Gower's Riddles in "Iphis and Iante."

Author/Editor
Lochrie, Karma.

Title
Gower's Riddles in "Iphis and Iante."

Published
In Ovidian Transversions: 'Iphis and Ianthe', 1300-1650, ed. Valerie Traub, Patricia Badir, and Peggy McCracken. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 80-98.

Review
The volume in which this essay appears is devoted to medieval and Early Modern authors' engagement with Ovid's version of Iphis and Ianthe, and Lochrie's is the only essay that treats Gower's use of the tale. Lochrie argues that Gower's version is "a tale that, in refusing to solve its riddles or provide the interpretive wherewithal of its gloss, creates the possibility for another kind of change--a metamorphosis, if you will, in the very moral and epistemological rubrics with which we read gender, sex and bodies" (93-94). Lochrie begins by exploring the "riddles" in Ovid's version, primarily that Iphis's embodiment as a man solves the "monstrous" riddle of love reflected in the same-sex relationship of Iphis and Ianthe. Turning to Gower's retelling of the tale, Lochrie suggests Ovid's riddles are replaced with a set of riddles defined by ambiguity and which frustrate the reader's attempts at certainty and resolution, which itself embodies the queer politics of the story. For example, when Gower's couple "use / Thing which to hem was al unknowe) (4.486-7), Lochrie considers the linguistic ambiguity of what that "thing" may be (from a reference to practice--to do things or engage in an activity--to a physical object or prosthetic phallus). Gower, Lochrie posits, "opens up a space of opaqueness courtesy of Nature and the desires of Iphis and Iante--a space that seems deliberately resistant to sexual epistemology" (86). Lochrie then turns to an exploration of the Latin gloss located at the beginning of the tale, and its "deliberate misprision of the Middle English story" (88). For Lochrie, Ovid's conundrum about how two women can physically love each other is replaced, in Gower, with a "more shadowy riddle about the position this physical love between women occupies with respect to nature" (90). This essay analyses the complicated and conflicting nonheteronormative aspects of Gower's tale. The collection in which this appears also includes, in Appendix B (286-8), Lochrie's translation of Gower's tale, which will undoubtedly contribute to greater inclusion of Gower's version in courses in which ME is not required and in courses more widely devoted to gender and sexuality. [BWG. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]

Date
2019

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations