Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Literature.
- Author/Editor
- Williams, Tara.
- Title
- Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Literature.
- Published
- Williams, Tara. Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Literature. (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2011).
- Review
- Williams identifies the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a turning-point when "Middle English writers experimented with new ways of imagining and representing women's lives and experiences" (3). She centers her study around "womanhood" as a "gendered term," "both because it directly invokes the conceptual problem of what defines women collectively, beyond specific experiences or roles, and because it was used so widely and in such interesting ways in the late Middle Ages" (3). The book accords a chapter each to Chaucer, Lydgate and Henryson, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe; chapter 2 treats "Beastly Women and Womanly Men: Gower's Confessio Amantis." Citing Judth Butler, Williams finds that Gowerian gender is "performative" (51). Gower is interested in transformations, which for him are "physical and explore how any figure can combine elements of womanhood, manhood, and beastliness. The intersections of these identities intrigue Gower and he locates them in many figures, including Amans . . . the loathly lady in the 'Tale of Florent' . . . Achilles and Iphis" (52). He also "is interested in the relationship between womanhood and social power," focusing on "how [womanhood] can act as a register of the morality of others, especially men" (52). These concerns lie behind the larger purpose of the frame narrative, which is "to teach Amans how to be a man" by showing him "how he should think about and react to women, especially the lady who is the object of his desire" (52). "The chapter connects Gower's concept of womanhood in the tales with the figure of Amans' lady in the frame narrative. As parts of his attempt to educate Amans on how to be a man and hence how to react to women, Genius persistently interprets his exempla, and even those with female protagonists, as lessons about male behavior. Only by understanding and sympathizing with female victims can Amans absorb the morals of the tales, but his continuing insensitivity toward his lady signals his inability to read women's experiences accurately" (53). The chapter has three sections. The first, "Beastly Women," treats the tales of "Florent," "Tereus," "Neptune and Cornix," and "Calistona" (53-65); the second, "Womanly Men," treats the "Tale of Achilles and Deidamia," "Sardanapalus," and the "Tale of Iphis" (65-72) ; the third, "'Mi ladi, which a womman is'," focuses on Amans' divided and underdeveloped understanding, revealing "his beastliness in his desire to violate the lady, like Tereus, and his womanliness in his inability to allow reason to overcome love, like Sardanapalus" (72-85, quote at 72). Amans' larger problem, in Williams' view, is that he suffers under an illusion: he expects his lady to act in accord with romance conventions while she, realistically, resists that stereotype. Ultimately, forced by Venus to acknowledge reality, Amans discovers himself, and a new purpose. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]
- Date
- 2011
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis