Gower's Monster
- Author/Editor
- Williams, Deanne
- Title
- Gower's Monster
- Published
- Williams, Deanne. "Gower's Monster." In Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures. Ed. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 127-150.
- Review
- "As a spiteful despot cum humble penitent, as a prophetic dreamer, gifted with foreknowledge of the apocalypse, and as a lamenting beast in the wilderness, Nebuchadnezzar is a figure for juxtaposition and the swift shifting of gears,,” Williams writes (144). She surveys the use of Nebuchadnezzar in other fourteenth-century texts, including "Cleanness," Chaucer’s "House of Fame" and "Monk’s Tale," and "Piers Plowman," but she focuses on his appearance at the end of the Prologue and Book I of CA, seeing the Biblical figure as an image of the cultural and linguistic hybridity both of Gower’s England and of his poem; of the multiple “divisions” of CA as a whole, including the tension between the orderliness of the frame and “the fascination with narratives of chaos, metamorphosis and monstrosity that make this ostensible orderliness spin out of control” (128); and of its form: “When Gower segues from the apocalyptic discourse and political analysis of the Prologue into the personal, amatory woes of Amans in the 'Confessio Amantis' he makes a generic move from prophecy, political treatise, and estates satire to dream vision and ars amatoria. With this shift of gears, . . . the 'Confessio Amantis' reveals itself to be as hybrid, generically, as Nebuchadnezzar is physically” (142). “The story of Nebuchdnezzar,” she concludes, “suggests how we can be, simultaneously, one thing and the other: a paradigm that defeats the kind of binaries that distinguish East from West, civilized from barbarian, self from Other. Nebuchadnezzar is both/and as opposed to either/or: a tasteless barbarian and an expansionist conqueror; an ignoramus and a visionary; a king and a monster; a human and a beast. He at once embodies the binaries, and transcends the conflict between them. . . . [The] dichotomy between the self/Other binary and the hybrid continues to motivate postcolonial theory: the true choice, it seems, is not between East and West, colonizer and colonized, and self and Other, but instead between a mentality of unassimilable cultural difference and multicultural diversity and cosmopolitanism. Gower’s alienated, ambivalent, yet compelling Nebuchadnezzar offers an alternative to these binaries that is monstrously resistant to classification: both” (144-45)]. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 25.2/]
- Date
- 2005
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
- Confessio Amantis