Abstract

Marguerite de Navarre's understudied Chansons spirituelles incorporate an underlying fascination with how a work of literature constructs and simultaneously undermines (or kills) its subject. Many of the chansons accomplish this by describing the narrator's spiritual experience and religious longing for death and rebirth. Multiple layers of meaning, however, also allow the poems to be read as an exploration of the blurry spaces between authority and authorship in the text, between the self and God and between literary subject and object. The texts present a contradictory and multi-layered image of an emergent self that leaves the reader simultaneously more and less sure of the soul's relationship to the divine. What promises to be a simple contemplation of Christ's worthiness to be desired becomes a boundary-blurring dialogue that erases the limits between self and the Divine Other to whom it purports to point. The idea of authority and who has the right to speak in the text lies at the heart of this enigma. Marguerite's theology at once dominates and submits to her poetry. The image of the self moves from object to subject and back to object as it seeks to differentiate itself from and define itself in relation to God. Using and manipulating pre-established poetic codes from the medieval tradition, the text creates a circle that further pixilates an already protean image of the self. Unable to resolve its true position in the poem, the soul is forced to accept the constraints placed on it from within and without. Ultimately, the soul fails in its attempt at complete unity with Christ, but this failure only serves to highlight a basic personal awareness of 'self' in the poem and confirms the view of the idea of 'subjectivity' as elusive, indeterminate and prone to conflict.

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