"[H]e which can no pite know": Murdered Children in the "Confessio Amantis."

Author/Editor
Grinnell, Natalie.

Title
"[H]e which can no pite know": Murdered Children in the "Confessio Amantis."

Published
Grinnell, Natalie. "[H]e which can no pite know": Murdered Children in the "Confessio Amantis." Investigo 1 (2023): 1-13.

Review
In the "Confessio Amantis," Grinnell argues, "violence against children, specifically male children, . . . turns in upon itself, circling back to damage the murderous parents," yielding "a self-annihilation that consistently destroys attempts to build an ordered, fertile familial structure in imitation of the ordered kingdom of God." Per Nicholas Orme's assertion that in the Middle Ages the relationship of parent to child reflected "that of king to subject and God to humanity" (5), this has consequences: "familial violence produces political violence as an unstable kingdom is disrupted by the blood of dead children" (1). Grinnell draws evidence from three tales primarily: "Canace and Machaire," "Jason and Medea," and "Tereus" (with a brief, important analysis of "Phrixus and Helle," [6]). All three build out from representation of child-birth in some--sometimes metaphoric, always horrific--form, in which the female protagonists, despite their responsibility for their children's death, are not condemned by Gower--rather, "Gower . . . concentrates on the male character's responsibility for provoking the violence" (5)--a failure of importance, as Grinnell sees it, since males govern in Gower's society, and the "young" lover Amans will become the aged "John Gower," incapable of "procreation" except through poetic tale-telling (or retelling). Such linkages, which Grinnell renders with dizzying, albeit convincing, evidence from sources including Ovid and the "Roman de la Rose," lead to her conclusion: "Nature, as Gower points out in the Prologue to the 'Confessio,' is unnatural, fallen, subject to time and death. [It is a "world turned upsidedown" (6).] Therefore, in the 'Confessio Amantis,' all births are deaths, and all children are murdered by their parents when they pass on original sin, until the work culminates in the death of the narrator and the birth of the author, both his father and his son" (9). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]

Date
2023

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations