[Previous: lines 168-188]
Joseph is narrating. A mysterious voice has instructed the reluctant Mary to marry, and many eligible young men assemble at her house, hoping to woo her. Elderly Joseph goes too, but without such hope. Now read on!
“Ecce autem, ut prœsens aderat quoque pronuba, cœtu------------
in medio Anna parens, subito correpta furore, [190]
plena Deo, tota (visu venerabile) in aede
bacchatur, tollitque ingentem cœlo ululatum.
Unum in me conversa oculos, me fertur in unum,
nil minus hoc ducentem animo, nil tale verentem;
corripiensque manu: ‘a Solus tu posceris,’ inquit. [195]
‘Annuit hoc uni superûm tibi connubium rex.’
Obstupuere omnes: nec tune ex agmine tanto
exsortem quisquam seniori invidit honorem.
Ipse, texi quôd eram seris minùs integer annis,
multa recusabam; multa hue venisse pigebat. [200]
Aequales aderant fidi, simul et renuentem
hortari, atque animum mihi blandis addere dictis.
Cedo igitur victus, tandemque uxorius illam
accedo, et lacrymans lacrymantem ad limina duco.
“Et iam nox aderat stellis fulgentibus apta, [205]
suffundens umbras mundo nigrantibus alis.
Secretis thalamis pariter succedimus ambo.
Flebat sponsa: solum lacrymis iuxtà omne madebat,
ac veluti, cùm vere subest uberrimus humor
arboribus, lentae vitis si forte cacumen [210]
falce putans stirpem feriat malè providus unca
agricola, immeritam et violârit vulnere matrem.
Ipse aderam, et dictis solabar mitibus aegram,
virginis haud cupidus primum decerpere florem.
Cùm sic longa trahens suspiria pectore ab imo est [215]
orsa loqui: ‘Non relligio mihi vana suasit,
et thalamos odisse, et virginitatis amorem
aeternum colere. Intus agit vis aetheris intus,
longaevam responsa licèt contraria matrem
sollicitent, vatumque minae; sunt et mea contra [220]
vatum iussa mihi, nulli succumbere labi,
nullis virgineam tedis summittere mentem.
Antè retro primos properet revolutus ad ortus
Jordanis, sistantque suos vaga sidera cursus!’
Haec ait, inque genas stillantes undique honestae [215]
ex oculis simul incipiunt turgescere gemmae.
“Nec mora; deinde mihi insinuans quatit ima repente
ossa timor; genua aegra labant; nox plurima oborta
ante oculos: ter sum conatus pauca profari;
ter frustrata sono lingua est, nec verba sequuta. [230]
Tum quoque vox audita: ‘Toro thalamisque paratis
parce; tamen concessa tibi connubia serva.’
Exurgo, atque oculos iam dudum in virgine fixus
horrenda, tali sum tandem voce loquutus:
‘Quis mihi te, virgo, invito conjunxit olympo? [235]
Quis tantis (non hos equidem quaesivi hymenaeos)
immeritum implicuit monstris? haud talia quondam
praedixit puero genitor ludibria vates,
iam senior vates idem, templique sacerdos.
Ille quidem aut nullos thalamos, mihi nulla manere [240]
connubia, aut certèclarum fore me inde canebat.
Verùm age, quae menti surgat sententia pandam:
quandoquidem Superi mihi te iunxere, sed iidem
absterrent monstris; licet, et mox usque licebit
virgineum serves intacto corpore florem. [245]
Haud tamen ipse ausim injussus dissolvere sacri
connubii vincla ista: domo degemus eadem,
ipse tibi ut genitor, mihi tu ceu filia semper;
teque adeô casus iam nunc complector in omnes.
Hoc tua relligio velit, hoc mea serior aetas.’ [250]
Ânnuit his, aliaque domûs in parte puella
secubuit: mitto totam quœ monstra per illam
sum passus, quàm mira horrens insomnia, noctem.”
“But, now—amazing!—the matron of honour,------------
Anna, started dancing wildly in their midst, [190]
moved by God (venerable sight!) through the house
revelling and lifting her voice to heaven.
On me alone she turned her eye—just me—
though I had not expected or hoped for it.
She took my hand: ‘it’s only you,’ she said. [195]
‘The king of heaven has chosen you for this.’
Everyone was amazed: though none there begrudged
an old man his honour—more than I deserve!
I tried to withdraw, on account of my age
and poor health; stung that I’d even gone there. [200]
But good men of my own age encouraged me
inspiring my soul with kind and faithful words.
Beaten at last, I yielded. Weeping I led
my betrothed, herself weeping, over the threshold.
“Soon the star-glittery night spread its wings [205]
pouring out black shadows over the world.
We went together to our secluded bedroom.
My wife wept; the ground was wet with her tears,
as when the abundant sap rises in spring
through the trees, and, pruning a winding vine [210]
up top, a farmer cuts the trunk with his scythe
accidentally hurting the mother tree too.
I stood near her and consoled the poor girl:
I had no desire to take her maidenhood!
Eventually, after many long sighs, [215]
she spoke: ‘it is not empty superstition,
that makes me hate marriage and want to remain
virgin forever. Inside, a heavenly
inwardness moves me. Though my mother has her
own prophetic prompts, mine are contrary to hers, [220]
urging me to abdure any stain and resist
all pressure to sacrifice virginity to marriage.
Sooner I would see flow back to its source
the river Jordan, or stars cease in their arcs!’
She spoke, and to show her sincerity, wept [215]
tears like jewels spilling out over her cheeks.
“Suddenly, a great fear took hold of me
bone-deep; my knees grew weak; night swamped
my eyes: three times I tried my best to speak;
three times I could make no sound, not one word. [230]
Then I heard someone: ‘The bridal bed and couch—
spare it! But preserve your permitted marriage.’
Getting up, I fixed my eyes on this woman:
terrifying! Until finally I spoke:
‘Who has joined us, virgin, against heaven’s will? [235]
Who (for I never sought this wedding day) has
implicated me in this monstrousness? This
was not what my old father, a seer, prophesied
as a senior priest of the temple when I was a boy:
he said I should never enter into marriage [240]
—or else that my marriage would make me famous.
Come then: I will tell you what I’ve decided
since the powers above have joined us, scaring
us with terrible portents; now and always
you shall preserve intact your virginity. [245]
But I wouldn’t dare dissolve these sacred wedding
bonds: we will live together in the same house,
me as your father, you as daughter, always.
In that sense that I embrace you, now and always.
Your piety, and my advanced years, require it.’ [250]
She agreed, and slept elsewhere in the house.
I will say nothing of the monstrous portents
I saw, shaking and insomniac, that night.”
There's something strange, even a little creepy, about this episode. It is doctrinally sound, of course, by the standards early Renaissance Catholicism: Jewish marriage had two phases, a pre-consummation betrothal and a post-consummation actual marriage. The idea is that Joseph contracts the former, and so is properly married to Mary, but doesn't follow-through on the latter; thus was the virginity of Mary preserved. This was considered a very important matter by the Church (and, so far as I understand modern Catholicism, still is today) although for the life of me I can't see why. Nonetheless, Vida has to write a scene in which a horrible old geezer marries a beautiful girl young enough to be his daughter, with her going off with him expecting to have to have sex.
There is no sex, of course; although by the same token sex is hardly purged from this scene. On the contrary, it is rather egregiously present, throughout the rather breathless, claustrophobic intimacy of this scene: the reiterated stress on night, all the weeping—so many fluids! Tears pouring from all the eyes, making the floor wet, and compared in that simile in lines 209-212 to a ‘mother tree’ wounded by a carelessly thrust sickle, and pouring out sticky sap. All very sexual, even as the passage repeatedly repudiates both the specific idea that Joseph feels any sexual desire for Mary, and the compatibility of sex and religion more generally. It's all a bit doth-deny-too-much, and the more hysterical and insistent it becomes the less we believe it.
It’s clearly ‘about’ sex, in that distinctive and surprisingly popular idiom in which artists talk about sex by not talking about sex, or by specifically repudiating sex. The passage starts with Saint Anne’s crazy dance about the house, filled with libidinal bacchanal (quite specifically: bacchatur) ecstasy—Vida’s lines:
Ecce autem, ut prœsens aderat quoque pronuba, cœtu... draws on Vergil's account of the Sybil's crazy dance in Book 6 of the Aeneid. This moment in Vergil's poem is prophetic (in that Aeneas will go on into the underworld and so see the future), and divinely-inspired, since the Sybil's power comes from Apollo. But Vergil's dance sees the Sybil ridden by the god, in a desperate, quasi-sexual frenzy:
in medio Anna parens, subito correpta furore,
plena Deo, tota (visu venerabile) in aede
bacchatur, tollitque ingentem cœlo ululatum.
All at once the girl's mother, Anna, who was also present as a matron of honour, was inspired by God to dance madly through the house—a holy sight!—and raise a great noise to heaven. [Gardner's translation]
Cumaea SibyllaThat's a strange kind of intertext, it seems to me.
horrendas canit ambages antroque remugit,
obscuris vera involvens: ea frena furenti
concutit, et stimulos sub pectore vertit Apollo,
... furor et rabida ora. [Aeneid 6:98-102]
The Cumaean Sybil sings from the shrine her dreadful riddles and booms from her cave, hiding truth in darkness; and as she does so, Apollo shakes the reins as she rages, strikes her with the goad under her breast, frenzied and raving.
And then there are the words applies to Mary herself, after Joseph's night of nonconsummation: in lines 233-34 he calls her virgina horrenda, ‘horrendous virgin’ (horrendus means ‘horrible, horrendous’, from horreō ‘dread, be afraid of’; Gardner goes with ‘awe-inspiring young woman’). A few lines later he calls his wedding a ‘monster’, monstrum: ‘a divine portent, an ill-omen’, something shown to us (from moneo, to show: from this root we get the French montre, and the English demonstrate). But what is shown to us, here, is precisely something not happening, the opposite of a consummation—a dysummation, perhaps.
That said, I have to concede that this is a rather twenty-first century way of reading this passage. Historicising the text is to understand how energetically questions of sexual connection and consent in marriage were being debating across the medieval and early Renaissance period. Irven M. Resnick discusses the growth of what he calls ‘consent theory’ in this era. Ideas of marriage began to change by the early middle ages, partly through pressure from the church. There was an increasing movement to outlaw and prevent clerical marriages, so as to distinguish the spiritual union of churchmen from the physical unions of the laity. As part of this movement, the idea of female consent, in a marital and therefore sexual sense, became more important than it had been before. Prior to this
marriages, at least among the members of the nobility, were usually arranged for economic or political advantage. Great families agreed upon some mutual benefit, and the two parties were brought together. The families exchanged promises, con- cluded a marriage agreement or pact, and provided a dowry or bride-price. Then the couple completed or consummated the marriage by sexual union, for marriage's primary purpose was to provide for the continuation and security of the noble house. The desires of the betrothed couple were almost irrelevant. A bride's mere presence at the desponsatio or betrothal was construed as a form of implied consent. Her explicit consent was useful but, in its absence, authorities simply assumed her obedience to paternal command. [Resnick, ‘Marriage in Medieval Culture: Consent Theory and the Case of Joseph and Mary’, Church History, 69:2 (2000), 352]Resnick suggests that insisting upon consent as crucial in marriage amounted to a power-grab by the church:
Since marriage was viewed by churchmen as a sacrament and an act of religious significance, it was important to church authorities to gain control of the social institution as well. A way of asserting its control was to substitute for customary forms defining marriage an alternative model ... the proposal of the consent of the parties themselves as an efficient cause of marriage. This ecclesiastical model, rooted in Roman law, would in effect limit the power of heads of families. Since it was the consent of the two parties to marriage that was essential, parental approval might be desirable but not necessary. As a result, the economic and social outcomes for which marriages had been arranged became increasingly uncertain. At the same time, a new or renewed emphasis on consent as the constitutive element in marriage also had the (perhaps unintended) effect of establishing a certain measure of equality between the prospective bride and bridegroom, since each one was required to agree to the union. Further, if consent—an internal disposition of the will—was the efficient cause of marriage, then to the extent that church authorities could reserve determinations of consent for ecclesiastical jurisdiction, they could extend their control over Christian marriage and society.Gardner shows how the peculiar circumstances of Joseph and Mary's marriage focused these concerns. There was, on the one hand, an increasingly widespread sense that a sexless marriage, a spiritual union between husband and wife, was superior to a carnal marriage (as Jesus is married to his church; as Joseph was married to Mary). ‘Thus Peter Abelard viewed the marriage of Joseph and Mary as a positive model, established by consent alone apart from sexual relations ... Ambrose advanced the idea that marriage consisted in the mutual agreement of the couple, not in their carnal copulation, while Augustine added that the bond of matrimony remained permanent even when the couple had agreed to abstain forever from the carnal enjoyment of the marriage bed.’ On the other hand, encouraging members of the laity to live in such unions would tend to erode the difference between clerics and ordinary people. And that would never do.
One way you could be sure that sex had taken place in a marriage was the birth of a child (‘for a consummation theory, children provided an objective sign of consent—just as their absence might provide grounds to question the consensual basis of the marriage-thereby establishing a convenient harmony between the needs of aristocratic families and theological requirements’, notes Resnick). Well: Joseph and Mary had a child, a miraculous one. A visible embodiment of consent, the sexless act of sex, consummation in its purest form.
Viewed from this angle, Vida's intense focus in this (quite lengthy) passage becomes about consent as such: becomes, that is, about the opacity of consent, given or not-given in the privacy of a secluded marriage bed, and yet absolutely necessary. Becomes about the world-shaking implications of consent being solicited and offered. It's about what is demonstrated, the monstrosity of something shown by being hidden, of being offered by being withheld; and about the terror, the sexual terror, of the man caught in this complicated web of commitment and consent.
The image at the top is one of the stained glass windows at the Church of Saint William in Round Rock: The Betrothal of Mary and Joseph.
[Next: lines 254-276]
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