Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 41

Delicious Poison:
Heloise and Abelard
Out of Time
Still painful, after all these years. After almost eight centuries,
it is still possible to feel real pain for Heloise and Abelard. They
lasted a lot longer than Romeo and Juliet, were more human than
Tristan and Isolde, knew each other better than Dante and Beatrice,
and were certainly better mannered than our own battling Windsors.
We are still enthralled by their ill-fated romance because we think
that they are just like us^ or just like what we wish ourselves to be.
Ready to die for love. Ready to live for love. Believing that love

conquers all.
If Heloise lived today, would she be gathering applause with
Oprah, clearly a woman done wrong? Would Abelard be baring his
all to Phil Donahue, proving that men too are sensitive? Could they
live in the bright glare of the twentieth century and still be who they
were in their own? Probably not.
This makes it all the more curious that in many twentieth century
versions of their story Heloise and Abelard are forced into twentieth
century molds for the redactors’ own purposes. We lose sight of who
they were, and perhaps a great deal more as well. The nature of this
greater loss becomes clearer as we examine representative examples of
this modem shape-changing.
If it were not for Heloise, Abelard would be forgotten as a jjerson.
He would, of course, be remembered as a scholar, as an innovator, as a
thinker who did much to shape the course of Western thought
throughout this millennium. He would be remembered for the daring
quality of his thought, his commitment to dialectic, and for the
revolution that he led in teaching. But as a person? We would
probably have never thought to ask. It is Heloise and the poignancy
of their tale of love and woe that have kept Abelard's image fresh
and green in our collective imagination. Heloise and Abelard have
come down the ages to us hand in hand, and surely have farther to
travel.
Most of our firsthand knowledge of the amatory adventures of
Heloise and Abelard is contained in Abelard’s H i s t o r i a