Practising shame by Mary C. Flannery

Author:Mary C. Flannery [Flannery, Mary C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526110077
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Fear fled, and Shame shot forth; flaming, all left the castle. From that moment no one wanted to put to the test what Reason had taught them.

(Romance of the Rose, p. 347)

The poem that concludes with the winning of the rose necessarily culminates first with the defeat of Honte. Built up in Guillaume's text as the best defender of honourable female chastity, she is then violently torn down in Jean's depiction of Venus's assault upon the castle.

By the end of the Roman, Honte is not only dismissed as a potentially counterfeit guardian of female chastity, but also depicted as a quality that, perhaps inevitably, is forcibly defeated by masculine desire. The Middle English afterlife of Honte takes the character's undoing still further. For while much of the fragmentary Middle English Romaunt of the Rose remains painstakingly faithful to its French source, its adaptation of the personified figure of Honte suggests that the translator(s) – consciously or unconsciously – discarded the slippery tone of the French text in favour of a more consistently negative characterization of female shamefastness. As in the Roman, womanly shamefastness plays an important role in the context of the Romaunt's treatment of desire. But whereas in the Roman de la rose shamefastness is a ‘worthy’ (vaillanz) opponent, in the Middle English Romaunt the very same figure is worthy of vilification or even disgust.34

As it survives, the Romaunt is an incomplete close translation of the Roman de la rose, covering all of Guillaume de Lorris's portion of the poem and only fragments of Jean de Meun's continuation.35 Ami's ‘rose-cutting’ advice does not appear in the extant text of the Middle English translation, nor does the French poem's concluding battle scene depicting the defeat of Honte and her allies. Initially attributed to Chaucer by William Thynne in his 1532 edition of Chaucer's works, what survives today of the Middle English Romaunt is made up of three fragments (usually referred to as A, B, and C) that appear to derive from different authors working in different parts of late-medieval England.36 Because the episodes I will be comparing with the Roman occur in Fragment B, my discussion will focus on that fragment of the Romaunt of the Rose. While early scholarship followed Thynne in attributing all or some of the Romaunt to Chaucer, the current consensus is that the second and third fragments are most likely not by him; with regard to the first fragment, the most that can be said is that ‘there is no persuasive evidence that the author … is not Chaucer’.37 Certainly Chaucer was very familiar with the French poem: as well as drawing on the motifs of the Roman de la rose in his own dream-poetry and elsewhere, he makes several direct references to the French poem and its authors throughout his works, and a furious Cupid accuses him of having translated the Roman in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women.38

While the Romaunt translates Honte as ‘Shame’, it seems clear that, as in the

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