Swooning in "The Song of Roland"

While I thought that Sharon Kinoshita's article was persuasive and illuminating in its discussion of the deployment of gender, I still think the world of The Song of Roland is primarily a man's world. It's a world of knights and war and territorial expansion and homosocial relationships between men. And, yet, it's also a world where there is a considerable amount of weeping and fainting, two activities that have been traditionally associated with women. I kept finding myself saying aloud, as I was reading Roland, "Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint!" courtesy of Jane Austen, because it's a marvel that these knights and warriors, who pierce each other with lances and see bowels and brains spill out of their companions, would have the sort of constitution that would resort to swooning when they are overcome with emotions. I agree with Kinoshita that the poem "is haunted by a crisis of nondifferentiation" when it comes to the Christians and Saracens but it is also haunted, to some extent, by this same crisis when it comes to gender. The men are brave and noble just as they are affectionate and emotional.

The Introduction to my copy of Roland, by Dorothy L. Sayers, does mention that by the standards of feudal epic this sort of behavior is correct as the death of a beloved nephew or close friend warrants weeping and swooning and would not have been perceived as a character weakness in the eleventh century. She states that "the idea that a strong man should react to great personal and national calamities by a slight compression of the lips and by silently throwing his cigarette into the fireplace is of very recent origin" (15). Fainting, especially by the thousands, is depicted as heroic and epic and perfectly acceptable in the poem. To be affectionate or overly emotional is somehow linked with the noble world of knights which raises questions about gender differentiation. Fainting in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, however, is usually depicted as proof of the weak constitution of women or it is parodied, usually as it relates to women. It would be interesting to trace this shift in public perception and breakdown, the shift from a knightly attribute to a female one, an illustration of heroism to one of weakness or absurdity.