The Cultural Otherness of Custance as a Foreign Woman in the Man of Law's Tale.
- Author/Editor
- Hamaguchi, Keiko.
- Title
- The Cultural Otherness of Custance as a Foreign Woman in the Man of Law's Tale.
- Published
- Hamaguchi, Keiko. "The Cultural Otherness of Custance as a Foreign Woman in the Man of Law's Tale." Chaucer Review 54 (2019): 411-40.
- Review
- As Hamaguchi states in her abstract, her article "explores how Chaucer highlights the cultural otherness of Custance as a foreign woman in England" . . . , how "Custance as the cultural other can be associated with real, historical foreign women . . . , and how aggression and xenophobia toward Custance" reflect similar, perhaps identical, late-medieval English attitudes toward foreign women--attitudes Chaucer sought to undermine through sympathy for Custance (411). At many points in her argument Hamaguchi compares Custance with the Constance figures in Gower's and Nicolas Trivet's versions of the story to show how Chaucer "accentuates her cultural otherness" (418) and how he consistently underscores this otherness by making her more vulnerable and helpless than either Gower's or Trivet's protagonist, often treated together here. Hamaguchi examines some dozen or more supporting details that occur in Chaucer but not the other two accounts, observing, for example, that Chaucer alone "focuses on [Custance's] unhappiness" (415) at leaving Rome, that Chaucer "accentuates her cultural otherness" through mention of "specific place names" during her journeys, and that only in Chaucer "does the foreignness of Custance's language appear" (418)--addressing some dozen differences overall. In only two instances does Hamaguchi address concerns and details that are not in Chaucer but are in Gower and Trivet: "love is an element" (427) in the latter accounts of marriage to the Anglo-Saxon king and, when confronted by a seducer in these accounts, she is "guileful" when thwarting her seduction through deception (435). Otherwise, Hamaguchi, shows, Chaucer's details emphasize the unhappiness and vulnerability of being a foreign woman, and she aligns Constance's condition with foreign women in Chaucer's world—particularly Anne of Bohemia, Isabella of France, and Katherine Swynford—by identifying historical parallels. There is little analysis here of Gower's or Trivet's narratives, but Hamaguchi's tally of details found exclusively in Chaucer is significant. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]
- Date
- 2019
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations