Chaucer Answers Gower: Constance and the Trouble with Reading
- Author / Editor
- Allen, Elizabeth.
Chaucer Answers Gower: Constance and the Trouble with Reading
- Published
- ELH 64 (1997): 627-55.
- Description
- Gower's "Confessio Amantis" presents Genius's tales as morally simple, although the incest stories stimulate readers to ask moral questions. In MLT, Chaucer represents his narrator as misreading Gower, affecting a simplistically moral stance and vehemently disavowing impropriety; the poet thereby shows the potential failure of Gower's techniques to elicit a moral response.
- Constance incites violence in others and through passive silence implies her lack of self-knowledge. Also discusses the dedication in Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde'.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Man of Law and His Tale.
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.
- Troilus and Criseyde.