Monstrous Femininity and the Female Body in Medieval Chivalric Romance (PhD dissertation)

Monstrous Femininity considers the female body’s function as a mechanism of knowledge production/meaning-making within medieval chivalric romance. Though often identified as a “woman’s genre,” romance is trenchantly organized by patriarchal values. Most often, female figures within these texts serve as proving grounds for the protagonist’s entrance into chivalric masculinity, the acquisition, exchange, or even elision of the heroine cementing his identity as a knight. This dissertation argues that female bodies function as points of rupture or fissure that unsettle this normative gender system. Examining romances from Chaucer, Malory, Chretien de Troyes, and Spenser alongside a number of anonymous Middle English romances, I demonstrate that female bodies across romance conflate forms of masculinity and femininity and open up the borders of the body through bleeding, excess, and desire. I read romance’s disruptive female bodies as an extension of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s theory of the monster, understanding female corporeality within romance as a site of instability, of systemic crisis and collapse.
I trace this thread of monstrous disruption through various forms of female corporeality. Each of my chapters takes up a different form of the female body, considering how loathliness, beauty, desire, and maternity all cross discursive and bodily bounds in distinct ways. A striking commonality that manifests from these discussions is how medieval romance works to shore up and shut down these ruptures, ultimately forcing the female body back into its role of normalizing agent through marriage, transformation, and death, and ignoring or covering over the residual excess that often results from this act. Ultimately, I argue that this monstrous construction of the female body, its refusal to assimilate fully into the patriarchal order that organizes and produces it, makes visible the ways that systems of power construct, manipulate, and make meaning out of bodies.