Literary Genealogy, Virile Rhetoric, and John Gower's Confessio Amantis

Author/Editor
Watt, Diane

Title
Literary Genealogy, Virile Rhetoric, and John Gower's Confessio Amantis

Published
Watt, Diane. "Literary Genealogy, Virile Rhetoric, and John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Philological Quarterly 79 (1999), pp. 389-415.

Review
"Gower's construction of rhetoric,” Watt asserts, referring primarily to the discussion that occupies the middle section of Book 7 but also with a view to the entire poem, “can be seen as both gendered and sexualized, especially when read alongside other classical and medieval discussions of the subject” (p. 393). As Schmitz, Craun, and others have noted, Gower departs from his source in Brunetto Latin’s "Tresor" in treating rhetoric as a matter of ethical choice and in emphasizing the virtues of honesty and plainness, but “correct use of language is also gendered as masculine,” Watt claims (393), and “the power of speech reaches its true fulfillment in men alone” (394). Gower also rejected Latini’s class-based distinction between ordinary language and the eloquence that he associates with true nobility, but Book 7 is nonetheless concerned with the conduct of the king rather than that of ordinary men. Aristotle is quoted as urging truth primarily in kings (7.1731-36), and abuses of language such as flattery and deception are associated throughout the poem with the royal court. Watt sees a direct address to Richard II in these warnings, and more specific allusions to his attachment to Robert de Vere (in Gower’s use of “assoted”) and to his failure to produce an heir (in the play on “conceive”) in 7.2338-43. By means of this collocation “rhetoric, reasonable behaviour, chastity, and the obligation to reproduce are interrelated” (396). Gower makes a tribute to the persuasive powers of rhetoric in 7.1630-40, but his discussion otherwise betrays considerable ambivalence about ornate language, as others have noted. Both Ulysses and Caesar are depicted as either implicitly or explicitly misusing language in order to obscure the truth. Gower’s use of the word “colour” with reference to Caesar, like his use elsewhere of “peinte,” evokes, furthermore, the condemnation of cosmetics as another form of deceptive covering among both classical and medieval writers and as a form of effeminacy by both Alain de Lille and Jean de Meun. Alain goes furthest in associating abuses of language with moral corruption, using the former as a figure for the latter throughout DPN. “The court satire and other literature of the later Middle Ages likewise reveal a nexus between rhetoric, dissimulation, self-indulgence, and all forms of lust including sodomy” (400). And such “masquerade and effeminacy” (401) was widely identified with Richard II’s court. “The conceptual link between false eloquence and sodomy (in its most general sense of non-reproductive sexual intercourse) [thus] indicates that it would be wrong to isolate Gower’s discussion of rhetoric from Genius’ praise of ‘honeste’ love and marriage, or from the extended account of chastity as the fifth point of Policy” (401). Gower repeatedly condemns effeminacy. Both Caesar and Ulysses, moreover, are associated with effeminacy in earlier literature. Watt concedes the problem here, and her response is also a justification of her method: “Of course the objection might be made that in his discussion of rhetoric Gower does not actually refer to either Ulysses’ womanliness or Caesar’s depravity and that therefore, in Confessio, the connection between rhetoric and effeminacy and sodomy is not established, that unlike Dante [in his portrayal of Latini in Inferno 15] Gower does not represent the rhetorician as sodomite. Nonetheless, we cannot isolate the text from its literary and cultural contexts and such connections did exist whether or not Gower and his readers consciously made them” (403). She then goes on the link Gower’s ambivalence about rhetoric to his doubts and questions about his own role as poet. In 7.2332-37, she notes (in “second recension” MSS only, not “first recension” as she claims, 403), Gower cites Dante, and identifies himself with the poet who tells the truth but who has less influence over the king than the flatterer does. She sees an attempt to dissociate himself from the misusers of language that he has condemned in Gower’s claims in the epilogue to have used no rhetoric (*8.3064) and to have written “with rude wordis and with pleyne” (8.3122). But he has used such rhetoric. Moreover, he has falsified his own appearance in adopting the role of Amans, as the glossator points out in the well-known passage at 1.59-64 mar. “It is manifest throughout Confessio that Gower’s double, Amans, is not exempt from charges of insincerity. . . . [And] by the end of the poem Amans has been exposed as a fraud when he beholds himself in the looking glass handed to him by Venus and sees his ‘colour fade’ (8.2825). . . . Having associated false language with masquerade and effeminacy, Gower (or the figure of the author-narrator) and his double Amans find themselves implicated in these very vices” (406). Watt also sees in the history of the dedications of the poem Gower’s efforts to distance himself from the king who was its first sponsor and from “the accusations of incompetence and corruption made during his reign, and thus to preserve his book from moral taint. Indeed, if we connect this elision to Gower’s failure to name Latini as the main authority for Book 7, we might be tempted to conclude that the author specifically wanted to avoid the stain of sodomy. At any rate, the Ricardian poet was aware that the writer, like the courtier, was susceptible to charges of effeminacy and degeneracy as he was to those of flattery and hypocrisy, and that not only his success but also his masculinity was contingent on the reputation of his patron” (407). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 20.2.]

Date
1999

Gower Subjects
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Confessio Amantis