INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly fix>m the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter frtce, while others may be from any type o f computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely afreet reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overiaps Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerogr^hically in this copy. Higher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for aity photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy fr>r an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Infimnation Compaiy 300 North Zed> Road, Ann Aibor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE THE MIRROR SPEAKS: THE FEMALE VOICE IN MEDIEVAL DIALOGUE POETRY AND DRAMA A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By SUSAN M. HALLORAN Norman, Oklahoma 1998 UMX Number: 9925589 Copyright 1998 by Bailor am, Susan Margaret All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9925589 Copyright 1999, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 c Copyright by SUSAN M. HALLORAN 1998 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE MIRROR SPEAKS: THE FEMALE VOICE IN MEDIEVAL DIALOGUE POETRY AND DRAMA A Dissertation APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY Table of Contents Dissertation Abstract V Preface vii Chapter One 1 Chapter Two 41 Chapter Three 102 Chapter Four 177 Bibliography 273 IV Dissertation Abstract for The Mirror Speaks: The Female Voice in Medieval Dialogue Poetry and Drama This study focuses on relationships between male and female characters as they are manifested in a variety of Western medieval dialogue literatures. I approach my task from a psychoanalytic perspective, using Lacanian theory to argue that dialog;ue exchanges between male and female characters show the male to be using the female as the “other'’ of Lacan’s mirror stage—in whom one may find constitution and confirmation of identity, or at least the illusion of it. In the course o f such an effort I examine subjectivity as it is created through the verbal interplay o f self and other—and how the positioning of self and other may in some cases be reversed. I argue that medieval literature, despite its overt emphasis on male sensibility and subjectivity, is permeated with the influence of the feminine. Through dialogue exchanges between male and female characters, identity is constructed, primarily for the male but sometimes also for the female characters. In the course of advancing this thesis I examine selected English lyrics and the troubadour poetry which influenced them; poems which contain male-female dialogue exchanges, such as the Middle English Pearl and Piers Plowman and their continental and Latin predecessors, the Consolation of Philosophy, the Complaint of Nature, and the Romance of the Rose: and the English morality, saint’s, and mystery play traditions. In discussing them I focus on the frequently paradoxical nature and function of female voicings within the literature. While the female speaker in such worics is more often than not ancillary to any male presence, her position as “other” in his construction of self nonetheless emphasizes the necessary and constitutive role of the female voice in medieval discourse and culture. What emerges in the end is the necessity of inter-gender complementarity to the fulfillment of both social and spiritual models of existence. VI Preface This study focuses on relationships between male and female characters as they are manifested in a variety of Western medieval dialogue literatures. I approach my task from a psychoanalytic perspective, using Lacanian theory to argue that dialogue exchanges between male and female characters show the male to be using the female as the “other” of Lacan’s mirror stage—in whom one may find constitution and confirmation of identity, or at least the illusion of it. In the course of such an effort I examine subjectivity as it is created through the verbal interplay of self and other—and how the positioning of self and other may in some cases be reversed. I have chosen this approach to my subject matter because it seemed a complement to critical analyses already in circulation. Many of the older studies examining male-female relationships in medieval literature explore the effect female characters have on the more central males of the work, excavating the notion that women served sometimes important, although almost always ancillary positions to males in literature. ‘ More recent works have examined the male-female literary * * Joan M. Ferrante’s Woman as Image in Medieval Literature: From the Twelfth Centurv to Dante (1975; Durham, NC; Labyrinth, 1985) is the classic early feminist medieval study; in it she focuses primarily on the symbolic function of women in the literature of the Middle Ages (for more on this see Chapter One). More recent works, such as Carolyn Dinshaw’s Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989) and Elaine Tuttle Hansen’s Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992) have used this classic approach to rethink a classic subject. Both writers seek to relocate Chaucer within the sphere of male appropriators or “translators” of the feminine, a fate he has traditionally avoided thanks to his apparent empathy for such female characters as Griselda, Criseyde, even the Wife of Bath. vu dynamic to conclude that marginalized, otherwise suppressed, or simply oppressed women manage to resist and/or subvert not only male characters but even the largely masculinist agenda of the male author/ Such activity often includes an examination of female subjectivity—how the female character is able to define herself through resistance to the opposing male forces. Yet studies that are primarily psychoanlytic in nature have more often than not focused on the development of male subjectivity rather than female; the literary woman is again relegated to the margins. Two recent book-length studies focusing on the lyric expression of the Provençal troubadours— the progenitors of the literature within which I begin my study—serve as examples. Sarah Kay is “concerned with [troubadour] subjectivity as produced by language or rhetoric”^ but does not cover the role of inter-gender exchange in the construction of subjectivity. Rouben Cholakian, while concerned with the psychological impact of ^ One such example, M. Keith Booker’s ‘“Nothing That Is So Is So’: Dialogic Discourse in the Voice of the Woman in the Clerk’s Tale and Twelfth Night.’’ Exemplaria 3.2 (1991): 525-37, takes a Bakhtinian approach in suggesting that Shakespeare’s Viola and Chaucer’s Griselda manage to resist authoritative, patriarchal directives by employing “double-voiced” speech—language that seems to confirm but actually resists or undermines the dominant paradigm. In a variation on that idea, E. Jane Bums offers in Bodv Talk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993), “If [the female character’s] voice is contained within the dominant voice of male culture, it can also speak to us in registers generally foreign to that dominant voice” (xvi). It is possible that the creation of female characters such as these was influenced by real-life women. Joan M. Ferrante’s recent To the Glorv of Her Sex: Women’s Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts (Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1997) suggests that despite the “intense misogyny” of the Middle Ages, historical women found ways of expressing themselves and wielding influence, particularly in the composition o f male-authored texts (4). See below. vui the woman’s symbolic presence on the poet-lover’s sense of self/ does not address chiefly the formative effects o f her voice upon him—or o f his voice upon her. In my study I attempt to bring all these threads o f critical activity together, using a Lacanian lens through which to examine texts in which female characters are both marginalized and of vital importance, are sometimes mere verbal tools in the development process of male subjectivity and at other times themselves consumers of male linguistic offerings. Joan Ferrante has written o f the relationships between the historical men and women of the Middle Ages; [Djespite the period’s intense misogyny.. .women could be respected colleagues. Mends, and relatives, whose affection, support, even advice were sought and cherished—or whose antagonism had to be confronted carefully.^ 1 believe that this dynamic is reproduced in the literature of the Middle Ages; furthermore, I believe that a Lacanian reading of the texts’ male-female relationships reveals the necessity of complementarity between the sexes, not only within the creation of individual identity but in the furtherance of religious and social harmony, so important to a culture saturated with notions of Christianity as the organizing framework of existence. As I demonstrate in the following chapters, even within secular works, evidence of this sensibility may be found.