John Gower

Author/Editor
Wetherbee, Winthrop

Title
John Gower

Published
Wetherbee, Winthrop. "John Gower." In The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Ed. Wallace, David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 589-609.

Review
Wetherbee's chapter on Gower is proportionally only slightly longer than Russell Peck's in the "Dictionary of Literary Biography" (vol. 146, pp. 178-90. Detroit: Gale, 1994), something under 10000 words compared to about 8000 for Peck, but it offers a great deal more to grapple with, giving far more space to interpretive issues than to the purely factual. Gower's biography is reduced to a single footnote (p. 590), there is a single sentence on his acquaintance with Chaucer (same page), and one has to search hard for any hint that CA is arranged in books that are identified with the Seven Deadly Sins (it's in the middle of p. 604). There is a great deal, however, on the comparison between Gower's and Chaucer's "projects,” and even more on Gower’s sometimes ambivalent relation to the literary traditions from which he drew. That is perhaps the greatest difference between these two essays. Peck acknowledges Gower’s debt to literary sources, but he emphasizes the poet’s depiction of contemporary society. Wetherbee acknowledges the poet’s self-defined role as social moralist, but he emphasizes the “evolving engagement with poetic tradition” evident in all three of his major works; and with reference to MO and VC, he declares, “the traditional emphasis on their doctrinal content has tended to distract attention from Gower’s skill and versatility as a poet” (p. 591). The details of his account take a couple of surprising directions. As similar in content as MO and VC may be, each is referable to a distinct tradition of literary form associated with the language that Gower chose. MO draws from the popular vernacular homily and to traditions of penitential discourse. It is also, according to Wetherbee, marked by an engagement with the "Roman de la Rose": the “psychology of mankind, suspended between Reason and the World, recalls the Amant of the Rose, challenged by Reason and Cupid, but unnerved by Dangier and a latent fear of love’s power” (p. 593), and Gower’s French “is everywhere alert to the corrupting power of the courtly language it deploys” (ibid.). VC is drawn from traditions of learned Latin satire, despite Gower’s claim to express the "vox populi." Wetherbee also discovers, in the conclusion to the "visio" in Book 1 and elsewhere, echoes of the anxious self-definition of the poet in Alan of Lille’s "De Planctu Naturae" and Ovid’s "Tristia" and "Ex Ponto." This “evolving engagement” culminates in the “synthesis” of CA, but CA is also a work of a different and more complex sort. Because of its dialogic structure, “moral judgments presented directly in the earlier works now sit in unresolved contradiction with a vision of man and the world that continually call the judge’s assertions into question” (p. 598). This is a view of CA that has been expressed before but never with quite as much force or on the basis of so thorough a knowledge of the poem. Wetherbee cites the form of the poem, of course, with its English verse crowded by the Latin marginalia and epigrams: the tension among their different views “is part of a long-standing debate between poetry and the conventional scholarly assumptions that define its place in medieval pedagogy” (p. 600). Genius is as divided as the poem itself, speaking for both “cultural” and “natural” values, for both "courtoisie" and for chivalry, “a virtue which in its sexual aspect brings love into association with aggression and violence” (p. 601). Chivalry, Wetherbee declares, “is in effect the villain of the 'Confessio,' at odds with Gower’s teaching in virtually every area” (p. 602), an assertion that he defends with a brief examination of a number of Gower’s tales. Gower’s goal is “a cultural system capable of controlling not only relations between the sexes but social relations of all sorts. And implicit in his treatment of love and chivalry is an awareness that the resources provided by courtly-chivalric culture are inadequate to this task” (p. 603). This awareness is reflected in the numerous contradictions in the poem, as “conventional paradigms fail to exercise a controlling function” (p. 603). It is also reflected in the inclusion of Book 7, whose departure from the form of the rest of the poem suggests that “the perfect synthesis of moral self-governance, courtly-chivalric 'gentilesse' and enlightened royal policy may finally be beyond the ordering power of Genius and his poet” (p. 604). Gower backs away from the full implications of his form and argument, however, ending his poem with “a ringing affirmation – in English and in his own voice – of the place of man in a divinely ordered universe”(p. 607-8), and in that Wetherbee finds the greatest difference between Gower and Chaucer, despite their substantial affinity. Where Chaucer’s view is fragmented, Gower retains a “guarded faith that the ‘well-meaning’ love of Apollonius is finally accessible to his society and can prevail” (p. 607). This is a challenging view of the CA and it is unfortunate that Wetherbee has only the space of a chapter to develop it. While his argument is clear, he isn’t able to deploy all of the evidence that we might expect. The issues in Gower’s tale of Paris and Helen, for instance, are too complex to be summarized in a single sentence; the assertion that chivalry is the villain of the piece needs more than a paragraph of justification; and the argument on the fragmenting and unifying aspects of Gower’s structure deserves more than the few pages that Wetherbee gives us here. We can only respond with a challenge of our own: Wetherbee owes us an entire book on Gower. [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 18.2.]

Date
1999

Gower Subjects
Backgrounds and General Criticism
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations