Compassionate Conversions: Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and the Problem of Envy.
- Author/Editor
- Rosenfeld, Jessica.
- Title
- Compassionate Conversions: Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and the Problem of Envy.
- Published
- Rosenfeld, Jessica. "Compassionate Conversions: Gower's Confessio Amantis and the Problem of Envy." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42 (2012): 83-105.
- Review
- Rosenfeld offers a new way of seeing the sin of envy as particularly useful in understanding the "Confessio Amantis." Citing Chaucer's "Parson's Tale," the "Fasciculus Morum," and "On the Seven Deadly Sins," she explains how envy in medieval penitential writing is distinct from other sins because it is an "inwardly experienced sin that is also necessarily social" (84), and because it is neither "directed toward the pursuit of pleasure" nor is pleasure its "instigating cause" (85) as it is with other sins. Rather, "envy is marked by a viciousness that inheres in a disposition of antipathy toward a neighbor's experience of happiness and sorrow. Envy thus demands a shift in morality from a focus on the discipline of desire, the seeking after 'true' pleasures, to a focus on one's proper relationship to the painful and joyful experiences of others." This shift is "one of the motivating concerns" of Gower's poem, Rosenfeld argues, exploring how envy is "a central problem" (86) of the CA and how the sin is remedied through compassion, pity, or charity that is the means to achieve the common good. Tales from Book II, of course, are important here--Polyphemus "betrays a viciousness beyond a desire for personal profit" (88) when he kills Acis in envy, for example, and in the "Tale of the Travelers and the Angel" the "unique viciousness" of the sin "is marked not by misplaced desire but by an opposing affective reaction to the pleasures and pains of others, no matter the specific goods involved" (90). As a form of charity and the remedy of envy, compassion "involves mimetic identification with the pain and pleasure of others," while "envy is marked by both failed and successful mimesis" (90), Rosenfeld tells us, helping to align several other tales with her thesis: "Amphitrion's feigning the voice of Geta" (91), the brass trumpet of Boniface's usurpation of Celestine, and the "imitated voices and counterfeit communication" (92) in the "Tale of Constance" all manifest envy in or through distorted mimesis, while the account of Nebuchadnezzar and the "Tale of Three Questions" (both in Book I) are "interested in the process by which people shift from dismissal of others because of perceived difference to recognition of likeness" (93) that engages the "golden rule" (92) and effects compassion. Genius offers the "Tale of Constantine and Sylvester" to illustrate "Charité / Which is the moder of Pité" (II.3173-74), a tale which "carefully unpacks the moment in which compassion is felt" (95), when Constantine, awakened by the lamentation of the mothers and children to be sacrificed for his sake, recognizes the likeness of all humans and leads eventually to a "Christian empire through love's defeat of envy" (97). This does not, Rosenfeld observes, resolve all the problems of worldly distortion of proper ethical values; Constantine's elite social status can be seen to compromise the moral value of his compassion, and Gower's allusion to the "Donation of Constantine" (97) makes clear that the temporal church compromises the spiritual community. Yet, the very operation of exemplarity depends upon likeness across human social and economic boundaries, Rosenfeld tells us, much as does compassion, and in this way, Gower shows in form and theme that "the ethical subject must desire the common good, and must first understand what it means to have things in 'common' rather than first to understand what is good" (99). Moreover, Rosenfeld concludes, "For Gower, charity is the recognition that one's relationship to others should not be determined by relative possessions, but by shared emotion borne of the realization that each has only one real earthly possession--life itself" (100). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 2012
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis