“A Chaste Adulteress and an Unchaste Virgin: Emotions and an Illusion of Female Virtue in the Middle High German Tristan-Tradition.”
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Overview
Overview
Description
Ambiguity is a characteristic feature of the medieval Tristan-stories. No matter whether the authors personally support the fated adulterous love between the two main protagonists (e.g., Gottfried von Strassburg) or consider it sinful and anti-social (Heinrich von Freiberg), they are compelled to walk a fine line in portrayal of their main characters, Tristan and Isolde: despite their dubious behavior, the lovers have to be perceived as virtuous and deserving of the audience’s sympathy. Emotions and gestures constitute one of the ways in which such ambiguity is created. Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and its two sequels by Heinrich von Freiberg and Ulrich von Türheim are products of a performative culture, in which emotions and gestures played an important part in conveying one’s status, age, gender, or virtue. This paper examines the role of laughter and grief in ambiguous or, better say, paradoxical depictions of two female characters—Tristan’s lover, Isolde the Fair, and his wife, Isolde of the White Hands. Despite the former’s unwavering adulterous passion for Tristan and the author’s own oscillating opinion, Isolde of Ireland’s grief in the Petitcrü-episode enables Gottfried to create an image of a virtuous woman (i.e. virtuous adulteress). As for the latter, Isolde of the White Hands’s seductive, and later immoderate, laughter in all three works casts shadow on her depiction as a pure and naïve virgin, thus foreshadowing her fatal role at the end of Heinrich’s and Ulrich’s texts. I argue that even though the two later romances lack Gottfried’s subtlety, the depiction of Isoldes’ emotions in all three texts play with the audience’s assumptions about virginity and chastity, while reinforcing traditional views of female virtue and propriety.
