WE HAVE SEEN in Chrétien's Yvain, how Laudine, the mourning widow, cries out, faints, claws at herself and tears out her hair at the death of her husband, Esclados the Red. We have similarly seen evidence of such emotive performativity of grief in the Eddic poem Guðrúnarkviða I, whereas in Egils saga Skallagrímssonar Ásger ðr's presumed grief over the death of her husband, Þórólfr Skalla-Grímsson, is conveyed in a single word of discontent. In Laxdoela saga (The Saga of the People of Laxardal), on the other hand, the heroine, Gu ðrún Ósvífrsdóttir, smiles as one of her husband's killers uses her shawl to wipe the blood off the weapon that killed her husband. In fact we see no evidence of grief on her part until twelve years later, when she goads her sons to avenge the killing of their father by taunting them with their father's bloody clothes. There is not a single exclamation of grief, no tears, no fainting, nor any other visible signs of sorrow. In Brennu-Njáls saga (The Saga of the Burning of Njal) another heroine, Hallger ðr Hoskuldsdóttir, similarly laughs at the news of her husband's slaying before sending the perpetrator to her father where he will be killed himself. The scenes differ from the understated reaction of Ásger ðr as well as the more exclamatory performances of sorrow evident in the Eddic elegy and in the romance, where the emphasis is on vocalisation and embodiment of internal emotions. Here, we instead witness a different performance, one that is intended to conceal or mask any presumed emotive interiority rather than stage it.

In this chapter the functionality of emotive gestures is considered as a means of obscuring or masking emotions rather than as a means of staging internal emotionality. Given that emotive gestures are biologically conditioned neural and muscular reactions to stimuli in humans, the use of such gestures to subvert emotional messaging or to mask emotions indicates that emotive gesticulation is being manipulated as a literary technique. The efficiency of such manipulation is dependent on the audience's capacity to decipher the gesture as subversive or as an intentionally disingenuous performance, rather than an expression of inexorable emotions. Guillemette Bolens notes that ‘the semantic retrieval of corporeal movements in narrative is of central importance to the understanding of major literary artworks’.