Desiring Women: Pleasure and Power in Late Medieval English Literature

Because discourse pertaining to medieval women’s sexuality has traditionally been directed by virginity and violence, there remains a substantial gap in medievalist scholarship where women’s desire and pleasure are concerned. To bring these topics into critical conversation, this dissertation foregrounds representations of women’s desire and studies its intersections with eroticism, pleasure, and power through a theoretical framework that pairs psychoanalytic concepts with Georges Bataille’s Erotism: Death and Sensuality. The project posits women’s desire as worthy of study in its own right, disassociates women’s pleasure from violence, and demonstrates how these medieval texts might be read as early erotica.

After Chapter One grounds my research theoretically and methodologically, the chapters proceed by examining representations of women’s desire in four late medieval English texts. In Chapter Two, I explore how the female protagonist in Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid is punished for her transgressive desire and demonstrate how the poem constructs her disfigurement and death as an erotic spectacle that provides pleasure for its masculine audience. In Chapter Three, I turn to The Book of Margery Kempe, where I reveal how Margery’s gendered experience and sexual trauma impair her desire, which she recovers through the visions of Christ that engender eroticism and provide her pleasure. In Chapter Four, I focus on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to elucidate how Alisoun articulates a theory about women’s desire that links the absence of sovereignty with sexual violence and discuss how this connection then carries over into her tale, where she fantasizes about female power and the reformation of male desire. In Chapter Five, I study Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, analyzing how the pseudo-sadomasochistic activity of the bedroom scenes works together with the violence of the hunting scenes to provide an erotic climax and position the Lady and Morgan le Fay in the primary positions of power. The epilogue then addresses additional areas of inquiry, including a future project, and the implications for further studies of eroticism in medieval literature.