Intro to my Master's Thesis

Courtly Lady or Lady Errant

Part of the adventure of the Courtly Romances of Chrétien de Troyes are the challenges presented by the women who permeate the genre. The trope of the Lady bestowing a quest upon the Knight—a quest he must complete in order to win her favor and his own honor—pervades the genre and is perhaps one of the most recognizable traits of the Courtly Romance. However, just as the Lady has held sway over her Knight and Lover, so too has she held sway over the minds of critics and readers; her undeniable power over the Knight and her ability to drive the story has made her a literary force with which to be reckoned. Unfortunately, one reaction to this literary omnipresence has been to diminish the Courtly Lady to just about anything but what she is—a woman trying to successfully navigate the expectations of the outer world of the Courtly Romance with her own inner identity as the subject of her own story.

Numerous critics have renamed her: an allegory, a mirror, a symbol . . . . Jacques Lacan, and then Slavoj Zizek, argues that the Lady in the Courtly Romance is little more than an object—the physical manifestation for the Other, that which the Knight is not. She is dehumanized, existing only to play her role “as an inhuman partner in the sense of a radical Otherness which is wholly incommensurable with our needs and desires; as such, she is simultaneously a kind of automaton, a machine which utters meaningless demands at random” (Zizek 90). This mechanization of the Courtly Lady to this monstrous other diminishes the woman, allowing one to relegate her to baser associations for which she is to act as a tangible representative. Lacan and Zizek assert that it is “when the person involved is transformed into a symbolic function that one is able to speak of her in the crudest terms" (Lacan 149). This reductive reading of women in the Courtly tradition and her inextricable relationship with ideas of seduction, captivity and servitude has merit, however, Lacan’s accusation that “all the poets seem to be addressing the same person” seems a sweeping generalization, especially upon his citation of Chrétien de Troyes by name as an example of the “extreme arbitrariness of the attitude expressed by [. . .] the authors of the period” (Lacan 149, 150). A consideration of the women in Chrétien de Troyes work reveals something very contrary to this idea. Characters like Enide, Fenice, Lunete and even some of the nameless women of Chrétien ’s literary universe stand apart from the trope of the Courtly Lady and from each other. Furthermore, the women within the Romances of Chrétien ’s work often defy the reductionist readings like those of Lacan and Zizek as they successfully undermine the objectification of their gender and recreate the Knight as a reagent, using his shining armor to reflect back onto themselves a subjectivity which the Other has denied them.