Gower's Queer Poetics in the "Mirour de l'Omme."
- Author/Editor
- Bullón-Fernández, María.
- Title
- Gower's Queer Poetics in the "Mirour de l'Omme."
- Published
- Bullón-Fernández, María. Gower's Queer Poetics in the "Mirour de l'Omme." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 6 (2020): n.p.
- Review
- Bullón-Fernández asserts that the MO explores gender, sex, and language leading to deeper implications than critics have thus far realized. She argues, "Gower develops an authorial voice and a poetics that in its embrace of male and female can be identified as queer." Bullón-Fernández first points us to an early passage in the poem (lines 1021-32) to show us Gower's invocation of the figure of the hermaphrodite, making "intersexuality more than a trope." The intersexual nature of the sins, Bullón-Fernández adds, presents a category crisis that further reflects on Gower's authorial persona, his poem, and his poetics. Gower uses queer language in his confession, acknowledging previous poetry that was "gender ambiguous or queer." Bullón-Fernández calls this an "authorial self-disciplining process," but she is careful to distinguish this as distancing rather than rejection. That is, when Gower "re-invents" himself, he still relies on "queer associations and queer ambiguities." To demonstrate this argument, Bullón-Fernández focuses on queer "indeterminaciones" in the poem--both language and gender--through a close reading of the depiction of Satan and the temptation of Eve, which illuminates the intersexual sins. These queer indeterminacies then provoke queer desires, claims Bullón-Fernández, specifically in the figure of Wantonness. She adds that the sins' associations with gender ambiguity are in addition to language and deception, which in turn links all three. Bullón-Fernández then suggests that the figure of Wantoness "introduces the specter of sodomy." Finally, Bullón-Fernández addresses Gower's confession at the end of MO and how his poetic approach to the Life of the Virgin Mary "suggests that he does not ultimately renounce [queer courtly language and practices associated with it] but reorients them, developing a different kind of queer poetics." She sees two types of fear expressed in his confession: gender anxiety and sodomy anxiety. Then, in the "Life of the Virgin Mary," Bullón-Fernández demonstrates how Gower queers divine figures, concluding that he strives to unify male and female. [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 2020
- Gower Subjects
- Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis)