Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 45

Delicious Poison 43 knowing it herself, as this philosophic stance was pandemic in the 1930s. It is true, as Robertson says, that this book has "served several generations of students as a pleasant substitute for history" (221-2). It is not true, as the word pleasant implies, that this is innocuous. Truth is not served by the beliefs of one century being grafted onto the stories of another, especially if it is done so attractively and so subtly that few realize where the break is. The confusion generated is not worth the addition of a pleasant novel to the endless roster of such. A case in point of this confusion is Etienne Gilson's 1938 Heloise et Abelard, discussed at some length by Robertson. Gilson was a prominent medievalist who was impressed by the story as presented by Waddell and published a scholarly work influenced by her version. This led to many years of perturbation among scholars of the period, including attacks on scholars who have since been vindicated (222-3).^ The medieval period is hard enough to understand without mixing philosophical fiction with our scant facts. Students are easily enough confus^ without giving them the philosophical wolves of one time wrapped up in the sheep's clothing of another. Another typically twentieth century version of the story of Heloise and Abelard is the film Stealing Heaven, produced in 1988 by Give Dormer. The film focuses on the redemption of bleak, oppressed human lives by romantic love, asserting that all that matters is the here and now and the love humans can find with each other. Donner takes almost indecent liberties with Heloise and Abelard's lives as we know them from their own words. We cannot doubt that there was hunutn love between them, as not even Abelard denies its existence, but it is not possible to assert absolutely that their vocations to God were only a poor second best, found by way of Fulbert's knife. Donner ignores all textual evidence to make romance paramount. The opening scene shows Heloise on her deathbed at the Paraclete. She requests a small crucifix from the altar, takes a small white object from its base, and smashes the crucifix against the wall. This sets up Donner's basic premise, that human love is all. Actually, if the viewer knew what Heloise had taken from the base, she would not need to watch the rest of the film. For Donner, suspense is all, and only curiosity keeps the viewer with him. We want to know what the object is, why Heloise needs it on her deathbed. We do not care nearly as much why she has come to despise religion. The film