Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Carolyn Dinshaw)

Sigh. Here we go...

Starting with Chaucer’s rebuke to his scribe, Adam, for sullying his ms. through “rape”, Dinshaw sets up a grand allegory that informs the rest of her book (shades of Robertson!). The text is a female body, which readers rape when they “read like men”, appropriating the text for their own purposes, imposing totalizing meanings on the text without regard for the text’s own desires (sliding ambiguities and possibilities). However, a man may read as a man without reading like a man (and so raping the text). Chaucer is said to do this well, in that he both produces texts open to multiple readings and depicts female characters with a mindfulness to those characters’ own desires (Criseyde and the Wife of Bath, in particular). In contrast, prominent critics like Robertson and Donaldson read T&C like men by imposing on it a totalizing meaning that eliminates ambiguity, just as Troilus and Pandarus read like men by reading Criseyde as nothing but an opportunistic whore. Imposing man-reading on stories of women is stultifying (see Legend of Good Women). The Wife of Bath, on the other hand, is a female character who is aware of how men read, and so appropriates man-reading, both in approach and substance, for her own ends: her tale depicts an imagined world in which patriarchy is not so much replaced as widened, to make room for the respect and affirmation of the feminine will. Oh, and the Pardoner reads like a eunuch, or something.

Not much of a fan of Dinshaw, because she really pushes the whole “Geoffrey Chaucer is a rapist” thing far beyond the evidence: characterizing the historical debate over the enigmatic legal document as all too tangled and inconclusive to pursue at length, she nonetheless states that “a sexual incident involving Cecilia and Chaucer does seem to have taken place” (11). O RLY? Even the Riverside Chaucer--hardly the most extensive treatment of this problem--presents a strong enough case to negate her statement: while Cecilia released Chaucer of all responsibility for the raptus, another person involved in the case, John Grove, though similarly released by Cecilia, actually paid her money, apparently in settlement. This would seem to indicate that the primary responsibility for the incident--whatever it was--lay not with Chaucer but with Grove. Dinshaw knew this--she consulted the Riverside Chaucer--but she does not mention it. She apparently seems intent on linking Chaucer with rape, for no reason other than to lend her allegory a historicist sexiness. Bah.