박윤희, 궁정식 사랑의 노래: 유혹의
언어
Yoon-hee Park, Courtly Love Poetry: Language for Seduction
Abstract
Courtly Love is a forbidden affair usually
between a noble bachelor and a married lady. That is why the relationship is
aristocratic, secret, platonic or adulterous. However, though illicit, in
courtly love a woman, as an ennobling spiritual and moral force, can exert a
favorable influence on men, a civilizing effect on knightly behavior. In
essence, courtly love is a contradictory experience between sexual desire and
spiritual fulfillment. Nevertheless, many readers are suspicious of the motives
because courtly love is a product of medieval Europe that is characterized by
its misogyny.
"With the word the garment entered," Tertullian declares,
implying that language is a kind of decorative covering like flamboyant dress.
Medieval and Renaissance courtly love poems, written mostly by male poets,
present a uniform situation in which a forlorn lover is desperately trying to
woo his cruel but idolized mistress. However, poems written by women poets
reveal that such tears and sighs are nothing but crocodile tears. Isabella
Whitney's dejected heroine warns, “Beware of fair and painted talk, / beware of
flattering tongues”; Aphra Behn's libertine confesses, "I never vow’d nor sigh’d
in vain, / But both, tho’ false, were well received; / The fair are pleased to
give us pain, / And what they wish is soon believed: / And tho’ I talk’d of
wounds and smart, / Love's pleasures only touch’d my heart."
Key Words
courtly love, love poetry, sonnet, sexual object, language for seduction