"Far semed her hart from obeysaunce": Strategies of Resistance in The Isle of Ladies

The fifteenth-century poem The Isle of Ladies has received little critical attention up to this point. At once dream vision and romance, it tells the tale of a narrator whose trancelike dream carries him into an island populated by women that is gradually and violently conquered by a marauding regiment of knights. Scholars have generally viewed the poem, as per its conclusion, as a masculinist victory that celebrates feminine oppression. Reading more sensitively between the lines of the action unearths a narrative of covert feminist resistance, horizontal alliances, and strategies for surviving a patriarchal regime. The opening frame of the poem, which delineates the power of half-sleep rather than full immersion into dream, trains readers in reading doubly for both the men's victory and the women's dissent.