Silence in the Sewing Chamber: Le Roman de Silence

Abstract

Following on from Howard Bloch's investigation of a ‘refusal of univocal meaning’ in the thirteenth-century Roman de Silence, this article examines the poem as inviting critics to investigate the collapse of binary systems such as male/female, in/out, language/silence, learned/natural, reward/punishment, innocent/guilty. Moving away from Bloch's focus on poetic language, this article examines the poem's systematic conflation of a woman's life with images of death and captivity. The action of the poem, and the characters within the poem, draw our attention to issues of gender performance in such a manner as to render it impossible for the poem's conservative ending to unsay or undo (to silence) the main body of the romance.