The borrowed knight: Representing the masculine hero in twelfth-century French verse romance.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the rhetoric used to represent the romance knight and claims that existing vocabularies for representing the woman, the monster, the epic knight, and the lover which are present in twelfth-century romance and contemporaneous genres are mined to provide that rhetoric. This negotiation of vocabularies places the knight in dangerous proximity to the Other, threatens his uniqueness, and ultimately challenges his masculinity. These rhetorical tensions point to the conclusion that the knightly persona in romance is ambivalently defined on rhetorical, narratival, and generic levels. The romance knight is never described with a vocabulary that is unique to him, nor are other characters described with vocabularies particular to them. Rather, the representation of the knight refers both to the knight and to another, be it woman, monster, lover, or warrior, by its intra- and intertextuality. This uncertainty in representing the knight indicates the struggle to construct a masculinity from existing paradigms that would fit into the courtly world, a struggle reflected in the realities of twelfth-century society. What this dissertation claims is that romance is attempting to construct a romance knight through rhetoric, but that this attempt never quite succeeds. The knight remains connected to the epic knight (and the woman and the monster) who exists side by side with him. The courtly world depicted in twelfth-century romance is a violent world, perhaps even more violent than the epic world as it struggles to incorporate these competing rhetorics in the depiction of its heroes. To put it another way, the construction of the romance knight is a descriptive process that implicates both gender and genre. Ultimately, this study indicates new avenues for investigation into the role of rhetoric and representation in the construction of gender and masculinity, and their connection to genre, in medieval literature.