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