The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women by Sheila Delany (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the appendix could have been profitably applied to a bibliography which more fully represented the extensive documentation of the notes of the introduction. The present select bibliography is superficial and sometimes redundant, as in the case ofNicholas Davis's Cambridge dissertation on the Tretise, which is cited on three successive pages. These problems are, however, minor and are balanced by the altogether more attractive presentation ofthis new edition. Davidson's expert updat­ ing ofthis essential drama text, reflecting more than a decade ofimportant scholarship on art, drama, Lollardy, and dialect studies, has given us a worthy continuation of the series with which he has been centrally involved. STEPHEN PAGE University of Hawaii SHEILA DELANY. The Naked Text: Chaucer's Legend of Good Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Pp. xi, 259. $42.00. The Naked Text offers extremely bold and, as such, vulnerable commen­ taries on Chaucer's LegendofGood Women. In a brief"Prolocutionary," Sheila Delany proposes several metaphorical extensions of Chaucer's image ofthe naked text (LGW G86) which will serve as her interpretive filters ofthe Legend. Without apology Delany then presents highly opportunistic read­ ings ofone of Chaucer's most problematic compositions. Her driving con­ viction throughout the book is that "to open the poem to irony-the play oflanguage-is to open it to the play ofcritical theory" (p. 150). Delany would have us address the Legend as a field ofplay for a number of critical inquiries, umpired by Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, Edward Said, Mi­ chel Foucault, and Susan Gubar. Delany's book is a very fashionable study, attractive as such to poststructuralists, New Historicists, and feminists, as well as Chaucerians. Nevertheless, Delany finally reaffirms Chaucer's com­ fort with the ready-to-wear doctrines ofSt. Augustine. As a sequel (p. 229) to her Chaucer's House ofFame (1972), Delany again asserts the poet's the­ matic recourse to The Poetics ofSkeptical Fideism. Ultimately Delany reads the Legendas the product ofa political "conservative" and a moral "rigorist" because the aporia ofhis own fictions mandated, for Chaucer, a final leap of faith. 192 REVIEWS The Naked Text conjoins several ofDelany's previously published articles about sections of the Legend into one interpretive whole. Most intriguing are her very close readings of the Prologue, especially its "gender-blind" balade; of Chaucer's strategies for naming himself in several works; of the double entendre that submerges the Battle of Actium scene in the Legend of Cleopatra; of the subversive wordplay of the Legend ofThisbe; and of obscene puns that hold "in equilibrium two lines of interpretation" (p. 73) throughout the Legend. Delany's first chapter explores how the Legend functions as "a work 'tran­ sitional' in several ways" (p. 13); it bridges Chaucer's dominant focus on reading in The House of Fame and his prevailing concerns with writing throughout The Canterbury Tales. The first chapter thus continues to ap­ proach the Legend's Prologue as a key statement in Chaucer's poetic theory, an appreciation initiated by R. 0. Payne and more recently elaborated by Lisa Kiser andDonald Rowe. By bracketing the Legendbetween the inter­ pretive extremes of both post-Ockhamist skepticism and hagiographic piety, however,Delany discloses the profound ambivalence and inherent sophistication of the Legend: "It is possible to write about the Legend of Good Women as a series of negatives, absences, or denials" (p. 59). Chapter 2 continues this exploration of the "issues of language, nature, and women, and their imbricated relations" (p. 71) in terms of the inter­ pretive space created byDerrida's aifferance (p. 75). Goodness itself is prob­ lematized.The nine extant legends-excepting perhaps a subsequent in­ terpretation of the Legend of Phyllis as "genuinely exemplary" (p. 224}­ "asserr not unitary faith and goodness, but contradiction" (p. 114) as prac­ tical manifestations of an aesthetic proposed in the Prologue. Chapter 3 offers a far more nuts-and-bolts analysis of the Legend's use of "rhetorical devices such as wit, wordplay, and obscenity," which "have, like any stylistic device, a logic of their own, an aesthetic reason for being" (p. 139). That reason is to propose a more natural, non-utopian, indeed anti-idealized...