This portfolio is probably my favorite piece of writing from the semester I spent abroad in Rennes, France in the spring of 2013. It contains a collection of 17 poems written by French female authors from the 12th-20th centuries, as well as a nine-page paper that examines the relationship between love and power from the perspectives of each author.
I began the project expecting to be able to track an evolution regarding the dynamic between power and love over the span of 800 years. In other words, I expected women’s perspectives on love in relation to power to change with passing time, and to be able to use their portrayals of this dynamic in their poems to show how women’s situation in society had changed over the centuries. I expected the more recent poems to reflect a more enlightened view on either how love can be empowering, or how it can make one powerless. Much to my surprise (and slight bewilderment) I did not find this to be the case.
As it turns out, what this vast corpus of poems reflected was that women have felt the same confusion, power, victimization, and triumph in love since the 12th century. This upset me greatly at first, since the optimistic feminist part of me so desperately wanted to show that women’s position has improved since the Middle Ages (and the student inside me was panicked that my deadline was so close and the entire plan for the trajectory of my paper had now crumbled). So I stepped back and wondered what the poems did reflect, if not an evolution. What were the similarities? It would have been easy to do a piece on how women were victimized in love. I did not want to write that paper, not least of all because women writing poetry in the Middle Ages were anything but victims (they were badass trailblazers!) It would have been less easy, though completely possible, to write about how women were empowered by love. I did not want to write that paper. That seemed like an oversimplification at best, and a dishonest interpretation at worst.
The fact of the matter is, women (anybody, really) can be either empowered or disempowered by love. What I ended up finding evidenced in these poems was that together they compiled a piece of wisdom about what determines which it will be. All of the authors showed, whether or not they intended to, that love is empowering when lovers are equal. Even the poems that show women as having the upper hand over her lover do not have a tone as inspired as those in which the author describes an equal relationship power dynamic. My paper ended up discussing how this was as true in the 12th century as it was in the 20th, and this gave me a distinct feeling of solidarity with women that traversed hundreds of years.
I began the project expecting to be able to track an evolution regarding the dynamic between power and love over the span of 800 years. In other words, I expected women’s perspectives on love in relation to power to change with passing time, and to be able to use their portrayals of this dynamic in their poems to show how women’s situation in society had changed over the centuries. I expected the more recent poems to reflect a more enlightened view on either how love can be empowering, or how it can make one powerless. Much to my surprise (and slight bewilderment) I did not find this to be the case.
As it turns out, what this vast corpus of poems reflected was that women have felt the same confusion, power, victimization, and triumph in love since the 12th century. This upset me greatly at first, since the optimistic feminist part of me so desperately wanted to show that women’s position has improved since the Middle Ages (and the student inside me was panicked that my deadline was so close and the entire plan for the trajectory of my paper had now crumbled). So I stepped back and wondered what the poems did reflect, if not an evolution. What were the similarities? It would have been easy to do a piece on how women were victimized in love. I did not want to write that paper, not least of all because women writing poetry in the Middle Ages were anything but victims (they were badass trailblazers!) It would have been less easy, though completely possible, to write about how women were empowered by love. I did not want to write that paper. That seemed like an oversimplification at best, and a dishonest interpretation at worst.
The fact of the matter is, women (anybody, really) can be either empowered or disempowered by love. What I ended up finding evidenced in these poems was that together they compiled a piece of wisdom about what determines which it will be. All of the authors showed, whether or not they intended to, that love is empowering when lovers are equal. Even the poems that show women as having the upper hand over her lover do not have a tone as inspired as those in which the author describes an equal relationship power dynamic. My paper ended up discussing how this was as true in the 12th century as it was in the 20th, and this gave me a distinct feeling of solidarity with women that traversed hundreds of years.