Prologue: The Poet as Subject: Literary Self-Consciousness in Gower's Confessio Amantis

Author/Editor
Meecham-Jones, Simon

Title
Prologue: The Poet as Subject: Literary Self-Consciousness in Gower's Confessio Amantis

Published
Meecham-Jones, Simon. "Prologue: The Poet as Subject: Literary Self-Consciousness in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts. Ed. Dragstra, Henk and Ottway, Sheila and Wilcox, Helen. New York: St. Martin's, 2000, pp. 14-30.

Review
The title of Meecham-Jones' essay does not refer to the Prologue of CA: it identifies it instead as the opening chapter in this collection on the self-presentation of the author, the remaining essays in which are concerned with post-medieval writers. Meecham-Jones takes a very broad view of Gower's fashioning of himself and of his conception of his role as poet in CA as a whole. His essay is addressed in part to Foucault's incautious claim that "the idea that from one's own life one can make a work of art" is absent during the Middle Ages, and in part to the many readers of Gower who fail to recognize the mature subtlety of his late poetry; and his argument is itself so wide-ranging and so subtle that it defies easy summary here. "The reticence of medieval authors in making use of the autobiographical style," he writes, should be understood "as expressing an anxiety at appearing to set their works in competition with the 'authoritative' texts of the revered literary past" (14). One solution to this dilemma of self-representation is found "in the emergence of a self-consciously 'literary' tradition in the English language in the second half of the fourteenth century" (15). Gower provides his principal example both of the intricacy and the "artificiality" of the late medieval autobiographical mode. Meecham-Jones focuses on the beginning and ending of CA. In the gloss in which the author depicts himself "fingens se . . . esse Amantem," Gower creates "a balance of sympathy and disengagement" (16) as he "strives to establish the poet in a position simultaneously within and outside the texture of his poem" (17). These two positions allow "two potentially antagonistic traditions of moral analysis" (17), the scheme of the Seven Deadly Sins with its apparent moral rigidity and the more tolerant view of the actions of the characters in the tales that emerges from the narration. The significance of this frame lies in its very inclusiveness: "Gower aspires to be recognised as an encyclopaedist of Love. The bulk of the poem is, therefore, to be regarded as a guarantee of its quality, in so far as it witnesses Gower's assiduous garnering of material from the sources of inherited wisdom" (19). Gower's plan here "is perhaps best understood as an homage to the texts of classical 'auctors', in whose poetry the consideration of love had been granted such especial prominence" (20). At the end of the poem, "in a mischievous parody of the predisposition of audiences to read lyric poetry as presenting an accurate record of 'real' events" (20), Gower portrays Ovid and Vergil both as lovers as well as poets, and implicitly associates himself with them, thus abandoning the authoritative stance of MO and VC in favor of a more limited role based upon direct experience. The "mirour" of society in MO becomes the mirror in which he is "forced to see himself without pretense" (22). "It is at this point that Gower's distinctive conception of the nature of authorship at this stage of his career is revealed" not as the achievement of fine phrases or inspired imagery but in the accumulation of a lifetime's wisdom" (23). Such wisdom "like the very comprehensiveness of the poem" is won at considerable physical cost, as the poet is now old and impotent. "In a curious display which combines self-assertion and humility, Gower succeeds in creating a work of art not from the events of his life, but from the self-denial of action which enabled him to achieve a literary career. Whereas, in Chaucer's poetry, the idea of the narrator as being exiled from the action is constantly and humorously invoked, Gower goes beyond this device to create a work in which the value of the work is explicitly related to that foregoing of life which has enabled its writing" (26). In the poet's swooning after seeing his image in the mirror, "Gower achieves, for a moment, an unaccustomed note of vulnerability, which must however be recognised as constituting one element in the poem's artful strategy to exploit the affective possibilities of the autobiographical mode as a means to establish his poetic value" (26). And as Gower allows himself to be "gathered into the company of his esteemed mentors" (27), he also "seeks to appropriate for himself the prestige that passing time has accorded their work" and effects a vision of the enduring contemporaneity of literature" (28). Along the way, Meecham-Jones manages to address a great many other issues, including the challenging morality of such tales as "Canace and Machaire" and what he perceives as the irony of Gower's invocation of Arion in the Prologue to CA. This essay deserves careful consideration. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1.]

Date
2000

Gower Subjects
Biography of Gower
Confessio Amantis