Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Theories of looking
- 2 Examples of looking
- 3 The Tristan story
- 4 Chrétien de Troyes
- 5 The Lanval story
- 6 Troilus and Criseyde and The Manciple's Tale
- 7 Partonope of Blois
- 8 The Knight's Tale and The Merchant's Tale
- 9 The Squyr of Lowe Degre
- 10 The Romaunt of the Rose
- 11 The Parliament of Fowls and A Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe
- 12 The Palice of Honour and The Goldyn Targe
- 13 The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo
- 14 Phyllyp Sparowe
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - The Romaunt of the Rose
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Theories of looking
- 2 Examples of looking
- 3 The Tristan story
- 4 Chrétien de Troyes
- 5 The Lanval story
- 6 Troilus and Criseyde and The Manciple's Tale
- 7 Partonope of Blois
- 8 The Knight's Tale and The Merchant's Tale
- 9 The Squyr of Lowe Degre
- 10 The Romaunt of the Rose
- 11 The Parliament of Fowls and A Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe
- 12 The Palice of Honour and The Goldyn Targe
- 13 The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo
- 14 Phyllyp Sparowe
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The poems discussed in Chapters 3–9 have been romances, along with two Canterbury Tales that can be read as disillusioned commentaries on romance; that is, they have been third-person narratives about love in which the storyteller, so far as his role is realized at all, exists on a different plane from the lovers and his other fictive creations. In these poems I have been concerned with two types of voyeurism, though it has emerged that each tends to interact with and influence the other: voyeurism involving the persons within the fiction, and voyeurism involving the storyteller and his audience as watchers of the fiction. Henceforward I shall be concerned with first-person narratives where in principle this distinction collapses, for now the narrating poet is his own subject. In practice what happens is not so simple: I begin with a first-person love-story, where the poet is his own hero, telling of his own dream-experience as a lover, but I then move to a series of narratives by Chaucer and his successors, in which, as in Troilus and Criseyde, the poet represents himself as having no such personal experience, even when dreaming, and his role becomes more and more explicitly that of a furtive watcher, debarred by his clerkly status from any enjoyment other than that of watching.
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- Information
- The Medieval Poet as Voyeur , pp. 194 - 210Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993