Variations on the Theme of Romantic Love in the Middle Ages

Focus on The Tale of Genji

". . . what was it Murasaki wanted to express in writing The Tale of Genji? . . . Perhaps the most obvious reading of the tale is to see it as a sexual poetics, a study of the distinctive feature of love — its language, forms, and conventions. . . . Courtship and seduction might seem to form the central theme of the novel, but the real theme is the longing to connect with another person." (p. 2176)

"In the Lais of Marie de France . . . and the vernacular love lyrics, men and women lead their romantic lives. . . ." (p. 1622)

"Of the various models for the love of God, none has so captured the imagination of the Bhakti poets than that of the erotic love between a man and a woman. In many bhakti poems, the devotee or the human soul is a woman who longs for her lover, and the conventions of classical love poetry are used to portray this mystical love." (p. 2374)

In this illustration of "The Broom Tree" chapter of The Tale of Genji, the friend of the guards officer serenades a lady (p. 2192).
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By the twelfth century, romantic love had become a central preoccupation of Western arts and letters. Sexual attraction, which the ancient world had seen as a pathological obsession, acquired new connotations: passion might still be dangerous and potentially self-destructive, but it also promoted aesthetic refinement and provided the occasion for self-realization. This transformed image of the lover may in part be traced to the influence of Arabic lyric poetry, which entered Europe through the permeable membrane of al-Andalus (the part of the Iberian peninsula under Islamic rule for hundreds of years, from the eighth century through the fifteenth), as well as to the continuing influence of the Roman poets, notably Ovid. At the same time, in one of those instances where similar concerns arise in different parts of the globe, although no direct artistic influence seems possible, a romantic sensibility focused on the exquisite pathos of love evolved in the court culture of Heian Japan (794–1185). This sensibility was forged by aristocratic women who had the time to cultivate their emotions and record their keen observation of the romantic transactions they saw all around them. Carnal need was elevated into desire and raw emotion transformed into the subtlest shades of feeling that the world has ever known.

Murasaki Shikibu, by Yukinobu.
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Marble head of Marie de France.
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Romance and the vernacular

The very word romance — the term that has come to denote stories about the progress of a love affair — reflects a linguistic fact that links the work of Heian noblewomen and medieval European poets. In both Japan and Europe, powerful men used the elite language in the service of government and religion. The romance languages emerged as classical and church Latin yielded to the popular vocabularies evolved by non-elite speakers in the geographical areas that we now know as France, Italy, Romania, Portugal, and Spain . These new vernaculars became the vehicles for romantic poetry and prose. In Japan, Chinese was the language of high culture; women were excluded from the study of Chinese as they were from the promulgation of laws and the conduct of war. The development of Japanese from the incubator of Chinese parallels the development of French and its sister tongues from Latin. Although we can identify a few women authors and intellectuals who were instrumental in refining the literary use of the vernaculars of the European middle ages, in Japan, women writers (notably Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon) played a far more crucial role in creating a language in which personal experience could be explored. And more often than not, such personal experience involved both the hope and the misery attendant upon the vagaries of sexual love.

The first kiss of Lancelot and Guinevere — the book that seduced Paolo and Francesca, as illustrated in a manuscript owned by the Morgan Library in New York City .
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The romance of the illicit

The romantic stories on which we dote rarely end happily; virtually all of the great medieval romances tell of adulterous and ultimately tragic liaisons. The female actors in these tales tend to be highborn ladies whose marriages were arranged by parents and guardians for economic and political reasons. The more elevated the protagonists, the less likely it is that they will have chosen to marry because of prior affection. Kings and princes needed wives to cement alliances and produce heirs. To ensure that the heirs were legitimate, the wives had to be well guarded. Western romance pays little attention to the children of these arranged unions, probably because the heroines tend to die before they have a chance to propagate. With alarming frequency, these women fall desperately in love with the brothers or real or surrogate sons of their legal husbands. Iseut's Tristan is the nephew of her husband, King Mark. Guinevere's Lancelot is the favorite knight of King Arthur. In the second circle of Dante's Inferno, we meet Paolo and Francesca, who were murdered in flagrante delicto by Francesca's husband, Paolo's older brother. These affairs are about more than star-crossed love; the tangled family relationships speak of hidden rivalries and complicated transferences of emotions from one object of desire to another.

Genji with Fujitsubo, from an illustration to Chapter 5. Harumasa YAMAMOTO; © University of Tokyo (Department of Japanese Literature) and Tsurumi University (Library). Reprint: Kichobonkankoukai Press in "Picture book of the Tale of Genji." Electronic versions: Mari NAGASE.
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The ultimate taboo: Incest in The Tale of Genji

Even more than the romances of medieval Europe, The Tale of Genji makes clear the power of the illicit in the workings of sexual desire. The mores of Heian Japan differ significantly from those of Christian Europe. Sexuality in and of itself does not have the same power to shock Murasaki's characters as it did in Western culture. The Japanese, after all, had not been brought up on a story of origins in which the innocence of the first man and woman is indicated by their failure to be ashamed of their naked bodies. Although aristocratic women had reputations to protect, it was understood that they might discreetly take a number of lovers before they entered into marriage. Consider the amused worldliness conveyed by Sei Shonagon in one of the many entries in her Pillow Book devoted to the visits of lovers, this under the category called "Hateful Things":

A man with whom one is having an affair keeps singing the praises of some woman he used to know. Even if it is a thing of the past, this can be very annoying. How much more so if he is still seeing the woman! (Yet sometimes I find that it is not as unpleasant as all that.) (p. 2284)

Shonagon seems actually to welcome the competition she ostensibly deplores here, as if it keeps one on one's mettle.

In the case of Genji, however, the illicit enters in the form not of mere promiscuity or casual adultery. The proliferation of quasi-incestuous relationships that lure and torment him speak of a deep longing that goes beyond sexual need. A compulsive risk-taker, Genji suffers from the early loss of his mother, a mother of insufficiently exalted rank whom his father had loved unreasonably. A multi-generational novel, unlike the briefer medieval romances, The Tale of Genji does concern itself with the children born of ill-advised passion. Because they are often unacknowledged, Genji's children and grandchildren are threatened by unwitting incest, as the narrative insists on the entangling web into which his desire leads not only him but also his similarly tormented offspring.

Dido and Aeneas in the cave. Vatican Vergil: Dido and Aeneas in the cave. Filio 106, recto.
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Medieval romance and the longing for personal fulfillment

There are many reasons why stories of passionate love and adulterous affairs are at best of secondary interest in the literature of the ancient world. Monogamy is not an issue in Heian Japan, nor is it particularly important in classical Greek literature or even the Bible. The best remembered romance of Latin literature, that of Dido and Aeneas, is tragic not for its transgression of any taboo: Dido and Aeneas are both mature and maritally unencumbered when they meet. That these two attractive rulers reach out to each other in their loneliness does not merit reproach; but when Dido's possessiveness begins to thwart the call of empire, they must part. The problem with romance in most ancient literature lies not in the personalities of the lovers or their psychological needs, but in their political consequences. In Heian Japan as in medieval Europe, sexual desire and psychological longing take on a new importance. The call of duty that impels Aeneas onward torments characters like Lancelot, Tristan, or Genji. Caught between the claims of the self and the strictures of the social, the medieval lover tends toward the former. The formula for romantic literature is born from the quest for personal fulfillment at all costs that leads to short-lived ecstasy and long-term suffering and loss.

A Space for Romance

This illustration for chapter 4 of The Tale of Genji, "Evening Faces," shows the relationship of the house of Genji's old nurse to the gate of the dwelling next door with the white flowers that attract his attention to the lady within.
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Despite his deep involvement with his step-mother, Fujitsubo, and her niece, Murasaki, Genji indulges in many chance encounters spurred by his serendipitous proximity to an alluring woman. In the "Evening Faces" chapter, for example, he finds himself next door to a tempting opportunity that he then, fatally, pursues. Even more often, the internal architecture of the palaces and homes he finds himself in lead him to a new conquest. The spaces in which we live greatly affect how we behave and, consequently, what our art and literature depict. The classic illustrations of The Tale of Genji literally lift the roof off rooms to look down into their recesses. Through the sliding doors of these darkened rooms, lovers had easier access to their ladies than did the amorous heroes of the medieval Western world, who often had to cope with moats and castle architecture to keep their trysts.

From The Tale of Genji scroll introduction to chapter 2, "The Broom Tree."
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Heian domestic architecture

Dido and Aeneas consummate their love, famously, during a hunt in a cave. Thus Virgil suggests that they are driven by animal carnality and respond to natural longing in a natural setting. In the romance literature of Japan and medieval Europe, place takes on a wholly different character. The women of Genji's world may be elliptically referred to in Murasaki's novel by the names of flowers and plants, but they are hothouse creatures, generally kept inside and away from the uncultivated nature that serves as metaphor rather than stage set. They can tend gardens and natural oases within their own compounds, but Japanese heroines never run through a landscape, as does, say, Isolde. They live indoors, on their knees, encumbered by gorgeous layers of beautiful fabrics. They travel in curtained coaches. Despite all these efforts to shroud their identities, however, they are incredibly vulnerable to outside penetration behind the flimsy construction of sliding screens, hanging drapes, and swaying blinds.

A castle in Wales .
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The European castle and the invention of privacy

Unlike their Japanese counterparts, the women of medieval romance live in stone structures. The available architecture literally frames the romantic tales of medieval Europe . The generic requirements of the narrative dictate the kind of space in which sexual encounters occur. The lower-middle-class protagonists of the fabliaux engage in their bawdy doings in common rooms that hold the entire family's beds; typically, in narratives like Boccaccio's Sixth Story of the Ninth Day or Chaucer's Reeve's Tale, audacious young men jump from bed to bed and humiliate and outwit husbands who lie nearby. The Miller's Tale, with its parody of grand romance, makes much of strategically placed windows and ceilings. The cramped urban quarters that thwart the lovers in Marie de France's Laustic are all too impenetrable. Couples like Dante's Paolo and Francesca, imitating Lancelot and Guinevere, take their ease in the newly available private chambers of European medieval construction. Suspicious husbands, however, ambush tragic couples like Tristan and Isolde, who seek escape in the natural world where they arrange their trysts.

Romantic Love and the Supernatural

Dosso Dossi, Circe (1508)
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The sorceress

When medieval romances are set outdoors, as in Marie de France's Lanval, the natural world often provides the opportunity for supernatural manifestations. The lady who rides up to the unhappy Lanval spirits him away at last to otherworldly Avalon, the final resting place of Arthurian legend. The witch or sorceress is a familiar figure of romance in the West, from Homer's Circe to Ariosto's Alcina and Keats's Belle Dame Sans Merci. Her power and beauty lure men from the everyday world of duty and responsibility into an alternative sphere, which may prove fatal but can also seclude mortal men from care and harm.

From a No play dramatizing the possession of Genji's wife, Aoi, by the spirit of the Rokujo lady. This is the demonic spirit whose exorcism is the subject of the culminating scene.
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Spirit possession

In Murasaki's world, powerful women like the Rokujo lady express themselves with terrifying force. If noblewomen had little physical scope in which to maneuver, their spiritual strength found ways to bore from within. In The Tale of Genji, we hear frequently of the fox spirits and ghosts of traditional East Asian arts and literature, demonic manifestations of passions that their generators must mute. Thus Chapter 4, "Evening Faces," begins by charting Genji's route: "On his way from court to pay one of his calls at Rokujo, Genji stopped to inquire after his old nurse" (p. 2264). On this visit, his "amative propensities" distract him from his original destination for a moment, but he forgets the as-yet-unseen lady of the evening faces in the company of the Rokujo lady, who "was strangely cold and withdrawn" (p. 2206). Soon, however, he literally uproots the lady of the evening faces and takes her to "a nearby villa" (p. 2214). There Genji has a dream, in which he is castigated by a beautiful woman for abandoning her; moments later, the young woman lies lifeless before him, and Genji sees the woman he had dreamt of hovering over the pillow: "It faded away like an apparition in an old romance" (p. 2215). The Rokujo lady's restless spirit possesses other of Genji's loves, even after she has physically died. Although the conventions of Heian court life stifle her behavior, the force of frustrated love and humiliated ego find eerie outlets for jealous fury that is all the more dangerous for being unspoken.

Titian, Miracle of the Jealous Husband, 1511. Fresco. Scuola del Santo, Padua, Italy .
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Gender, Jealousy, and Romance

Anthropologists and psychiatrists studying jealousy have sought to analyze the role of gender in its manifestations. Do men and women experience this unsettling emotion in different forms? Certainly, they have had different opportunities to act out their jealousy. For centuries, readers have seen the Rokujo lady as a malevolent figure preying on her rivals. Noting that only women are possessed in The Tale of Genji, Doris G. Bargen argues that Murasaki writes in a spirit of solidarity with these heroines, including the Rokujo lady, who may herself be understood as a victim of Genji's predatory self-indulgence:

The possessed woman is not a passive victim but an active agent who uses — subconsciously, surreptitiously, subversively — the charisma of others . . . to empower herself . . . a dynamic that is no longer defined as an antagonism (the male viewpoint) but as an alliance (the female viewpoint). (A Woman's Weapon: Spirit Possession in The Tale of Genji [Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997], p. 27)

To be sure, Genji's heroic statue, for all his thoughtless and predatory behavior, stems in part from his capacity to recognize and suffer from his errors. He needs no ghost to tell him of his wrongs; in his frequent bouts of sickness and depression, he seems a very modern figure, a man who internalizes the sins from which he cannot keep himself.

In medieval Europe, the jealous lover tends to be a cuckolded husband whose anger fuels direct revenge. Dante allows Francesca, whose adulterous romance with her brother-in-law condemns the two lovers to an eternity in the Second Circle of the Inferno, to predict that Giancotto Malatesta, who vengefully murdered her and his brother, will languish in Caina (in the Ninth Circle) for his much viler crimes when he ultimately dies. In The Art of Courtly Love (1184–86), a probably less than serious treatise on romantic matters, Andreas Capellanus offers 31 Rules of Love, for which he claims an authoritative Arthurian source. The second rule — "He who is not jealous can not love" — and the several amplifications of this idea that follow, show how high a priority must be accorded to this emotion. The openness of these declarations, and the brutality with which they were frequently enforced, distinguish the Western from the Japanese model. The masters of medieval narrative made much of the crudity of the physical retaliation to which the jealous husbands were shown to resort, a crudity that only underscored cuckolds' inferiority to the elegant charmers who seduced their wives. As a consequence, the jealous husband becomes a figure of fun in fictions like the French fabliaux and many of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Companion Persuading Radha as Krishna Flutes, Folio from the "Lambagraon" Gita Govinda, India, Himachail Pradesh, Kangra ( Los Angeles County Museum of Art).
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Bhakti Poetry: Love and Mystic Longing

Romantic love and holy love share the same vocabulary; from the very earliest times, the shamans and priestesses of religious rites sang of (and in various ways probably enacted) union with the deity. In the Middle Ages, Christian poems like Hadewijch of Brabant's "The Cult of Love" (pp. 1811–12) and Islamic works like Rumi's ghazals and robais (pp. 1544–49) celebrate the world of the senses as a conduit that leads the true worshipper toward the divine. In the Bhakti poetry of medieval India, this language of love became a vehicle for a number of gifted women. Like Marie de France and Shikibu Murasaki, poets like Mahadevi, Chandidasa, and Mirabai found in their local vernaculars a way to voice a personal longing that orthodox scripture had obscured. Even the male writers of Bhakti poems take on the persona of the lovelorn female, one more testament to the paradoxical recognition that desire for sexual union with the beloved is simultaneously idiosyncratic and universal. In that long, amorphous period known as the Middle Ages, intense longing to merge with another — whether mortal or not — seems to have become an irresistible human urge.

All of these writers took as their central subject a yearning for emotional connection that had previously been suppressed or ignored — or perhaps such yearning only emerges in a culture that has developed a certain level of comfort and leisure time. Realists who record the minute details of an often-opulent external life, the authors of medieval romance are simultaneously fantasists who give us access to the strange internal world of the tormented lover. In exploring their work, we learn to look more closely at the mysterious intersection of the daily with the supernatural.