Adultery – Islam & Medieval Western Literature

Where’s the chaste knight?

jordan — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 01:24:08 +0000

Okay, I get that Tristram is a great guy. Courageous, merciful (see previous post), cunning, etc. And maybe I’m just having a hard time following all of this (I really have no previous knowledge of medieval literature), but weren’t we just talking about the chaste knight emerging in medieval literature? For example, the Knights of the Round Table? Before the chaste knight, I realize it was accepted that an exceptional knight more or less gets what he wants when he wants it, but it seems that Tristram has done the same., which still I can swallow until he bests the chaste Knights of the Round Table. Isn’t that saying something?

Granted, I haven’t completely finished the reading yet, so if he learns his lesson in the very end I don’t know it yet. And granted, given the choice the lady refuses to leave with Tristram and wants to return to her husband, but that’s after she’s already been getting it on with him. In my mind this seems to be pretty dismissive of chastity.

PS

jordan — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 03:07:02 +0000

This is really stating the obvious, but our dear Knight of the Cart is (what a coincidence!) the epitome of our chaste girly-knight. He lies with the damsel strictly out of a sense of duty, suffering internally all the while. This virtuous knight is not only obeying our rules on love, but also obeying the theory put forth in a prior reading that this courtly literature relies heavily on unrequited love to suit its purposes: the knight grudgingly lies with this damsel out of a sense of duty, despite the fact that his heart belongs to another.

It would seem then, that this particular work is placing duty above even love, and perhaps this also follows the idea of literature of this tradition actually serving as a critique of love for anything other than one’s God. During this time period especially, one’s God goes hand-in-hand with one’s duty. It is because of duty alone that the knight is persuaded to sleep with the damsel, preferring however to keep himself chaste, to avoid betrayal of his beloved, and to honor his God, all on varying levels.

Of course it doesn’t hurt that the damsel turns out to be the ultimate nagging “I-was-just-testing-you” psycho. All else pales in comparison to the knight’s true love, especially this nutjob. As difficult as it is to be painfully irritating within such simple sentence structure, the damsel manages; the only acceptable acts she performs are offering to leave the knight’s bed and offering to return home.

That said, I’ve only read the first chunk so far, so if I’m missing something huge that’s relevant to all of this, you know why.

Guns don’t kill people, Husbands who come home from work early kill people…

ebarn4wv — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 09:06:05 +0000

I stole that title from a one-liner I heard on The Blue Collar Comedy tour, but I feel it applies quite well to our readings. The knee-jerk reaction of the husband who discovers that his wife is sleeping with another man – as found in The Arabian Nights – is to kill them both, and with one stroke if possible. As you can probably guess, I’ve been wondering with exceeding wonder about the way adultery is portrayed in The Arabian Nights, and how that contrasts to the way we tend to see it in the west. In a traditional western story, when a wife commits adultery, it’s usually because her husband isn’t satisfying her. So she looks elsewhere – oftentimes to the village priest or some other “unlikely” figure – for gratification, and we all share a laugh over how she was able to get away with it. In the few eastern stories we’ve read, the prevailing trend is that the women sleep with other men – usually black slaves as Kathryn pointed out – with no apparent motive. Unlike the western story, where the circumstances of the adultery contribute to the humor, the eastern story robs us of this background, and makes us accept that the woman is sleeping around merely because she can. I’ll probably come back to this topic later, after we have a little more foundation to base our conclusions on, but for now, I’d like to return to the matter of the wive’s overwhelming lover of choice.

Why a black slave? The answer to that is simple: because in arabia, africans were foreigners, and every culture attributes some sort of sexual supremacy to outsiders. Don’t believe me? Look at our own culture. Black men are supposedly “gifted” in certain areas of the anatomy. Asian women are supposed to possess some innate skill in the bedroom that will fulfill a man beyond his wildest dreams. The list goes on and on, and many of these same stereotypes existed in the Islamic world of which we read. So the fact that the wife of a sultan is seeking her pleasure with a black slave serves one main purpose: to establish the wife as a faithless nymphomaniac. Since the sexual prowess of black men is so legendary, naturally, that’s who she will choose as her lover. The fact that he is a slave just reinforces the fact that she cares for naught but her satisfaction, flingling class and social taboo to the wayside.

I’m not necessarily sure what any of this means – if anything – and I realize that I may just be reading too far into a minor detail, but while the jury is out on that, I leave you with this: