Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature: Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts by Elaine Treharne (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.3, 2004 735 The quality of the essays presented here is uneven, but they contain much that is engaging and challenging. Questions of genre are addressed from a variety of viewpoints and it is this, as well as the focus on personal identity, which forms one of the strengths of the collection. University of Bristol Judith A. Jefferson WritingGender and Genre in Medieval Literature: Approaches to Old and Middle Eng? lish Texts. Ed. by Elaine Treharne for the English Association. (Essays and Studies, 55) Cambridge: Brewer. 2002. x +142 pp. ?30; $50. ISBN 0-85991760 -6. How times have changed. A decade ago it would have been unusual to have a British collection on gender in medieval literature that included essays on Old English texts, had male contributors, and discussed representations of men as well as women. This useful volume signals that gender has now entered the medieval British mainstream. But gender in what sense? By and large, this eclectic compilation does not have any overt political or theoretical allegiance (with the exception of Greg Walker's savvy essay on Absolon). Only David Salter and Walker address the connection between gender and genre in detail. Gender is understood as an 'interest in or awareness' (p. 2) of female and male characters, rather than as an explicitly feminist reading practice. This is certainly the case for the firstthree essays: Hugh Magennis on the Old English Judith, Mary Swan on Anglo-Saxon accounts of the life and miracles of St Veronica, and Salter on wives and mothers in Middle English romance. These mostly represent good old-fashioned textual scholarship and source study, but they are none the worse for that. Magennis's careful reassessment ofJudith argues that its heroine has the role of a hero but the heart and body ofa woman. The result ofthis discrepancy is to magnify 'her faith and achievement' (p. 18). Swan's informative, scholarly essay considers in particular the ultimate Latin source for the two Old English accounts of the apocryphal Veronica: the VindictaSalvatorisin MS Saint-Omer 202. This manu? script has annotations in Old English, possibly done in Exeter. Swan demonstrates that in eleventh-century English culture the legend is given a distinctive spin that makes Veronica a more powerful figure: it connects the image of Christ that she possesses with a piece of his garment?the only one to survive his transfiguration. Salter's essay considers the highly polarized representations of wives and mothers in Octavian and King Alisaunder. As the hero moves fromchild to adult, this 'involves a transferoflove and loyalty from one woman to another, as he loosens the intense emotional bond that ties him to his mother' (p. 43). Stereotypes of gender determine the representations of women, either connecting the passive woman with selflessness and the active with villainy ,or eliciting laughter and derision. For both romances, the implied reader is male. Salter's essay is in some ways paradigmatic of the collection: it is very good at exposing the stereotypes but not at tryingto suggest how we might read the texts against the grain. So in Elaine Treharne's sociolinguistic essay on the Wife of Bath, Chaucer appears as a 'proto-folklinguist' (p. 100), a latter-day Otto Jesperson, foregrounding the myths ofwomen's language (that they nag, gossip, etc.) but never doing more than presenting Alison as 'a fourteenth-century victim of patriarchal ideology' (p. 115). Treharne wants to contest readings of the Wife as powerful, but Alison 'is' neither one thing nor the other: she is what readers make of her. Walker, on the other hand, does engage with difference. Drawing on Freud, Kristeva, Mary Douglas, and Bakhtin, he argues that the mockery of the Miller's Tale is directed, through Absolon, not at ro? mance but at 'the inappropriate erasing of sexuality' that is central to religious drama and Mariolatry (p. 89). This essay fairlybounces along: 'Absolon [. . .] plays his small 736 Reviews rubible in the pubs and singles bars of Oxfordshire' (p. 70). The one essay that does not really earn its keep is Anne Marie D'Arcy's on typology in the Prioress's Tale. Dense with scholarship, this never makes a case (and certainly...