外國語言學系外國文學與語言學碩士班
碩士論文
關於「女人議題」:《玫瑰的羅曼史》
，《女人城市之書》與
《特伊勒斯與克莉賽緹》
On the “Women Question”: Romance of the Rose, The Book of
the City of Ladies, and Troilus and Criseyde
研 究 生: 張端容
指導教授: 金守民 博士
馮品佳 博士
《特伊勒斯與克莉賽緹》
On the “Women Question”: The Romance of the Rose, The Book
of the City of Ladies, and Troilus and Criseyde
研 究 生: 張端容 Postgraduate: Tuan Jung Chang 指導教授: 金守民 博士 Advisor: Dr. Margaret Kim 馮品佳 博士 Dr. Pin Chia Feng
國立交通大學
外國語言學系外國文學與語言學碩士班
碩士論文
A Thesis
Submitted to Graduate Institute of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics
College of Humanities and Social Science
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Master of Arts
in
Literature
June 2011
Hsunchu, Taiwan
中華民國一百年六月
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents i
Acknowledgement ii
English Abstract iii
Chinese Abstract iv
Chapter One: Introduction: the Tradition of Misogyny and The Romance of the Rose 1
Chapter Two: Christine de Pizan: the Defense of Women in The Book of the City of Ladies 19
Chapter Three: Chaucer’s Position on the “Women Question”: the Gendered Responses in Troilus and Criseyde 30
Chapter Four: Conclusion 60
Acknowledgement
I want to pay special thanks to three professors who have guided me so far in this long journey. First of all, I would like to thank Professor Kim for all guidance and instructions during the past three years. Second of all, I am grateful for Prof. Feng’s encouragement and support when I was confused and lost. I also want to thank Prof. Chao for being one of my committees. I know that reading a thesis takes much time and effort and I appreciate all your help.
I also want to name a list of my friends who have shown great support during the time I felt like giving up. Howard Liu, Orlando Wang, Lan lo, Michelle Lin and Kevin Tong. You gave me tremendous help when I was always away from school. Fox Lin, Bernice Liao, Lance Chen, Seye Chang, Ken Feng and many others. All of you gave me so much encouragement and energy that I kept trying. It is with your help that I am now writing this acknowledgement of my thesis.
Finally, I want to thank all my dear family members: my great parents, my two lovely sisters and my grandparents. You always believe that I can accomplish this task and so I finally make it. This thesis belongs to all of you.
Abstract
In 1405 Christine de Pizan writes The Book of the City of Ladies to challenge the misogynist conceptions in The Romance of the Rose which derives from religious as well as classical sources. Christine argues that it is “virtue and morality” that makes one superior to the other, rather than sexual difference. Chaucer chooses a different way to present his concerns about whether women should be equal to men and be regarded as individuals. Chaucer thinks that denying women as individuals is inhuman; however, he is also troubled by the consequence if women are considered individuals. This thesis aims to present Chaucer’s ambiguous position on the “women question” through both of his protagonists in Troilus and Criseyde. In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer applies Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy to explain the relationship between Fortune and free will. According to Larry Scanlon, the function of Fortune in Troilus and Criseyde is to show the inevitability of the patriarchal power. On one hand, Criseyde is able to show her free will and ability to judge and act when she confronts Fortune/patriarchy in Chaucer’s Trojan story. On the other, all the choices Criseyde makes turn out to benefit men, the central power of patriarchy. On the contrary, Troilus as a part of the patriarchal system reveals that the hierarchy in the designation of Fortune/patriarchy is unbreakable. The reactions of Troilus and
Criseyde to Fortune/patriarchy are gendered and disclose Chaucer’s hesitation about whether women should be free from the control of patriarchy. Chaucer’s ambiguous position on the “women question” not only shows his personal viewpoints but also represents the troubles and contradictions in the Middle Ages.
Keywords: Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Boethius, Fortune, patriarchy, Christine de Pizan, The Romance of the Rose
摘要 在 1405 年克莉絲汀德皮桑撰寫《女人城市之書》挑戰在《玫瑰的羅曼史》 中眾多的反女性觀點，其觀點不僅源自於文學經典也源自於宗教經典。克莉絲汀 主張「性別的差異無法辨別個體之間的差異，只有美德與道德才能讓人有所高 下」。有別於克莉絲汀，喬叟選擇不一樣的方法來呈現自己對於「女人是否應該 跟男人同等地被視為個體」這個問題的觀點。喬叟認為否認女人也是個體是非常 不人道的。然而，他也非常困擾於女人被視為個體之後所可能產生的後果。這篇 論文旨在透過喬叟《特洛伊斯與克莉賽緹》的兩位主角來呈現作者在「女人議題」 上的矛盾立場。在《特伊勒斯與克莉賽緹》中，喬叟應用波伊提烏的《哲學的慰 藉》來解讀命運與自由意志的關係。根據賴瑞史蓋倫的說法，命運在《特伊勒斯 與克莉賽緹》的功能是彰顯了父權體制的不可逃避性。在喬叟的特洛伊故事中， 雖然克莉賽緹在面對命運即為父權的情況下尚能夠運用他的自由意志與能力來 判斷與行動；但事實上克莉賽緹所做的決定最後都使男人受惠，而男人正是父權 體制的中心。相對地，特伊勒斯作為父權體制的一份子，揭露了命運/父權中牢 不可破的階級概念。特洛伊斯與克莉賽緹對命運即父權的反應是有性別之分的， 這也揭露了喬叟對於「女人是否應該從父權的控制中解脫」這個問題的遲疑。喬 叟在「女人議題」的矛盾立場不僅代表他個人的觀點，更象徵中古世紀對此議題 普遍的困擾與矛盾。 關鍵詞: 喬叟，《特伊勒斯與克莉賽緹》，波伊提烏，命運，父權，克莉絲汀德皮 桑，《玫瑰的羅曼史》
Chapter One
Introduction: the Tradition of Misogyny and The Romance of the Rose Stephanie Trigg applies Charles Muscatine’s address to the New Chaucer Society in 1980 about how we should read Chaucer and speak for him: “While it does look, as if it would be highly un-Chaucerian to be too solemn or too pious about Chaucer scholarship, none of us is under the obligation, after all, to be Chaucerian” (1). Trigg thinks that Muscatine’s address releases all the Chaucerian scholars from the
responsibility of reading Chaucer in a solemn or pious way. According to Trigg, Muscatine “reintroduces Chaucer as a moral authority, directing us to discover our own individuality… encourage[ing] us to be ourselves” (1). Trigg also points out the historical as well as literary importance of Chaucer and his poetic works. She
mentions that the tastes in literature keep changing as time goes by, but Chaucer is always on the list of the canon (6). I believe that Chaucer’s presence in the canon of English literature is the main reason for people’s paying attention to him because I am also one of them. Enchanted by Chaucer’s particular concern for women, I choose one of his most famous heroines, Criseyde, as my central topic of this thesis.
Born into a very traditional Chinese family, I frequently hear about how men are better than women because men can promise the continuation of the family as well as the property while women are belongings to other households once they are married. Hence, reading the texts about the debates about whether women are equal to men or women are also individuals as men are, reminds me of my own experience. From The Romance of the Rose, The Book of the City of Ladies to Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde, I see all kinds of struggles concerning the “gender” issues. I think it is very true that Trigg says about finding one’s individuality in Chaucer’s works because that is what I am doing in the process of writing this thesis. I wish I could say that I am now living in a family in which men and women are equally important. The truth is
that many conservative elders like my grandparents are also troubled by the
consequence if women are considered equal to men. People like my grandparents may feel that nowadays men and women have the same position in society, but they are still hesitant to women’s equal importance to men. That is why on the day in the early April when Chinese family have to worship their ancestors, I can be absent from the great event, but my brothers cannot. If I say it does not occur to me as certain kind of sexual discrimination, I would be lying. Yet sometimes the inequality gives me the convenience of being a free person from the strong bond among most Chinese family. With such life experience, I start the journey of visiting the “women question” from reviewing the tradition of misogyny to the three major works I concentrate: The Romance of the Rose, The Book of the City of Ladies and, Troilus and Criseyde.
According to Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr., from ancient Greece to the Renaissance, “the questions of female equality and opportunity were raised that still resound and are still unresolved (ix)”. In this thesis, the “women question” I focus mainly concerns two issues: Are women less human than men? Are women
individuals as men are? Chaucer, who also writes about women in many of his works such as the famous Wife of Bath and Criseyde, is one of those who talk about the “women question”. Therefore, to discuss Chaucer’s position on the issues about women, it is important to give a quick review of the history of the subject, especially the history of how people and literary works in the Middle Ages deal with related issues. In fact, a lot of medieval literature is sexist. Many poems, stories and epics give negative portrayals of woman and The Romance of the Rose is one of them. David F. Hult points out that in the Rose there are many “misogynist, antireligious, and obscene passages” (12). In response to those anti-women ideas in the Rose, Christine de Pizan starts a series of debates with the supporters of the work, Jean de Montruil and Gontier and Pierre Col. According to Rosalind Brown-Grant, what
Christine mainly protests against is the idea suggesting women “as a race apart from men, a race which is less human” (13). Later in 1405, Christine finds a way to defend women. In her most famous work The Book of the City of the Ladies, Christine uses examples from the past as well as the present to argue that women can be equal to men in terms of virtue and morality. Christine de Pizan is the first woman to fight the misogynistic traditions (Brown-Grant 2) and therefore Hult calls Christine “the other voice”.1 Asides from Christine de Pizan, Chaucer presents himself as another kind of ‘voice’. Christine tries to show that women in terms of virtue can be equal to men and Chaucer deals with the issues about women in a different way. Chaucer talks about women’s freedom to choose in Troilus and Criseyde and shows his position on the “women question.”
The Romance of the Rose
The Romance of the Rose is composed by two authors, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Since the text is written by two different authors, many discussions have been made about the relationships between the two parts of the Rose. The first three chapters are written by Guillaume de Lorris in between 1225 and 1230. The rest of it was continued by Jean de Meun between 1269 and 1278. 2 Jean takes
Guillaume’s work by himself and continues it with his own style. The Romance of the Rose is a best seller in its day. Frances Horgan in his introduction to The Romance of the Rose emphasizes that the Rose was one of the most influential works among all medieval texts, including The Canterbury Tales (1). The idea helps us understand the general points of view on women since in the Rose there are so many issues about women. It is one of the famous works which broadly deliver the messages about women’s negative natures, mainly in the part written by Jean. In the part composed by
1
It is the title of David F. Hult’s introduction to his own volume of Debate of the Romance of the Rose.
2
Guillaume, the story does not stray far away from the traditional story of courtly love. It is a dream allegory in which the poet, the protagonist as well as the narrator, goes into a garden and finds a magic fountain. In the fountain is a reflection of a rose which the narrator longs for despite the many obstacles he later faces (King and Rabil xv). In Horgan’s words, Guillaume writes his part as a certain kind of “textbook,” following “the tradition of treaties on the theory of love, most notably exemplified in the Middle Ages by the twelfth century The Art of Love by Andreas Capellanus” (xiii).
Guillaume’s dream vision serves as a teaching model to show how the courtly lovers, taught by God of Love, should behave (Hult xiii).
However, the part written by Jean de Meun is on a quite different track. Hult points out that “Jean inserted lengthy digressions on a variety of topics [and] these digressions consist from learned Latin authors, both classical and medieval” (11-12). In the longer part of the Rose by Jean de Meun gives a general explanation of
women’s natures: “women are greedy and manipulative, marriage is miserable, beautiful women are lustful, ugly ones cease to please, and a chaste woman is as rare as a black swan” (King and Rabil xv). Charles Dahlberg in the introduction to his translation of the Rose mentions the major question concerning the two authors: “The existence of two authors separated in time gave rise quite naturally to the question of whether or not the two parts form a united whole” (2). Before the nineteenth century, the question did not bother critics, but the differences lying in length as well as style started to encourage some debates (Dahlberg 2-3). According to Dahlberg, the debates gradually lead to a conclusion: “Guillaume and Jean were opposed in intent and treatment” (3). The first part celebrates “courtly love” while the much more lengthy part by Jean de Meun is an “anti-Guillaume” criticism of courtly love (3). Both Gérard Paré and C. S. Lewis agree on the notion suggesting that there is indeed opposition in the two parts of the poem (3). Dahlberg and Alan Gunn hold different
opinions from the previous one. Gunn thinks that both Guillaume and Jean write the poem as a treatise on love and they all embody this “love” on the personification of the rose (21-22). The issue of ‘love’ not only signifies the unity between two parts in the Rose and its great influence on medieval people but also suggests the connection between Jean and Chaucer.
Recent critics tend to accept the idea that the two parts of the poem are unified and John Fleming is one of them (Dahlberg 4). Fleming reminds us that there is a central theme that both Guillaume and Jean share in their poems: love (12). In their introduction of Rethinking Romance of the Rose, Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot also point out that the theme “love” is central to both authors of the Rose (5). Most importantly, it is the central theme, love, which brings forth all the issues that medieval people concern. Critics often neglect that “love is a central doctrine of Christianity and, as a theme, occupies a dominant place in much medieval poetry” (Dahlberg 12). The issues about the love of God in Christianity receive a lot of attention among medieval people, and therefore, the theme of love also brings forth the popularity of the Rose.
According to Brownlee and Hout, The Romance of the Rose is also one of the most important works in Old French literature. For medieval readers, though written between 1225 and 1275, the text is quite special and its influence is also extraordinary. Both in and out of France, the Rose receives much attention from medieval people and its popularity continued to the Renaissance. (1) Due to the popularity of the Rose in the Middle Ages, it is inevitable to give a review of how medieval people read the Rose. Huot in her own monograph dedicated to the research of numerous manuscripts of the Rose asks several crucial questions when it comes to the receptions of the Rose in different periods of time:
We cannot assume that Machaut, or Chaucer, or Christine de Pizan
necessarily read the text that we find in the modern editions…What aspects of it were considered important, or shocking, or difficult, or superfluous? What kind of text did people think it was, or want it to be? (8)
At the time people in the Middle Ages read various versions of the translations of the Rose, they pay a lot of attention to the issues about “love and marriage, gender and sexuality, about sin and free will, about language and power, about human society, nature, and the cosmos” in a wild range (Huot 9). Those issues are the ones that concern medieval people most, and in the Rose the descriptions and explanations concerning those issues all result from ‘love,’ the protagonist’s love for the rose. That is the reason why people in the Middle Ages read the Rose to find answers or
suggestions on those topics.
When it comes to the modern ages, the “orientations” of interpreting the Rose become richer and more diverse than it is in the medieval period (Brownlee and Hout). As Brownlee and Hout briefly conclude, there are three major orientations regarding the modern interpretations of the Rose. The first one is the “neo-patristic” perspective. Critics who read the Rose with this perspective treat it as Christian allegory and usually focus on the topics about morality and didactics. Robertson and Fleming are both critics of this scheme (2). The second one is from the “philosophical perspective”. Critics taking this direction such as Winthrop Wetherbee and Thomas D. Hill consider the Rose is set in a “context of medieval neoplatonist poetics and mythology” (2). The third kind is a more purely literary one. Critics such as Stephen Nichols and Douglas Kelly of this group tend to concentrate on the “rhetorical organization, narrative structure, literary genre, and poetic discourse” of the Rose (2). The list of different orientations and receptions of the Rose may keep on going since the text has been discussed a lot since it was first published (Brownlee and Huot). What the first group
of critics concentrate invites most attention. If people really follow the moral lessons and didactics in the Rose, then people would think that women are just greedy and lustful creatures. Do people in the Middle Ages actually regard the Rose as a book to offer moral instructions and a guidebook to show how they should deal with the questions about marriage, love and especially, about women? With the purpose of introducing the Rose as a guidebook dealing with certain issues in the Middle Ages, let us go back to the parts in the Rose where medieval people pay most attention.
It is mentioned earlier that both Guillaume and Jean have the same theme in their stories: love. Although the theme is common in the writings of the two authors, the interpretations of ‘love’ in the Rose are quite diverse. The various kinds of love elaborated in the Rose control the development of the whole poem. Dahlberg believes that “traditional Christian analyses of love offer the best background for our
understanding of the theme and its structural development” (12). Dahlberg thus further gives the definitions of amor,3 referring to the different kinds of love in the Rose which arouse many discussions. Dahlberg writes that “from the time of
Augustine, this term…came to be used for both charity and cupidity” (12). Dahlberg applies the explanations of amor from Alanus de Insulis who “defines amor, “in the strict sense,” as cupidity, but also as charity, as the Holy Spirit, as Christ, and, most importantly, as “natural affection”” (12). The natural affection is the love of God which in the words of Reason is what the Lover should pursue. Reason tells the Lover that compared to the love of God, other kinds of love, such as friendship (72), the love for Fortune (74) and the love between animals which is created for propagation, are all not worthy being pursued (88). Reason criticizes that even the love between the animals is better than the one between the Lover and the rose: “You have embarked upon a far more foolish enterprise in the love that you have undertaken, and you
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would be better off abandoning it if you wish to seek what is good for you” (89). The Lover’s love for the rose can do nothing but harm him (88). Dahlberg concludes: “the Lover’s desire for the rose is the classic form of cupidity, a love for earthly object for its own sake rather than for the sake of God” (15). Hence such kind of love is foolish and is not worth pursuing.
This chapter which begins with Reason’s advice to Fair Welcome also suggests the connection between Jean and Chaucer. Fleming in “Jean de Meun and the Ancient Poets” emphasizes that there are two classical poets who provide the intellectual contents in the Rose: Ovid and Boethius (85). In Fleming’s explanation, both
Guillaume and Jean take Ovid’s Art of Love as their models for their parts in the Rose, (86). In terms of being “Ovidian,” Jean’s difference from Guillaume is that Jean applies Boethius’s philosophy to the art of love (89). “Jean’s first and most powerful move is to subject this ‘Ovid’ to the scrutiny of Boethius, which is the effect of the long dialogue between Reason and the Lover that begins Jean’s continuation of the poem” (Fleming 89). For Jean, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy offers him an agent that turns the eroticism in Ovid’s Art of Love into a philosophical and moral theme (88). Furthermore in the Rose, Jean talks about people’s relationship with Fortune: “It is that people that benefit and profit from Fortune when she is perverse and unfavorable than when she is gentle and gracious” (74). Reason takes the love of Fortune as an example to present all kinds of love and proves to Fair Welcome that his love for the rose is unworthy. The connection between Jean and Boethius shows another great influence of the Rose on Chaucer. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer also elaborates the relationship between free will and Fortune which he derives from Boethius through his two protagonists. Both Jean and Chaucer take Boethius’s philosophy as a medium for their portrayals of “love”. The greatest difference between Jean and Chaucer lies in their female characters. The Old Woman
in the Rose only speaks ill of women, but Criseyde in Chaucer’s writing presents herself as an individual with the ability to judge and act while facing
Fortune/patriarchy.
The chapter entitled “The Advice of Reason” is the first chapter written by Jean after the allegorical story of Guillaume. Reason gives many instructions and implies that the love of cupidity is not as noble and worthy as the love of God. Later, through other characters, Jean further explains why. In the chapter “The Advice of the Old Woman,” Jean portrays the character, the Old Woman, to show that women have been the crucial problem in the issues about love. The Old Woman tells Fair Welcome that she wants to teach him “the game of love” and gives her advice when Fair Welcome answers with a silent consent (200). She tells Fair Welcome that in the game of love, he should never be generous:
Never be generous, fair son; bestow your heart in several places, never just in one, and neither give it nor lend it but sell it very dearly and always to the highest bidder…if you wish to choose a lover, I advise you to give your love to the handsome young man who values you so highly, but let it not be fixed…It is good to frequent rich men if their hearts are not mean and miserly and if you are skilled at fleecing them. (201-02)
The Old Woman even provides many examples that explain that if a person has only one lover, he or she only suffers from tragical consequences like Dido, Phyllis, Oenone and Medea (203-04).
The reason why the Old Woman tells the stories of those women is not only to instruct Fair Welcome to play the game of love. The Old Woman’s real purpose is to elaborate what she thinks about women. Earlier before the Old Woman starts to give advices, she talks about her own past: “[W]hen I was your [Fair Welcome’s] age, I had been as wise as I am concerning the game of love—for I was very beautiful then,
but now I must sigh and weep when I gaze at my ravaged face” (197). In Jean’s writing, because the Old Woman had once been a beauty who had experienced the game of love, she knows exactly the skills and tricks women have in the love affairs. Superficially, the skills and tricks depicted by the Old Woman are devices to praise how women are good at the love game. Yet as a matter of fact, those descriptions only serve to present many negative images of women. First of all, in response to the stories of foolish women who give their love to only one man, the Old Woman suggests that a woman should have several lovers so that she can bring great sufferings to men as their revenge on deceitful traitors to love (204).
Later the Old Woman starts to describe what women should do to win the game of love. For example, the Old Woman thinks that women “should be familiar with games and songs, but avoid quarrels and strife. If she is not beautiful, she should enhance her appearance; the ugliest must be the most elegantly attired” (204). She suggests that women’s tears are only “traps” (206). Also women should always pay attention to their table manners and even their breath (205). The Old Woman emphasizes that women should not wait too long before they take pleasures and should not live a “cloistered” life, either (207-08). After this, the Old Woman begins to speak out about more antipathetic aspects of women. She advises that women should never love poor men: “she will be interested only in what she can get. Any woman who does not fleece her lover of everything he has is mad. (211)” It seems that in the words of the Old Woman, women should be or are all very avaricious and evil. The Old Woman even proposes that if a woman senses that she can get nothing more from her lover, she should ask him for a loan and promise to return it one day but never will (212). Even more, women should be good at the skill of pretention: “And so a woman, if she is not a simpleton, should pretend to be alarmed, to tremble with fear and be tormented with worry whenever she is about to receive her lover”
(212). She uses Venus as an example to show women’s pretension and speaks of Helen to point out that women are usually the “cause of battles” (213-14).
The examples and bad images of women provided by the Old Woman are quite lengthy. In her conclusion, the Old Woman says to Fair Welcome that women are not trustworthy: “Women have very poor judgment, and I was a true woman” (223). Women in the Old Woman’s portrayal are just antipathetic and greedy. Lee Patterson in “Feminine Rhetoric and the Politics of Subjectivity: La Vieille4 and the Wife of Bath” points out the great influence of the Rose, especially the character ‘La vielle’ on Chaucer’s works: “If the Middle Ages is a culture of the book, then for vernacular writers its central text is the Roman de la Roes: to trace the Roman’s influence is virtually to write the history of late-medieval poetry. And of no writer is this more true than Geoffrey Chaucer” (316). Furthermore, within all the characters created by Chaucer, the Wife of Bath is the best model which reveals Chaucer’s inheritance from the Rose (Patterson 316). In the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the fate of the knight who
involves in a rape is decided by the noble ladies in the court. Chaucer deals with the question of whether women have poor judgment or not in the Wife of Bath’s Tale. Also the Wife of Bath talks about how women love men’s wealth and how greedy they are: “Somme seyde women loven richesse/ Somme seyde honour, somme seyden
jolymesse/ Somme riche array, sommeseyden lust abedde” (925-27).
In Patterson’s viewpoint, the Old Woman in Jean’s the Rose and the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are the best examples to show a particular
characteristic of the female figures in the literary discourse in the Middle Ages. They represent the position of women in the Middle Ages: “Throughout the Middle Ages, women were denied social conceptualization and even existence as social, and historical, beings” (341). From the similarities between the Old Woman in the Rose
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and the Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales, one can see the influence of the Rose on Chaucer’s writing. Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde also deals with whether women have good judgment or whether women are all selfish and greedy through the heroine, Criseyde. The differences between the Old Woman, the Wife of Bath and Criseyde present how Chaucer develops his ideas about women. What the Old Woman says in the Rose only lower women’s position but the Wife of Bath achieves to speak out “the right of selfhood” (341). Criseyde, set between the antipathetic Old Women and powerful Wife of Bath, is a female character which shows Chaucer’s ambiguous position on the “women question”.
With Patterson’s observations, the great influence brought by the Rose on the questions about women in the Middle Ages is clearly explained. Besides the Old Woman, Jean also conveys his ideas about women through other characters in the Rose. In the chapter “Nature and Genius,” Genius offers to console Nature’s troubles and finds the solutions for her. In his reply, Genius says: “it is doubtless true that women are easily moved to anger. Virgil himself, who knew a great deal about them, testifies that no woman was ever so steadfast as not to be fickle and inconstant” (252). Not only Genius judges women as fickle and inconstant. Elsewhere in the Rose, such as in the chapter “The Advice of Friend,” Friend also tells the Lover that women are all “unchaste,” no matter in thoughts or in action (140). Through the words of Friend, Jean even criticizes marriage as “an evil bond” (135).
With all the characters telling the bad images and antipathetic pictures of women, Jean de Meun leads the story of courtly love by Guillaume de Lorris onto a different path. And the indisputable popularity of the Rose in the Middle Ages encourages many interpretations as well as debates. Among all the issues, the ones about “love and marriage, gender and sexuality,” as Huot emphasizes, bring about most attention as well discussions. Aside from Geoffrey Chaucer, who adapts the Old Woman for his
With of Bath, there is another writer who responds to the misogyny-oriented
portrayals of women in The Romance of the Rose and makes her own argumentations: Christine de Pizan.
In fact, the misconceptions of women Christine de Pizan fights against have a long history. King and Rabil give a summary of it. The ancient Greeks understand female nature based on Aristotle’s thoughts in duality about males and females. According to Aristotle, “the male principle in nature is as sociated with active, formative and perfected characteristics, while the female is passive, material and deprived, desiring the male in order to become complete” (328). Aristotle’ dualism reveals a predominantly assumption that women possess inferior principles while men have superior qualities (King and Rabil x). According to King and Rabil, such
dualism also has a social and political significance. “If the male principle was superior and the female inferior, then in the household, as in the state, men should rule and women must be subordinate” (xi). Although Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, portrays in his Republic where men and women do not have to be separated into superior and inferior groups, the ideal of gender equality remains in his imagination while in reality the subordinate situation of women remains (King and Rabil xi). And such Aristotelian thoughts of women’s nature become the basic perceptions in the Middle Ages (King and Rabil xii).
The concept of women’s being subordinate to men does not only flourish in Aristotelian thoughts. Later in Rome’s republic, the term “father” carries more than its biological meaning. It suggests the father of the family who “owned the household’s property and, indeed, its human members” (King and Rabil xii). The idea of “father” follows the traditional views of women as men’s subordinate objects. In such a fashion, women are further legitimately limited in their rights to inherit the property of their fathers or husbands. The laws limiting women’s rights to the property become
a means of excluding women from civil and public society. Under the influence of Roman laws, “women [have] only a private existence and [possess] no public personality” (King and Rabil xiii).
Besides the classical discussion, there is the biblical discussion which shows the negative nature of women. In Genesis, the fact that Eve is created from Adam’s rib is clearly written, therefore the women’s subordinate position is well secured.
Furthermore, Eve is presented as the origin of human fall because she is seduced by the evil serpent:
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat... And the man said: The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat…Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. (Gen. 3: 7-17)
This passage is well known as ‘the fall of mankind’ and many theologians such as Tertullian and Thomas Aquinas maintains that Eve should be responsible for the act since she is easily seduced by the evil and deceived her husband. “From the pulpit, moralists and preachers for centuries conveyed to women the guilt that they bore for original sin” (King and Rabil xiv). Given both philosophical and biblical evidences, women’s subordinate position to men is very secure.
Through the role of Christine de Pizan as “the other voice” in the Middle Ages, one can see that during the time when the misogyny tradition has its prevalence, there
are always voices speaking for women. Chaucer, whose famous work The Canterbury Tales stands as a best seller with The Romance of the Rose in the Middle Ages, surely deals with the “women question,” too. Many critics develop their analyses of
Chaucer’s position on the “women question” based on The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and Suzan Crane is one of them. In Crane’s “Alison’s Incapability and Poetic Instability in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, she shows how Chaucer struggles between the two genres, romance and anti-feminist satire or, to be further addressed, the struggle between feminist and anti-feminist positions. Crane argues that both romance and satire contain many conventions about feminine ability and how they exercise their abilities to deal with “heart and hearth” and mentions that Chaucer often “illustrates the conventions of these two genres regarding feminine power” (21).
Crane suggests that in romance women always exercise their sovereignty in a way beneficial to men while anti-feminist satire centers on negative femininity such as mercenary dependence and overbearing sexuality (21). While anti-feminists would argue that women’s emotional sovereignty is harmful, aggressive, and falsely
exercised, the poet of romance would say that women’s sovereignty actually derives from native feminine virtues (21). The question of whether women should have sovereignty or not in Chaucer’s the Wife of Bath’s Tale echoes one of Christine’s troubles about why women cannot get involved in many public affairs (Christine 63). Should women have the sovereignty or do women have the mind and experiences to participate public affairs? The question remains the same: Is a woman equal to a man? When Chaucer in the Wife of Bath’s Tale keeps shifting the narrative tone from an anti-feminist satire to a romance and back forth, he is trying to deal with the major “women question” in a very careful way. Chaucer’s struggle between two genres, according to Crane, is also his struggle about how he would answer the “women question.” For Chaucer, the shift is a strategy to avoid giving specific answers to the
‘“women question”. When Chaucer is ambivalent about anti-feminist satire and romance, he presents his ambivalent position on the “women question.” Sheila Delany in her “Techniques of Alienation in Troilus and Criseyde” also points out how
Chaucer uses the technique of alienation to “goad the audience toward critical judgment of the conventions of medieval romance, and of character and action in the poem” (30). It can be seen that Chaucer is also aware of the complexity and
ambivalence of making a voice for women.
In Crane’s opinion, even Christine choose the way of obedience because sometimes women writers can only defend their sex by partly accepting cultural models of female submission (21). Is Chaucer, as a male author, also troubled by the misogyny tradition prevailing in the Middle Ages as Christine is? If so, does Chaucer decide to speak for women as Christine does and grant women the equal opportunity to men? Or Chaucer chooses another way to present his position on the “women question”? To discuss Chaucer’s dealing with the patriarchal system and the misogyny tradition could be a huge task, but Larry Scanlon offers a clue to view Chaucer’s position on women in a very different way. To see how Criseyde reacts to Fortune is to see how Criseyde is portrayed as an individual woman. With Boethius’s
explanation of the relationship between Fortune and free will, Chaucer presents that both Troilus and Criseyde show that they have the ability to exercise their free will while facing Fortune. In terms of free will and individuality, Criseyde is no different from Troilus. But is Chaucer’s Criseyde also one of the good wives who fit the descriptions of Christine’s ideal model: to have good judgment, to manage the household well and have possession of great minds? While the misogynist traditions derived from the religious aspect seem to be fully solved by Christine de Pizan when she turns the focus back to ‘morality and virtue,’ it is noteworthy to see that how Chaucer, as a contemporary with Christine, deals with the “women question” and the
complexity of gendered issues through the reactions of Troilus and Criseyde to Fortune.
It is noteworthy that Chaucer does not only show his struggle for the “women question” in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, but also his most famous tragedy, Troilus and Criseyde. In his portrayal of Criseyde, Chaucer presents himself as another kind of ‘voice’ other than Christine de Pizan. Larry Scanlon in “Sweet
Persuasion: The Subject of Fortune in Troilus and Criseyde” offers an interesting view about how the idea of Fortune in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is portrayed as a symbol of patriarchy: “it would seem that Fortune’s ultimate effect in this poem is to produce ideological control, to undergird the poem’s final transcendence with a clear-eyed political recognition of the inevitability of patriarchal power” (223). In Scanlon’s words, both Troilus and Criseyde are all in the hands of Fortune, the patriarchal system. Delany also mentions that even Chaucer is constrained by the patriarchal system: “Chaucer, too, as a bourgeois in the aristocratic court, was constrained by dominant (masculine) power, as were aristocratic women (72). The tradition of misogyny which Christine fights so hard against is also part of the patriarchal system. How Chaucer represents his most famous heroine, Criseyde, to face the ‘generalized, mystifying, and hence invincible hostility’ in patriarchy (Dickson 77) is worthy of further discussions.
The thesis begins with the introduction of The Romance of the Rose and its great influence on Christine de Pizan and Chaucer. It then moves on to the introduction of Christine’s The Book of the City of Ladies brings forth how professional writers in the Middle Ages such as Christine and Chaucer are troubled by and deal with the “women question”. The last part concentrates on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. By closely analyzing how Troilus and Criseyde react to Fortune/patriarchy on the basis of Boethius’s philosophy about the relationship between free will and fortune, one can
Chapter Two
The Defense of Women in The Book of the City of Ladies
More than a century later after The Romance of the Rose is finished by Jean de Meun, Christine de Pizan starts a series of debates with the supporters of the Rose. Christine de Pizan in 1405 publishes her Christine’s Vision as a remark of how she starts her career as a professional writer: “Between the year 1399 when I began writing and the present year, 1405, during which I am still writing, I have compiled fifteen major works” (Hult 8-9). Christine declares that she begins with a “lighter nature” such as the topic of love and courtliness in her God of Love’s Letter in 1399 and later moves to more sophisticated ones (9). In 1402 she writes the six-thousand line Long Road of Learning, in which Christine elaborates her comments on France’s “war-torn” situation” in need of leadership (10). In 1403, she writes The Book of Fortune’s Transformation, in which she talks about the influence of Fortune on the basis of her own life experience (10). Furthermore, the range of Christine’s writing is not limited to courtly and philosophical sorts. Christine’s works also reach the
political area. From 1405 to 1414, Christine writes Book of the Body Politics, the Book of Arms and of Chivalry, the Lamentation on the Ills of France and the Book of Peace to convey her own political viewpoints (10-11).
As a professional writer, Christine deals with all kinds of issues. Due to the popularity of the Rose in fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Christine is also greatly influenced by the work. In 1399, Christine makes her position of opposing the negative images about women in the Rose through the voice of Cupid in her God of Love’s Letter (12). Two years later, with the praise from Jean de Montreuil for the Rose, Christine decides to start a series of debates with the Rose’s defenders. In the debates, Christine mainly argues against Reason’s immoral statements, the Old Woman’s improper lessons for young ladies and Genius’s instructions for men to flee
from women (12). After the debates, Christine writes The Book of the City of Ladies which is set to be a model to show that it is in terms of virtue and morality, not of sexual difference that some people are superior to others.
In the very beginning of The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine talks about how she is troubled by the prevailing misogynist traditions in the Middle Ages. Being an intellectual woman, she is quite troubled by the negative assumption or even beliefs about women’s evil natures. The fact that The Romance of the Rose by Jean de Meun also includes abundant classical materials and its being one of the best sellers at Christine’s time suggests that her trouble may be quite common in the Middle Ages. In Christine’s thoughts, what misogynists say or write is all formed by those learned men as famous scholars or philosophers. Hence, she finds herself in a very difficult situation—could those intellectual men be wrong? Or are the natures of women just like what they say (4)?
The history of misogyny can be traced back to the time of Aristotle, but the negative conceptions of women in the Middle Ages are aroused by one of the most popular books at that time, The Romance of the Rose. In the Rose, many negative portrayals of women are elaborated through many characters with strong images such as the Old Woman and Genius. As mentioned, Christine de Pizan, troubled by its popularity and all the misogynistic discourses in it, writes The Book of the City of Ladies as a response to show that women are not all like those pictured in the Rose. There are many similarities as well as differences between The Romance of the Rose and The Book of the City of Ladies. Both of them are indispensable for the discussions about how medieval people treat questions about women. The misogynistic
descriptions of women in the Rose and the responses from Christine de Pizan to it give the “women question” in the medieval period a clear background for the further discussion of Chaucer’s position on the “women question.”
Maureen Quilligan in her The Allegory Female Authority introduces the life of Christine de Pizan:
Married, apparently quite happily, since age fifteen to a courtier-bureaucrat like her father, she was widowed at twenty-five and thereby left responsible for the support of three young children and of her mother….Widowhood brought with it not only the need to take charge of her own destiny, but also the freedom to do so. (1)
Quilligan suggests that Christine’s life experience is one of the reasons for her being a professional writer (1).5 Christine’s works have a wild range of topics. She st writes books about courtly love such as God of Love’s Letter and later gets involved with political issues in her Book of the Body Politics, the Book of Arms and of Chivalry, the Lamentation on the Ills of France and the Book of Peace. In all her works, Christine shows that being a professional writer, she not only specifically deals with the
question about women; but also concerned about the political issues about the country. Also, it is due to the sense of being a professional person of letters that Christine decides to start a series of debates as her responses to The Romance of the Rose.
In Christine’s debates on the misogynist arguments in the Rose, she points out two major issues. First, Christine concentrates her objections to the characters created by Jean de Meun which carry all kinds of negative images of women, like the Old Woman. Second, Christine remarks that the misogynist concepts in the Rose may be dangerous for both men and women (Brown-Grant 11). She believes that the
anti-feminism provoked in the Rose could lead to a disharmony between the sexes since it is quite immoral and anti-Christian (Brown-Grant 10). Brown-Grant suggests that Christine mainly tries to argue against the generalizations that castigate women
5
For the life of Christine de Pizan, see also Charity Canon Willard’s Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works, A Biography. New York: Persea Books, 1984.
(13).6 Although Christine tries very hard to attack the misogynist thoughts in the Rose with its supporters, she does not place women in the center of the argument. Christine in her debates about the Rose focuses on the issues “condemned by Christian morality—obscenity, blasphemy, immorality, pornography, deceit, carnality—that largely frame her criticisms of the text” (Hult 13).
Brownlee in his “Discourse of the Self: Christine de Pizan and The Romance of the Rose” from another aspect makes explicit analyses of the position Christine stands on to argue against the defenders of the Rose: “She attributes to literary discourse an inescapably exemplary character: literary texts by definition present themselves as models to be imitated, in behavior and in speech” (253). Such a moral notion about literary discourse is the point Christine takes to criticize the Rose. Most importantly, presenting literary works as models for people to follow in act as well as in speech is also Christine’s “literary vocation” and her “female authorial identity” (254).
With the sense of responsibility to write literary works as models for people to follow, Christine de Pizan writes one of her most famous works: The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405. Christine’s main purpose of writing this work is to find solutions to the questions about women which have troubled her for a long time. Being an
intellectual woman, she is quite confused by the negative assumptions or even beliefs about women’s evil natures:
One day as I was sitting in my study surrounded by books of different kinds… My mind had grown weary as I had spent the day struggling with the weighty tomes of various authors whom I had studied for a long
time…why on earth that so many different men, both clerks and others have
6
See Blamires, Women Defamed, 1-15; and Three Medieval Views, 1-27. See also Katherine Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996); R. Howard Bloch, ‘Medieval misogyny’, Representation 20 (1987), 1-24; and Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
said and continue to say and write such awful, damning things about women in their ways…that female nature is wholly given up to vice. (5-6)
Christine reads many works that convey many “awful and damning things” about women (6).7 Christine asks why so many well-known scholars all talk about women in such an insulting way. One of the authors Christine reads may be Jean de Meun. Since Christine presents examples to show that women are indeed constant and have good judgment in responses to Jean’s evil portrayals of women through the words of the Old Woman.
Christine solves such confusion by describing a dream in which she is visited by three ladies: Lady Reason, Rectitude, and Justice. When Christine is in despair, she sees there is light coming up to her lap: “I looked up to see where the light had come from and all at once saw before me three ladies, crowned and of majestic appearance, whose faces shone with a brightness that lit up me and everything else in the place” (7-8). While Christine is still stunned by the bright appearances of the three ladies, Lady Reason speaks out why they show up to her: “Our aim is to help you get rid of those misconceptions which have clouded your mind and made you reject what you know and believe in fact to be the truth just because so many other people have come out with the opposite opinion” (8). Later Reason tells Christine that there is a more important reason for their visit. The three ladies tell Christine that the female sex has been defenseless for a quite long time and therefore they want noble ladies and valiant women can be protected in the future. Hence, they want Christine to create a building with strong wall, “sturdy and impregnable”. Furthermore, only women with good reputation and virtues can be granted to enter the city (11).
It is obvious that Christine also writes The Book of the City of Ladies in the form of a dream allegory like the Rose. Choosing the same genre is not the only similarity
7
between Christine and the authors of the Rose. In the following conversations between the protagonist, Christine herself, and the three ladies, Christine also writes many examples to show her purpose of setting models for women in the Middle Ages to get rid of the “misconceptions”. In the beginning of her conversation with Reason, Christine asks her why so many authors give slanderous judgments on women: “Is it Nature that makes them do this? Or, if it is out of hatred” (17)? Reason replies: “Some of those who criticized women did so with good intentions: they wanted to rescue men who had already fallen into the clutches of depraved and corrupt women…They therefore attacked all women in order to persuade men to regard the entire sex as an abomination” (17). But are these good intentions good to women? Listening to Reason’s reply, Christine at first thinks that Reason agrees with men’s abusive
descriptions of women. Yet Reason further explains that good intentions cannot justify wrong doings: “If I killed you with good intentions and out of stupidity, would I be in the right (17)? Reason also uses Ovid as the example to show that the men who pass slanderous judgments on women are those who have affairs with wanton women (20-23).
After this, Christine asks Reason then if it is true that female children are the result of the “weakness or deficiency in the mother’s womb” (22). Reason provides Christine an answer from a biblical story: “He [God] put Adam to sleep and created the body of women from one of his ribs. This was a sign that she was meant to be his companion standing at his side, whom he would love as if there were one flesh, not his servant lying at his feet” (23). By telling the story of the creation of human, both men and women, Christine with her own interpretation of the biblical story tries to say that men and women are flesh of the same kind. Furthermore, Christine quotes Cicero by saying that “man should not be subject to woman…because it is wrong to be subject to one who is your inferior” (23). Reason’s reply to Cicero’s discriminatory
thought is the central theme in the whole work: “It is he or she who is the more virtuous who is the superior being: human superiority or inferiority is not determined by sexual difference but by the degree to which one has perfected one’s nature and morals” (23). Here, through Reason, Christine conveys the most important message to her medieval readers, especially female ones: it is the superiority of “virtue” which distinguishes the differences between people, not the nature of one’s sex. While the sexual difference makes men and women different, the morality and virtue can offer them an equal stand.
Aside from writing her story in the form of a dream allegory, Christine also provides many examples as Jean de Meun does in the Rose. In The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine lists many virtuous women, both religious and secular, to show that women are not all wanton or greedy as the Old Woman portrays in the Rose. There are numbers of examples. For instance, Christine mentions another author who says that “women are by nature weak-minded and childish, which explains why they get so well with children…because they’re acting out of ignorance…rather than a natural instinct to be gentle” (25). Reason unfastens Christine’s confusion by telling the story about Jesus Christ’s answer to the question “who is the greatest one” among all his apostles. “He called a child to him and laid his hand on its head saying, “I tell you that he who is humble and meek like a child will be the greatest among you” (25). In addition to the biblical story, Christine also describes pious women in the religious history as great models to be followed, such as Saint Catherine who refuses to marry and devotes her entire life to God (203).
Besides those religious models, Christine writes about more secular examples to answer and explain all kinds of ideas against women. In the middle of her
conversation with Reason, Christine asks if women are naturally endowed with good judgment: “can women distinguish between what is right and the wrong thing” (78)?
This part responds to what the Old Woman says in the Rose: “Women have very poor judgment” (223). Reason lists several women with good sense and judgment such as Gaia Cirilla, Queen Dido and Opis, Queen of Crete (81-86). For those women who give great love to their parents, Rectitude mentions Drypetina, Hipsipyle, and Claudine (103-05). After that, Christine points out to Rectitude that many authors accuse women of being the main cause of failed marriages. Those authors claim that women’s “shrewish, vengeful nagging” becomes a “constant hell” to men. Therefore, in order to run away from such suffering and trouble, men are advised to not marry at all. Most importantly, no women are faithful and constant to their spouses and so marriages are not worthy to pursue (108). This resonates to Jean’s accusation that women cannot be constant in the Rose. First Rectitude replies to Christine by declaring a simple fact that all those texts which tell bad images of women are not written by women (109). Later Rectitude gives a long list of good wives who maintain the status of their marriage in a good condition. On the list are Queen Hypsicratea, Empress Triaria, Queen Artemisia, and King Adrastus’s daughter, Argia (110-16). Christine is not the first one to make the moral lessons clear by giving a lot of examples. According to Brown-Grant, Christine’s predecessors, Petrarch and
Boccaccio, also use the same strategy of delivering moral lessons. In Brown-Grant’s summary, the purpose of Petrarch’s writing about the examples of the past is to encourage people to pursue the “earthly glory,” while Boccaccio’s is to admonish the idea that people should always avoid every chance of falling (137). Therefore, in Boccaccio’s Famous Women, he writes about many bad women and declares that he is actually doing the female sex a favor so that they are rescued from historical oblivion (139). Although Christine also presents many virtuous women as examples like Petrarch and Boccaccio have done, she does not merely write an epitome or in a tone of castigating the falling race. Instead Christine sets up a guidebook like Jean de
Meun does, trying to offer a different viewpoint of women’s inferior position.
Christine’s dream allegory about virtuous women shows that women can also be moral and virtuous humans as good men are. Lynne Dickson, in her “Deflection in the Mirror: Feminine Discourse in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” points out that Christine with her debates on the Rose and other works tries to offer medieval women another mirror to look upon themselves except for the one set up by patriarchy
(64-65):
Reason presents Christine with a mirror, offering her a more positive self-image…this mirror is The Book of the City of Ladies—the first history of women.8 Throughout this book medieval women would find
representations of the feminine that resisted the definition that discourses like antifeminism would thrust on them. (65)
These representations lie in Christine’s numerous examples from the past as well as religious history. Christine expects that through those good models, women can finally realize that those misconceptions are by no means objective but subjective in a male-dominated society (Dickson 64).
It is surprising to see that there are not just women in Christine’s long lists of good examples. Christine also talks about men who trust their wives and thus lead good lives such as Emperor Justinian, Belisarius, and King Alexander (128-30). There are many other virtuous women from the past as well as in the present in Christine’s work such as Judith, Queen Esther, the Sabine women and Verturia (131-38). The examples in The Book of the City of Ladies are numerous and therefore it stops for fear of digression. Christine writes about so many good women who love their parents, keep faithful to their husbands or maintain their pious minds for the religious purpose to show that there is a chance for women to be good and virtuous. The examples she
8
represents in the text serve to confirm the idea that Christine wants to emphasize: it is not the natural sex which decides one’s superiority or inferiority; it is ‘virtue” that makes one higher than the other (23). Thus Christine with her own strong evidence successfully gives convincing ideas that women can also be treated as human beings in terms of virtue and morality.
In debating The Romance of the Rose, Christine emphasizes that a writer should take the responsibility of being a moral instructor and that is what she tries to achieve in The Book of the City of Ladies. Christine as a female writer does establish a text with instructive and inspiring messages. As a female author as well as a professional writer, Christine feels the urge and necessity to defend women from those
misogynistic conceptions in the Rose. Christine deals with the “women question” by offering many examples of virtuous from the past and in the present, both secular and religious. By proving the possibility of women being virtuous, Christine shows that women in terms of virtue can be equal to men. From Christine’s doubts and answers, one can see that the inferior position of women in the Middle Ages actually come from those works written by male authors such as Jean de Meun. Christine through her works shows that it is possible for women to attend the same position as men in terms of virtue and morality. Since for Christine, it is the most important thing for women to possess virtues, she later writes The Book of the Three Virtues, or the Treasure of the City of Ladies, in which she gives moral instructions for women to follow. According to Hult, this is the turning point where Christine stops her career as a defender for women (10).
The popularity of The Romance of the Rose brings the “women question” into hot debates and The Book of the City of Ladies in response to it reveals the possibility of women’s sharing the same equality with men. Christine de Pizan chooses the importance of virtue to defend for women, then how does Chaucer as a contemporary
of Christine and under the influence of the Rose react to the debates about whether women should have the right to be considered as humans like men? As it is pictured in Christine’s description that she is troubled by some great literary works, it is very possible that Chaucer also encounters such confusion in his course of being a professional writer. For Chaucer, the “women question” is a more complicated issue than it is for Christine de Pizan. Like Christine, Chaucer is also troubled by the question about what the relationship between men and women would be if women attained the same position in society as men. But does Chaucer feel the urge to defend women as Christine does or he feels no need to do so? And if Chaucer does, what manners does he take to present his position on this “women question”? Does Chaucer also solve his trouble with emphasis on virtue and morality, or does he choose a very different method?
Chapter Three
Chaucer’s Position on the “Women Question”: the Gendered Responses in Troilus and Criseyde
In The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan responds to the
misogynistic ideas in The Romance of the Rose and argues that women should have equality and the same opportunity as men do in terms of “virtue” and “morality”. Chaucer as a contemporary of Christine also finds himself in the aura of the debates about the “women question” in the Middle Ages. As a man, Chaucer may not feel the urge to defend the female sex, but he does engage with the misogynistic ideology of his time and society. According to Derek Pearsall, he is indeed “troubled” by –the “women question”:
A particularly insistent question for him is that of women’s freedom and independence and their capacity to judge and act on the basis of a fully developed moral consciousness. All these faculties were systematically denied to women in the Middle Ages, and Chaucer is troubled both by the inhuman stupidity of the denial and by the consequences to men if the rights of women as individuals are allowed. (138)
It seems natural for Christine as a woman to take the position of defending women. Chaucer as a man, however, is still uncertain about whether women should be regarded as individuals in his society. And what may be the consequences if women are regarded as individuals as men are? If women are individuals, then the position of men and women will suffer from great changes. Chaucer is also very concerned about the issue. One can look at the famous women characters in Chaucer’s writing such as the Wife of Bath for clues or even answers about how Chaucer responds to the “women question”. In addition to characters like the Wife of Bath, Chaucer’s other female characters such as his most famous tragic heroine, Criseyde, can serve as other
examples to show the poet’s hesitation and ambiguity on the issues of women. Compared to the With of Bath, Criseyde possesses more complex images. For example, Criseyde is a fine lady who attracts Troilus at his first sight but in the end becomes an unfaithful traitor to their love. Therefore, it seems to me that Criseyde offers more materials to define Chaucer’s hesitant and ambiguous position on “women question” than the Wife of Bath.
Christine de Pizan responds to the misogynistic conceptions in The Romance of the Rose by offering secular as well as religious models in the past and at present. The examples include the Amazons who lead the country by themselves after their
husbands are dead (37) and Anastasia who piously takes care of many martyrs (229). Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde shows the gendered responses to Fortune as his response to the tradition of misogyny through his two protagonists. According to Larry Scanlon, Fortune in Troilus and Criseyde represents a social system, the
patriarchal system--- It manifests itself as the power to trap both Troilus and Criseyde (211). According to Scanlon, Fortune in Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy represents the limits of the hegemonic power of the ruling class (211). Chaucer further defines the function of Fortune in social terms.Chaucer talks about the philosophical conception of Fortune in terms of society and compares Fortune to the patriarchal system. When Chaucer presents the love between Troilus and Criseyde as a mishap designed by Fortune, he implies that the lovers are actually trapped by the patriarchal power (211). Through the different and gendered responses of Troilus and Criseyde to Fortune, Chaucer elaborates on his own interpretation of patriarchy and his positions on the “women question”. Troilus, as a man, in Chaucer’s writing does not feel the strong necessity or urge to respond to Fortune/patriarchy. Instead of confronting Fortune/patriarchy face to face, most of time he just accepts its designation and follows it with unyielding will. On the other hand, Criseyde as a woman feels very
different about Fortune as patriarchy. While Christine asserts that women can choose what kind of people they want to be like in terms of virtue and morality, Chaucer presents the matter of “choice” in another way. Through Criseyde, Chaucer shows that women’s choices lie in their inner freedom and individuality to act and judge. Even so, Chaucer is still hesitant about whether the female sex should gain complete freedom and be considered as individuals as men are. Therefore, the decisions made by
Criseyde, though they seem to be made through careful and discreet thinking, turn out to suit what will benefit the patriarchal system. In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer offers his heroine, Criseyde, an equal stand to show her free will and individuality. Although Criseyde’s free will is so limited that she is unable to subvert
Fortune/patriarchy, Chaucer’s intention of portraying women as individuals is
discernible. Hence, Criseyde shows that the poet takes a quite ambiguous position on what consequences will be brought out if women are free to make their own decisions as individuals.
In Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer shows the way Criseyde exercises her free will and individuality while confronting Fortune as the patriarchal system. Criseyde does not resemble most of the good women in The Book of the City of Ladies. Criseyde is not one of those who bring great skills to the world, such as Pamphile who discovers the skill of gathering silk from worms or Minerva who invents the technique of making weapons from iron and steel (66-74). Does Chaucer mean to portray Criseyde as merely an unfaithful woman or does he try to set a different model to point out that women are also individuals? To elaborate Chaucer’s intention of writing a heroine as an individual, it is necessary to return to Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy since in it the most important element of an individual is his/her free will. In
Consolation, Boethius gives clear explanation of the relationship between Fortune and free will. According to Boethius, even though God foresees all, people still have the
possession of free will: “For the nature of his knowledge… establishes a measure for everything, but owns nothing to later events. These things being so, the freedom of the will remains to mortals, inviolate.” (433) Most importantly, with free will, people can be defined as individuals.
The idea of Fortune in Chaucer’s writing derives from Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy in which Boethius has a conversationwith Lady
Philosophy about the relationship between human free will and Fortune. In response to Boethius’s questions, Lady Philosophy offers detailed definition of fortune, fate, providence and free will. According to Lady Philosophy, Providence is:
the divine reason itself, established in the highest ruler of all things that exist; but fate is a disposition inherent in movable things, through which providence binds all things together, each in its own proper ordering…so that this unfolding of temporal order being united in the foresight of the divine mind is providence, and the same unity when distributed and unfolded in time is called fate. (359)
In Boethius’s definition, Providence represents the transcendent, reasonable mind of deity and fate is its designation when it relates to things that are movable and alive. In other words, people can react to fate since it deals with temporal and moveable things while Providence remains high above all things as a mere watcher.
According to Boethius’s philosophy, although Providence foreknows all, the divine mind, God, is only an observer (433). Therefore people still possess free will under the reign of Providence. Taking a cue from Boethius’s philosophy, Chaucer elaborates on his ideas about free will when the fate of the story is a certain necessity.9 In Troilus and Criseyde, both protagonists represent different manners of how human
9
In Boethius’s philosophy, Providence foresees all and foreknowledge may be seen to be the sign of that necessity” (407).
