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Leaving Wilton: Gunhild and the
Phantoms of Agency
by Katherine
O'Brien O'Keeffe, University of Notre Dame
"Amasti amantem te comitem Alanum Rufum."
"I stayed because I was scared, not because I liked him."
—Gypara Bek, kidnapped Kyrgyz bride.
Separated by time and place, the two epigraphs of my essay speak to each
other from the narratives of women's agency within which each finds its
meaning. In the first, Anselm of Canterbury writes to Gunhild, a nun of
Wilton who had been taken from the convent by a powerful Norman magnate.
In two remarkable letters, Anselm presents Gunhild to herself as a woman
who has chosen an inappropriate love, having abandoned her true
spouse, Christ, for a mortal lover. Anselm's emplotting of the abduction
of Gunhild within two interlocking narratives of women's identity—marriage
and the religious life—has framed contemporary understanding of this moment
in Gunhild's life in terms of will and choice. Indeed, Anselm's letters
have been so convincing that much contemporary scholarship has viewed Gunhild's
abduction in terms of romance rather than rape. In order to construct Gunhild
as a willing agent, Anselm draws on the master narratives of will and consent
within which religious women were embedded in the early Middle Ages, using
language drawn from both canonical collections and religious ritual, in
order to imagine a Gunhild responsible for her own abduction. In doing so,
he ascribes to Gunhild what I am calling a "phantom agency," an agency that
has only a rhetorical existence and functions solely to indict her for collusion
in her own rape. In this essay, I trace the cultural logic of Anselm's narrative
by examining its sources in canonical and liturgical texts, showing how
a "master narrative" of individual agency came into being as a
way of protecting group identity—here, a group of women bound to life in
the convent at Wilton. We can imagine that Gunhild, like Gypara bek, "stayed
because she was scared"—and if we cannot in the end uncover her motivations,
we can at least expose the ideological interests at work in Anselm's version
of her life.
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