"The Treasure above All Treasures: Interpreting a Pre-Modern Obsession.”
Presentation
Overview
Overview
Description
The lady’s little red mouth is one of the most prominent and recurrent motifs in medieval literature. Even though it is frequently used as a poetic cliché (particularly in the courtly love poetry), it would be one-sided to see this image only as simple metonymic allusion to female beauty. Many medieval texts go beyond mere rhetoric and invest this particular body part with erotic significance. For this reason, one may be tempted to examine the medieval obsession with the little red mouth through the lens of the Freudian psychoanalysis — in terms of fetish, castration fear, and sublimation. The voyeuristic pleasure of both the male speaker and the listening audience may have played a role in the enormous popularity and perpetuation of the red mouth motif. Yet the medieval use of the red mouth motif simultaneously uncover the limitations of such approach. The Freudian interpretation leaves certain questions unanswered: Is it at all possible to talk about fetish in the case of the mouth— a genital symbol, a part of Medusa’s head and thus a reminder of castration? Isn’t the very purpose of fetish to conceal and distract attention away from the female genitals? Why do medieval texts then so openly savor and play with this image? Finally, why are the male speaker’s praises to the female mouth so frequently accompanied by his emphatic proclamations of the lady’s virtue?
By looking at two late-medieval texts which clearly exploit the little red mouth motif (Der Teichner’s didactic poem “Of Red Mouths” [“Von rôten müenden”] and a Maere “Of the Most Beautiful Woman Called Red Mouth” [“Von der schönsten frawen, genant der rot munt”]), this paper addresses the limitations of the Freudian theory in the case of this popular medieval topos. It argues for the historicist explanation for the eroticization of the female mouth based on the existence of a pan-European tradition connecting the activities of the female mouth to the loss of virginity and to sexual activity.
