Courtly constraints: clothing, gifts and honour in Medieval Romance

By investigating three texts, namely Chrétien de Troyes' Erec and Enide, Geoffrey Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale", and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I seek to demonstrate how clothing, honour, gender and gifts shape the experiences of the characters as they find their social place, and disrupt the body as a category on which to base nobility. Although my texts emerge from different social and historical circumstances, the clothing they depict represents similar social transactions of class, gender and honour in the courtly space: ladies are made suitable for marriage through dresses, and a knight is forced to come to terms with the fallibility of his honour through his armour and a girdle. Vital to my investigation is the category of the body, on which Medieval theories of class and virtue were based. Clothing that is frequently used as a constituting symbol of acceptable bodies proves fallible; Enide and Griselda take up royal robes and positions unsuited to their humble origins, and Gawain cannot maintain his honourable manhood when faced with the lure of the life-saving girdle. The characters' divergence from the norms of symbolic representation through clothing alienates the performance of honour from the body, thereby destabilizing bodily superiority (nobility) as a basis for social elevation. Enide and Griselda change their clothing and their social position, but neither woman's translation alters their core characteristics of virtue and goodness. Clothing is physically removable from the body, which poses a challenge for a society so invested in its representative and symbolic power. My investment in clothing as it relates to 'correct' social performance relies on the disjuncture between the characters' natural embodiment of honour and the clothing they receive as gifts. The obligatory reciprocation of gifts takes on the nature of economic transactions, linking clothing to gendered expectations of honour and virtue. Throughout these texts, changeable clothing, whether received as a gift, put on or taken off, demonstrates the heightened attention paid to the rapidly-changing social structure of commercialising society in the high- to late-Medieval era. Removable and improvable, clothing disrupted concepts of class and gender, allowing for greater social freedom in the courtly space.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Department of English Language and Literature

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Barnard, Laura

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Higginbotham, Derrick

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/27890

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/27890