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 Holly A. Crocker lucy m. allen-goss, Female Desire in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Middle English Romance. Gender in the Middle Ages, Volume 15. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. ix, 225. isbn: 978–1843845706. $99. With this study's focus on feminine desire, Lucy M. Allen-Goss asks what I believe will be the most crucial question in premodern literary studies: what will emerge if we change the standpoint from which we begin our scholarly enquiries into gender, sexuality, and other literary representations of embodiment? Allen-Goss focuses welcome attention on Chaucer's Legend of Good Women as a hermeneutic locus where the absences that might create a 'lesbian-like erotic' potentially emerge. Allen-Goss pairs this consideration with analysis of Middle English romance, or 'a mode of writing about female desire and bodily agency that is innovative and contemporary rather than isolated and retrograde' (pp. 28–29). In thinking through the tradition Chaucer and romance writers inherited, where women's desire is equated with deviance or treated as an absence, this book pursues a model of sexuality that is not constructed in relation to masculine desire. That kind of sexuality is almost always thwarted in Chaucer. While Chaucer might seek to represent a form of desire that emerges outside or beyond masculine domination or violence, in Chapter One Allen-Goss suggests that the 'Legend of Philomela' shows how a feminine hermeneutic is ultimately silenced in keeping with Jerome's famous model of reading as the rape of a conquered woman. Chapter Two, which turns to the Alliterative Morte, reads the giant's violent rape of the duchess at Mont St Michel as a traumatic hermeneutic that subtends the knights' attempts to establish their martial prowess. By thinking through this narrative's hyper-masculine suppression of feminine agency and desire, Allen-Goss offers a completely persuasive reconsideration of this poem as 'not anti-war but anti-rape' (p. 71). In Chapter Three, it becomes clear, there needs to be more than a foregrounding of women to render a plot revisionist. With his rethinking of the relicta motif in the 'Legend of Hipsiphyle and Medea,' Chaucer potentially queers Jason's faithlessness—unmooring him from conventional masculinity—in order to make space for women's desire. Despite the fact that Chaucer's 'Legend of Dido' expresses a more fluid form of feminine desire, Chaucer's poem codes her non-binarized attraction to Aeneas as deviant, and tumbles together Hipsiphyle's and Medea's betrayed expressions of desire for Jason in a way that diminishes the potential of the female masculinity it explores. Chapter Four, which analyzes the 'stony femininity' of Floripas in the Sowdone of Babylon, argues that this romance imagines the possibility of a woman whose desire is [End Page 95] not constituted in relation to masculine fantasies or demands. Rather than nightmares of women's affective and embodied fluidity, this romance instead charts the ways that an impenetrable feminine body produces desires that cannot be contained by masculinist fantasies of penetration or manipulation. It is only with his Thisbe, whom Allen-Goss considers alongside Ariadne in Chapter Five, that Chaucer creates a narrative of feminine innocence that might exceed the phallic logic that a masculinist hermeneutic demands. By reading these women's relation to veiling and reading, Chaucer's legends entertain the possibility of lesbian-like erotic that admits feminine desire through gaps and openings in edifices conventionally drawn to render women's bodies as available to men's sexual domination. By circumscribing the desire Chaucer associates with these women, these legends mark feminine eroticism as deviant in a way that assures Chaucer's own gendered authority. In Chapter Six, Allen-Goss turns to the late fifteenth-century romance, Undo Your Door, to argue that 'female sexuality [is] represented as a transgressive yet creative force, which . . . assembles its own objects of desire from inanimate materials and from mechanisms disturbingly reminiscent of the objects medieval writers associated with same-sex desire and female autoerotic satisfaction' (p. 166). By showing how women's desire is associated with inanimacy...