Where are the bodies?

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In the Roman de la rose, it might seem that the nominally female speaking characters (particularly Raison, Nature, and La Vieille) disrupt the privileged male site of intellectual knowledge by introducing learned female voices. This essay considers how subversive these voices really are. Each character’s claim to being an embodied female speaker breaks down as it becomes apparent that she is being ventriloquised by a male author. The Rose is insistent in drawing attention to the constructed nature of its speaking voices, both female and male. The female body appears to interfere with the discussion of abstract theoretical material and the text bears witness to male anxieties about both the female body and female threats to participate in male theoretical discourse, even as it demonstrates the disembodied and ultimately unthreatening unreality of any of the speaking female voices in the poem’s narrative.