The mirror speaks: The female voice in medieval dialogue poetry and drama.

Abstract

I argue that medieval literature, despite its overt emphasis on male sensibility and subjectivity, is permeated with the influence of the feminine. Through dialogue exchanges between male and female characters, identity is constructed, primarily for the male but sometimes also for the female characters. In the course of advancing this thesis I examine selected English lyrics and the troubadour poetry which influenced them; poems which contain male-female dialogue exchanges, such as the Middle English Pearl and Piers Plowman and their continental and Latin predecessors, the Consolation of Philosophy, the Complaint of Nature, and the Romance of the Rose; and the English morality, saint's, and mystery play traditions. In discussing them I focus on the frequently paradoxical nature and function of female voicings within the literature. While the female speaker in such works is more often than not ancillary to any male presence, her position as "other" in his construction of self nonetheless emphasizes the necessary and constitutive role of the female voice in medieval discourse and culture. What emerges in the end is the necessity of inter-gender complementarity to the fulfillment of both social and spiritual models of existence.

This study focuses on relationships between male and female characters as they are manifested in a variety of Western medieval dialogue literatures. I approach my task from a psychoanalytic perspective, using Lacanian theory to argue that dialogue exchanges between male and female characters show the male to be using the female as the "other" of Lacan's mirror stage---in whom one may find constitution and confirmation of identity, or at least the illusion of it. In the course of such an effort I examine subjectivity as it is created through the verbal interplay of self and other---and how the positioning of self and other may in some cases be reversed.