Her Father's Daughter: The Re-Alignment of Father-Daughter Kinship in Three Romance Tales.
- Author/Editor
- Ashton, Gail.
- Title
- Her Father's Daughter: The Re-Alignment of Father-Daughter Kinship in Three Romance Tales.
- Published
- Ashton, Gail. "Her Father's Daughter: The Re-Alignment of Father-Daughter Kinship in Three Romance Tales." Chaucer Review 34.4 (2000): 416-27.
- Review
- Gail Ashton examines in this article three tales that share the motif of the exiled daughter, Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale," Gower's Tale of Constance, and "Emaré," in order "to explore the centrality of the family within society and the problematical role of 'daughter' itself" (416). On the surface, Ashton argues, these daughters are presented as passive "unsignified" (418) figures to be traded among men. Their role in their father's house is only temporary, as they wait to be married off. Ashton identifies a patriarchal ambivalence toward this temporary role. In trading his daughter, the father exerts power and, simultaneously, experiences the loss of power over his daughter, a loss that is also an emotional loss. Looking under this surface we can also see that the daughters are not merely passive but manage to have some control over their own identity and fate after leaving the father's house. Ashton notes that all three daughters choose the men they finally marry (Chaucer's and Gower's Constance do not marry the sultan, the man chosen by their father, but a king they meet on their own after they are set adrift following the sultan's murder; Emaré meets the man she marries after fleeing from her father). In addition, in all three stories, the daughters use silence in strategic moments to hide their identity and, in the cases of Gower's Constance and Emaré, they even change their names slightly at one point in their story. Constance, Custance, and Emaré also carefully stage their stories' final encounter scene, a reencounter of the daughters with both their fathers and husbands through the mediation of their sons. Ashton argues that through their sons the daughters return to their fathers, thus healing the breach signified by marriage and restoring the patriarchal structures, but they do so on their own terms, in effect critiquing marriage and patriarchal laws through a "re-positioning and rearticulation of 'daughter'"(420). [MB-F. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2000
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantic
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations