The English Romance in Time, Helen Cooper

The whole subtitle reads, "Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare." To be clear, the motifs themselves are transforming with the shift in time. The book does not purport to change them.

Helen Cooper is an author I've seen a lot in medieval scholarship. I'm familiar with her Chaucer writings secondhand. I chose this book because it was written in the past ten years, and seemed to be a general, thematic treatment of the medieval romance, one that made nothing of crossing between the medieval and Renaissance (a linchpin I want to study in more detail).

I like her approach. It is a basic one - pick out several of the motivating memes of different romances, and trace them as they progress through time. How do they develop? For what reasons are they appropriated at a particular time? Do their valent associations change through time? Do the tropes cross genres, as for instance with tragedy and comedy? In other words, what is the convention developed with the audience, how is it regularized, and in what ways is it broken? (21-22). Finally, what does all this mean for the work and its audience?

She emphasizes the word meme rather than trope in order to get at the social significance I was hinting at in the last few questions. A trope can be interpreted as something that exists in the literature, that is primarily static and formal. A meme is more fluid, dependent on social currency and spreading rather like a virus. Certainly the terms are interchangeable in this case, but it changes the determination.

The memes/tropes she focuses on include (copped with paraphrase from the Table of Contents):

Pilgrimage and questing - think of motifs of traveling, with its parallels with interiority in direction, motivation, setting, and so on.
Providence and the sea - "So we set this ship into the water, gave it no means of orientation or propulsion, and let God sort it out."
Faulty magic - "I got this cool ring but never got to use it," or "I tried using this ring but it didn't work," or "I guess the magic worked, but it was totally incidental and misleading."
Fairy rulers and so on - What happens when you ride the liminal line between the benign supernatural and the diabolic?
Desirable desire - is women's desire a good thing in different works? How does its motif get treated?
Women on trial - Pretty much about what it sounds like, with particular focuses on alleged and proven adulteries, and the normally supernatural interventions that attest the truth.
The Rightful Heir - inheritance, the Fair Unknown, the dangers of lacking an heir (ELIZABETH!!!)
Unhappy Endings - what happens when the typically happy romantic ending doesn't happen?

The book also comes with an extremely useful appendix listing the romances that were current in England after 1500. I don't trust the list as exhaustive, but it's sufficiently detailed that I've written down a lot of pertinent information from it.

To say one interesting focus that comes out of this, her approach to romances demonstrates something that I've thought to be true since I first sat down with Le Morte Darthur: one of the key subjects of romance, which one avoids only to the subtraction of one's work, is women. Women's place in chivalric order, in feudal order, in inheritance, in desire, in magic, in the quest, in trial (you can see I'm picking out the major memes of the book), all these are often far more progressive than one might expect, and are even interesting when they turn out to be antifeminist.

I can expand that to include gender. I think that the romance is a rather amorphous genre that often includes works due to superficial reasons like, "Well, the magic in that is kinda funny," or, "Well, she went on a quest of sorts, nevermind that it was spiritual and totally a pilgrimage." In its collection of memes or tropes, every romance has the parts that don't fit the others, the part that gives the whole renown because it defies expectations in a way that is nonetheless desirable. Now, one place where expectations can be played with is gender. There is the woman who wields a sword, whether or not she uses it. There is the trope of disguise, whether as a man or as a woman. One can also be mistaken, without intention, as is the case in Le Morte Darthur when Lancelot falls asleep in a pavilion only to have another man snuggle up with him, because he thinks that Lancelot is his beloved lady. Even in more general terms, the romance often struggles with the question, "What makes a man the ideal man? What makes a woman the ideal woman?" Virtue, faith, fidelity, reason - whatever the guidelines, what happens when they succeed? Still worse, what happens when they fail?

And an observation - many times the criteria for men and women are actually quite similar. To say that men quest and women are rescued is far too simplistic. To say that women are punished for unchastity and men aren't is likewise reductive. Now, perhaps these are just true enough to become generalizations, but the rules are often broken. Sometimes the markers of assumed gender fall away, in such a way that it would be worthwhile to study a few romances in parallel to see how gender might have functioned. A theoretical structure for such a work might be to figure out whether the romance was a place where one could experiment with gender, or whether such flexibility was inherent in the society? Is this flexibility, or is it simply that we see flexibility as compared to what we think the past would hold gender to be? Perhaps its boundaries are different, its intersections different.