Personification in Piers Plowman by Lavinia Griffiths (review)

REVIEWS LAVINIA GRIFFITHS. Personification in Piers Plowman. Piers Plowman Studies III. Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Dover, N.H.: Boydell and Brewer, 1985. Pp. ix, 125. $25.00. Given the tendency ofcriticism to find personification the most mechanical and uninteresting ofallegorical devices, and the familiarity ofits promi­ nence in Piers Plowman, one expects that a study called Personification in Piers Plowman will prove a tired war pony trotting a well-worn track. Lavinia Griffiths's concise addition to the Brewer Piers Plowman Studies is anything but that. Griffiths finds the current state ofliterary theory, to say nothing ofPiers Plowman criticism, propitious for a recognition that in personification "The two poles ofthe figure and the relation between them are essentially problematic" and that the figure "is transformed as it is drawn into the narrative and stylistic conditions ofPiers Plowman" (p. 1). She approaches personification not as the giving ofan abstract name to a figure in an action but "as the grammatical transformation ofa noun or other part of speech into a proper name" (p. 5). As a result, she must approach Langland's use of the figure through an analysis of how his rhetorical devices can be placed on a spectrum between commonplace usage or dead metaphor at one extreme and fully developed personifica­ tions at the other, and how difficult it is to tell at many points "whether the dreamer is talking about the constituents of the dream or simply the constituents ofhis own discourse" (p. 6). Griffiths draws on Mary Carruthers's argument that personification is "the obvious tool for exploring the nature and limitations of human language" (The Searchfor St. Truth, p. 40) as well as on her analysis ofthe "referential instability" (p. 44) of Langland's personifications; she also makes good use of recent analysis (like that of Maureen Quilligan) of allegory and word play. Her argument, however, illuminates especially how Langland presents even ostensibly simple concepts in words that "belong to a set of related often overlapping matrices, the systems of thought, ethical, psychological and economic which constitute a perplex­ ing intellectual world in which the dreamer wanders" (p. 21). As a result, "The discourse monopolizes the narrative, interpreting and criticising the story, and the subject ofthe discourse, the dreamer.... Personifications are not sustained as actants, and their readiness to revert to discourse undermines the completeness ofthe represented world" (p. 9). Griffiths focuses primarily on the B-text, making some use ofC where its alternative development is of special interest. Rather than offering a 195 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER complete reading of the poem, she focuses on a limited number of impor­ tant complexes of imagery, especially the Meed Debate, the Confession of the SevenDeadly Sins, Wit's Castle, andtheTreeof Charity.Asaresult, she can deal analytically with a problem central both to Langland's style and to his thought in an extremely useful way. She does not offer a systematic poetics of allegory, but places her argument in a number of pertinent perspectives.Especiallyusefulisherdiscussionofcontemporarynominalists and realists which argues that Langland offers an inherently "nominalist" allegoryinwhich"whatisbeingtransformedbymetaphorisnotathingbuta name, a term which becomes a proper name in a transformation which is formal and functional rather than ontological" (p. 45). Her conceptual frameworkisnot, however, historicalonly, butincludesperspectivesoffered by contemporary theorists and philosophers.Without using the vocabulary of any onereadership in such a way as to excludeothers, shemakes excellent use of Carruthers, Bloomfield and Barney, of M. R.Jung, Angus Fletcher and Anthony Nuttall, ofZumthor, Ricoeur, Todorov and Barthes, and of the categories devised by Inge Crossman to discuss metaphor in Proust. She offers convincing comparisons notonly betweenLangland'spersonifications and those of TheRomance oftheRose and Deguilleville, but with Spenser. Her conciseness results in an understated, lucid and suggestive analysis, illuminating rather than polemical. Precisely because it defines its scope so strictly, its observations will be ofreal use to those considering Langland's contemporaries, especially Chaucer in some of the respects in which he seems to differ most from Langland. ELIZABETH D. KIRK Brown University RALPH HANNA III. The Index ofMiddle English Prose. Handlist I: A Handlist of Manuscnpts Containing Middle English Prose in the Henry E. Huntington Library. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1984. Pp. xiii, 81. £ 19.50. G. A. LESTER...