Incest Narratives and the Structure of Gower’s Confessio Amantis by Georgiana Donavin

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER -Eager to show that Arveragus in The Franklin's Tale is guilty of the kind of "tyranny and deceit" (p. 53) representative of his knightly estate, Dillon tells us that all is well in the tale until Arveragus goes off to England: "Military activity, the active seeking ofwar simply for the sake of 'worship and honour,' becomes his only desire and he leaves Dorigen, his wife, for two years" (p. 52). It is problematical enough to state as fact that Arveragus goes "simply" to bolster his own reputation rather than, say, because knightly duty calls him to help his lord. But when Dillon glosses the first two words of Chaucer's "Shoop hym to gon and dwelle a yeer or tweyne / In Engelond" (FranT 809-10) as "decided" rather than as "ar­ ranged" or "prepared," she misleads readers into believing that Arveragus made an arbitrary and selfish decision to abandon his wife. I do not mean to close on so negative a note. Janette Dillon's Geoffrey Chaucer will be a useful book, particularly for the undergraduates for whom it was intended. It is particularly sound in its treatment of the developing status of English as the language of England, for its statements about the production and reproduction of early fiction, and for its discussion of England's wide connections with continental Europe in Chaucer's lifetime. Although Dillon's central contribution is in her discussion of the historical contexts that inform Chaucer's work, she is also capable of helpful discus­ sions of literature. To the continuing debate, for example, about whether Alison of Bath is Chaucer's negative stereotype of a wife or a Chaucerian critique of that stereotype, Dillon has this to say: "A character who con­ sciously enacts the stereotype of the wicked wife cannot at the same time be accused of being no more than the stereotype" (p. 69). Good point. PETER G. BEIDLER Lehigh University GEORGIANA DoNAVIN. Incest Narratives and the Structure ofGower's Con­ fessio Amantis. English Literary Studies, vol. 56. Victoria, B.C.: Univer­ sity of Victoria, 1993. Pp. 103. $9.50 paper. In recent decades readers of the Confessio Amantis have attended increas­ ingly toJohn Gower's treatment of incest in that poem and particularly in two of its tales, "Canace and Machaire" and "Apollonius of Tyre." In this 198 REVIEWS new study Georgiana Donavin reexamines those tales and also discusses others where she sees incestuous desire as an implied subject; she looks at references to incest in Genius's other statements and finds, in all of these assorted materials, a significance for the work as a whole. For Donavin, Genius's description of the incest of Venus and Cupid in book 5 sets the framework for understanding the love that Amans pursues and eventually rejects. The principal characters in the frame--not only Venus and Cupid but, by association with their court, Genius and Amans--appear at some time or other to condone incest. Eventually, how­ ever, and especially through the poem's incest narratives, Amans learns to replace his amorous passion with a love of God. That Donavin should find the theme of incest so central to the work is problematic, for Gower does not literally represent it in a narrative until book 3, describe it in reference to Venus and Cupid until book 5, or introduce it as a confessional topic until book 8. Amans there asserts that he is innocent of the sin, and the rest of his confession supports his asser­ tion. That he writes ballads for his lady, dreams of kissing her, or gossips about other lovers might suggest that he is libidinous, but this evidence does not establish that he "imitates incestuousness," as Donavin claims (p. 6). In her effort to show the structural importance of incest (in its special meaning, not its general meaning of "unchaste"), she excludes from consideration the poem's many other representations of love; in the end, the hypothesis does not adequately address the work's complexity. That is not to say, however, that Donavin avoids complexity entirely: she recognizes Genius's inconsistencies, for example, as well as other problem­ atic features of...