The Function of the Jeweled Bridle in Gower's "Tale of Rosiphelee"

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The Function of the Jeweled Bridle in Gower’s "Tale of Rosiphelee" James T. Bratcher The anonymous French poem Lai du Trot, preserved in a manuscript thought to date from 1267 or 1268,1 shows a number of correspondences to John Gower's "Tale of Rosiphelee" in Confessio Amantis, Book IV. Basically, the lay tells the same story as Gower's, and it draws the same moral: that women—and men—should commit themselves to love. In some form the lay must have contributed to the "Tale of Rosiphelee"; certainly it offers the closest known analogue to Rosiphelee's talk with a dead woman who suffers in the afterlife for having been "slow" to love and marry.2 Major differences separating Lai du Trot and the "Tale of Rosiphelee" are noted below. I believe that the differences reflect deliberate reworkings in Gower's handling of the earlier story, a story in which a knight in search of sexual adventure has a dream vision in which he beholds a troupe of mounted ladies in an otherworld setting. Further, I submit that one of the more interesting of Gower's departures, his equipping the dead woman to whom Rosiphelee speaks (a central figure also in the lay) with a jeweled bridle as part of her horse gear, sets the stage for an intended pun on the word brydel at the conclusion of the "Tale of Rosiphelee." Equestrian allusions are important in both stories. In the dream vision of Lai du Trot, the contrast between departed ladies who submitted to love and sought marriage while living, and a lady who is now ostracized from their company in the afterlife for having spurned love, is expressed chiefly in equestrian terms. Emphasis is on the ambling gait and the discomfort of trotting. A knight named Lorois—one of Arthur's knights—sees a group of courtly ladies emerging from a forest; evidently they are enjoying a springtime outing. The horses they ride in the afterlife are smooth-pacing white amblers. Groomed and sleek, and outfitted with saddles and trappings of expensive manufacture, the amblers transport the ladies in perfect ease through a dreamscape of meadows and flowers;3 the ladies' knight-companions are in attendance. Set apart from [End Page 107] these well-mounted, well-dressed, and well-attended ladies, however, a solitary rider comes into view, a distressed lady who had scorned love while alive. Because she died uncommitted to love, she must now travel at a distance to the rear, unescorted, her mount a nag that trots and jars her body so that her teeth chatter and she can scarcely speak. In the "Tale of Rosiphelee" we find no direct reference to the trotting gait, though the emaciated black horse ridden by Gower's ostracized lady does have a halting step caused by a misdriven horseshoe nail. Gower has rejected horse gaits as a governing metaphor. His tale involves amblers and ambling (though not as an exact parallel to the settled state of marriage), and it disregards trotting as a way of suggesting the unsettled course of those who disdain love. Instead, to make his point about submission to love in a different way, Gower seizes upon an item of horse gear—a bridle—to warn Rosiphelee, a king's daughter, about her standoffish attitude toward love and marriage. The warning is effective, for at the conclusion of the tale Rosiphelee determines that she will not be one who carries horse-halters for a favored group of dames in the afterlife, as does the forlorn lady in the scene she has witnessed. Rosiphelee will marry straightway, for "sche none haltres wolde bere" (IV.1446).4 The grim portrait of the ostracized lady in Lai du Trot is unrelieved by any positive sign whatever. The lady's horse is commonplace and unruly; its rough trot is enough to shake her very bowels; and though barely able to speak to Lorois because she is being tossed to and fro, she informs him of her folly in scorning love while alive. In the "Tale of Rosiphelee," on the other hand, the portrait is somewhat different. Gower's ostracized lady has tattered clothing and rides a nag...