The Wild Dream  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Medieval literature, Medieval erotica

“The Wild Dream” is a fabliau and a wild dream it is! The 213-line poem shows, among other things, that women are as needful and desirous as sex as men are, although, perhaps, they conceal their lust better--at times, at least. The opening lines of the poem capture the audience’s attention by promising that they shall hear of sex between “fine, upstanding folk”:

I’ll tell as briefly as I can

about a woman and a man

and what befell them, if I may.

I heard about it in Douay.

I do not know his or her name,

but I can affirm all the same

what fine, upstanding folk they were

and that she loved him and he her.

A woman’s husband returns home after having been away on business for three months. Horny, she is looking forward to having sex with him. However, during dinner, she plied him with wine, and he falls to sleep (or passes out) soon after they retire. Annoyed, she falls to sleep, and has a wild dream:

She dreamt a dream while she was lying

there fast asleep--don’t think I’m lying!--

that she’d gone to a yearly fair,

the likes of which you have to hear,

for every shop and stall display

there, every house and place to stay,

every exchange and table was

not selling bolts of cloth or furs

or linen, wool or silks of price,

it seemed to her, or dyes, or spice,

or goods, or pharmaceuticals--

just penises and testicles

in wild profusion. . . .

There is a penis for every girl or woman, at every price, from eight shillings for “some smaller ones, which could still sate,” to a pound for “good ones,” and “the best and biggest ones for sale,” the narrator emphasizes, “were closely watched and very dear.”

The wife seeks the biggest, best penis she can find, searching the market until she finds one that meets her high standards:

The wife went looking everywhere

and put much effort in her quest

till at one stall she came to rest

on seeing one so long and wide, it

just had to be hers, she decided.

The shaft was large and well-endowed

with a big head, cocky and proud,

and if you want to hear the whole

truth, you could toss into the hole

with ease a round, ripe cherry, and it

would go on falling until it landed

down in the scrotum, which was made

like the shovel-end of a spade.

The vendor, a man, tells the wife that the member was amputated from “the finest. . . stock” in Lorraine, a “province in northern France, where men were reputed to be sexually well-endowed,” as the anthology’s editors’ gloss on this line points out.

The wife purchases the penis, and raises her hand to “give him [the vendor] high five.” In doing so, she inadvertently awakens her husband, who demands to know why she has struck him in his sleep. She begs his pardon, relating the incidents of her dream of the penis fair and how “she bought the largest they had,/ by far more impressive than any,/ for fifty shillings and a penny.”

He accepts her apology, and they hug and kiss. His organ becomes erect, and he “lays his penis in her hand,” asking her what price it might have brought at the penis fair. No one would have wanted to buy it, she replies, even if he were selling them by the bushel, because, even, erect, his penis is too small to be of any interest to a buyer:

. . . someone selling a full coffer

of them would find no one who’d offer

a speck of money for the lot

Why, even those the paupers bought

were such that one of them with ease

would equal at least two of these

the way it is now. . . .

It’s unclear as to whether the wife is merely teasing her husband, is gaining revenge upon him for having fallen asleep (or passing out) and leaving her sexually aroused but unsatisfied, or truly means what she says. In any case, she seems to agree with her husband that an available penis is better than an imaginary “dream” penis, for the storyteller leaves his audience with the impression that, at last, the spouses make love:

“So what?” he says. “That’s how it goes.

Take this one--the others don’t matter--

until you think you can do better.”

(And so she did, if I am right.)

The last lines of the poem, as is often the case with fabliaux, identify the author. This one is Jean Bodel, who came to hear of the incidents he reports in the story as a result of the husband’s having injudiciously “spread it round/ till a rhymer of fabliaux. . . . put it in his anthology neither embellished nor extended.”