Courtly Love and Social Change

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Courtly Love and Social Change 1 Introduction When the popularity of courtly love began to wane in the late 1500s through the early 1600s and other paradigms of love encroached upon its dominance with the social elite, essential elements from its philosophy, no longer guarded as the distinct purview of those with genteel blood, were appropriated by some very unorthodox authors who recreated the role of a courtly lover in ways that broadened greatly its definition. These authors from comparatively disadvantaged social positions were able to utilize some of the inherent contradictions within the doctrines of courtly love and its place as an essentially medieval philosophy in a modern society to write some ingenious literature that encourages its reader/audience to reevaluate their entire perception of love and who is most qualified to fill the admired role of courtly lover. The process of rethinking this position and allowing people outside of the traditional upper class men into the role entailed a reevaluation of those social groups who formerly had been almost universally excluded from the position. In the work of Mary Wroth, for example, putting a woman in the active role of lover instead of the traditional passive role of beloved forces the question of why the gender division of roles exists at all, and emphasizes the unreasonable assumption implicit in courtly love discourse that only men pine after an unreachable beloved. The writings of Mary Wroth, Francis Beaumont, and Richard 2 Barnfield all rewrite courtly love in a manner that encourages their audiences to rethink some of the most deep-seated of contemporary social stigma surrounding groups like women, the middling sort, and men with homosexual leanings. All of the works considered in the following chapters are accordingly prime examples of Alan Sinfield’s theory of cultural change. When Sinfield addresses the issue of how cultural change may still occur in spite of the fact that all subjects within a given society are produced by, and whose thoughts are therefore bounded by, the limits established by the dominant discourse, he theorizes that, “dissident potential derives ultimately not from essential qualities in individuals (though they have qualities) but from conflict and contradiction that the social order inevitably produces within itself even as it attempts to sustain itself” (752).1 Sinfield illustrates this point with the example of Shakespeare’s Desdemona. Desdemona was very much subject to the dominant ideologies of her day. She fulfilled the pre-scripted roles of a dutiful daughter and later a (tragically) faithful wife to Othello, but her initial act of the play in defying her father to marry a man of her own choice seems to be so potentially subversive. Rather than imagining that Desdemona has managed to think completely outside of the contemporary mode of discourse into which she was born, Sinfield points out that this radical act was given implicit encouragement by the preeminent ideologies of her day in the form of an 1 For some of the more pivotal works on the longstanding academic debate over the relationship of dissident literature to cultural change and Foucault’s theory of power see: Miller, J. Hillis. "Presidential Address 1986: The Triumph Of Theory, The Resistance To Reading, And The Question Of The Material Base." PMLA: Publications Of The Modern Language Association Of America 102.3 (1987): 281-291; Williams, Raymond. "Base And Superstructure In Marxist Cultural Theory." New Left Review 82 (1973): 3-16; and Holstun, James. "Ranting At The New Historicism." English Literary Renaissance 19.2 (1989): 189-225; for works that discuss the application of this debate to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see: Williams, Raymond. Culture. Glasgow: Fontana, 1981; Cust, Richard, and Ann Hughes Eds. Conflict in Early Stuart England. London: Longman, 1989; and Porter, Carolyn. "Are We Being Historical Yet?." The States of 'Theory': History, Art, and Critical Discourse. 27-62. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. 3 unresolved contradiction. The early modern understanding of marriage included the perception of women as property.2 A woman was her father’s property who was then transferred to her husband upon their marriage, a paradigm that demanded absolute obedience to father before marriage and to spouse afterward; but this stark understanding of matrimony was hardly its sole defining characteristic. Seventeenth-century marriage also included the idea of marriage as a “fulfilling personal relationship” and one of mutual love (753). When Desdemona falls in love with Othello, contemporary standards of behavior contradict each other, at once demanding that she obey her father and that she marry the man she loves and with whom she will have a tender, satisfying relationship.3 Lawrence Stone describes this particular early modern conflict of ideals as “dutiful children experienc[ing] ‘an impossible conflict of role models.4 They had to try to reconcile the often impossible demands for obedience to parental wishes on the one hand and expectations for affection in marriage on the other’” (754). This specific conundrum of early modern standards is representative of the many unacknowledged, or poorly glossed over contradictions in dominant ideologies that provide “faultlines” in their usually smooth, natural-seeming facades. These ruptures, if they become the sites of 2 For more information on women and their legal status in early modern England both as property and in roles that transcend that categorization see: Vaughn, Virginia Mason. "Daughters Of The Game: Troilus And Cressida And The Sexual Discourse Of 16Th-Century England."Women's Studies International Forum 13.3 (1990): 209-220; Gowing, Laura. "Women's Bodies And The Making Of Sex In Seventeenth-Century England." Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture & Society 37.4 (2012): 813-822; Ferguson, Margaret W, A. R. Buck, and Nancy E. Wright Eds. Women, Property and the Letters of Law in Early Modern England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 3 For further elaboration on these conflicting marital standards, see also: Sinfield, Alan. Literature in Protestant England: 1560-1660. New York: Croom Helm, 1983; Dusinberre, Julia. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women. New York: Macmillan, 1976; Shepherd, Simon. Amazons and Warrior Women. New York: Harvester Press, 1981. p-53-6, 107-118; and Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy. New York: Routledge, 1985. Ch. 7. 4 See: Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800. London: Harper Collins, 1977. p 143. 4 cultural conversation, allow people to identify, at least momentarily, the artificial nature of a reigning ideology, and potentially imagine alternate ways of seeing the world. There are, of course, some ideologies that are more closely guarded than others. There are some doctrines that are considered sacred and therefore, even if they contain the kind of fractures that Sinfield points to as the means of cultural disruption, it is less likely that they will become a site of discussion or debate. If we look at Christianity, for example, the many contradictions embedded in its theology majorly went overlooked for hundreds of years by faithful practitioners of the religion who held the tenets to be sacrosanct. However, beginning with the Protestant revolution and moving into the Age of Enlightenment when science began to compete with religion as a dominant ideology, Christianity began to lose its unquestionable status.5 The faultlines in its doctrines increasingly were noticed and emphasized in the discourse between Christian sects and between the scientific and religious communities leading to an escalating number of criticisms to the point that, in the twenty first century, they are no longer even remarkable. When a discourse loses its association with power, it markedly becomes easier to both identify and point out the contradictions within it. There is an opportune point in the decline of an ideology when it is still respected enough to cause serious reflection but not so sacred as to be indisputable that makes it particularly apt as a vehicle of social change. Courtly love was exactly at this point when the writers discussed in the following chapters were writing plays and sonnets about love. 5 For more on the decline of Christianity and the age of Enlightenment, see: Popkin, R. H. and Arjo Vanderjagt. Eds. Skepticism and Irreligion in the Late seventeenth Century. New York: Brill, 1993; Kroll, Richard, Richard Ashcraft and Perez Zagorin, Eds. Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Westfall, Richard S. “The Rise of Science and the Decline of Orthodox Christianity,” God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, Eds. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992; and Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton, Princeton UP, 1986. 5 This is not to imply that fin amour from its inception had been so inviolable that it was never questioned nor that it never became the subject of satire. Anyone even passingly familiar with Le Roman de la Rose is very much aware of how fin amour became the subject of very pointed mockery as early as 1230. There are even satirical elements that question some customs of fin amour in works that scholars point to as models of courtly love: Andreas Capellanus’ De Amore, for example, or Chretien de Troyes’ Lancelot (Robertson 2). Like many
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