A few weeks ago, I sat down with a copy of Eleanor Johnson’s excellent book (published last year) Scream with Me: Horror films and the rise of American feminism (1968-1980). I didn’t expect cosy reading. The book is about the subgenre of “domestic horror”: movies in which a male antagonist terrorizes and victimizes a woman in a confined place such as an apartment or a hotel. Children are often part of the story, either as fellow victims or monsters in their own right. She argues that these movies reflect the period’s debates about abortion access and equal rights – topics sadly still relevant to American women today.
I can’t bear to watch horror: I am still haunted by the meningitis scenes in Pet Sematary, a movie I viewed in a Toronto basement with other teenagers some time around 1992. But my tolerance for reading descriptions of grotesque violence is remarkably high. On occasion, I’ve looked up from a gory medieval epic I was teaching with gusto and been surprised by my students’ appalled faces. So I thought I would be on the safe side with descriptions of movies. I wasn’t prepared, though, for how close the nightmares would feel in this particular case.
Take Rosemary’s Baby (1968), in which a vulnerable New York woman is raped by Satan and forced to have his child, all with the collusion of her husband. It was still in theatres when New York state underwent a huge shift in popular attitudes towards abortion, leading to a repeal of its oppressive abortion laws in 1970. The film, Johnson points out, showed a kind of domestic violence that many women would have experienced, without quite having a term for it. This is “coercive control”, a term coined by the sociologist Evan Stark to refer to a range of abusive actions. These include restricting the victim’s education, money or movement, employing psychological abuse, isolating her from friends, family or medical help, and forcing or controlling her pregnancies.
I have known women at the receiving end of such abuse. And reproductive coercion was government policy in the Romania of my birth, which limited access to contraception and abortion. I suppose this is why I had to think of the other part of the abhorrent equation of forced birth: the fact that it results in an unwanted child. I wondered whether there was a medieval story that showed what it meant to be a child who wasn’t welcome in her family, whose very existence threatened her mother’s life.
In Marie de France’s “Le Fresne”, a noblewoman accuses a mother of twins of having had sex with two men. Her comeuppance arrives soon, with a double pregnancy of her own. Afraid of the inevitable shame, she contemplates killing one child, then agrees to have it carried away with some rich tokens of her birth. The little girl is raised in an abbey, named after the ash tree (“fresne”) where she is found. She grows beautiful, courteous, wise.
Le Fresne falls in love with a knight and becomes his lover. All is well until the knight’s people convince him to take a legitimate wife. Like other inhumanly patient women – Chaucer’s Griselda comes to mind – Le Fresne does not complain. She even prepares the marital bed for her replacement, laying on it the Byzantine brocade in which she had been wrapped as an infant. Unsurprisingly, the new bride is her twin sister, the cloth leads their deceitful mother to recognize Le Fresne as her own, and she is legitimized and united with her beloved.
It is a standard happy ending for a woman of superhuman endurance, but hard to enjoy as a reader. Le Fresne is adored by her knight and his servants, but says no word when she is shoved aside for political convenience. To be sure, she has no known family, but she is educated and well mannered, and the treasures left with her suggest noble origins. Why, I asked myself, does she erase herself so readily?
Marie de France knew about the practical requirements of infants. Even in this tale, she describes how the foundling baby was warmed, suckled and bathed. I suspect she was also sensitive to their emotional needs. Le Fresne allows herself to be put aside by a lover because she has already been thrown away once. She can please others, but not protest her own mistreatment. Abandoned as a child, she does not know how to hold on to herself.
Irina Dumitrescu teaches medieval literature in a small town in Germany.
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