Looking for Homoeroticism; Finding Homophobia

Rather than focusing on the titular character of Silence, this article compares the two similarly-named characters, Silence’s mother Eufemie and Silence’s antagonist, Queen Eufeme, as exemplars of “good” and “bad” female sexuality. The cross-dressed Silence is treated as asexual in this analysis.

Eufemie is presented as both an extraordinarily gifted woman – educated, skilled in medicine, and socially powerful – and as the ideal romance heroine who was won as a marital prize through martial prowess, and who subsequently subsumes her agency entirely to her husband. To be fair, a great deal is made of how Eufemie and Cador’s marriage is a love match, but it is clear that the marriage would have occurred regardless of her feelings. With regard to sexuality, Eufemie loves only her husband, loves him deeply, and is rewarded by abandoning all personal autonomy or even separate identity. She is the ideal woman.

In contrast, Queen Eufeme is also beautiful and talented and has also entered marriage via agreements that she had no agency in. But there is no love on either side; her talents are for deception and seduction; she is above all an adulteress; and her extramarital liaisons all have an additional layer of transgression. Although her sexuality is heterosexual in intent, it carries the appearance of homosexuality in several ways. Eufeme’s primary lover is a man who lives among her ladies-in-waiting disguised as a nun. And her unreciprocated desire for Silence has the apparent form of lusting after a young man, but the underlying reality of targeting a woman. An additional queer layer is added when the rebuffed Eufeme, unwilling to accept that a man would resist her seduction, accuses Silence of being a homosexual man. [Note: The author also frames Silence as being perceived as a “boy” adding pederasty to the equation, but I’m dubious about this reading as we’re talking about a character who has already become a military hero.]

The author frames Eufeme’s sexuality as “lesbian” based on the superficial appearance of one (the “nun”) and the underlying reality of the other (Silence). I find this reading a bit strained. (That is, while I see same-sex themes in the story, I disagree that Eufeme’s actions are driven by same-sex desire.] Eufeme is aware of the “nun’s” sex and engages in the relationship on that basis, whereas she genuinely believes Silence to be male, and her actions and words during the attempted seduction all align with a woman seducing a man.

Eufeme represents a “bad woman” because of her unchastity and her actions to take revenge on Silence for the rejection. She is unfaithful to her husband, takes an aggressive sexual role, and punishes virtue with treachery. But the author, rather than viewing this through the lens of “the fury of a woman scorned” alleges, “fearful of her own latent lesbianism, she seeks to destroy the stimulus.”

So, in sum, although I agree that there are interesting themes around homosexuality in the tale (perhaps especially the hint in passing that a “homosexual identity” would be a believable reason for rejecting a heterosexual liaison), I find Blumreich’s analysis hard to support from the text.