Gower's Beast Allegories in the 1391 Visio Anglie.
- Author/Editor
- Carlson, David R
- Title
- Gower's Beast Allegories in the 1391 Visio Anglie.
- Published
- Carlson, David R. "Gower's Beast Allegories in the 1391 Visio Anglie." Philological Quarterly 87 (2008), pp. 257-75. ISSN 0031-7977
- Review
- The Visio Anglie that constitutes the first book of "Vox Clamantis" depicts the peasants as beasts in two not entirely consistent senses, Carlson explains. In the vision itself, the dreamer sees not humans but beasts of burden which are then transformed into monstrous versions of themselves. The representation of the peasants as beasts, Carlson points out, was a widespread topos serving to justify their repression and servitude, while in fact also representing the daily conditions under which they lived. The second trope is found in the prose heading to the Visio and in the verse that precedes the beginning of the dream, which Carlson suggests were added after the fact. Here Gower "apologetically mitigates his chief metaphor" (263): the rebels were humans (thus possessed of reason, and capable of making a different choice) who were transformed into beasts under force of their own vice. Carlson traces the roots of this “ethical-judgmental conceit” (269) to Boethius and Ovid, and notes, most importantly, that it serves to undermine the rationalization of feudalism implicit in the depiction of peasants as beasts by nature. “The mitigating change of conceit in the post-festal prose acknowledges the bad faith of the original verse misrepresentation of the rebels as subhuman; but the mitigation cannot eliminate or expunge. The fact remained that the feudal political economy was itself inhumane, treating human beings as unequal, reducing some to non-human status, the status of thingness, for exploitation.” In a passage in which Gower gives voice to the rebels' complaints (ll. 693-96), he “acknowledges common humanity and calls oppression by its proper name. . . . Gower’s vision-nightmare is an act of aestheticizing political will, properly anaesthetizing too, perhaps: while articulating the justice of the threat that the 1381 Social Revolt posed, willfully also still to deride it and its bestial or bestialized agents” (270-71). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2].
- Date
- 2008
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
- Vox Clamantis