Desire by Gender and Genre in Trouvère Song (review)

This study is initially organised according to gender, with alternate chapters examining male- then female-authored trouvère songs from a particular perspective. The first two chapters discuss 'The Song System' and the hierarchy of an order in which the masculine provides the universal, 'unmarked' category, while the feminine is confined to a marked, delimited and inferior space. Chapter 3 outlines the operation of desire in the trouvère system, focusing on the point of view of the masculine subject and his objects, then Chapter 4 attempts the same operation with feminine subjects and masculine objects. Chapters 5 and 6 reverse the gender order to place the discussion of 'space-times' in female-authored songs before their discussion in male-authored texts in an attempt to signal the fact that feminine desire and subjectivity do not always function as a secondary term. This gender opposition operates throughout the study, as Dell seeks to define the feminine relationship to desire in contrast to the masculine, as it appears in a select sample of songs from different trouvère genres. In this, she draws cogently on Lacan to provide a framework for her close readings and commentary. This proves particularly useful when attempting to delineate the 'desiring subject' and its relation to loss and time across different genres. Dell's corpus of texts is necessarily small, but she skilfully contrasts the 'low style' genres of the pastourelle (masculine-voiced), the chanson d'ami and the chanson de malmariée (feminine-voiced) with the 'high style' chanson, concluding that it is only in the feminine chanson that speaking of her desire makes woman a subject. The concern throughout is with fèminité textuelle, rather than féminité génétique – Dell makes no attempt to identify the possible female authors of songs – but the focus on the narrative feminine voice as a poetic construct can at times sit oddly with the notion of a desiring feminine subject. Chapter 7, 'Desiring Differently', confronts the problems inherent in negotiating and redefining a feminine voice that adopts the discourse of the masculine chanson, yet the feminine discourse that emerges here seems to be much more closely related to the feminine speaking subject as existing external to the song. The distinction between different kinds of narrative voice – the textual or narrative feminine and the narratorial/authorial feminine voice – could usefully have been explored more fully, particularly in regard to the relation between the final chapter on the feminine chanson and those that precede it. The study as a whole, however, recognises the blurring of boundaries and renegotiation of categories that comes into play when the notion of gender is introduced to the composition of trouvère song. Dell's conclusion then raises the problem at issue throughout her study: the impossibility of defining a feminine space that does not operate in relation to the masculine, and the impossibility of writing a sexual relation which, according to Lacan, 'cannot be written' (p. 207). That said, this study provides a welcome and thought-provoking addition to the work that has been written on the feminine trouvères.