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Constructing the Female Subject in Anglo-Norman, Middle English and Medieval Irish Romance by Giselle Gos A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Giselle Gos, 2012 Constructing the Female Subject in Anglo-Norman, Middle English and Medieval Irish Romance Giselle Gos Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto 2012 Abstract Female subjectivity remains a theoretical question in medieval romance, a genre in which the feminine and the female have often been found to exist primarily as foils for the production of masculinity and male identity, the Other against which the masculine hero is defined. Woman‘s agency and subjectivity are observed by critics most often in moments of transgression, subversion and resistance: as objects exchanged between men and signs of masculine prestige, female characters carve out their subjectivity, agency and identity in spite of, rather than with the support of, the ideological formations of romance. The following study makes a case for the existence of a female subject in medieval romance, analogous to the oft- examined male subject, a subject in both senses of the term: subjected to the dominant ideology, the subject is also enabled in its agency and authority by that ideology. I combine a feminist poststructuralist approach to discourse analysis with a comparative methodology, juxtaposing related romance texts in Anglo-Norman, Middle English and Medieval Irish under the premise that stress-points in ideological structures must be renegotiated when stories are revised and recast for new audiences. The principal texts considered are Roman de Horn, King Horn, Horn Childe and the Maiden Rimnild; Gamair‘s Haveloc episode, Lai ii d’Haveloc, Havelok the Dane; Gui de Warewic, Guy of Warwick, The Irish Lives of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton; The Adventures of Art, Son of Conn, Mongán’s Love for Dubh Lacha. Through close attention to textual change over time, a profound shift can be seen in the emergence of female characters which cease to be symbols, signs and objects but through a variety of discourses and narrative strategies are established as subjects in their own right. iii Acknowledgments I have a lot of people to thank. First of all, I want to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the generous Canada Graduate Scholarship, through which a large portion of this degree was funded. Many thanks as well to the faculty and staff of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto for their help and support throughout the many years. I would like to thank my parents, Silvana and Elci Gos, and my sister Gesseca Gos for their support and encouragement and for always believing I could do it. I am also grateful to Freyja for keeping me company during many long days of writing. I want to thank Susan McNair, Elvina Chow, and Randy Ornstein for over a decade of devoted friendship and emotional support. In addition to his constant support, I want to thank my husband Sébastien Rossignol for being so understanding and patient and for reminding me that scholarship should be fun even when it is hard. I think the process of going through a Ph.D. together is a bonding experience like no other and so I owe a special thanks to my medievalist friends and colleagues, especially Rachel Kessler, Jen Konieczny and Kristen Mills, who were always there with sound advice and shoulders to lean on. For help with proof-reading, I am grateful to Jen, as well as Emily Blakelock and Tadhg O‘Muiris, to whom I am grateful for insightful comments on the introduction, conclusion and my Irish chapters. I look forward to returning the favour. I am expecially indebted to Victoria Goddard, my out-of-town thesis buddy: I still can‘t believe she read everything! Her comments were invaluable, and constant support even more so. I would not have been able to finish this dissertation without her. My thesis committee was invaluable. I want to thank Ian McDougall, who was a great help in the early stages when Norse was still a chapter. I look forward to going back to his always detailed and helpful notes and comments in my post-doctoral work. Thanks as well to David Townsend, whose critical theory class changed the course of my dissertation and who was so helpful with the theoretical side of my thesis. I also want to thank the members of my defence committee, Will Robins, David Klausner and my external Ivana Djordjević, for their thoughtful questions, suggestions and detailed comments. Finally, last but not least, I owe special thanks to my two wonderful supervisors. My Middle English supervisor, Suzanne Akbari, I want to thank for being so helpful, insightful, demanding and encouraging, not only with my thesis, but the myriad of professional academic challenges. I have learned so much from her and I count myself so very lucky for having been her student. Ann Dooley, my Irish supervisor, has been so much more than a doctoral supervisor to me over the past ten years. I walked into her Celtic Culture class at eighteen years old, and it changed my life. Ten years later, here I am. I wouldn‘t be here without all of her inspiration, support, encouragement, knowledge and wisdom, warmth and kindness. I am so grateful to her for everything, for being not only my mentor, but also my friend. iv Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................................. iv Table of Contents.................................................................................................................................... v Introduction: Introducing the Female Subject of Romance.................................................................... 1 Women in Medieval French and Middle English Romance.......................................................3 Gender and Genre: Romance as Ideology and Masculine Subject-formation..........................12 Subjectivity ...............................................................................................................................17 Comparative Methodology .......................................................................................................30 Part One: Romance in England............................................................................................................. 34 Chapter One: Desire, Agency and Women‘s Exchange in the Narratives of King Horn..................... 34 Manuscripts, Texts and Textual Relationships .........................................................................35 Sexual Politics and the ‗Wooing Woman‘: Gift-Exchange, Desire and Subjectivity ..............38 Attempting to Break the Rules: Anglo-Norman Rigmel‘s Transgressive Subjectivity...........47 Breaking the Rules? : The Subjectivities of Rimenhild and Rimnild in Middle English Horn Narratives..................................................................................................................................63 Hagiographic Interconnections .................................................................................................74 Chapter Two: ―Quen and levedi‖: Goldeboru‘s suffering, sainthood and sovereignty in Havelok the Dane............................................................................................................................................... 80 Manuscripts, Texts and Textual Relationships .........................................................................81 Argentille‘s Disappearance in Gaimar‘s Haveloc Narrative and the Lai d’Haveloc................85 ―Þe gest of Hauelok and of Goldeboru‖: Parallelism and Goldeboru‘s Subjectivity ...............90 ―Quen and levedi‖: Goldeboru‘s Formal Access to Power ......................................................97 Wisdom, Piety, Chastity and Suffering: Goldeboru‘s Hagiographic Life ..............................101 Chapter Three: Countess of Warwick: Felice‘s Penitence, Piety and Praise in Gui de Warewic and Guy of Warwick ........................................................................................................................... 114 Introduction: What‘s at stake in the story of Felice? ..............................................................114 Texts, Manuscripts and Comparative Methodology...............................................................117 Gender and Subjectivity in Alfred Ewert‘s edition of Gui .....................................................123 Felice‘s Subjectivity ...............................................................................................................134 Translation and Transformation in the Middle English Versions of Guy of Warwick ...........138 ―In all the world ys none here pere‖: Felice‘s Praise and Piety in the Later Middle English Versions of Guy ......................................................................................................................158 Part Two: Romance in Ireland ............................................................................................................ 178 Interlude: Romance and Rómánsaíochta in Hiberno-Norman Ireland ............................................... 178 Chapter Four: Translating Romance in Hiberno-Norman Ireland..................................................... 190 Felice in the Irish Life of Guy of Warwick..............................................................................196 The Erosion of the Relational Construction of Gender ..........................................................203 Sisian in the Irish Life of Bevis of Hampton ...........................................................................222 Chapter Five: Gender, Subjectivity and Sexuality in The Adventures of Art Son of Conn, and Mongán’s Love for Dubh Lacha .................................................................................................. 236 Exchanging Women: Desire, Gaze and Subjectivity..............................................................243 Sex, Marital Fidelity and Subjectivity ....................................................................................254 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 266 Works Cited ........................................................................................................................................ 273 v Introduction: Introducing the Female Subject of Romance Medieval romance as a genre is traditionally known for its special engagement with questions of identity and individuality.1 More recently, scholars, recognizing the limitations of the post- Enlightenment, humanist conceptualization of the individual, have opted instead for a post- structuralist model of the fragmented, discursively constructed subject, and moved towards a study of subjectivity and the subject in romance.2 However, these studies are of male individuality and identity, or the masculine subject of romance. Female subjectivity and the female subject remain theoretical questions in romance, a genre in which the feminine and the female have often been found to exist primarily as foils for the production of masculinity and male identity, the Other against which the masculine hero is defined. Woman‘s agency and subjectivity are observed by critics most often in moments of transgression, subversion and resistance. Female characters, as objects exchanged between men and signs and/or symbols of masculine prowess and prestige, are seen to carve out their subjectivity, agency and identity in spite of, rather than with the support of, the ideological formations of romance. The following study poses the question of whether there is space for a non-transgressive female subject of romance, a female subject that is endorsed by the ideological structures of its text, that is indeed a subject in both senses of the term: subjected to the dominant ideology, the 1 Peter Haidu, ―Romance: Idealistic Genre or Historical Text?‖ in The Craft of Fiction: Essays in Medieval Poetics, ed., Leigh A. Arrathoon (Rochester, MI: Solaris Press, 1984), 1–46; Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Erich Köhler, L’Aventure Chevaleresque: Idéal et Réalité dans le Roman Courtois, trans., Éliane Kaufholz (Paris: Gallimard, 1974); Donald Maddox, The Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes: Once and Future Fictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially 133–40. Eugène Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 2 See Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Post-Structuralist Theory, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997), especially 32–34. For a full treatment of the philosophical and critical theoretical concept of ‗subjectivity‘ see Donald E. Hall, Subjectivity (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). For examples of medieval critics moving to an analysis of male identity in terms of subjectivity rather than individuality, see Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 1 subject is also enabled in its agency and authority by that ideology.3 In order to do this, I employ a comparative strategy, examining related romance texts in Anglo-Norman, Middle English and Medieval Irish under the premise that stress-points in ideological structures must be renegotiated when stories are revised and recast for new audiences: thus it is in the juxtaposition of different versions of the same story that shifts and differences in ideology become visible. In the linking of genre, gender and ideology, I follow Simon Gaunt and Susan Crane‘s view that gender and genre are mutually constructive forces in a text: genre can be seen as an ideological formation that governs constructions of gender, and certain gender configurations and their interrelationships contribute to the production of genre.4 Through close attention to textual change over time, a profound shift can be seen in the emergence of female characters which cease to be symbols, signs and objects but are established as subjects in their own right. A review of scholarship on women and gender in Medieval French and Middle English romance will allow me to demonstrate the degree to which female subjects are lacking.5 The French romances in this project are strictly-speaking Anglo-Norman, that is to say, composed in the dialect of Norman French spoken and written in England. However, both because Anglo- Norman romances are sometimes included in the scholarship on Old French romances and because, as Ian Short stresses, Anglo-Norman literature shares a cultural context with Continental French literature and ―can be properly understood only within this wider cultural context,‖ I include scholarship on both Old French and Anglo-Norman romances in my review of the critical literature. 6 This will be followed by a more detailed introduction of the concept of subjectivity and a close reading of two of the most prominent theorists of gendered and sexed subjectivity in medieval romance criticism, Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin, as examples of how 3Even Peter Haidu, whose study, The Subject Medieval/Modern, deeply engages post-structuralist theories of the subject, has little to say about the female subject of romance. Haidu claims that ―[Erec et Enide‘s] focus in the second part on Enide‘s subjectivity pushes the issue of women to the forefront‖ (100), but he never explores Enide‘s subjectivity. Rather he finds that, in being dragged along by Erec and told to keep quiet as knights approach, Enide ―is forced to face the ideological conflict of multiple semiotic roles‖ (100). He dichotomizes acting as a woman and acting as a subject: ―Will she follow her husband‘s order as a properly submissive wife, or will she act as a subject, voicing independent judgment of the danger incurred by the couple and especially the husband?‖ (100–101). 4 Gaunt, Gender and Genre, 1; Crane, Gender and Romance, 4. 5 No investigation has yet been conducted on women and gender in Medieval Irish romance— by which I mean both translations of romances and the closely related genre of rómánsaíochta (―romantic tales‖)— and so this study aims to bring such criticism to the study of this group of texts. See chapters 4 and 5. 6 Ian Short, ―Patrons and Polyglots: French Literature in Twelfth Century England,‖ Anglo-Norman Studies XVI (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1992), 229–50: 245. On Anglo-Norman literature as distinctive from Old French, see Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); M. Domenica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). 2 models of gender and subjectivity indebted to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis do not include possibilities for non-resistant female subjects; I suggest that it is likely that the lack of female subjects in medieval romance criticism is in part due to the fact that the theoretical paradigms underlying the current studies cannot account for them. After demonstrating that Butler‘s and Rubin‘s theories are are only of limited applicability to the socio-historical context of twelfth to fifteenth century England and Ireland, I will then propose the use of a different, post-structuralist feminist approach to subjectivity that will allow for possibilities of reading female subjects when they appear in romance texts. Women in Medieval French and Middle English Romance The position of women in medieval romance is a topic that has been key to studies of the genre in Medieval French (by which I refer to both Old French and Anglo-Norman) scholarship since feminist reconsiderations of the ―courtly lady‖ in the 1970s and 1980s, and this interest spread quickly to the study of the related romance tradition of Middle English. An interest in women and gender has gained momentum with the growing influence of post-structuralism, feminist and gender theory in these fields; however, as this survey will demonstrate, certain trends prevail that limit the possibility of the discussion of women as subjects in romance. The question of the courtly woman's power was raised early in feminist scholarship on medieval French texts, both continental and insular. E. Jane Burns has provided a detailed summary and analysis of the trends of feminist scholarship on courtly love and the place of women in courtly French texts.7 At first the putative power of the woman worshipped by her admirer was connected to a rise in women‘s status and held up as a possible figure of empowerment. The texts, taken literally, seemed to reflect an actual increase in status and power for women in twelfth-century France. The romances were seen not only to portray women as powerful, but were understood to do so in response to and because of real historical circumstances.8 However, when feminist scholars re-examined this position they found the opposite to be true: the women were disempowered objects of desire, who, as symbols of male prowess, mainly functioned to establish homosocial bonds between men, both horizontal—by establishing the suitor and her father as partners of gift-exchange— and vertical, by awarding the suitor superiority over his rivals. Ultimately constrained by the desires of her loving knight, the courtly woman had no choice but to consent to her wooer, and yet, at the same time, could 7 E. Jane Burns, ―Courtly Love : Who Needs it? Recent Feminist Work in the Medieval French Tradition,‖ Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27 (2001), 23–57. 8 Burns, ―Courtly Love,‖ 35–37. 3 be held up to misogynistic discourse as the cause of men‘s pain. This ―vanishing lady‖ criticism has a strong theoretical debt to Lacanian and French feminist theory.9 As Burns summarizes, the woman of medieval French romance ―is less a woman…than a representation of male nobility.‖10 Woman as symbol of male nobility is not only limited to the ‗wooed‘ lady of French romance, but has been applied to women generally in romance and, as will be seen shortly, the courted lady‘s structural opposite, the ‗wooing woman‘ of Anglo-Norman romance.11 Neverthless, as Burns describes under the heading ―Resistant readings: Feminists remap the courtly terrain,‖ a new trend developed in the 1980s concerned with questions of agency and subjectivity for the displaced and marginalized female characters of these amorous exchange systems that privilege male social bonds. Focused on identifying and exploring points of weakness and breaks in the ideological structures, these studies show how ―courtly texts that silence and oppress female characters also stage them as subverting hierarchized structures of gender, effectively – if often subtly – prying those structures open and remapping the terrain of courtly love.‖12 The observation of women‘s resistance and the potential for gender-fluidity or gender-contestation marks these feminist readings of romance texts. They typically contain some kind of statement that romance opens up a fictionalized space for the contestation of 9 Burns, ―Courtly Love,‖44. Burns comments, ―[e]ach of these interpretations plays out Jacques Lacan‘s basic premise that courtly love articulates the absence of sexual relations with women, or Kristeva‘s contention that courtly lyric has no referent, no object as ―the lady is seldom defined and, slipping away between restrained presence and absence, she is simply an imaginary addressee, the pretext fo the [male poet‘s] incantation‖ (Kristeva,1987, 287) [sic.]‖ (Burns, ―Courtly Love,‖41). See Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 10 ―In these readings, courtly love and Provençal domna emerges as the quintessential woman ―between men,‖ in Eve Sedgwick‘s (1985) sense of the phrase, women placed in scenarious of heterosexual love to facilitate the staging of more significant homosocial bonds between men. Functioning as a metonymy of her husband, the feudal lord, the fictive courtly lady becomes both irresistibly attractive to aspiring lover/knights and excessively powerful in their eyes, because, in the end, she is less a woman (whether historical or fictive) than a representation of male nobility‖ (Burns, ―Courtly Love,‖40). Among other studies, Burns cites Georges Duby, Mâle moyen age: De l’amour et autres essais (Paris: Flammarion, 1988); Joan Ferrante, ―Male Fantasy and Female Reality in Courtly Literature,‖ Women’s Studies 11 (1984), 67–97; Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Roberta L. Krueger, ―Love, Honor and the Exchange of Women in Yvain: Some Remarks on the Female Reader,‖ Romance Notes 23 (1985), 302–17; Christiane Marchello-Nizia, ―Amour courtois, société masculine et figures du pouvoir,‖ Annales Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations (1981), 969–82; Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). See also Roberta L. Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 34. 11 See below. 12 Burns, ―Courtly Love,‖ 28. 4 gender roles and thereby allows women to achieve some form of identity and agency through resistance.13 This resistant agency is not confined to the text, but has also been theorized for women readers of romance. Roberta Krueger observes that several Old French romances raise the question of woman‘s agency and authority, only to mask her objectification behind a veneer of choice and systematically erase her from the text. Krueger argues that the contradictions visible in the text can push the resistant medieval female reader to question her status as an object of exchange. Indeed, Krueger suggests that one of Chrétien‘s goals may have been to foster such resistance in his romances; nevertheless, such a hypothesis must remain speculative. In positing medieval women readers‘ resistance to their textual appropriation, Krueger works to recover possibilities for female agency; her goal is indicative of this trajectory of feminist scholarship, in which a recuperative trend co-exists with the acknowledgment of women as oppressed.14 Burns‘ discussion of subjectivity and ‗subject-positions‘ belies the post-structuralist theoretical underpinnings of these studies, a feature which they share with Krueger‘s study; nevertheless the theoretical models in this trend of academic inquiry consistently model female subjectivity and agency as partial and resistant. The true subject-position is male: When women in the courtly world move, however tentatively or partially, into the subject-position – as singers and poets or resisting readers, as desiring ladies or debating women, as knowledgeable or masterful speakers, as cross-dressed minstrels or knights, as mystical or lesbian lovers, and as women working on cloth or fashioning themselves with it – the terms, limitations, and the very features of that male-defined subject position change significantly.15 [my emphasis] The medieval heroines considered here suggest a kind of agency that is not conscious, controlled, or full-blown; nor is it an expression of autonomous, individual will. Agency emerges in these revised courtly scenarios, rather, as a relational dynamic between individual protagonists and the social formations surrounding them. The complex social positioning of these women in love shows that we cannot understand them unproblematically as dominant, empowered, or active speakers. But neither are they merely subservient, disempowered, silent, or passive players in the courtly world. Rather, they might best be understood in line with Joan Scott‘s readings of historical women as discursive sites where numerous competing forces produce political (in our case, ―literary‖) subjects. Agency in these alternative medieval love plots no longer resides principally in the heroic actions of a knight rescuing a damsel in distress, troubadour lovers entreating an unattainable ladylove, or a Christian lord converting a 13 Burns surveys numerous strategies of resistance, including double-voiced ―body talk‖ and cross-dressing (―Courtly Love,‖44–9). See also, E. Jane Burns, Body Talk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 14 Krueger, Women Readers and Ideology of Gender, passim. 15 Burns, ―Courtly Love,‖48. 5

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in The Craft of Fiction: Essays in Medieval Poetics, .. however, so that we may be unsure which position is truly the writer's own. (New York: Peter Lang, 2003; Myra Seaman, ―Engendering Genre in Middle English Romance:
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