The Logic of Love in "The Canterbury Tales."
- Author/Editor
- Sharma, Manish.
- Title
- The Logic of Love in "The Canterbury Tales."
- Published
- Sharma, Manish. The Logic of Love in "The Canterbury Tales." Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2022. x, 395 pp.
- Review
- Sharma refers sparingly to Gower in this study, although he does cite the "Tale of Apollonius" several times in his reading of "The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale." Differences among Gower's, Trevet's and Chaucer's versions of the Constance narrative help Sharma to show how the entanglement of the Man of Law in the motif of incest even as he seeks to detach his narrative from it exemplifies "the Chaucerian principle of unintended consequences" (110) which rebound on the narrator, who "actually seems to enjoy the oppressions" Custance endures (113). More generally, Sharma gives something of a new twist to the dismissiveness of the traditional label of Gower as "moral." Asserting that he has "no desire to insist on any stark opposition between Chaucer as ludic ironist and Gower as didactic moralist," Sharma makes clear that Chaucer is no less moral than Gower, although he finds the latter to be more pessimistic than his fellow poet. When setting out to clarify Chaucer's use of paradox, Sharma briefly contrasts it with Langland's use of enigma and then explores "some significant points of diffraction" between the CT and the "Confessio Amantis," regarding both "as sustained meditations on the nature of love" (24). In a swift description of hierarchical, analogical love in the CA, Sharma tells us the poem "supplies us with a double perspective on love: On the one hand, 'sub specie aeternitatis' love is an element subordinated within God's providential regulation of the cosmos; on the other hand, ' for mortals, love is a force that can never be internally regulated. Love may submit to the authority of divine reason, but it rebels against the authority of human reason. Human existence in the 'Confessio,' at least after a fantasmatic golden age, is thus inherently disordered" (27). Chaucer, Sharma tells us in the following paragraph, "finds a radically different way to articulate order, disorder, and love" in the CT, where "reality . . . is hierarchical and anti-hierarchical at the same time." Gower sees only a "metaphysical abyss" between "divine necessity" and "human contingency," while, in Chaucer, "God strictly determines us to be absolutely free" (28) and the poet's "charitable hermeneutic" (30) serves as a bridge across the abyss Sharma sees in Gower. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations