In A Discovery of Witches, the first installment of her best-selling All Souls trilogy, Deborah Harkness creates the consummate courtly lover — out of a vampire. As a vampire, the novel’s hero, Matthew Clairmont, seems born to the courtly-lover role. He already doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat (food, at least,) and has quite the possessive streak when it comes to the woman whom he fancies, a young historian (and witch) named Diana Bishop. Harkness makes Clairmont’s connection to fin amors even more apparent by placing his ancestral home in Aquitaine, the area from which the troubadours, who first disseminated courtly love, hailed. Clairmont even speaks langue d’oc, the language of the troubadours and, hence, of fin amors. These myriad connections delight readers well versed in the literature of the Middle Ages, who can see elements of famous medieval lovers in Clairmont, such as Tristan, Troilus, and Lancelot, to whom Harnkess refers at several points in the tale. What readers may find less delightful, however, are the changes that Matthew’s affections wreak on Diana. Once she begins to countenance Matthew’s suit, she transforms from a serious scholar of medieval and early-modern manuscripts on alchemy to a young woman literally swept away by her lover, craving little more than his affection and constantly requiring his protection and advice. She forfeits the intellectual life she has carefully built for herself for one predicated on her emotions. Harkness signals this metamorphosis by having Diana embrace the supernatural powers bestowed on her as a witch, powers that require that she feel rather than think (439). By stressing the value of our emotions, Harkness may be attempting to valorize the feminine. However, in so doing, she also reinforces stereotypical thinking about the sexes, views that hearken back to those held as well in the Middle Ages.
About the presenterMary Behrman
Mary Behrman received her PhD in English from Emory University in 2004, where she wrote her dissertation, “Chaucer, Gower and the Vox Populi: Interpretation and the Common Profit in The Canterbury Tales and Confessio Amantis,” under the direction of John Bugge. She has had articles published in journals including The Chaucer Review and The Henry James Review. One of her essays, “The Waiting Game: Medieval Allusions and the Lethal Nature of Passivitiy in Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” appeared in the Winter 2010 volume of Studies in the Novel and stemmed from an essay first presented at MAPACA’s 2008 conference in Niagara Falls. Currently, Ms. Behrman teaches English courses at Kennesaw State University and serves as MAPACA’s president and the Co-Chair of the Medieval/Renaissance Area.