Geoffrey Chaucer by Jill Mann (review)

REVIEWS at times is distracting; she explains that "connotations of 'femininity' often make this word inappropriate" (p. 1 n. 1), but perhaps a justification on grounds of feminist theory would be more appropriate for a study of this type than a reference to Eric Partridge's Usage andAbusage. Overall, McLeod's history of the catalog of women, and its associations with the florilegium, is a wonderful survey of the genre that will be useful for many people. Chaucerians, for example, will find the first three chap­ ters helpfulbackgroundmaterialfordiscussionof theWife ofBath as much as for the Legend. MARTHA A. KALLSTROM Georgia Southern University JILL MANN. Geoffrey Chaucer. Feminist Readings Series. Atlanric High­ lands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1991. Pp. xv, 222. $39.95 cloth, $12.50 paper. Women's traditionally ascribed adaptability to change, pity, and patience form the basis for Jill Mann's feminist reading of Chaucer's works. Her approach, by her own prefatory declaration, comes out of no particular school of feminist criticism. Instead she seeks to "describe Chaucer's 'femi­ nism' in his own terms rather than ours,... to avoid bounding him in the orthodoxies ofthe present" (p. xii). It is important to recognize this caveat before picking up the book, for if a reader approaches it expecting radically new approaches to text, as the Feminist Readings Series announcement promises, she will be disappointed. In fact, Mann criticizes new historicism andpolitical concerns of feministcriticismas either binding Chaucer in the past and "patronizingly awarding him praise" for anticipating modern views (p. xii) or "perpetuat[ing] the sterile antithesis between active and passive, to stigmatise female passivity only to find that the obverse of this is approval of male activity" (p. 185). What Mann offers is a feminist reading that focuses on the status of women in Chaucer's writing (p. 165) to determine that he repudiates the male role model of action, aggression, and coercion in favor of a female model of passivity, pity, and patience that ultimately undercuts the male model and creates a new mutuality between the genders. Claiming Chau­ cer to be free of the culturally constructed preference for "activity," and 177 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER using Prudence, Constance, and Griselda as evidence, Mann concludes, "For him, it is the 'passive' role that is superior; we must never forget that patience conquers" (p. 161). But that is Mann's conclusion. She begins in a slightly different place. Chapter 1,"Women and Betrayal," praises Chaucer for retrieving a female viewpoint in conventionally male-centered stories. Mann finds in both Dido and Criseyde Chaucer's acute awareness of a special burden that women bear: their knowledge that their actions cannot escape meaning in reference to models of good and bad women (p. 17). Similarly, in The Manciple's Tale we see Chaucer's realization that the words and the ways tellers choose to tell stories determine attitudes toward women in those stones. Instead of balancing stories of bad women with stories of good women in a conventional response to misogyny, Mann sees Chaucer challenging the authority of the misogynist stories themselves in The Legend of Good Women. Retelling the stories with the women's concerns at the center, he showsmen eliciting pity from the women butnotreciprocating. This causes the poet to cry out for the pity in his own heart, and the reader, joining him in the"womanly ethos of pity,""is feminised, as it were, by the process of reading" (p. 41). In the second chapter,"Anti-Feminism," Mann argues, through May of The Merchant's Tale and the Wife of Bath, that Chaucer sees female shrewishness as the inevitable result of male selfishness and antifeminist stereotypes. This near-symbiotic relationship in which women use stereo­ typical behavior to withstand oppressive male behavior comes to an end only when the malesurrendershis sense of"maistrye." Then, as Mannreads the end of The Wife of Bath's Tale in chapter 3, "The Surrender of Maistrye," the woman's desire becomes the man's desire in her desire to please him; the two meet in a"vision of mutuality, which strips obedience of its oppression by making it an emotional response which matches and balances male...