Chapter 8 - Arts of Love and Justice

Summary

This essay reads the Roman de la Rose as taking up Ovid’s playful association of sex with the origins of human society. Jean de Meun’s Rose returns repeatedly to the narration of political origins – the fall from a Golden Age – imagining an idyllic communal past before it was shattered by conflict over wealth and women. These stories frame erotic desire as inevitably linked to the law and to possession, associating eros with desire for private property. I argue that Aristotle’s Politics functions as an unacknowledged literal referent that troubles the poem’s allegorical treatment of justice and social origins. Whereas Golden Age fables typically speak in unmarked terms about human comity and common possessions, Aristotle and medieval Aristotelian commentaries speak in terms of gendered power dynamics, masculine ownership and the fate of women as property. The Rose reveals the literal truths of scholastic philosophy to be in conflict with mythic truth, while anatomising the necessarily gendered dynamics of human sociality. In a political sphere in which women are considered in the same category as property, the heterosexual desire for possession will always be political. The Rose also leads us to consider whether the political, in turn, is always erotic.