Clothes Maketh the Man; Absence Maketh the Monster:Transformation and Anxiety in Bisclavret as a Corollary of the Medieval Christian Imaginary

Abstract

Deriving from the unclothed state of Pliny’s ‘monstrous races’ and Adam and Eve’s shameful nudity after The Fall, the Medieval Christian imaginary faced nakedness with distinct anxiety, ultimately positioning this uncovering as an identifier of monstrosity (Clifton 2003, 642; Mittman 2015, 49). For the mid-12th Century court of King Henry II, who constituted the audience of Marie de France’s Bisclavret, transformative clothing in reconfiguring human to beast signalled a revelatory polarity that established the nobleman as an obverse to the monster (Marie de France n.d., ll. 67-98). 

From its capacity to conceal, Christo-English society regarded clothing as a deceitful actor relative to the already established ‘other.’ Be that the fictional Plinian races or the demonized Jew of 12th and 13th century England — equally fictitious but ‘real’ in Christian imagination — both figures were met with suspicion and violent mistrust correlative to reverse motions of clothing the monstrous body (Strickland 2003). Such condemnation, mirroring that of Bisclavret’s wife, is confirmed in psalters and bestiaries contemporary to the poem and is thus indicative of this reactionary fear of an apparent interloper in public consciousness. The transgression of Bisclavret’s re-entrance into courtly company after the non-consensual relocation of his clothing, however, is morally neutralized by his explicit non-transgression of hierarchical conduct. Despite the necessity of attire for admission to hegemonic society, he suspends the aggressive binary of the clothed and unclothed body as a stand-in for the bestial and the human, identifying the tenuous boundaries between each state and the accompanying discomfort towards corporeal liminality (Marie de France n.d., ll. 67-98).