UC Santa Barbara

Starting with the Biblical Song of Songs, architectural structures of the castle and tower have served as a metaphor for women's bodies. Throughout the Middle Ages, this metaphor continued to stand in for the female body, emphasizing a desire in the cultural imagination that the female body should be impenetrable, their sexuality carefully controlled. With the advent of castle architecture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the castle tower also became metonymically linked with the female body as women historically occupied this deepest--that is, the most architecturally inaccessible--space of the castle. This dissertation considers the trope of the female body entowered in romance, Middle English lyric, Geoffrey Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, and in the Paston letters.

The architectural theory of access analysis contends that the deepest spaces of architecture, those that take the most architectural steps to reach, are the highest status spaces in an architectural structure. Aristocratic women were placed in these spaces both historically and in the literature of medieval England. Gaining access to these spaces and to the female bodies that inhabited them thus conferred status on the men who were lucky enough to do so. Social status was highly fluid and often contested in high to late medieval England. The highly charged tower with its association with high status therefore became a site around which social status could be contested.

In this dissertation, I examine how authors whose status was contested--the cleric and the civil servant--manipulated the trope of the entowered woman to negotiate their own status. I do so by first situating the tropes as part of a real, historical understanding of castle architecture, rather than as part of an allegorical program. I then build on New Historicist theories that imagine the text as entering contemporary social conversations, but I further those theories by following so-called New Materialists, who argue that objects can have material effects in the historical world. Following Pierre Bourdieu, I consider texts not just as art qua art, but commodities jockeying for status in an economic and social world. I bridge the divide between discursive, ideological "effects" theorized by New Historicists and the material effects of what I consider to be the complex assemblage of the text, which is not reducible to the physical material of the text or the discursive/linguistic "matter" of the text. I argue that texts are a special kind of commodity, one in which the labor of the maker, the author, is not abstracted in the exchange process. The text, as it circulates via manuscript, carries with it, in the linguistic signs on the page, the intention of the author. As male authors imaginatively accessed the high status space of tower and its female occupant in the literature they produced, they thus made a radical claim for increasing their own social status. The dissertation concludes with a consideration of the women of the historical Paston family, who serve as a counterpoint to the ubiquitous trope of the entowered woman, as they chose to live in the lower status architectural program of the gentry manor house, where women were not relegated to the inaccessible space of the castle tower.