The Romance of the Rose

Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1230

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-12

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Rose

The rose is a symbol for female sexuality and the female body in the work, embodying the narrator’s beloved. As symbols of passion and romance, roses are often associated with love in medieval literature.

The rose thus functions both as a “character” and as a symbol in the poem, illustrating the theme of The Complications of Sexuality and Desire. The rose functions as a stereotypical beloved in the courtly tradition, as it is both heavily idealized by the narrator and difficult to woo, as the narrator must overcome many social and emotional barriers that could prevent their union. The rose is a passive object: While other female figures in the text speak their minds and even help shape the action of the plot, the rose cannot speak and does not have any real agency in the narrative. The consummation between the narrator and the rose at the end of the text represents the successful fulfillment of love, in which sexuality and desire are at last united in union with the beloved.

Weapons

Weapons are an important motif in the work. The weapons that characters carry develop their strength and personalities. For example, Generosity of Spirit carries a lance tipped with gentle prayers, while her combatant, Rebuff, carries a mace or club made from the wood of Refusal. The imagery communicates the allegorical layers to their characters. Generosity is noble and therefore carries a knight’s weapon—a lance, often used in jousting. Rebuff, on the other hand, uses a club, which has more lower-class and less refined associations. This pattern continues across the other characters, with the weapon they carry developing their thematic and allegorical personalities.

Weapons also illuminate gender roles in the poem. The narrator repeatedly emphasizes that the allegorical women in the work carry their weapons with feminine grace, suggesting that they are more delicate and less warlike by nature than the male characters, who carry their weapons with dignity and nobility. Regardless of a character’s gender, if they are perceived as not conforming to the exacting standards for social class, their use of weaponry is typically condemned.

Clothing

Characters’ clothing is often described, forming a motif that alludes to The Tensions Between Nobility and Poverty in the work. As with weapons, the clothes a character wears not only symbolize their social class but can also reveal or reinforce aspects of their characterization.

Idleness, for example, wears extremely fine clothes, which enhances her presentation as someone full of luxury and leisure. With other characters, their clothing is meant to invoke the tensions between how they wish to appear and what they truly are: False Seeming wears holy garments despite being a liar, which invokes the text’s preoccupation with the dangers of religious hypocrisy, thereby interrogating the relationship between outward appearances and inner qualities.