Rereading Rape in Two Versions of La fille du comte de Pontieu

Summary

La fille du comte de Pontieu, one of the first French novellas, recounts the plight of a woman who is raped by bandits in the presence of her husband. Dating from the thirteenth century and later revised in the fifteenth, La fille du comte de Pontieu raises some important questions both about how the story of rape has (or has not) been told and about the problematic use of rape as subject matter for novellas, stories intended to entertain their readers. This article will examine the novelists’ representation of rape in the two versions of the tale.

The topic of this essay—reinterpreting rape—is not without its own risks, many of which are detailed in a recent study by Evelyn Birge Vitz, “Rereading Rape in Medieval Literature: Literary, Historical, and Theoretical Reflections.” Vitz criticizes the approach some contemporary scholars have taken toward the theme of rape in medieval literature:

Some of this work is sound and provocative. But much of this scholarly trend is, in my view, plagued by a tendency toward naive, anachronistic, and inappropriate readings of literary works, high levels of indignation and self-pity, and a pervasive hostility to men (1).

She goes on to describe and condemn what she sees as the three principal flaws of this “scholarly trend.” First, according to her, such scholarship “demands that rape be treated straightforwardly and realistically” (1) and therefore “ignores fundamental aspects of medieval esthetics” (3), i.e., medieval authors’ attempts to create a distance from reality by technical and other devices. Secondly, she complains about scholars who deny the possibility that both men and women in the Middle Ages might have found rape scenes entertaining or even, perhaps, titillating. Finally, Vitz says that much recent scholarship argues on the one hand that rape is easy to define and, on the other, that “virtually everything—every act by which a male dominates or ‘possesses’ a woman, erotically or even in other ways—is ultimately an act of rape: all is sexual power play” (18).

In light of Vitz's cautionary remarks, a comparison of La fille du comte de Pontieu's two principal versions becomes all the more interesting. To begin with, the two narratives (from the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries) represent rape in dramatically different ways. Indeed, the fifteenth-c. version treats rape quite “straightforwardly and realistically,” to use Vitz's terms, whereas the thirteenth-c. text has other (more esoteric?) concerns: God's mysterious ways.