Rape in John Gower's Confessio Amantis and Other Related Works

Author/Editor
Mast, Isabelle

Title
Rape in John Gower's Confessio Amantis and Other Related Works

Published
Mast, Isabelle. "Rape in John Gower's Confessio Amantis and Other Related Works." In Young Medieval Women. Ed. Lewis, Katherine J. and Menuge, Noël James and Phillips, Kim M.. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, pp. 103-32.

Review
Mast's long essay falls into three unequal parts: a consideration of the instances of rape in three other collections of tales nearly contemporary with Gower's, an examination of the language Gower uses for rape in each of his three major poems, and an analysis of some of the major instances of rape in CA. The three other tale collections--the "Gesta Romanorum," the "Alphabet of Tales," and Christine de Pisan's "Cité des Dames"--treat rape very differently from one another, but none explores the consequences of rape for the woman, the principal way in which Mast finds Gower's treatment differs from that of his predecessors. Gower's vocabulary for rape is shaped in part by the framework of the confession. In Book 5, where many of the instances of rape in the poem are found, the vocabulary of theft, with its implication that women or their sexuality are mere commodities, is drawn from the metaphor of Avarice that governs the book as a whole, but it also embodies the woman's lack of consent, it suggests that rape is less an act of desire than of aggression and power, and it does not prevent Gower from considering the consequences for the victim. Other expressions, such as "hadde his wille," are more androcentric, but Gower never stoops to pornographic descriptions of the violent act. The incidents of rape in CA appear to be carefully chosen: Gower depicted far fewer than the fifty such acts, for instance, in the "Metamorphoses." His alterations in the tales of Philomela and Lucrece reveal his attitude towards rape. In the former tale, Gower places the rape and its consequences at the center. He betrays his sympathy for Philomela by allowing her to voice her feelings of shame and embarrassment, and in the transformations at the end he affords her some partial compensation for her fate. He alters the story of Lucrece in order to emphasize the victim's innocence. She too experiences the shame of pollution. In both these tales, "the victims are cleared as fully as possible. In both cases Gower tried to think himself into the position of the victim. He successfully expressed the feeling of shame which is not based on complicity, a reproach women often had and still have to endure, in addition to the pain that has already been inflicted upon them. He also makes every attempt to show the effects on the women's identity" (pp. 120-21). In two briefer examples of Book 5--Cornix and Calistona--the woman's lack of consent is less explicit but it may be inferred from the context of the frame. Gower focuses on "the violent and unsympathetic reaction of the girls' social environments" (p. 123): even when her struggle is not depicted, the woman is still depicted as the victim. This essay appears to have been put together in some haste: it contains a couple of sentence fragments and a number of paragraphs that don’t quite cohere, and at one point a line from “Sir Degaré” is attributed to Chaucer (p. 107). There is a more troubling problem at the core of its thesis. Gower demonstrates his sympathy for women, Mast repeatedly asserts, by allowing them to voice the shame that they experience as a consequence of being raped. This shame is associated with the “concomitant loss of reputation and, implicitly, social standing” (p. 107); in the tale of Philomela, Gower “is displaying thoughtfully how a young woman could be shamefully embarrassed about the sexual pollution and common knowledge of her rape and how she might try to avoid the public stare” (p. 116); Lucrece is ashamed because “the rape has destroyed a significant part of her identity as a woman and may by association besmirch the name of her family on the public stage, regardless of her actual innocence” (p. 119). Mast does not interrogate either the basis of this public (as opposed to private) shame or its validity, and she appears to accept that the woman’s loss of reputation following a rape is both natural and inevitable. She thus dismisses Augustine’s condemnation of Lucrece’s suicide (“Si pudica, cur occisa?”) as misogynistic, not recognizing the misogyny in the notion that a woman can be “besmirched” by an act of violence against her; and in the course of her discussion, she mentions the tale of Leucothoe (p. 123), but she has nothing to say about how the father has his daughter buried alive because she suffered her maidenhood to be stolen (CA 5.6764-75). Gower betrays a sympathy for the victims of rape, to be sure, but that is not necessarily to say that he is fundamentally sympathetic towards women. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 18.2.]

Date
1999

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Language and Word Studies