Weaving a narrative: Clothing, conjointure, and composition in twelfth-century French romance

The writers of twelfth-century French romance show an unprecedented interest in clothing, apparent in their widespread use of an established vestimentary code coupled with an acute ability to manipulate this code for their narrative purposes: the creation of an open, dynamic literary work. This dissertation examines their use of clothing as a multivalent signifier, particularly in light of changes in the material and social conditions of the period and concurrent changes in the representational system and in relation to the process of narrative composition. Chapter one focuses upon the extratextual factors that determine the parameters of the use of clothing in the literature of the period, including the context of conjointure, or the conception and practice of the creative process, the context of the representational mentality, and the historical context in which major changes were occurring. In chapter two I discuss the function of description in romance and how clothing helps to elaborate characters' identities, paying particular attention to the dynamism of the emerging clothing system and the way it inscribes flexibility into the descriptions. My discussion leads to an examination of code manipulation by which the writers altered the process of signification in several ways. I continue my analysis of code manipulation in chapter three but concentrate instead upon clothing acts as signifiers for which meaning is mediated through changes in context and interpretable only in light of context. Nonetheless, the signifying system does not replace the code but subsumes it, a fact confirmed by my discovery that romance writers model the very process of fashioning new meanings from old material and in which they themselves are engaged when they show characters making cloth or clothing. Chapter four investigates the way the clothing signifying system interacts with different levels of the text: structural, thematic and narrative. Clothing provides structure as clothing references open and close narrative threads and as they create links among episodes through both formal and thematic analogy. The clothing system also helps elaborate and illustrate the major themes of a given romance, providing thematic cohesion to the work as a whole. Finally, chapter four concludes with the close reading of two works of courtly literature, Marie de France's Guigemar and Chretien's Guillaume d'Angleterre, for which it is possible to read the narrative through the clothing, and my conclusion emphasizes and confirms the contribution that clothing makes to a narrative as a whole.