SOURCE: Giannasi, Robert. “Chartier's Deceptive Narrator: La Belle Dame sans mercy as Delusion.” Romania 114, nos. 3-4 (1996): 362-84.

In the following essay, Giannasi refutes biographical interpretations of La Belle Dame sans mercy that see Chartier as the poem's narrator. The narrator, he argues, functions as both the teller of a story of a lady's cruelty and the protagonist who dies as a result of her disdain.

Early studies of Alain Chartier's poetic work and of his most popular piece, La Belle Dame sans mercy, focused either on the apparently biographical information that would help constitute a poetic autobiography of Chartier himself¹, or on the allusions (or lack of them) to contemporary events, including Chartier's supposed political or social partisanship².

Written in or around 1424, the 100 huitains of octosyllabic verse that make up the poem consist of the record of a verbal exchange of a man and his unwilling lady as...