Resistance to love perhaps carries a greater sense of social transgression in the Middle English tradition compared with French works: because English romances focus more consistently upon the fulfilment of love within marriage, resistance takes on additional social and political functions here. In addition, the focus on love within marriage aligns Middle English romances more closely with the expectations governing their readers’ own lives. By attending to the points of connection and disjunction between romance and real-life expectations, I am not suggesting that romance is mimetic, realistic, or naturalistic. Romances’ reliance upon coincidental reunions, revelations of hidden identities, and super-human feats of prowess are fantastical, sometimes to the point of being ridiculous – though they are no less enjoyable or effective for this. Yet romances also engage with contemporary realities, not least in terms of their portrayal of marriage, love, gendered expectations, and dynastic concerns. My attention to points of contact between romance depictions and real-life models departs from, yet also builds upon, work on romance’s ‘radical fictionality’.
1 Katherine C. Little and Nicola McDonald, ‘Introduction’, in Thinking Medieval Romance, ed. by Little and McDonald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 1–10 (p. 4). Katherine C. Little and Nicola McDonald argue that romance is distinguished by its conscious emphasis on make-believe, but that this difference from other contemporary genres allows it to ‘imagine alternatives to and even deconstruct the values inherent in clerkly culture’.
2 Ibid., p. 5. In doing so, they suggest that fictionality does not prevent, but in fact facilitates, a certain – perhaps radical – relationship to the ‘real’ world.
Romances’ expectation and celebration of love, desire, and marriage, and their relation to readers’ own expectations, position resistance to love as a potentially subversive trope. Previous isolated discussions of resistance to love have not usually considered it in this light: Sylvester has argued that romances ‘require a woman’s (initial) refusal’, but this book challenges such an argument by drawing attention to the anxieties that female resistance can provoke, as well as by exploring a much wider range of works in which resistance is not always gendered.
3 Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality, p. 12. Crane too argues that ‘no’ becomes a gendered expectation in romance:
Later romances, particularly under the influence of the
Romance of the Rose, develop a strongly narrative impulse within courtship by relocating the difficulties that divide the knight and his beloved from external circumstances to the lady’s own resistance. With this development, refusal becomes an integral part of courtship, an expected first response that the lover’s efforts can overcome.
4 Crane, Gender and Romance, p. 63.In describing resistance as ‘an expected first response’, Crane conflates resistance to love with
dangier, a gendered behavioural performance of rebuffing a lover as a gesture of modesty.
Dangier does relate to resistance to love and I explore the points of connection where relevant, but resistance to love is not gendered in the same way, is not necessarily a deliberate strategy, and seems to provoke more anxiety within romances than the expected performance of
dangier. Indeed, to conflate
dangier and resistance to love, and to accept
dangier as a pattern of behaviour rather than deconstructing it as a carefully crafted fiction, poses something of an ethical problem for the modern feminist reader. As Sara Torres notes, ‘one of the most enduring fictions in amatory narrative is that women’s refusal of consent is designed to advance, rather than terminate, courtship’.
5 Torres, ‘Sans merci’, pp. 328–9. To read
dangier at face value is to accept the fiction that ‘no’ will inevitably become ‘yes’, which upholds the tenets of rape culture. I propose instead to take resistance to love seriously, valuing refusals for what they are rather than folding them into the structures of coercive courtship. Of course, there are other ways to read the examples I discuss: depictions of men resisting higher-status women could be seen as a disingenuous move, for example, but I choose to take their refusals seriously here. In honouring a romance protagonist’s resistance
as resistance, we can unpick coercive structures and their strategies for transforming resistance into acceptance.
Crane also positions resistance to love as a plot-generating device, which of course it is. As Samantha Katz Seal has argued, romance plots are ‘often precisely about the initial lack of female desire; it is when “women don’t really want to” that the male lover is spurred to his most ardent pursuit’.
6 Samantha Katz Seal, ‘Chasing the Consent of Alice Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 44 (2022), ‘Colloquium: Historicizing Consent’, ed. by Harris and Somerset, 273–83 (p. 275). Yet while we might expect romances in which resistance to love motivates chivalric prowess to use this motif as a celebration of chivalric masculinity, such works often pose questions about and even critiques of masculine performance. Even where it ultimately advances the love-plot of a romance, the subversive potential of resistance to love can remain latent. The motif of resistance to love exemplifies romance’s capacity to prompt questions about its assumed norms and gesture towards alternatives outside of those norms, even while arriving at a conventional ending. Such questioning is not a purely rhetorical exercise: as Laine E. Doggett points out, imaginative literature can function as ‘indicators of social and cultural phenomena with the potential to shape and change attitudes, not merely […] record[s] of attitudes’.
7 Doggett, Love Cures: Healing and Love Magic in Old French Romance (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009), p. 6. Romance does not just passively draw on the cultural and literary discourses described above but may have actively interrogated, challenged, and reconfigured these discourses, offering material for its readers to debate.
8 See Cooper on romance as ‘a secular forum analogous to academic debate’: The English Romance in Time, p. 13.Romance also has a more personal impact on its readers, encouraging them to want what it depicts as desirable. As I will argue throughout the course of this book, romance teaches its readers whom they ought and ought not to desire, and how they ought to behave in pursuit of their desires. In this respect, my book builds upon Nicola McDonald’s work on romance as ‘an enormously powerful cultural discourse’, which ‘both scripts our desires […] and seeks to organize them into legible and socially acceptable forms’.
9 Nicola McDonald, ‘Desire Out of Order and Undo Your Door’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 34 (2012), 247–75 (p. 247). Romances achieve this not by offering an explicit didactic message but by consistently and repeatedly emphasising that love and marriage matter. Modern theorists of asexuality have pointed to the power literature has to shape its readers’ understanding of their own sexuality:
Many of us learn to desire by watching other people desire. […] In theory, mimetic desire can be perfectly fine. In practice, the world is not a neutral place. […] If you don’t know who you are or what you want, the world will decide for you. It will show you a couple of options and tell you those are the only ones.
10 Chen, Ace, p. 172.Of course, I am not suggesting that the readers of romance thought their only options were to become chivalrous knights and wealthy heiresses, but I am suggesting that through its consistent celebration of love and marriage, romance ‘delimit[s] a particular notion of what
is right’, of what is desirable.
11 McDonald, ‘Desire Out of Order’, p. 255. See further Sylvester, Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality, p. 2. It presents love and marriage as normal things to want; indeed, portrayals of resistance to love usually suggest that even if you do not want these things at first you will eventually come to do so. As Chen argues of the celebration of love in modern writing, ‘the effect of these stories is powerful’. Yet she encourages us to ‘look a little closer, and the authority can begin to crack’.
12 Chen, Ace, p. 135. While transformations of resistance into desire portray marriage and love as normal and desirable, the initial presence of resistance may constitute a fault line through which romance’s authority might start to crack. Expressions of resistance to love interrogate the genre’s priorities and may be a means through which readers can question if they really share these priorities. In this way, this book seeks to contribute to queer readings of medieval literature: although I focus primarily on relationships between men and women, which often lead to marriage, I make such relationships the subject of critical inquiry, deconstructing how they are formed and presented as normative. By examining moments of resistance to sexual and gendered norms, particularly in the first two chapters, and by considering the extensive use of coercion in romance relationships, I aim to denaturalise their ubiquity, to examine the ideological forces that shape romance relationships, and to draw out instances of resistance to these ideologies. In keeping with the contemporary intersectional feminist turn to a political critique of desire, I both affirm that ‘there is no entitlement to sex’ – or love – and ‘everyone is entitled to want what they want’, while also taking account of how ‘personal preferences […] are rarely just personal’.
13 Srinivasan, The Right to Sex, p. 88. Deconstructing ideas of romantic or sexual obligation
and the forces that shape what we do and do not desire form key threads throughout this book.