THE MOTHER'S MARK: REPRESENTATIONS OF MATERNAL INFLUENCE IN MIDDLE ENGLISH POPULAR ROMANCE

Abstract

This dissertation investigates fourteenth- and fifteenth-century in English as they struggle with the complicated question of maternal influence, collectively constructed by intersecting, yet often contradictory discourses and interests. I argue that for Chaucer and the late medieval poets who wrote Octavian, Sir Gowther, and Melusine, the genre of the romance proved particularly conducive to exploring the status of maternal influence and contribution in the context of these political, medical and religious contexts in their poems. In this project, I argue that not only is biological maternity and its significance interrogated in these romances, but that romance, especially the so-called family romances that gained in popularity in the later Middle Ages, with their narrativization of the vicissitudes of genealogy, offered poets an appropriate vehicle for meditating on the problems mothers posed to patriarchal genealogies – and, in some cases, the solutions they offered. Religious and medical texts often located maternal influence as a source of deviance, even monstrosity. Yet Octavian, Sir Gowther, Chaucer's Man of Law's and Clerk's Tales, and the Middle English Melusine undermine and critique paternal claims of maternal monstrosity or pollution as both untrue and ultimately dangerous to the genealogical project of reproducing the patrilineal dynasty. Modern scholarly discussions of medieval maternity tend to avoid the maternal body itself, identifying motherhood as a series of practices or identifying maternal images and metaphors as they were used by non-reproductive figures to describe their identities in other contexts. This project seeks to shift the register of an emerging conversation about medieval maternity to a more complicated level, one which acknowledges and references the complex and ambivalent social contexts in which maternal bodies and their influence were read and interpreted in the late Middle Ages. From the Octavian-poet, who acknowledges and refutes claims that the maternal body is a source of pollution, to the Melusine-poet's examination of the repercussions of recognizing and acknowledging maternal influence, late medieval poets approached the maternal body with profound ambivalence and an awareness of the social and religious stakes involved in representing that body and its significance to the community.%%%%