I’ve talked before about the themes of speech and silence recurrent in Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, and about its position in the wider canon of mermaid literature. But Andersen wasn’t actually the first writer to come up with a story about a mute mermaid-bride. In the twelfth century, monastic theologian Geoffrey of Auxerre had another story to tell about a mysterious, silent sea-fairy, one who seems very much entangled in the history of speech, gender, and silence.
The story goes that a young man from Sicily was swimming in the sea with his friends when he felt someone come up behind him and splash him. Thinking it was one of his friends attempting to play a prank, he seized them by the hair and dragged them back to shore, only realising once he was on dry land that his captive was actually a stranger to him: a young woman with long, long hair. When she indicated that she could not speak to him, he took her home to his mother, and demanded that he be allowed to marry her (her opinions on the subject are neither mentioned nor recorded).
Because of the girl’s unknown origins (and, hopefully, her son’s latent psychopathy), the mother refused, and so the young man went to the local bishop, who confirmed that the girl was human and capable of consenting to marriage in spite of her lack of voice. The couple married, and in time had a son, and though the mermaid never spoke, she seemed happy in their life together and loved the child dearly. So the little family lived in peace for a while, until a friend of the young man began to press him to discover if his wife was truly mute, suggesting he threaten to kill their child if she would not speak to save him. Our hero takes his friend’s advice, and holds a sword to the little boy’s throat, demanding his wife speak to save him. The mermaid finally breaks her silence to scold her husband, but when he releases the child, she tells him that their marriage was conditional upon her silence, and, in the manner of melusinian heroines, she leaves forever.
While this was presented in Geoffrey’s sermon as a popular tale among his parishioners, his interpretation of the story was counterintuitive to say the least. He argued that the mermaid, if she existed at all, was clearly a demon sent to call attention to human women who talked too much. It’s an interesting moral to take away from a story in which, as in the Roman de Mélusine, the main conflict between the couple is caused by male gossip rather than female speech.
It does, however, slot perfectly into the overwhelming anxiety many medieval men expressed about female speech and discourse, particularly in spaces that men could not usually access. My favourite example of this anxiety is the Évangiles des Quenouilles, or Distaff Gospels, a collection of anecdotes and superstitions from fourteenth-century France. In its recently-published English translation, two separate versions are provided: the older Chantilly manuscript, and the Paris manuscript which holds the version most frequently reproduced through copying, translation, or printing.
These stories and superstitions are portrayed as the work of a young scholar who has been allowed to sit in on a group of women who gather in the evenings to wind up their spinning, and record their ‘gospels’ of superstitions and stories. In the Paris redaction of the text, the educated male narrator frequently remarks on the foolishness of his subjects, mocking their beliefs, their passions, and their delusions that their trivial stories are worth recording.
And yet, some of these “trivial” stories held enough problematic power that our mysterious redactor disappeared them as he produced the Paris manuscript, particularly erasing the more graphic references to domestic violence (and also werewolves, but we’ll come back to them, don’t worry). As in Geoffrey of Auxerre’s mermaid story, the locus of concern is female speech rather than male violence. In these texts, it is acceptable for men to abuse their wives and children, but unacceptable for women to talk about it, even among themselves.
So what’s so important about the ways in which women’s speech was policed in a group of texts from 700-900 years ago? To get to the core of why I find these issues of speech and gender so interesting, we’re hopping a long way forward in time, to the summer of 2012. I was 17, a passionate young Internet-feminist, and thus a big fan of feminist media critics & bloggers like Anita Sarkeesian. And then GamerGate hit. Suddenly, speaking-while-female on the internet became a very real risk. Women I admired and looked up to were all but driven off the Internet through harassment and abuse which sometimes crossed over from the digital realm to their everyday lives. While this likely wasn’t the first example of an online campaign of ridicule and silencing of women’s voices, it’s a cultural moment that has stuck in my mind as an example of how predominantly-male movements have attempted to ridicule or silence female voices, particularly when they don’t like what these voices have to say. There was an easy line to trace from Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn to Geoffrey’s mermaid and the spinners in the Distaff Gospels – women who talked too much, women who talked at all. Women who needed to be silenced.
In this context, the #MeToo movement came almost as a surprise to me. Not because I doubted its veracity – the number of acclaimed film directors known to be abusive towards their ‘muses’ is an ever-rising figure, and yet the image of director-as-auteur, placing a (usually male) creator in a position of power close to godhood, remains frustratingly unquestioned. The backlash, though? That was a song I’d heard far too many times. What really counts as sexual harassment or assault? Is a joke or sexual comment really that bad? What about a touch to a knee or a hand? Who are all these women coming out of the woodwork anyway, and why should their voices be heard or believed?
And suddenly I was 17 and 20 and 22 again, and people were still asking the same questions. Because the undercurrent to all these debates from the Middle Ages through to MeToo was never really on what these women were talking about. Violence perpetrated against them and their families by privileged men is never what actually comes up. The real debate is always whether these people should be talking at all.
Melusinian Musings 