Ninth International Colloquium

S.I.T.M. Odense, Denmark 1998

PORNOGRAPHY AND THE SAINTS PLAY

There are times when it pays to be a medievalist. So I thought as I sat watching a drama featuring excruciating violence, explicit sex as female spirituality, pain as a divine test, suffering as a holy ordeal that led along a lurid via crucis from virginity to whoredom to sainthood. I was not watching a medieval drama, but rather the Danish director Lars von Trier's 1996 film Breaking the Waves.

In its shrewd mixture of voyeuristic depravity and heroic sanctity, this film rediscovers what seems to be an old and successful dramatic formula. A rebellious young virgin defies the authorities of her family and community, heeding the voice of God instead, and suffers an ascendingly horrific sequence of ordeals leading to a martyrdom with miraculous consequences. A context of spirituality envelopes, and lends moral justification, to sensational events that might otherwise be mistaken for pornography.

Let me confess, before I pursue the medieval parallels and prototypes for von Trier's film, that the bare summary given above scarcely does justice to the baroque extravaganza of male fantasies enacted in Breaking the Waves. The heroine Bess is a humble, and perhaps mentally retarded member of an insular, puritanical Scottish community (they are so strict they don't believe in church bells) who takes it into her head to marry an outsider - Jan, a virile Scandinavian oil rigger. We witness her defloration in a bathroom during the wedding reception, and her ecstatic initiation into the joys of sex; simultaneously, she develops the ability to channel the voice of God, and conduct self-dialogues with Him. The God voice warns her of trials to come - the price of her pleasure, so it seems - and the trials come quickly, in overwhelming waves, as a series of ordeals for Bess.

Before the film is over, she will have suffered alienation, pillorying and ultimate banishment from her family and community, the maiming, paralysis and near-death of her husband, and, at his mad bidding, a rampage of sexually obsessive behavior, from phone sex to flagrant promiscuity and finally a sordid gang rape on a haunted ship which leads to her death. But Bess has not died in vain - her husband Jan is miraculously cured and made whole again, and when he buries her body at sea the miraculous sound of church bells is heard on high, signaling her magical vindication.

All of this was good enough in 1996 to win Emily Watson an Oscar nomination for her performance as Bess, and the film the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. But is it really medieval?

I would say that it definitely is, that in its mordant focus on the suffering of a vulnerable young woman, and its demonstration of the miraculous power of that suffering to overcome all evils, this fin de siècle film is, in its own gratuitous way, is enacting a saints life. And in his own decadent manner, von Trier can help us to understand more comprehensively what the moral ambiguities, sensational events and miraculous conclusions of a Saints Play are all about.

But first, since I have used it accusatively in my title, we need to define that troublesome word "pornography". The American Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, admitting he didn't know how to define pornography, famously went on to explain "But I know it when I see it." In applying this term to Breaking the Waves, and by extension the medieval Saints Plays, I am indebted to a line of interpretation followed by Diane Taylor in her recent book Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's Dirty War. Viewing a vivid political drama in Buenos Aires, purportedly denouncing torture by staging scenes of graphic violence against the female body, Taylor concluded "The performance replicated and affirmed the fascination with eroticized violenceä the visual frenzy provoked by her abuse seemed closer to pornography" (4).

In the drama which Taylor viewed, as in Breaking the Waves, the female victim dies an excruciating death, yet redemptively, "She dies so that we (the viewers) might liveä As spectators we are required to participate in the misogyny in order to reap the redemptive dividend. Sadism and redemption for the price of one single ticketä the play transformed her pain into public pleasure and titillation." (5-7).

When Taylor pointed out to the playwright Eduardo Pavlovsky that his high-minded drama was actually exploitative and voyeuristic, he was indignant "'How could this play be misogynist? After all, she wins'" (20). The same sentiment, I am sure, would have been expressed by the authors of the numerous vivid medieval Saints Plays on the martyrdoms of Saint Agatha, Saint Agnes, Saint Apollonia, Saint Barbara, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Saint Christina and Saint Dorothea of Caesaria which are the subject of this paper. By intention, and by definition, they are dramatizations of holy events and glorious moral victories of the spirit over the flesh. But is this all, or even primarily, what they mean?

As a genre, the Saints Plays have a strong literary background. From the earliest days of Christianity, historical and/or legendary tales of conversion and martyrdom were preserved and retold, recorded and compiled. By the late Middle Ages this hagiographic tradition had produced massive collections of saints lives such as Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea. It was from these texts, and their characteristic narrative patterns, that the Saints Plays were derived.

One recurrent variety of saints life is that of the virgin martyr. As Karen Winstead points out, this literary genre shares many common features with other categories of saints lives, but has distinctive qualities of its own:

Many of the standard ingredients of virgin martyr legends are found in the accounts of most early Christian martyrs, male or female: the saint refuses to participate in pagan sacrifices, debates her antagonist, affirms the fundamental tenets of Christianity, destroys idols, performs miracles and endures excruciating torments. What distinguishes the legends of most female martyrs from those of their male counterparts is a preoccupation with gender and sexuality. Almost all virgin martyr legends dramatize some threat to the saint's virginityä She is stripped and beaten before an audience of leering spectators. She is hauled to a brothel or otherwise threatened with rape. Her breasts or nipples are torn off. She is shaved or strung up by the hair (5-6).

This profile is remarkably consistent from one virgin martyr's ordeal to the next; it is almost as if one story is continually being retold. As Judith Wogan-Browne summarizes it:

The virgin is young, beautiful, rich and noble. Her father is part of the pagan establishmentä she is secretly a Christian. sooner or later she is approached for marriage, seduction or rape and is persecuted by her tyrannous father and/or lustful suitor for her refusal of these optionsä Desired and tortured by officialdom, the virgin is threatened, then incarcerated, stripped naked, publicly flogged, lacerated, burnt and boiledä Her conduct during all this remains impeccable (315).

It would be powerful enough to hear such grisly tales recounted, and more powerful yet to see visual images of them painted on a church wall. But if such acts were to be dramatically reenacted, the actors and audiences would find themselves in highly problematic aesthetic territory.

The wonder is that events of this kind were indeed staged - not on rare occasions, but widely across medieval Europe in numerous localities over many centuries. The 10th century plays of Hrosvitha offer an early example. Hrosvitha's Sapientia subjects its three female heroines Faith, Hope and Charity to flogging, boiling in oil and beheading. The tone of the action, as Richard Axton points out, is consistently comic:

Faith jumps laughingly into the boiling oil. She is thrust on a gridiron, and calls it "a little boat becalmed." When a cauldron of pitch and wax is brought, she pretends to swim about in it. The horrors of torture are turned to child's play (174).

It may be argued that these scenes were not staged. It is possible that Hrosvitha's plays were purely closet dramas - a point which is still being debated among critics of her work. But the spread of Saints Plays across Europe in the later Middle Ages, attested by voluminous records and extant texts, makes it clear that staged scenes of violence against virtuous women were not isolated incidents, but one of the staple commodities of medieval drama.

Even in England, where nearly all of the texts have been obliterated by time and iconoclastic zeal, there is ample evidence of such a tradition. The story of Saint Catherine of Alexandria seems to have been a particular favorite, dramatized in the 12th century in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, in London at Skinner's Well in the 14th century, in Coventry in the late 15th century and Hereford in the early 16th century. Though the texts of these performances are lost, Clifford Davidson connects them visually to a sequence of wall paintings in Sporle, Norfolk showing the full story: Saint Catherine contending with the Emperor Maximus, refusing to worship an idol, her naked humiliation, whipping, torture on the wheel, the breaking of the wheel and wounding of the emperor, Catherine tortured, condemned, beheaded, martyred and worshipped (48-49).

The English Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is of course famous for its stage violence. The neo-classic critics who criticized this tendency as "medieval" were probably right; the frequent scenes of violence against defenseless females can plausibly be connected to the Saints Play tradition. The ordeals of such Shakespearean heroines as Lavinia in Titus Andronicus or Hermione in The Winter's Tale, or of Celia in Ben Jonson's Volpone, are hagiographically pathetic. And as late as 1620 Thomas Dekker and Thomas Massinger were dramatizing the martyrdom of a Catholic Saint - Saint Dorothea of Caesaria - in the public playhouses of Jacobean London in a play called The Virgin Martyr, complete with evil pagans, tortures, guardian angels and miracles (Wasson, 252-253).

From medieval France a far wider range of evidence is available to demonstrate the undoubted popularity of this genre, with over 100 extant Saints Play texts, and records of lost plays on the lives of some 40 additional saints. Among these many examples I want to give particular emphasis to the dramatized legend of Saint Barbara, which Lynette Muir identifies as 'the most frequently performed of all saints plays in France between 1450 and 1550 (1986, 165;170-173). (1)

The life of Saint Barbara follows the familiar virgin martyr pattern: daughter of a rich pagan, she secretly becomes a Christian, refuses to marry the suitor picked out for her, and is imprisoned in a tower by her angry father, where she defies his will by having three windows, symbolizing the Trinity, installed during his absence. Infuriated, he has her tortured and hauled off to a high hill for beheading. Just as the fatal ax decapitates brave Barbara, her father is felled by a miraculous bolt of lightning - winning Barbara a place in heaven and a role thereafter as patron saint of miners and artillerymen.

This exciting tale is dramatized in two extant French texts - a five- day manuscript play of 20,000 lines from the 15th century, and a two-day 16th century printed play of 3500 lines, reprinted in several editions. In addition there are records of three-day and four-day versions performed at various localities. Elizabeth Lalou notes that when this play was performed in Metz in 1495, people arrived as early as 4 a.m. to secure a good place to watch the action. What they saw may have been edifying, but it was certainly grisly - Barbara was whipped with rods, torn with iron hooks, placed on a bed of lacerating pot shards, and then burned with red-hot blades before she was decapitated (37, 42).

How did the medieval audience respond to these horrific events? Lalou reminds us that death and violence were a part of everyday life in medieval France, and that the late Middle Ages saw a rise in the frequency of public executions and torture (39-41). Crowds frequently responded with pity as well as fear to these real events - did they identify equally with the torture of Saint Barbara? A clue to the realities of audience response lies in an anecdote related by Muir, documenting a 1506 performance at Nancy before the Duke of Burgundy in which the role of Barbara was played by a woman (1995, 55). While the instance is fascinating from several angles, it serves to remind us that a live actor (in this case female) endured the stage tortures, including the beheading, and lived to tell the tale. (2)

The technical special effects, or feintes, employed on the French medieval stage to produce such illusions are well documented. In this case a dummy was substituted at the last moment for the actor playing the victim, in such a manner as to make it appear that the actor had been decapitated.

I want to make the point that the dramatic effectiveness of such a scene depends upon an audience's confidence that no real blood has been shed. Freed from any genuine humanitarian concern for the well being of the actor, audience members can enjoy the titillation of an obscene moment of cruelty, as well as the skill of the special effects. It is precisely this conscious suspension of disbelief which permits an audience to applaud as a magician "saws" a woman in half.

In the case to the Saint Barbara play, a subsequent scene of apotheosis would not merely convey the character to her heavenly reward, but also confirm the unblemished survival of the actor. Nevertheless, it seems to me that what has transpired in the theatrical assault on the body of Saint Barbara is deeply pornographic. The audience has been invited to participate, voyeuristically, in the defilement of a virgin; simultaneously, they have been provided with the edifying illusion that they are witnessing not something degrading, but something inspiring - the triumph of a holy martyr-in-the-making. This seems to my eye to be a highly compromised aesthetic and moral transaction, but certainly one with built-in popular appeal.

The same analysis could be applied to the stage assaults on numerous other virgin martyrs, including the famous theatrical martyrdom of Saint Apollonia depicted in Fouquet's miniature. I want to mention one other French example which, through its heightened sexual content, seems even more pornographic than the previously described plays. The 14th century Occitan Play of Saint Agnes is a sweeping lyric piece including 21 musical interludes, but the tale it enacts is the familiar story of a virgin martyr. Agnes is a young woman who clings to chastity, rejecting marriage to a noble Roman. When he attempts to rape her, he is miraculously struck dead. Hauled before the Roman court, Agnes is condemned to imprisonment in a brothel. There, stripped of her clothes, she is subjected to scenes of humiliation, involving lechers and other ribald onlookers. This brothel scene is, of course, a cliff-hanging prelude to execution and divine intervention, which in this case involves a burning at the stake and the appearance of Christ and three archangels - an event sufficiently impressive to effect the conversion of all the onlookers to Christianity, including the executioners, the prostitutes in the brothel and even Agnes' erstwhile would-be rapist, who has been magically resurrected from the dead to repent his sins, as Agnes is escorted to heaven by a flight of angels. Several of these last touches do not appear in the literary source of the play, and are evidently the dramatic invention of the anonymous Provençal playwright (Schulze-Busaker, 159). This is one instance, and probably not an exceptional one, in which dramatization produces further sensationalism.

Such salacious renditions of the lives of the virgin martyrs may be quintessentially French, but are hardly confined to France. In a recent article Nerida Newbigin has studied the texts of Italian plays about martyred virgins published in Florence in the 1490's. Among these works are a Saint Barbara play in which she is burned on the arms with a flaming torch and hit on the head with a hammer, a Saint Agatha play in which the heroine has her breasts hacked off, and a Saint Apollonia play in which the eleven year-old victim is beaten with rods and has her teeth broken before she is beheaded.

Even more extreme is the Rappresentazione di Sancta Christina, which went through 15 printed editions and features a heroine who is turned over by her exasperated father to torturers. They tie her to a column and tear her breasts with billhooks. When she throws a piece of her own flesh at her father, he orders a fiery cauldron to be brought for her. Her prayers cause the cauldron to overturn, spreading fire and death on all sides but not harming Christina. Undeterred, her tormentors tie a millstone around her neck and attempt to drown her in a river. This too fails, as do their subsequent attempts to boil her in a vat of pitch, oil and turpentine, cast her into a fiery furnace, and throw her to the serpents. Eventually Christina's breasts are cut off and her tongue is cut out - but nevertheless, she still speaks(!), pleading with the King to turn to Jesus Christ, but only succeeding in triggering his final infamy, as he shoots her fatally through the body with an arrow (179-181).

Newbigin sees a clear difference between male and female martyrdom plays in the Florentine tradition; it is only in the latter plays that victims are praised for their beauty and lusted after by their torturers. As for the torturers themselves, "there can be no doubt that this imagined mutilation of the female body is linked to a profound terror and hatred of female sexuality" (183).

This perception of enacted misogynist fantasies leads us back to the ideas of Diane Taylor and other contemporary theorists who see a concerted assault on the bodies of women as the true content of pornography. And as Newbigin adds, "Delight also lies in violence and in the representation of itä One printed edition at least makes it clear that the torments themselves are a source of pleasure to the audience. The play of Valentino and Giuliana 'contiene assai Martiri & belli & piacevoli' ('contains many Martyrdoms both beautiful and pleasing')" (186)

Newbigin finds the evidence for performance of these plays inconclusive. They may have been produced by male confraternities and other groups, though there is also some evidence that women could have performed them, subsequent to their publication. Nevertheless she identifies the plays with the acting-out of male fantasies, concluding that the excessiveness of the violence makes these texts a curious mixture of holy legend and "transgressive carnival fareä authorized by dominant malesäfor the devout consumer" (192).

This brief survey of medieval virgin martyr plays from England, France and Italy, though hardly exhaustive, suggests some pertinent conclusions. The violence and sexual exploitation of contemporary films, however deplorable, is nothing new. Nor is the fascination with excruciating special effects, nor indeed the redeeming social context in which these exploitative events are couched. Breaking the Waves is akin to medieval drama, and medieval drama is akin to Breaking the Waves.

And both, for whatever that is worth, are intrinsically imaginary. The fakeness of a medieval Saints Play, or of a pseudo-spiritual erotic melodrama like Breaking the Waves, is the key to its dramatic success. However 'realistic" the violence, it necessarily occurs in a distanced and artificial environment far afield from everyday life. Subliminally reassured, the audience is permitted to indulge its worst imaginings, to enjoy the gratuitous sexual degradations rather than be disgusted by them.

The viewers may "witness" the worst excesses of torture and violence to women, with a certainty that the unfortunate victims are indeed quite safe, merely "faking" the terror and anguish they seem to be experiencing. They are certainly actors, not real female victims. They are (in most cases) male actors anyway, in the medieval context. And in any event, even in fictional terms, they are impersonating saints whose legendary sufferings were not merely creative, but holy. As such, medieval virgin martyr plays can be seen not merely as the prototypes of our own pornography but also, rightly considered, as pornography in the first place.

Robert Potter
Department of Dramatic Art
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA
potter@humanitas.ucsb.edu

Works Cited

Axton, Richard. European Drama of the Early Middle Ages. London: Hutchinson, 1974

Davidson, Clifford. "The Middle English Saint Play and Its Iconography." The Saint Play in Medieval Europe. ed. Clifford

Davidson. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1986. 31-122.

Lalou, Elizabeth. "Les Tortures dans les mystères: Théâtre et réalité." Medieval English Theatre 16 (1994): 37-50.

Muir, Lynette. "The Saint Play in Medieval France." The Saint Play in Medieval Europe. ed. Clifford Davidson. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1986. 123-180.

Muir, Lynette. Biblical Drama in Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Newbigin, Nerida. "Agata, Apollonia and other martyred virgins: did

Florentines really see these plays performed?" European Medieval Drama 1 (1997): 175-197.

Pottier, Lucien. La Vie et Histoire de Madame Sainte Barbe, le mystère joué á Laval en 1493 et les peintures de Saint-Martin-de-Connée. Laval: n.p., 1902.

Schulz-Busacker, Elizabeth. "Le théâtre occitan au XIVe siècle: le Jeu de Sainte Agnès." The Theatre in the Middle Ages. ed. Herman Braet, Johan Nowé, Gilbert Tournoy. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1985. 130-193.

Taylor, Diane. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's Dirty War. Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

Wasson, John. "The Secular Saint Plays of the Elizabethan Era." The Saint Play in Medieval Europe. ed. Clifford Davidson. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1986. 241-260.

Winstead, Karen A. Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Wogan-Browne, Judith. "Saints Lives and the Female Reader." Forum for Modern Language Studies 27 (1991) 314-332.

1) The story of Saint Barbara does indeed appear to be apocryphal; she was decanonized in the course of the Second Vatican Council, and her many ordeals labled a 'pious legend" - much to the disappointment of the city in California where I live, which bears her name. Subsequently I wrote a play about Saint Barbara's response to these events, Saint Barbara in the Flesh, produced in 1995 in Santa Barbara by the theatre company Dramatic Women.

2) For an exploration of the possibility (or is it an urban myth?) that actual deaths occurred as the climax to Saints Plays, see Jody Enders' forthcoming study Death By Drama, and other Medieval Urban Legends.