Using Reason to Change Their Worlds: The Tale of Rosiphelee and the Tale of Alceone in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis."
- Author/Editor
- Bakalian, Ellen S.
- Title
- Using Reason to Change Their Worlds: The Tale of Rosiphelee and the Tale of Alceone in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis."
- Published
- Bakalian, Ellen S. "Using Reason to Change Their Worlds: The Tale of Rosiphelee and the Tale of Alceone in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.'" In Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. Standing in the Shadow of the Master? Chaucerian Influences and Interpretations. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Pp. 82-112.
- Review
- In large part, Bakalian's essay is an extension of her 1998 dissertation and 2004 book-length study, "Aspects of Love in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'," reprising many of her useful generalizations about reason, nature, and female responsibility for their own rational love, and echoing her discussion of the Tale of Alceone in the CA, in which Gower "illustrates a woman who enjoys a marriage of passionate love moderated by reason" (83). Much of what is new here pertains to the "Tale of Rosiphelee" in which the protagonist "uses her reason to turn towards love" (82) and becomes like Alceone, Bakalian claims, insofar as both characters use reason to "change their worlds and achieve their desires" (83). Bakalian's technique is impressionistic appreciation of the "deftness that is Gower's hallmark" (92), underpinned by interpretative commentary and connections with analogous accounts. The "sources for Gower's Rosiphelee tale are various," Bakalian observes, "but Rosiphelee herself is Gower's own creation" (85); she then goes on to find similarities between Gower's protagonist and Chaucer's Man in Black from "Book of the Duchess," his Criseyde (discussed twice), Gower's own Amans, his Rosemund, and the fairy interlocutor of Rosiphelee's tale. Thoughtful solitude characterizes Rosiphelee for Bakalian, and the tale is made "so special" because Rosiphelee "manages to stay focused" and self-aware even when the fairy disappears suddenly, leaving the protagonist to choose to love in a "powerful ending to a romantic tale" (93). Turning to Alceone's tale, Bakalian observes that the protagonist does not speak at all, "yet she speaks through her actions which support Gower's message of truth in marriage." When Alceone's husband departs, "Gower conveys emotion brilliantly in this realistic and intelligible farewell scene" (96) through tears rather than through speech, while Alceone's later "traditional speech actions" are those of a "doting and dutiful wife . . . even in her new shape as a seabird" (97). Such claims--and there are more like it--will raise many pro-feminist eyebrows, but commenting further on several other female characters in CA, Bakalian insists that "Gower eliminates all anti-feminist and anti-matrimonial rhetoric" from the CA and "promotes women and marriage consistently in the poem" (99). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2010
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations