Abstract
The thesis considers the depiction and function of maternal characters within late twelfth
and thirteenth-century French texts, a topos which varies according to genre. The main
generic category of the study is that of the chanson de geste, with additional chapters on
romance, and on didactic literature pertaining to women. The ideological constructs of
contemporary religious and medical teachings on the feminine/ maternal provide an
introduction and a background to the study, while modern feminist theory is used as a
methodological and critical approach.
The first chapter examines the inherent ambiguity of didactic texts, including those by
Etienne de Foug&res, Raymond Llull and Philippe de Novarre. The prescription of a
code of ideal female conduct is here implicitly and constantly undercut by the
sexualisation of the female body through the very strategies of writing which would seek
to contain it, a problem which appears notably in Robert de Blois' Chastoiement des
Dames. The authoritative stance taken by these texts is haunted by a fear that the very
prescription of an ideal of behaviour may be symptomatic of failure, a disquiet also
given voice by the many negative examples they cite. A tension is thus produced
between the projected containment of female sexuality and the intimation that didactic
writing always, by form and by content, undercuts its own prescriptive enterprise.
Chapter 2 studies the role of the mother in the romance texts of Guillaume de Dole,
Perceval and La Manekine. The maternal image here appears limited and confined,
reflecting the concerns of didactic literature in the emphasis placed on female chastity,
presenting the mother as a religious symbol, or simply placing her as peripheral to the
masculine discourse of the text. Chapters 3-5 then compare the depiction of maternal
characters in the chanson de geste. Although chansons de geste (e.g. the Crusade Cycle
and Berte as Grans Pies) and romance both appear to subscribe to an idealised and
ideologically-conforming model of femininity, in the chanson de geste constructions of
the maternal are often undercut by the narrative disquiet which these can produce.
Framing and containing the maternal character within the body appears inherently
problematic and unstable, as with the hero's mother in Raoul de Cambrai, while the
destabilising ambiguity of the maternal influence in reproduction and familial structure
is highlighted by Ami et Amile and Parise la Duchesse. In these texts the mother
functions as an agent in social and narrative frameworks far more complex than a linear
genealogy of fathers and sons in which her role would be that of a silent, passive and
unacknowledged supplement. It is the epic's emphasis on intertextual and familial
connections — in contrast with the enclosed, self-limiting reproduction of the romance —
that allows for this more multi-faceted maternal function. The genealogical imperative
of the chanson de geste is seen to afford greater possibility for significant maternal input
and for greater play in the genre's articulation of the maternal, on both the syntactic and
the semantic levels of textual representation. Indeed, the positioning of the mother as
nexus between the signifying units of father and son within the narrative of lineage is of
prime strategic importance. Her 'silence' within the symbolic structure of society and
language, or of text, destabilises and troubles any vision of a self-sufficient, monolithic
language adequate to the representation of a world and a history. This recognition of the
possibility of a maternal influence, and the textual space which this allows to the maternal
voice, thus resists and restructures the social and rhetorical conventions which figure
femininity in the medieval text.
