laȝamon were the first to produce accounts that could actually be understood by the Norman patrons for whom they were written. Since we are primarily interested in understanding the social function of this episode (rather than, say, its literary function) within the genre of historical writing, we must explore the social conditions under which vernacular “Bruts” were produced at the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth by looking at the interests of their patrons and potential patrons.

The aristocrats who could have commissioned vernacular histories, from the English King Henry II (who may have patronized Wace) down to the minor nobility on the western “marches” of the kingdom (who may have been Laȝamon's patrons), were responding during this period to a series of disturbing political and economic developments that threatened many of the ideological boundaries by which the medieval aristocracy defined itself. Twelfth-century Europe experienced what Robert Bartlett has called an “aristocratic diaspora,” a period of military expansion during which the aristocracy of Western Europe, especially those who occupied the old Carolingean empire, spread out from their homelands into new areas, where they settled and augmented their fortunes (Bartlett, Making of Europe, 24-56). This acquisitive expansionism coincided with—but was not limited to—the age of the crusades. It included the “conquest” of such far-flung and exotic places as Sicily, Spain, Syria, Palestine, Castile, Poland, and Prussia as well as places like England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, which to us seem much less exotic and alien but which to their Norman conquerors must have seemed like the borderland between culture and utter chaos. It was during this period, almost simultaneously, that both genres—vernacular history and romance—first emerged (or reemerged). Both genres manage the anxieties—of both conqueror and conquered, the powerful and the exploited—about the chaos that lies beyond what is known, during a period of expansion; during an era in which geographical, political, and social boundaries, both in England and abroad, are forming and reforming.

In The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade attempts to encode anthropologically the construction of territorial boundaries in what he refers to as “traditional”—or preindustrial—societies, such as that of twelfth-century Europe. He argues that traditional societies create rigid boundaries between what he calls sacred territory—territory consecrated, inhabited, and known—and that territory which lies beyond, in which lurks danger, demons, turmoil (Sacred and Profane, 20-65). Sacred territory is “our” territory. “We” have claimed it from the chaos, from the monsters who ruled before our coming. We have cleansed this territory, killing its previous evil inhabitants, often decapitating them and displaying their hideous heads as reminders of both our victory over disorder and the possibility that disorder may once again reign if we become overly complacent. New churches are erected on the former sacred sites.

Vernacular histories, like those of Wace and Laȝamon, which represent the antique history of England, illustrate just this process of marking geographical spaces with the signs of the political body. Both Wace and Laȝamon, for instance (like Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia regum britanniæ serves as a source text for all British histories well into the seventeenth century), describe Brutus landing at Totnes on the Cornish coast and discovering the land inhabited by giants. The giants are horrific; they are described as demons and fiends. Their leader, Gogmagog, is the worst of all—Laȝamon calls him “Godes wiðer-saka” (God's adversary; Laȝamon's Brut, line 906). Wace and Laȝamon both stress his huge size; in Wace, he is leader of the giants “Pur sa force e pur sa grandur” (Because of his power and his greatness; Le Roman de Brut de Wace, lines 1071-72).¹ To establish their claim to this new land, Brutus and his men must immediately banish these creatures to the geographical margins of the land, to the mountains.

Banishment to the periphery, however, is not enough to secure the new boundaries. The giants return and violate the Trojans' religious observations, their sacred space. The Trojans kill nineteen of the giants and force Gogmagog to wrestle Corineus in front of Brutus. Corineus dispatches the last threat to the Trojan conquest of the island by throwing him over a cliff, “& mid swilce ræde. þas eotentes weoren deade. / Nu wes al Þis lond. iahned a Brutus hond” (“And so by this policy those giants were destroyed. / Now to Brutus's hand was allocated all this land”; 966-67).

Eliade's model, however, neglects the political, economic, and ideological implications of the differentiations he identifies between sacred space (secured and ordered space) and what lies beyond. He neglects to recognize, for instance, how such differentiations provide the ideological justification for imperialistic ventures in traditional societies. In Laȝamon, Brutus's defeat of the giants is quickly followed by a scene in which Brutus surveys his recently conquered territory:

Brutus hine bi-þohte. & þis folc bi-heold.
bi-heold he þa muntes. feire & muchele.
bi-heold he þa medewan. þat weoren swiðe mære.
bi-heold he þa wateres. & þa wilde deor.
bi-heold he þa fisches. bi-heold he þa fuȝeles.
bi-heold he þa leswa. & þene leofliche wode.
bi-heold he þene wode hu he bleou. bi-heold he þat corn hu hit greu.
al he iseih on leoden. þat him leof was on heorten.

(1002-7)

(Brutus began reflecting, beholding all those people,
He beheld the mountains, beautiful and mighty,
He beheld the meadows which were most magnificent,
He beheld the waters and the wild creatures,
He beheld the fishes and all the birds and fowl,
He beheld the grasslands and the lovely groves,
He beheld the woodland flowering and beheld the cornfields growing;
All this he saw in the country and his heart was light and happy.)

What is significant in his survey is not its contents but its form. The echo of the biblical creation story—and the story of God's victory over the giants (Gen. 6.4)—imparts ideological authority to Brutus's appropriation of Britain. He sees that it is good and founds the city of Troynovant. Creation follows thought.

The migrations of Bartlett's aristocratic diaspora were primarily the result of pressures created by the medieval dependence on land as a source of economic wealth. Land by its nature is a finite resource, so that landless aristocrats, disinherited because they were younger sons in a system of primogeniture favoring eldest sons or because they were not legitimate sons, needed to go elsewhere to make their fortunes. Control of the land as an economic resource, however, also depended on control of women as economic resources. Strategic intermarriage with conquered people forged necessary political alliances and ensured orderly succession and inheritance of property through the production of legitimate heirs. Aristocratic women could also be called upon to mediate between the men of different cultures—between different languages and different cultural identities.

The portrait of Queen Matilda in the Chronicle of the Kings of England, written by the twelfth-century monk William of Malmesbury, attests to the ideological significance of such strategic marriages. Matilda became the wife of the Norman king, Henry I, last son of William the Conqueror and grandfather of Henry II, who may have been Wace's patron. According to William of Malmesbury, Matilda was “descended from an ancient and illustrious race of kings, daughter of the king of Scotland” (Chronicle, 452). Her subsequent marriage to Henry symbolically united the native aristocracy and the dukes of Normandy. During the conquest she had taken refuge in a nunnery, as had many other aristocratic women, to protect herself from rape by invading soldiers. One of the great controversies of the post-Conquest period concerned which of those ladies should be allowed to escape their vows and marry Normans once the Normans had secured the English throne (Elkins, Holy Women, 2-5). Matilda “wore the garb indicative of the holy profession. … This, when the king was about to advance her to his bed, became matter of controversy; nor could the archbishop [Anselm of Canterbury] be induced to consent to her marriage, but by the production of lawful witnesses, who swore that she had worn the veil on account of her suitors, but had never made her vow” (William of Malmesbury, Chronicle, 493-94). William, who counted himself of both Norman and Saxon descent, simultaneously praises and covertly criticizes her role as cultural mediator between Saxons and Normans: “Her generosity becoming universally known, crowds of scholars, equally famed for verse and for singing, came over. … Nor on these only did she lavish money, but on all sorts of men, especially foreigners, that through her presents they might proclaim her celebrity abroad. … Hence, it was justly observed, the disposition crept upon the queen to reward all the foreigners she could, while the others were kept in suspense, sometimes with effectual, but oftener with empty promises” (453). The passage begins as praise for Matilda's patronage but ends up sharply criticizing her for favoring foreign clients (presumably Normans) over her own countrymen. By the late twelfth century, the collective social practices of the aristocracy that sustained conquest and intermarriage spawned a host of new genres—genealogy, romance, vernacular history—that preserved and reproduced this metonymic link between land and women. The aristocracy's search for land, ladies, and legitimacy fueled the popularity of both romance and vernacular history.

If marriage, like warfare, could be used to expand wealth and political influence, then, failing that, rape and abduction might accomplish the same thing (Duby, Knight, Lady, and Priest, 38-40, 237-38). The view of women as resources in dynastic expansion no doubt explains the extent to which abduction and rape tend to collapse into each other in medieval law. The term rape derives in antiquity from the word raptus, literally “to carry off by force.” Gratian defined rape as involving the abduction of a woman in addition to unlawful intercourse with her (Brundage, “Rape and Seduction,” 141-42). The offense of rape was as much about stealing a woman away from those under whose authority she lived as it was about sexual intercourse. These legal distinctions find their way into Wace's description of the Mont St. Michel giant's rape of Eleine. When Eleine's nurse describes the events, she distinguishes between the actual abduction, for which she uses the term ravie:

Lasse, pur quei l'ai tant nurrie
Quant uns diables l'ad ravie;
Uns gaianz mei e li ravi
E mei e li aporta ci.

(11403-6)

(Alas, why did I nurse her so much
If some devil ravished her away;
A giant ravished me and her
And me and her he brought here.)

and sexual coitus, for which she uses the verbs purgesir and desforcier.

La pucele volt purgesir,
Mais tendre fu, nel pout suffrir.
Par force m'ad ci retenue
E par force m'ad purgeüe.
Sa force m'estuet otreier,
Ne li puis mie defforcier.

(11407-27)

([The giant] wanted to couple with the maiden,
But she was tender, she could not endure him.
By force he detained me here
And by force he coupled with me.
I had to yield to his strength,
I could never thwart him.)

Since Eleine dies before she can be raped, the horror of the giant's crime is transferred to his violent abduction of Eleine, while forced sexual intercourse is displaced onto the ancient and lower-class nurse.

If we understand the story of Arthur, as it is related in the vernacular chronicles, to be an ideological legitimation of monarchy and ultimately of the imperialistic ambition that marked the late twelfth-century aristocratic diaspora, then we should be struck by the centrality of rape to the legend, by its obsessive and symptomatic repetitiveness. Arthur's history is structured by rape. Uther Pendragon's rape of Igerna, which leads to Arthur's conception, begins the story. Mordred's rape of Guinevere ends Arthur's career and life. (Medieval historians portray Mordred's abduction of Guinevere variously as consensual or forced, depending on their political loyalties, but the distinction is beside the point; if rape is defined by abduction it cannot be obviated by the woman's consent. The crime lies in stealing a woman from the man under whose authority she lives.)

The Mont St. Michel giant's rape of Eleine and Arthur's vengeance for that act occupy a pivotal moment in Arthurian history. Having previously received an embassy from the Roman emperor demanding tribute, Arthur refuses to pay or to recognize the emperor's authority over him. He assembles an army and travels to Brittany, which will serve as a staging point for his conquest of the continent. With this move, Arthur's dynastic ambitions become imperial ones. No longer content to be merely king of England, he lays claim to the imperial crown, establishing the legitimacy of his claim through a genealogical link with his predecessors Belinus, Constantine, and Maximian.

While in Brittany Arthur hears of a giant, called Dinabunc by Wace, who has abducted his kinswoman Eleine, niece (or, according to Laȝamon, daughter) of King Hoel. The giant has taken her to the remote and inaccessible Mont St. Michel. How does the narration of this incident function generically to transform Arthur from local to world historical hero? How does it legitimate imperial ambition? In Ravishing Maidens, Gravdal argues that in the genre of romance, rape narratives can have five principal meanings (44). Three of these, it seems to us, are relevant to Wace's and Laȝamon's accounts of the Mont St. Michel giant and may be significant for our understanding of rape as a generic component of vernacular history, as a “nodal point (point de capiton is the term Lacan uses) that ‘quilts’ an ideological formation” (Žižek, Sublime Object, 72). First, rape can function as a trope for military prowess. Arthur proves his worthiness to contest with the Roman emperor for control of all Europe by defeating the giant/rapist. Through this strategic display of violence, he accrues the symbolic capital of military reputation. Wace, like Geoffrey, further emphasizes the significance of the killing of the Mont St. Michel giant by linking this incident to Arthur's encounter with another giant, Riun. In this encounter Arthur earns his reputation as a warrior by defeating a giant who demands his defeated opponents' beards—the symbol of their masculinity—as a tribute. Out of these beards he has fashioned a coat, which serves as a visual symbol of his appropriation of their reputation. Arthur's victory over this giant earns him the coat, which then becomes the sign of his military prowess—of his ability to use violence to achieve tactical aims. By knitting together Arthur's defeat of the giant Riun with his defeat of the Mont St. Michel giant, the narrative unmistakably associates the masculinity represented by the beards and that represented by the possession—even the forcible possession—of women.

The second meaning carried by the rape scene is as a social marker that distinguishes the nobility from all other classes. Insofar as either historian aestheticizes rape in this episode—that is, uses it as a sign of female beauty (Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, 44)—it is in the service of marking class distinctions. Eleine must be characterized as an innocent yet nubile aristocratic woman, which is about all we learn of her. The narrative accomplishes this end in several ways. Both accounts report Eleine's death through the narrative of her wet nurse and foster mother. The effect is to infantilize Eleine, preserving her innocence—her asexuality—while recognizing her sexual value as Hoel's niece and an aristocratic lady. Our attention is focused not on the relations between Eleine and her uncle, between Eleine and the king, between Eleine and a potential suitor, or even between Eleine and her abductor, but on the relation between the young girl and her surrogate mother.

A nurrir m'esteit commandee;
Lasse, pur quei l'ai tant nurrie

(11403-4)

(I was ordered to nurse her;
Alas, why did I nurse her so much?)

bewails the nurse mother in Wace. Laȝamon's translation of Wace dramatizes the intimacy of their relationship:

Wale Eleine. wale deore maide.
Wale þat iche þe uedde. þat iche þe vuostredde.

(12904-5)

(Alas! Helen; alas! dear maid,
Alas! that I thee fed, that I thee fostered.)

Embroidering on Geoffrey's disembodied portrayal of the nurse-child bond, the vernacular historians embody a material relationship based on the exchange of milk between mother and infant.

Wace deliberately contrasts the two women's rapes as a pointed reminder of the class difference between them:

La pucele volt purgesir,
Mais tendre fu, nel pout suffrir;
Trop fu ahueges, trop fu granz,
Trop laiz, trop gros e trop pesanz;
L'aume li fist del cors partir,
Nel pout Eleine sustenir.

(11407-12)

([The giant] wanted to couple with the maiden,
But she was tender, she could not endure him.
He was too huge, he was too big,
Too ugly, too large and too heavy;
He made her soul depart from her body,
Eleine could not bear him.)

Eleine is so delicate, so refined and “tender” that she cannot endure the crude advances of the gross and horrifying giant. She simply perishes on the spot. When the giant turns to slake his lust on the old woman, she is more able to endure.

Par force m'ad ci retenue
E par force m'ad purgeüe.
Sa force m'estuet otreier,
Ne li puis mie defforcier.
Mais plus sui vielle e plus sui forte
E plus sui granz e plus sui dure
E plus hardie e plus seüre
Que ne fu damisele Eleine.

(11424-31)

(By force he detained me here
And by force he coupled with me.
I had to yield to his strength,
I could never thwart him.
But I am older and I am stronger
And I am bigger and I am tougher
And bolder and more solid
Than ever was my young lady Eleine.)

The narrative stresses her difference from Eleine—her otherness. Her age and lower status sexualize her, mark her as someone already possessing sexual knowledge. This sexualization connects her with the giant in a grotesque and coercive parody of lower-class domesticity. The scene is sketchy in Wace but receives Pantagruelian treatment in Laȝamon, where the giant returns with twelve swine, sets six of them on the fire, has sex with the old woman, gets up and eats the six swine, and finally, with a stretch and a roar, goes to sleep (12960 ff). Certainly it is possible to see the old woman as more dispensable, her rape less horrific and hence more representable because she is old—past childbearing—but also, we think, because her presence serves by contrast to call attention to Eleine's social and sexual status.

The third function of rape in this scene, and the most significant for our purposes, is as a spectacle of political hegemony, of Arthur's imperial and dynastic ambition. In both vernacular histories, Arthur defeats the giant/rapist not simply as an individual knight errant out for personal glory—a marker of the romance as a genre—but as the established king of England and potential emperor of Rome. His act of vengeance against the giant provides a fitting transition for Arthur from king to emperor (or potential emperor). Arthur has a prophetic dream prior to his encounter with the giant. When asked to explain this dream of a dragon's battle with and ultimate victory over a gigantic, flying bear, Arthur's wise men claim, according to Wace:

Que li draguns qu'ils out veü
Esteit de lui senefiance,
E li granz urs ert demunstrance
D'alcun gaiant qu'il occirreit,
Ki d'estrange terre vedreit;
Li altre d'altre guise espunent,
Nequedent tuit a bien le turnent.

(11267-74)

(That of the dragon which he has seen
He [Arthur] himself was the meaning
And the big bear was a foreshadowing
Of some giant whom he would kill,
Who would come from a foreign land;
Others explain in other manners,
Nonetheless all turn it to good.)

Arthur rejects the explication of his sages and offers another, in which his conquest of the giant serves as a metonymy for his conquest of the Roman empire: “Ainz est, dist il, ço m'est viaire, / La guerre que nus devum faire / Entre mei e li empereür” (Instead, [the meaning] is truly to me / The war which we must wage / Between myself and the emperor; 11275-77). Laȝamon similarly incorporates the prophetic dream to demonstrate Arthur's power and potential for violence, but his discussion of the dream's analysis is, we think, indicative of his anxieties—far greater anxieties than those of Wace—concerning his marginalization from Norman patronage networks. Laȝamon offers no commentary on the dream:

Biscopes þis iherden. & boc-ilærede men,
þis iheorden eorles. þis iherden beornes;
ælc, bi his witte. wisdom sæiden,
þis sweuen aræhten.
Ne durste þer na cniht. to ufele ræcchen na wiht.
leoste he sculden leosen. his leomen þat weoren him deore.

(12788-93)

(The bishops listened to this, and men who'd learned from books;
Earls listened to it; barons listened to it;
Each from his understanding spoke intelligently:
They interpreted this dream [as they thought appropriate];
No knight there had the courage to interpret it unfavourably
Lest he would be made to lose those parts he especially loved.)

Throughout his translation, Laȝamon shows interpretation—either unhappy interpretation or misinterpretation—to be a dangerous activity, one which can carry severe penalties for those who draw power from the business of giving advice. This as much as anything sets Laȝamon's account apart from Geoffrey's and Wace's, suggesting, perhaps, his uncomfortable position as a Saxon priest negotiating indifferent or even hostile Norman patronage networks.

The period of the aristocratic diaspora, not surprisingly since it was a period in which political boundaries were being constantly redrawn, was also marked, as R. I. Moore and John Boswell have both noted, by a growing intolerance and even persecution of those who lay outside the dominant hegemony. Whereas Boswell documents growing state and Church persecution of same sex love, Moore explores the creation of the “persecuting society” in the treatment during the high Middle Ages of heretics, lepers, and Jews. The events that the episode of the Mont St. Michel giant displaces as fantasy were certainly more mundane, though hardly less horrific. They included the persecution and massacre of heretics, lepers, Jews, homosexuals or sodomites (depending on your perspective), and anyone else who for whatever reason threatened the political security of the ruling classes (Moore, Persecuting Society). Arthur, however, could hardly achieve world historical stature by riding around the countryside dispatching bands of peasants, lepers, and Jews. As the representative of the forces of order and religion, Arthur must triumph over more menacing and hence more prestigious foes.

The Mont St. Michel giant's rape of Eleine, then, serves as a nodal point (point de capiton) that “quilts” together networks of ideological relations these histories were designed to reproduce, while itself producing a certain excess (Žižek calls this “surplus-enjoyment”) that exceeds the rape's ideological and structural function. The event coalesces several anxieties about the maintenance of boundaries during times when they are being redrawn in potentially disturbing ways. The particular ideological field being quilted by the rape is attempting to shore up the boundaries between those born to wealth and those born to poverty, between those trained to fight and those who are not, and, most significantly, between familiar and foreign.

Both Wace and Laȝamon represent the giant not as a homegrown threat but, following Geoffrey of Monmouth, as an exotic outsider; he is said to be from Spain. The giant's origin strikes us as significant, speaking to the aristocratic anxieties represented in the scene on Mont St. Michel. The second half of the eleventh century witnessed extraordinary upheaval in Moslem Spain, ripples of which could be felt at least as far north as Burgundy. During the eleventh century, the Burgundian abbey of Cluny, perhaps the most renowned and influential religious house in the West, was lavishly patronized by Spanish kings, who funneled to the monastery tributes received from the taifa rulers of al-Andalus, the petty kings who ruled Muslim Spain after the eleventh-century dissolution of the Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba. As Richard Fletcher has argued, the Clunaic economy was utterly dependent on the continued flow of gold from al-Andalus; a portion of this annual tribute of two thousand gold pieces was being used to finance the rebuilding of the abbey church. In the last decades of the eleventh century, however, the Moslem rulers of al-Andalus came under considerable criticism from Islamic fundamentalists for embracing increasingly secular lifestyles and forging alliances with Christian Europe. For example, in 1064, shortly before his death, the scholar Ibn Hazm condemned Spain's taifa rulers: “by God, I swear that if the tyrants were to learn that they could attain their ends more easily by adopting the religion of the Cross, they would certainly hasten to profess it! Indeed, we see that they ask Christians for help and allow them to take away Muslim men, women, and children as captives to their lands. Frequently they protect them in their attacks against the most inviolable lands and ally themselves with them in order to gain security” (Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 109). The Moslem strategy of appeasement described in this passage, along with its concomitant cultural assimilation, was not enough, however, to satisfy the increasing pressures of the Christian world's expansionism. Spanish kings were forced to acquire more and more resources to meet the escalating demands of their vassals, which included not just gold but also slaves, horses, and land. The increasingly aggressive posture of the Christian lords toward Islamic Spain drove the taifa rulers into the arms of the fundamentalist Almoravid factions. Finally, like Hengest and Horsa of Britain's early history, the Almoravids ultimately displaced the very leaders they had come to protect from an immediate external threat.

The ascendancy of the Almoravids in Islamic Spain dramatically altered the relationship between the Christian and Islamic worlds. Compared with their cultivated predecessors, the Almoravids must have seemed grotesque to European Christians. Fletcher describes them as “outsiders, … unsophisticated tribesmen, materially and culturally impoverished.” Their leader Yusuf “dressed in skins, reeked of camels, and spoke Arabic only with difficulty. It is impossible to imagine him at the elegant soirées of the Abbadid court of Seville” (Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 108). During the early twelfth century, the relationship between Christians and the Almoravids was marked by escalating belligerency. Christian rulers abandoned all pretenses of benign exploitation in favor of a policy of outright conquest. Within a generation, Almoravid rule was being torn apart by Christian incursions from the north, internal strife, and the threat of even more radically fundamentalist Moslems—the Almohads—from the south. Reports about conflicts between Christian chivalry and what to Europeans must have seemed like an alien, even demonic mass, however exaggerated by propaganda, would likely have reached as far as England, where they may have found their way into Geoffrey's characterization of the Mont St. Michel giant and later into the vernacular accounts produced by Wace and Laȝamon.

The giant figures foreignness represented as monstrosity. His defeat carries world historical import in the context of the larger conflict between Arthur and the emperor Lucius, which is portrayed as a conflict between Christian Europe and the rest of the non-European, and largely Moslem, world. While from our geographical and historical perspective, Arthur might seem, at best, to be king of a marginal outpost of the Roman Empire who is invading a wealthier, more powerful, and hegemonic neighbor, both Wace and Laȝamon—following Geoffrey of Monmouth—reconfigure the sides. Arthur's army is composed of knights from England, Scotland, and Ireland but also Jutland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Orkney, Man, Normandy, Anjou, Poitou, Flanders, Boulogne, and Lorraine. Together these principalities, coupled with Arthur's claim to the lineage of former emperors Belinus, Constantine, and Maximian, define much of what we usually think of as the Northern European hegemony. The emperor's army, on the other hand, seems composed almost exclusively of foreigners from alien, exotic, and primarily Middle Eastern and Mediterranean lands. They include the king of Greece and the duke of Boeotia as well as the kings of Turkey, Egypt, Crete, Syria, Phrygia, Babylon, Media, Libia, Bitunia, Ituria, Africa, and Ethiopia. The last, according to Laȝamon, “of Ethiope he brohte þa bleomen” (12666); Wace writes: “Africans amena e Mors / E porter fist ses granz tresors” ([He] led Africans and Moors / And had his great treasure brought along; 11109-12). Like the giant of Mont St. Michel, these potential invaders from the south represent the threat of cultural, political, and sexual violence. Destroying them ensures not only domestic tranquillity but expansion of European hegemony.

Curiously absent from the ranks of both sides are the Spanish, who are represented only by the giant, though, as we suggest above, Spain was at the heart of Christian-Moslem conflict for much of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In the form of the giant, the actual threat is dehumanized, literally made monstrous, in the interests of creating a credible opponent—a giant—with whom Arthur can exchange violence and, by doing so, win the right to lay claim to empire. Far from calling readers' attention to the legal and social consequences of rape, then, the fantasy renders them invisible. Justification for political, economic, and ideological expansionism is frequently found in the demonization of those “others” who populate contested territories, and this demonization almost always includes a sexual component (Moore, Persecuting Society, 100-101). The other is invariably seen as sexually menacing. As Moore writes, “Pollution fear … is fear that the privileged feel of those at whose expense their privilege is enjoyed. Marked sensitivity to the possibilities of sexual pollution may therefore suggest that the boundaries which the prohibitions in question protect are threatened, or thought to be. Conversely (what may in practice amount to the same thing) if new social boundaries are being established it will be appropriate to consider whether heightened vigilance over sexual matters may be one means of securing them” (101). As boundaries are extended, those at the margins must be assimilated, pushed to more distant margins, or destroyed. These sometimes contradictory impulses—assimilation, marginalization, and destruction—allow for contradictory mythologies of the other—the leper, the heretic, the Jew, the Moslem—as sexually attractive, perhaps even endowed with extraordinary sexual prowess, sexually dangerous, and sexually hideous. These mythologies allow for such various kinds of domination as rape, dispersion, and murder.

The vernacular historians demonstrate Mary Douglas's argument that violations of physical bodies can be metonymies for violations of the political body by representing the giant as aggressively disruptive of the social order; he threatens not only the intactness of Eleine's female body but that of the social body as well. In Wace's account, the giant not only abducts and rapes a high-born virgin; he also lays waste the countryside:

Mult veïssiez les païsanz
Maisuns vuider, porter enfanz,
Femes mener, bestes chacier,
Es munz munter, es bois mucier.
Par bois e par deserz fueient
E encor la murir cremeient.
Tute esteit la terre guerpie,
Tute s'en est la gent fuïe.

(11309-16)

(You could see many peasants
Leave their houses, carry their children,
Lead their wives, herd their cattle,
Climb the hills, hide in the woods.
They fled by woods and deserts
And even there feared death.
The whole land was forsaken,
All the people have fled from it.)
þa ȝaten alle he to brac. and binnen he gon wende,
He nom þare halle wah. and helden hine to grunde;
þaes bures dure he warp adun. þat heo tobarst a uiuen.

(12919-21)

(He smashed all the gates and squeezed himself inside,
He grabbed the curtain wall and hurled it to the ground,
He tossed down the chamber door and it shattered in five pieces.)

Wace—who throughout most of his career profited from the largesse of Norman imperialism—suggests that Arthur's destruction of the giant comes as a boon to the peasantry, which has been especially harassed by the creature. His narrative thus indicates that the aristocracy must keep the peasantry in check not only to maintain its own privilege but for the sake of the peasantry as well. On the other hand, by mentioning the giant's gestures of geopolitical transgression, Laȝamon—who writes from a much more marginalized cultural position as a Saxon priest from Arley, who would have witnessed, and perhaps even suffered, imperialism's oppressions—strengthens the association between the monstrous “other” and the behavior of an invading army.

Simultaneous to expansionism, and coincidental to the demonization of foreigners, lurks an anxiety that those at the margins, like the Almoravids, not only may succeed in reclaiming their previously held properties (including the women taken from them by invading forces) but also may embark upon imperialistic ventures of their own. Just as imperialistic forces make claim to the women and land they capture, causing their forced assimilation, these same forces anxiously eye the situation of their own property should those on the margins attempt an incursion. Their anxiety hardens defenses against incursions while at the same time fueling further imperialistic enthusiasms—there can be no rest until “difference” is obliterated. The genre of historical narrative necessarily reflects these anxieties and their antidotes, and we find them manifest in the story of the Mont St. Michel giant.

After the giant's defeat, Arthur has the creature beheaded and authorizes expenditures to establish a church honoring the Virgin Mary. Eliade addresses such a consecration as a victory of the sacred over the profane, but we are struck by the ideological ramifications of this gesture. In the place where the giant performed his grotesqueries, in the place where carnivalesque gestures of uncontrolled eating, drinking, and sex were acted out, is now a religious institution. The church functions to restore a specifically Christian order, to restore the purity that was temporarily lost with the giant's rape of Eleine. It also serves to justify Arthur's expansion of his borders, to further acts of imperialism, and to legitimate ambitions of world conquest.

Notes

1. Translations of Laȝamon's Brut are from Rosamund Allen. Translations of Le Roman de Brut de Wace are our own. We thank Anna Roberts for her help with the translations.

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