`The boy who was a girl': Reading gender in the Roman de Silence

Abstract

Medieval romances contain few obvious narrative challenges to the status of the body as the origin of gender: in fiction, as in other cultural discourses, gender identity and social roles are defined by sexual characteristics inscribed on the body at birth. There is, however, a group of narratives in the romance corpus that calls into question the simple equation of body and gender. Transvestite romances, stories of women who dress and act as men, directly challenge the primacy of the body in determining gender. These narratives suggest that gender is not essential but performative, that the enactment of a gender through performance and dress may have an authority equal to that of anatomical characteristics in determining gender identity. Transvestite romances question the nature of sexual difference by valorizing the role of performance in gender identification. In their relocation of gender identity from the body to a performance they represent the possibility of an ambiguously gendered being whose convincing performance as a man is contradicted by anatomical features classified as female. The crossdressed heroine disrupts gender categorizations that are based on a reading of anatomy and suggests that all gender roles are performative, that any gender identity is fabricated through corporeal signs and through discourse.(1) The medieval transvestite romance presents a profoundly troubling spectacle to an aristocratic society founded and maintained by dynastic marriage and succession because ambiguous gender threatens the disruption of dynastic structures - a woman dressed as a man cannot engender a child. The anxiety provoked by the transvestite heroine must be contained in these romances through a restoration of proper channels of reproduction and succession. Yet although body and performance are realigned once the discrepancy between them is discovered, the realignment does not always conform to a natural gender dictated by the body. In a few narratives the disjunction between the gendered body and the gender performance is convincing enough to require a miraculous regendering of the body to conform to its dress. In another romance, the thirteenth-century Roman de Silence, a cross-dressed heroine's appropriation of a masculine identity is successful enough to subvert her assumption of a female identity at the end of the story. Transvestite romances recount the process of bringing the body and performance into line according to a cultural imperative grounded in and maintained by marital alliances and dynastic succession. Yet in the initial disjunction they set forth between the gendered body and a performance of gender, and in the importance they give to performance in the identification of gender, transvestite romances reveal the constructed nature of the gendered subjectivity of all romance characters. They suggest that the idea of a natural sexual difference indicated on the body is part of the ideology that supports the founding institutions of medieval aristocratic society: marriage and succession. Naming Gender Scholars from a variety of disciplines have begun to question the commonly invoked distinction between sex, a biological identity, and gender, a social identity. Biologists, for example, have used studies of children born with ambiguous genitalia to show the importance of socialization in determining both sex and gender.(2) Even in cases of children with clearly defined sexual characteristics, biological and social identifications may reinforce each other, obscuring origins while reinforcing cultural definitions of male and female: If a society puts half its children in skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their underpants, while putting the other half in jeans or overalls and encouraging them to climb trees and play strenuous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the half that has been in trousers is exhorted to eat like a growing boy, while the half in skirts is warned to watch their figure and not get fat; if the half in jeans trots around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters around on spike heels, then these two groups of people will differ biologically as well as socially. …