Returning the Gaze: Men and Masculinities in the "Dánta Grádha"

Author(s): Grace Neville

Source: Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium , 1998/1999, Vol. 18/19
(1998/1999), pp. 298-311
Published by: Department of Celtic Languages & Literatures, Harvard University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20557348

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 Returning the Gaze:
Men and Masculinities in the Danta Gr?dha

Grace Neville

In recent years, feminism has propelled literary scholarship in new

and ever more interesting directions. Sometimes these strides are so great,
and so much important work remains to be covered in areas such as the
representation of women in literature, that there is a danger of overlooking
the other side of the coin, an essential side of the story?the literary
representation of men and masculinities. As if only women were gendered
beings, as if men were somehow above examination.1 I have therefore
decided to take as the topic of this paper the representation of men and
masculinities in the 1926 edition of the Danta Gr?dha. The Danta
Gr?dha is a collection of 106 medieval and early modern poems dating
mostly from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. These poems of
love or about love were edited and published by the great Irish scholar,
T.F. O'Rahilly, at the Cork University Press in 1925, with a second
edition (amended and expanded), running to about 3500 lines of poetry, in
1926. While most of these texts are anonymous, thirty-one of them have
been attributed with varying degrees of certainty to two main groups:

(i) native Irish poets (professionals like S?athr?n C?itinn,

Eochaidh ? hE?dhasa and amateurs like Maghnas ?
Domhnaill) and
(ii) poets of Anglo-Norman origin (like Riocard do B?rc).
In content, these poems sometimes recall the amour courtois movement of
medieval Europe. To what extent, if any, these poems have been
influenced by the amour courtois movement has been a subject for
discussion among critics.2

1 Fenster, "Why Men?" in Medieval Masculinities.

2 ? Tuama 1988, Mac Craithl989, Neville 1982, 1995.

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 GRACE NEVILLE

So are there any men to be found in what Robin Flower calls these
"celebrations of ladies"?3 Or have they all been pushed out to the margins
or even over the edge by the concentration here on women - beautiful
women -- with endless, mesmeric evocations of their hair (with its
profusion of loops, curls, ringlets, waves, fringes), their eyes (like g?ass,
candles, dew, stars, crystal), their skin (like snow, chalk, lime) and so
forth? The first point to be made is that the Danta Gr?dha are, indeed,
full of men - especially men's voices - voices filled with anger, desire,
sarcasm, longing, regret, anguish. And who are these men? They art
lovers, former lovers and aspiring lovers, along with a motley crew of
rivals, husbands, clerics, blind men and corpses. The backdrop to these
poems is busy with hosts of other men famous in Celtic and Latin
mythology (characters like Naoise, Diarmaid and Narcissus). Their lofty
social status - for they are noblemen -- is underlined by constant
reference to their involvement in typical aristocratic pastimes like hunting,
Most of the poems in this anthology are anonymous; most are
male-narrated. It does not follow, of course, that they were all composed
by men: that is another issue. Even on the rare occasions when the
narrator is a woman,4 this, on its own, is no proof that the author was
indeed a woman. At that, only one poem in the anthology has been
attributed to a named woman, Isibeul Ni Mhic Cailin.5
The focus of these poems is overwhelmingly the beautiful woman
whom the narrator would wish to control and have for his own. To quote
Robin Flower: "the ladies celebrated in these poems are beautiful after one
pattern, the bright-haired type always admired where a population is
mixed of dark and fair."6 The evocation of this unchanging beauty fills
verse after verse, page after page. Even her eyebrows merit a praise poem
to themselves.7 Where then, if anywhere, one might ask, is the viewer, the
voyeur, the male narrator? It is obvious that just as a camera does not film
itself, the viewer presents not himself but the focus of his gaze, the

3 Q'Rahilly, T.F., with introduction by Robin Flower, Danta GrMm, xxvi.

Hereafter cited as DG.
4DG41,54,96.
SDG54.
6 DG, p.xxvi.
7 See DG 66: 28.
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 RETURNING THE GAZE

beautiful woman. However, even within these parameters, he does hint at

physical representations of himself, of the aspiring lover with his white
skin and flowing ringlets; aristocratic attributes essential if one is to merit
love, for ~ in the world of the Danta Gr?dha, as in amour courtois circles
~ only well-born people are worthy of love or even attention. Indeed, it is
interesting that these same physical attributes of the self-styled handsome
nobleman are also those of the beautiful woman: white skin and flowing
hair.8 Similar blending is to be noted in the endearments used by one
female narrator in addressing her husband and lover: a bhl?th
flonnchraobh, a ghrianghal sn?imh shamhraidh-se, a bhl?th coilleadh
cumhraidhe ('blossom of fair boughs', 'soft sunny Summer haze',
'blossom of the scented wood'.9 Such eulogies are pointedly not gender
specific, as if perfect beauty transcends (heals?) divisions into male and
female and attains a kind of godly, pre-lapsarian oneness, a sort of
androgyny.10
Not all descriptions of the man's physique depict him as some
kind of Adonis, however. Indeed, one narrator who imagines that he is
desired by hosts of women advances not the slightest reason ~ physical or
otherwise ? why this should be so.11 In fact, a man can be old and gray
but still physically attractive to women (according to himself at any rate!)
although narrator after narrator declares that for a woman to deserve male
attention she must at the very least be young and beautiful. Only a tiny
minority of narrators express any interest in women other than beauties.
One such woman is called Gr?inne ? 'the ugly one'/ 'grain' (from Latin
granum)}2 Through her name, she may in fact echo countless older texts
in which an ugly woman is transformed into a young, fertile beauty as
soon as she and the rightful heir meet. In Danta Gr?dha five, the narrator
says that, unlike his peers, he is not averse to dark-haired women... as
long as they are beautiful! In other words, the underlying credo has not
been disturbed: male narrators are entitled to nothing but the best ? dark

8 Diarmaid na bruinne b?ine, DG 7:6.

9 DG, 41: 2, 76,90.
10 See Kiberd, Men and Feminism, 1985).
11 DG 12.
12 DG 6.

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 GRACE NEVILLE

haired beauties or personifications of sovereignty/ fertility. Nothing - or

rather no one ~ else will do. Consequently, particular venom is heaped in
Danta Gr?dha ninety-seven by a man on his wife whom he castigates as
thin, hard, cold ~ in other words, beyond child-bearing age. A double
standard is clearly in operation here as it is highly probable that the man
speaking was the same age as she, though he does not view himself as
being in any way physically undesirable. The same double standard is in
evidence elsewhere in the highly moving poem attributed to S?athr?n
C?itinn (Geoffrey Keating) in which another aging gray narrator imagines
a beautiful young woman propositioning him.13 Thus, with their positive
self-image, the male narrators in the Danta Gr?dha deem themselves to be
always physically desirable to women irrespective of whether they
themselves conform to the canons of great beauty or not.
Moving away from men as physical objects to the more plentiful
representations here of men's characters, one finds in these poems several
types of male hero, people who clearly meet with the approval of the male
narrators. First among them is the man of action. Men are hailed as
creachtach ('aggressive, wounding'); in the distance, they can be seen
marching to war.14 Such a man is decisive: he knows what needs to be
done and scatters orders left and right (12 imperatives in 16 lines15) as he
goes. His success on the field of battle prefigures his triumph in the arena
of love in which men and women are seen not as equals or as
complementary but as sworn enemies. His identity as a sexual predator
(of women) is thus hinted at through his assimilation to images of birds of
prey like hawks, powerful creatures like dragons or wild animals.16
In a handful of upbeat poems here, the male narrators bask in the
warm remembrance of successfiil sexual adventures in the recent past and
look forward confidently to repeat performances in the near future.17 And
one cannot but admire the self-confidence of the narrator who, on seeing a
dejected woman, is convinced that her depression has been triggered off

13 DG 100.
14 DG 71: 28; 41:45.
15DG39:1-16.
"DG7:17,41:34;41:51;.41:81.
17 e.g. DG 38, 78.
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 RETURNING THE GAZE

by her (as yet) unrequited love for him. He prompts her18 and consoles her
that she may yet get lucky! In other words, he sees himself as the first
prize, as every woman's desire.
However, a very different role-model from this successful man of
action is proposed by the poems that close the anthology, poems that may
postdate the bulk of those here and that may have come under the
influence of the Counter-Reformation. In these texts, the male narrator
stridently and confidently advises his male listeners to transcend
physicality and its embodiment ? woman ~ at all costs. Only disaster can
follow if a man relents and ties himself to a woman. Misery not just in
this life but even more so in the next may be the price exacted for rejection
of this advice. In other words, the narrators are not above using moral and
spiritual blackmail to ensure adherence to this dour, isolationist model of
the man-alone. One senses from their tone that they themselves have
managed to reach this superior level of detachment. Even outside these
closing poems, the narrator is often at pains to present himself primarily as
a creature of the intellect, valued from time immemorial as being more
important than anything corporeal (like women): music and conversation
count among his primary activities.19
In the immense majority of poems here, however, the male
narrator positions himself outside these twin versions of dominant
masculinity: He depicts himself neither as the successful man of action nor
as the man who has succeeded in quelling his interest in women. Instead,
in poem after poem, he describes himself as a double failure, someone
who has failed to win his lady and someone who has, at the same time,
also failed miserably to rise above his physical needs and desires. Far
from controlling his corporeality, he is dominated by it, just as any woman
might be according to the conventional wisdom of the day. For at the
most basic level, his body has failed him and this disaster obsesses him.
Poem after poem is filled with details how extensively his bodily integrity
has been violated (by women and love): his body is covered in wounds20

18 b? dorn aslach, DG 11: 38.

19DG65:17.
20 DG 67: 31.

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 GRACE NEVILLE

and is continuing to be wounded every day (s?orghoin;1 aonl?22); his side

has been punctured23 and his heart pierced and broken24. He itemises the
weapons used to wound him: darts,25 arrows26 and arms that,
paradoxically, have never spilt his blood (arm diobhraigtheach n?r dhoirt
m'fhuil27). In a poem attributed to the Kerry poet Piaras Feiriteur,28 the
woman is portrayed as armed and dangerous, deadlier than the male, her
body parts being entirely transformed into lethal weapons. Her eyes aione
can kill countless people.29 Even a glimpse of her plaits or her toes can
kill!30 In constant pain, the narrator concentrates on conveying the exact
nature of this torment that he is experiencing: stinging pains, for
instance.31 And so it goes: he likens himself to a man or a horse that has
received a beating.32 Continuing this depiction of physical wretchedness,
he imagines that love has poisoned him.33 More gruesome still, he has
been decapitated by the woman in images that recall the age-old vagina
dentata motif.34 The end result is on view everywhere: a sick, emaciated,
withered, shrivelled, tormented (stuagh thimdil do chr?idh mo chorp; a
bhean do chr?idh mo chuirpin) creature.35 Any physical attractiveness he
may have had is no more as she has ruined his appearance.36 She has done

21DG69:35.
22 DG 23: 2.
23 DG 66: 21; 72: 15.
24 DG 32: 7; 50: 4.
25 of love, DG 66: 21; see also 65: 4, 8; 66:16, 67: 17.
26 DG 37: 32.
27 DG 20: 25.
28 DG 26.
29 DG 26: 11-2.
30 DG 70, 13: 8; 28: 12.
31 DG 33: 5, 14; 22: 18, 36: 2.
32DG86:12;88.
33 DG 66: 20.
DG 81, see also DG 55; Neville, "Fox eats Heron in Learned Irish Love
Poetry," 1992.
35 DG (sick)30: 24; (emaciated)65: 18; (withered) 25: 21,67:12,79: 21;
(shriveled) 42: 30; (tormented) 67: 38; 74:14.
36 isi sin do mhill mo ghn? DG 22: 10, see also 36: 8.

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 RETURNING THE GAZE

nore than that, however: she has managed to kill him. Men in love are
portrayed as corpses; others address us from beyond the grave.37 For in
the bleak vision of humanity proposed in these verses, it is taken as
axiomatic that heterosexual relationships are a battle-ground, a fight to the
bitter end in which no hostages are taken. Not that death represents the
ultimate disaster: on the contrary, it is welcomed as a release from
unbearable sufferings.38 The ultimate disaster would be to be unable to
die, trapped in an eternal present, deprived of all escape routes.39
The narrator's physical and psychological integrity are no more as
parts of him are declared missing: his heart and soul, his head, his bone
marrow, his strength, his speed on a hillside, his musical prowess, his wits
and his memory.40 Indeed, if his body is no longer under his control but is
suffering at the hands of women and love, his mind is no better off, for the
woman has robbed him of his wits to such an extent that he is now totally
confused, unable to distinguish between night and day, the sun and the
wind, water and wine41: the confusion or lack of mental ability
traditionally attributed to womankind.
Far from being a man of action, he constantly portrays himself as
passive, a prisoner (z ngioll), tied up (do cheanglais mo chorp), in prison (i
bpr?os?n).42 Significantly, many of the love scenes recounted here depict
the narrator supine, immobile, unconscious, asleep on his bed while his
woman initiates some kind of a relationship by coming to visit him in his
sleep.43 Among other images of powerlessness are those involving water,
love/desire being likened to tidal floods that have drowned the narrator.44
In other words, woman/love has immobilized him. She has cut him off
from him male peer group: because of women and love, he is no longer

37 DG 9:18; 25; 28; 30.

38 DG 33,35, 36.
39 DG 34.
40 DG (heart) 16: 117,49:1; (soul) 36: 5,49: 4, 59: 4; (his head, his bone
marrow) 67: 34; (strength) 18: 6, 36: 7; (speed) 36: 9; (prowess) 36: 10; (wits)
30: 22,36: 13,44: 1, 52: 4,67: 25; (memory) 36: 13.
41 DG 68 and 69: 41.
42 DG 36:20,90: 18; 30: 38; 35: 42.
43DG68:9.
44 DG 30: 6; 32: 26; 66:13; 69: 29,39.

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 GRACE NEVILLE

interested in his usual, everyday pursuits: comhr?dh, ce?l, imirt and, of

course, ?/.45 The most he can hope for is the tantalizing experience of
being allowed to gaze on the woman's beauty without ever getting close to
it. His emasculation is complete.
He may have been defeated by women and love but his spirit of
competitiveness lives on as strongly as ever it does in the successful man
of action and in the ascetic model outlined earlier. In this, he is a kindred
spirit of these two alternating versions of masculinity for though he
adheres to neither model, one could argue that one trait is shared by both
successful models and by the failure he sees himself to be - all are
intensely competitive: the action man who (like the parfait amant in
courtly love literature) surpasses himself and succeeds in winning first
prize (his lady), and the ascetic one who conquers his impulses and rejects
women. The competition is with himself.
In the 'suffering model', the male narrator is literally at pains to
point out that he too is the greatest, he too is unsurpassable, first among
the last: last in love and first in suffering. Here, as elsewhere, size matters.
His love is greater than anything to be found in nature, as if some
competition had been declared between himself and nature: no dog ever
gave her first litter and no duck ever gave a stretch of water greater love
than he gave his lady; no doe ever loved her little calf and no bird ever
loved its nest more than he loved her.46 He deems himself to have
succeeded again in surpassing nature as he proclaims that his love will last
until after the sun and the stars have fallen from the heavens.47 Similarly,
the enormity of his suffering mirrors his love in size: it is so huge and so
extreme that no herb or doctor could help.48 It would represent a challenge
for any doctor.49 There is something boastful in his assertion that he is far
beyond help: for anyone to try to cure him of his love would be as
pointless as swimming against a powerful flood or planting a sapling in
sand.50 His plight defeats even the great Celtic healer, Dian C?acht.51

45 DG 65: 17; 69: 25.

46 DG 32: 21-4; 87: 85-88.
47 DG 87: 75-6.
48 DG 31:9-10; 90: 15-6.
49 DG 65: 11.
50 DG 32:53-6.

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 RETURNING THE GAZE

Turning to another religion, Christianity, no one but God's Mother, the

Virgin Mary or indeed God himself could conceivably be of any use to
him.52 But even that is not certain.
And his despair that all he can do is go and gaze on the woman
without ever coming closer to her is not so clear-cut either. A French
minister for culture once declared that a building belongs to the person
who is looking at it at that moment, to the voyeur. As the Danta Gr?dha
narrator feasts his eyes on the object of his desires, slowly itemising her
body parts, even (especially?) those he cannot see (because they are
shrouded in clothing, for instance), edging them out of the shadows by
naming them, one could argue that through such fantasising, such wish
fulfillment, he is calling her into existence, giving birth to her. Time
stands still; past and future are blotted out in favor of an eternal present.
Gabhaim cead af?achsana, 'I take unto myself the right to look at her,'53
he announces. For all its immobility, his act of gazing is, one might argue,
the supreme act of possession.
Many of the lost attributes he mourns he projects onto the belle
dame sans merci, this object of his affections. Like him, she is intensely
competitive, the difference being that she is successful in her
undertakings. She is all-powerful: not only can she kill masses of people
and condemn them to eternal damnation; but she can equally heal the sick
and even bring the dead back to life.54 In other words, life, death and the
hereafter are entirely under her dominion. She is a woman of action: she
stalks him by day,55 pursuing him with her kisses and by night invades his
dreams. When she fails to do this, he actually regrets it.56 One could
argue that, paradoxically, the most conventionally masculine creature in
these verses is none other than this belle dame sans merci.
When I decided to look at the whole question of men and
masculinities in these poems, I must admit that I expected to uncover
patterns similar to those existing in medieval French lyric literature:

51 DG, 53: 3.
52 DG 32: 75-6, 63: 32; 62: 17.
53 DG 75:19.
54 DG 26: 11-2; 83; 37: 26; 16: 2; 15.
55 DG 42: 2.
56 DG 44: 9-10.

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 GRACE NEVILLE

powerful, active men and their opposites, silent immobile women, men
ruled by their intellect, and women slaves to their corporeality, with the
occasional gender-bender like B?roul's Tristan where Iseut is the powerful
active one and Tristan is the wimp. Reader, I was wrong! The fissure Mee
in the Danta Gr?dha is not between two hermetically-sealed categories,
male and female, perceived in the kind of neat binarism often found in
medieval writers.57 In appearance, personality and behavior, male and
female, as we have seen, share many traits here: men are handsome hut m
are women; men are active, but so are women; men are competitive but so
are women. In other words, there is very little essentialism in these texts
as women are portrayed as being not radically different from men but all
too similar. Indeed, intense relationships may not necessarily involve sex
(real or imagined) and may not necessarily be heterosexual. The case of
Danta Gr?dha forty-one, the extraordinary F each f?in an obair-se, aAodh
comes to mind. Far from being, in Robin Flower's words, a "picture of a
woman swaying between two loves... many such pictures have been
drawn, but never one like this';58 or any reconfiguration of the eternal
triangle of wife, husband and lover, critics have suggested that this poem
may in fact be something quite different: an address by a male poet to his
male patron. Similarly, Danta Gr?dha eighty-six recounts the exemplum
of two (presumably male) scholars whose twelve year same-sex
relationship ended acrimoniously. This story springs to the mind of the
male narrator as a comparison for his present predicament in which the
woman he loves has rejected him.
The difference, therefore, is not that men and women have
diametrically opposed personalities or that they inhabit mutually exclusive
worlds. The difference seems to be this: men and women are situated at
opposite ends of the moral spectrum. Men are morally superior to women
who, to put it mildly, have no morals: these ambitious creatures whom the
male narrators understand all too well (because they resemble them so
closely in so many areas) are successes (notably at controlling members of
the opposite sex) because they are cheats, liars, hypocrites, moral
degenerates, daughters of Eve. This idea is, of course, at least as old as

57 See Bullough, "On Being a Male" in Medieval Masculinities.

DGp.xxix.

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 RETURNING THE GAZE

Aristotle, but centuries of filtering through medieval Christianity had not

dimmed its appeal. So, like students at an examination who know that the
person at the next desk may come first because s/he is cheating, their
resentment knows no bounds.

The most some narrators can do in these whistle-blowing

exercises is protest, complain and plead ineffectually. In this context, one
is struck by the fantasies of sexual violence contained in some of these
texts: mo bheith ag coill th'?ghachtal badh aoibhne learn 'n? iarlacht
(Td rather be plundering your virginity than a kingdom'59 is one
narrator's greeting to the woman he desires, interestingly depicting female
virginity as some kind of male possession or spoil, one that is somehow
divorced from the woman herself. In an exemplum involving a woman
tricked by a 'truth-testing device', the narrator joins the woman's husband
in gloating at her discomfiture.60 Through them, one senses that, even at
one remove, the audience may be experiencing a delicious sense of
revenge for a lifetime of perceived wrongs.
This discussion raises the eternal, problematic question of the
relationship between the mentalit? on view in these poems and the society
that produced them. Is this really how people saw things or even how
they lived their lives? Or were these games, some kind of compensation
in literature for perceived grievances against women? Were these poems
mere literary imitations? Or were they deliberate parodies by powerful,
successful people playing at being failures for the amusement of audiences
who knew that they were nothing of the kind? Much ink has been spilt on
this question not just in the Irish case but further afield. It is impossible to
be dogmatic about this: too many gaps still remain too many
contradictions. And, in any case, any body of material spanning several
centuries, languages and countries makes a single answer impossible.
For my part, I tend to agree with the great French historian,
Georges Duby, for whom these posturings were "un jeu d'hommes," a
game played by men in the literature they produced. This was not how

59 DG 32:3-4.
60 DG 83, See also Neville 1996.

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 GRACE NEVILLE

they lived their lives (Duby 1991). To take but one of many examples
from the French context, we may examine the case of the Southern French
nobleman, Guillaume d'Aquitaine (1071-1126). Guillaume, Count of
Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine, was the richest and most powerful
nobleman in France in his day. He owned vast tracts of land spanning the
Southern half of France. His colorful lifestyle is well known, as it clearly
fascinated the chroniclers of the day. They report on how the Pope was so
alarmed by Guillaume's behavior and in particular by the harem he
maintained that he sent his nuncio on an ultimately unsuccessful mission
to persuade Guillaume to mend his ways. His poetry contains some
almost pornographic fabliau-type offerings as well as standard amour
courtois-style material: humble first-person protestations of love and
desire for haughty women with skin like ivory. This latter type of material
which has caused him to be hailed as the earliest amour courtois poet is, to
put it mildly, at odds with the rest of his oeuvre and with what we know of
his lifestyle. One cannot avoid the conclusion that poetry for him
represented a kind of playacting, an opportunity to adopt different
personae for the benefit of his courtly audience. Could the same be true
for the wealthy noblemen and professional poets to whom many of the DG
are attributed? Are the many versions of masculinity they rehearse less
autobiography than showmanship? This is but one of the many tantalizing
questions that remain to be further elucidated in this unique and highly
significant anthology.

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 RETURNING THE GAZE

Bibliography

Primary:

O'Rahilly, T.F. 1926 (2nd ed., expanded, with introduction by Robin

Flower). Ed. Danta Gr?dha, Cork: Cork University Press. [DG]

Secondary:

Bullough, Vern L. 1994. "On Being a Male in the Middle Ages," in Clare
A. Lees, ed. Medieval Masculinities: regarding men in the middle
ages, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 31-45.

Duby, Georges. 1991. Male Moyen Age: de Vamour et autres essais,

(Paris: Flammarion).

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