Gender and Language in Chaucer by Catherine S. Cox (review)

REVIEWS CATHERINE S. Cox, Gender and Language in Chaucer. Gainesville: Uni­ versity of Florida Press, 1997. Pp. x, 196. $49.95. Despite a plethora of intelligent guides, the maze of text and gender in Chaucer's work has yielded few clear pathways and even fewer satisfying destinations. We are often led in one direction by the author's erudition and by his vocation as translator and in quite another by the extraordi­ nary modernity (or so it seems to us) of the gendered-that is, human­ relationships he creates as a makyr of vernacular poetry. In Gender and Language in Chaucer, Catherine Cox sets out to explore the maze by delin­ eating the roles text and gender play in the construction of subjectivity and in the articulation of a merapoetics through a variety of Chaucer's texts. She identifies as particular concerns the "en/gendering" of a text's internal epistemologies and the self-reflexive nature of much of Chau­ cer's poetic (p. 5). More broadly, Cox argues that in medieval texts, Medieval Woman is not only the carnal or only the passive, or submissive, or whatever; complex and multiple, often contradictory and paradoxical, Woman is representative textually not only of the carnal ...but also of the potential multiplicity of meaning that gives rise to the polysemy necessary for language to transcend literal constraints.Woman may be understood to represent not only the body of the text ...but also its figurative capacity to generate and articulate meaning; Woman corresponds to both form and process.(p.12) Cox argues that Chaucer exploits these representational potentialities through "complex and reflexive tropes" that point to the role of the "feminine" in epistemology and hermeneutics (p. 12). Cox also sees the feminine in Chaucer as enabling a violation of the decorums inherited from the very canonical texts the author relies upon as sources: ...the feminine translatio inscribes the capacity ofsignification to challenge­ or violate-proper decorum in order that multiple senses (poly/mne) obtain.The feminine signa, as improper, are frequently articulated in conjunction with sex­ ual metaphors since the unlimited sense of the epistemological feminine is, in effect, promiscuous (prolmiscere. mixed, confused, indiscriminate), for signa translata resist constraint and challenge masculine insistence on ordered deco­ rum.(p.13) 335 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Cox has read widely in both postmodern theory (with a particular debt acknowledged to Carolyn Dinshaw) and in patristic literature. Bringing these two discourses to bear on Chaucer's poetry yields some intriguing analyses of the "inextricable coincidence of flesh and text" (p. 120). However, this reader found herself longing for a clearer articulation of those conclusions. Although there is not space here to work through each chapter of Gender andLanguage in Chaucer, a brief discussion of chapters on the Wife of Bath, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Retraction will point to the volume's strengths and weaknesses. After the introduction, Cox begins, appropri­ ately enough, with a study of the Wife as glossator, arguing, as others have done before, that the erotic play of language takes precedence for the Wife over the sexual act itself-that the text is sexualized just as much as it textualizes sex (p. 26). Cox emphasizes the issue of control over bodily and textual fertility, arguing that in her perpetuation of the patriarchal binary, virginity/promiscuity, and in her insistence on pri­ vate, internal discourse, the Wife is, ironically, "revirginizing" language even as her own polysemous language resists that control. This concern with the codification of virginity and its textual permutations resurfaces in chapter 3 as Cox argues that the tales of suffering virgins, in The Legend ofGood Women, The Physician'.r Tale, The Second Nun'.r Tale. and else­ where, are also tales of virgin texts: that is, texts circumscribed, con­ strained, and barren (pp. 63-64). Cox's reading of the Wife is nuanced and complex. She does not suc­ cumb to the simplistic notion that the fecundity of the Wife's Prologue and the portrayal of feminine power in the Tale render them feminist texts. In this reading, usurpation and transference are crucial to the Wife's appropriation of language for pleasure and public display, and yet she...