Poetry and Power in Ovid's Tristia and Chaucer's Legend of Good Women

Near the end of his most sustained, and arguably most successful, experiment with a classical subject, Geoffrey Chaucer makes a series of self-locating moves. Lines 1751 through 1799 of the fifth book of Troilus and Criseyde, quoted in part below, gesture at Troilus's deeds of valor in war, only for the poet to lay this quintessentially epic material aside and reiterate his exclusive concern with the hero's love life. He then proceeds to assert the greater, or at least equal, relevance of his topic to women's lives and amatory travails as to men's, despite the fact that his poem describes a woman's betrayal of a man:

N'y sey nat this oonly for thise menBut moost for wommen that bitraised beThorugh false folk—God yeve hem sorwe, amen!—That with hire grete wit and subtilteBytraise yow.¹

Leading up to an envoy in which Chaucer instructs his "litel bok" (TC, 5.1786) in humility before other poetry in general and five classical poets in particular, these statements seem to articulate the conscious inhabitation of a seemingly marginal literary space that, by its accommodation of the experiential, the contingent, the personal, and the feminine, can serve as the stage for both submissions to and subversions of textual authority.

Scholarship has traced this choice of perspective to a classical inheritance: Chaucer has been placed on the elegiac, Ovidian end of an epic-elegy, Virgil-Ovid binary.² Amor over arma is the generic choice that Ovid makes (or has imposed on him by Cupid's theft of a metrical foot from his hexameter line) at the beginning of his Amores.³ Chaucer reminds himself of the same choice at the end of Troilus: that he has undertaken to write not of Troilus's "armes," but "[o]f his love" (TC, 5.1766, 1769). In a larger sense too, Ovid offers a significant classical precedent for Chaucer's angled and evasive negotiations with authoritative texts and their writers. A classical writer, possessed of prestige and authority himself, Ovid provides from within the canon, in James Simpson's words, "recognition of the pain of marginal, rejected, belated, experiential, and often feminine voices; and an understanding of the ways in which those experiential narratives can destabilize, through subtle changes of perspective, the apparent solidities of the masculine, imperialist, epic tradition."⁴

Yet, as this essay argues, Chaucer's Ovidian art and self-positioning can also bring a different view of literary history into focus. In this alternative vision, Ovid's paradoxical capacity to serve as the voice of both "experience" and "auctoritee" (to borrow the Wife of Bath's terms) is not simply an accident of respectful reception gentrifying subversive or secondary substance but congruent with Ovid's own insistence, late in his life, on the cultural centrality of his work and on the entrenchment of erotic desire and its elegiac narratives at the heart of epic's grand narratives.⁵ In book 2 of his Tristia, Ovid argues that elegy is really the most enduring and illustrious genre of poetry. If we interpret this argument not just as a playful attempt to stand literary tradition on its head, but as a serious expression of cultural understanding and self-identification, then the experiential, marginal, disempowered voice that we justly associate with Ovid turns out to issue from the center, not the margins, of cultural power. To be an auctor is still to be the subject of powers outside one's (conscious) self: cultural and linguistic systems, imperial rule, and one's own libidinal unconscious.

The Tristia gives us reason to rethink authorship as subjection, for in this book, written from exile in the bleak frontier city of Tomis, Ovid locates his former authorial self—an elegiac poet, writing of private loves rather than civic or imperial endeavors—in the mainstream of Roman civic culture, as a loyal subject of Augustus Caesar. This is a repositioning of the elegiac "I" as Ovid had himself positioned it earlier: a recusant from the narrative of imperial history, or, alternatively, its...