Widows and the Romance of Grief

Abstract

This chapter investigates how emotional and gender practices entwine to articulate the contours of the story of noble privilege. It looks closely at Chrétien de Troyes's Erec et Enide and his Yvain to explore the relation between grief, gender, and narration in romance. While the chapter reveals much about how gender operates and what it does, it argues that is not simply about aligning grief and suffering with the feminine. Often read as objects of men's desire, widows like Enide are also desirable because women's mourning entails narrative. The chapter discusses grief as a kind of storytelling, one eroticized as it narrates power for the powerful. It seeks to answer the questions such as, whose feelings may be expressed, whose feelings matter? Who can practice desire beyond the bounds of the law?