'Lusti Tresor': Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower's Confessio Amantis
- Author/Editor
- McDonald, Nicola F.
- Title
- 'Lusti Tresor': Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower's Confessio Amantis
- Published
- McDonald, Nicola F.. "'Lusti Tresor': Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Treasure in the Medieval West. Ed. Tyler, E.M.. York: York Medieval Press, 2000, pp. 135-156.
- Review
- McDonald explores the "discursive interplay between sex and commerce” (136) in medieval portrayals of Avarice, both verbal and visual, focusing on examples from Gower. She begins with an early sixteenth-century drawing found at the beginning of Book 5 in a Pierpont Morgan Library copy of Caxton’s 1483 edition of CA. It shows a woman with an outstretched arm holding what appears to be a full set of male genitalia, interposing herself between a man and another woman who reach towards one another. This is a figure of Avarice holding her “purse,” McDonald claims, citing other examples, both sculpted and painted, in which the sin is identified by the same or similar attributes; and the drawing illustrates the opening lines of the initial epigram of Book 5: “Obstat avaricia nature legibus, et que / Largus amor poscit, striccius illa vetat” (5 vv. 1-2). The image derives from a broader tradition, for which McDonald also provides examples, in which Lust and Avarice are juxtaposed as similar and equally sinful forms of desire and are given a similar iconography. Gower too juxtaposes commerce and sexual desire in his poem, in Venus’ dismissal of Amans, for instance, at the end of Book 8, where she asks, “What bargain scholde a man assaie, / What that him lacketh forto paie?” (8.2431-32), but more importantly in Book 5, Amans’ confession on Avarice. Sex and money are treated as virtually interchangeable in this book, not only in Genius’ discourse and tales but also in Amans’ confessions, as a woman’s love or the woman herself is treated as a treasure or an object of value that one might give or gain. Genius’ efforts to construct a morality of love, however, lead to failure, because Largitas, the virtue that is opposed to Avarice, would lead, if Genius pursued the logic of his own argument, to a type of behavior incompatible with Christian morality were it applied to conduct in love. “In Christian terms, terms which Genius invokes in support of his code of moral conduct, only monogamy and virginity constitute virtuous sexual conduct. In terms of the ‘economy of love,’ both states . . . , by insisting that love’s treasure be either hoarded or spent sparingly, are necessarily avaricious. What is for the Christian a virtue is for Venus’s disciples a vice. And what for Venus’s disciples constitutes virtue, the free and generous expenditure of the lady’s treasures, is for the Christian a damnable vice” (154). These contradictions and paradoxes, McDonald argues, are left unreconciled. The reviewer has recently examined the same juxtapositions of imagery in Book 5 (and wishes that he had known of McDonald’s fine essay beforehand), but reached a very different conclusion, that Gower plays throughout on both the similarities and differences between love and gold, as evidenced in passages that McDonald chooses not to cite, including the lines with which the initial epigram of the book concludes: “Non debet vt soli seruabitur es, set amori / Debet homo solam solus habere suam” (5 vv. 5-6). [PN Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.22]
- Date
- 2000
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis