Chaucer’s Women: Nuns, Wives, and Amazons by Priscilla Martin (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER point this out may be redundant given what I said in the first paragraph of this review and what Mann herself says in her Preface as she separates this study from approaches taken by other critics such as Sheila Delany, Arlyn Diamond, Louise Fradenburg, and Lee Petterson. SUSAN K. HAGEN Birmingham-Southern College PRISCILLA MARTIN. Chaucer's Women: Nuns, Wives, andAmazons. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990. Pp. xv, 254. $29.95. Priscilla Martin states in her Introduction that as she writes uthere are no full-length studies available of the women in Chaucer'spoetry"(p.xi).Now there is one. Chaucer's Womendeals with just about every female character in Chaucer's poetry-a large cast that includes not only the regulars of any feminist treatment of Chaucer (e.g., Criseyde, the Wife of Bath) but also the less celebrated (e.g., Anelida, the Virgin of An ABC). The book is arranged according to typologies of female characters; chapters include "Two Ideals: The Dame and the Duchess,""Two Misfits: The Nun and the Wife,"" The Amazon and the Wise Woman, or 'God Knows What She Thought,"' "The Merchandise of Love: Winners and Wasters,""The Mer­ chandise of Love: Wives and Merchants,""Real Women in Imaginary Gardens,""The Saints," and "Criseyde."Religious and secular feminine ideals, this study argues,"overlap and influence each other"(p. 14). The opposing figures of Eve and Mary inform the representation of women in Chaucer's works; the Eve-Mary dichotomy inflects women's represented silences as well as their speech. The figure of "The Man with the Book" (chapter 1) presides over the analysis of femininity; female characters are often responding to their entrapment by clerical authority or to the mas­ culine bias of literary tradition. Hence the titles of the final chapters,"The Women in the Books" and "Sex, Discourse and Silence." Chapters are devoted-more or less-to discussion of specific characters, with analysis of the Wife of Bath punctuating the entire book. The Wife, in this study, is clearly the height of Chaucerian achievement and, in fact, is something of an autobiographical character: "Of the pilgrims she is closest to Chaucer" (p. 217). (The Wife seems indeed to exist in an ontological space shared by historical figures such as Christine de Pizan [pp. 11-12].) This study is 180 REVIEWS apparently intended for undergraduates, to judge from the large amount of plot summary and the explanations of non-Chaucerian medieval works. The "women" who emerge from this analysis do the best they can within an extremely limited range of options. "Nun" and "wife" are among the only roles available to women, and thus some characters, like Criseyde, are without a place (p. 162); others, like the Prioress and the Wife of Bath, do not quite fit in where they are supposed to (pp. 30-39). Women find themselves in interlocking systems of commerce and sexuality and ac­ quiesce to their commodification (the wife in The Shipman's Tale) or both question and exploit it (theWife of Bath). Making thebest of her situation, Emily casts a friendly eye on Arcite (p. 52); Alison of The Miller's Tale "goes unscathedas if she cannotbe blamed for wanting ways out of her 'cage'" (p. 75); "May takes what fruit she can find" (p. 120); Cecilia is "a militantly active heroine" (p. 150) whose "gender [is] no disadvantage to her" (p. 153); "Dorigen arguably bears more responsibility for her plight [than Lucretia] but what purpose would her suicide serve?" (p. 128); "In such a world, no wonder Criseyde compromises" (p. 188). In what I find to be the most interesting suggestion in the book, the Prioress is seen to play "the role of being a woman" (p. 31), doing no harm to anyone and deriving small pleasures from the little that such a role affords her. There are a few women, too, who are not allowed by their narrators to be free: Dorigen, though she does not commit what would apparently be a pointlesssuicide, is still the least "fre" of all characters in The Franklin's Tale (p. 130); Constance suffers and takes what is cast her way...