Fathers and Daughters in Gower’s ‘Confessio Amantis’: Authority, Family, State, and Writing by María Bullón-Fernández (review)

Abstract

160 Reviews Fathers and Daughters in Gower's 'Confessio Amantisy: Authority, Family, State, and Writing. By Maria Bullon-Fernandez. (Publications of the John Gower Soci? ety) Cambridge: Brewer. 2000. viii + 24ipp. ?50; $90. ISBN 0-85991-578-6. In her exploration of father-daughter relationships in John Gower's Confessio Amantis , Maria Bullon-Fernandez sheds important new light on a poet whose stock continues to rise as critics increasingly come to understand how sophisticated and artistically adroit his handlingof moral, social, and political issues can be. Gower does not shy away fromcomplex, difficultsubjects. Largely through an analysis ofpower re? lationships in eleven tales ofthe Confessio, Bullon-Fernandez illumines how his work not only expresses but also challenges aspects of the patriarchal ideology that so significantlyunderlies familial, political, and artistic structures in late medieval England. While assessing the poem in its fourteenth-century political and religious contexts, Bullon-Fernandez also draws heavily on recent feminist psychoanalytic and anthropological theory to frame her analysis. Exogamy and the prohibition of incest are presumed by some medieval authors (and by Genius, the priest and storyteller in Gower's fiction) to be necessary for the functioning of society. Following Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler, Bullon-Fernandez challenges the assumption (by Levi-Strauss, for example) that social organization depends on the use of women as commodities of exchange, but she also recognizes in Gower's poem that as daughters like Thaise, Peronelle, and Constance avert the dangers of incest and accept, even seek, their own exchange, they also reaffirm,in terms Bullon-Fernandez borrows from Derrida, 'so? ciety,language, history' (p. 17). Teaching and even 'redeeming' their fathers through their counsel and actions, they also provide a critique of the patriarchal ideology to which they submit. Between their situations and counterposed cases, Genius uncovers or unwittingly betrays tensions regarding patriarchy and authority that also emerge in other forms elsewhere in the poem. Bullon-Fernandez examines these as well, considering the gender dynamics that emerge in Gower's treatment of such subjects as chivalry,eloquence, textual authority, and privacy. Repeatedly, however, she returns to incest as a controlling theme of the work. To perceive it as such, she occasionally blurs distinctions, as when she claims that because women are exchangeable, fathers and husbands, as masculine authority figures, are interchangeable and 'to an extent indistinguishable' (p. 104) in their rela? tionship with daughters and wives. While this fosters suggestions of incest ('fathers as husbands, husbands as fathers'), it does not sufficientlyaccount forimportant, clearly articulated differences in masculine roles and individual behavior in the tales. In treating incest also as a metaphor, Bullon-Fernandez offersher most suggestive insights into the poem. She remarks, forexample, that Gower uses the theme of incest to comment on Richard II's conduct of government. The absolutist, self-absorbed king is caught up with court favourites, impervious to outside influence, and deeply insensitive to the welfare of his people. The analogy is a powerful one, but still hypothetical , in need of further evidence that Gower is actually making that connection. Somewhat more firmlygrounded is the suggestion of a sort of patriarchal abuse in Genius's creation of texts: like the Pygmalion who fails in love with his own creation, the priest is possessive, controlling, and 'incestuous' as a storyteller, eager to fashion, point, and interpret his tales as a rightthat is exclusively his, and unwilling to release those tales to the interpretation of readers. To be sure, every storyteller constructs tales to elicit certain responses, and Genius as priest is constrained by the idiom of confessional instruction to moralize his tales in certain ways. Bullon-Fernandez would have done well to explore that issue more fullywhen she addressed the inconsistencies, for example, in his judging (or not) the actions of three fathers who are responsible for the death of their daughters (Canace, Virginia, and Leucothoe). Nevertheless, there can be no question that although Genius is quick to assert his authority on any MLR, 98.1, 2003 161 topic he introduces, that authority is undermined by his repeated inconsistencies and blunders, so much so that our coming to understand issues and possibilities must depend to some extent upon rereading the poem and reframing the questions...