The Lover’s Voice: The Poetics of Direct Discourse in Medieval French Romance

This dissertation proposes that the frequent inclusion of characters’ speech in medieval romance is more than a formal marker of genre; rather, certain romance texts use dialogue between male and female protagonists to portray varied experiences of affect and desire, and to explore questions of subjectivity and gender difference. While scholars often assume that asymmetrical models of gender difference are deeply entrenched in twelfth-century courtly literature, I argue that an ephemeral subgenre of early romance not only problematizes such models, but also reaches toward an ethos of collaboration between men and women. In the Old French adaptation of Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe,” the adaptor grants his protagonists lengthy paired monologues that illuminate their interiority and agency, suggesting a humanistic affirmation of subjectivity. At first glance, the Old French text might seem to depart from its Latin model mostly in form; however, the adaptor’s interest in his character’s speech marks a more profound commitment to a poetics of dialogue. Chrétien de Troyes’s romance Érec et Énide might be read as a repudiation of such a poetics, given its unusual problematization of dialogue between its titular couple: Énide’s speech is not represented until after her marriage to Érec, and when she does speak, her words disrupt rather than repair the couple’s peaceful marriage. I argue that, despite Énide’s troubled speaking status, this romance shows how a female subject might navigate courtly society by focalizing Énide’s subjectivity; furthermore, although conversation within the couple rarely leads to greater accord, mutual touch offers an alternate form of communication. Direct discourse is less fraught but no less charged in the Tristan legend; this chapter analyzes three Tristanian texts in order to examine the role of evocation in the narrative and in the way communication between Tristan and Yseut is portrayed. I advocate for a reconsideration of the “fragmented” Tristan tradition, and propose reading it as episodic instead, a shift that reveals the ways in which different authors evoke a larger narrative. This relationship of the part to the whole is echoed by the way communication between Tristan and Yseut is treated as both exceptionally seamless and oddly overwrought: these lovers understand each other so effortlessly that their speech must be glossed for the reader, in order to explain the evocative nature of their dialogue. These three chapters reveal romance’s exquisite sensitivity to its characters’ speech, and outline a model of the medieval love relationship that champions a cooperation and dynamism that can only be represented in dialogue