Gower for Example: Confessio Amantis and the Ethics of Exemplarity

Author/Editor
Mitchell, J. Allan

Title
Gower for Example: Confessio Amantis and the Ethics of Exemplarity

Published
Mitchell, J. Allan. "Gower for Example: Confessio Amantis and the Ethics of Exemplarity." Exemplaria 16 (2004), pp. 203-234.

Review
The "Confessio Amantis" is a "profoundly inclusive but indeterminate poem,” Mitchell claims; it is “comprehensive” but not “coherent”(205). It contains a vast diversity of tales and lessons, but it resists reduction to single consistent ethical or moral argument; it contains the materials for a moral lesson, but not the lesson itself. But rather than being a failure, either on Gower’s or on Genius’ part, this diversity is a reflection of the type of ethical instruction that the poem offers, in which Amans or the reader must actively participate in the choice of the moral lessons that are applicable to his or her own case. Mitchell chooses as his examples of the poem’s “incoherencies” not the instances in which Genius’ moralization seems to have little to do with the tale that he has just told but instead the conflicts that arise among the different tales and their moral lessons. The lesson of “Pygmaleon,” for instance, on the effectiveness of speech in bringing about love’s rewards (with its distant echoes of the statements in the Prologue on man’s responsibility for his own fate) seems to be inconsistent with the lesson of “Jupiter’s Two Tuns,” which echoes instead the opening lines of Book 1 on the caprices of love’s fortunes. The tale of “Phebus and Daphne,” in which Daphne is turned into a tree because of Phebus’ impatience, seems to offer advice on conduct that is directly contrary to that suggested by “Demephon and Phillis,” in which Phillis becomes a tree because of Demephon’s neglect. But Gregory long ago advised that the message must be modified according to the listener: “The slothful are to be admonished in one way, the hasty in another” (quoted on p. 227). Each lesson is valid under particular circumstances, and the proper course of conduct may also lie in discovering a mean. The comprehensiveness of the poem thus places a burden upon the listener or reader to discover the most relevant application. “In the strongest sense, the poem remains to be invented through reader response” (221), and the proper test of the poem itself “is not whether the text is formally coherent or logical, but whether it can stimulate a practical ethical response” (218 n.) As Mitchell puts it in his conclusion: “What evidence Amans finds useful and appropriate to his own case of unrequited love is for him to invent--not "ex nihilo," but in the old rhetorical sense, out of the myriad possibilities he has been proffered in the form of moral exempla on various topics. Exempla, as much as instantiating conventional morality, are therefore in a sense on a quest for practical precepts that practitioners have not yet formulated, or at the very least supply moral guidance which, as I’ve argued, one can affirm, refine, or deny. Gower’s Amans, like any other practitioner, is thereby invited to explore sundry stories (e.g. about fortune and free-will, haste and hesitancy) in order to, as it were, triangulate a present, proportional response that m[a]y not be reducible to any single precedent. The technique has a strong theoretical basis in that there is no universal and invariable abstract form of the good according to which every moral act can be automatically judged apart from contingent circumstances. As Aristotle said and the 'Confessio Amantis' emphatically affirms, ‘the good is not something common which corresponds to a single Idea.’ The good is instead perforce instantiated in a multiplicity of ethical practices. . . . Moral cases, as Aquinas elaborates in his exposition of Aristotle’s Ethics, themselves tend to be ‘infinitely diversified.’ It is therefore necessary to acquire a sense of the diversity and to cultivate the discretion that enables one to judge cases as they arise. Readerly circumspection, rather than textual coherence, becomes crucial” (233).
This is a challenging and thought-provoking essay, for what it says or implies about Amans’ role, Genius’ role, and the nature of the teaching in the poem, and for the way in which it deals both with those who seek the meaning of the poem in a single ethical or philosophical proposition and with those who throw up their hands and proclaim that whatever argument the poem proposes is undermined within the poem itself. It is also pleasingly well written. Mitchell has a book on "Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower" forthcoming from Brewer in October. We should look forward to it. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society 23.2.]

Date
2004

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis