Reading Narratives of Rape: The Story of Lucretia in Chaucer, Gower and Christine de Pizan.
- Author/Editor
- Sylvester, Louise.
- Title
- Reading Narratives of Rape: The Story of Lucretia in Chaucer, Gower and Christine de Pizan.
- Published
- Sylvester, Louise. "Reading Narratives of Rape: The Story of Lucretia in Chaucer, Gower and Christine de Pizan." Leeds Studies in English 31 (2000): 115-44.
- Review
- Sylvester seeks to identify the roots of rape fantasies and the appeal of rape narratives, offering a "reader-response" analysis of the tales of Lucretia in Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women," Gower's "Confessio Amantis" (Book VII), and Christine de Pizan's "Le Livre de la Cité des Dames," attending in particular to how the versions reflect notions derived from "romance and romantic texts" of "female masochism that is erotic, rather than psychological," (116), and how they deal with "the idea of female pleasure in enforced sex" in the Middle Ages and modern society. All three texts, Sylvester tells us, "acknowledge the possibility of an erotic response to these rape narratives," and because they do, she sets out to assess "how eroticism is inscribed within or erased from these texts" and to "examine the kinds of conditioning and experiences that might allow readers to experience them as erotic" (120). All three versions present male "competition about wifely virtue" (128), although the topic is displaced in de Pizan. It is "emphasized most strongly" in Gower's version, and "we may see in it . . . the working out of masculine hierarchies, with women's sexuality as the space across which power relations move" (129). De Pizan's displacement, however, "refuses to offer the reader the pleasure of narrative" by disconnecting the rape from "falling in love" (132), a connection made in both male-authored texts, and a parallel to the love-leading-to-sexual encounter trope of romance. Furthermore, only in de Pizan's version is Lucretia's suicide presented as an "unambiguous counter-example" to "refute the suggestion that women want to be raped," while "Lucretia's conscious decision to submit to the rape in the source texts [in order to save her good name] appears to have suggested to Chaucer and Gower an acquiescence that could be constructed as having led to enjoyment, and so, in their texts, Lucretia faints rather than actively submit to her rapist" (133). "The well-documented fantasy of rape," Sylvester concludes, "may well be derived from a culturally dominant set of beliefs about passivity or lack of female desire announced in conventional depictions of male and female sexual roles" (135). Rape narratives "may function for the woman reader as the correlative of the erotic desire for the annihilation of self . . . perceived as antipathetic to a feminist project . . . yet paradoxically . . . [they] may work to liberate female desire from the bounds of a dominant representation of sexuality enacted as a struggle for power which offers a reductive and limiting articulation of the possibilities of sexual pleasure" (136). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 2000
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations