Women, Nature, Language

A piece is missing. It is a piece of rhetoric, a metaphor so deeply embedded in Western culture, so absolutely taken for granted, that it is virtually invisible. Nonetheless it is this missing piece that enables the connection of theory to practice—that is, of Prologue to legends—and of the aesthetic of nature to the literary representation of women. This link is the equivalency of woman with nature. This is so ancient and omnipresent a turn of thought and of language that only with difficulty can it be treated simply as metaphor. It has become what P. N. Medvedev and Mikhail Bakhtin called an "ideologeme."

"Is female to male as nature is to culture?" Anthropologist Sherry Ortner asks this question in the title of her well-known essay and the answer, she claims, in most cultures is "Yes." She cites three reasons for this phenomenon. First, women's reproductive capacity; second, women's social role as family nurturer and socializer of children; third, the "feminine" personality structure that is a consequence of social arrangements, particularly division of labor and family structure.

While Ortner's evidence comes mainly from the tribal societies that constitute her field of specialization, the idea itself is by no means limited to these societies. In ancient Greece, for instance, gender difference was intimately linked with agriculture and with writing: as Page du Bois writes, "For the Greeks, writing is like plowing is like sexual intercourse," and women are "tablets for

inscription, fields for sowing and writing, assuring the scriptural, agricultural and sexual reproduction of the polis" (45, 47). Since my interest here is the analogy itself rather than its socioeconomic determinants, I shall confine myself to noting its amazing longevity through the most drastic metamorphoses of social life. Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival gives us the startling image of earth as a virgin grandmother raped by her grandson Cain (9.464), and the femininity of nature was an accepted topos among the Chartrian humanists of the same period. We learn from Annette Kolodny that "Mother Earth"—a slogan in the battle for People's Park in Berkeley, 1969—was a recurrence of the "land-as-woman symbolization in American life and letters" (ix, 3–4), and Susan Gubar brings the metaphors full circle with her discussion of places in modern and contemporary literature where woman is likened to page or text. I choose these moments—classical, medieval, and modern—as representative of what would otherwise be an unwieldy list of references. To transfer these data, then, to the Legend of Good Women: the literary representation of women can serve as test case for an aesthetic of nature, because woman has traditionally been thought to bear a far more intimate relation to nature than man does, a relation so close as to border on equivalence.

Women and nature, then; but where does language fit, the third component of my argument? Here anthropology can help again, for it is Claude Lévi-Strauss's exposition of the exchange of women that links women to language through the notion of the sign. Insofar as women represent value, they become signs. It is not, however, simply as "a thing of worth" that Levi-Strauss uses the term "value," although women's reproductive capacity certainly renders them valuable in this sense. Like language, they are full of "meaning" in their ability to generate other signs: more people, the wealth of the tribe. But the value represented by women, according to Lévi-Strauss, is rather a social function, the prohibition of incest. This rule has the same purpose as language: communication and integration with others. Rules governing marriage and non-marriage are "a means of binding others through alliance," so that "the relations between the sexes can be conceived as one of the modalities of a great 'communication function' which also includes language." Thus "Women themselves are treated as signs, which are misused when not put to the use reserved to signs, which is to be

communicated" (493–96). Although the exchange of women is no longer as important as it once was, the remnants survive, as testified in these words to an old jazz classic:

As a silver dollar goes from hand to hand,
A woman goes from man to man.

In the Middle Ages, though, the exchange function of women was still a very prominent aspect of marriage mores, including dowries, property settlements, and family or political alliances made by marriage. Chaucer himself, as guardian of marriageable young aristocrats and bourgeois, personally profited from the marriage market of his day. The sodoeconomic realities of marriage, especially the exchange value of women, are an important theme in the Canterbury Tales. Obvious examples are the Merchant's sardonic praise of a wife as a more durable gift than "londes, rentes, pasture, or comune, / Or moebles" (IV.1313–14) and Alison of Bath's commodification of her own sexuality as a response to society's commodification of women. Less obvious, perhaps, is Chaucer's description of the other Alison, the young wife of the Miller's Tale. In a long series of natural images—animal, avian, and botanical (I.3233–70)—there intrudes the following dissonant couplet:

Ful brighter was the shynyng of hir hewe
Than in the Tour the noble yforged newe.
                               (3255–56)

Coinage of the gold noble had been introduced only in 1344, and it is not clear just how complimentary Chaucer means to be here. On one hand, the Tower mint maintained probably the purest standard (that is, the highest percentage of precious metal) in Europe, during a period when debased or alloyed foreign coinage was common; indeed during the 1390s the English noble would be counterfeited by Duke Philip the Bold of Flanders. On the other hand, John Munro notes that the gold noble had already been debased by 14 percent of its original weight within a few years of first issue, and after 1370 there was a continuing deterioration of English coinage (Munro, chs. 1 and 2). Relatively, then, the coin was "fine"; absolutely, it was flawed.

Why an intrusive money image—social, urban, man-made, technological—to disrupt this otherwise consistent set, if not to

make the point that woman, like the coin, has exchange value: she does go "from hand to hand." In one sense, of course, she ought not to do so: that is in the promiscuous sense represented in the narrative. Yet in another sense, she must, for such are the demands of marriage as a social institution when a woman goes from her father's hand to that of her husband, her exchange value dependent on her father's income and status. Of this perspective we are reminded in the last lines of the descriptive passage:

She was a prymerole, a piggesnye,
For any lord to leggen in his bedde,
Or yet for any good yeman to wedde.

Intertextually, though, the money-image was related to nature in the Chartrian discourse familiar to Chaucer. In a passage Chaucer had already imitated in the Parliament of Fowls, Alanus de Insulis has Natura define herself as God's vicar. She uses the imagery of numismatics:

He appointed me as his substitute, his vice-regent, the mistress of his mint, to put the stamp on the different classes of things¼ I obeyed the commander's orders in my work and I, to use a metaphor, striking various coins of things according to the mould of the exemplar, and producing copies of my original by fashioning like out of like, gave to my imprints the appearance of things imaged. (Plaint, trans. Sheridan, Prosa 4)

By way of Alanus's treatise, then, the coin-and-mint image came to Chaucer already integrated into a doctrine of nature, already spoken by a female figure whose fertility links woman, nature, and language in the metaphor of exchange.

It might be objected here that men as well as women were exchanged in medieval marriage; indeed, both of Chaucer's wards were young men. Yet this would be a superficial objection. One needs to ask with whom exchange is made, and for what. To the extent that men hold positions of sodal power (government, clergy, administration) and, in the main, own capital (land and other means of production), to that extent it is men with whom political alliances or property settlements are made. Hence woman remains, structurally, the exchanged item. Had women equal power and status with men, we would be able to speak of exchange of men and women, although this power and status would have to be general

rather than exceptional. Two centuries after Chaucer wrote the Legend of Good Women, even Queen Elizabeth I knew full well that her best strategy to retain "maistrie" both personal and political, was predsely to maintain her single state.

Returning now to language, I note that an interesting feature of Chaucer's rhetoric in the Legend is an absence, one of the several mentioned in Chapter 1. Nowhere in any legend does the poet describe the lady who is its protagonist. This absence of physical description is especially striking because the blazon of female charms was so prominent a convention in the courtly literature that the Narrator has been ordered to imitate. In Troilus the deferral of physical description invests those descriptions with special force when they do finally appear in book 5. Here, the omission of physical description seems a clue to the poet's subversive intention. He refuses to titillate the reader with a conventional catalogue of female charms, or to fragment the natural human body and hand it over, in fetishized form, on a silver platter of rhetoric.

Yet if this refusal of the catalogue signals a poetic practice that Chaucer means to reject, it simultaneously implies what he wishes to endorse. I mean that sense of the proper use of goods that came to Chaucer from numerous late-classical and medieval sources. Here is one formulation, taken from Augustine's discussion in The City of God (22.17) of whether women's bodies will retain their own sex in the Resurrection:

For my part' they seem wiser who make no doubt that both sexes shall rise. For there shall be no lust, which is now the cause of confusion. From those bodies, then, vice shall be withdrawn, while nature shall be preserved. And the sex of a woman is not vice, but nature. It shall then indeed be superior to carnal intercourse and childbearing; nevertheless the female members shall remain adapted not to the old uses but to a new beauty, which, so far from provoking lust, now extinct, shall excite praise to the wisdom and clemency of God, who both made what was not and delivered from corruption what He made.

If the poet Jack Spicer is right that the desire for meaning is the desire for love, then the medieval poet's wish for "the naked text" is a utopian wish for the naked body too. (The wish, and the metaphor, are further explored in Chapter 3.) Text-as-language becomes analogous to woman, the two linked as versions of what Eugene

Vance suggests we think of as temporality. It is a wish infinitely deferred, as Augustine writes, to the time or non-time beyond nature when we will see naked bodies with no ill effect; when we will interpret everything aright, and meaning will be redeemed in the transcendent signifier. This, I propose, is what Chaucer too considers the best use of signs, whether these are female beauty, nature, or language: as good coin in the exchange between this world and the next. That his text juggles these registers of meaning may explain not only the silence of scholars but that of the text itself: unfinished, after all, like the House of Fame before it, which also dealt with the nature of language, textuality, and communication. To end where I began, with Barthes: "The disintegration of language can only lead to the silence of writing" (75). It is no coincidence, therefore, that I find a fit ending in the last chapter of the same text, Writing Degree Zero, entitled "The Utopia of Language":

Feeling permanently guilty of its own solitude, [literary language] is none the less an imagination eagerly desiring a felicity of words, it hastens toward a dreamed-of language whose freshness, by a kind of ideal anticipation, might portray the perfection of some new Adamic world where language would no longer be alienated. The proliferation of modes of writing brings a new mode of Literature into being in so far as the latter invents its language only in order to be a project: Literature becomes the Utopia of Language.

For the medieval writer, necessarily mistrustful of utopia, literature could not be the site of utopia outright, not while there remained, in Catholic ideology, a "mystical society of universality" that did hold forth the ultimate possibility of transparent signification. At best literary language could acknowledge the utopian wish together with its natural failure, so that only in this restricted sense might one add to Barthes's conclusion the rejoinder: it always has been.