From Perseus snatching Andromeda from India to a young A’isha’s marriage to the Prophet Muhammad, love and (more commonly) marriage are present in religious doctrine and folklore alike. These narratives offer guidance and instruction on such relationships and interestingly reveal how consent was portrayed and understood. A recurring theme emerges: women’s agency to consent is often acknowledged yet quickly dismissed or warped. Through investigating the works of Ovid and the Muslim Hadiths discussing marriage, I argue that women’s consent in the Middle Ages was more of an illusion than a reality - present in concept but inconsequential in practice.
We begin with the ancient poet Ovid, whose beliefs about love would likely offend many modern readers. In the Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), Ovid describes himself as the tamer, teacher and employer of love, giving his reader (who is presumably a plucky young Roman aristocrat) advice on how to pursue women. In this comprehensive guidebook, Ovid repeatedly uses language which likens men to hunters, like a “wild-fowler” in the woods, intrinsically placing the woman in the position of the fowl in question – prey. And if this notion of women as conquest was too implicit for the Roman man who isn’t quite reading between the lines, Ovid makes the unsavory claim that women actually want to be raped: “It is force that pleases the girl”.
Notably, Ovid does not suggest that women have no agency to consent or not. Rather, it seems that Ovid is all too aware of women’s attempts to exercise said agency. Thus, he distorts the act of rejection as simply a practice pertaining to the societal expectation of women, rather than any autonomous decision that a woman has made. In the eyes of Ovid, you are simply giving her what she wants “against her will”. Thus, Ovid acknowledges the concept of women’s agency to consent, but disregards it entirely in practice, reducing consent to an illusion or a performance rather than a necessity. This being said, it is important to note that many view this work as satirical rather than genuinely instructional. But I argue that satire inherently functions by dramatizing reality. Thus, even if Ovid does not explicitly endorse rape, his remarks still reflect contemporary attitudes toward consent.
The topic of consent also appears in religious narratives, where — much as in Ovid — women’s agency is addressed but ultimately undermined. For instance, consent is mentioned in the Hadiths, which are stories told about the life of Muhammad. On first glance, it may seem that the Islamic texts have a somewhat more “progressive” outlook on consent (though, I suppose Ovid has set a rather low bar) as Muhammad instructs that a virgin must be consulted before marriage. However, he immediately undermines himself, saying that “silence implies consent.” Once again, the question of consent is raised, and an answer is presented which appears to grant agency when, in reality, the word “yes” isn’t actually required.
Further, since Muhammad’s assertion of women’s silence equating to consent comes after A’isha notes that the bride “feels shy” and cannot verbally consent, the narrative is twisted. Now, ‘silence as consent’ is not just another form of stripping a woman of any real ability to deny consent, but is rather something that was instructed to the service of women. This is reminiscent of Ovid’s assertion that a woman cannot say what she wants out loud, and thus it must be assumed that she consents. Again, agency is an illusion, and consent is made a guarantee.
It could be argued that a woman in this position could say no. However, medieval marriages weren’t all about finding love — these unions often had socio-economic consequences which created immense social pressure for women and made refusal much harder to give. Thus, consent had the potential to be the strongest of the few tools of agency given to the medieval woman: her last defense in a society that valued her primarily for physical use, and thus her last card to play. Yet, when such texts, whether satirical, secular or religious, repeatedly raise the evidently significant question of consent only to demean and distort it, even this final trump card suddenly becomes void.
Not only are these texts differentiated by genre and purpose, but they are also separated by centuries, cultures and geographical origins. The disparities between the two texts’ provenance strengthen the argument that this tendency to provide a false illusion of agency to consent is a repeated pattern - one which transcends time and place. This invites us as readers to examine other historical texts with similar attentiveness, trying to spot this seemingly pervasive phenomenon. Even further, it urges us to consider whether the gap between what is labelled “consent” and genuine freedom of choice for women has ever completely been bridged.
Works Cited:
Sahih Muslim 16, "The Book of Marriage," trans. Abdul Hamid Siddiqui (Original work compiled 9th century)
Ovid, The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria), trans. D.S. Kline (Poetry in Translation, 2001)
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