A medieval woman capable of jouissance and tragic activeness in love: Heloise

Gender/sex relation in Western Europe during the Middle Age was dominated by man/woman hierarchy based on Aristotelian biological dichotomy and ascetic male-centrism as preached by the Christian Church. Woman was either praised as Maria, the sexless mother, or condemned as Eve, the evil seducer of man. One can easily have the impression that women in this society had to hide their feminine desire and feeling in regard to love and sexuality behind this mystified images. In this essay I wanted to show that it was not always the case. The correspondence between Abelard and Heloise in the first half of the twelfth century contains one of the most famous love stories in Europe. In the beginning the seducer was the man, Abelard not the woman, Heloise. The seduction was done not for love but for demonstration and self-proof of male sexual ability. But the seducer and the seduced fell soon in real love. The following story is well known. The wrath of Heoloise uncle, Fulbert, and continued conflicts between him and Abelard led, despite marriage of Heloise and Abelard, to the latters castration, Wife and Husband became monk and nun. In this tragedy the female partner, Heloise was more active, courageous, selfconscious and upright to her love. In the beginning she was only an object of male desire but she became the subject of real mutual love. She changed the banal seduction story into a heroic love tragedy. In a society where sexual relationship between man and woman was recognized only within the boundary of legal marriage, her original choice was love for love, not the status of spouse. It was both for Abelard and for herself. She wanted to love according to her own will, not to social rule and control. Though she was forced to accept the marriage with Abelard, it could not prevent the castration of her husband. After she became nun according to Abelards urge, she never regretted or negated her love. She remembered her love with joy and did not condemn it as sin. She did not evade the whole tragedy of her love but embraced it nobly. Most of all she was honest to her love. She was sure that her love was innocent. Abelards attitude was different. He was more egocentric in every phase of the love story. For him what Heloise felt and wanted was not important. Even his proposal to marry Heloise was given as compensation for her uncle, not as a way to please her. Though he himself was the seducer he never forgot criticizing female sexual attractivity as cause of mens fall. After his castration, he made his youthful wife a nun, regardless of her intention. And then he condemned their past love as sinful misdeed. It was his psychological emergency exit because he could, as a sexually impotent man, survive only by justifying his own present lot and by negating sexuality. In the letters to Heloise he concentrated therefore his effort to give Heloise moralizing lectures and tried to make her a kind of repentant seductress devoted to religious life, though she was never a seductress. Heloise accepted his directions and silenced thereafter about their worldly love. Because she still loved Abelard and wanted to please him. But the female autonomous will and ability of jouissance she expressed in her letters prove that women were not always passive other but could be active subject in gender/sex relation even in the middle ag