Of Monsters and Men: The Power of Female Imagination in Les Quatre Sohais Saint Martin

Abstract

Fabliau were a popular genre and existed practically in every vernacular language, though the most prominent corpus comes from the north of France. For lack of a more precise alternative, the genre has mainly been defined in very general terms, by way of its length, its content, and its effect: All fabliaux are short (ranging from eighteen lines to approximately twenty printed pages), they are mostly sexual or scatological in theme, and they are meant to be funny. But, as R. Howard Bloch states, “if the fabliaux have any coherence as a generic grouping…, this unity lies less in a single origin, thematics, intention, or form than in the sustained reflection upon literary language writ so large across these rhymed comic tales whose subject, mimetic realism nonwithstanding, is the nature of poetry itself ”1 In other words, the genre’s preoccupation with sexual organs and sexual language stands for a primary literary desire, not a sexual one. With this premise in mind, I want to look at Les quatre Sohais saint Martin and its shape-shifting bodies from a Bakhtinian perspective, viewing the grotesque body as “in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body.”2 Les quatre Sohais saint Martin, “Saint Martin’s Four Wishes,” is also, as I will argue, informed by a solid background knowledge of contemporary medical literature.

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