Description
Discussions of the "quarrel" between Chaucer and Gower (anchored in MLP) pose a Chaucer who was free of base, ingratiating attitudes toward his sovereign and who was the source of pure poeticality--language and aesthetics unpolluted by self-interest. In contrast, the same discussions create a Gower who was an "ingrate" and a "sycophant" at court, content to "follow" and to imitate in his moralizing, unequivocally second-rate poetic endeavors. Gower plays the lumbering "fall guy" to the nimble and free-spirited Chaucer.
Dinshaw argues that such rivalry effaces women--that when "read in interaction," Gower's Philomela narrative and aspects of Chaucer's Criseyde "can be opened to reveal and resist the violent obliteration of the feminine."
Revised slightly in Anna Roberts, ed. Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998).
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