Milk and blood: maternal frameworks in Old French literature

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.