The Speaking Wound: Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and the Ethics of Listening in the #metoo Era.

Author/Editor
Watt, Caitlin G

Title
The Speaking Wound: Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and the Ethics of Listening in the #metoo Era.

Published
Watt, Caitlin G. "The Speaking Wound: Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and the Ethics of Listening in the #metoo Era." postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 11 (2020): 272-81.

Review
Caitlin G. Watt argues that Gower demonstrates that the confessional mode in "Confessio Amantis" is inadequate "to address such traumas as sexual violence" and that he calls for "a more egalitarian ethics of listening" (273). Using "the confessional discourse of feminist narrative anti-rape politics" (273), Watt considers the intersections of Gower's "Tale of Lucrece" with #MeToo movement insofar as confession may correct the social order and heal the one confessing. She attends to the numerous examples of sexual assault in CA, exploring how survivors are vulnerable to "public and legal patterns of counteraccusation" when they speak (274). Watt turns to the "Tale of Lucrece," which she claims "best illustrates Gower's representation of the pain of confession," adding that Gower's particular version of this tale focuses on the physicality involved (275). She claims Gower's narrative suggests a kind of voyeurism as a source of narrative pleasure--pain at the expense of Lucrece for the reader's entertainment--which parallels modern media's treatment of rape survivors and their narratives. Gower, however, takes us into the private experiences of Lucrece's rape, attempting to lead us through a reading that stresses her innocence; yet, as Watt explains, the confessors in Gower's tale "fail to alleviate her pain and succeed only in using her body to achieve revenge" (278). By the end of CA, though, Amans's swoon ends his suffering--a mercy not afforded to Lucrece and other rape victims in Gower's tales (and of course in the world). Watt concludes that the type of change sought by movements such as #MeToo cannot be achieved by confessional discourse alone: "It will require careful, self-reflective listening, and perhaps also new ways of reading the texts, medieval and modern, that have shaped the way we understand sexual violence" (280). [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]

Date
2020

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis