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"You All Are, Were, or Will Be Whores":
Masculine Power and the Crisis of Being a Woman in La Passion Beatrice


The opening scenes of La Passion Beatrice set the tone for the film: a knight leaves his family behind to pursue the violent glory of battle. He kisses his wife who stands by dispassionately, the expected fear and apprehension missing from her eyes. The knight's son is more emotional, and the exchange between father and son is exponentially more passionate than that between the knight and his wife. As he departs, the knight hands his sidearm to the young boy, telling him, "Defend your mother. She is so comely and men are so brutal." These words immediately call to mind the condition of the women in many of Marie de France's lais, who are locked up and "guarded" by their husbands. The misogyny underlying this statement and similar sentiments expressed by male characters and society in the literature of the time is echoed throughout the film. The most striking incidence of this comes when Beatrice approaches the priest of the manor and tells him that her father has raped her. The priest asks her, "Are you sure you didn't tempt him?"; he accuses her throughout the conversation of being a temptress of sorts, bringing about her own incestuous rape. That she comes to a holy man, seeking protection and redemption, seeing her forced "impurity" as a sin that blackens her own soul, illustrates the misogyny of Christian beliefs of the time. Before raping her, Beatrice's father forces her to pray to the statue of the Virgin Mary to ask for forgiveness for the sin she will soon "commit" by engaging in this "sexual" act.
Rape and the monsterization of female sexuality recur throughout the film. Each female character reveals either in speech or act, even madness, that she has been raped and otherwise forced by men. Beatrice's experience is the focus of the film and explores the incestuous control and ownership of women that, in reading Marie de France's Les Deuz Amanz, seems to be very common of the medieval period in Anglo-Norman society. The two "madwomen" in the film, the Saint and the Witch, both give the viewer their stories: the Witch, clad all in black and starving in a cave with the child of her rapist reveals a bit of her story to Beatrice in passing. The Saint is seen burning at the stake, wailing in pain and fear; she had lived on the boundaries of her society, fasting, worshipping her god, and spending days on end in prayer. In the end, she is (ironically) burned as a witch. One can assume that before she was tied up and burned that she was subjected to many humiliating and dehumanizing "tests" to determine her witch-ness. Whether or not this ritual included a physical rape is indeterminable from the immediate information, but the plight of the other women in the film and some knowledge of the treatment of women and "witches" of the time allows for the assumption that her symbolic rape may not have been her only one.
Misogyny runs rampant throughout the film. As mentioned above, the opening scene of the film shows chivalric and Christian marriage to lack the passion and "romance" often expected by modern readers/viewers of medieval narratives. It is easy to assume that the woman was often subjected to unwanted sexual advances and rape. The woman later known as Beatrice's paternal grandmother is powerless against the masculine power of even her child son who slays her lover when he discovers the two of them in bed together. The viewer learns as the film progresses that this incident and the sentiment earlier seen expressed by the young man's father idolized father permanently shape a blinding and violent misogyny in Beatrice's father. The idea of masculinity and manhood haunts Beatrice's father, who was emasculated in battle, and seeks to regain his masculine identity through the subjection and torment of the female characters, including his son who is gendered feminine to Beatrice's father by his cowardice in battle. During an intriguing scene between the man and Beatrice, who still loves her father, the two play a game of chess in which Beatrice tries to intentionally lose though she is clearly the better of the two. "You should have been the son," states Beatrice's father. He has been emasculated by his own daughter.
It is clear throughout the film that this man fully believes that he has ownership rights over the servants, particularly the female servants, in his household. Indeed, the law of the time dictated as much, as is illustrated in the hanging of the two young boys who stole a crown piece. At several points in the film, male characters, particularly the lord of the manor and the two debtors refer to the female servants literally as property. This plays out in one particularly disturbing scene in which Beatrice's father attempts to make his son, Arnaud, into a "man", by screaming at him to force himself on a young woman servant, in effect emotionally raping the battle-haunted young man and committing gross psychological violence against the girl.
Another motif of the film is the questioning of Christian values and beliefs. As in Marie de France's lais, the expected Christian statues and rituals are present, but the role of the religion is questionable. As in the lais, prayers to the Christian God are either ignored or answered in strange ways. The Saint is burned at the stake as a witch for all her holy devotion and piety. Beatrice is forced to prayer to and then raped beneath the statue of the Holy Virgin Mary. The film's main psychological action is book-ended by the two main characters (Beatrice and her father) cursing the Christian God, holding the sword of the film's patriarch to heaven: "My lord God, I hate you."
The role of the church is also examined, painting a picture of the institution that is far from complimentary. As mentioned before, the priest of the manor essentially enables Beatrice's rape and imprisonment. The idea and act of repentance is thoroughly mocked in the film: Beatrice is told to rub nettles on her tongue when she tells the priest that she wishes her father were dead, Beatrice's father commands her to pray before and after raping her; he locks her out on the same roof where he vigilantly awaited the return of his own father, telling her to seek redemption, to stay out there until she loves him.
This roof is part of another motif, a repeated storyline first revolving around Beatrice's father and then feminized and retold by Beatrice's experience. The young lord awaits his father's return on the roof. Beatrice states at the beginning of the film when recounting her father's story that she too awaits her father's return, but "not so fervently". The sword that is initially handed down by Beatrice's grandfather to his son sheds the first and last blood of the film, the lover who sparks Beatrice's father's misogyny, and the man himself, who fatalistically tells Beatrice where to strike him, knowing full well that he has earned her wrath. Beatrice uses this phallic symbol/sword (indeed, the film warrants a close Freudian exposition for its use of the Oedipus trope) to destroy her destroyer, striking the fatal blow as soon as the man utters a final misogynistic curse of the female gender.

Other issues/characters of interest in the film:
-the Freudian overtones
-incestuous relationship between Arnaud and Beatrice
-characters like Jehan and the wet nurse
-the effeminate old man who sits with the women and tells stories