Table Of ContentMonstrous Femininity and the Female Body in Medieval Chivalric
Romance
A dissertation submitted by
Jenny L. Howe
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
English
Tufts University
May 2014
[© 2014, Jenny L. Howe]
Adviser: Professor John Fyler
UMI Number: 3624706
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ii
Abstract
Monstrous Femininity considers the female body’s function as a mechanism of
knowledge production/meaning-making within medieval chivalric romance. Though often
identified as a “woman’s genre,” romance is trenchantly organized by patriarchal values. Most
often, female figures within these texts serve as proving grounds for the protagonist’s entrance
into chivalric masculinity, the acquisition, exchange, or even elision of the heroine cementing his
identity as a knight. This dissertation argues that female bodies function as points of rupture or
fissure that unsettle this normative gender system. Examining romances from Chaucer, Malory,
Chretien de Troyes, and Spenser alongside a number of anonymous Middle English romances, I
demonstrate that female bodies across romance conflate forms of masculinity and femininity and
open up the borders of the body through bleeding, excess, and desire. I read romance’s disruptive
female bodies as an extension of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s theory of the monster, understanding
female corporeality within romance as a site of instability, of systemic crisis and collapse.
I trace this thread of monstrous disruption through various forms of female corporeality.
Each of my chapters takes up a different form of the female body, considering how loathliness,
beauty, desire, and maternity all cross discursive and bodily bounds in distinct ways. A striking
commonality that manifests from these discussions is how medieval romance works to shore up
and shut down these ruptures, ultimately forcing the female body back into its role of
normalizing agent through marriage, transformation, and death, and ignoring or covering over
the residual excess that often results from this act. Ultimately, I argue that this monstrous
construction of the female body, its refusal to assimilate fully into the patriarchal order that
organizes and produces it, makes visible the ways that systems of power construct, manipulate,
and make meaning out of bodies.
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Table of Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 1
I. Modern “Medievalisms” ....................................................................................................................... 2
II. Chivalric Masculinity and the Social Confines of Romance ............................................................... 5
III. Cultural Productions and the Monstrous Female Body .................................................................... 12
Chapter One: Dame Ragnell’s “snotyd” nose: Excessive Corporeality and Monstrous
Transformation in the English Loathly Lady Tales............................................................................... 26
Introduction: Vagina Dentata ................................................................................................................. 26
I. “A lothly wommannysch figure”: Femininity, Monstrosity, Corporeality ......................................... 29
II. Dame Ragnell’s ‘ungoodly’ body: the Loathly Lady’s Excessive Flesh ........................................... 34
III. “Leaky Vessels”: Fluids, Fluidity, and the Unstable Female Body .................................................. 38
IV. “Lifting the Veil”: the Revelatory Loathly Body ............................................................................. 44
V. “Out of the Woods”: the Loathly Lady’s Disruptive Presence .......................................................... 51
VI. Beauty as an Agent of Containment ................................................................................................. 59
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 67
Chapter Two: “The fresshe beautee sleeth me sodeynly”: Violent Beauties and Suffering Knights in
Erec et Enide and the Knight’s Tale ......................................................................................................... 73
Introduction: The Gorgon’s Head ........................................................................................................... 73
I. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Normativity, Excess, and Romance’s Heroines .................... 77
II. Beauty is a Beast: Excessive Beauty as Monstrous Difference ......................................................... 87
III: “It’s just a flesh wound”: Suffering Knights and Masculine Wholeness ....................................... 113
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 124
Chapter Three: “but that I loved thys noble knyght Sir Launcelot oute of mesure”: Disruptive
Female Desire in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur ....................................................................... 126
Introduction: “Great Peril” ................................................................................................................... 126
I. The virgin, the wife, and the whore: limited feminine desire in the Morte Darthur ......................... 129
II. “A good girl will love you to death”: the Fair Maiden of Ascolat and self-annihilating love ......... 137
III: Acting like a man: Elaine of Corbin and romantic gender inversion ............................................. 144
IV. “Unmanning” Lancelot: Guinevere, “treasonous” love, and romance’s heterosexual imperative . 153
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 169
Chapter Four: Mommy Dearest: Monstrous Maternity and Female Sovereignty in Book I of
Spenser’s Faerie Queene ......................................................................................................................... 173
Introduction: Monstrous Offspring and Maternal Desire ..................................................................... 173
I. Adversarial (Feminine) Flesh ............................................................................................................ 178
II. Violent Wombs and “Poisonous Dugs”: the Monstrous Maternal ................................................... 185
III. Virtuous Women and “Unfleshly” Bodies ..................................................................................... 199
IV. The Queen’s “Two Bodies”: Sovereignty and the Flesh ................................................................ 210
Conclusion: Discursive Femininities .................................................................................................... 215
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Monstrous Femininity and the Female Body in Medieval Chivalric Romance
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Introduction
I. Modern “Medievalisms”
2006 saw the release of a small independent horror film entitled Teeth.1 Taking an
interesting spin on the coming-of-age genre, Teeth quite literally imagines the phenomenon of
vagina dentata. The protagonist, Dawn, is a pretty blond teenager dedicated to abstinence and
purity. Early in the film, she meets a boy named Toby who sparks desire within her and whose
very presence tests her strongest convictions. But Dawn remains true to her beliefs, doing her
best to keep her distance from Toby in order to avoid temptation and constantly repeating the
mantra “purity, purity” whenever her mind strayed from the “right” path. One afternoon while
Dawn is swimming in the local pond with Toby, he sexually assaults her. During the attack,
Dawn discovers that she has a set of sharp teeth embedded in her vagina. These teeth function as
a means of protection, emerging only when her body is threatened. Though she is horrified at
first, Dawn eventually becomes empowered by her “weapon” and begins to take revenge on the
boys around her, using her body as a means of both seduction and castration.
Teeth is often more funny than horrifying, but beneath its humor swirls a heavy subtext of
cultural anxiety concerning female corporeality. Because Dawn’s body is the source of her
power, the female body is marked by the film as both other and frightening.2 Teeth is, of course,
playing with these antifeminist notions, but it also suggests that archaic fears surrounding
feminine sexuality and the female body are alive and well in the twenty-first century. Take, for
example, the episode “Leap Day” of the popular sitcom Modern Family. One of the central
1 Teeth. Dir. Michael Lichtenstein. Perf. Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Josh Pais, and Hale Appleman. Weinstein,
2008. DVD.
2 Early in the film, you learn that the local school board has decided to hide the diagrams of the vagina in the high
school’s health textbooks with large stickers but has allowed the diagrams of the penis to remain visible. Such an act
institutionalizes a sexual hierarchy where masculinity is normalized and femininity is something other and shameful.
3
storylines in this episode is the havoc that the Dumphy women’s synched menstrual cycles wreak
upon the men in the family. The father, Phil, reacts to his wife and two daughters with
exaggerated fear and anxiety and refers to them as “Satan’s trifecta” and as “Dracula, the Wolf-
man, and Frankenstein,” aligning the menstruating female body directly with monstrosity. Just to
drive the point home further, the youngest son Luke, when accosted by his sisters for a prank,
claims he did it because they were “monsterating.”3
The 2012 presidential election transferred this anxiety around female corporeality from
the realm of popular culture to politics. Women’s health, particularly the availability and
affordability of contraception, was a central debate in the election, and a number of bills
concerning contraception and abortion were put before both state and federal legislatures in the
months leading up to it. Some of the most striking were Virginia’s ultrasound law, which
required any woman who wished to have an abortion to undergo a vaginal ultrasound first,4 and
the Protect Life Act, which would allow federally funded hospitals to refuse women abortions,
even under life-threatening conditions, if the hospital opposes them.5 These proposed laws not
only suggest that even in our “post-feminist” world women do not fully control their own bodies,
but also that the female body continues to be devalued and dehumanized, allowing for a
supporter of the Protect Life Act to insist that “the mother's life should never take precedence
over the baby's.”6 Such a construction of motherhood presents the mother only as an incubator
for new life, with no intrinsic function or value of her own.
3 “Leap Day.” Modern Family. ABC. WCVB, Boston. 29 Feb. 2012. Television.
4http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/02/virginia_ultrasound_law_women_who_want_an_abortion
_will_be_forcibly_penetrated_for_no_medical_reason.html
5 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/11/protect-life-act-anti-abortion-bill_n_1005937.html
6 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/11/protect-life-act-anti-abortion-bill_n_1005937.html
4
What all these examples demonstrate is that the female body remains a site of contention
in our modern world. The jokes around female genitalia and menstruation illustrated both in
Teeth and the “Leap Day” episode of Modern Family house persistent fears around the power
and impact of a woman’s body, particularly concerning its potential violence, instability, and
“leakiness.” Similarly these legislations on abortion and contraception demonstrate that even in
2012, the female body remains a platform upon which masculine forms of power are negotiated
and established, whereby politicians (many of whom are male) decide how female bodies will be
accessed and controlled.
This dissertation takes up the medieval female body to explore the mechanisms by which
that body bears the burden of patriarchy, mechanisms that align strikingly with those described
above. Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger, in the introduction to Queering the Middle Ages,
underscore the importance of locating such parallels between the Middle Ages and modernity in
order to loosen the strict divides so often assumed between these two periods. “Might,” they ask,
“the apparently stable essences of historical thinking (primitivity, modernity, the medieval) need
to be reconceived not as stable entities but as stabilized effects of retrospection? In other words,
might we need…to rethink what we have come to know as the Middle Ages not as preceding
modernity but as the effect of a certain self-construction of the modern, which gives itself
identity by delimiting a ‘before’ that is everything the modern is not?” (Burger et al xiii). Burger
and Kruger suggest here that we can learn as much about our current cultural moment from
studying the medieval period as we can about that period itself. Though Queering the Middle
Ages is most concerned with shining a light on the various sexual identities culled from
understandings of the medieval produced by such modern/postmodern self-identification, this
aim to unsettle the distance between the Middle Ages and the modern elucidates erroneous
5
assumptions about medieval gender as well. Too often modernity/postmodernity is defined
wholly in opposition to the past, forging only lines of dissonance (women “back then”) and
veiling important points of connection. By emphasizing the ways in which medieval culture, just
as modern culture, creates and reiterates certain constructions of female corporeality (the
“monsterating” woman, the potentially violent/threatening female sex organs, etc.), I hope to
upset such temporal oppositions and illustrate instead how the past might inform the present,
how reading the female bodies produced by medieval texts can help us better read our own
productions of femininity.
II. Chivalric Masculinity and the Social Confines of Romance
Monstrous Femininity argues that the female body functions as a monster within
medieval chivalric romance, a site of disruption and instability that exposes not only romance’s
anxieties around female corporeality, but those of the larger medieval world as well. Though
romance is often categorized as a “woman’s genre,” medieval romance is trenchantly organized
around patriarchal values. It is, to put it somewhat basely, a “woman’s genre” that does not care
about women.7 Female figures within romance narratives most often serve as proving grounds
for the protagonist’s entrance into chivalric masculinity, the acquisition, exchange, or even
elision of the heroine cementing his identity as a knight. Through this, the female body serves as
a means of promulgating the masculine, aristocratic values of knighthood, a role that, as I argue
throughout my project, these bodies often refuse or resist.
Many critics have noted the difficulty in defining the romance genre. Fredric Jameson,
for instance, highlights the tendency of romance to disrupt and disturb fixed generic borders
7 Simon Gaunt asserts that “female characters in romance are not real women, but figures within a male discourse”
(Gaunt, Gender and Genre 72). Similarly, Maureen Fries demonstrates how these female characters are often the
“instruments” of masculine progress, the impetus for movement and the reward for success (Fries 63).
6
(Jameson 135-38) and W.R.J. Barron’s recognition of the many influences on romance by other
genres, including folktale, heroic epic, dream vision, and hagiography, further testifies to
romance’s troubling relationship to classification (Barron 48-62). Ad Putter, similarly,
underscores the varied audience and murky manuscript history of medieval romance that
complicate attempts to locate its identifying characteristics. He stresses the multitude of content
and structures that fall under the umbrella of “romance,” reiterating Jameson’s insistence that
content or form alone cannot effectively elucidate genre. In fact, Putter’s attempts to list topics or
even subgenres within romance quickly spiral out of control:
some romances tell of the self-fulfillment of a knight in adventures of love
and chivalry,…[others] trace the fortuitous wanderings of calumniated,
exiled or abandoned ladies…; others deal with outlawed heroes…,or with
classical legends…; some are based on, or call themselves, ‘Breton
lays’…; while still other romances contain a strong didactic or penitential
impulse. (Putter, “Historical Introduction” 1)
He goes on to note that “subdivisions [of romance] could easily be multiplied. Arthurian
romances, homiletic romances, society romances, crusading romances, family romances,
penitential romances, exemplary romances, Charlemagne romances…” (1-2). Putter is quick to
point out the futility of these types of divisions, declaring that “sharp dividing lines can be
imposed but they cannot convincingly be demonstrated” (2).
I recognize these pitfalls in attempting to define such a vast, diverse genre as romance,
and this project is not invested in validating or debunking any currently existing definitions.
Rather, I am concerned with how some of the recurring characteristics of romance—particularly
its repeated return to masculinity, aristocracy, and chivalry—determine not only the function of
female bodies within the genre, but their production as well. Monstrous Femininity takes up
specifically those romances termed “chivalric,” romances concerned with a central knightly
