| Working from Patricia Parker's definition of "romance" as a form that simultaneously pursues and postpones some given end, object, or revelation, this dissertation investigates intersecting discourses of gender, genre, visual culture, and mourning as they pertain to the poetics of the romance mode. Noting the powerful affinity between patience and spectacle in the genre, I explore the erotic, ethical, and narrative implications when poets conflate the force of patience, particularly feminine patience, with the force of the image. Building upon narrative theories of classical and medieval ekphrasis as well as socio-political approaches to the "image debate" in late medieval England, my early chapters examine how energies contained within the image can sometimes frustrate the natural-seeming, linear movement of narratives towards some culturally privileged telos. Dante and Chaucer become critical figures in this discussion, for each self-consciously experiments with patience as telos, thereby undermining traditional systems of closure with a figure that pointedly calls attention to the limits of language, poetry, and knowledge.;My first chapter attends to Dante's representation of "pazienza" in the Commedia: an image that aligns the demands of mourning and art and becomes critical in understanding Dante's poetic attempts to transcend Virgilian pathos. My second chapter investigates the rather complex associations that Geoffrey Chaucer traces between this virtue at the heart of fourteenth-century piety and various cultural, religious, and representational concerns. In particular, I am interested in how Chaucer's uneasy constructions of patience are often linked to problems of human vision and learning, informing the steady descent of poetry into prose, language into silence, faith into doubt in works such as the Canterbury Tales. In my third chapter, I explore the relevance of the memento pati to the numerous textual and visual representations of Queen Elizabeth as "Patient Prince" while considering the relations among imperialism, romance, gender, and power. I conclude with a chapter that traces the connections between Shakespeare's early appropriations of patience and early modern emblem iconography, building towards an understanding of what it at stake in the images of feminine patience which often resonate in the final moments of his late romances. I suggest that patience, as telos, unsettles traditional gestures towards narrative closure, in part, because these images of patience are so often images of narrative itself. |
