Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics by Carolyn Dinshaw (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER taken out of the word "feith" nothing is left but "ih" or, more likely, "h," a breath. Thisisfeebler thananything...even...than the word "nought," which containsin it the aspirate but surrounds it with stronger sounds. [P. 41) As Davlin observes, "... analysis of puns takes so much longer than punning" (p. 24). Her solution is to analyze examples that govern in passus 1, 18, 9, and 11, each getting a separate chapter. The textual analysis is detailed and highly specific, making for some tough reading. Most readers will want to read this book with their own Piers at hand for annotation. But Davlin's book also articulates and cogently demonstrates the centrality of wordplay to Piers as a whole. She argues that this is part of the long Christian tradition ofmeditational reading, notexpressingany fourteenth­ century anxiety of discontent with traditional forms. Whether or not one agreeswith this formulation, and itseems to me that the jury isstill out, the intelligence and knowledge that inform both her general thesis and her particular interpretations of textual detail are unusually rewarding to ponder. MARY]. CARRUTHERS University of Illinois at Chicago CAROLYN DINSHAW. Chaucer's SexualPoetics. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Pp. x, 310. $37.50 cloth, $15.00 paper. Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics is a provocative book, one that medievalists of all critical and ideological orientations should be dealing with for some time to come. Beginning with a close analysis of the short poem "Chaucers wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn" and continuing through chapters on Trot/us and Criseyde, The Legend ofGood Women, and the tales of the Man of Law, the Wife of Bath, the Clerk, and the Pardoner, Dinshaw argues that Chaucer self-consciouslyconstructsa sexual poetics by engaging the metaphorics prevalent in his culture that repre­ sents literary activity as gendered, and particularly as a masculine activity performed on the body of a text imaged as female. To provide the back­ groundfor herargument, Dinshawtracesthe classical andmedievalhistory of this metaphorics, with special attention toJerome's use of the captive woman of Deuteronomy (21:10-13)-the woman who must be stripped, shorn, and reclothed before she can be domesticated to assume her proper 188 REVIEWS position within patriarchy-as the basis for his model of converting the pagan text for Christian consumption. In the processDinshaw underlines the contradictory value that is assigned to the text-or the features ofthe text-figured as female. If at times the body of the text or woman is associated with a carnality that must be transcended, at other times that body is figured as the truth hidden behind the veils of language and rhetorical adornment. T here are a number ofreasons why Dinshaw's book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the medieval conceptualization of literary activity and of Chaucer's participation in it. First, it presents a cogent and detailed investigation of the ways in which medieval literary activity was explicitly figured as and understood to be sexualized, marked by a metaphorics in which gender is the central term. Moreover, when Dinshaw analyzes the metaphorics found in modern editing and criticism ofmedieval texts, represented here in the works ofD. W Robertson and E. Talbot Donaldson, she convincingly demonstrates that the gendered lan­ guage ofliterary activity and its ideological ramifications have not vanished from our own purview. Dinshaw's book also makes an important contribution to our under­ standing of medieval literary activity because of the ways in which she situates her argument about Chaucer's writings and his cultural context in relation to two modern theorizations of women and the genderedness of language: those of Claude Levi-Strauss andJacques Lacan. Dinshaw uses the formulations ofLevi-Strauss and Lacan not only to inform her readings ofChaucer's texts but also to investigate and illuminate the ways in which medieval figurations of women-and thus medieval poetics in general­ are grounded in the presupposition of women's exchangeability and ab­ sence. YetDinshaw does not accept these formulations uncritically. Rather, she presents a compelling analysis ofthe misogyny inherent in the concep­ tualizations ofboth modern theorists, underlining the ways in which their very applicability to an understanding...