Caught in a Bad Romance: Race and Ontologies of the Human in Middle English Literature
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Correa, Jonathan
- Graduate Program:
- Comparative Literature (PHD)
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 26, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Scott Smith, Major & Minor Field Member
Stephen Wheeler, Outside Unit & Field Member
Robert Edwards, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Caroline Eckhardt, Major Field Member
Charlotte Eubanks, Program Head/Chair
Nahir Otaño-Gracia, Special Member - Keywords:
- Race
Human
Middle English Romances
Medieval Literature
Premodern Critical Race Theory - Abstract:
- Recent scholarship demonstrates that the history of race and racism has roots in the medieval period and earlier. Consequently, the task for researchers of premodern race now concerns not whether, but how racial ideologies were deployed. Middle English metrical romances provide important evidence of racial thinking and racial discourses. As popular works that also draw on sources in high literary culture, the metrical romances are directly invested in defining a collective English identity and drawing boundaries around it. Their efforts to define a communal identity often yield an ontological hierarchy that centers Anglo-Christian subjects and bodies as exceptional. It is along this axis of imagining an Anglo-Christian exceptionalism that racial discourses are deployed. To better understand how race operated within medieval discourses of the body and of subjecthood, this study takes as a point of departure Sylvia Wynter’s theorizations, in which racial discourses become integral elements in efforts to articulate understandings of the Human, which Wynter terms the “genre of Man,” that privilege masculine Anglo-Christian bodies and subjects. Both explicitly and implicitly, each Middle English romance considered here defines and overrepresents a singular genre of Man as an ideal to strive for. Racial difference not only helps construct these genres of Man, but also results from them, ultimately ensuring the uneven distribution of power and resources. Whereas those who come close to the body and subjectivity held as ideal in each narrative enjoy considerable privilege, bodies and subjectivities that deviate from the norm are designated as objects of righteous systemic violence. Therefore, understanding race primarily as a discourse based on belief, the racial differences in these Middle English romances create and maintain social and political regimes that depend on and benefit from the oppression and antagonization of human groups conveniently presented as non-human, or humans of lesser rank. The chapters in this study analyze seven Middle English metrical romances. Composed beginning with the late twelfth century and approaching the early modern period with one late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century example, these romances display a range of interventions within broader conversations of medieval ontologies of the Human. Although Wynter’s historical argument about the Human and its overrepresentation begins with the secularization of Man and the rise of rationalistic discourse in early modernity, aspects of her historical model are discernible in the medieval literary archive. Considering King Horn (late twelfth century) in the first chapter, a case is made for the figure of the hero as one of the primary vehicles through which this and other Middle English romances formulate and overrepresent a particular understanding of the Human. The second chapter focuses on the Otuel group of romances (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) to explain how the possibility of conversion complicates a genre of Man that promotes Christian subjects and bodies as the ideal; in response to the crisis of nondifferentiation ushered by conversion, race emerges as a category of inalienable alterity. In the third chapter, attention is directed to how the language and narrative structure of The Siege of Jerusalem (fourteenth century) discursively lengthen the distance of non-Christian subjects and bodies, especially Jewish ones, from an ideal imagined to be coterminous with Christian subjectivity. Finally, the process through which Capystranus (late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries) imagines a Christian race in answer to anxieties over Turkish imperialism is examined. As a whole, this series of analyses demonstrates that as an ideological and discursive tool, race was an instrumental element within efforts to define the Human in a way that favored medieval English subjects.