Looking Back: Medieval French Romance and the Dynamics of Seeing.

Abstract

This dissertation examines looking in twelfth- and thirteenth-century French romances and argues for its importance in understanding the ways in which the interrelational dynamics between characters are both scripted and subverted through seeing and through the circulation of knowledge about what is seen. Focusing on how medieval love narratives construct sight, and how sight constructs these narratives via the repetition of scenes of looking and in the representation through looking of relationships between characters, this project seeks to understand how seeing in medieval romances complicates the view of female characters objectified by masculine desire.

The first chapter explores the repeated use of windows as a frame in Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Chevalier de la Charrette for the ways in which characters relate to each other. The second chapter discusses how objects define relationships between male and female characters in the Prose Lancelot and the Mort Artu, and how the characters act upon the objects and, in turn, how the objects act upon the characters. The third chapter focuses on seeing and on claims to have seen a maiden’s birthmark in Jean Renart’s Roman de la Rose, and the ways that the tension between seeing and speaking turn the lady and her birthmark into objects of circulation in the narrative. Sight is privileged in the analysis as the primary sense associated with love; as the chapters progress, other senses are at play with seeing. Sight is the most important sense in the first chapter, as characters look upon each other from windows and from the ground. Touch joins seeing in the second chapter, because in the absence of missing lovers, the characters look upon and caress paintings and statues that represent them. Hearing (and speaking) displace touch in the third chapter, and are in constant conflict with seeing. This dissertation builds upon the work of feminist medievalists and other literary and cultural scholars to argue that sight, and objects that are seen, articulate love relationships between characters in medieval romances, and that seeing is frequently a locus of resistance to gender norms the texts both establish and refuse to accept.