The motif of the proud lady in love can be socially subversive as well as conservative, raising questions about the performance of gender (especially masculinity) in medieval romance, even while reimposing normative desires. These romances’ ultimate adherence to norms reveals the political investment they have in female (heterosexual) desire: while Felicity Riddy argues that in romance, ‘the woman […] simply moves, plotlessly, from daughterhood to wifehood’, the romances discussed in this chapter reveal the plot within this pattern and the politics within that plot.
1 Felicity Riddy, ‘Middle English romance: family, marriage, intimacy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. by Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 235–52 (p. 240). McDonald also argues that in romance, ‘women’s lives […] are conventionally plotless’: ‘Desire Out of Order’, p. 271. Romantic a(nti)pathy is a gendered motif, as I have argued, which differentiates between men’s and women’s expressions of romantic a(nti)pathy, resolves them to different extents and for different purposes. Women’s desires emerge as not solely about love but as holding important implications for the transfer of political and economic power and the continuance of patriarchal structures, revealing the ideological functions of romance literature and exposing the ways in which its approach to love is at times more pragmatic than idealistic. However, at the same time as these romances’ conclusions adhere to sociocultural expectations and set a pattern for women’s behaviour in secular society, they also raise questions about normative assumptions, particularly with regard to chivalric masculinity. The fact that they seem to problematise gender roles even while trying to reassert the importance of love and marriage may suggest the difficulty of imposing binaries that do not account for the complexity and variety of human expressions of gender and sexuality. Even in a genre – and with a motif – that seems particularly concerned to uphold marriage, love, and procreation (with, that is, what have become the ‘cultural appurtenances’ of heterosexuality), formulations of gender and sexuality are not absolute, and attempts to impose norms are undermined by the questions that remain unanswered, the suggestions of alternative and queer practices, and the necessity of coercion.
2 Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. xiii. The next chapter continues to explore the coercive strategies at work in medieval romance, uncovering the ways in which resistance to
mésalliance opens up coercive situations that reveal men’s sexual vulnerability as a concern of this genre.