The Female Patience Figure as Frozen Empress

Abstract

One would expect to find patience in saints. But patience literature cannot work as a distinct genre unless there are secular works that apply heroic virtues of patience to women who are not saints—ideally for my argument, not even saintly. Chrétien de Troyes in his twelfth-century French poem Cligés supplies an important example of such a nonsaintly patience figure in the character of the empress Fénice, an analogue to Griselda. Chrétien is (among other things) an important contributor to the profeminine side of the debate concerning roles for women that arises during and after the “courts of love” described by Andreas Capellanus and that runs all the way to the fifteenth century and beyond in Western Europe.¹ In Cligés the empress Fénice falls in love with the titular character, a Greek prince. The lengthy interior monologue concerning her emotions is parallel to the Dialogue Portion of the passios, where a declaration of belief, a kind of self-identification, is the primary aim (4364–529). As frequently occurs in Chrétien’s works, her passion is also described, in typical courtly love fashion, as an illness. Fénice cultivates and uses this love-sickness as a way to attract her beloved (2947–61; 4295–529).² Proactive, brave, and resourceful, she commissions her servant Thessala, a female magician and herbalist, to prepare a potion for her mistress that will simulate death so that Fénice can get out of her marriage to the emperor and instead set up a secret life with Cligés (5272–305; 5372–402).³

The bryde was broght abedde as stille as stoon.

—Chaucer, The Merchant’s Tale (Fragment IV, line 1818)