La Jeune Fille et l’amour: pour une poétique courtoise de l’évasion (review)

The present volume builds on research undertaken in a previous book, La Veuve en majesté: deuil et savoir au féminin dans la littérature médiévale (Droz, 2000), which provided a sturdy foundation for an argument centred on female heroism in Old French literature. Yasmina Foehr-Janssens’s paronomastic title — playing on the medieval and Renaissance motif of la jeune fille et la mort in which a beautiful, virginal woman is embraced by a rotting cadaver — announces the author’s intention to provide a positive response to a traditionally negative portrait of feminine sensuality. This she sets out to achieve through the study of the pucelles or demoiselles that appear in the canonical romance texts of twelfth-century France: rather than conforming to expected stereotypes that preclude or condemn female autonomy, Foehr-Janssens proposes that the maiden’s experience of love offers much more than an echo to the dominant masculine monologism of amorous discourse. Through her desire for escape, la fugue, and her hope for reciprocal affection, l’amitié, the maiden attempts to circumvent the limitations of her sex that dictate that love must result in either marriage or death. The study is prefaced by a detailed and relevant introduction in which the philosophical and psychoanalytical readings of love proposed by Denis de Rougemont, Jacques Lacan, and Charles Baladier are used alongside assorted gender studies to foreground the female stereotype that Foehr-Janssens seeks to challenge. By introducing the non-erotic models of Agape and Philia to that of Eros’s sexual desire, the author convincingly presents her argument for a dialogical reading of courtly love in which the female voice enjoys a more significant role. The first half of the book puts her theories to the test through a discussion of the heroines of Pyrame et Thisbé and Floire et Blanchefleur, both of whom are believed to pave the way for more positive portraits of female heroism. Although Thisbé plays an important part in the action by orchestra-ting her own flight from oppressive patriarchy, and although Floire and Blanchefleur appear to embody the ancient principle of amiticia in offering to sacrifice their lives for each other, they do not manage to evade the expected denouements of marriage or death. The second half is then devoted to tracing the development of these preliminary sketches of femininity in Thomas’s Roman de Tristan, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, and the Lais of Marie de France. The final section, on the Lais, persuasively argues that Guildeluëc in ‘Eliduc’ presents the most complete model of female heroism in so far as she succeeds in dissolving the divide between Eros and Agape and thereby sidesteps the marital/mortal fates of her forerunners. This is a sophisticated and accessible book that takes great care to defend anticipated accusations of ‘banalité’ (p. 14) and presents an interesting and well-supported hypothesis. In the light of Foehr-Janssens’s consistently thorough treatment of her subject matter, however, the lack of a conclusion is surprising and a little disappointing.