“Thou Art Inexcusable”: Deflected Disgrace in the Old French Fabliaux

Abstract

This essay proposes that, during the thirteenth century, shame (honte) was the driving force of the Old French fabliaux. A need to rebalance spousal or communal relations via a calculated management, meting out, or, in some cases, judicious deflection of public shame was central, if not centrifugal, to the potency and comic seduction of the majority of the tales. Often it was through a careful and consistent averting of public shame that the fabliaux's provocative play with the private was permitted. The essay's analysis of the endings of more than eighty fabliaux demonstrates how this was the case, proposing that ignorance was spectatorially read as a temporarily soluble form of innocence. Characters who did not know, knew no shame; and such a lack of shame—acceptable through ignorance—worked to preserve social order and to balance relations. Indeed, when ignorance is read as a form of innocence, what comes to light is how non-random and non-liberative the fabliaux might have been.

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