The Mythographic Chaucer: The Fabulation of Sexual Politics by Jane Chance

Abstract

REVIEWS gender implications can be understood until the authors' intentions, and likely audience responses, are explored more carefully" (p. 3). Why this should be so needs explanation. Gender criticism would seem to have been particularly apt in Brown's essay, which attempts at least in part to redeem the Lady in La Belle Dame by showing that humor and criticism in the poem are directed toward the Lover. Each essay in this volume presents a patristic reading intended to pro­ mote acceptance and validity of the method. Chamberlain is to be com­ mended for his attempts to present a more moderate and situated patristic practice. Until the theoretical issues his approach raises are addressed, how­ ever, it would appear that those who come to this volume with a belief in its assumptions will find the approach valid, while those who would like to be persuaded will require further proof. BARRIE RUTH STRAUS University of Windsor JANE CHANCE. The MythographicChaucer: The Fabulation ofSexual Politics. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Pp. xxix, 378. $18.95 paper. Mythographic criticism has much in common with "Robertsonian" or pa­ tristic analysis: both decode medieval literature by reference to a meta­ literature. In the one case, the works of the Church fathers are used to articulate how words, images, and allusions communicate-often covertly-the Augustinian aesthetic goal of encouraging Christian charity among readers. In mythographic analysis, the parallel goal is the piercing of integumentum-the disclosure of hidden truth-and the method is simi­ lar in that medieval commentaries on pagan literature and philosophy sup­ ply a meta-level body of discourse that the critic uses to explain what underlying or hidden truths the given work holds. Jane Chance's contributions to mythographic criticism are impressive, to say the least. Rooted in her The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (1975) and numerous articles, her more recent volumes reflect the depth and range of her comprehension of mythographic interpretation and its tradition. In recent years, she has edited a collection of essays, The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early 195 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER France and England (1990), and produced a sweeping historical survey, Medieval Mythography: From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres (1994). The volume under review reprises some of the earlier articles and focuses the legacy of Chance's scholarship upon Chaucer, arguing that mythographic analysis reveals his "embarrassing secrets," mostly sexual, and perverse by traditional standards. Although such a focus on sexual secrets is not typical of Chance's earlier work, nor of mythographic analysis generally, these secrets here supply a centralizing focus for the mythological references and allusions in Chaucer's works.Just as detractors of the patristic school are concerned that Christian charity can in some cases be too blithely imposed upon all of medieval literature, I am concerned that Chance's idea of Chaucer's "secrets" is more an a priori assumption than a notion derived from Chaucer's works. She does not document with certainty Chaucer's familiarity with mythographic materials, and her arguments are therefore punctuated by such necessary qualifiers as "may," "might," and "perhaps." Unfortunately, such qualifiers occasionally drift into seeming certainties without justification, as in refer­ ences to Chaucer's knowledge of Theodulf of Orleans (pp. 100, 265). This general concern notwithstanding, Chance gives us a number of readings that are complex, provocative, and in step with postmodern con­ cerns with sexuality and the reading of "gaps." She opens with a discussion of the Man of Law and the Manciple as alter egos of Chaucer, reflections of his anxieties about what art might disclose about the artist and the conse­ quent need for disguise. This introduction is Chance's justification that there are secrets to be found in Chaucer, although I do not find much that is secretive in the ensuing discussion of The Book of the Duchess and The Legend ofGood Women, where the two works are related by the presence in each of a female figure who descends to the underworld (Alcyone and Alceste). Reading the Black Knight's arc of emotion against Alcyone's descent, and comparing...