Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on translations
- Introduction: living death
- 1 Roland and the second death
- 2 The knight as Thing: courtly love in the non-cyclic prose Lancelot
- 3 The ubi sunt topos in Middle French: sad stories of the death of kings
- 4 Ceci n'est pas une marguerite: anamorphosis in Pearl
- 5 Becoming woman in Chaucer: on ne naît pas femme, on le devient en mourant
- Conclusion: living dead or dead-in-life?
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
5 - Becoming woman in Chaucer: on ne naît pas femme, on le devient en mourant
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on translations
- Introduction: living death
- 1 Roland and the second death
- 2 The knight as Thing: courtly love in the non-cyclic prose Lancelot
- 3 The ubi sunt topos in Middle French: sad stories of the death of kings
- 4 Ceci n'est pas une marguerite: anamorphosis in Pearl
- 5 Becoming woman in Chaucer: on ne naît pas femme, on le devient en mourant
- Conclusion: living dead or dead-in-life?
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
Summary
This final chapter considers the various relations between female characters, ideals of femininity and death in two poems by Chaucer: the early Book of the Duchess and later Legend of Good Women, principally the Prologue. Both poems foreground figures between two deaths. The Legend is dominated by Alceste who, herself returned from the dead, colours the heroines of the legends, while the Book throngs with undead. I explore the explanatory value for these poems of an anthropological account relating to funerary rites of passage by which a deceased person is detached from the community of the living and, after a threatening liminal stage, is integrated into the community of the dead. I find that this model accentuates the normative and socially constructive uses of the ‘between two deaths’, thus it enhances understanding of how the dead lady central to the Book is elevated as a feminine exemplar. The absence in the Legend of such a close fit between theory and text is itself productive, enabling us at once to refine the anthropological model and to argue that the Legend works against certain normative constructions of femininity exemplified in the Book. I return to a Lacanian model in analysing the more disturbing figures in both poems.
My subtitle derives from the famous opening line of volume ii of Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe: ‘On ne naît pas femme: on le devient’, in Parshley's translation: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ – a rendering of Beauvoir's insistence on the subject's existentialist freedom and becoming.
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- Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature , pp. 191 - 214Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011