Speaking of Tongues: The Poetics of the Feminine Voice in Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women'

Published: Edelgard E. DuBruck, ed. New Images of Women (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), pp. 47-60.

Description: Harvey examines "tongue" as metonymy for voice: women were often victims of the wagging tongue. To be "rolled" on "many a tongue" describes both erotic and discursive powerlessness in LGW and TC. Descended from the Ovidian ironic palinode in "Remedia amoris" and "Ars amatoria," LGW as palinode is like a prototype: Stesichorus's lyric disavowing an earlier ode in which he blamed Helen of Troy for the Trojan War--significant in that Criseyde is associated with Helen in TC.; The "self-conscious use of multiple sources intensifies Chaucer's irony" and indeterminancy. Chaucer forces the complaint genre of LGW into the hagiographic mold for comic effect. The Legend of Philomela is a "trope of censorship." Like the "Heroides," LGW represents a sort of "transvestite ventriloquism," as a male author renders a feminine voice.; LGW and TC demonstrate that male control exerted in "celebration of women's virtue" is as "debasing and despotic" as the most "virulent of anti-feminist texts."

Alternative Title: New Images of Women: Essays Toward a Cultural Anthropology.

Chaucer Subjects: Legend of Good Women.; Troilus and Criseyde.; Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.