Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace After 1381

Chapter 4: In Defense of Cupid: Poetics, Gender, and the Legend of Good Women

4 in defense of cupid: poetics, gender, and the legend of good women C upid has been dubbed ‘‘one of Chaucer’s most comically obtuse exegetes.’’1 However, I propose that we listen attentively to Cupid in the Legend of Good Women, and at the risk of appearing obtuse, I insist that we take his understanding of literature seriously. In the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, Cupid complains that the gender politics of Chaucer’s poetry are problematic, that Chaucer’s poetry shapes men’s perceptions of women, and that men treat women worse as a result. In essence, Cupid argues that cultural artifacts help shape readers’ consciousness and lives. Cupid’s complaint should not seem too inane to literary scholars familiar with British cultural studies or with the past four decades of contemporary cultural theory , especially feminist, queer, and critical race theory, where the ways in which cultural artifacts shape consciousness have been an area of intense investigation. Despite the prevalence of such premises as Cupid’s in current cultural theory and in much literary scholarship, Suzanne C. Hagedorn, who branded Cupid ‘‘one of Chaucer’s most comically obtuse exegetes,’’ is not wrong. How does one negotiate this contradiction? How does Chaucer take what are self-evident premises for most literary scholars now—that texts shape consciousness, that literature informs readers’ beliefs about themselves and others, and that cultural artifacts help produce readers’ understandings of the world—and render these propositions absurd? Remarkably, Chaucer managed to do so in late fourteenth-century England, when several of his contemporaries, most notably John Gower and William Langland, generated poetry founded on these assumptions. This chapter investigates the complex processes through which the Legend makes such an CHAUCER, GOWER, AND THE VERNACULAR RISING understanding of literature uncompelling and incoherent, processes articulated the most clearly at the site of gender. Cupid’s complaint is key to these strategies and to the poem’s discussion of poetics and accountability. A central concern of the Legend of Good Women is the issue of art and social responsibility, a discussion instigated narratively by Cupid’s grievance. This chapter argues that, in what could be viewed as a Chaucerian treatise on poetics, the Legend launches a fullblown investigation of the problem of poetry and accountability and conducts this investigation at the locus of gender. The poem examines the conundrum of where culpability for suspicious gendered practices in and surrounding the field of cultural production lies. Through its investigation, the Legend obscures inequitable gender relations in Chaucer’s poetry, in the larger textual tradition, and in social praxes surrounding literature in late fourteenth-century England. Furthermore, the Legend helps to construct the parameters of debate regarding acceptable responses to poetry and to establish which conversations about literature could occur in late medieval England. Ultimately, the poem works to fragment readers’ recognition of gender as an appropriate, or even possible, category of analysis when discussing texts. In doing so, the poem simultaneously works to disarticulate understandings that cultural artifacts shape consciousness and hence affect lives—while proceeding as if poetry can do exactly that—rendering such approaches uncompelling and incoherent. The Complaint Textuality and reading have been central issues in scholarship on the Legend of Good Women for the past three decades, discussions in which Cupid frequently looms large.2 Regarding Cupid’s complaints about the effects of literature on readers, two approaches have dominated. Among one group of Chaucerians, Cupid’s concerns about effects have been deemed untenable or even derisive. Lisa J. Kiser, whose chapter on Cupid is tellingly dubbed ‘‘On Misunderstanding Texts,’’ maintains that Cupid’s claims about the effects of Chaucer’s poetry reflect his incompetence as a literary critic, while Sheila Delany believes that Cupid’s confidence in the effectiveness of literature, namely, ‘‘that it will change the behavior of masses of readers—can only strike us as it must have struck Chaucer, as another piece of utopian-bureaucratic comedy.’’3 One could loosely align Elaine Tuttle Hansen with this camp. Although Hansen maintains that the Legend 106 IN DEFENSE OF CUPID explores the impact of literary and social idealization on women, she is surprisingly silent regarding Cupid’s comments about effects, ultimately arguing that Cupid, the narrator, and the antifeminist tradition to which both subscribe, are undercut by Chaucerian irony.4 A second group of Chaucerians have viewed Cupid’s concerns about literature’s impact as part...