Romance of the Rose

Begun by Guillaume de Lorris between 1225 and 1230, the Old French Romance of the Rose, an allegory in rhymed octosyllabic couplets, was continued as an often satiric encyclopedic gloss by Jean de Meun (or Meung) around 1275. The hybrid text is an important and influential vernacular work of the European Middle Ages.

THE STORY

Guillaume's first-person narrative begins by citing Macrobius, author of the early fifth-century Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. Guillaime then announces that he will recount the dream vision he had at the age of twenty and later reveal its meaning (a promise usually considered unfulfilled). Guillaume next names the romance—generally understood as a quest for the rose that symbolizes the female beloved—li Romans de la Rose and specifies that the art of love is enclosed within the remaining four thousand lines of the poem.

In his almost eighteen-thousand-line continuation, Jean, at the midpoint of the combined work, has li diex d'Amors (the god of love) recite the last three couplets of Guillaume's poem, explaining that Guillaume had died forty years before and that Jean Chopinel from Meungsur-Loire will finish the tale, calling it Le Miroër as amoreus (The mirror for lovers).

Little is known about Guillaume except that he probably was from Lorris, a village near Orléans. Jean, who was from another village near Orléans, moved to Paris, where he lived until his death in 1305. Jean undoubtedly was associated with the University of Paris and translated into Old French a number of works, including Boethius's early sixth-century De Consolatione Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy) as well as the letters of Abélard and Héloïse.

Although Guillaume essentially invented the medieval dream vision of love, the literary vision prototype Consolatione and the twelfth-century planctu Naturae of Alanus de Insulis (Alan of Lille) influenced the two sections of the Rose, which in turn served as models for later poetic dreams by Chaucer, Gower, and others.

The allegorical tradition of which the Rose is a part includes Prudentius's early fifth-century Psychomachia and the De Planctu. The conflicts in both parts of the Rose among the various allegorized and personified vices and virtues, mythological figures, and characteristics of the Lover (Amant) and of the beloved "rose" reflect the moral battles in the earlier works, especially as pertains to "irregular" sexuality, and place the romance within the tradition of the psychomachia (battle for the soul) as well as establishing it as a vernacular prototype that illustrates moral and spiritual struggles.

As a vernacular poem on the art of love the Rose reveals the influences of Ovid's first-century Ars amatoria (Art of love), Remedia amoris (Cures for love), and Metamorphoses, as well as Andreas Capellanus's late twelfth-century De Amore. Along with the De Amore and earlier works such as the poems of the troubadours and trouvères (poets of northern France) and the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the first part of the Rose epitomizes what later became known as courtly love.

In Guillaume's text a youth dreams that he awakens, arises, and goes out to enjoy the May morning. He crosses a river, arriving at an enclosure to which he is admitted through a small opening in the wall by Lady Oiseuse (ease, or idleness). The young man meets the courtly company within the verger (orchard) and then comes upon the fountain of Narcissus, where he sees reflected rosebushes and a particular rosebud of which he becomes enamored. In his attempts to gain the rosebud the Lover receives instruction in the ways of love from the God of Love but encounters resistance from others, especially from Bel Acueil (Fair Welcome), who guards the rose. The Lover's struggle to attain the rose/bud obliges him to seek aid from Reason and Friend. With the eventual help of Venus and the acquiescence of Bel Acueil, the Lover enjoys a "kiss" from the "rose." Bad Mouth tells Jealousy, who then builds a tower where she imprisons Bel Acueil. In the closing lines of the poem the Lover laments the absence of his "sweet friend," Bel Acueil, promising to remain true to him.

Jean retells and rewrites the story, introducing new characters such as the Jealous Husband and elaborating others such as La Vieille (Old Woman). Jean also intersperses a number of discursive digressions. First, Reason dissuades the Lover from his quest; then Friend alternately advises and distracts him. Finally, the Lover is aided by the God of Love, who gathers his forces to attack the fortress where Jealousy holds Bel Acueil. Upon the initial defeat of his army, Love calls on his mother, Venus, for help, and Nature and Genius confess and sermonize, respectively. Venus leads the new, successful assault, allowing the young man to seize the rose, after which he awakens from his dream.

CRITICAL REACTION

The success of the Rose was unparalleled in the medieval world, and until the mid-sixteenth century the two disproportionate parts of the poem were copied, translated, rewritten, reworked, reedited, and reprinted, almost always as a unitary work, perhaps because Jean claimed to have finished Guillaume's poem.

In the first years of the fourteenth century Christine de Pizan led the literary Querelle (Débat) de (quarrel [debate] on) la Rose, accusing Jean of vicious attacks on women and their character. Those attacks, including the violent assault of the Lover on the rose at the end of Jean's poem, again received critical attention, especially from feminists, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

After a relative lack of interest in the Rose from the mid-sixteenth until the mid-nineteenth century, a resurgence of editions and critical studies indicated new areas for research, including Jean's life and career; the historical, social, and theological meanings of his satires and parodies in his poem; manuscript studies; sources for the Rose; whether Guillaume's poem was finished; episodes and characters that may reveal Guillaume's hidden meaning or Jean's intentionality; and the nature of allegory and poetics as they appear in the Rose.

Since at least the mid-1980s some scholars have focused on the narcissistic, autoerotic and masturbatory (Frese 1991), homosocial, and homoerotic tensions in the Rose. Marta Harley (1986) concludes that through the use of certain classical myths Guillaume is "consciously flirting with sexual ambiguity and homosexuality" (Harley 1986, p. 333). Others have remarked on the gender ambiguity of Bel Acueil (Gaunt 1998). Although he is grammatically masculine, manuscript illustrations sometimes portray him as feminine in recognition of his traditional function as the receptive aspect of the beloved, supposedly feminine, rose. Ellen Friedrich (1998) understands the rosebud as phallic-appearing but interprets the rose as the anal object of desire sought by the Lover in his beloved Bel Acueil, who eventually is imprisoned for their transgression. Jean's obsession with condemning corrupt love and, through Genius, promoting procreation and cautioning against the catastrophe caused by castration confirms the gravity of ignoring nature and practicing "unnatural love."

see also Allegory; Literature: I. Overview; Pizan, Christine de; Queering, Queer Theory, and Early Modern Culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arden, Heather M. 1993. The Roman de la Rose: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland.

Frese, Dolores Warwick. 1991. An Ars Legendi for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: Re-constructive Reading. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

Friedrich, Ellen. 1998. "When a Rose Is Not a Rose: Homoerotic Emblems in the Roman de la Rose." In Gender Transgressions: Crossing the Normative Barrier in Old French Literature, ed. Karen J. Taylor. New York: Garland.

Gaunt, Simon. 1998. "Bel Acueil and the Improper Allegory of the Romance of the Rose." Vol. 2 of New Medieval Literatures. ed. and intro. Rita Copeland, David Lawton, and Wendy Scase. Oxford, UK: Clarendon.

Gunn, Alan. 1951. The Mirror of Love: A Reinterpretation of "The Romance of the Rose." Lubbock: Texas Tech Press.

Harley, Marta Powell. 1986. "Narcissus, Hermaphroditus, and Attis: Ovidian Lovers at the Fontaine d'Amors in Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la rose." PMLA 101: 324-337.

                                  Ellen Lorraine Friedrich