Isn't the gaze male?: Gender and the visual experience in the romances of Chaucer and Malory
Abstract
This study of the romances of Geoffrey Chaucer and Sir Thomas Malory provides a comparative look at the ways in which vision motivates the gendered narrative. My theoretical foundation plots an essential bi-directionality of sight-lines. The modern idea of the "male" gaze, though often applied liberally across literary studies, neglects the scientific and philosophical concepts of vision in the Middle Ages. Intromissive optics, which theorizes movement from the object to the eye, had gained popular and academic support by the time of Chaucer. The subject of the intromissive gaze does nothing, while space collapses between the image and the sight organ. The object's primacy and the passivity of the viewer contradict modern ideas of gazing and indicate patterns of fractured gender identity in looking males. The masculine subjectivity associated with gazing becomes nonexistent. This is of particular import in the romance tradition, which privileges vision and the sight of the beloved. Medieval romances are thus generically encoded to problematize masculinity with vision. Visual narratives, read through the lenses of courtly love, medieval optics, and modern theories of gazing and seeing, illuminate an interconnectivity of sight, gender, and genre in the texts that creates a crisis of masculine identity. This dissertation shows how Chaucer and Malory respond to this crisis and consequently re-formulate masculinity through concepts of vision specific to genre. In his Troilus and Criseyde, and his tales of the Knight and the Merchant, Chaucer narrates away from romance beginning at these crucial moments of sight, using other genres and their visual modes in order to secure normative. In the Morte Darthur, on the other hand, Malory evidences a devotion to the romance genre and uses alternative methods of romance vision, and in particular spectacle, in order both to confirm masculinity and to validate the genre.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Hughes, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Literature|Middle Ages|British and Irish literature|Gender
Off-Campus Purdue Users:
To access this dissertation, please log in to our
proxy server.