Rivalry, Rape, and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer

Published: R. F. Yeager, ed. Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutability, Exchange (Victoria B.C.: University of Victoria, 1991), pp. 130-52.

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).

Alternative Title: Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutability, Exchange.; Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts.

Chaucer Subjects: Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.; Man of Law and His Tale; Troilus and Criseyde; Chaucer's Life