The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature.
- Author/Editor
- Edwards, Suzanne M.
- Title
- The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature.
- Published
- Edwards, Suzanne M. The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
- Review
- Edwards maps out how "medieval discourses of survival" have something in common with modern-day understandings of what it means to "outlive" sexual violence, that is, to be a "survivor" rather than a "victim." Beginning with Augustine's response to the Lucretia story in the "City of God," she reminds us that he rebutted Livy's celebration of Lucretia's suicide as "a courageous act of devotion to spouse and city" (4). For Augustine, rape was a violation of a woman's body but not her mind, and he struggles to understand Lucretia's actions "so that he can more effectively dissuade rape victims in his own historical moment from doing likewise." Augustine concludes, according to Edwards, that "Lucretia's suicide was not a failure of her chastity, but rather evidence of her inability to live with shame" (7). This sets up the author's reading of Gower's version of the tale in Book VII of the "Confessio Amantis" (and her final chapter) in which "Lucrece's chaste fidelity is an exemplary model for the will's sovereignty over the body and for the ruler's sovereignty over the body politic" (113). The body of the suicidal woman, the incomparable spouse, and paragon of virtue thus becomes an exemplum of political violence; her dead body is displayed publicly to incite anger among the populace and provide a motive for rejecting the tyranny that rape and the rapist represent. The scene that Gower re-presents is sensitive to Lucrece's state of mind when Aruns plots his attack. Described as a "tigre his time awaiteth / In hope for to cacche his preie" (ll. 4945-46), he "tok thane what him liste,/ And goth his wey, that non it wiste" (ll. 4989-90) . When the terrorized woman faints during the assault, enacting the sense of dissemblance described by Edwards as a rape survivor's not knowing "how she thinks she knows herself" (9), we see the relevance of the scene to present-day rape survivors. Yet Lucrece lives in ancient Rome where the shame of rape for a married woman is unbearable; she is not a rape survivor in the modern sense, nor a martyr in the ancient sense. Rather, her violated body becomes an emblem of political turmoil and tyrannous rulership. And while this is clearly one of the points of Gower's tale, Edwards' tendency to look away from Lucrece's corpse to the men who find her body seems an abrupt swerve. Gower's representation of Lucrece's rape illustrates the mind/body separation that Augustine claims for her, but it also indicts the underlying rivalries among men that fuel violence both public and personal; the poet's sensitive rewriting of Lucrece's response to the violation of her "wommanhiede" is deserving of greater explication than is afforded in Edwards' concluding chapter. [ES. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2016
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis