Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature (review)

A more accurate title for this book might be Masculinity and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature, for it is predominantly concerned with deployments of gender inversion as a means of disciplining male agents. Sexuality, if it is at issue at all, mainly enters the frame in the guise of heterosexual normalcy: it is queer gender that gets conscripted in the service of constructing this “heteronormative” masculine identity, and—allusions to the queerness of friendship and sword brotherhood aside—eroticism generally assumes a much less prominent role. Pugh’s argument is that the exploitation of gender queerness in the service of normativity fulfills the needs of the prevailing ideological order; but this process also generates discontented subjects, since those who forswear the pleasures of queerness are engaged in an exclusionary process, which constructs a version of masculine selfhood that “may not be what the man desired in the first place” (12). This hypothesis is tested with reference to a series of close readings of male protagonists in Middle English texts: the Dreamer in Pearl, Harry Bailly, Chaucer’s Clerk, and the eponymous heroes of Amis and Amiloun and Eger and Grime. The book concludes with an intriguing discussion of the genders and gendered desires of medievalists themselves, mediated as they are by contemporary regimes of normativity.

Pugh’s analysis is at its most compelling when he discusses the role of subjection and feminization in medieval Christian formations of selfhood. Examining the erotic bonds that link the Dreamer, the Pearl Maiden, and God in Pearl, Pugh makes the point that when God assumes a role within this triangulated scenario, the Dreamer’s desires can only be directed one way—toward God himself—and that this requires the Dreamer to sacrifice his identity as a courtly lover. The consequences of this loss of self are queer because gender categories no longer follow their earthly trajectory: whereas the Pearl Maiden is “queerly described in male terms” (46), the Dreamer himself inhabits “an eroticised yet paradoxical position as his rival’s bride” (26). Less successful are the analyses of Chaucerian masculinities that follow, where Pugh’s “queering” describes a process that might, from a contemporary vantage point, look more like versions of misogyny and/or homophobia. Harry Bailly may well believe that his successive attempts to emasculate his fellow travelers (first the Cook, then the Clerk, then the Pardoner) reinforce his position as the “aller cok”—or, as Pugh has it, “alpha cock” (55)—of the Canterbury pilgrimage. But Pugh’s point is that this gender-baiting vocabulary ultimately queers Harry himself: when the Knight compels him to bestow a kiss upon the Pardoner, he is forced into a secondary masculinity in which he henceforth plays “Robin to the Knight’s Batman” (67). Still, what Pugh interprets as “queer chinks” in the Host’s normative armor sometimes smack more of gender containment than gender subversion: Harry’s “murye” intervention at the conclusion of The Clerk’s Tale, to the effect that he wishes his wife back home would follow Griselda’s example, evokes a desire for female submission within marriage that sits uneasily with the more expansive vision of gender performativity usually associated with queer readings. The complaint reveals the discontentment Harry experiences in his own Griselda-like attachment to marriage, for sure—but the misogyny is impossible to ignore all the same.

Pugh’s point about The Clerk’s Tale itself is that, by representing Walter and Griselda’s “queer fidelity” to the tropes of male tyranny and female submission, the fictionality of gender binaries is exposed and ultimately transformed. As he puts it, “it takes balls—queer balls—to be such a faithful wife” (90), and it is precisely Griselda and Walter’s sacrificial commitments to their respective roles that turn them into hermaphroditic figures. Yet this queering of category constitutes a necessary precursor to the tale’s conclusion, which illustrates the “normative bliss of a reunited family” (92). The Clerk...