Oedipus, Apollonius, and Richard II: Sex and Politics in Book 8 of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis

Oedipus, Apollonius, and Richard II: Sex and Politics in Book 8 of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis Diane Watt University of Wales, Aberystwyth Near the end of Confessio Amantis, the poet famously inscribes his own name into his vernacular poem. When Venus, the Goddess of Love, asks her supplicant, Amans, to identify himself, he replies ‘‘Ma dame . . . John Gower’’ (8.2322).1 This revelation is startling for two reasons. First, both reader and lover are shocked by the recognition of what the latter is, or at any rate, what he has become. Like the poet, Amans is now old, decrepit, and almost blind. Shortly afterwards, Venus holds up a mirror to his face (8.2820–23). In this reversal of the Lacanian mirror stage, the viewer does not misrecognize himself as unified and whole, but has his identity exposed as fragmented, divided, and duplicitous. Second, the reader is confronted with the question of why the author chooses to publish his own name in this way. In attempting to answer this, we might be reminded of the Derridean notion that the inscription of the proper name is driven by two desires. One is oedipal (‘‘to preserve one’s proper name, to see it as the analogon of the name of the father’’), the other narcissistic (‘‘to make one’s own ‘proper’ name ‘common,’ to make it enter, and be at one with the body of the mothertongue ’’).2 According to Anne Middleton, internal self-naming performs a specific ‘‘grammatical and ontological’’ function in medieval poetry.3 1 All references to Confessio Amantis are to The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, EETS e.s. 81, 82 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 2 vols. 2 See the preface to Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. lxxxxiv. 3 Anne Middleton, ‘‘William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name’: Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England,’’ in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 15–82; 27. 181 ................. 9680$$ $CH6 11-01-10 12:34:49 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER However, in such texts, authorial signatures are not ostensibly egotistical . Rather, they serve to ground the text ethically in the lived experience of a posited historical individual. As Middleton explains (borrowing Johan Huizinga’s words), ‘‘to signify historically or literally’’ in this way is ‘‘to ‘choose the text for the sermon of one’s life.’’’4 Yet, in signing his name to Confessio Amantis (a collection of stories organized around the frame of the lover’s confession to his priest, Genius), Gower chooses a very odd kind of sermon, one which takes as its example tales of oedipal urges and narcissistic longings, and stories of repression and impotence. Nowhere is this more manifest that in the final book (Book 8), which focuses on the sin of incest. In the frame narrative of Book 8, Gower’s alter ego, Amans, repeatedly insists that the subject Genius has chosen to complete the confessional narrative is irrelevant to his situation. While usually willing to admit that he is subject to ‘‘loves Rage’’ (8.150), Amans denies that he is so ‘‘wylde’’ as to seduce either kinswomen or nuns (8.171–57). In so doing, he anticipates an epithet later applied to the evil incestuous King Antiochus in the Tale of Apollonius. Amans also reiterates his innocence after the tale is done (8.2204). Genius acknowledges that Amans is not guilty of this particular sin (8.184–89), yet pushes on regardless with his examples of lust which ‘‘excedeth lawe’’ (8.263). But in a sense Amans is guilty of incest in so far as he seems to be engaged in an oedipal struggle with his own incestuous parents: Venus and Cupid, the Queen and King of Love.5 Genius, as the priest of Love, has already condemned these two deities (5.1406–20), yet both he and Amans continue to worship them until Amans’s own aged image is revealed and he is dismissed from their court. It is only with this dismissal that Amans is finally freed from his...