Date of Graduation

8-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

English

Advisor/Mentor

Long, Mary B.

Committee Member

Doucet, Annie

Second Committee Member

Smith, Joshua B.

Third Committee Member

Quinn, William A.

Keywords

Ecocriticism; Queer Theory

Abstract

This dissertation conducts queer eco-sensitive readings of a selection of medieval love texts in Middle English and Old French. Informed in turns by the works of feminist, queer, and ecocritical scholars, each chapter engages with a different iteration of literary queerness by bringing the representation of natural spaces and objects (especially the forest) to the fore and reading through nature depicted in the texts. The readings all share a broad goal of inviting modern audiences to play with desire and its manifestations within each text to make meaning and compel intimacy between the work and its current audience. Chapter 1 argues that the Middle English Amis and Amiloun queers genre, and the forest acts as a haven for the two titular protagonists to engage in homoerotic gender parody play. Drawing on queer touchstones from other premodern and early modern narratives, I assert that the friendship between Amis and Amiloun teems with homoerotic overtones corresponding to the other characters in their story. Chapter 2 explores the Middle English lyric’s tendency to queer women into nature objects. I argue that such naturalizing begins as poetic metaphor when courtly suitors attempt to seduce women at court, but it eventually dehumanizes women and weaponizes natural-world discourse against them when they are in unprotected, unsupervised, and isolated spaces. Finally, I propose that in some lyrics, queered young women reclaim their diminished humanity to resist and survive the sexual encounters they are subjected to. Chapter 3 proposes an alternative framework for power modelled by the Old French Yvain, ou le chevalier au lion. Working closely with Donna Haraway’s ideas on kinship during the chthulucene, I decenter the knight Yvain to reveal the depth of connectivity among the constellation of characters in the tale named for a single knight. Finally, Chapter 4 draws attention to the villain of Le Roman de Silence, a 13th century French tale mostly known because of its girl-knight who is raised as a boy. I argue that Queen Eufeme is a queer-coded villain who is, in fact, more transgressive in her sexuality and gender performativity than the girl-knight Silence, and with the help of Elizabeth Jane Burns’s thorough work on the queering of fabliaux women, I construe Queen Eufeme as a genre-queer fabliau woman trapped in the role of a courtly lady. Working with the vast but relatively novel body of queer-medieval scholarship, I draw out the natural world as a focal place of meaning, more significant than its role as mere setting suggests. Partly an effort to trouble the persistence of binaries (male-female, Subject-object, human-nature, self-Other) in feminist and queer readings of medieval courtly love texts, each chapter shifts its gaze to a different possibility for queerness in the medieval, purposefully refusing to land on certainty and dedicated to relishing the perplexity of desire and its many faces in medieval love.

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