Weaving Narrative: Clothing in Twelfth-Century French Romance (review)

Through beautifully written prose, insightful literary analysis, and a wealth of sociocultural and historical references, Monica Wright demonstrates that clothing plays an integral and multivalent role in twelfth-century French romances. Her detailed literary analyses of Old French and Occitan romances and lais (included for their similarities to romance) offer new interpretations of well-known texts and will be of interest to literary historians. Her summaries of the making, acquiring, and wearing of medieval clothing along with their place in medieval society and culture will be useful to costume historians. Wright's greatest achievement, however, is to weave together these two realms and thus advance our knowledge of their close interconnection and interdependence.

Wright lays out her methodological framework in Chapter 1. She blends ideas from medieval poetics, modern semiotics, and structuralist narratology. With regards to the former, she adopts Douglas Kelly's assertion that medieval authors inscribed ambiguity into their works through the process of conjointure, the weaving together of source texts, and in so doing opened them up to multiple interpretations. According to Wright, clothing functions ambiguously in these texts with the degree of ambivalence growing over time as the significance of clothing grew. To map this change Wright turns to the field of linguistics and in particular to the concepts of the symbol and the sign, the former being absolute, while the latter is contingent and open to multiple readings. Following Julia Kristeva, Wright contends that the primary mode of thought in the medieval period altered from symbol-based to sign-based but, as witnessed in the literary tradition, this happened in the twelfth and not the thirteenth century. Wright pursues this line of inquiry in order to support her contention that clothing in these texts is multivalent but also to argue that the rise of fashion (characterized by fluctuating meaning) occurred much earlier than scholars have previously suggested.

Wright sets the stage for literary analysis in Chapter 2 with topics such as costume history, economy of cloth, raw materials, and gift economy. Her discussion is useful for readers not versed in these subjects as well as necessary for the ensuing argument. Noteworthy is her discussion of the aristocratic vestimentary code and its alteration over time as the result of social and economic changes. In short, merchants were becoming wealthier through trade, while nobles were becoming poorer through overspending. Thus the former were able to adopt the dress of the latter. The result was a transformation of the traditional vestimentary code with its absolute signification to a clothing system of contingent signs. The primary characters of medieval romances are nobles and thus understanding how this social class dressed and perceived clothing is important for understanding their representation in literature.

Most of Wright's book is given to analyzing clothing in literary works. She organizes her analysis in three chapters that build on each other in a progressive fashion, from discrete narrative sections to entire stories. Chapter 3 looks at medieval authors' employment of dress in their description of characters and, in particular, their growing manipulation of the vestimentary code for narrative purposes. Chapter 4 presents clothing acts and identifies three categories: gifts of clothing; dressing and undressing; and making and destroying clothes. Each act results in some form of change to a protagonist's appearance, status, or character. In most cases the authors describe these transformations within standard clothing conventions. At other times, they play with the code to inscribe social and gender ambiguity for specific narrative reasons. According to Wright, this play in the vestimentary code seems to happen in a progressive manner, though examples of adherence to the code continue throughout the twelfth century. In Chapter 5 Wright argues that clothing is one of the main strategies that twelfth-century writers used 'to structure and develop narrative' and 'to inscribe dynamism into romances at the level of narration' (125). Each author handles clothing signifiers differently at the level of narrative and...