How do Geoffrey Chaucher's 'The Knights Tale' and Lady Mary Wroth's 'Pamphilia to Amphilanthus' present the experience of romantic love?

Abstract

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus both explore how male domination and subsequent female subjugation can transform romantic love into a destructive force. In The Knight’s Tale fulfilling the men’s desires is contingent upon disregarding the women’s wishes, presenting a heavy critique on the ironies of chivalric romantic traditions which glorify supposed male heroes. This is consolidated by the narrative structure wherein a kaleidoscope of male voyeurism objectifies and silences the women, Emelye and Ypolita. Wroth contrastingly voices her poem through a woman - Pamphilia - but her narratorial autonomy is undercut by her complete focus on her male lover, Amphilanthus, with whom the relationship is replete with imagery of colonialism to symbolise her subjugation under patriarchal forces that pervade romantic love. While Hanson (cited by Madeline Bassnett, 112) asserts that Wroth’s sonnets lack ‘tension that might bring [it] to life for… 21st-century readers,’ this is incorrect: both texts poignantly present anxieties towards love which exist in the present-day - anxieties which concern forces of patriarchal power used to constrain women’s autonomy, coercing them to abide by men’s desires.