Romance Of The Rose Analysis

Undaunted by the male-dominated literary realm of the Middle Ages, Venetian born writer Christine de Pizan (1364 – 1431) emerges as an early champion of the female sex. Highly critical of society’s misogynistic and largely abusive representation of women, de Pizan awakened readers to the inaccuracies and unfairness of such portrayal through her works. She sought to defend and demand respect for women’s roles in society, by tackling assumptions about women’s inferiority and recognising their contributions throughout history. De Pizan’s literary influence is immense, and much of her work served as a precedent for future debates and movements for woman’s right. In this essay, I will discuss selected works of de Pizan and their contributions to

The first part of Romance of the Rose, by Guillaume de Lorris, functions as an allegorical text worshipping the ideals of courtly love while Jean de Meun’s continuation of it in 1275 speaks brutally of the vices of women. This dichotomy of women being either romantic or vicious lasted well into the seventeenth century. According to Stock (1978), not only did de Pizan opposed the misogyny of the second part of the work, she resented men’s general attitude toward women, as reflected in the anti-feminist teachings of the clergy (Better than rubies, pp. 41-42). Her response to the text which, “by the end of the fourteenth century, had established itself as the vernacular authority on misogyny” (Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women, p. 7), came in the form of Letter to the God of Love. In it, Cupid presents to the other gods a women’s petition asking for an end to the outrages they were forced to bear. The debate generated by this work grew as de Pizan continued exchanging contentious letters with famous scholars of her day. In addition to establishing herself as a female intellectual, this exchange eventually led to the beginning of a series of literary debates on women, known as ‘Querelle Des Femmes’ or ‘The Woman

Her first and most prominent work, The Book of the City of Ladies, tackles the issues of misogyny and sexism head-on by acknowledging women’s contribution in history, providing an alternative to the dominant narrative (which was largely written by males). In The Book of the City of Ladies, three allegorical figures—Lady Reason, Rectitude, and Justice—appear before Christine, where they discuss the oppression of women and the misogynistic subject matter used by contemporary male writers. Under the guidance of the Ladies, Christine then goes on to construct the City of Ladies, a place of refuge for all good and noble women, impenetrable by the malicious attacks of sexist male writers. Through the celebration of women and their achievements throughout history, de Pizan was able to counter the negative stereotypes associated with the female sex since antiquity. Ultimately, de Pizan argued that women, like men, are capable of adopting virtuous behaviour and following intellectual pursuits. According to Brown-Grant (1999), this text “enjoyed great popularity among Christine’s immediate contemporaries and had a substantial readership well into the sixteenth century” (Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women, p. 128). It also had “considerable influence on French writers such as