Female Desire in Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women” and Middle English Romance by Lucy M. Allen-Goss

Abstract

Reviewed by: Female Desire in Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women” and Middle English Romance by Lucy M. Allen-Goss Michelle M. Sauer Lucy M. Allen-Goss. Female Desire in Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women” and Middle English Romance. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. ix, 225. $99.00 cloth; $24.99 e-book. Lucy M. Allen-Goss has given us a book that we need. Of course, there are a great many books out there on Chaucer, but there are few that concentrate on The Legend of Good Women, and fewer still that focus exclusively on female desire. Allen-Goss begins with an author’s note (viii–ix) that is imperative to her project: in it, she explains why she has avoided using the word “queer.” Whether or not we personally agree with her decision, the careful way in which she has outlined her choice, particularly how it connects with her understanding of Alain de Lille, is appreciated. Similarly, her introduction judiciously defines “female desire,” which is the central idea of her book and thus all the more important to be treated respectfully and completely. Early on, she notes, “As will be clear, the spectrum of female embodied desires I discuss is, because those desires are defined in the negative as not orientated towards masculinity, both wide and difficult to visualize” (6). In other words, to explore female desires adequately, masculinity must also be examined critically. And she does. The straightforward thesis of the entire work is thus: “I argue that, in the late fourteenth century, Chaucer inaugurates an interrogation of the available modes of representing women’s emotions, desires and aversions, carried out primarily through his most radically disruptive poem, the Legend of Good Women” (7). Although I am unsure the Legend is the most radical of all Chaucerian texts, Allen-Goss is ultimately very convincing in her position, and I finished the book even more convinced that Chaucer’s text is an essential tool in understanding the development of femininity, female desire, and medieval feminisms. Her applications to other romances demonstrate how this view works outside a Chaucerian framework. Chapter 1 focuses on the “Legend of Philomela.” It is a good place to start, setting up Allen-Goss’s basic premises well, since Philomela is raped, mutilated, and silenced, seemingly leaving no space for female desire. Allen-Goss instead argues that Chaucer’s “mutilation” of the text—he pieces together multiple sources and leaves off the traditional ending of the tale—allows for the possibility of a recuperative female voice. The chapter [End Page 281] is argued provocatively and adeptly and is ultimately quite convincing. Perhaps most intriguing is the section on Philomela’s prosthetic voice, accomplished through Chaucer’s rewriting of classical texts to eliminate blood (and gore), suggesting that “Chaucer’s lacuna, his omission of the lurid imagery of Philomela’s flesh and bloody tongue, makes visible the tensions within the discourses available for representation of violated female sexuality, showing how easily female aversion to male sexual violence can be made to look like transgressive female desire punished” (48). Eventually, she suggests that the entirety of the Legend reflects Philomela’s voice, thus setting up a “feminine hermeneutic that disrupts the rhythm of traditional narrative and poetics” (60). From here, Chapter 2 switches gear and examines the Alliterative Morte Arthure, which sets the pattern for the rest of the book in alternating Chaucer with other romances. Allen-Goss says that, like Philomela, the Alliterative Morte is a “displaced representation of silenced female suffering [that] brings coherence to seemingly dissonant, fragmented, repetitive and structurally disarticulated aspects of the poem” (62). But more than that, she goes on to suggest that in the Morte, female desire is specifically linked to male sodomy. Sorting through the incident where the giant rapes Arthur’s kinswoman, and various penile images (e.g., Arthur thrusting his lance through Mordred’s anus), the conclusion is that while there is sodomitic energy and possible queerness, the poem also engages with the potential for expressing female desires even as it resists actual female characters. Chapters 3 and 4 are similarly paired, and address first the “Legend of Hipsiphyle and Medea...