The Woman's Body in the Hortus Conclusus: Queer Femininity from Genesis to Chaucer's "Knight's Tale"

Abstract

The space of the hortus conclusus, or walled garden, is often depicted in medieval literary culture as a peculiar location where societal norms can be temporarily subverted. Ever since the primordial garden of Eden, these loci amoeni have been associated with spiritual contemplation and, at the same time, with sensual and carnal delights, fostered by the lush shades of the pleasure garden. Unsurprisingly, the garden’s inhabitants par excellence are women, whose bodies are contained – some might say imprisoned - within the walled garden and scrutinized by patriarchal structures seeking complete control over female sexual agency. Nonetheless, by virtue of the garden’s heterotopic nature, the women contained therein, ranging from Eve in Genesis to Emelye in Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale,” can obtain for themselves a degree of sexual and authorial agency which allows them to challenge heteronormativity and queer the space of the hortus conclusus. By drawing on the work of queer theorist Sara Ahmed, this study explores the role of women in a number of biblical and literary enclosed gardens, in order to determine how feminine queerness shapes the literary space of the garden. The fictional women imprisoned within medieval walled gardens are necessarily in a dialogue with biblical models of chastity on the one hand, and negative examples of sinfulness on the other, but they often choose to abandon this dualistic thinking in order to find their own version of queerness within the hortus conclusus. The example of Eve in Genesis, the Shulamite in the Song of Solomon, the Virgin Mary, Christine de Pizan, May and Emelye in Chaucer’s tales and the poet’s beloved lady in the Kingis Quair might instruct modern readers on how to approach the space of the garden as a potentially queer location by highlighting the subversive power of grotesqueness, abjection, ugliness, and disorder.