Studies in Medieval English Romances: Some New Approaches ed. by Derek Brewer (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER persuasive. In his reading of both The Prioress's Tale and The Monk's Tale (in separate chapters and not related to each other), I do not think that he gives sufficientattentionto ironies generated by the fact that these tales are constituted in some way by their speakers, speakers who are after all less than ideal representatives of their way of life. In the chapter "Mary and Love in Fourteenth-Century Poetry" he discusses The Prioress's Tale as a straight hymn of praise in a way that I find problematic. Hisanalysis of the Hugelyn episode in The Monk's Tale in his chapter "Two Versions of Tragedy: Ugolino and Hugelyn" likewise simplifies Chaucer, overlooking the pos­ sibilities provided by seeing the tale more as the Monk's self-righteous attempts at justification than as a textbook example of medieval tragedy. These are debatable interpretationsto be sure, but Boitani does not debate them. The placement of thes� texts within the larger categories framed by each individual essay does not encourage him to look for these possibilities. Certainly we must commend a work that argues for the importance of medieval texts, which marshals considerable learning in support of the proposition that medieval texts still have much to teach us. In a book that is as elusive is this one in form and content, different sensibilities might well come to different conclusions. For some, no small virtue will lie in the ease with which such a large number of medieval texts are placed within the much larger traditions of European literature. The medievalist in me wonders, however, ifhis approach does not imply that, finally, the medieval texts are not enough in and of themselves. My own intuition is that medieval texts teach us more by being medieval than by being modern and ultimately stand or fall as medieval texts. And I think that this is more than simply a preference that I bring to my reading of Boitani. I believe that, despite his enthusiastic and imaginative attempts at showing modern value in these texts, his own analysis conforms to this intuition, as much because of its strengths as because of its weaknesses. RONALD B. HERZMAN SUNY, College at Geneseo DEREK BREWER, ed. Studies in Medieval English Romances: Some New Approaches. Cambridge and Wolfeboro, N.H.: D.S. Brewer, 1988. Pp. vii, 197. £25, $48.00. Conscious of the resurgence of scholarly interest in Middle English ro­ mances, Derek Brewer has produced a collection of nine essays colored, in 168 REVIEWS part, by his mythic and neo-Freudian vision of the romance mode. Starting with his important essay, "The Interpretation of Dream, Folktale and Romance with Special Reference to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (NM, 1976), and culminating in two book-length studies, Symbolic Stories (1980) and English Gothic Literature (1983), Brewer has scrutinized the potential application of concepts (mother figure and father figure) and motifs explored in dream psychology to the symbolic fabric of folktales, fairy tales, and romances. Viewing the family unit as the dramatic center of numerous stories, Brewer thus has examined the narrative pattern of such tales in terms of a rite depassage. In particular, the fictional protagonist­ initially a parent-controlled child-attempts to gain an adult identity, frequently through marriage, by rebelling against and by severing any ties with the parents. Such a struggle by the young adult, channeled through the audience's unconscious, involves "patterns of expectation" (p. 9), not a rational sequence of causes and effects, in order to evoke an emotional response of satisfaction from readers. Apart from these matters, which form the bulk of his introductory essay ("Escape from the Mimetic Fallacy"), Brewer discusses symbolism as the unveiler of the true significance of narrative events and characters. In the course of his explanation (p. 6), however, he gets enmeshed in a distinction between "manifest" (the apparentsubstance of a literary work) and "latent" (the underlying meaning fueled by the manifest), thereby making him vulnerable to critical charges of reductionism and aesthetic insensitivity. The remainder of Brewer's introduction, actually the first section of it, is devoted to current awareness of the value of romance, especially because scholars...