The Wretched Constance: Defining a "Mens Exili."
- Author/Editor
- Lee, J, Seth.
- Title
- The Wretched Constance: Defining a "Mens Exili."
- Published
- Lee, J. Seth. "The Wretched Constance: Defining a 'Mens Exili'." In The Discourse of Exile in Early Modern English Literature. (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 15–33.
- Review
- After describing pilgrimage and voice-crying-in-the-wilderness social criticism as medieval modes of exile, Lee describes (in a chapter entitled "The Wretched Constance: Defining a Mens Exili") Gower's Tower/ship image from the Visio of "Vox Clamantis," where exile "becomes an essential part of the dreamer's experience" (19). For Lee's subsequent discussions of early modern literature, the dreamer's experiences serve as a "baseline or 'standard' discourse of exile" which entails "mens exili," i.e., the "cognitive steps undertaken by an exiled group or individual that manifests in the narratives they produce" and thereby influence or reflect the "category of national formation and nationalistic subjectivity" (21). To clarify "mens exili", (and using as a bridge Gower's image of a boat without rudder ["sine gubernaculo"], VC 1.Prologue, 20), Lee assesses in sequence Nicholas Trivet's, Gower's, and Chaucer's versions of the story of Constance where the protagonist, Lee tells us, becomes increasingly a figure devoid of agency, marginalized in her world, while becoming at the same time more "transformative," particularly associated with religious conversion. In Lee's reading, Gower's Constance is less educated than Trivet's and her agency is reduced through lack of direct speech. "Ironically," however, "Chaucer has Custance speak directly more than she does in Trivet and Gower combined," even though her "words further locate her in a subservient, powerless position" (26). Yet, as the agency of the Constance figure decreases from Trivet to Gower to Chaucer and her "marginalization" (26) increases, her "transformational" (22) impact on religion in her society rises, Lee maintains, suggestively linking the exile's role to Lollard/Wycliffite concerns, the topic of Lee's following chapter, subtitled "A Wycliffite Mind of Exile." [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations