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Abstract
Scholarship on Middle English romance has paid persistent attention to the definition of the genre over the course of the past century. My dissertation seeks to contribute to this body of scholarship by adding a critical perspective through the lens of emotions. Contrary to the mainstream readings that view happy endings as a literary convention which romance genre uncritically operates, my research re-calibrates the convention with Barbara Rosenwein’s coinage of the term emotional communities and argues that bliss—i.e. the wholesale of the felicitous rhetoric in romance stories such as “alle is wele” or “there is joy withouten ende”—is the key affect (or emotion norm) that governs the genre. This realignment of happy endings with the rhetoric of bliss consequently leads to a second thesis that examines the way in which the making of bliss necessarily creates certain generic constraints and conflicts with other non-compliant emotions. The literary transition from adversity to prosperity, I argue, is never an automatic, let alone magical, process, but is constantly overshadowed by other dissidents. The acquisition of any happy closure is eventually determined by the ways in which those unhappy emotions come to terms with bliss, sometimes through assimilation, sometimes through suppression.
With my dissertation, I select four major unhappy emotions, with each of which displaying certain struggles and compromises with the genre’s pursuit of happiness. In the first chapter, “Feeling Jealous,” I argue that jealousy triggered between Palamon and Arcite at the sight of Emelye remains the major narrative problem in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. By juxtaposing the romance with the history of jealousy—particularly the Christian distinction between “godly jealousy” and “suspicious jealousy”—this chapter demonstrates how Chaucer’s depictions of jealousy are largely in compliance with “suspicious jealousy,” which was typically frowned upon and thus disavowed by medieval society. The negative reception of jealousy, furthermore, becomes a foil in the design of Chaucer’s narrative; the happy closure of the romance—which has remained a major controversy in the Knight’s Tale scholarship since the past century—I argue, can only come into being upon the suppression of jealousy.
In the second chapter, “Feeing Angry,” by tracking the development of anger from antiquity, I highlight a two-fold definition of anger (sometimes read as contradictory) that was popularized throughout the high and late Middle Ages: anger either triggered by vice or by virtue. Whereas classical and early patristic authors saw human anger as vicious and that which breeds wrongdoings and violence, a new form of anger—zealous anger—had come to be acknowledged and accepted as a result of scholars’ century-long debates and revisions over God’s anger in Scripture. Not only is anger derived from zeal considered noble and just by Church authorities, but it also leaves an open window for the subject to take revenge for a good cause. By using Bevis of Hampton as a case study, I argue that the dynamic of the romance is primarily anger-driven and that the happy closure is only made possible upon the manifestation and fulfillment of Bevis’ zealous anger.
In the third chapter, “Feeling Alienated,” by focusing on the emotion invoked during exile, or feelings of alienation, I present some different perspectives and receptions of the affect in various contexts. Whereas classical authors typically deem feelings of alienation an affective result that is not only futile but also, in some extreme occasions, vicious, such reception underwent some major revision in the Christian Middle Ages. By integrating alienation of affect with the topos of peregrinatio, Christian authors overturn the predominantly negative reception of alienation. Given that alienation in this context alludes to men’s initial separation from God, the affect is deemed both normative and essential in the making of Christian identity. This changed attitude toward alienation consequently influenced the ways in which the affect was represented in literature. As a major genre during the high and late Middle Ages, romance tapped into this cultural grammar with its recurring exile-and-return motif: while romance protagonists go into exile and experience the affect to various degree, it is no longer seen as a self-destructive, plummeting into a state of perpetual despair; instead, the affect guarantees a recovery after the emotional setback. Not only does the affect become a major tool for the romance to sharpen its heroes’ character, but it is also an essential pathway to spirituality. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)
