Chaucer and the fictions of gender (review)

210 Reviews should certainly find a place in the library of any University where medieval studies are part of the curriculum. MaxweU J. Walkley Department of French University of Sydney Hansen, Elaine T., Chaucer and the fictions of gender, Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford, University of California Press, 1992; cloth and paper; pp. ix, 301; R.R.P. US$42.50 (cloth), $15.95 (paper). This is an important book which challenges the pervasive critical perception that a tolerant feminism is a component Chaucer's 'humanism'. The author seeks to show that this supposed quality is in fact deeply misogynist. Her argument resting as it does on often-exhUarating, close analysis of Troilus and Criseyde, the Dream poems, and a selection of the Canterbury Tales (the AFragment , Wife ofBath, Clerk, Merchant, and Franklin) is persuasive. It is also demonstrates the general value of a feminist approach as the author offers insight into the criticism of Chaucer and indeed of medieval literature itself. The analysis of the conflicting demands in the courtly love code and the dilemmas these posed for a stable gender indentity of masculinity is brilliantly iUuminating particularly in the chapters on the Book ofthe Duchess and Troilus and Criseyde. There is much valuable social contextualization of textual observations. Professor Hansen argues that the compromised position of women within patriarchy as it is portrayed in Chaucer's writings is implicated in the problem of the male nanatorfindinga poetic voice. Chaucer's works display a temporary identification between the nanator and women which is disturbing in its intimations of the collapse of secure gender identity.for men. The resultant instability is ultimately resolved, at great cost to the principal feminine character, in favour of an assertion of masculinity as detached Olympian poetic voice. I found the argument about the compromised position of the feminine more convincing than that about the identification between the nanator and women. For while the author explains what she means by 'feminization' she does not really say how she understands femininity/femaleness. The argument about the identification of the male nanator and women rests on an elision of biology and sexuality: the idea of gender as social construct only. Marginalization and enforced silence equals femaleness. In the discussion of selected Canterbury Tales, some consideration of Chaucer's experimentations with genre and with nanative voice would have been welcome, as both introduce complexities which affect ideology. For example, the discussion of the nanative perspective on May's inner Ufe in the Merchant's Tale, in its levelling out of the narrative voices,tendedto simplify the encoded ideology. Reviews 211 This last of course is part of Hansen's declared strategy: in contrast to the postmodernist focus on the multivalence of Chaucer's writing, she finds the author alive, well and misogynistically kicking. Yet this in turn givesriseto an issue which needs to be addressed: Chaucer's position, in relation to that of his peers, towards women and the feminine. Surely 'feminism' and 'antifeminism' must be defined relative to the culture in which they are manifested. Hansen's very analysis of Chaucer's writings suggests that he was for his time unusually perceptive not only about the problems for men presented by the feminine within patriarchy, but also about the inedeemably compromised position of women within the system. No, after Hansen's inspiring study, we can no longer read a complacent and comfortable feminism in Chaucer's writing, but neither can we (nor should we expect to) in the novels of Charlotte Bronte. 'Feminism' may be defined by a reluctant epistemology as well as by ethics, and ethics will not necessarily come first. Joy Wallace Department of English University of Sydney Hindman, Sandra L., Printing the written word: the social history of books, circa 1450-1520, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1991; cloth and paper; pp. xii, 332; 89 figures ; R.R.P. US$9.50 (cloth), $16.45 (paper). Printing the written word is a collection of essays which are mosdy based on papers given at the Northwestern University conference 'From scribal culture to print culture' in April 1987. They neverthelessrepresenta 'methodologically coherent point of view: namely that w e can best study the phenomenon of the...