The Motives of Reeds: The Wife of Bath's Midas and Literary Tradition.
- Author/Editor
- Taylor, Karla.
- Title
- The Motives of Reeds: The Wife of Bath's Midas and Literary Tradition.
- Published
- In Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture: Essays in Honor of James M. Dean, eds. Brian Gastle and Erick Kelemen (Lanham, MD.: University of Delaware Press, 2018), pp. 25-41.
- Review
- Taylor's primary focus in "The Motives of Reeds" is Chaucer, particularly the Wife of Bath's invocation of the story of Midas in her prologue. The story of Midas--and the broader network of invocations of Midas--provides a means to explore Chaucer's relationship to the classical tradition as a vernacular poet; Taylor is especially interested in the story's implications for understanding Chaucer's notion of "translatio auctoritatis" in relation to Ovid. After an overview of the Ovidian version of the Midas story, Taylor examines medieval receptions of Midas in Gower, Machaut, and Jean de Meun. For Ovid, artistic self-consciousness is key to the narrative; Midas gets his infamous ears as a punishment for judging against Apollo in a piping competition, and when Midas's servant whispers this truth into the marshy ground, it is the reeds that grow there that make the story public. Thus, the story--and its transmission--draw attention to the challenges of speakers and hearers in oral and aural transmission: the audience and the speaker often take away different meanings. Chaucer's changes to this tale, making the barber/servant into Midas's wife, is often used to position the Wife of Bath as a bad reader; however, reading this version of Midas alongside others suggests alternative possibilities. Gower tells of Midas and the famous golden touch, but he ends his version not with Midas the fool, as in the "Ovide Moralisé," but with a reasonable Midas tempted by gold but in the end repentant. Gower thus loosens the hold of the commentaries on this narrative interpretation, engaging in a long tradition of discursive appropriation. From here, Taylor moves to Machaut, whose Midas is linked to Paris as a figure of poor judgment, particularly literary judgment, who favors the wrong kind of vernacular poetry. Chaucer, like Gower, truncates his source's ending, with no reeds spreading the word. Thus, Taylor suggests, the point of Chaucer's references to Ovid is in fact to see transmission and its differences, thus pointing to the fiction of transmission of "The Canterbury Tales" itself and, further, to the tribulations of hearing and mishearing. [KMcS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]
- Date
- 2018
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Confessio Amantis