Autobiographical Selves in the Poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate.
- Author/Editor
- Matthews, David.
- Title
- Autobiographical Selves in the Poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate.
- Published
- Matthews, David. "Autobiographical Selves in the Poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate." In Adam Smyth, ed. A History of English Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 27–40.
- Review
- Matthews here surveys "autobiographical fragments or moments . . . [that] appear to be performances of self" (27) in works of select fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English poets, gauging their "truth value" to be generally unreliable (39) but asking more broadly "what can be said about the ways in which such writers might have entwined life-writing into their larger literary projects?" (29). Before turning very briefly to Gower, Matthews usefully observes A. C. Spearing's distinction (2012) between "autography" and autobiography, glances at conventionalized uses of first-person pronouns in works of the early fourteenth-century writers, and explains why Chaucer's performances of self in "Book of the Duchess," "House of Fame," "Legend of Good Women," and "Canterbury Tales"--with the possible exception of his Retractions--are "difficult to label" as autobiographical because of the poet's playful ironic self-deprecation: the "Chaucerian self is clearly embodied in his work, but his self-presentations can rarely be taken at face value" (32). Matthews then turns to Gower (for two paragraphs only) for evidence that "inserting a version of oneself into literary works was by this time a viable poetic strategy." He mentions Gower's use of his own name in "Confessis Amantis," observes that Amans/Gower's "abjecting himself" to Venus is similar to Chaucer's self-abjection to the god of Love in the Prologue to "The Legend of Good Women," and points out that "There is little to be gleaned about the real Gower's autobiography from these passages." Matthews then sidesteps a more complex engagement with Gower and autobiography: "So far as autobiography is concerned, [Gower] critics have been more interested in what goes on at the beginning of the 'Confessio,' and the claim made there that the work was commissioned by King Richard himself" (33). Moving on immediately from this statement to discuss fifteenth-century poetry, Matthews neither cites the interested critics he mentions nor assesses the truth value of Gower's account of meeting Richard on the Thames in the first recension of the poem--perhaps because there is no easy or obvious way of establishing that the scene is historical or fictional, apart from the discovery of at-present-unknown documentary evidence. Is this an instance of genuine autobiography, maybe the first in English? Does it make any difference? How does Gower's revision/elimination of the scene affect his presentation of self elsewhere in the poem? As he proceeds, Matthews effectively shows that Hoccleve and Lydgate--like Chaucer (along with W. G. Sebald, Marcel Proust, and Karl Ove Knausgaard)--combine fact and fiction for rich thematic and stylistic effects in their various presentations of self. Gower's scene on the Thames might well be investigated in this light too. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2016
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Biography of Gower