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Chaucerian Narrative And Gothic Style: A Study Of The "Legend Of Good Women," The "Monk'S Tale," And The "House Of Fame."
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Chaucerian Narrative And Gothic Style: A Study Of The "Legend Of Good Women," The "Monk'S Tale," And The "House Of Fame."
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CHAUCERIAN NARRATIVE AND GOTHIC STYLE:
A STUDY OF THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN.
THE MONK1S TALE, AND THE HOUSE OF FAME
by
Antoinette Fleur Empringham
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
February 1973
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University Microfilms
300 North Zeeb Road
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106
A Xerox Education Company
73-7247
EMPRINGHAM, Antoinette Fleur, 1939-
CHAUCERIAN NARRATIVE AND GOTHIC STYLE:
A STUDY OF THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN,
THE MONK'S TALE, AND THE HOUSE OF FAME.
University of Southern California, Ph.D.,
1973
Language and Literature, general
University Microfilms, A X E R O X Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan
©Copyright by
ANTOINETTE FLEUR EMPRINGHAM
UNIVERSITY O F SO U TH E R N C A LIFO R N IA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 07
This dissertation, w ritten by
An.tQlne.t.te..i?I.eur...Einpr.ingham................
under the direction of h&V... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fu lfillm en t of requirements of
the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y
\ f Dean
D a te..
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
........
Chairman
PLEASE NOTE:
Some pages may have
indistinct print.
Filmed as received.
University Microfilms, A Xerox Education Company
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE 1
CHAPTER ONE: Chaucer and the Visual Arts:
A Justification
5
CHAPTER TWO: The Essence of Gothic 40
CHAPTER THREE: The Legend of Good Women
73
CHAPTER FOUR: The Monk's Tale
95
CHAPTER FIVE: The House of Fame 117
CHAPTER SIX: Conelusions 141
LIST OF WORKS CITED 145
ii
PREFACE
. . . although each art has thus Its own specific order
of impressions, and an untranslatable charm, while a
just apprehension of the ultimate differences of the
arts is the beginning of aesthetic criticism; yet it
is noticeable that, in its special mode of handling
its given material, each art may be observed to pass
into the condition of some other art, by what German
critics term an Anders-streben— a partial alienation
from its own limitations, through which the arts are
able, not indeed to supply the place of each other,
but reciprocally to lend each other new forces.
Walter Pater1
This study is ultimately about three poems— the
Legend of Good Women, the Monk's Tale, and the House of
Fame— that many have considered to be failures on the
part of their author, Geoffrey Chaucer. The fault in
; all three poems, moreover, has been ascribed primarily
to their form, as the survey of opinions at the begin-
; ning of Chapters Three, Four, and Five will indicate.
The preliminary material in Chapters One and Two estab
lishes the thesis which underlies my own examination:
that the onus of failure— a relative judgment in any
case— often lies with these poems' readers, not with
i
their maker.
My interest in this topic, as well as my method
ology, stems from an article by Robert M. Jordan on
1
"Chaucerian Narrative" in Beryl Rowland's Companion to
Chaucer Studies.2 Jordan's survey of scholarship ends
with the statement that
Although balance and proportion are not prominent
features of Chaucerian narrative, sufficient evidence
has accumulated in recent years to suggest that for
Chaucer writing was a compositional art, in which the
poet stood as a master of his materials, ordering
them according to principles that seemed right and
good to him. A major task confronting Chaucerians
today is to elucidate those principles, (p. 99)
Elsewhere in his article, Jordan suggests looking for
such principles in works of "extra-Chaucerian and extra-
literary scholarship" (p. 98); in following this sug
gestion, I have covered an area which Jordan does not
himself consider in his book-length study of Chaucerian
narrative, Chaucer and the Shape of Creation. By
including this material on the psychology of perception
in Chapters One and Two I have, I believe, supplied a
necessary step in all such attempts at explaining one
art through analogies with another.
My methodology is as follows. In Chapter One,
"Chaucer and the Visual Arts," I present the arguments
for and against analogies between the arts, and the
justification for such interdisciplinary pursuits con
tained in Ernst Gombrich's important work, in Art and
Illusion, on the nature of psychological predispositions
to form in the visual arts. In Chapter Two I set forth
those (admittedly generalized) formal characteristics
of Gothic style found in two- and three-dimensional
arts of the period; I then present a summary of theory
from Rudolf Arnheim's Visual Thinking which provides
the necessary basis, again psychological, for transposing
these characteristics of Gothic style from one medium to
another. In Chapters Three, Pour, and Five I examine
the Legend of Good Women, the Monk's Tale, and the
House of Fame in light of the principles set forth in
Chapter Two. Chapter Six contains my general conclusions
and observations.
All quotations from the above poems are taken from
The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by F. N. Robinson.^
4
FOOTNOTES
lMThe School of Giorgione," in The Renaissance:
Studies in Art and Poetry (1873; rpt. Sew York: New
American Library, 1959)» pp. 94-95.
2(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 85-102.
^2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961).
I. CHAUCER AND THE VISUAL ARTS:
i
A JUSTIFICATION
Literary criticism in the area of medieval studies
has, for the most part, been subject to the same New
Critical emphasis prevalent in other periods of litera
ture during the past thirty years. The focus has been
; firmly placed on the object— not on the poet or his
readers— and the interest has been to apply the same
I fixed, universal standards to Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight or the Canterbury Tales, for example, as to The
Prelude, The Wasteland, or the Cantos. In part, this
kind of criticism has corrected the distressing "sources
and analogues" emphasis which, carrying over from the
late nineteenth century, examined in great detail-what
medieval poets didn't write rather than what they did.
But by ignoring or minimizing the five-hundred-year gap
between the end of the Middle Ages and our own time,
New Criticism and its auxiliary movements have inevi
tably done an injustice to the literary works of an era
vastly different from our own in every imaginable way.1
Countermoveraents have, of course, sprung up in
defiance of the tenets of New Criticism. My particular
5
interest in the first part of this chapter is to examine
one such movement whose increasing prominence is indi
cated by the recently announced group topic for Chaucer-
ians planning to attend the 1972 Modern Language Associa
tion meeting in New York: "Chaucer and the Visual Arts."
First of all I would like to discuss briefly some recent
works by Chaucer critics who have chosen this approach;
I will then proceed to survey similar approaches in
periods other than the medieval. The purpose of this
survey is to show the inadequacies, for the most part,
of such an emphasis, as summarized by Rene Wellek.
Finally, I should like to propose an alternate way of
approaching literature through the visual arts: not
through drawing direct analogies between one medium and
another, but by indicating that through the introduction
of ah intermediate step— the psychology of perception-
certain analogies can become useful in the evaluation of
Middle English literature in general, and of Chaucerian
narrative in particular.
Three book-length studies have, within the last
fifteen years, attempted to draw analogies between
literature and the fine arts in their particular ap
proaches to Chaucer. The most successful of these,
Charles Muscatine's Chaucer and the French Tradition,
relies least on the comparison it makes between the
poet's combination of two distinct traditions in
writing— courtly and bourgeois— inherited from the
French, and the same combination of traditions in the
fine and plastic arts of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. Muscatine's conclusion— that Chaucer's
realism, seemingly a novelty in the context of medieval
and early renaissance English writings, is actually part
of "that international, Gothic tradition of which French
is the central literature"2— rests on an examination of
literary works, in particular the two halves of the
Roman de la Rose, which Chaucer is known to have studied
closely. The analogies which Muscatine makes between
one art and another, for example that in form the Canter
bury Tales follows the principles of juxtaposition and,
duality found in Gothic painting and architecture, serve
merely to illuminate and to lend breadth rather than
support to his argument.
Another attempt to draw analogies between literature
and art is D. W. Robertson's highly controversial A Pref
ace to Chaucer (1962), whose third chapter, entitled
"Late Medieval Style," includes a selective survey of
the fine arts in Western Europe from the twelfth through
the fourteenth centuries. Robertson describes some of
the differences between medieval and modern literature
as background for an approach to the poetry of Chaucer.
Each of the five chapters is therefore concerned "with
perspectives, with medieval attitudes and opinions which
may be thought to account in part for the peculiar char
acter of medieval literature."^ A major target of this
study is modern criticism, which is both irrelevant and
misleading when applied to medieval poetry. Robertson
offers instead an approach based primarily on his own
reading of medieval aesthetic theory. Augustine and his
successors taught that "all material is inferior to its
fabricator." A work of art, Robertson continues,
should thus lead us to appreciate the conception of the
artist, and this, like the beauty of nature itself,
c should lead us to a contemplation of the immutable
beauty which is its source. . . . [A] beautiful object
may be taken as a figurative expression representing a
principle which forms a part of . . . the immediate
source of created beauty: the Providential Order. .
(pp. 75-76)
From this Augustinian aesthetic, Robertson has concluded
that all medieval poetry should be read in light of the
exegetical tradition, that the allegorical surface
meaning has to be stripped away so that we may discover
the doctrinal truth underneath (p. 32).
Robertson's theories have by no means been endorsed
by medievalists generally. A Preface to Chaucer has, in
fact, been condemned for its lack of genuine contemporary
evidence showing that the interpretation of medieval
secular poetry depends on patristic exegesis.^ Unfor
tunately, the section on the art of the period suffers
9 I
from this same kind of reductionism; Robertson has care- j
• !
fully selected evidence to support his theories, and the
i
result is a chapter which gives us a fascinating though j
* c !
ultimately a distorted view of Gothic style. - 3 None- j
theless, his approach is valuable for two reasons. i
First, as Robert 0. Payne points out, Robertson and his
followers "have helped to force us to an open recon- j
sideration of fundamental issues in critical procedure."*3 j
I
I I !
And second, in the words of Francis Utley, from the j
plastic arts [Robertson] has received a fresh impulse
which is less destructive to critical Judgment than the
unitary doctrine of cupidity and charity."^
This "fresh impulse" has, it seems, inspired at
least one book-length study of Chaucer's narrative tech
nique : Chaucer and the Shape of Creation: the Aesthetic
Possibilities of Inorganic Structure by Robert M.
j Jordan.® While dissenting from Robertson's "extravagant
estimate of the importance of Christian exegetical
tradition in the poetry of Chaucer," Jordan acknowledges
i _
his indebtedness to the "considerable light" cast upon
the differences between medieval and modern approaches
to art (p. 3). His own study, therefore, intends to
propose a basis for the criticism of Chaucerian style
• i
i
more in keeping with the poet's own aesthetic rationale j
than with "the precepts of narrative art which have |
i
generally prevailed in criticism since Henry James" j
10
(p. lx). Drawing primarily on terminology and theories
of structure used by Otto von Simson in The Gothic
Cathedral,^ Jordan intends to give us a new set of stan
dards with which to measure Chaucerian narrative. He
believes in the existence of an analogy between the two
art forms--literature and architecture— since
the typical Chaucerian narrative is literally 'built1
of inert, self-contained parts, collocated in accor
dance with the additive, reduplicative principles
which characterize the Gothic edifice, (p. xi)
Jordan's method is first to establish an intellec
tual context by a brief and exceedingly telescoped survey
of influential sources of medieval thought: the Tlmaeus,
Boethius, Macrobius, Augustinian theology, the new
humanism, Dante. His second chapter narrows the dis
cussion to a consideration of "The Gothic Cathedral:
Salvation through Structure," based for the most part
on von Simson, but also on Erwin Panofsky's Gothic
Architecture and Scholasticism, and on Panofsky's edition
and translation of the Abbot Suger.10 The conclusion
of this section, through its reference to two leading
members of the school of New Criticism, helps to explain
the book's subtitle and also its target:
We have seen how mercurial is the concept of structure
in modern theory, as represented by such critics as
Blackmur and Schorer, and how closely the term resem
bles form, style, technique, vision, and similar
counters, all of which tend to stand for the total
unity of a literary work. The organicist presupposi
tions of modern criticism preclude the possibility
13.
that ’structure' can have a meaning independent of
’content1 or 'texture' or any and all other qualities
of the unified literary organism. But the Middle Ages
held no such presuppositions. If my exposition of the
rationalistic and quantitative bases of medieval
aesthetics has served its purpose, it should be pos
sible now to see how literary structure could par
ticipate in the universal vision of rational order
that governed other modes of expression, (pp. 59-60) i
|
According to Jordan, Chaucer did think of his plots and j
characters as concrete and measurable entities, as j
"relatively fixed quantities" to be "disposed according
to recognized canons of structural propriety." The
rest of his study is supposedly devoted to testing this
assumption, to examining Chaucer from a "Gothic point
of view" in an attempt "to discover how the poet's
sense of inorganic structure could enable him to resolve
the serenity of Truth and the tumult of its images"
(p. 60).
Jordan's methodology, to begin with, is not alto-
| gether original; it was, in fact, anticipated by Fried
rich Schurr in 1926, in a book which pursued "with
j relentless vigor" the parallelism between a Gothic
1
! cathedral and a French epic poem. The use of parallels
and repetitions in action, themes, and motifs in the
| epic, according to Schurr, makes it an "architectonic
composition" which agrees with the "repetition with
variation" principle found in all Gothic art.11 Even
I i
setting aside the question of originality, however, j
1
Jordan's study does not succeed; he is rightly faulted j
by his reviewers in three major areas: his vague and
inaccurate terminology, his use (and misuse) of art
history sources, and the gap between his thesis and its
so-called proof from the Canterbury Tales and Trollus
12
and Crl3eyde. Whatever praise is due to Chaucer and
the Shape of Creation is not for what it proves, but
rather for what it wants to prove; in the words of
R. T. Davies, it is "Mr. Jordan's strenuous attempts to
grapple with this kind of literary and cultural issue
that make his book valuable.
Studies which rely on the kind of analogy drawn by
Jordan, Robertson, and Muscatine are not unique to
medieval literature; Wylie Sypher, for example, has
published two lengthy works in this vein. The first,
Pour Stages of Renaissance Style, traces a series of
parallel "transformations," as the author terms them, in
art and literature between the end of the Middle Ages
and the early 1700s; while the second, Rococo to Cubism
in Art and Literature, repeats the process for the
eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.
And Mario Praz, perhaps best known for The Hero in
Eclipse in Victorian Fiction and The Romantic Agony, has
recently published in book form a series of lectures
originally delivered in 1967 and entitled Mnemosyne:
the Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts, in
which he follows Sypher's methodology without, however,
acknowledging indebtedness.
All three of these books are interesting because of
the unexpected comparisons they make, forcing us to think
visually (as far as that is possible) in verbal contexts.
At their best, such analogies can expand and enrich our
understanding of literature. At their worst, however,
they either force parallels which do not in fact exist,
as is the case with Jordan's remarks on Chaucer and itfnr -
Gothic cathedral, or else they err in the opposite
direction, as in the following passage from Sypher:
As with all great renaissance artists . . . Shake
speare's profoundly human representations do not focus
by any mechanical perspective but, instead, upon some
implied poetic vanishing point, making 'things seem
small and undistinguishable, like far-off mountains
turned into clouds.' Under the spell of this per
spective we find, with Hermia, that we 'see these
things with parted eye, when every thing seems double.'
The authentic renaissance perspective attained by
major painters and poets is not an artificial and
exacted unity, but a heightened consciousness of being
in the world, a dramatically foreshortened view of
man's fate. As a result of this strong perspective-
eonsclousness each of Shakespeare's plays has its own
climate and landscape, its own dominating and recurring
symbols, making a dramatic firmament from whose arc
every stroke of fate seems to fall with its own
meaning.^
Here the problem is, of course, that the same remarks
can be made about any major playwright regardless of
whether or not he flourished when techniques of per
spective in painting were being consciously worked out.
Such parallels between literature and art are so all-
embracing as to be virtually meaningless.
All approaches to literature through art, illumi
nating or not, have had, in fact, a fairly shady repu
tation in the second and third quarters of the twentieth
century. The history of this kind of methodology and
the reasons for its rejection by most critics who con
sider themselves "serious" have been best summarized by
Rene Wellek in an address to the English Institute over
thirty years ago. Wellek begins his paper by tracing
the question of whether one art can be compared with
another, from Simonides' statement that "painting is
mute poetry and poetry speaking painting" ^ through
Heinrich Wolfflin's distinctions between Renaissance and
baroque art on purely structural grounds, and Oskar
Walzel's attempt, in 1916, "cautiously and modestly" to
transfer to literature the categories set up by
Wolfflin.'^ But Oswald Spengler, Wellek says, threw
caution to the winds in The Decline of the West (1918),
an enormously influential work in the whole question of
analogies between the arts. Spengler
revived and deeply impressed on recent scholars the
concept of organic, necessary evolution from flowering
to decay and erected into a dogma the idea that a
period is a closed organic whole, (p. 35)
His method, "prepared as it was by suggestions in
Schlegel and others," soon found scholarly glorification
in Geistesgeschichte, which attempts to reconstruct the
spirit of an age from its artifacts, its religion, its
social customs, and so forth. Thus "a universal analo- j
gizing between the arts is at the very center of the
i
method" (p. 36). j
I
The purpose of Wellek's argument is to show that |
i
theories of parallelisms between poetry and painting j
have been spreading since the early twentieth century,
and to show also that "most of them point only to the
slightest and most tenuous thematic or emotional simi
larities" held in common by the two arts" (p. 49). To
achieve these ends, he distinguishes several different
categories among such approaches, demolishing each in
turn. "Most of our criticism in literature and the
arts," he notes, "is still purely emotive; it Judges
works of art in terms of their emotional effect on the
reader or spectator . . . ."
Many parallels between the fine arts and literature
amount to an assertion that this picture and that poem
induce the same mood in me: for example, that I feel
light-hearted and gay in hearing a minuet of Mozart,
seeing a landscape by Watteau, and reading an Ana
creontic poem.
But this, he concludes, "is the kind of parallelism
which is of little worth for purposes of scholarly
analysis: . . " (p. 50). And "Time-Spirit" or Qelstesj-
geschlchte explanations are likewise of little value,
since they have "merely succeeded in transferring cri
teria from one series to the whole," then characterizing j
the times and every work of art in them in terms of
16
vague opposites like "rationalism" and "irrationalism."
Whatever genuine parallels might follow from similar or
identical social and intellectual backgrounds have almost
never been analyzed concretely, and even then, Wellek
points out, all that could be proved by this method
would be similar influences on the evolution of the j
!
different arts, not necessarily any parallelism at j
all (p. 55).
Wellek concludes, predictably enough, that the only
valid approach to any comparison of the arts is "based on
an analysis of the actual objects of art, and thus of
their structural relationships" (p. 56). Unfortunately,
we have hitherto had scarcely any tools for such a com
parison. What is needed, then, is to recognize that
"the vaguely emotive, the fancifully metaphorical, and
the drearily speculative analogizing between the arts"
are blind alleys. Wellek proposes instead, in extremely
hesitant terms, an approach which would reduce all the
arts to branches of semiology, or so many systems of
signs:
These systems of signs might be conceived as enforcing
certain systems of norms which imply groups of values.
In such terms as signs, norms, and values I would look
for a description of the common basis of the arts.
(p. 63)
Wellek’s proposal, the inevitable result of a
i
school of criticism anxious to exclude any criteria but
those having to do with the work being examined, would
17
of course have been presented in much more positive terms
today, what with the possibilities of computer-assisted
studies open to scholars. But in the meantime the glow
of New Criticism has dissipated somewhat; and we are
readier now to admit that attitudes toward literature
change with the passage of time, that works of art
produce different effects in different contexts because
of the associations they arouse. We are ready, in other
words, to admit the possibility of our own share, through
conditioned attitudes and responses, in what we read.
And we are ready also to admit that our ideas of good
and bad have a great deal to do with the rise of a genre
which has inevitably colored our opinions of what a
narrative should or should not do. This genre is the
novel. And within the last ten years, several works
have been written with the purpose of giving us a system
of Judgments about narrative fiction to correct the
dogmatism grown up around the theories of James, Flau
bert, Zola, Conrad, and the disciples who changed these
theories into all-encompassing laws.
One of these corrective works is Wayne C. Booth's
The Rhetoric of Fiction, whose point of departure is
Henry James's remark that "the house of fiction has 'not
one window, but a million,' that there are, in fact,
'five million' ways to tell a story. . . . Booth's
thesis rests on the assumption that what seems natural
18
In one period or to one school seems artificial in
another age; "each man trusts his own brand of
reality, . (p. 42). He therefore asks us to forget,
or at least to lay aside for the moment, some of our
automatic literary judgments and the principles behind
them in order to increase our appreciation of the many
possibilities of fictional narrative.
A similar appeal is made by Robert Scholes and
Robert Kellogg in The Nature of Narrative. The authors
of this work observe that "now, in the middle of the
twentieth century, our view of narrative literature is
18
almost hopelessly novel-centered. This "novel-
centered" view is unfortunate for two reasons: first,
because it cuts us off from the past and its culture;
second, because it cuts us off from the future and the
avant-garde of our own times. Scholes and Kellogg
believe that "Chaucer’s language is the least of the
barriers we have to overcome in order to understand
him" (p. 91). This is because, in a culture of written
letters such as ours, a text which survives its native
milieu is forced to "make its way in alien surroundings,"
surroundings in which "assumptions about man and nature
and about the proper way to tell a story . . . will also
recede farther and farther from the assumptions of living
men" (p. 83). Scholes and Kellogg conclude, as does
Booth, that in order to understand a literary work, "we
19 j
I
rauat first attempt to bring our own view of reality into j
i
as close an alignment as possible with the prevailing viewj
i
in the time of the work’s composition. . (p. 83).
A third work representative of the tendency to break
away from the noveli3tic approach to/ narrative fiction is j
directly concerned with the medieval period in literature.
This is an address entitled Form and Meaning in Medieval
Romance, delivered by Eug'ene Vinaver before the Modern
Humanities Research Association in 1 9 6 6 .^ Vinaver,
whose major scholarly contribution has been his work on
Sir Thomas Malory, begins with a cautionary statement
against value Judgments about medieval literature by
critics whose view of what a genuine artistic achieve
ment must be is quite unrelated to the medieval literary
scene. This view, which "springs entirely from the
critics' own philosophy and training, from their own
cogitations as literary men," is a norm so much a part
of these critics' world that they are not even aware of
it. New Criticism, he continues, "has conferred a mea
sure of authority" on those who think that "the less they
know about the historical background of a work of litera
ture the more likely they are to achieve what they call
’the relevance of response.'" The remedy, according to
Vinaver, lies in the realization that "all such prin
ciples are products of taste and sensibility, and that
our taste and sensibility have . . . a long, varied and
20
eventful history" (pp. 4-5).
Onoe we approach the earlier periods of literature,
he continues, the inadequacy of customary "norms" becomes
apparent. Our failure to realize the limitations of the
concept of "organic unity," for example, has "caused us
to overlook the very things that give life and meaning to
medieval literary art and to much of our own." We must
open our eyes to other possibilities of perception and
composition; we must recognize at least the possibility,
if not the fact, that the change from medieval to modern
patterns of narrative form is not a change from
"primitiveness to maturity or from maturity to decadence,
but from one valid structure to another" (p. 23). To
say all this, he concludes, is to go against the cur
rently prevalent doctrine of literary absolutism which
assumes an essentially static group of forms of literary
expression— forms which can be judged by the same
standards whatever the age. But Vinaver rejects any such
exclusion of history, "if the Humanities are to endure
as a defense of cultural values," he believes,
they must restore to us whatever values the variations
of taste and fashion may have removed from our reach;
they must indeed be themselves, and this means that
they must lead us towards an understanding of the
changing forms of art and thought. Any exploration of
form is a search for meaning,*,. . . (p. 24)
Critics like Vinaver, Booth, and Scholes and Kellogg
are trying to open our eyes figuratively to other ways of
seeing narrative form. It remains for another kind of
critic— art historian and theorist Ernst Qombrich— to
expand our vision in a broader and more fundamental
sense. Qombrich has, for most of his scholarly career,
been concerned with ideas about the psychology of per
ception: why artists create within certain limits of
form and color and not others, why (and how) break
throughs in style and technique come about in the visual
arts, why we are able to "read* 1 some styles and not
others, why the art of the past— and of the avant-garde—
is so often closed to us. In his major work on such
questions — Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology
of Pictorial Representation2^— he proposes answers to
such questions and, indirectly, answers them for those
of us whose primary concern is literature, not art. He
shows us that what we see is determined by what we
expect and want to see, that our vision is governed by
certain predispositions which impose form and meaning on
the external world. I would therefore like to select
out and examine in some detail those answers in Gom-
brich's work, and the concepts behind them, relevant to
that area of criticism which has been trying to approach
literature in general— and Chaucer in particular— through
the medium of the visual arts.
Gorabrich's study begins with a cartoon and a ques
tion. The cartoon, from the New Yorker, shows a group
22 j
of ancient Egyptian art students in a life-drawing class, j
working from a live model, holding up their sticks of !
PI !
charcoal as gauges of perspective. The joke is that i
i
!
the model stands in the typically impossible tomb-
sculpture posture— legs and feet in profile; eyes,
i
shoulders, and torso in frontal position. Qombrich
extracts a little lesson from the cartoon:
If the methods taught in the life class today result in
more faithful imitations of nature than the conventions
adopted by the Egyptians, why did the Egyptians fail to
adopt them? Is it possible, as our cartoonist hints,
that they perceived nature in a different way? (p. 3)
At one time, he continues, the art critic was
concerned almost exclusively with methods of represen
tation; a work of art was placed on the scale of good/
better/best according to how lifelike its artist had
made it. The corollary was, of course, that "Egyptian
art adopted childish methods because Egyptian artists
knew no better." Thus, "their conventions could perhaps
I be excused, but they could not be condoned" (p. 4).
Now, to be sure, we are bound by no such standards; we
have learned, through developments in the first half of
| our century, if not to look down on, at least to divorce
photographic accuracy from excellence. "Aesthetics, in
other words, has surrendered its claim to be concerned
with the problem of convincing representation, the prob
lem of illusion in art" (p. 5).
23 j
A major breakthrough In attitudes toward so-called I
i
i
"primitive" art came from Alois Riegl, a museum curator
of arts and crafts during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Riegl became convinced of the
t
Inadequacy of technological assumptions linking skill of
hand with skill of representation and duplication. In
his Stllfragen of 1893* he introduced the idea that
styles of ornamentation have differed because intentions,
not artistic skills, have changed. And in Spatromlsche
KunstIndustrie (1901), he attempted to interpret all of
art history in terms of changing modes of perception.
Thus, he explains that what we see as lack of perspec
tive in ancient art is actually a lack of understanding
on our part of what was intended. Vision plays only a
subsidiary part in Egyptian art; rather, things are
rendered as they appear to the sense of touch, which is
more objective because it reports permanent shapes
irrespective of shifting viewpoints. The Egyptians
avoided the third dimension— not because they weren*t up
to the logistics of vanishing points and lines of vision,
but because foreshortening and recession would have
Introduced a subjective element, and art was meant to be
outside the human limitations of time and space. Riegl
concludes that "every style aims at a faithful rendering
1
of nature and nothing else, but each has its own con- j
i
ception of Nature. . . . !
24
Another breakthrough in attitudes toward represen
tation and perspective in art was made by Emanuel Loewy
I
in The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art (1900).
Loewy described the natural tendency of the human mind to
sift out “the characteristic features of objects, those j
I
aspects which show them in their most distinctive form"
(p. 23). The primitive artist— like the child and the
untutored adult--takes memory rather than life as his
starting point; he tends to represent the human body
frontally, for example; horses and dogs in profile;
lizards from above. Although this theory behind con
ceptualism in art is somewhat too rigid to be embraced
without reservation, it does serve to make us aware of
the "tenacity of conventions, on the role of types and
stereotypes in art," exerting an enormous pull against
which the Greek revolution had to battle in its turn
toward illusion (p. 24)
The central problems of Gombrich's book are style
and illusion, but his approach is psychological rather
than exclusively aesthetic— hence, in part, his useful
ness for literary studies. In this "counterraid across
the psychologist's frontier," he hopes to bring back
"more than a few isolated results of psychological
experiments"; that is, he wishes to initiate "a radical
reorientation of all traditional ideas about the human j
mind, which cannot leave the historian of art unaffected" !
25
(p. 27). The major source for his theories about per
ception is K. R. Popper, whose "searchlight theory" of
the mind posits the living organism as constantly
probing and testing its environment. The emphasis (as
opposed to that in earlier theories) is shifted from the
stimulus itself to the organism’s response— a response
which, "it is becoming clear, will be vague and general
at first and gradually will become more articulate and
differentiated" as familiarity within a particular
context or situation is acquired.
Gombrich’s theory, following Popper’s, is formulated
in terms of sorting and categorizing and on the role of
anticipation and tests in the workings of the human mind.
All cognitive processes, in other words,
whether they take the form of perceiving, thinking,
or recalling, represent 'hypotheses’ which the
organism sets up. . . . They require ’answers' in
the form of some further experience, answers that
will either confirm or disprove them. 5
Gombrich's survey of the theory behind Art and Illusion
concludes with the hope that "some such theory of per
ceptual trial and error will prove fruitful in other
fields than mine. . ." (p. 29). I am convinced that
students and historians of medieval literature will be
particularly affected by the following results of
Gombrich's psychological counterraid— results which, to
cite only one example, lend new depth to Eugene Vinaver's
defense of another kind of form in the thirteenth
century Arthurian Cycle.
Qombrich explains the history of representational
art in terms of pictorial schema and correction. What
is a schema? It carries several values in this book.
First of all, it refers to "a particular form or con
figuration that an artist uses to represent . . . an
object in the world."2** The chubby-cheeked children of
Peter-Paul Rubens are an example; they all look more or
less alike, from which we may either conclude that the
artist's young subjects all resembled one another, that
he preferred drawing well-fed infants, or that he only
knew how to draw this kind of child. The end result is
In any case the same. Second, "schema" is used to
indicate certain highly simplified forms or configura
tions which serve as a kind of artistic shorthand and
which we are used to seeing in "How To" books. We may
be told In such a manual that the way to draw a human
head Is first to draw an egg, although, as Qombrich
points out, we would be immensely startled at encounter
ing any such individual in real life. Nobody's head,
in other words, is really egg-shaped, but we are so used
to seeing this formula that most of us accept its
accuracy without question. The third use of "schema" is
much more difficult to pinpoint or define, but it amounts
to an equation, In the plural form (schemata), with the
word "style." An artist's choice of subject-matter falls
into this category, as do the atmosphere with which the
subject Is invested and the preference for a certain
kind of overall finish or lack of finish in a painting.
!
Gauguin's smooth brown Tahitian figures— done with
brushstrokes licked clean of excess pigment; colors
solid, flat, and altogether painterly— might, for
example, be contrasted with Van Gogh's tortured land
scapes, in which trees, fields, sun, moon, even the sky
itself assume souls of their own through thick slashes
of color. Each of these artists, by choosing certain
distinctive schemata through which his vision is
expressed, carves for himself a style by which we learn
to recognize his work. Finally, the word "schema" is
used to describe the "mental set" in the mind of the
beholder of a work of art.2? we look for certain kinds
of symbols, we accept certain conventions, we recognize
certain shorthand techniques in painting, sculpture,
! drawings these are our schemata, which may or may not
correspond to those of the artist we are viewing,
i
depending on our conditioning, our education, our level
of sophistication in approaching works of art.
Although parallels exist in literature for all
these definitions of schema, the last two— schemata as
artistic style and as beholder*s "mental set"— seem to
be particularly relevant to the study of medieval
literature in the twentieth century. Therefore, I
28
should like to examine these concepts more closely before
moving on to Gombrich's conclusions.
One way of looking at style Is to see It as a series
of limitations imposed upon the artist. Some of these
limitations are, of course, self-imposed: the choice of j
subject, to begin with; then, the choice of medium. An
artist working with pencil and paper will see hi(s motif
(his subject) in terms of lines; working with brush and
canvas, he sees in terms of areas and masses. The
"individual talent" is another kind of self-imposed
limitation, in that an artist will tend to work with
those media and motifs which he has found most satis
fying— usually meaning that he achieves his greatest
success with them, that he does them "best."
But style is not Just a matter of the individual;
he needs a context, a tradition, which he acquires by
studying already existing forms of representation and
adapting them to his own needs. Thus, explains Gombrich:
. . . Just as the lawyer or the statistician could
plead that he could never get hold of the individual
case without some sort of framework provided by his
forms or blanks, so the artist could argue that it
makes no sense to look at a motif unless one has
learned to classify and catch it within the network of
a schematic form. (p. 73)
The "will-to-form" is therefore actually a "will-to-
make-conform," an assimilation of any new shape or
subject into the schemata an artist has learned to
handle.28 And these schemata tend to be more or less
29
the same for any group of artists living at a given time
in a given place. Breakthroughs are made, new schemata
are discovered and adopted— individual talent again— but
the important point is that "you cannot create a faithful
image out of nothing. You must have learned the trick if
only from other pictures you have seen. . (p. 83).
Style, then, does not depend solely on the artist’s will,
but also on the kinds of schemata with which tradition
has provided him, and on the degree of freedom with which
he is able to change and modify his idiom. Perhaps,
suggests Gombrich, the reluctance to acknowledge a
process such as schema and correction is "one of the
reasons why we have made so little progress in the
explanation of style" (p. 77).
Just as the artist needs schemata in order to
translate the visible world into the language of his
medium, so also the beholder of the finished product—
the work of art— needs his own schemata, stored in the
memory bank of his mind, in order to "read" that work
and to make it a part of his own experience. Moreover,
the mind of the beholder plays an active rather than a
passive role in the process. Comparing the viewing
situation to one within another realm of perception,
that of language comprehension, Gombrich quotes the
following passage from William James to show by analogy
how expectations create illusions in the presence of
30
given stimuli. Actually, says James,
When we listen to a person speaking or read a page
of print, much of what we think we see or hear is
supplied from our memory. We overlook misprints,
imagining the right letters, though we see the wrong
ones, and how little we actually hear, when we listen
to speech, we realize when we go to a foreign theatre;
for there what troubles us is not so much that we
cannot understand what the actors say as that we cannot
hear their words. The fact is that we hear quite as
little under similar conditions at home, only our mind,
being fuller of English verbal associations, supplies
the requisite material for comprehension upon a much
slighter auditory hint.29
Projection, in other words, often takes the place of
perception without our realizing it.
Two conditions are necessary if this projection is
to take place: first, the beholder must have no doubt
as to how to close the gap between his mind and the
external object; and second, he must be given a "screen,"
an empty or ill-defined area, on which to project the
expected image. This process is, for most of us, an
| unconscious one. The art lover, "unless he is a
restorer," says Gombrich,
i
may go through life without ever realizing to what an
extent the pictures he loves are crisscrossed by
j subjective contours of his own making. If he were
; ever to strip them of these projections, merely a
meaningless armature might well be all that would
i remain.30
But although the viewer is unaware of the extent to
which his own mind is painting pictures, the artist has
often deliberately used the phenomenon of projection.
The Impressionists, for example, "tease us with
31
incomplete forms," but "they take good care to remain |
] i
intelligible so that we can appreciate their concern with j
the transitory and elusive features of visual reality."
It is surely no accident, continues Gombrich, that "they
limited themselves to the motifs and scenes of la vie
contemporaine, where they could . . . rely on the
beholder's knowledge" (p. 215). But in several hundred j
• ;
years, will the beholder have the same kind of knowledge
; needed to flesh out such paintings? Perhaps, Gombrich
suggests, "we shall become increasingly aware of this
need to supplement their hints from our own experience as
their period recedes from ours" (p. 216). It is pre
cisely this need for a different kind of knowledge which
we should be aware of having to supply when we, nearly
six hundred years later, approach the art and literature
of the Middle Ages.
Gombrich's conclusions in Art and Illusion are
directed primarily toward the history of perspective in
I art, and are therefore not entirely relevant to my own
j
I thesis. But I do find particular relevance in his
application of psychological findings about "mental set"
i
to the message of the artist and to the readiness of the
viewer to receive that message. A style in literature,
just as in art, Is not really the window through which j
we see the visible world.^1 Instead, any style sets up I
a "horizon of expectations" which "registers deviations !
32
and modifications with exaggerated sensitivity.And
those conventions with which we have not grown up and
i
learned to accept unconsciously will strike us as j
|
exaggerated, as awkward, perhaps simply as "bad," while j
a more objective approach will show us that such con
ventions are often merely "different" or "other." Once
our receivers are attuned, once we become familiar with
the kinds of modifications needed in our mental set,
we will be as little troubled by the act of adjustment
as we are when we step in front of a sculpted torso and
understand that we are not seeing a representation of a
severed head, but rather an object that belongs to the
convention called "busts." Without this horizon of
expectations, our situation is like that of the foreigner
in a strange country, who "lacks a frame of reference
that allows him to take the mental temperature around
him with assurance."33
For some critics, the art of the past is lost to us
altogether; this is the conclusion of Andre Malraux in
The Voices of Silence. His opinion is that art can
survive only as what he calls "myth," that it is
transformed through "the ever-changing contexts of the
historical kaleidoscope," and that we can never hope to
understand it except as a kind of "romantic saga,
invested with legendary glamour." Gombrich, who is
j
"a little less pessimistic," believes that \
j
t
33
the historical imagination can overstep these barriers,
that we can attune ourselves to different styles no
less than we can adjust our mental set to different
media and different notations. Of course some effort
is needed. But this effort seems to me to be eminently
worth while. . . .34
Rene Wellek has defined the development of litera
ture as "a process of continuous evolution toward dif
ferent and diverse specific aims which it is best to con
ceive as so many systems of norms or values." Every
individual work of art, he continues, "can be understood
as an approximation to one of these systems.
The analysis of literary works through analogies
with the visual arts can, I believe, help us to reach
j Wellek’s set of norms (though he himself would deny
this), as long as we are conscientious enough to Include
the all-important intermediate step. This step,
| hinging on Gombrich’s "psychology of perception," will
allow us to draw analogies if we see and understand why
i
| we are drawing., them, if we understand what makes us think
things are alike or not alike. Most of us are already
willing to recognize that the mental set of the Middle
I
Ages was different from our own. What we must now do
is determine, as best we can, some of those expectations
about form and structure which might have been held by
Chaucer and his contemporaries. With this knowledge we
can, I think, expand our own horizon of expectations
and by broadening and deepening our responses we can
thus come to appreciate artistry where before we saw
only ineptness and a striving toward the so-called
"formal realism" of the twentieth century.
35
FOOTNOTES
Among the "auxiliary movements" of New Criticism
I include the Chicago School of neo-Aristotelians; I am
in agreement with George Watson who, in The Literary
Critics, comments that "only in a radically anti-
historical atmosphere in English studies could [the
Chicago School] ever have achieved a reputation for
historical criticism." (Baltimore: Penguin Books Inc.,
1962, p. 223).
p
^Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tra
dition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley: Univ.
of Calif. Press, 1957)V P. 245.
^D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer:
Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton. )W. J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1962), p. viii.
4
Following are some of the more comprehensive
reviews of A Preface to Chaucer: William Matthews,
"A New Preface to Western Medieval Literature,1 1 Romance
Philology, 17 (1964), 634-42; Robert 0. Payne, Com
parative Literature , 15 (1963), 269-71; Francis Lee
Utley, "fcobertsonianism Redivivus, Romance Philology,
; 19 (1965), 250-60. ■
^For example, Robertson states that "the framework
of The Canterbury Tales exhibits a typical Gothic dis-
regard for spatial coherence" (p. 258;. Although "dis
regard for spatial coherence" perhaps means something
quite singular to Robertson, the judgment seems hardly
appropriate in light of extant Gothic architecture.
g
Payne, p. 269.
^Utley, p. 253.
8
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967).
Two fairly recent articles have also been inspired at
least in part by Robertson: Julia G. Ebel, "Chaucer's
The Book of the Duchess: A Study in Medieval Iconog-
raphy and Literary Structure," College English, 29
(1967), 197-206; and Elizabeth Salter, "Medieval Poetry
and the Visual Arts," Essays and Studies 1969, 22
(London: The English Association, 1969). And the
Chaucer topic for the 1972 MLA meeting is, I believe,
ultimately the result of Robertson's third chapter.
• 36
I
! Q
Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral; Origins of
Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order,
2nd ed. (New York: Boilingen foundation, 19b2).
1QQothlc Architecture and Scholasticism (Latrobe,
Pa. s Saint Vincent Archabbey, 1951) ; AbbotHsuger on the
Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, ed. and
trans. by Brwin Panofsky (Princeton: PrincetonGniv.
Press, 1946). Other sources cited, though not quoted
directly, by Jordan include Paul Frankl on Gothic
Architecture (Baltimore, 1962) and The Gothic (Princeton.
i960); James S. Ackerman, "'Ars sine scientia nihil
est'; Gothic Theory of Architecture at the Cathedral of
Milan," The Art Bulletin, 31; 84-109 (1949); and Nikolaus
Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (London,
| 1948), pp. 31-76. '
•^Friedrich Schurr, Das altfranzosische Epos
(Munchen, 1926), p. 148. The citation, as well as the
quotations in this paragraph, are from Rene Wellek,
The Parallelism between Literature and the Arts,"
English Institute Annual, 1941, ed, Rudolf Kirk (New
?ork: Columbia Univ. Press, 1942), pp. 42-43.
IP
^Following is a list of reviewers whose analyses
were most useful: D. S. Brewer, Notes and Queries,
NS 16 (1969)# 109-110; R. T. Davies, Review of English
Studies, NS 20 (1969). 207-9; Julia G. fibel, College
j . English, 29 (1968), 572-76; Alan T. Gaylord, JE6p,68
(1969), 161-06; Richard L. Hoffman, Speculum, 441"(1969),
468-71; Stephen Manning, English Language Notes, 6 (I900),
125-27; Derek Pearsall, Modern Language Review, 64 (1969),
j 855-57. --------
1^fffiS, p. 209. Similarly, D. S. Brewer comments in
I N&Q,. p. 110: "Mr. Jordan has made a useful contribution
to a promising line of inquiry, ..." And Stephen
Manning believes that "Jordan has done quite enough in
one book in pointing out the broad outlines of Gothic
structure and in demonstrating the insights which such
an approach Gan produce" (ELN, p. 127).
■^^Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style:
Transformations in kvt and literature 1400-1700, Anchor
Books (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleciay, 1^551* p. 79.
■^Plutarch De gloria Athenlenslum, 346F., F. C.
Babbitt, ed.. Plutarch's Moralla (Cambridge, Mass. and
London, 1962), ±V, $00. Plutarch goes on to say that
37
while poetry and painting "differ in the material and
manner of their imitation (mimesis), the underlying aim
(telos) is the same." In fact, the association of the
two is much stronger than just "sameness"— it is a kind
of essential indivisibility. See Chapter Two, "The De
gloria as Moral Criticism, in James LeRoy Johnson's
Plutarch on the Glory of the Athenians: A Reassess
ment," unpubl. diss. University of Southern California
1972.
■^Wellek, "Parallelism," p. 34 (cf. n. 17). Hein
rich Wolfflin's Principles of Art History; The Problem
of the Development of Style in Later Art was first
published under the title Kunstgeschlchtliche Grund-
begriffe in 1915; Walzel's article, "Shakespeares
dramatische Baukunst," first appeared in Jahrbuch der
Shakespearegesellschaft, LII (1916), and was reprinted
in Das Wortkunstwerk: Mittel seiner Erforschung
(Leipzig, 192b), pp. 302-25.
• ^The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: The Univ. of
Chicago Press, 19bl), p. 24. Booth is quoting from the
collected prefaces of Henry James edited by R. P. Black-
mur: The Art of the Novel (New York, 1947).
18
Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of
Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 19bb), p. b.
■^(Cambridge, England: Modern Humanities Research
Assn., 1966); Vinaver's The Rise of Romance (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1971) presents these views in
expanded form.
2^The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Pine Arts, 1956;
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Bollingen Series
XXXV, 5 (New York: Pantheon Books, i960).
^The drawing is by Alain (The New Yorker Magazine,
Inc., 1955).
22KunstIndustrie. 2nd ed. (Vienna, 1927)* p. 394;
quoted in dombrich, p. 19.
^The most obvious objection to Loewy's theory is,
as Gombrich states, that "none of us . . . carries in
his head such schematic pictures of bodies, horses, or
lizards as Loewy's theory postulates." Nonetheless
"this criticism cannot detract from the value of Loewy's
38
; analysis of those features which the works of children,
; untutored adults, and primitives have in common”
(Gombrich, p. 23).
24 i f
The theoretical model for this approach . . .
ultimately goes back to Kant, . .” (Gombrich, p. 28).
Works by K. H. Popper cited in Art and Illusion are The
Open Society and.Its Enemies (Princeton, 1950; 3rd ed.
London, 1957); "^The Philosophy of Science: A Personal
Report," British" Philosophy in the Mid-Century, ed.
Cecil A. Mace (London, 1957)» PP. 155-94); The Logic of
Scientific Discovery (London and New York, 1959).
2 5
J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman, summarized in
Floyd H Allport, Theories of Perception and the Concept
; of Structure (New York and London, 1955)» p. 378) quoted
in Gombrich, p . 29.
^Richard Wollheim, "Reflections on ’Art and
Illusion,’" Arts Yearbook 4 (New York: The Arts Digest,
Inc., 1961), ‘ p ". T75^
2 7
"Mental set" refers to the role which our own
expectations play in deciphering experiences and stimuli;
Gombrich uses the phrase to indicate "that state of -
readiness to start projecting, to thrust out the ten
tacles of phantom colors and phantom images which always
flicker around our perceptions. . . . what we call
'reading' an image may perhaps be better described as
testing it for its potentialities, trying out what fits"
(Gombrich, pp. 58-60, 227, and 407 [notes and biblio
graphy ]).
pQ
"Will-to-form" is Alois Riegl’s phrase; Gombrich,
I P. 77.
2^William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology
and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (New York and
London, 1099)* p. 1^9; quoted in Gombrich, p. 204.
30
Gombrich, p. 211; an armature is the base, usually
of wire, upon which a clay sculpture is built.
^Gombrich, on pt 299, states that "it was Alberti
[in the sixteenth century] who first suggested the idea
of considering a painting as a window through which we
look at the visible world" (Leone Battista Alberti,
Della Plttura, ed. Janitschek, p. 79 > date and place of
publication not cited). Students of literature will be
39
more familiar, no doubt, with Emile Zola's rather more
precise definition of a work of art as "a corner of
nature seen through a temperament"; this phrase is also
cited by Gombrich on p. 64 (Zola, Mes Haines, Paris,
1866; cf. Collection des Oeuvres completes Emile Zola,
Paris n.d., XXIII, 17b).
32
Gombrich, p, 60; the words "horizon of expecta
tions" are K. R. Popper's.
^Both examples are Gombrich's; the quotation is
from p. 60.
^Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. by
Stuart Gilbert (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1954), p. -619;
Gombrich, pp. 61-62.
^^Rene* Wellek, "Periods and Movements in Literary
History," English Institute Annual, 1940, ed. Rudolf
Kirk (New tfork: Columbia Univ. Press, 1941), p. 92.
II. THE ESSENCE OP GOTHIC
In his massive volume on the Gothic, Paul Frankl
has condensed nearly nine hundred pages of documentation
and Interpretation into a single quality— partiality—
meaning that "each part is a fragment of a whole which
itself tends to be only a fragment of infinity."1
Certainly this Is a major feature of Gothic style; but
i V
exactly what does "partiality" mean? How Is it realized?
And what other features are Important to an understanding
i
of the period? The answers to these questions will, I
believe, provide a set of characteristics useful for
describing literary as well as visual works of art
originating In Western Europe during the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries.
Before considering characteristics of Gothic style,
however, I would like to consider briefly a more funda
mental question: what is style? Meyer Schaplro has
written an essay on the subject for Anthropology Today:
! 2
An Encyclopedic Inventory. And although his essay is
concerned primarily with the fine arts, Schaplro’s
remarks apply equally well to other areas of personal
expression. Style is, he begins, above all "a system
40
of forms with a quality and a meaningful expression
through which the personality of the artist and the broad
outlook of a group are visible." Second, it is a
"vehicle of expression within the group, communicating
| and fixing certain values of religious, social and moral
life through the emotional suggestiveness of forms."
And third, it is "a common ground against which innova
tions and the individuality of particular works may be
; I
measured." Schapiro goes on to say that
By considering the succession of works in time and
space and by matching the variations of style with
historical events and with the varying features of
other fields of culture, the historian of art attempts,
| with the help of common-sense psychology and social
j theory, to account for the changes of style or specific
traits.
; For the historian of culture or the philosopher of
history, however, style becomes a much broader concept,
"a manifestation of the culture as a whole, the visible
j sign of its unity." Thus, what is important for such
a historian is "not the style of an individual or of a
! single art, but forms and qualities shared by all the arts
of a culture during a significant span of time" (p. 287).
j
Several points have to be acknowledged before
proceeding under such a definition. No single phase in
i the history of art, literature, music, or culture itself
can be cut off from another except in our minds and
textbooks: past, present, and future interpenetrate I
1
without regard for dates; and every age has more than j
one artistic current at any given time. Yet it is still
true that one group of style characteristics will arise
to dominate the expression of an age. And we, with our
penchant for classification, attach names to these
periods from a later perspective.
Nearly all stylistic devices may occur at almost
any given time; however, such devices, and the forms to
which they give rise, cannot be understood in isolation.
And when a number of works from a given period are set
side by side, symptoms of a general trend begin to
emerge. Frederick Artz has observed in his study of the
movement from the Renaissance to Romanticism within
various art forms that
no one style is ever complete in a single painting,
sculpture, building, poem, or musical composition.
Style may be defined as a series of variations on
a theme that is never given.3
But even though the theme is never given, its notes
are more often repeated in some periods. Historians
and philosophers call this recurrence "dominant style”
and give it labels: Romanesque, Baroque, Cubist.
Gothic, too, has been recognized as an accepted label,
or "mode," governing most representations of the period.
As Schaplro observes,
The Gothic style is applied in religious and secular
works alike; and, if it is true that no domestic or
civil building in that style has the expressiveness
of a cathedral interior, yet in painting and sculpture
the religious and secular images are hardly different
In form. (p. 305)
Various reasons have been advanced to account for this
unity, none of them entirely satisfactory. For my
purpose, however, it is enough to recognize that the
theme never given during what we have come to label the
Gothic period, roughly extending from the twelfth century
through the early 1400s in Western Europe, is, in
Schapiro’s words, "broadly speaking, the same in build
ings; stained glass; sculptures of wood, ivory, and
stone; panel paintings; miniatures; metalwork, enamels,
and textiles" (p. 304).
This does not imply, however, that every feature of
the period arose in every art form simultaneously. The
Gothic era originated around the year 1150 in the fairly
limited area of the Ile-de-France; at its peak, a
hundred years later, most of Europe had come under the
influence of what we call Gothic style. By 1450 this
influence was beginning to recede, and by 1550 it had
been supplanted almost entirely by the features of the
Renaissance in Italy, and by the Flemish School north
of the Alps. The term "Gothic" was coined for archi
tecture, and architecture played a dominant role during
the formative years of Gothic style. Gothic sculpture,
which developed and was greatly influenced by its close
alliance with cathedral architecture, was not prominent
44
in its own right until the late thirteenth century, and
for some time after that it retained, for the most part,
the stylistic features of the art which fostered it;
while Gothic painting, never very important outside
Italy until 1400 and after, was the most conservative of
the three arts in its adherence to features of Romanesque
style.
Of the following characteristics, the first five
are categories used by Heinrich Wolfflin in Principles
of Art History; the rest I have added to describe
features not readily accounted for by the Classic/Baroque
dichotomy. Furthermore, although these features are
taken from— and are meant primarily to be applied to—
the fine and plastic arts of the Gothic period, they
are ultimately meant to be descriptive of historical
style as defined by Schaplro: those forms and qualities
shared by all the arts of a culture during a significant
h.
span of time.
Linearity
The emphasis in a linear style is on line and out
line (its opposing concept is "painterly," emphasizing
mass and volume). Fixed boundaries become superior, or
at least equal, to what they contain. Thus, linear
vision sharply distinguishes form from form, resulting
in separation, Independence, distinctness plastically
45
felt of what is enclosed. Distance and flatness are
often Involved in the perception of this quality.
Linearity became a prominent characteristic of
Gothic architecture because of three features--the
pointed arch, the rib vault, the flying buttress— which
were combined for the first time in the Ile-de-France
for a new aesthetic purpose: "to enliven inert masses
of masonry, to quicken spatial motion, to reduce a
building to a seeming system of innervated lines of
action."^ Emphasis is thrown on the units of construc
tion; we feel that we are looking at the skeleton of a
g
skyscraper turned inside out. In sculpture, linearity
refers primarily to organization, to the way in which
statues are arranged side by side within a cathedral
porch or along a fagade, each in its own niche, each
with its own canopy and pedestal. In the decorative
arts, linearity designates the use of line for its own
sake, of design for sheer prettiness, for pure decora
tion: form supercedes content. This practice was
especially true in the later Middle Ages, when, as
George Henderson observes,
The cup of Matthew Corvinus at Wiener-Neustadt and
the great silver ewer at Goslar, both of the second
half of the fifteenth century, are as it were frag
ments of the visual continuum, small patches of that
ebullient linear energy shared by every late-Gothic
artifact be it a cup or a castle, an embroidered
vestment or a church fagade.'
46
Horizontal Perspective
This quality, used mostly to describe the two-
dimensional arts-*-, lluminatIons, stained glass, altar
paintings— during the Gothic period, refers to the ab
sence of Illusionist techniques introduced in the Early
o
Renaissance by Italian experiments in perspective. In
Gothic painting, objects are arranged on the surface of
one or more well-defined planes, and space Is treated as
being essentially two-dimensional. Conceptualism rather
than realism is still predominant, as is the assumption
that the beholder’s world is entirely separate from that
of the art object, resulting in an impression of flat
ness and stasis.
Another impression likely to result from this
feature is that of spatial incoherence, since each person
or object within a scene tends to be emphatically
separate. Little or no effort is made to interrelate
figures to one another, and the result is a two-dimen
sional, superficial, stylized visual continuum— confor
mity and pattern at the expense of naturalism and depth.
These lllogically juxtaposed scenes are often judged to
be the products of a lack of technical skill; in fact,
they represent the willed expression of a world where
time and space carry values different from those of
modern art.
Open Form
The easiest way to describe this concept in painting
is to begin with its opposite. Closed form designates
a style which makes a picture into a self-contained
entity through the use of a fixed vanishing point;
everything within the composition thus relates logically
to a single scale and to a single point of vision through
which we enter the picture. Open form, on the contrary,
has no single fixed point; it is, therefore, closely
related to the quality of horizontal perspective
described above.
In architecture, open form refers to the kind of
space composition which finds expression in the Gothic
cathedral. "We are apt, in considering architecture,"
notes Charles Morey in Mediaeval Art, "to be more
absorbed by its solids than its voids"; it is the
latter, however, which can have the greater effect on us.
"Space in architecture," he continues,
satisfies the same desire which seeks the panorama
of a view, the craving for submergence of self in
real or suggested infinitude, and the release from
limitations of personality and circumstance.9
And this is the intent of open form in the Gothic
cathedral; the observer is deliberately linked with
infinity, with a system and an order centered not in
man and this world, as in Renaissance architecture, but
in God and eternity. Hence the grandness of scale and
48
the resulting belittlement of the human figure by
deliberate means.1®
Multiplicity
This refers to details which retain independence
while participating in an overall composition. Often,
as Heinrich Wblfflin observes, such details are apt to
be felt as separate entities in a new or unfamiliar set
of forms; once the observer accustoms himself to the
mode of representation, however, the balance is restored
and the principal design emerges.
Multiplicity, a quality prevalent throughout the
Gothic era, was inherited from the Romanesque tendency
to achieve compositional unity, in the words of George
Henderson, by "the mere accumulation of aggressively
distinct parts, ..." The artist's style is "vehement,
schematic, repetitive, and inhuman"; and he "tends to
think in distinct units which he accumulates but does
not integrate, . . (p. 43). In the first half of the
twelfth century, this static Juxtaposition of details
is exchanged for a new kind of "constitutive unity"
(see below). As Gothic style developed and matured,
however, the tendency toward detail and decoration
eventually overwhelmed and obscured whatever underlying
unity might be present. By the late fourteenth century,
therefore, we find in painting, architecture, sculpture,
. and the decorative arts an "indiscriminate reduction
of everything to ornament," resulting in many cases in
sterility and monotony through sheer multiplication, as
artists no longer equipped with any intellectual founda
tion for their art struggle to give coherence to the
11
world of visual phenomena. Whether or not Henderson is
correct about the underlying cause, we cannot escape the
conclusion that the late Gothic artist is himself at
times uncertain about or indifferent toward the overall
design and balance of his elaborate creations.
Unclearness
This quality really only comes into its own in
painting through the experiments of Leonardo da Vinci.
The more conscientiously an artist copies a figure line
by line and detail by detail, the less we can imagine
that it ever moved and breathed. The solution to the
I problem comes only when the painter leaves the beholder
; something to guess. Gombrich observes that "if the out-
; lines are not quite so firmly drawn, if the form is left
a little vague, as though disappearing into a shadow, this
impression of dryness and stiffness will be avoided."
Leonardo's invention— sfumato— allows one form to merge
with another through blurred outlines and mellowed
colors, always leaving something to our imagination.12
But although Gothic painting was not yet concerned
50
with the beholder's role, and is thus characterized by
clarity, Oothic architecture introduced an element which,
according to Arnold Hauser, was first noticed by Qoethe.
This is the impression that cathedrals, though completed
in actuality, are somehow involved in a process of
no *
"endless, interminable development." The interior of
a Romanesque church, Hauser continues, is "a self-con
tained, stationary space that permits the eye of the
spectator to rest and remain in perfect passivity." A
Gothic church, on the other hand, seems to be "rising
up before our very eyes; it expresses a process, not a
result." Hauser traces the modern preference for "the
unfinished, the sketchy, and the fragmentary" to its
origin in this period, as he concludes that
. . . all great art, with the exception of a few
short-lived classicist movements, has something
fragmentary about it, an inward or outward incomplete
ness, an unwillingness, whether conscious or uncon
scious, to utter the last word. There is always
something left over for the spectator or reader to
complete. The modern artist shrinks from the last
word, because he feels the inadequacy of all words—
a feeling which we may say was never experienced by
man before Gothic times. (I, 242)
Naturalism
This became a feature of Gothic style only in the
mature and late segments of the period, coinciding with
the movement toward nominalism in philosophy and
mysticism in religion. Man has begun to look to his own
51
world as well as to God's for inspiration, and as a
result immediacy, sincerity, and melodrama become
characteristic of sculpture and painting. Whereas early
Gothic religious art is isolated, remote, self-sufficient,
the best analogy for the late-Gothic period, according
to George Henderson, is the poster: "spasmodic, sharp,
appealing instantly to the eye and to the emotions"
(p. 168).
One specific result of this altered vision is the
travel landscape, a typical pictorial theme of the age;
for Arnold Hauser, in fact, the pilgrim procession of
the Ghent altar is "to a certain extent the basic form
of its world-view."
Again and again the art of the late Gothic period
depicts the wanderer, the traveller, the walker;
everywhere it tries to arouse the illusion of a
journey, everywhere its characters are driven by an
urge to be always on the move, always on the road.
The pictures pass in front of the beholder like the
scenes of a constantly moving procession— and the
beholder is spectator and participant at the same
time. And this aspect of the 'side of the road,'
which eliminates the sharp division between stage
and auditorium, is precisely the special— one might
say the 'film-like'— expression of the age.
The onlooker is being drawn into the sphere of the
representation for the first time, as the frame of the
picture begins to be equated with that of a window
through which one looks out at the world. Hauser
attributes late Gothic naturalism to this new feeling
for space, although, he notes, medieval art still forms
52
Its illusions somewhat inaccurately and inconsistently
in comparison with the Renaissance grasp of perspective
(pp. 264-65).
There is, however, an important difference between
Gothic naturalism and what we think of as naturalism
today. Despite an abundance of meticulous detail based
on personal observation, notes Henderson, we never
catch a hint of an evolving system, of "any attempt to
build up individual verisimilitudes into a coherent
picture of the external world." The master sculptor
who carved the vine and oak leaves of Southwell Cathedral
quite literally failed to see the wood for the trees,
and as a result "fragments only of nature were scruti
nized and painstakingly recorded: nature as a whole
still remained a formidable mystery" (pp. 92-93). The
artist's approach was still that of Villard de
Honnecourt, working In the Ile-de-France nearly two
centuries earlier. For though Villard tells us In his
notebook that he has portrayed a lion "from life," we
can see that he has in fact been able to proceed only
after laying down a geometric pattern of two circles,
the smaller for the head, the larger for the body. To
Villard, as to the Southwell master, drawing from life—
"naturalism"— meant filling in an abstract framework
with details based on direct observation.^
Constitutive Unity
Henderson describes this feature of Gothic style by i
borrowing two definitions from the treatise De con
siderations, completed by St. Bernard of Clairvaux in
1152. There is a lesser kind of unity, says St. Bernard,
which is "collective, as for example when many stones
make one heap." In contrast, however, is the "consti
tutive unity" of the Three Persons of God, in which
"many members make one body or many parts constitute one
I
whole." During the first half of the twelfth century,
Henderson observes, "the principle of collective unity as
the basis of artistic composition was replaced by the
principle of constitutive unity, and as a result the
Gothic style was created."1- *
Henderson, like many specialists in the Gothic
period, sees a correlation between this change in style
and the "great new age in Christian scholarship" in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries throughout Western Europe:
The methods of this scholarship were revolutionary.
Previous generations had merely allowed patristic and
later commentaries on scripture to pile up, like the
hallowed but unsifted archives of some great insti
tution. Now the work of evaluation began. The
commentatorsr doctrinal interpretations of scriptural
passages were systematically arranged on the ground-
plan of the Creed, so that what pertained to God the
Father came first, what pertained to the general
resurrection and the Judgment came last, with all else
in between. Thus an intelligible shape was given to
the whole accumulated tradition of Christian
learning.
54 I
!
These books of Sentences, Henderson observes, are !
!
organic and unified; so, too, are the architectural j
compositions of the early Gothic period, as details
are consciously subverted to an overall purpose.
An example of constitutive unity is furnished by
I
the western portals of Chartres Cathedral, where the i
i
column figures flanking the doorway perform a dual
function, in their ordered verticality, as human beings
and as architectural accents. Tall and slender, like
"the columns whose vertical rhythm they underline, they
nevertheless exhibit their sculptors' magisterial under
standing of the organic unity of the human body" (p. 55).
Another example, the Tree of Jesse window erected by
the Abbot Suger in the cathedral of Saint-Denis, deals
in organic terms— the growth of a plant— with "the
historical emergence of Christ's body, that flesh which
he took from his mother, and through her from the root
of humanity, Adam." Moreover, Suger deliberately
placed this window in the caput of- his church to
demonstrate "the organic constitution of the Church on
earth, a body united by its physical nature to Christ
the head" (p. 51).
The Tree of Jesse window and the western portals
of Chartres, concludes Henderson, "make it clear that
their designers were pursuing the ideals of formal unity
and constitutive unity common to all branches of en-
deavour at that time" (p. 57). This passion for "order,
consonance, and cohesion," for "grand organic design,"
was obscured in later centuries by the passion for
decoration and detail--multlplicity— noted above. It
never disappeared altogether, however, and furnishes
the basis for one of the several dualities which
characterize the period as a whole.
Dualism
"In every art," writes Charles Morey, "there is a
conflict between the universal and the specific, between
the real and the ideal, but commonly one or the other
determines style." Only in the art of the High Gothic
period are the two elements "equally potent and produc-
| tive of poignant beauty by their very opposition."
Morey traces this "sensitive tension" to two factors:
One . . . is the popular and plebeian element in
! European culture, becoming articulate in the twelfth
| century, and reducing as it were the poetry of
Romanesque emotion to prose. The other is the church
| and the new learning of the universities, whose
schoolmen by their logic made out of Christian theology
an all-embracing Christian philosophy, offering
confident solution to all the problems of existence.
i
Prom the contradiction, confusion, and sheer variety of
I experiential fact, scholastic philosophy of the
thirteenth century elicited a "synthetic harmony" whose
"volume and grandeur is the greater for the endless
number of its component notes" (pp. 253-5^).
Morey is not the only art historian to see the
Gothic period in terms of a synthetic harmony, of
opposites held, as it were, in delicate balance. Arnold
Hauser, in a chapter entitled "The Dualism of Gothic
Art," describes this quality in terms of a compromise
between Platonic realism and the nominalism of the later
Middle Ages. The "moderate nominalism" which is the
outcome of this compromise does not deny the reality of
ideas, but "regards them as inseparable from the things
of sense experience," thus providing "the key to the
whole of Gothic dualism" (I, 237). Faith and knowledge,
authority and reason, theology and philosophy each
express a kind of truth, thus setting up a series of
oppositions--feudalism/bourgeoisie, otherworldliness/
innerworldliness, spiritualism/sensualism— which
influence the art of the period.
Dualism manifests itself in several aspects of
Gothic art. The decorative and cumulative style of
Romanesque composition, for example, is broken up into
a number of partial units, "each one . . . built up
according to the classical principle of unity and of
subordination, but in total giving the effect of a rather
indiscriminate conglomeration of subjects" (I, 238).
For another, the frontality and resulting formal rigor
of Romanesque architecture is challenged by a Gothic
rejectio n of fro n ta lity which, m obilizing the
spectator, compels him to be constantly changing his
viewpoint; he is "shaken out of re s tfu l contemplation
of the work of a rt and impelled to follow the movements
of the subject represented" ( I , 243)* F in a lly , the
Gothic period witnessed the beginning of an opposition
between the "confessional character" of modern a rt,
presupposing unique and firs t-h an d experience in the
a r tis t , and the burden of a technique which tends
toward the impersonal. With Gothic, Hauser observes,
begins "the lyricism of modern a rt, and also its cult
of v irtu o s ity " ( I, 244).
The Gothic A rtis t
The modern notion that an a r tis t should be o rig in a l
was by no means shared by most peoples of the past.
Not u n til the nineteenth century, notes Gombrich in
The Story of A rt, did a rt become the means of expressing
in d iv id u a lity , fo r "the idea that the true purpose of
a rt was to express personality could only gain ground
when a rt had lo st every other purpose" (pp. 113 > 3^0 )•
The whole train in g and upbringing of the medieval
a r tis t was very d iffe re n t from today; he was apprenticed
to a master by whom he was given tasks gradually
increasing in th e ir demand fo r s k ill, from f i l l i n g in
re la tiv e ly unimportant parts of a picture to painting
an apostle or the Holy Virgin. The mature artist took
his motifs for the most part from pattern books; not
even when representing living subjects— a ruling king
or bishop, for example— would he draw from life.
Instead, he would draw a conventional figure and give
it the insignia of office— a crown and scepter, a mitre
and crozier— perhaps writing a name underneath to
I complete the process of identification. The medieval
artist's product should therefore be thought of,
Oombrich feels, "in the way that we today think of the
i
performance of musicians and actors." For since the
text is there, it is "the manner of presentation— the
charging of that text with meaning— [which] constitutes
the aesthetic achievement."1^ And although this
concept began to alter with the approach of the
Renaissance in the late fourteenth century, the change
j was gradual and incomplete. As with Villard and his
lion, the artist expressed his originality by filling
I in details from direct observation, while the basic
!
! forms remained abstract, traditional, basically
| unalterable.1^
| The Middle Ages, after all, did not believe that
the artist could or should create; only God could
create.1^ The status of the Gothic artist, therefore,
was primarily that of a civil servant, an "officer
through whom art is done"; between himself and his
patron existed a bond which was still fundamentally
feudal. And because the artist expended his best skill
in return for favor and support, his art may be inter
preted, according to George Henderson, as "a labour-
service, such as the medieval villein owed his lord."
Thus, “the work done is the patron’s due. It appertains
to him for whom it is done rather than to him who does
it " (pp. 34-35).
Many characteristics true of Gothic art are true
of culture in general during the medieval period.
Medieval man, in the words of C. S. Lewis, is "an
organizer, a codifier, a man of system"; his ideal is
summed up in "the old housewifely maxim ’A place for
everything and everything in its (right) place.1" In
three of the most typical products of his time— Salisbury
Cathedral, the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, and the Divine
Comedy— we see the energy of "a passionately logical
mind ordering a huge mass of heterogeneous details into
unity." Hence the Comedy is, perhaps, "the supreme
!
achievement: crowded and varied as a railway station on
a bank holiday, but patterned and schematized as-a
PO
battalion on a ceremonial parade."
Medieval life generally was, in fact, crowded and
varied yet patterned and schematized. Lewis ascribes
this contradiction to an inherently contradictory
! 60
classical legacy, a chance collection of ancient Hebrew,
classical Greek, classical Roman, decadent Roman, and
early Christian elements. The medieval mind, with its
reverence and respect for written knowledge (authority),
sought to harmonize this legacy, to seek explanations on
symbolic levels where literal explanations would not do.
Out of this set of circumstances, medieval men evolved
their picture of the universe:
a chance collection of materials, an inability to say
'Bosh1, a temper systematic to the point of morbidity,
great mental powers, unwearied patience, and a robust
delight in their work. All these factors led them to
produce the greatest, most complex, specimen of
syncretism or harmonization which, perhaps, the world
has ever known. They tidied up the universe, (p. 45)
The result of this tidying up is a synthesis or
organization of theology, science, and history into a
single, complex, harmonious "mental Model," arranged,
not in flat equality, but in a hierarchical ladder which,
]
Lewis believes, is not only a supreme medieval work'of
art, but is in a sense the central work, "that in which
most particular works were imbedded, to which they
constantly referred, from which they drew a great deal of
21
their strength." Everything, according to E. M. W.
Tillyard, was included in this hierarchical ladder,
everything was made to fit and connect, both vertically,
within "a chain beginning on high with the noblest and
descending to the meanest things of creation," and
horizontally, within "a number of planes, arranged one
61
below another In order of dignity but connected by an
22
immense net of correspondences." Lewis, comparing
this net to a fugue, or "the orderly and varied re
iteration of the same ’subject,’" describes the original
motif as a triad in the form of Agent (the planets),
Medium (the air) and Patient (man, the Earth). This
triad is repeated at every level, among angels, among
men, among the relations between the two distinct
communities:
. . . God governs the world through the angels; the
whole angelic population, without prejudice to its
complex internal triads, is the medium between God
as agent and nature (or Man) as patient. Just so
on Earth a King governs the commons through the
barons.
The correspondences continue endlessly, throughout the
realms of animate and inanimate objects, all in an effort
to gratify, in the words of E. M. W. Tillyard, the
"great medieval striving after unity" (p. 84).
Whereas Lewis and Tillyard see the medieval pen
chant for horizontal and vertical classification as
arising out of its contradictory inheritance from pagan
and early Christian times, Johan Huizinga finds a
psychologically oriented explanation in "the passionate
and violent soul of the age, always vascillating between
tearful piety and frigid cruelty, between respect and
insolence, between despondency and wantonness. ..."
A rigid system of conventional forms in every phase of
62
life was essential; for without such strict formalism,
"passion and ferocity would have made havoc of life."
Thus, through sublimation, each event became a spectacle;
and "for want of the faculty to express emotions in a
simple and natural way," men resorted to formal aesthetic
representations of sorrow and joy in the events of their
oh
everyday lives.
The penchant for symbolism, according to Huizinga,
also plays its part in the formalism of the age. For
the Middle Ages never forgot that all things would be
absurd if, by their essence, they did not extend beyond
the phenomenal world; here, in fact, is "the psycho
logical foundation from which symbolism arises":
In God nothing is empty of sense: nihil vacuum neque
sine slgno apud Deum, said Saint Irenaeus. So the
conviction of a transcendental meaning in all things
seeks to formulate itself. About the figure of the
Divinity a majestic system of correlated figures
crystallizes, which all have reference to Him, because
all things derive their meaning from Him. The world
unfolds Itself like a vast whole of symbols, like a
cathedral of ideas. It is the most richly rhythmical
conception of the world, a polyphonous expression of
eternal harmony, (p. 202)
From this overly rigid idealism comes an equal rigidity
In the conception of the world, a fixed system of
deductive logic which sees Ideas as distinct and
Important only by virtue of their relation with the
Absolute, so that the medieval mind, when It wants to
know the nature or the reason of a thing, "neither looks
'
into it, to analyse its structure, nor behind it, to i
63
inquire into its origin, but looks up to heaven, where it
shines as an Idea." The first step in resolving any
i
I
question, whether political, social, or moral, is there- !
1
fore to "reduce it to its universal principle" (p. 214). I
i
The mind is not in search of individual realities, but of
"models, examples, norms"; the danger is, of course, that
"the meaning of a conception runs a constant risk of
being lost in the too vivid form" (pp. 216, 237).
Now, given the fact that these correspondences
i
exist between art and culture, an important question
remains to be explored. And that is: how can we
assume, let alone prove, that the same rigid categoriza
tion and reliance on an Ideal unity behind apparently
isolated forms influenced perception and creation in
literature within the construct known as the medieval
mind? This, after all, has traditionally been the
point at which critics such as Rene Wellek have broken
faith. Wellek, who defines a literary period as "a
time section defined by a system of norms embedded in
the historical processes, irremovable from its temporal
place," is so insistent on the development of literature
as autonomous that, although he is willing to admit that
literature does have "vital relationships with all the
other activities of humanity, he is nevertheless adamant
in the plea that we "try to derive our system of norms,
our ’regulative ideas,' from the art of literature, not
merely from the norms of some related activity. And
his attitude is still prevalent over thirty years later--
not because literary critics see someone like Sypher or
Jordan as invalid, though this is often true also, but
because they are uneasy in the presence of analogies
for which there seems to exist no scientific proof in
a pre-eminently scientific, proof-conscious age.
But proof does exist. The work being done to link
phenomena in the visual arts with discoveries in
psychology have, as I noted in discussing Gombrich,
opened our eyes to relationships between inherited forms
and the beholder's expectations in a painter's style,
for example. I should like to offer as additional
support the work of Rudolf Arnhelm, whose study of
Visual Thinking (1969) is extremely illuminating with
respect to the question of formal links between the arts.
Arnheim's best-known work, perhaps, is Art and
Visual Perception (195*0, which describes in the
terminology of gestalt psychology what happens when
people create or look at visual works of art. In
Visual Thinking, he applies his discoveries to a much
broader area, that of thinking in all its aspects.
Arnheim's assertion is that artistic activity is a form
of reasoning, in which perceiving and thinking are
65
indivisibly intertwined. However, this union of'
perception and thought is not merely a specialty of the
arts: first, he believes that "the remarkable mechanisms
by which the senses understand the environment are all
but identical with the operations described by the psy
chology of thinking"; and second, he has found much
evidence that "truly productive thinking in whatever area
of cognition takes place in the realm of imagery."2^
The arts have been neglected in modern education because
they are based on perception, "and perception is
disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought."
Arnheim proceeds to show that this assumption is false,
and to make a case for his belief that the "widespread
unemployment of the senses in every field of academic
study" be reversed in order to heal the "unwholesome
split which cripples the training of reasoning
power" (p. 3).
Perception itself, according to Arnheim, is a mental
process, an act of cognition no different from what
happens when a person sits with eyes shut and "thinks."
For perceiving is an active performance in the world of1
raw sensory material, a world through which the glance -
roams, "directed by attention, focusing the narrow range
of sharpest vision now on this, now on that spot,
following the flight of a distant sea gull, scanning a
66
tree to explore Its shape" (p. 14). Moreover, not only
is seeing a form of thinking; as a source of "inex
haustibly rich information" about the outer world,
vision— not language— is "the primary medium of
thought" (p. 18).
If we do think first in shapes and colors before
translating into words, then I believe that Arnheim's
theories of perception offer an explanation for the
kinds of metaphors and analogies which we are often
tempted to draw between the various arts of a given
period. Moreover, his observations about the role of
memory in perception offer an even more concrete example
of validity in this area of interdisciplinary aesthetics.
Perception, notes Arnheim, cannot be confined to
what the eyes record in the external world, because a
perceptual act is never isolated. Rather, it is "the
most recent phase of a stream of innumerable similar
acts, performed in the past and surviving in memory."
And because experiences of the present, stored and
combined with those of the past, precondition the
percepts of the future, then "perception in the broader
sense must include mental imagery and its relation to
direct sensory observation." The result is "a store
house of visual concepts," bound together by similarity,
by associations of all kinds, by geographical and his-
torical contexts, by spatial settings and time j
sequences (p. 80). Almost every act of perception, then, j
involves subsuming a particular phenomenon under some |
visual concept, under some sort of "norm image" harbored
in the individual mind.
Arnheim's complementary assumption Is that thought
without images is Impossible; thus, he refutes the
findings of early twentieth century psychologists whose
experiments In this area led them to the conclusion
that while thinking often takes place consciously, this
conscious happening Is not Imagistic. Such a con
clusion is unsatisfactory, in Arnheim's view, because
of the tacit assumption that imagery can be involved
i
in thinking only If it shows up consciously; nowadays
psychologists are much more aware of the many processes
which occur below the threshold of awareness. Perhaps,
he goes on to suggest, thought images are accessible
to consciousness, but observers have so far not been
geared to acknowledging them; perhaps "they did not
report the presence of Images because what they
experienced did not correspond to their notion of what
; an image is" (pp. 101, 102).
To illustrate his assumption, Arnheim presents the
verbalized thought Images of psychologist Edward Brad
ford TItchener, who taught himself in the course of a
given experiment to think consciously in a kind of
imagistic language. Titchener, in Lectures on the
Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes (1926), j
I
describes in the following terms the images which arise |
!
out of his reading of a particular book: "I get a sug- j
gestion of dull red . . . of angles rather than curves; I
get, pretty clearly, the picture of movement along lines,
and of neatness or confusion where the moving lines come
together." He is also able to visualize the concept
of "meaning":
I see meaning as the blue-grey tip of a kind of scoop,
which has a bit of yellow above it (probably a part
of the handle), and which is Just digging into a
dark mass of what appears to be plastic material.
While Titchener was recording - these introspections,
notes Arnheim, artists such as Wassily Kandinsky were
exploring "the mysterious zone between the representa
tional and the abstract." How much modern art had
Titchener seen and absorbed? We do not know, yet surely
in the examples cited he was looking at the inner world
of the mind through the images of the modern painters
(p. 114).27
Arnheim's thesis, in summary, is that we think in
images before thinking in words, and that a major source
of imagery is art. The visual arts are thus as important
to the learning process as the traditional Liberal
Arts, since they can help us deliberately to organize
and sort out the world of phenomena on a conscious as
well as an unconscious level. If this is true, then
the connection between visual and verbal arts in every
age is less tenuous and fanciful than has been previously
supposed. Would the thinking of a widely travelled
man of the Court such as Chaucer, exposed as he must
have been to so many works of art of the Gothic period,
be influenced in any way by what he saw throughout his
lifetime? An analysis of some of his works in the
light of what we know of Gothic style will, I believe,
help to supply an answer.
v .
FOOTNOTES
Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and
Interpretations through Eight Centuries (Princeton» N.J.
Princeton Univ. PressT l$bO), p. 830.
A
Meyer Schapiro, "Style," Anthropology Today: An
Encyclopedic Inventory, ed. A. L. Kroeber(Chicago:
The univ. of Chicago Press, 1953)» p. 287.
^Frederick B. Artz, From the Renaissance to
Romanticism; Trends in Style In Art, Literature, and
trtu3lc, 1300-1830 (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press,
1962), p. 3. r”am indebted to this source for the ideas
in this paragraph and the one which Immediately precedes
it.
Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles of Art History;
The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art,
trans. M. D. Hottinger (1915; rpt. New York: Dover
Publications, Inc., 1950).
^Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Archi
tecture, 7th ed. (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books Inc.,
1963), PP. 89-90.
g
Robert Branner, Gothic Architecture (New York:
George Braziller, Inc.7 1981)t PP. 24, 25.
7
'George Henderson, Gothic, Style and Civilization
Series, ed. John Fleming and Hugh Honour (Baltimore, Md.
Penguin Books Inc., 1967), pp. 108-109.
Q
The term "horizontal perspective is borrowed from
Wylie Sypher's description of this quality In Four
Stages of Renaissance Style, p. 19. Wolfflin's term
is plane,*1 as opposed to J ‘ recessional."
^Charles Rufus Morey, Mediaeval Art (New York:
W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1942), p. 259.
10This "reinforcement of scale," as Branner terms
It, Is seen, for example, at Reims Cathedral, where
the pedestals of the piers are nearly at shoulder
height; someone used to the lower pedestals of earlier
structures would, in a kind of "Alice in Wonderland"
effect, feel shorter in relation to the overall height
of the building (Gothic Architecture, p. 28).
71
■^Henderson, pp. 123, 126.
-*-^ E Ernst ] H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (New York:
Phaidon Publishers In c ., 1966), p. 219*
13Arnold Hauser, The Social History of A rt. trans.
Stanley Godman (New York: Vintage Books, In c ., 1957),
I , 23S*
^ H . W . Janson, History of Art: A Survey of the
Ma.ior Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the
Present Day (Englewood C liffs , N. J. and New York:
P ren tice-H all Inc. and Harry N. Abrams, In c ., 1962),
p. 266.
•^ Gothic, p. 43; St. Bernard is quoted by Henderson
on th a t page.
•^ Gothic, p. 49. The most authoritative study of
th is correlatio n is Erwin Panofsky’ s Gothic Architecture
and Scholasticism (New York: Meridian Books, 1957).
As evidence, Panofsky quotes from V illa r d ’ s "Album" a
passage in which the a rch ite ct, while discussing a
chevet, uses the Scholastic term disputare. Here, says
Panofsky, scholastic d ia lec tic s has driven architec
tu r a l thinking to a point where i t almost ceases to be
a rc h ite c tu ra l (p. SB).
•^Gombrich, "Achievement in Medieval A rt," Medita
tions on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory
of A r t, 2nd ed. (New York: Phaidon Publishers, In c .,
1971), P. 72.
i d
Gombrich, Story of A rt, p. 141. S im ilarly,
C. S. Lewis comments: " I f you had asked Layamon or
Chaucer T Why do you not make up a brand-new story of
your own?r I think they might have replied (in e ffe c t)
’Surely we are not yet reduced to th a t? ’ . . . The
o r ig in a lity which we regard as a sign of wealth might
have seemed to them a confession of poverty." The
Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and
Renaissance L itera tu re (Cambridge, England: Cambridge
Univ. Press^ 1964), P* 211.
■^Sypher, Renaissance S ty le , p. 57*
^"Im agination and Thought in the Middle Ages,"
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cam-
bridge, England: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966), p. 44.
PI
Discarded Image, pp. 11, 12.
22E[ustace] Mfandevllle] W[etenhall] Tlllyard,
The Elizabethan World Picture, Modern Library Paper-
backs (New York: Random house, n.d.), p. 83.
^"imagination and Thought," p. 58.
pii
The Waning of the Middle Ages. A Study of the
Forms of Life, Thought and Art In prance and the
Mfetherlands In the XfVth and XVth ftenturles, Doub1eday
Anchor iBooks (1924; rpt. Garden City, N. V.: Doubleday
& Co., Inc., 195^)> PP• 50-51.
25»periods and Movements in Literary History,"
pp. 90-93 passim.
2^Vlsual Thinking (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press,
1969), P. v.
2^Arnheim quotes from Titchener's Lectures (New
York: Macmillan, 1926), but does not give a page
reference.
III. THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN
The Legend of Good Women is the first major work of
what has been called Chaucer's "English" period. The
poem consists of a Prologue in two versions, plus nine
Legends, the last unfinished, of which the longest (Dido)
is 444 lines. Most scholars have preferred to devote
their time to the Prologue, either in puzzling over the
priority and reason for the two versions, or in appre
ciation of the famous passages telling of the narrator's
adoration of the daisy. The Legends themselves are
generally dismissed as being unworthy of extended
examination; Kemp Malone's opinion, briefer than most,
is nonetheless representative of this attitude:
Chaucer wrote these very short lives because he had
to, not because he wanted to. . . . the nine lives
of the ten saints of Cupid were done in a perfunctory
spirit and we could do without them. They are worth
reading; Chaucer never wrote anything truly worthless.
But they are not worth reading over and over and
living with. It is Just as well.that Chaucer did not
finish the Legend of Good Women.
The predominant method of defending this position
has been to take seriously the narrative of the Prologue:
Chaucer has offended the God of Love by writing about
the unfaithfulness of Crlseyde in the Troilus and by
translating the Romance of the Rose: as penance, the
73
74
poet must produce a palinode on faithful womens
Thow shalt, whll that thow llvest, yer by yere,
The moste partye of thy tyme spende
In makynge of a gloryous legende
Of goode women, maydenes and wyves.
That were trewe In lovynge al here lyves;
And telle of false men that hem betrayen,
And thogh the lesteth nat a lovere be,
Spek wel of love; this penaunce yeve I thee.
(G. 471-76, 480-81)
But the task went against the poet's grain and, dis
satisfied with his subject and severely limited by
theme and scope, he became Indifferent, careless, and
openly bored by the project. The frequent use of
abbrevlatlo throughout the Legends Is most often cited
as evidence for this opinion; In the words of Nevill
Coghill, Chaucer
coloured his narratives with rhetoric, urged them
forward with cries of haste, enlivened them with
humour and touched them with sentiment. Yet he seems
to have felt he could do nothing with them; they
'encumbered his wits.'2
And Robert Kilburn Root, making use of the intentional
fallacy to prove hl3 point, concludes that
Though the tales are well and gracefully told, and
are much more than mere imitations of classical
authors, many readers, I think, will fail to read
them through. We are conscious of a 'hidden want,'
the want of Chaucer's own participant enthusiasm.
Anything which has been hastily and reluctantly
written will be hastily and reluctantly read.3
The major flaw in this approach is that in an
effort to Justify modern opinions of the Legend, certain
conventions of medieval poetry are ignored altogether.
We should not assume that the poet Chaucer was reluctant
to begin or to complete the Legends merely because we
have witnessed the Imposition of the task In the Pro
logue; the palinode was, after all, a familiar enough
4
form In the fourteenth century. As for the use of
abbrevlatlo— "to make a long story short"— perhaps it
Is more Intrusive to us than it was to Chaucer and his
audience. W. Nelson Francis, in an article entitled
"Chaucer Shortens a Tale," has shown that the poet's
use of this trope is ten times more frequent than that
of any of his contemporaries, and that such abbreviating
tags occur repeatedly not when Chaucer is most bored,
but rather when he is most dependent on a source (for
example in the Legend of Good Women, the Man of Law's
Tale, the Knight's Tale).^ And Robert Worth Frank, Jr.,
in "The Legend of the Legend of Good Women.” argues
convincingly that Chaucer uses occupatlo (the refusal
to describe or narrate while referring briefly to a
subject or scene) as a device of abbrevlatlo throughout
the poem, not to flaunt his own boredom, but
to indicate where he was cutting his sources in the
interest of brevity or emphasis, to end a scene or
incident, to provide a transition, to intensify by
implying how much could be said, and once or twice to
assist him when his material was thin. The passages
cited as evidence of impatience or weariness come at
points in his narrative when they clearly have a
functional purpose.®
The Legend, he concludes, Is "a brilliant work of
selection" In which the device of occupatlo is an im
portant technique in accomplishing the dual tasks of
weeding out material and combining the selected parts.
The attraction of the boredom theory lies in its com
fort: it "puts Chaucer on our side." And therefore,
believes Frank, "we can go on to the Canterbury Tales
with restored confidence and a sunny conscience" (p. 117).
A second major approach to the Legends, its goal
closely related to the first, criticizes them in light
of what precedes and what follows them in the Chaucer
canon: Trollus and Crlseyde and the Canterbury Tales.
Thus, writes Percy Van Dyke Shelly,
In the Trollus and Crlseyde he had spread his wings
to the widest and had had ample room in which to spend
all his art on details of scene and character. But
in the Legend of Good Women this was impossible,
except in a very restricted way. And after writing
the Trollus and Crlseyde he must have found the small
canvas of the individual Legends extremely cramping.7
Not only do the Legends fall 3hort of the scope found in
the Trollus; in their uniformity, observes J. S. P.
Tatlock, they also compare unfavorably with "the extra
ordinary variety and contrasts of the Canterbury Tales
Q
in point, tendency, and style." This attitude seems
to have originated with Thomas R. Lounsbury, whose
position, like that of his contemporaries, was that
Chaucer's development as a poet coincided with his
rejection of the stylistic conventions of his time, as
77
represented by collections of stories such as the
Legend and the Monk*s Tale:
The taste which made collections of 3tories of this
kind popular came to be recognized by Chaucer as
essentially vicious in art, and therefore transitory.
It shows how thoroughly developed was the critical
side of his intellectual nature that he should have
reached such a conclusion, while this style of com
position was not only in full fashion, but had before
it centuries in which to exist and flourish."
This view is, however, no longer acceptable to scholars
of the Middle Ages. As Frank has observed,
We no longer see Chaucer as an artist throwing off
the literary conventions of his day and ceasing to
be a medieval writer. We understand more adequately
than did Lounsbury's generation the role of convention
in art, and we do not stigmatize the particular con
ventions of Chaucer’s age as inevitably crippling
and destructive.
Instead, we recognize the taste of his time as being
"more sophisticated than Lounsbury allows"; the problem
is rather that "our knowledge about taste in that age
is too Incomplete, too uncertain, to permit such dogmatic
assertions about its character" (p. 114).
At this point, therefore, I would like to suggest
a positive approach to the Legend of Good Women. By
looking at Chaucer as a Gothic artist, and at the
Legends collectively as a Gothic work of art, we can,
I believe, begin to see this relatively neglected poem
in terms of accomplishment rather than in terms of
failure. To begin with, even granting a basic truth
behind the fiction of the Prologue, we are not justified
In assuming that Chaucer would resent being asked to
write on a given subject by his patrons at court. Like
any medieval artist, the poet would have recognized
the bond between himself and his lord or lady; he would
have looked upon any such task as a labor-service
rightfully due to one who was his source of income.
It is the "art" or skill which belongs to him; the
product itself belongs to whoever has commissioned it.
Furthermore, the textual evidence in both versions
of the Prologue supports this position. Following her
spirited and lengthy defense of the poet Chaucer for
what Cupid has chosen to regard as "heresye ageyns my
lawe" (0. 256), Alceste proposes that
'He shal no more agilten in this wyse,
But he shal maken, as ye wol devyse,
Of women trewe In lovynge al here lyve,
Wherso ye wol, of mayden or of wyve,
And fortheren yow, as muche as he mysseyde
Or in the Rose or elles in Crisseyde.'
(Q. 426-31)
Chaucer's reaction is one of complete gratitude; he
goes down on his knees to her and thanks her for
Interceding in his behalf. He then states (and here
is where most interpretations find their proof of a
task reluctantly assumed) that he doesn't believe he
has sinned against love, since his intent, whatever his
source might have meant, was
79 |
i
'To forthere trouthe in love and it cheryce, j
And to be war fro falsnesse and fro vice !
By swich ensaumple; . . . (O. 462-64) !
Alceste advises him to leave off arguing, however, since
"love ne wol nat counterpletyd be/ In ryght ne wrong;"
(G. 466-67), and assigns him his task (G. 471-81).
The God of Love then reveals the identity of the Queen
as Alceste, and enjoins the poet to write of her and
of women like her:
. . . 'A ful gret neglygence
Was it to the, to write unstedefastnesse
Of women, sith thow knowest here goodnesse
By pref, and ek by storyes herebyforn.
Let be the chaf, and writ wel of the corn.1
(G. 525-29)
Chaucer speaks only twice after line G. 464; the
first time in answer to the God of Love to show that
he is familiar with Alceste's story (G. 505-22), the
second time to conclude the Prologue: "And with that
.
word, of slep I gan awake,/ And ryght thus on my
Legende gan I make" (G. 544-45). It is possible, of
course, to argue from Chaucer's silence in the last
part of the poem that he harbors resentment against
outwardly imposed tasks such as this; to argue from
silence is, however, dangerous in any case, and par
ticularly so here, when to begin writing as his patron
has commanded would have implied no moral compromise
on Chaucer's part. We are dealing, after all, not with
the artist as rebel, but with the artist as civil |
i
i
80
servant
t
Not only does the Legend of Good Women present a
picture of Chaucer as Gothic artist; It also provides
us with an example of a Gothic work of art both In
structure, and In content. Many of the characteristics
cited as Indicative of Chaucer's failure are, In fact,
those features which make the Legend a particularly
Gothic poem.
In the past, the Legend of Good Women has been
compared structurally with the Canterbury Tales and
found wanting. Both, it is true, are frame stories
introduced by a Prologue which sets up a situation and
provides motivation for the tales to follow. But the
Prologue to the Legend. in both its versions, differs
from that of the Canterbury Tales in two important
respects: it describes a dream rather than a situation
in the poet's waking life; and, while it provides a
reason, it does not furnish a cast of characters who
narrate the individual stories. Once the Prologue is
ended, the Legends, which unfold without the familiar
links between the Tales, vary in length as follows:
Lucrece
Ariadne
PETIoineia
Phyllis
Hypermnestra
Hypsipyle and Medea
thisbe
5I3o
Cleopatra 126 11
218 11
444 11
312 11
206 11
342 11
166 11
168 11
162 11. (nearly finished)
The range Is 318 lines; this is, however, quite 3mall
in light of the great difference in length between the
shortest and longest of the Canterbury Tales in verse
(the Manciple's Tale has 258 lines, the Knights Tale
2250). Moreover, only the Manciple's Tale, the Second
Nun's Tale, and the unfinished Cook's Tale fall within
the range of the Legends. These Lives of Cupid's
Saints, in other words, exhibit a uniform brevity
reinforced by a uniformity of proportion and focus s
the setting, the situation, the heroine and her lover
are Introduced briefly at the beginning of each story;
proof of the heroine's "trouthe" in love takes up the
rest of the narrative, with the exception of a short
personal tag by the poet, sometimes faintly humorous,
sometimes sympathetic, sometimes merely deferring to
his source for further details ("Wei can Ovyde hire
letter in vers endyte,/ Which were as now to long for
me to wryte," Medea, 1678-79).
The sameness of the Legends Is undeniable, espe
cially In comparison with the great variety of the
Canterbury Tales. However, this sameness In not
necessarily a sign or source of Chaucer's boredom, nor
does it need to be a stumbling-block to our own appre
ciation. Rather than examining the Legends as failed
versions of the Canterbury Tales, therefore, I would
like to examine them in terms of those aspects of style
82
set forth in the preceding chapter, so that we can
begin to see what Chaucer has achieved in these stories
structured according to principles of Gothic partiality.
The Legend of Good Women is, to begin with, con
structed in a linear rather than a painterly style,
meaning that our attention is directed to the outlines
or boundaries of the poem as opposed to what it contains.
The "outlines," in the case of the Legend, are made up
of two main elements: the uniform length of each story
for one, the recurring theme of faithful woman betrayed
by weak or faithless man for another. The invariability
of these two elements throughout the ten stories builds
up cumulatively into a rigidity of form almost as
tangible as, for example, the elaborate border of a
manuscript illustration or the network of buttresses
encircling a cathedral.
Once we are aware of the outlines of the Legends,
moreover, we can only consider their mass and volume—
the differences in the individual stories— by a conscious
effort. This inability to take in outline and mass
simultaneously has its parallel too in the visual arts;
Ernst Gombrich illustrates the phenomenon in Art and
Illusion with a discussion by Sir Kenneth Clark on "Las
Menlnas" by Velasquez. Looking at the painting,
[Clark] wanted to observe what went on when the brush
strokes and dabs of pigment on the canvas transformed
83
themselves Into a vision of transfigured reality as
he stepped back. But try as he might, stepping
backward and forward, he could never hold both visions
at the same time, and therefore the answer to his
problem of how It was done always seemed to elude
him.12
If we were to read the Legends singly— one at a sitting,
perhaps, or two at the most--our consciousness of
outline, and therefore of repetition, would probably
disappear. The point is, however, that we read them in
larger units, and the resulting impression of sameness
1^
is inevitable. J Such an impression, moreover, is an
asset in any medieval composition of this nature; as
Huizinga has explained, idealism (Platonic realism) is
at the heart of all mental activity in the Middle Ages.
Every idea is combined and classified; every utterance
becomes "a dictum, a maxim, a text."
For every question of conduct Scripture, legends,
history, literature, furnish a crowd of examples or
of types, together making up a sort of moral clan,
to which the matter in question belongs. If it is
desired to make someone to pardon an offence, all
the Biblical cases of pardon are enumerated to him;
if to dissuade him from marrying, all the unhappy
marriages of antiquity are cited, (p. 227)
Linearity of construction is accompanied and
reinforced by several other features of Gothic style,
among them horizontal perspective. In painting this
term describes the two-dimensional art of the pre-
Renaissance; objects are arranged on the surface of a
panel, a wall, or a manuscript page without regard for
84
scale and, therefore, without any attempt to relate
the viewer to what Is going on In the picture through
a fixed vanishing point. The Legend is essentially a
two-dimensional poem; Chaucer has not made an effort,
as he was later to do in the Canterbury Tales, to impose
sequential order on the individual stories or to connect
them with the Prologue other than through the abstract
"Good Women" concept. Such techniques— assigning an
order to the Legends and thus building toward an implied
climax, a literary vanishing point; or developing a
cast of characters in the Prologue who, by narrating
the individual Legends, relate them to a larger context—
would add a third dimension to the composition. We
Judge the Legend. as it stands, to be thin, superficial,
patterned, and shallow. Depth, however, is not the
primary aim of the artist here; he is working within an
open-form aesthetic in which conformity, pattern,
emphatic separation between objects and scenes, are
accepted without question. Time and space in Gothic art
are so implicitly a part of a larger continuum that the
need for an immediate and tangible context is not the
necessity— or the urgency— it becomes in later centuries.
Perhaps the most difficult principle to explain in
discussing the Legend of Good Women as a Gothic work of
art is that of the unity on which the entire structure
depends. The problem is , I think, that there is more
than one kind of u n ity here, and each, a t least in part,
contradicts the other. One kind is contained in the
continuum described above, a unity in the medieval model
of the universe in which a ll things p a rtic ip a te . Thus,
an in d ivid u al work— the Legend, fo r example, or Piers
Plowman. or the House of Fame—depends on th is larg er
context; the a r tis t is therefore fre e r than his la te r
counterparts to elaborate, to indulge in variations on
his own theme, to m ultiply and divide endlessly the
theme it s e lf .
This kind of u n ity is related, closely in e ffec t
to another, termed co llec tiv e unity, which focuses on
the p a rtic u la r work of a rt as a separate construct.
Here, otherwise unlike things are gathered together
without evaluation or subordination on the basis of a
single s im ila rity —the theme, fo r example, of wom en
"trewe in lovynge a l here ly v e s .” And the backgrounds
and events of these true womenfs liv e s are re a lly quite
diverse. Chaucer ranges from the a llite r a te d sea-
b a ttle at Actium
He styngeth hym upon his speres ord;
He rent the seyl with hokes lyke a sithe;
He bryngeth the cuppe, and biddeth hem be blythe
He poureth pesen upon the haches slidere;
(Cleopatra, 645-43)
to the pageantry of the royal hunt a t Carthage,
86
Into the court the houndes ben ybrought;
And upon coursers, swift as any thought,
Hire yonge Knyghtes hoven al aboute,
And of hire women ek an huge route.
Upon a thikke palfrey, paper-whit,
With sadel red, embrouded with delyt,
Of gold the barres up enbosede hye,
Sit Dido, al in gold and perre wrye;
(Dido. 1194-1201)
to the wonders awaiting Jason on the island of Colchis:
That therin was a ram, that men mighte se,
That hadde a fles of gold, that shon so bryghte
That nowher was swich anothir syghte;
But it was kept alwey with a dragoun,
And many other merveyles, up and doun,
And with two boles, maked al of bras,
That spitten fyr, . . .
(Hypslpyle. 1427-331
and so on throughout the classical world. His heroines
find themselves in a variety of situations: Thisbe, for
example, the victim of two hostile fathers as well as
of her lover's rashness; the honorable Phyllis deserted
by Demophon after he has "piked of hire al the good he
myghte" (like father like son); and Philomela enduring
the nightmare of rape by her sister's husband, followed
by a violation equal if not greater in horror:
For fere lest she shulde his shame crye,
And don hym openly a vilenye,
And with his swerd hire tonge of kerveth he, . . .
(2332-34)
These variations are emphasized by Chaucer's shifts in
attitude toward his heroines. For the most part he
treats them seriously, if somewhat distantly. Toward
Philomela, however, he is more warmly sympathetic:
87
'Where is my sister, brother Tereus?1
And therwithal she wepte tenderly,
And quok for fere, pale and pitously,
Ryght as the lamb that of the wolf is biten;
(2315-18)
And every so often, as in the description of the death of
Lucrece, the tone shifts to a humor which is surely not
just accidental:
. . . pryvely she kaughte forth a knyf,
And therwithal she rafte hirself hir lyf;
And as she fel adoun, she kaste hir lok
And of hir clothes yet she hede tok.
For in hir fallynge yet she had a care,
Lest that hir fet or suche thyng lay bare;
So wel she loved clennesse and eke trouthe.
(185^-60)
A close reading of the Legend, in other words,
reveals so many differences among the individual stories
that the similarities temporarily disappear; Chaucer
seems to be relying wholly on the principle of collective
unity, stringing his stories together on the slender
thread of the "Good Woman" theme. Yet a counter-principle
is at work here, that of constitutive unity, in which
details, while numerous, nonetheless perform a necessary
function in an overall design. This design is structural
in part, emerging from the consistency in length, from
the number of lines devoted to the Good Woman's plight,
and from the long lament with which five of the stories
lii
end. In part, too, the design— and thus this third
kind of unity— comes about through the heroines' simi
larities in personality, isolated and analyzed by
88
Pat Trefzger Overbeck in an article on "Chaucer’s Good
Woman.Overbeck points out many consistencies in
the attitudes of these women toward God, human authority,
love. "Chaucer's heroine," she concludes, is "an
engaging character, perpetually youthful, misguided
rather than evil, desirous, and doomed" (p. 86). The
tendency toward excess of emotion, coupled with a
distinct penchant for self-destruction, is probably the
most striking of these consistencies; it emerges, for
example, in the violence of Thisbe's reaction to the
suicide of Piramus:
Who coude wryte which a dedly cheere
Hath Thisbe now, and how hire heer she rente,
And how she gan hireselve to turmente,
And how she lyth and swouneth on the grounde,
And how she wep of teres ful his wounde;
How medeleth she his blod with hire compleynte;
How with his blod hireselve gan she peynte;
How clyppeth she the deede cors, alias!
How doth this woful Tisbe in this cas!
How kysseth she his frosty mouth so cold!
(869-78)
And the loneliness and futility which inevitably follow
the Good Woman's passion come out in Ariadne's lament
for the man who deserted her:
. . . 'Theseus! myn herte swete!
Where be ye, that I may nat with yow mete,
And myghte thus with bestes ben yslayn?'
The holwe rokkes answerde hire agayn.
(2190-93)
Thus, two very opposite kinds of unity exist side
by side in this poem, neither one strong or pervasive
enough to take over from the other. The Legend of
Good Women is, in fact, compounded of a series of dualisms
typical of the age in which it was written, embodying
on the one hand the Gothic penchant for variety,
multiplicity, decoration, and detail, and on the other
the equally strong penchant for order, consonance,
cohesion, and design. Moreover, this dualism explains
an attitude found in analyses by critics such as Percy
1
Shelly and Raymond Preston — that the poem, while
unsuccessful in the aggregate, contains many "fine
moments" worthy of the poet who wrote Troilus and Criseyde
and the best of the Canterbury Tales. These moments
turn out to be lines in which Chaucer combines freshness
of detail and direct observation with his sources, as
in the Legend of Philomela:
This olde Pandion, this kyng, gan wepe
For tendernesse of herte, for to leve
His doughter gon, and for to yeve hire leve;
Of al this world he loveth nothyng so;
But at the laste leve hath she to go,
For Philomene, with salte teres eke,
Gan of hire fader grace to beseke
To sen hire syster, that she loveth so;
And hym embraseth with hire armes two. 17
(2279-87) '
Such moments exemplify late Gothic "poster art," sharp
and spasmodic, appealing without shame or restraint to
the emotions. That they can occur within a framework as
schematic as that of the Legend is due to the fact that
a Gothic artist would have seen nothing incongruous in
90
the combination of rigid formalism and naturalistic
details.
Finally, even the incomplete ending of the Legend
can be explained much more reasonably by stylistic con
vention than by the often-cited theory that Chaucer,
overwhelmed by the boredom oppressing him throughout the
poem, at last gave up in despair and disgust. As Frank
observes, only one certain conclusion can be drawn from
the evidence at hand: "namely, that the poem is
unfinished, nothing more." So, he continues, is the
House of Fame, the Canterbury Tales, the Squire’s Tale,
the Cook's Tale:
The evidence is unmistakable that sometimes Chaucer
worked on one poem for a time, dropped it, and worked
on another poem, and that sometimes at least he had
every intention of returning to the abandoned poem
at a later date. If we have to say that the Legend
is unfinished because it bored him, then we have to
say it about the others too. (p. 131)
I believe, with Frank, that Chaucer intended to return
to the Legend, but that he was drawn to other projects
and eventually ran out of time. I would add only that
incomplete form is a characteristic of Gothic architec
ture, that the concept of an unfinished work, a work in
progress, would have been familiar to Chaucer's audience,
and that they would have accepted the Legend as It stands
without feeling the necessity for constructing elaborate
theories about something that isn't even there.
91
This Is not to say that the Legend Is without fault.
Its major flaws are, I think, that too many of Its scenes
are static, and that Chaucer too often describes In his
own (or his narrator's) voice what would become much
more vital In the mouths of his characters. But
within the limits of its own form, the Legend of Good
Women Is a respectable work from the mature period of
the greatest poet of Gothic England. By first opening
ourselves to more of the aesthetic principles underlying
his art, we have much to gain from the rereading of this
and other so-called failures.
92
FOOTNOTES
• ^ Chapters on Chaucer (Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins
Press, 1951)* P* 99.
2
The Poet Chaucer (London: Oxford Univ. Press,
1949; corrected rpt. 1961), p. 93.
^The Poetry of Chaucer, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1922}, p. 150.
4
Robinson includes a brief history of the palinode
form in his introduction to the Legend; his conclusion
is that "in writing such a recantation, . . . Chaucer
was following a familiar custom" (p. 481).
^PMLA. 68 (1953), 1126-41. Despite his discoveries,
however, Francis still subscribes to the prevailing
"boredom" thesis about the Legend (pp. 1132-34).
g
Chaucer Review, 1 (1966), 132.
^The Living Chaucer (1940; rpt. New York: Russell &
Russell, 1968;, p. 150.
Q
The Mind and Art of Chaucer (1950; rpt. New York:
Gordian Press, 196b), p. 01.
9
Studies in Chaucer. Ill, 339.
Percy Shelly and Raymond Preston are the exceptions
to this general attitude. Shelly begins his discussion
of the Legend with a burst of enthusiasm: "The Legends
as a whole . . . are delightful reading, in spite of
the familiarity of the stories and the way they are
associated in our minds with the work of later English
poets. To understand their appeal to readers of Chaucer's
time we must remember that they were less well-worn
than they are today. They had much more freshness of
appeal, more of the charm of novelty" (The Living Chaucer,
p. 175). Yet he admits earlier that "The ten Legends
are not of equal merit. Here and there they betray
evidence of haste and of the fatigue and even boredom
of the poet" (pp. 156-57). Shelly seems, in fact, to
be discussing the Legends to be different, and his
analysis consists of singling out those particular
moments during which the poems rise above their predominant
level.
Preston's discussion of the Legend is directed
toward his thesis that the entire poem, or at least
93
"a great deal of it, may be read as criticism of Ovid.
. . . The poet of Crlseyde, bringing Ovid and classical
story into English, could have found nowhere else a
complete analysis of female emotion: . . . But--and
this is the criticism— his poetry . . . is also a comment
on Ovid's relish of horrors that still have power to
corrupt. There is no farcical engagement, here, with
the naughty male. Chaucer is propounding a serious
problem: the problem of evil. Preston seems to
believe, however, that were it not for this "arriere-
pensee" which runs through the work, Chaucer "could
not have shown even the degree of interest which I shall
try to indicate" (Chaucer [London and New York: Sheed
and Ward, Ltd., 1952J, pp. 129, 145).
1CL,
Prank offers a much more extensive argument against
the charges of weariness and resentment in the Prologue
as well as in the Legends themselves; cf. especially
pp. 126-28 on the "weariness" topos in Philomela
(2255-60) and Phyllis (2452-647T
^Introduction, 28 11.; Hypsipyle, 184 11.j Medea,
100 11.
12
Kenneth Clark, "Six Great Pictures, 3: 'Las
Meninas' by Velasquez," London Sunday Times, June 2,
1957* P. 9; cited in Art and Illusion, p. b'.
13
Arnheim's remarks, intended primarily for visual
media, are interesting and valuable in this context:
"When a number of forms within the same work of art are
meant to be similar to each other, considerable dif
ferences between them will be no obstacle as long as
their structural skeletons are reasonably alike. The
image of a human figure may be stripped to a very few
elements; it may greatly deviate in its detail from the
familiar appearance of a person— it will still be
recognized without difficulty as long as the structural
skeleton of the image corresponds to that of the visual
concept that the observer has of a human being" (Art and
Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye
IBerkeley: Univ. of tialif. Press, 1954J* P. 80).
14
This lament takes the form of a letter in four
of the Legends (Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Phyllis); the
fifth is Ariadne" Th all cases, Chaucer is following
one of his major sources in the Legend, Ovid's Heroldes.
1^Chaucer Review, 2 (1967), 75-94.
94
16
See n. 9 above.
■^In "Chaucer and the Ovide moralised" PMLA, 33
(1918), 302-25, John Livingston Lowes has demonstrated
through a lina-by-line comparison between Ovid, the
Ovide moralise, and the Legend of Philomela that while
600k VI of the Metamorphoses forms the basis for the
narrative in the LOW, Chaucer takes from the French
source "the details that enhance the vividness and
clarify the motivation. . . , Where Gower omits or slurs
over even Ovid's most telling details, Chaucer heightens
Ovid's effectiveness by a dexterous interweaving of
fresh narrative touches from the French recasting of
the tale" (p. 318). Lowes finds no indication of any
use of the French Philomena in Gower's version (Con-
fesslo Amantis, v, 5^1 ff.).
IV. THE MONK'S TALE
The Monk'3 Tale Is today one of the least popular
and least read of Chaucer's works. The tale, part of
Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales, is preceded by
the narrator's Tale of Mellbee and followed by the Nun's
Priest's Tale, an order unmistakably Chaucer's: Harry
Bailly comments on the contrast between Melibeus's
wife, Prudence, and his own wife, Goodelief, before
turning to the Monk for the next story; and at the
conclusion of the tale, after the Knight and the Host
have given their opinions of the preceding stories, the
Monk Is asked to try again:
'Sir, sey somewhat of huntynge, I yow preye.'
'Nay,' quod this Monk, 'I have no lust to pleye.
Now lat another telle, as I have toold.'
(VII 2805-7)
The Host then passes on to the Nun's Priest, who gives
the company the kind of "murye tale" it has been waiting
for.
But if the position of the Monk's Tale is well-
established, its purpose is not. Why are the seventeen
brief tragedies at such variance with the Monk's
character as presented In the General Prologue? Were
these stories boring to Chaucer's audience, as they
95
96
have come to be to us? And if so, does this boredom
have a dramatic function within the context of the
journey to Canterbury? Finally, can any insight be
achieved through principles of Gothic partiality rather
than through more traditional literary approaches?
These questions, all but the last raised by critics
willing to examine this tale, will not be entirely solved
by viewing the Monk's Tale in terms of medieval art in
general. A new and illuminating perspective, however,
often comes about through the assumption of a slightly
different angle of vision, a different approach, and
this is what I wish to offer here after summarizing
what has already been theorized about the Monk and his
tale.
Like the Legend of Good Women, the Monk's Tale has
been criticized for its structural and thematic monotony.
"We need not mourn," observes Willard Farnham, "that
Chaucer actually gave us no more than the seventeen
stories which the Knight allows the Monk to tell." On
the contrary, "we should agree . . . that if we had to
choose one of Chaucer's incomplete works whose end we
•l
could best go without, we should have to choose this."
And Root, who labels the tale as one of the poet's
"literary bastards," has this to say about its defects:
A discussion of the literary merits of these
•tragedies' must resemble the famous chapter on the
97
snakes of Ireland. With few exceptions, they have no
literary merit. Apart from the unspeakable monotony
of the series, the dry epitomizing character of the
individual narrations and the inevitably recurring
moral makes them intolerable, (p. 207)
Again like the Legend, the defects in this work
have been excused on the grounds that they are at least
in part intentional. While granting the string of
brief tragedies to be the product of an earlier period,2
critics who take this line of defense find in the
assignment of these stories to the Monk an ingenious
instance of character revelation. Such an explanation
reconciles the discrepancy between the portrait of the
Monk in the General Prologue and what we are given here,
while adding, in the words of Bertrand H. Bronson, "an
entirely new, surprising, yet credible dimension" to the
cleric. "It Is impossible," he continues, "with the
whole sequence now present in our mind's eye, not to
contemplate It as living drama." The> "living drama,"
as Bronson reconstructs it, is that the Shipman's Tale—
about another "outrider" monk— in combination with the
Host's comments, have caused the Monk to correct "the
base image that has been foisted upon him so gratu->
itously. A variant of this theory emphasizes the
irony arising from the contrast between the materialistic
and worldly Monk and a series of stories which (pre
sumably) teaches hatred of the world.* * Whatever explana
tion is offered, however, the judgment remains the same.
98
The Monk*3 Tale is, at best, a boring preamble to the
Nun*s Priests Tale, an opinion obviously shared by
Chaucer since he stopped the tragedies and offered
criticism of them through two major characters on the
pilgrimage, the Knight and the Host.
Would Chaucer and his audience have been as harsh
in their Judgment of this tale as we have been in modern
times? A partial answer is contained in the reason
given by the Knight for stopping the flow of tragedies.
For although he begins by saying that "litel hevynesse/
Is right ynough to muche folk," his main argument against
the Monk’s continuing in the same vein is that
'. . . for me, it is a greet disese,
Whereas men han been in greet welthe and ese,
To heeren of hire sodeyn fal, alias I1
(vii 2769-71)
On the other hand, it is "joye and greet solas" to hear
news to the contrary,
•As whan a man hath been in povre estaat,
And clymbeth up and wexeth fortunat,
And there abideth in prosperitee.'
(VII 2775-77)
The Knight, in other words,, objects to content rather
than to monotony of form or theme. And the Host is, for
the most part, in agreement with the tenor of this Judg
ment:
'. . . pardee, no remedie
It is for to biwaille ne compleyne
99
That that is doon, and als it is a peyne,
As ye han seyd, to heere of hevynesse.'
(VII 2784-87)
Such-talk is "nat worth a boterflye," because "therinne
is ther no desport ne game1 ' (VII 2790-91). His remark
that were it not for the clanking of bells on the Monk's
bridle he would have been asleep long ago contains, to
be sure, a slur against monotony of structure as well as
of content. Harry Bailly's conclusion, however, is that
he has had enough of sober sentences and wants, as he
tells the Nun's Priest, "swich thyng as may oure hertes
glade" (VII 2811).
The words of the Knight and the Host, then,
criticize the subject matter rather than the structure
of this typical medieval production. And indeed,
Chaucer has managed to inject a surprising degree of
formal variety into the Monk's series of tragedies. The
length of each, to begin with, differs widely: the
shortest tales are those of Lucifer, Adam, Peter of
Cyprus, and Barnabo of Lombardy; the longest is that
of Zenobia.
Lines Stanzas
Preface 8 1
Lucifer 8 1
Adam 8 1
Sampson 80 10
Hercules 48 6
Nabugodonosor 40 5
Balthasar 64 8
Cenobia 128 16
100
De Petro Rege Ispanne 16 2
De Petro Rege de Cipro 8 1
De Barnabo de Lumbardia 8 1
De Hugelino Comite de Pize 56
7
Nero 88 11
De Oloferno
24 3
De Rege Antiocho Ill u s t r i 56
7
De Alexandro 40
5
De Julio Cesare 56
7
Cresus 40
5
Most of the stories range between fiv e and eight stanzas;
yet w ithin the lim its noted above, length fo r Chaucer
is a random fac to r as opposed, fo r example, to the
precise mathematical in tric a c ie s found in the Middle
English P earl. Moreover, although several c ritic s have
attempted to discover principles of ordering or develop
ment which connect one story with another,? the Monk
informs us in the Prologue that we are not meant to fin d
such re g u la rity here:
’Now herkneth, i f yow lik e th fo r to here.
But f ir s t I yow biseeke in th is mateere,
Though I by ordre t e lle nat thise thynges,
Be i t of popes, emperours, or kynges,
A fter h ir ages, as m en writen fynde,
But te lle n hem som b ifore and som bihynde,
As i t now comth unto m y remembraunce,
Have m e excused of m yn ignoraunce.’
(V II 1933-90)
The random ordering of the ind ivid u al tragedies
is fu rth e r reinforced by the v a rie ty of ways in which
these stories are to ld . The four single-stanza tragedies
follow the same formula: a highly generalized and
abbreviated account of the hero’ s ris e and f a l l .
101
Loo Adam, in the feeld of Damyssene,
With Qoddes owene fynger wroght was he,
And nat blgeten of mannes sperme unclene,
And welte al paradys savynge o tree.
Hadde nevere worldly man so heigh degree
As Adam, til he for mysgovernaunce
Was dryven out of hys hye prosperitee
To labour, and to helle, and to meschaunce.
(V II 2007-1*0
The longer tragedies, however, exhibit almost as
many patterns as there are stories. In the tales of
Samson, Balthazar, Julius Caesar, and Croesus, for
example, the introductory stanza has the generalizing
character of the eight-line tragedies. Beyond this
point, however, the development differs noticeably.
Samson's feats of strength, his betrayal by his wives,
his imprisonment, the pulling down of the temple, the
moral that "no man telle hir conseil til hir wyves/
Of swich thyng as they wolde han secree fayn,"
(V II 2092-93)— all are told to us in the third person.
The same narrative voice runs throughout the story of
Julius Caesar, but here the events build through the
interweaving and comparison of the two careers, Caesar's
and Pompey's, leading to the conclusion that Julius,
like Pompey before him, is conquered at last by Fortune
who once made him conqueror over all. In the stories of
Balthazar and Croesus, on the other hand, the conclusion
is the same as that of Julius Caesar, but the development
depends largely on the first person narrative interpre
tation of each ruler's dream which foreshadows hi3 fall.
102
Other tragedies— that of Hercules, for one— begin with
a catalogue of the hero's prowess, but otherwise follow
the pattern of Samson's story. In the account of
Ugolino, however, adapted from Dante and usually con
sidered the only part of the Monk's Tale worth critical
attention, a specific incident is the focus of the
entire poem— an incident rendered lifelike and moving
by the use of direct discourse to underline the pathos
of the story:
His yonge sone, that thre yeer was of age,
Unto hym seyde, 'Fader, why do ye wepe?
Whanne wol the gayler bryngen oure potage?
Is ther no morsel breed that ye do kepe?
I am so hungry that I may nat slepe.
Now wolde God that I myghte slepen evere!
Thanne sholde nat hunger in my wombe crepe;
Ther is no thyng, save breed, that me were levere.'
(VII 2431-38)°
Finally, not only are the stories developed in a
variety of ways, but they also draw upon a myriad of
subjects ranging from Lucifer and Adam to one of Chaucer's
contemporaries, Barnabo Visconti. Nobody falls from
Fortune in exactly the same way; some, like Samson and
Adam, find women to be their downfall; some, like
Nebuchadnezzar and Balthazar, defy God and are punished;
still others— Alexander and Zenobla, for example— fall
from Fortune simply because they have been at the top of
her wheel for so long; while Ugolino suffers misfortune
through the false witness of another man. There is
further variety in the way misfortune befalls its victim.
103
Croesus is hanged; Julius Caesar is stabbed in the
Capitol by Brutus and other traitors; Zenobia is taken
prisoner and made to march through Rome in Aurelian's
victory procession, her neck hung with chains of gold;
Antiochus, through the vengeance of God, becomes
physically repulsive to himself and to his followers:
. . . thurgh his body wikked wormes crepte,
And therwithal he stank so horribly
That noon of al his meynee that hym kepte,
Wheither so he wook or ellis slepte,
Ne myghte noght the stynk of hym endure.
In this meschief he wayled and eek wepte,
And knew God lord of every creature.
(vii 2615-22)
Monotony, then, is not an altogether fair way to
describe what Chaucer has achieved in the Monk's Tale.
Why have so many readers done so? One answer is contained
in the following comment made about another Gothic artist,
whose frescoes in Padua Chaucer himself may have seen
during his missions to Italy. In the first chapter of
Art and Illusion, Ernst Gombrich observes that a style,
like a culture or climate of opinion, sets up a "horizon
of expectation" or "mental set" which registers modifica
tions and deviations with what he calls "exaggerated
sensitivity." "To those used to the style we call
•Cimabue,'" continues Gombrich, "and expecting to be
presented with a similar notation, the paintings of
Giotto came with a shock of incredible lifelikeness"
(pp. 60-61). And a quotation from the Decameron supports
104
this view: "There is nothing," Boccaccio writes, "which
Giotto could not have portrayed in such a manner as to
deceive the sense of sight.Boccaccio's judgment
seems strange to us; yet, as Gombrich points out, we
have experienced something similar in the twentieth
century:
When the cinema introduced *3— * the distance between
expectation and experience was such that many enjoyed
the thrill of a perfect illusion. But the illusion
wears off once the expectation is stepped up; we take
it for granted and want more. (pp. 61-62)
Gombrich1s conclusion is that "we cannot but look at the
art of the past through the wrong end of the telescope."
Thus, we approach Giotto "on the long road which leads
from the impressionists backward via Michelangelo and
Masaccio," and what we see in him is therefore "not
lifelikeness but rigid restraint and majestic aloof
ness" (p. 62).
This same distance Inevitably influences our view
of the Monk's Tale. For the remainder of this chapter,
therefore, I would like to turn the telescope around
and look at Chaucer's series of tragedies in light of
what we krtow about the style of his period. As with
the Legend of Good Women, such an examination will
perhaps lead to an increased appreciation and under
standing of what Chaucer has attempted and what he has
accomplished here.
105
The Monk's Tale, like the Legend, is written in
a linear 3tyle. Once again, emphasis is thrown on the
outlines of the poem, the way in which it is constructed,
and as a result we are more conscious of repetitions in
form and theme than of differences among the individual
tragedies. Several features contribute to this impres
sion, among them the unique stanzaic form (ababbcbc);
nowhere else does Chaucer use this stanza, finding it,
perhaps, too rigid for his purposes in other works. The
shortness of each tragedy also reinforces the linearity
of the whole, for while the distance between one and
sixteen stanzas seems wide at close range, this impression
disappears the moment we consider the length of the
other poems in the Canterbury Tales. Here we feel,
inevitably, that we are given no time to explore content;
our attention is never (with Ugolino as a possible
exception) sifficiently drawn into the story and away
from its frame.
Another kind of rigidity, and hence linearity, is
found in the opening stanza of each poem. In nine of
the seventeen tragedies, this initial stanza follows
the .formula of rise and fall as in the story of Adam
quoted above. In five others— Hercules, Nebuchadnezzor,
Zenobia, Nero, and Alexander— It follows a second formula,
depicting the hero at the height of pride and glory:
106
Of Hercules, the sovereyn conquerour,
Syngen his werkes laude and heigh renoun;
For in his tyme of strengthe he was the flour.
He slow, and rafte the skyn of the leoun;
He of Centauros leyde the boost adoun;
He Arpies slow, the crueel bryddes felle;
He golden apples rafte of the dragoun;
He drow out Cerberus, the hound of helle; . . .
(VII 2095-2102)
Moreover, seven of the tragedies end with a similar
reference to Fortune and her Instability in the lives
of men, while all end with the defeat or death of the
hero. These formulaic openings and endings thus form
a conspicuous boundary for what is contained in between.
The Gothic form of the Monk's Tale comes out also
in the two-dimensional nature of its structure. Like
most paintings of the period, Chaucer's tragedies appear
to be taking place on the surface; they lack depth
because of their brevity, because we are given few
details about the lives of these heroes. Realistic
exploration of character is not Chaucer's purpose here;
when It occurs— as it does briefly in the Ugolino
episode— the effect Is startling. Contributing to this
two-dimensional quality is the abruptness with which one
tragedy follows another; with the exception of Nebuchad-
nezzor and Balthazar, whose father/son relationship is
an important factor in the latter's fall from power, no
attempt Is made at connecting the subjects of the various
tales personally. Instead, certain abstract concepts
are meant to perform this function: Fortune deserts man
107
after raising him above all; pride goeth before a fall;
never trust a woman. The focu3 is on concepts, not on
personalities, and as such is perfectly congruent with
the hieratic, conceptual Romanesque style which carried
over into the Gothic period even as late as the four
teenth century.^
Reinforcing the two-dimensional— or horizontal—
nature of the tragedies is their openness of form in
both senses of the term as it applies to Gothic style.
1116 Monk*3 Tale, in other words, has no single narrative
vanishing point; we could begin and leave off reading
these heroes 1 lives at any point with only a partial loss
of chronology, and no loss of meaning save that which
arises from the cumulative effect. In contrast, of
course, stands the Miller’s Tale, a narrative unit
complete in itself, in which every detail becomes
_ I
significant at the denouement, or the pilgrimage to
Canterbury which, in its completed form, would have
offered the pilgrims and their journey as the perspective
by which we enter, progress through, and leave the poem.
The second meaning of open form is that characteristic
which links art and its observer with infinity through
seemingly endless repetition of the same motif. Gothic
art is often deliberately unclear, unfinished, in process,
and Chaucer has managed artfully to make use of this
quality in his stinting of the tale. The Knight’s
108
Interruption thus carries with it the silent implication
that only an external termination 3uch as this could
bring to an end a collection which does not "build" in
terms of content or theme.
The multiplicity of the Monk's Tale is yet another
structural feature which reinforces its essentially
Gothic nature. This quality refers to details retaining
their separateness and independence while participating
in an overall composition. In the case of this par
ticular composition, the "details" refer to the individual
tragedies--Lucifer, Adam, Samson, and so forth— each of
which is developed as a story in its own right as well
as an example of the instability of Fortune which
furnishes the overall theme. The variety of characters,
background, setting, and incident noted above contributes
greatly to this impression of independence, as does the
fact that none of these lives is explored in depth or
at any length. Arnheim's principle, cited in reference
to the Legend of Good Women, thus applies here also:
that the simplicity of the parts of any composition
causes them to stand out as independent entities rather
than to efface themselves immediately in the whole.11
Also, since the series is not building to any kind of
internal climax, the emphasis once again falls on the
parts rather than on the tale as a unit.
109
® ie Monk's Tale, then, relies on collective unity
as a binding principle, building by example after
example gathered together in a seemingly random and
desultory fashion: the point is never made that one
tragedy is greater, or lesser, or deeper, or more
poignant, or more significant than another; nor do such
impressions arise implicitly out of the stories them
selves. And yet there is a kind of constitutive unity
at work here also, that unity in which, in the words of
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, "many members make one body,
1 P
or many parts constitute one whole." The whole has
several facets here; for while the tragedy of how the
mighty have fallen is the primary connecting thread
between one story and another, other themes— related yet
separate--arise also. Fortune and her instability,
betrayal, false and true pride, defiance of God, the
treachery of women: each of these concepts links
several of the tragedies together on an abstract level.
Woman, for example, is the undoing of Adam, Samson
(twice), Hercules, and Holofernes; Pedro of Spain, Bar-
nabo of Lombardy, Ugolino and Julius Caesar are slain
through the treachery of relatives or followers; Lucifer,
Nebuchadnezzor, Balthazar, Antiochus, and Holofernes
are punished for not acknowledging the predominance of
God over all men and their rulers; Zenobia and Alexander
110
govern justly and with great success, but their
elevation so far above the common level makes their fall
1*3
Inevitable. And In eleven of the seventeen tragedies,
the references to false Fortune who leads men up and down,
who flatters and then deserts her subjects, who over
throws them by a least suspected way, provide a major
leitmotif summarized by the Monk just before the words
of the Knight Interrupt his tale:
Tragedies noon oother maner thyng
Ne kan in syngyng crie ne biwaille
But that Fortune alwey wole assaille
With unwar strook the regnes that been proude;
For whan men tru3teth hire, thanne wol she faille,
And covere hire brighte face with a clowde.
(VII 2761-66)
These various themes argue for a kind of organic
design, for a consonance and cohesion which, in our
eyes, the Monk’s Tale never really achieves. Even as
we realize their presence, even as we begin to see
connections and threads and motifs, we reject their
implications and take refuge behind our initial impres
sion: the stories are all alike. This impression comes
in part, of course, from a natural reluctance to let go
of an accepted view; it comes also from an unfamiliarity
with the genre of collected exempla. But a third reason,
I believe, is that here once again is a composition
which participates in the dualistic nature of Gothic art,
which forms itself along two opposing principles at
once— collective and constitutive— without needing to
Ill
declare for one or the other as long as Its viewers are
willing to accept ambivalence. Here too, as in the
Legend, the independence and individuality of the various
tragedies is counterbalanced by their formal resemblance
to one another. And the naturalism, the "poster art"
verisimilitude, is likewise balanced by the schematic
and abstract framework within which it is contained.
Thus, although we become involved briefly in the fates
of Ugolino and his children, captured for us by Chaucer's
metaphor ("Allas, Fortune I it was greet crueltee/ Swiche
briddes for to putte in swich a cage!" VII 2413-14);
although we tremble momentarily for Nero when
The peple cried and rombled up and doun,
That with his erys herde he how they seyde,
'Where is this false tiraunt, this Neroun?'
For fere almoost out of his wit he breyde, . . .
(VII 2535-38)
our involvement is just that: brief and momentary,
forever held in abeyance by the rigid, repetitive for
mula which asserts itself or which— to give the artist
his due— is introduced strategically so that we will
keep our distance.
Consideration of the Monk's Tale in light of Gothic
principles of structure does not, of course, rule out
every other interpretation. It is possible that
Lounsbury and his followers were right, and that in
this series of stories Chaucer was parodying a typical
medieval genre just as he parodied the romance in Sir
112
111
Topas. It Is, after all, significant that both of
these tales, which appear in the same Fragment, were
stinted deliberately by members of the pilgrimage.1^
The difficulty here, as opposed to Sir Topas. is that
we are not certain about how to interpret the interrup
tion. Is It meant to show up the Knight as a nobleman
thinking of his own interests and seeing his fate
mirrored in that of the seventeen whose lives reached
such a sorry conclusion? Is it meant, as R. E. Kaske
suggests, to be part of a deliberate physical pairing
and philosophical opposition of Knight and Monk
originating in Chaucer’s descriptions of each in the
General Prologue? Is it meant to underline the broad,
common-man humor of Harry Bailly, that humor which makes
him insensitive equally to the comedy in Sir Topas, the
tragedy in the Monk's Tale, or the parody in both? Or
is this tale meant to be taken at race value, a3 a
typical medieval production— an instructive and improving
series of stories perfectly congruent with principles
of Gothic structure— designed, by artful interruption,
to fill one evening of reading by Chaucer before his
17
courtly audience? ' Even if none of these questions
can be answered definitively, we can develop an
appreciation for what Chaucer is doing in the Monk's Tale
113
through a heightened awareness of the aesthetic prin
ciples behind what is perhaps the most Gothic--and thus
the most truly medieval— of his works.
114
FOOTNOTES
^The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy
(Berkeley: Univ. of CallfT Press, 1936), p. 130.
p
Robinson, In his survey of critical opinion on
this tale, Informs us that although positive evidence
Is lacking for any firm date, "the general character
of the tragedies favors an assignment to the beginning
of Chaucer's Italian period (about 1374)." The
tragedies of Barnabo, the two Pedros, and Ugolino are
usually regarded as later additions (Works, p. 746).
In Search of Chaucer ([Toronto,] Canada: Univ. of
Toronto Press, 19&0), pp.72-73.
^Ibld., p. 74. The "base image"— if such it is—
arises from the Host's "murye wordes" to the Monk:
I pray to God, yeve hym confusioun
That first thee broghte unto religioun!
Thou woldest han been a tredefowel aright.
Haddestow as greet a leeve, as thou hast myght,
To parfourne al thy lust in engendrure,
Thou haddest bigeten ful many a creature.
Nat oonly thou, but every myghty man,
Though he were shorn ful hye upon his pan,
Sholde have a wyf; for al the world is lorn!
Religioun hath take up al the corn
Of tredyng, and we borel men been shrympes.
Of fieble trees ther comen wrecched ympes.
(VII 1943-48, 1951-56)
And so on for another ten lines.
The most elaborate working-out of the Monk's Pro
logue and Tale as part of the living drama" in the
Canterbury Tales is found in R. M. Lumiansky's Of Sondry
Folk (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1955)* PP. 97-1047
**See, for example, E. T[albot] Donaldson, ed.,
Chaucer's Poetry (New York: Ronald Press, 1958), p. 939*
^That Chaucer owes much more to Dante than the
story of Ugolino has been argued by Mario Praz ("Chaucer
and the Great Italian Writers of the Trecento," The
Flaming Heart, Doubleday Anchor Books [Garden City, N. Y.:
Doubleday, 1958]> p. 55). In the Monk's Tale, he
suggests, Chaucer has medievalized— in miniature, of
course— the entire Inferno, if not the whole Commedla:
115
. . .on the whole Chaucer ignores Dante's original
framework and reverts to a traditional type of mediaeval
composition; for in a sense the Divina Commedla.
particularly the Inferno. may be considered as a series
of brief tragedies, thestories of the various sould
which they themselves narrate to Dante; but Chaucer makes
nothing of Dante's novelty of treatment, and the Monk1s
Tale has the very indicative title De Caslbus Vlrorum
lllustrium. For Chaucer, Ugolino's tragedy is essentially
a tragedy of death by starvation: . . .
R. W. Babcock traces the history of collections of
tragedies from the Roman tradition through Boccaccio
and Chaucer to show the popularity of the genre in the
Middle Ages' in "The Mediaeval Setting of Chaucer's
Monk's Tale." PMLA, 46 (1931), 205-13.
^In the best group of MSS (Ellesmere and most of
its near relatives;, the Modern Instances stand at the
end of the tale, thus Indicating a loose chronological
order. However, the reference in the following head-
link to the closing lines of Croesus, plus the definition
of tragedy with which that story ends, suggest that
Chaucer himself put the Modern Instances in the middle,
and that the Ellesmere order Is due to an "officious
scribe." See Robinson, Works. pp. 746-47 for further
discussion.
Edward M. Socola traces a developing conception of
Fortune— from abstraction to personal being— In the
tragedies as they stand in most MSS (with the Modern
Instances in the middle). His thesis is carefully
argued, but the idea that this was Chaucer's guiding
principle is not altogether convincing. See "Chaucer's
Development of Fortune in the 'Monk's Tale.1" JEGP.
49 (1950), 159-71.
8
This passage does not appear In Dante. Chaucer's
shift In focus from Ugolino to his children, and the
resulting change in the tenor of the story, is sum
marized by Donaldson: "Dante's Ugolino is a man of vast
strength of mind, as powerful and self-controlled as he
is wicked, and his account of his own ending carries all
the pity and terror of Greek tragedy. In Chaucer we
feel only pity for a tender father suffering wrongfully
and not very bravely, and the emotional force of the
narrative Is weakened by the emphasis laid on the
pathetic little boys. . . . Dante's reader is moved too
profoundly for tears. In Chaucer the floodgates are
opened" (Chaucer's Poetry, p. 940).
116
S im ilar opinions have been expressed by Praz in
The Flaming Heart, p. 55, and by Theodore Spencer in
"The Story of Ugolino in Dante and Chaucer," Speculum.
9 (1934), 295-301.
^Boccaccio, Decamerone, Giornata V I, Novella 5;
quoted by Gombrich in Art and Illu s io n , p. 61.
-^See Chapter One, pp. 23-24. Characteristics of
Romanesque style are surveyed in H. W . Janson’ s History
of Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, In c ., 1962),
pp. 206-26.
Art and Visual Perception, p. 61.
^D e consideratione. Book Five; quoted by Henderson
in Gothic, p. 43•
•^The exceptions are the tragedies of Adam, Samson,
Nebuchadnezzor, Pedro of Spain, Barnabo V isconti, and
Antiochus.
•^Lounsbury, I I I , 333-35. Babcock seems to give
credence to th is opinion on p. 212 of "The Mediaeval
Setting of Chaucer’ s Monk’ s -T a le ,1 1 although elsewhere
he tre a ts the ta le as a straightforward example of a
widespread medieval type.
■ *-^ K e m p Malone in p a rtic u la r points th is out (and
uses the term "s tin tin g ") in Chapters on Chaucer,
pp. 171-72; he does not, however, subscribe to the
theory of parody.
E. Kaske, "The Knight’s Interruption of the
Monk’s Tale." English Literary History, 24 (1957),
249-6$.
•^Bronson states that a ll of Chaucer’ s w ritin g is
"demonstrably conditioned" by the primary rule that each
work was to take an hour to an hour-and-a-quarter of
reading time (Search, p. $7). The Monk’ s Prologue and
Tale and the f ir s t part of the Nun’ s P rie s t’s Prologue
would take approximately that long to read aloud,
depending n atu ra lly on the speed of the reader as w e ll
as the nature and number of the interruptions.
V. THE HOUSE OP FAME
The House of Fame was written sometime between 1374
and 1385* when Chaucer was controller of customs for
the Port of London.1 The most intriguing questions
raised by this poem— the identity of the man of great
authority and the news he is about to reveal when the
narrative breaks off— will probably never be answered,
unless someone is fortunate enough to find the completed
2
version which some critics believe once existed. Other
questions— those of the poem’s sources and models, of
Chaucer’s indebtedness to the French love-poets who
influenced his earlier work, to Dante's Divine Comedy,
to Boccaccio's Corbaccio, to Virgil, to Ovid— have been
thoroughly explored, resulting in the conclusion that
Chaucer drew on a great many works rather than on one
primary source while composing the poem. This problem
of sources leads to the major question, in the opinion
of most critics, which arises in connection with the
House of Fame. Did Chaucer abandon the poem because of
its (presumably) controversial ending, or because he
perceived its lack of structure, unity, and direction
and was unwilling to continue with something which had
117
118
gotten so out of hand? A summary of the plot will, I
think, begin to reveal the basis for this uncertainty
and divergence of opinion.
Book One begins with a sixty-five-line Proem on
types and causes of dreams, leading to Chaucer's wonderful
dream of December 10 which he will now tell. After a
formal invocation to the God of Sleep, the poet begins
with a description of the temple of glass— of Venus, as
it turns out— where hi3 dream began, and of the walls
lined with brass tablets containing the story of the man
who, after the destruction of Troy, fled to Italy at
Venus' command. After shipwreck the man, Aeneas, finds
refuge on Carthage with Dido, whose lament and death
after her abandonment by the hero lead the poet to recall
other examples of "untrouthe" in love. Aeneas continues
on his Journey, interrupted by another shipwreck and a
visit to the underworld, finally arriving in Italy to
fulfill his destiny. Chaucer, after seeing all this,
still doesn't know who engraved this story or where he
is, and decides to go outside to ask someone. Book One
thus ends with the poet standing in the middle of a
field of sand, praying to Christ, casting his eyes to
heaven, and watching, with cool self-possession, the
descent of a golden eagle shining like a second sun in
the heavens.
Book Two takes up the story after a brief Proem
119
invoking Cipris (Venus) and Thought. The eagle descends
and picks up Chaucer in his talons; the poet is
astonished, bewildered, and afraid, but the eagle— Jove's
messenger, he tells us— reassures him by explaining that
this journey is meant to requite him for serving Venus
and her son for so long without reward. The eagle is
therefore taking Chaucer to the House of Fame, where
he will hear wonderful things, more tidings of Love's
folk than there are grains of sand. And since Chaucer
finds it hard to believe that Fame can know so much,
the eagle will prove it. Each thing in nature has its
own natural place where it is best preserved, and toward
which it moves of its own volition. The natural dwelling-
place of sound, or broken air, is between earth, sea,
and sky; and here, at this exact spot, is where Fame's
palace is located. The eagle, soaring upward all the
while, congratulates himself for explaining all this so
"lewedly to a lewed man." Chaucer then describes the
earth and the heavens from this unusual vantage point,
having finally gathered the courage to open his eyes,
and having also successfully averted another long explana
tion by the eagle about the nature of the stars. By this
time the pair are near enough to hear the "great sound"
of Fame's House, like the beating of the sea against
rocks or the rumbling of thunder. The eagle, after once
again allaying the poet's fears, and explaining the
120
embodiment of sounds in the likenesses of those who
uttered them on earth, bids Chaucer farewell and leaves
him to enter the castle.
The invocation which opens Book Three is addressed
to Apollo, "God of science and of lyght," asking for
his guidance of "this lytel laste bok." The dream
continues with a description of the rock on which the
House of Fame is built, followed by an account of the
palace itself and its cathedral-like decorations outside.
Entering through the elaborately carved gate, Chaucer
encounters an enormous throng crowding the hall; more
important, at last he sees Fame herself, seated on a
ruby throne high above the crowd, many-eyed, many-eared,
many-tongued, sung to by Calliope and her eight sisters,
surrounded by pillars on which stand the great authors
of antiquity. Just then a noise like bees swarming from
a hive heralds the approach of a great company, whose
various members present nine separate petitions to Fame
and are rewarded or rejected according to her caprice.
Someone at Chaucer’s elbow asks if he, too, has come for
reward; and if not, what is he doing here? To learn new
tidings of love, or "suche thynges glade," the poet
replies. The stranger then offers to lead him to another
place where he will hear what he has come for, and the
two of them leave the castle. There, in the valley,
stands a house of many-colored twigs, turning as swift
as thought, emitting a great roaring noise through the
thousand holes in its roof. This is the House of Rumor—
or "tydynges"— every corner filled with whispers and
pratings of events both true and false. The eagle, who
sits on a stone nearby, furthers the poetTs education by
bringing him in through a window of the rapidly revolving
construction. Inside, Chaucer finds a great company of
people whispering to one another, distorting and
aggrandizing events which eventually escape to be
classified by Fame and blown about by her messenger,
Aeolus. Suddenly an unusually loud noise rises from the
corner where love-tidings are told; everyone rushes over,
a wild scramble ensues, a man of great authority appears.
The story breaks off at this point.
The wandering, encyclopedic nature of the narrative,
the piling up of details and events in Book Three, the
lack of obvious connection between the story of Dido and
Aeneas in Book One and the rest of the poem— these
features have put many readers off. D. S. Brewer, for
example, noting that the House of Fame "proceeds some
what crabwise" after the fashion of the Roman de la Rose,
finds that "what is lacking, . . . is unity of mood and
a strong sense of direction throughout all three books."3
In partial support of these charges, Brewer cites the
passage in Book Three in which Chaucer tells the stranger
122
that he himself has not come hither to have fame:
•Nay, for sothe, frend,' quod y;
•I cam noght hyder, graunt mercy,
For no such cause, by my hedl
Sufficeth me, as X were ded,
That no wight have my name in honde.
I wot myself best how y stonde;
For what I drye, or what I thynke,
I wil myselven al hyt drynke,
Certeyn, for the more part,
As fer forth as I kan myn art.’ (1873-82)
But when asked what he is_ doing there, continues Brewer,
the poet is equally evasive:
It is to learn some new tidings, he does not know what,
either of love or similar glad things. His unnamed
questioner replies with another question— 'What are
the tidings that you have thus brought here, which
you have heard? But no matter, I see what you desire
to hear.’ (p. 76)
This, Brewer concludes, is "the sort of mysterious
inconsequentiality which makes the poem so exasperating";
either Chaucer is indulging in "private jokes in
panelled rooms," or else he "never really worked out
what he wanted to say." Brewer himself, it seems, opts
for the latter explanation:
Several times when Chaucer composed a poem for which
no source or analogue has been found, he failed to
finish it. Like Shakespeare he seems to have found
it hard to invent a plot— unlike Shakespeare, he
sometimes rashly ventured to embark without this
necessary chart, (pp. 76-77)
Other reasons have been put forward for the lack of
obvious unity in the House of Fame. Several critics,
among them Charles Muscatine, point to the transitional
nature of the poem in an attempt to excuse its flaws
123
In structure:
[The House of Fame] Is a free-floating, gratuitous
display of talent and of humor, thoroughly Chaucerian
in Its quality, but not yet bent to the magisterial
control of the mature narrative artist, (p. 113)
Because he does not yet have his material in focus,
Muscatine believes, Chaucer "works at each episode with
gusto, then leaves it behind as if forgotten." The
irony deeply imbedded in the texture of the poem runs
through all three books, but fails to provide unity since
we cannot determine its object or direction. Despite
the poem's virtuosity, its conscious power, its spirit
and originality, Muscatine concludes that "incoherency
[is] the central fact of its character" (p. 114). And
Raymond Preston, while putting a slightly more favorable
construction on this jumbled aspect by calling the poem
"Chaucer's great loosening," nevertheless finds the
House of Fame to be "nearly a major disaster," written
during "one of those periods that every artist must
endure, when he is working towards a new direction or a
new point of balance" (pp. 35, 39, 42)
In opposition to this majority opinion stand those
critics who have found a unity or principle of structure
hidden from ordinary readers. Thus, Alfred David reads
the poem as "planned chaos," a literary parody in which
Chaucer becomes "an ignorant imitator of the courtly
school of writing," and the work "exactly what we are
124
led to expect from 3uch an unsophisticated pen."-*
Bertrand Bronson throws the entire burden of unity on
the missing conclusion, deliberately withheld before the
House of Fame was put in circulation either from ’ ’ motives
of prudence” or because "the allusions had lost their
f i
aptness and point." Laurence K. Shook, in an essay for
Rowland's Companion to Chaucer Studies, reads the poem
as an informal ars poetlca, finding a unified plot in
Chaucer's simultaneous rejection of the Temple of Love
tradition and his movement toward the theory that a
poem, in the last analysis, is "the work (albeit in the
medium of sound and with subjects and themes proposed by
the recorded history of man in whatever form) of a man who
is a poet: . . ."7 And in one of the most elaborately
worked out schemes of all, Paul G. Ruggiers, countering
the "general attitude of perplexed dissatisfaction" with
the House of Fame, proposes a system of unity in which
Fame becomes interchangeable with Love and Fortune, thus
binding the three books of the poem together:
. . . the first book . . . presents us with a love
story in which Fame, much like Fortune, plays an
important role in the lives of two lovers; . . . the
second book, while maintaining both the motive power
of a love-vislon and the force of a quest, gives us a
view of an orderly universe, of which Fame is a part,
in which all things seek and find their proper resting
place; . . . the third, satisfying the demands of the
quest and the love-vision, reveals the actual distri
bution or withholding of renown in such a universe. . . .
Whatever was to have been announced in the grand
climax by the man of great authority may have been
intended to provide an answer to the common considera-
125
tlon of the Middle Ages, the relationship of man to
the mutable world through the agency of Fame.®
Within this scheme Boethius, suggests Ruggiers, would
have been the logical authority with whom to end the
poem.
These attempts to find unity and theme are, I think,
overly ingenious. Much more to the point is Wolfgang
Clemen's approach to the poem in Chaucer's Early Poetry,
in which he manages indirectly to reconcile those critics
who find the House of Fame to be without unity alto
gether, and those who find in it a unity too esoteric
to be detected by the ordinary reader. The House of
Fame, Clemen observes, is a "true narrative," in which
the poet "describes things as they strike him, as his
own experience revealed them to him step by step."^
The poem belongs (with numerous reservations) to the
general literary pattern of the allegorical Journey, in
which "the poet is usually led in a dream to some allego
rical spot; and his guide's duties further Include
instructing him on many points" (p. 71). Such a concept
frees the House of Fame from those "repeated efforts
. . . to explain the poem in the light of some single
central theme." Clemen continues by observing that
if we were to require organic unity from a literary
work of art and to demand that all its constituent
parts shall be directed towards one central subject,
we would be thinking along the lines of a modern
conception of poetry; and we are not entitled to do
126
this without question In the case of a medieval poem.
The allegorical journey In the course of which the
poet experiences different kinds of happenings and
encounters, was a vehicle for the most varied themes.
The mere fact that all these happenings were stages
on the way to some constant and definite goal, was
sufficient to ensure that the individual parts stood
in a mutual relationship, (p. 72)
A certain unity, he believes, is achieved by "the poet's
consistent attitude and the equally sustained wryly-
ironical tone and spirit of the whole." However, "to
relate every part of a poem to one single central theme
or to seek for some philosophical or conceptual focal
point from which every detail can be interpreted"— that,
says Clemen, is a unity "wrung from the poem by an
excess of ingenuity" (pp. 72-73).
Clemen makes an interesting observation in the course
of supporting his view of the poem. The action, he
notes, is simple enough: Book One sets the stage for a
journey to the House of Fame, Book Two gives us the
journey itself, while Book Three describes the arrival
and twofold goal of the journey— the House of Fame and
the House of Rumor. Much, however, has been added to
this basic structure, "in rather the same way as the
copious variety of late Gothic decoration often shrouds
and masks the shape of a late medieval building." The
House of Fame is, in fact, "an example of the typical
style of an outgoing period," deriving "a wealth of
themes and elements from the rich cultural and literary
127
tradition behind it" (p. 112). And Charles Muscatine
has drawn a similar analogy in his criticism of the poem:
the House of Fame. he believes, is Chaucer's "most
flamboyant poem, the one most characteristically late
Gothic, colorful, varied to extremes, undigested"; in
it the poet is "embracing as much as his arms can strain
of the cultural and stylistic endowment of the times"
(pp. 114-15).
These observations offer, in their analogies between
Gothic narrative and Gothic art, a new way of looking
at the House of Fame. I would like to pursue the analogy
in some detail, since I believe that it places a neces
sary emphasis on stylistic features and conventions of
the period, and on the particular phase of development
which the poet himself had attained at this point.
J. A. W. Bennett, in his study of the literary background
and sources of the House of Fame. remarks that
never was [Chaucer's] art more deliberate than when
he constructed this supremely architectural poem, in
which each theme is treated in architectonic and
constructional terms.10
Chaucer was, I think, at a much more tentative and
transitional stage than Bennett's comment leads us to
believe; the proof is in the poem itself, which reflects
this change. Moreover, a similar transition was taking
place in the stylistic period as a whole; and thus,
whereas the Legend of Good Women and the Monk's Tale
128
3how Chaucer as a Gothic artist at the height of his
powers, the House of Fame, despite its earlier date, is
actually more forward-looking in terms of the direction
which the poet— and the period as a whole--will eventually
take. Some of the features of the House of Fame, judged
to be structural or thematic flaws, are those same
qualities which make it late rather than high Gothic,
balancing, like its maker, on the brink of the Renaissance.
In calling attention to the colorful, varied,
"undigested" character of the House of Fame, Muscatine
is actually describing the late Gothic quality of
naturalism— that sharp, spasmodic poster-art tendency
which coincides with mysticism and nominalism as man
becomes more adept at putting into words his own feelings
and his view of the world around him. The form of the
poem reflects this alteration of vision since, in the
words of Arnold Hauser, the art of the late Gothic period
most typically presents "the wanderer, the traveller,
the walker." Everywhere, he continues, this art tries
to create the illusion of a journey; while the beholder
becomes "spectator and participant at the same time"
(I, 264-65).
We see this tendency carried out in both the basic
form and narrative stance of the House of Fame. As
Clemen has noted, the journey provides as much plot and
structure as Chaucer's audience would have required in
129
the interests of unity and cohesion. And the poet
himself, throughout the three books, is careful to
remain always with us as well as with the events of his
narrative, with the result that we as onlookers feel
ourselves being drawn into the action at the same time
that we sense the narrator's essential aloofness (and
thus our own) from much that takes place in the poem.
This somewhat contradictory effect occurs, for example,
in the relation of Aeneas’ adventures in Book One;
Chaucer reminds us continually of his position as spec
tator by his reiteration of the same basic formula:
First sawgh I the destruction/ Of Troye, . . .
(151-52)
.And I saugh next, in al thys fere, . . . (174)
Ther saugh I thee, cruel Juno, . . . (19#)
Ther saugh I Joves Venus kysse, . . . (219)
And so forth throughout the summary of the Aeneid. This
distancing is counteracted, however, by the immediacy
of such passages as the following, in which Dido laments
in detail and with a great deal of emotion the loss of
her lover:
'Allas!' quod she, 'my swete herte,
Have pitee on my sorwes smerte,
And slee mee not! goo noght awey!’
'0 Eneas, what wol ye doo?
0 that your love, ne your bond
That ye have sworn with your ryght hond
Ne my crewel deth,’ quod she,
'May holde yow stille here with me!
0 haveth of my deth pitee!’ (315-17, 320-25)
130
The narrator’s dual role as onlooker and participant
are skilfully combined In Book Two, as Geffrey faithfully
relates to us the eagle’s disquisition on the nature of
sound while being borne aloft in its talons, too fearful
at first to open his eyes, then gathering the courage
to do so and interspersing the learned explanations of
his guide with his own travelogue:
And y adoun gan loken thoo,
And beheld feldes and playnes,
And now hilles, and now mountaynes,
Now valeyes, now forestes,
And now unnethes grete bestes;
Now ryveres, now citees,
Now tounes, and now grete trees,
Now shippes seyllynge in the see. (896-903)
And this same quality is carried out in Book Three,
although less skilfully, as Chaucer the onlooker precedes
every few sentences from lines 1136 through 1281 with
fourteen variations on the same formula— "tho saugh I,"
"Thoo gan I," "Ther herde I." Meanwhile Chaucer the
participant engages in conversation with onlookers like
himself (e.g. 1873-82) and relates vividly such scenes
as the encounters between Fame and her petitioners:
Thoo come the seventh route anoon,
And fel on knees everychoon,
And seyde, 'Lady, graunte us sone
The same thing, the same bone,
That [ye] this nexte folk han doon.'
'Fy on yow,' quod she, 'everychon!
Ye masty swyn, ye ydel wrechches,
Ful of roten, slowe techchesl' (1771-78)
131
The late Gothic naturalism of the House of Fame Is
reinforced by the quality of multiplicity— that
characteristic whereby details retain independence while
participating in an overall composition. Whereas in the
twelfth century these details were for the most part
controlled by and subordinated to the organizing principle
which brought them together, by the late fourteenth
century the tendency toward multiplicity had begun to
overwhelm and obscure the underlying unity of a given
composition. The result in many cases was, in the words
of George Henderson, an "indiscriminate reduction of
everything to ornament" and, at the same time, a
certain sterility and monotony through sheer repetition
and bulk of detail (p. 123).
Multiplicity, while evident in Books One and Two of
the House of Fame, does not yet present a threat to the
balance of the composition, since the narrator and his
objective within the dream provide a unity which works
against the independence of separate incidents— or
details— of the poem. In his description of the temple
of glass, for example, a liberal use of the personal
pronoun reminds us frequently of the poet's presence:
For certeynly, I nyste never
Wher that I was, but wel wyste I,
Hyt was of Venus redely,
The temple; for in portreyture,
I sawgh anoon-ryght hir figure
Naked fletynge in a see. (128-33)
132
The ”1 sawgh” formula performs the same function in the
Aeneid detail, which ends, moreover, with a passage
reminding us explicitly of the larger context, the
narrator’s dream-journey and the unanswered questions
it has raised for him so far:
’A Lord!’ thoughte I, ’that madest us,
Yet sawgh I never such noblesse
Of ymage, ne such richesse,
As I saugh graven in this chirche;
But not wot I whoo did hem wirche,
Ne where I am, ne in what contree.
But now wol I goo out and see,
Ryght at the wiket, yf I kan
See owhere any stiryng man,
That may me telle where I am.’ (470-79)
In Book Two the same kind of balance is struck
between detail and composition; the eagle descends,
grasps the poet in his strong claws, and bears him aloft
while explaining that Jupiter wants to reward him for
past services to Venus and Cupid by a journey to the
House of Fame. Thus the incident, independent and
entertaining in its own right, ties in thematically with
what has happened and what is to come in the poem. This
is true also of the long, often abstract passage about
the origin and natural dwelling-place of sound, in which
the eagle’s carefully interspersed asides cancel the
complete independence of the detail:
’Now herkene wel, . . .’ (725)
’Geffrey, thou wost ryght wel this, . . .’ (729)
’Now herke what y wol the lere.’ (764)
’Now hennesforth y wol the teche. . . .’ (7^2)
’I preve hyt thus— take hede now— . . .’ (7#7)
133
In Book Three, however, the negative aide of late
Gothic multiplicity begins to take over as detail follows
detail and the structure— Chaucer’s quest to learn about
Love's folk at first hand— gradually collapses from
sheer weight of ornament. This book contains signs
that the poet himself sensed the lack of balance and
!
tried to restore it; hence, for example, the fourteen
variations on "Tho saugh I" in 150 lines (1136-1281)
already noted. The narrator is still in the poem, but
too often he is merely standing by or walking from place
to place. Instead of the direct Involvement of Book
Two, we have static asides such as the following:
•Allas!' thoughte I, 'what aventures
Han these sory creatures!
For they, amonges al the pres,
Shul thus be shamed gilteles.
But what! hyt moste nedes be.’ (1631-35)
These remarks interrupt the descriptions from time to
time; unfortunately they fail to give depth or direction
to the poem, instead merely serving to remind us that
the poet has assumed the role of commentator in his
struggle for coherence. The man of great authority
and his announcement are presumably part of the same
attempt to strike a final balance between structure and
detail. At this point in the poem, however, as Donaldson
has remarked, "it is difficult . . . to see how any
revelation could be other than a small tail on a large
dog" (p. 955).
134
In addition to the qualities of naturalism and
multiplicity, the House of Fame exhibits two other Gothic
traits which help to explain its organization and struc
ture. One of these is horizontal perspective, which
describes the impression of spatial incoherence arising
as each object in a scene remains separate and unrelated
to its neighbors. The scene, here, is both the poem
itself and the individual books which comprise it; the
unrelated objects are, in the second case, the details
or separate incidents of the narrative, while in the
poem as a unit they refer to Books One, Two, and Three,
connected to one another by little more than the nar
rative persona and thus posing problems of unity and
direction to readers used to modern fiction. The concept
of open form is also a useful one here; the House of Fame
is not constructed around a fixed narrative vanishing
point, nor does it claim to be. For Chaucer does not
promise in. the Proem to Book One that he is going to
visit the House of Fame and reveal to us the secrets
overheard there. His guiding purpose, clearly stated,
is simply to tell us about his dream:
For never, sith that I was born,
Ne no man elles me beforn,
Mette, I trowe stedfastly,
So wonderful a drem as I
The tenth day now"of Decembre,
The which, as I kan now remembre,
I wol yow tellen everydel. (59-65)
135
Not until Book Two do we learn, along with the poet,
that he is going to the palace where Fame dwells to
hear first-hand news about Love's folk, and not until
Book Three do we find that he is going to the House of
Rumor as well. The implication, I believe, is that the
poet expects us to be as open as his structure is.
The House of Fame is perhaps more important for
what it points toward than for what it is. John Matthews
Manly, in 1913* saw the poem as "the first in a series of
experiments in grouping stories of which the Legend of
Qoode Women was the second member and the Canterbury Tales
the final and satisfactory outcome" (p. 8l). This theory
assumes that Book Three is very near completion as it
stands, and that the entire House of Fame was intended
to announce a group of love stories and to serve as
their prologue;
We have been told in Bk. ii that the poet is to hear
new stories; and since his interest in learning new
stories is to tell them, we may be certain that some
provision was to be made for his telling them, . . .
Even if he was to learn and tell only one, we can
hardly suppose that it could have been told in full
in 'this litel laste book.' It is possible, therefore,
that the poet was merely to announce here his new
treasure of stories which were to be told later; . . .
(p. 77)
Manly'3 proposal has been amplified and extended in
Bennett's book on the House of Fame. In the House of
Rumor, Bennett notes,
136
The poet cryptically presents himself as especially
anxious to hear a tiding
That I had herd of som contree
That shal nat now be told for me (2136-7)
— the tidings, in fact, that the eagle had promised
(647-99); and the tales of Canterbury (so many of which
are set on foreign strands) may be taken as proof that
he ultimately had his desire— . . . (p. 182)
The phrase in lines 2139-40 ("For al mot out, other late
or rathe,/ Alle the sheves in the lathe") confirms, in
Bennett's words, "the preceding hint that the fullness
of the tidings he is concerned with will not be revealed
in this poem; . ." (p. 183). His conclusion is that
although we may feel cheated by the abrupt manner in
which the House of Fame breaks off,
the cheating may be deliberate, and its purpose to
suggest that the true conclusion is to be found in
the poetry that was to follow— the love-tidings and
the tales of 'aventures* that are to make up the bulk
of the Canterbury stories, presented as these are
essentially as oral narratives, (p. 185)
The catalogue of pilgrims which appears in the House of
Rumor at the end of Book Three has lent strength to
such theorizing:
And, Lord, this hous in alle tymes,
Was ful of shipmen and pilgrimes,
With scrippes bret-ful of lesinges,
Entremedled with tydynges,
And eek allone be hemselve.
0, many a thousand tymes twelve
Saugh I eke of these pardoners,
Currours, and eke messagers,
With boystes crammed ful of lyes
As ever vessel was with lyes. (2121-30)
This passage, notes Raymond Preston, has often been
quoted as a "backward tracing." "A slight shift or spring
137
of the mind," he continues, "and Chaucer could let his
shlpmen and pilgrims speak: courage came with mastery"
(p. 44).
Chaucer shows a similar mastery from the point of
view of artistic style. The House of Fame Is typically
late Gothic, embodying the excesses and weaknesses which
characterize the visual as well as the verbal media of
the period.
Though the eye is agreeably impressed, these pictures
have neither art nor reason; neither symmetry nor
proportion; neither choice of values nor grandeur.
In short, this art 13 without power and without
distinction; it aims at rendering minutely many things
at the same time, of which a single one would have
sufficed to call forth a man's whole application.il
The critic who speaks here is Michelangelo; his target,
ostensibly, is Flemish painting. But, comments Huizinga,
this passage actually judges the medieval spirit itself,
for Michelangelo is a true representative of the
Renaissance as opposed to the Middle Ages:
What he condemns in Flemish art are exactly the essential
traits of the declining Middle Ages: the violent
sentimentality, the tendency to see each thing as an
independent entity, to get lost in the multiplicity
of concepts. To this the spirit of the Renaissance
is opposed, and, as always happens, only realizes its
new conception of art and of life by temporally mis
judging the beauties and the truths of the preceding
age. (p. 266)
The indiscriminate accumulation of vivid detail, the
humorous dialogue that goes on too long about too many
subjects, the journey that becomes static and thus
defeats its purpose as a source of movement and direction—
13 d
all these problems of late Gothic style, which eventually
cripple the House of Fame, are solved in the Canterbury
Tales as the poet, striking at last a balance between
detail and frame, between multiplicity and unity, achieves
the ultimate dualism. For while in the Canterbury Tales
Chaucer is the supreme Gothic artist, he is also an
artist of the Renaissance, beginning to see man rather
than God as the measure of things, perfecting his skill
as storyteller with the fabliaux, in which perspective,
vanishing points, unity and direction coalesce in
compact, self-contained narrative units.
We cannot be sure why the House of Fame was never
completed, but one reason may be that the poet sensed
the futility of working against the inertia of a period
in its dying stage. In the House of Fame Chaucer is
temporarily overwhelmed by the decadence of late Gothic
style. But while this poem seems to have ’ ’ taken a
wrong turn and become unmanageable,” notes Percy Shelly,
it is a success
not so much in itself as in its clearing the way for,
and making possible, greater things to come; it is
full of the joy of the artist— of the artist reaching
out into new fields, discovering new beauty, and
finding fresh realms of the imagination in which to
disport, (p. #5)
The House of Fame, in other words, is an experiment in
style which results eventually in the mature control
of Troilus and Crisevde and the Canterbury Tales. To
139
read the poem this way, rather than as a failed version
of Dante, Boethius, or anybody else, is to read it
generously— and this, I believe, is the spirit in which
it ought to be taken.
140
FOOTNOTES
Robinson discusses the question of dating in Works.
P. 779; in general, he notes, probabilities favor the
early Italian period, before the composition of Palamon
and Arclte or the Troilus— i.e. c. 1379-80.
p
cSee, for example, Bronson, Search, p. 40; Kittredge,
Chaucer and His Poetry.'p. 102; and John Matthews Manly,
^What Is Chaucer's Hous of Fame?” in Anniversary Papers
by Colleagues and Pupils of 6eorge Lyman Kittredge (1913;
rpt. New York: kussell & Russell7 19&7), p. 79.
^Chaucer. Men and Books Series (London: Longmans,
Green & Co., 1953)> PP. 73# 76.
4
The transitional nature of the poem is made much of
by almost everyone who chooses to comment on it at all.
^"Literary Satire in the House of Fame." PMLA, 75
(I960), 333-39.
g
Search, p. 40; also see Bronson's "Chaucer's Hous
of Fame: Another Hypothesis," University of California
Publications in English. 3 (193^)# 171-92.
rj
'"The House of Fame," Companion to Chaucer Studies,
p. 352. By the "Temple of Love tradition" Shook means
allegory, dream-visions, the French love-poets, Ovid—
i.e. "authority."
8
"The Unity of Chaucer's House, of Fame," SP, 50,
16-29; rpt. in Chaucer: Modern Essays in Criticism,
ed. Edward Wagenknecht, Galaxy Books (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1959)# p. 296.
Q
^Chaucer's Early Poetry, trans. C. A. M. Sym
(London: Methuen & do., 1963), p. 70.
A. W. Bennett, Chaucer's Book of Fame: An
Exposition of 'The House of frame' (London: Oxford Univ.
Press, 19t>8), p. x.
11Quoted in The Waning of the Middle Ages, p. 265
(original reference not cited;.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
Ye gete namore of me, but ye wole rede
Th’origynal, that telleth al the cas.
(LOW, 1557-58)
'To see the object as in itself it really is,' has
been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism
whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step
toward seeing one's object as it really is, is to
know one's own impression as it really is, to dis
criminate it, to realize it distinctly. . . . What
is important, then, is not that the critic should
possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for
the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the
power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful
objects. He will remember always that beauty exists in
many forms. To him all periods, types, schools of
taste, are in themselves equal. . .
Walter Pater
These chapters have been an exercise in possibilities;
I have been trying to show that by approaching Chaucer on
his own ground, by examining his poetry in light of a
medieval rather than a modern aesthetic, we can become
more precise in our evaluations of what he has achieved
or failed to achieve in three poems largely ignored in
this century. In the case of all three, ours is, I
believe, the greater failure; we have unthinkingly
accepted traditional judgments, we have relied on a
continuity of structural principles and on standards
which exist only in our own minds. According to the
141
tenets of Gothic style, the Monk's Tale Is actually a
successful poem, albeit a highly limited and controlled
one. According to these same tenets, the Legend of Good
Women Is by and large a success; Its flaws are certainly
less all-encompassing than we have been led to believe,
and Chaucer doubtless Intended to complete and probably
to revise a work which he thought enough of to mention
as a complete unit (in the Man of Law's Prologue) in
later years, and to return to at least once, as evidenced
by the P and G versions of the Prologue. And, finally,
the structural problems in the House of Fame, the least
successful of these three works, can be more precisely
pinpointed once they are divorced from the question of
organic unity which has been the focus of its critics and
apologists up until now.
These principles of Gothic style do not apply just
to those poems which have come to be known as Chaucer's
failures. They apply equally to those poems regarded as
successful: to the block-like construction and stately
movement of the Knight's Tale, for example; to the late
Gothic naturalism of the Miller's Tale; to the structure
and balance of the Canterbury Tales as a whole. For
while Jordan has noted that "balance and proportion are
not prominent features of Chaucerian narrative,"2 the
situation is rather thafc Chaucer's very strong ideas of
balance and proportion are simply not the same as ours.
143
The Canterbury Tales stands, like Its author,
between one stylistic period and another. Hitherto, we
have been content for the most part to appreciate Chaucer
as a modern poet, praising those works which come
closest to our own predispositions to narrative form,
reserving for him a place in the House of Fame beneath
and slightly to the side of Shakespeare, holding against
him those works for which our understanding raises limits
and objections. Once we appreciate him as a Gothic poet
as well, within his own aesthetic milieu, his command
of language, genre, and style is suddenly overwhelming.
Bertrand Bronson has entered an eloquent plea for
the kind of scholarship willing to meet the poet Chaucer
on his own ground:
!
It behooves us, . . .to clarify our thoughts as to
the sort of questions we may legitimately ask of
Chaucer's work, the sort of demands we have a right
to make upon it, and the sort of techniques we may
fittingly apply. It may be that he Is the wrong
subject for the kind of Investigation many of us today
are most Interested in pursuing In literary studies.3
What we need, says Bronson, Is more light on the princi
ples of literature and of art in Chaucer's day. My
study is intended to fill a small part of that need.
144
FOOTNOTES
1
The Renaissance, pp. xii-xiii.
2"Chaucerian Narrative," p. 99.
^Search, pp. 10-11.
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Empringham, Antoinette Fleur
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Chaucerian Narrative And Gothic Style: A Study Of The "Legend Of Good Women," The "Monk'S Tale," And The "House Of Fame."
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