Roman de la Rose

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Roman de la Rose, Le (begun c.1225-40, completed c.1270-78). Poem in octosyllabic couplets, cast as an allegorical dream-vision, that describes a young man's initiation into love and his efforts to possess the rosebud of which he is enamoured. The first 4, 058 lines were composed by Guillaume de Lorris, of whom nothing further is known; the remainder—nearly 18, 000 lines more—is the work of Jean de Meun, a Parisian writer and intellectual. The Rose was the most widely read work of medieval French literature, surviving today in nearly 300 manuscripts dating from the late 13th to the early 16th c.; most are illustrated, many quite lavishly. Numerous printed editions date from the 15th and 16th c. Jean Molinet produced a prose version with commentary, interpreting the Rose as spiritual allegory (1500); Clément Marot adapted the poem into early modern French (1526). The Rose circulated outside France as well; it was read by such poets as Chaucer, Gower, Dante, and Petrarch. By the end of the 14th c. it had been translated into Italian, Dutch, and English.

Guillaume's poem, purportedly the story of the narrator's dream, is set in the allegorical Garden of Delight, where the dreamer meets the God of Love and his entourage, gazes into the fountain of Narcissus, and sees there a rosebud with which he falls in love. The God of Love delivers a sermon about behaviour in love, based largely on Ovid; Reason tries to dissuade the Lover; Ami offers courtship advice. The allegorical construct is such that there is no real figure for the lady, whose various attributes are represented by the Rose and by the figures that surround it. The two with whom the Lover interacts directly are male: Bel Acueil, a pleasant young boy who allows him to approach the Rose, and Danger, an obstreperous peasant who chases him away. Two other guardians of the Rose, Fear and Shame, are female. With the aid of Venus, the Lover manages to kiss the Rose; alerted by Male Bouche, Jealousy then constructs a fortified tower to protect it. The poem ends with the Lover's lament.

It is uncertain whether Guillaume intended to continue the poem beyond this point. The text remains true to the lyric model, whereby the Lover never achieves full consummation of his desires. None the less, an impulse to complete the narrative soon resulted in a brief anonymous continuation, pre-dating that of Jean de Meun, that allows the Lover to spend a night of bliss with the Rose. Jean's continuation, in turn, completely transformed the poem. It is constructed on a series of discourses by the major characters: Reason, Ami, Richesse, the God of Love, Faux Samblant, the Old Woman who guards the Rose, Nature, and her priest Genius. In this way the framework of the poem is expanded to include rational, erotic, self-serving, procreational, and sacred forms of love. In a thinly disguised allegory of sexual intercourse, the Lover finally succeeds in penetrating to the inner sanctum where the Rose is enshrined; the poem ends with his awakening at daybreak.

The original Rose of Guillaume de Lorris introduced important innovations that profoundly influenced subsequent French literature. It is the first example in French of sustained first-person narrative and of narrative allegory. Jean's continuation, equally innovative, used Guillaume's allegorical framework as the vehicle for a literary review of encyclopedic proportions. Unlike Guillaume, whose romance remained within the closed world of the allegorical garden, Jean opened the poem up to the satire of contemporary society through such characters as the Jealous Husband, with his misogynistic attack on marriage; Faux Samblant, with his exposé of ecclesiastical corruption; and the Old Woman, who explains the sexual manipulation of men by women. Jean's expanded focus also allows for extended discussion of such diverse issues as language and signification; Fortune, destiny, and free will; government and justice; optics and meteorology; and the role of procreation in the cosmic order. He incorporated considerable material from the Latin tradition, especially Ovid, Boethius, Alan of Lille, and Guillaume de Saint-Amour. The result is a mixture that defies easy analysis—all the more so in that the material taken over from the Latin authors is subject to parodic distortion and seeming incongruities, such as Reason's defense of obscenity in a speech that otherwise maintains a lofty moral tone, and Genius's claim that heterosexual coupling is a means to eternal salvation.

As a result the Rose has been subject to divergent readings ever since it was written, and has inspired diverse literary responses. Machaut, whose entire corpus is marked by the influence of the Rose, used it as the basis for an intellectualized vision of love which, though quite different from that portrayed in the Rose, owes much to Jean's blend of Ovidian eroticism and Boethian rationalism; a prime example is his Remede de Fortune (c.1341). Gervais du Bus drew on the Rose in the satirical Roman de Fauvel (1310-14); Guillaume de Degulleville used it as a model for moral and spiritual allegory in Le Pelerinage de vie humaine (1330-1). A similar range of attitudes can be found in the variant versions of the text itself. It was subject to abridgements, both to produce a narrative more narrowly focused on the conquest of the Rose, and to delete bawdy passages in favour of the poem's moral and philosophical content. More often it was preserved intact and expanded through interpolations that contributed sometimes to its religious or didactic message, sometimes to its eroticism.

A debate about the Rose, initiated by Christine de Pizan's Epistre au Dieu d'Amours (1399), unfolded during the opening years of the 15th c. [see Querelle Des Femmes]. Christine attacked the Rose for defaming women, for justifying seduction and rape, and for bawdy language and a subversive use of authoritative material. Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, joined her in attacking the poem as blasphemous and, in effect, pornographic. The Rose was defended by three royal secretaries, Jean de Montreuil and Gontier and Pierre Col, who argued that it was a satirical text intended to expose human follies. The documents of the Querelle, precious sources for the origins of French literary criticism, demonstrate the cultural importance of the Rose as a focal point for fundamental issues: language and authority, sexuality and gender, and the role of eros in the social, natural, and cosmic order.

[Sylvia Huot]

Bibliography

• D. Poirion, Le Roman de la Rose (1973)
• P.-Y. Badel, Le Roman de la Rose au XIVe siècle (1980)
• D. Hult, Self-fulfilling Prophecies (1985)

Mirth and Gladness lead a Dance in this miniature from a manuscript of the Roman de la Rose in the Bodleian Library (MS Douce 364, folio 8r).

The Roman de la Rose is a late medieval French poem styled as an allegorical dream vision. It is a notable instance of courtly literature. The work's stated purpose is to both entertain and to teach others about the Art of Love. At various times in the poem, the "Rose" of the title is seen as the name of the lady, as a symbol of her love, and a symbol of female sexuality in general. Likewise, the other characters' names function both as regular names and as abstractions illustrating the various factors that are involved in a love affair.

History

The poem was written in two stages. The first 4058 lines, written by Guillaume de Lorris circa 1230, describe the attempts of a courtier to woo his beloved. This part of the story is set in a walled garden or locus amoenus, one of the traditional topoi of epic and chivalric literature. In this walled garden, the interior represents romance, while the exterior stands for everyday life. It is unclear whether Lorris considered his version to be incomplete, but it was generally viewed as such. Around 1275, Jean de Meun composed an additional 17,724 lines. Jean's discussion of love is considered more philosophical and encyclopedic, but also more misogynistic and bawdy. The writer Denis de Rougemont felt that the first part of the poem portrayed Rose as an idealised figure, while the second part portrayed her as a more physical and sensual being.^[1] Still, much recent scholarship has argued for the essential unity of the work, which is how it was received by later medieval readers.

Reception

The work was both very popular and very controversial — one of the most widely read works in French for three centuries, it survives in hundreds of illuminated manuscripts. The popularity of the work is especially notable because it predated the Gutenberg printing press by several hundred years. Still, its emphasis on sensual language and imagery provoked attacks by Jean Gerson, Christine de Pizan and many other writers and moralists of the 14th and 15th centuries.

Translation and influence

Part of the story was translated from its original Old French into Middle English as The Romaunt of the Rose, which had a great influence on English literature. Chaucer was familiar with the original French text, and a portion of the Middle English translation is thought to be his work. C.S. Lewis's 1936 study The Allegory of Love renewed interest in the poem.

Gallery

See also

• Romance (genre)
• Courtly love
• Courtly literature
• Allegory in the Middle Ages

Notes

References

• Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, présentation, traduction et notes par Armand Strubel. Lettres gothiques, Livre de Poche, Librairie Générale Française, 1992. ISBN 2-253-06079-8
• Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, translated and annotated by Frances Horgan. Oxford World's Classics, Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-19-283948-9

External links

French Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Le Roman de la Rose

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Roman de la Rose

• Full text from Project Gutenberg: Vol. 1, Vol. 2
• Roman de la Rose Digital Surrogates Project at Johns Hopkins University
• Showcases :: Roman de la Rose on the British Library Online Gallery

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