Courtly+Love+in+Victorian+Poetry

Courtly love is a trope that has emerged and reemerged in love poetry across the centuries and across the world. The courtly love tradition is most notably associated with Medieval English literature but has also made appearances in works all throughout Europe and the Near East (Boase). Its revival in Victorian-era Britain provides an important commentary on Victorian values and sheds light on Victorian notions of love. At its inception, the term “[|courtly love]” described a situation in which a man falls in love with a woman who is his moral, spiritual, or social superior, thus making her unattainable; this unattainability, in turn, renders the woman, even more, desirable to the man, creating the perception that the woman is in some way super-human (//Britannica//). The woman is idealized by the man as an almost heavenly being, and the man engages in extreme acts of chivalry in order to make himself worthy of the woman. He experiences an almost feminine faintness in her presence, his reverence for her is overwhelmingly strong, and he will do anything she asks to gain her attention (Newman). It is also important to note that in most early medieval expressions of courtly love, the courtly love affair was always extra-marital, posing a significant amount of stress on the woman (Boase).

The source of the courtly love trope has been debated among scholars of medieval literature, but it is widely believed that the pattern first occurred in Hispano-Arabic culture, and was transmitted through Muslim Spain to the rest of Europe, where it took particular hold in Italian poetry. By the early twelfth century, courtly love tradition had spread across Europe, where it makes its appearance in many French love stories of the time such as Chrétien’s //Le Chevalier de la Charrette//, as well as in Britain’s Arthurian myths with the characters of Guenevere and Lancelot (Boase). In the Medieval case, courtly love was between a distinct set of characters – peasants were never involved, reserving the nuances of courtly love for the upper classes only. It was in this way that the tradition flourished throughout the twelfth century (Boase).

In true Victorian fashion, poets of the mid to late nineteenth century reinstated traditions of the British past by bringing the courtly love trope back to the forefront of the literary world. Seen most notably in George Meredith’s “Modern Love,” Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” and Dante Rosetti’s “Jenny,” courtly love became an indispensable device used by Victorian poets to describe and analyze the formalities and constraints of upper-class Victorian courtship rules, which were similar to those of medieval times.

The Victorian model of courtly love differs, however, from its Medieval counterpart in that it acts not merely as a pleasant storytelling device, but as a vessel for social commentary on issues of class and stratification of gender. By taking the courtly love tradition and bending it to fit their needs, Victorian poets who used courtly love were able to represent harsh realities about the nature of human relationships in an era of extremes (Grant Tucker).

Aside from the fact that Victorians took great pride in their ability to reconnect with traditions of the past, courtly love emerged in the Victorian poetic cannon because it fit well within other Victorian ideas about love. Another common phenomenon that described love and gender roles in Victorian society, a phenomenon often juxtaposed with courtly love within the same poem, was the separate sphere ideology, or the idea of the angel in the house. This idea suggested that woman’s place was in the home where she would be safe from the corruption found in the outside world. These separate spheres fostered courtly love’s fundamental component: the woman’s supposed perfection and superiority to the man who covets her. Because Victorians wanted their women to be morally and spiritually perfect, all love had a courtly nature as women were perceived to be superior to men and thus, in a sense, unattainable (Grant Tucker).

Many poets, like Meredith in “Modern Love,” used courtly love to point out the disconnect occurring in human relationships. Victorian courtly love stories show that extreme reverence of a woman’s super-human characteristics reveals the man’s lack of understanding of the woman as a regular human being. In medieval courtly love, it was accepted that the woman was perfect, but in Victorian courtly love poetry, it is clear that the woman’s perfection is an illusion, and that the man’s blindness to the woman as a complete human being with flaws and feelings represents the tragic failure of love in Victorian society.

The reappearance of courtly love in Victorian poetry acts as a perfect representation of Victorian society as a whole, providing a connection with the literary tradition of the past, a link to ideas about gender roles, and above all, a tool to show the tragedy that arises when love, too, is dragged into a culture of extremity.

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KC/HWS/ENG 214