English 5250: Chaucer and Gower Fall 2005
Discussion questions for
Below you’ll find three
remarks by three different critics discussing the Legend of Good Women. Using any one of them as a prompt, write a couple of paragraphs
about Chaucer’s poem and your two weeks’ work on it.
That is, the Legend's ostensible subject, love, is
not its real subject at all. Rather, the
poem was written to set forth some of Chaucer's basic views about literature:
its sources, its usefulness, its forms, its audiences, and its capacity to
represent Christian truth.
Lisa Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Cornell, 1983), p.9.
In the event he enacts his revenge upon authority in a
number of ways: by radically deforming his auctores, by unmasking the
mysogynistic violence that underwrites Alceste's version of feminine virtue, by
simply refusing to fulfill his commission.
But the form of resistance of most interest to us now is the irony with
which he treats the cult of "fyn lovynge": subject to9 the
intransigent and uncomprehending demands of a gentil audience, the poet in turn
subjects gentilesse to a relentless critique....(239)
In the world of the legends gentilesse designates not nobility of spirit but
social advantage, a superiority of place that unprincipled men use to victimize
grasping women.
Cupid gives voice to the essential dilemma of the
narrator after TC: if one begins to become aware, as he does via the women in
his audience, that authoritative tradition proceeds by defaming women, how
would one be able to write a poem or construct a literary tradition that is not misogynistic in theme and/or structure? Alceste's representation in the Prologue
suggests that the problem can be articualted; however, a positive solution is
far from imminent.
Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer's
Sexual Poetics (Wisonsin, 1989), p.68.