Difference: The Balade

One way in which the Legend of Good Women reshapes the tide term "women" is by refusing rigid gender demarcation: blurring the lines, exchanging the roles. Chaucer's massive debt to Ovid in this poem has been acknowledged by virtually every scholar who has written on it, and Ovid does a good deal to even up the odds of gender. This is particularly true in the Ars amatoria, of which the third book aims at a female audience, and which, even in its first two books, stresses the importance of female desire and female pleasure, including foreplay and orgasm (e.g., 2.679–732). Woman may be the hunter and man the prey (3.558–60, 591, 669) as well as the more typical reverse. The Remedia amoris, sequel and palinode to the Ars, ends with the assurance that its therapeutic lessons will have cured both man and woman: "Carmine sanati femina virque meo." As for Heroides, not only are three of the epistles uttered by men, but portraits of female desire and initiative are prominent, and one of the epistles (9, Deianeira to Hercules) concentrates on the hero's adoption of woman's dress and labor.

Of the many formats through which Ovid was known to the high and late Middle Ages, one was the commentary on his works. We have already encountered (Chapters 2 and 3) prose and verse commentaries on the Metamorphoses in the Ovide moralisé and in the work of Pierre Bersuire, but all of Ovid's other works were commented on as well, and these texts tell us a good deal about medieval Ovid interpretation. They are all, for example, agreed that in the Heroides , Ovid, as self-defined praeceptor amoris ("love's instructor" [Ars 1.17], and not—as context makes clear—what Philip Roth might call a

"professor of desire") expresses an intention that is genuinely moral and didactic: "per hanc monere ne qua stulte et illicite diligat, ne propter similem culpam similem penam incurrat" ("to warn [one] lest [one] love foolishly and illicitly, so that because of the same fault [as the characters, one] might not incur the same pain"). While this statement is from a comment on Epistle 17 (Helen to Paris),^[1] the accessus , or introductions, to the commentaries make the same point. The scholia are equally sure that Ovid's moral was intended for men and women alike:

Ethice supponitur: loquitur enim de moribus tam heroum heroidibus, scribentium quam heroidum, idest matronarum, heroibus, idest viris, scribentium.^[2]

This is the ethical application: it tells as much about the behavior of heroines writing to heroes, as of heroes (that is, husbands/men) writing to heroines (that is, wives).

Intentio huius operis est reprehendere masculos et feminas stulto et illicito amore detentos. (Huygens, 29)

The intention of this work is to censure men and women enthralled by foolish and illicit love.

Nor is the Christian literary corpus without cross-dressing, so to speak. As Caroline Bynum has shown, the use of female imagery to describe God, Jesus, and even abbots was a well-established practice in high-medieval devotional writing, particularly among the Cistercians and including such authors as Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of Clairvaux. Moreover, as James A. Brundage points out, canon lawyers from the twelfth century on "flatly rejected the postulate of female inferiority and insisted instead that men and women had precisely equal rights and obligations ¼ both within marriage and outside of it" (67). Whatever Chaucer's textual in-

[1] Hexter, 286, from the T2 (Tegernsee) commentary on Epistulae Heroidum ; my translation, in which I have deliberately reproduced the genderless quality of the original. Further on Ovid commentaries and their literary influence, see Desmond's special issue of Mediaevalia on "Ovid in Medieval Culture," especially articles by Frank T. Coulson, Ralph Hexter, and Barbara Nolan.

[2] Hexter, 223, from accessus to Epistulae Heroidum. Hexter comments that "from the very first words of the manuscript, students were presented with the idea that Ovid's purpose in the Epistulae heroidum was to castigate both men and women involved in foolish and illegal love affairs" (154).

spiration, I shall argue that his practice reflects both the medieval academic understanding of Ovid as ethical poet and the mixed messages about women contained in orthodox Christian doctrine.

Already in Troilus we have had a hero who, despite his valor on the field, becomes almost pathologically passive in his relationships with male friend and female lover. He is manipulated by both of them; he is seduced and abandoned; it is he who weeps and laments. In the Legend, commissioned by its fictional sponsors as a palinode to Troilus, Eros and Alceste require that this role allocation be reversed, back to what Eros defines as the "correct" version, and in five of the lives it is. These are the tales of Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Ariadne, and Phyllis, all abandoned. Of the remaining five heroines, two are raped—Lucrece and Philomela—while for three—Cleopatra, Thisbe, and Hypermnestra—there is no question of abuse or abandonment. In its self-reported genesis, then, gender role-reversal (from male to female suffering, from female to male malfeasance) is the intended point of the Legend, and if the issue is power, masculine power is shown at work in seven of the ten stories. Yet there is in the tales, as in the Prologue, a fragile and continually oscillating balance between the assertion and the undercutting of masculine prerogative, or between sexual equality and sexual hierarchy.

It makes little sense, I think, to try to decide whether Chaucer was or was not "woman's friend" (as the Scots poet Gavin Douglas put it in the early sixteenth century); I prefer here to look at the systems within which a late-medieval courtly writer was permitted to be women's friend, and the systems within which he was not so permitted. My argument will be that Chaucer both "is and is not" the friend of woman. I borrow the phrase "is and is not" from Salman Rushdie, who himself borrowed it from ancient Arabic storytelling. I use it in order to articulate a deep-rooted ambivalence about women that is a structural feature of late-medieval culture, providing a terminus ad quem beyond which even the most well-intentioned writer, male or female, cannot pass.

That the culture itself was divided on "the woman question" is evident from social fact and ideological theory. Socially, women were integrated into the work force in rural and urban communities, contributing their labor to the burgeoning European economy of the high Middle Ages and benefiting from the wealth they

helped to create. At the same time they were excluded from important arenas of social activity and influence: from universities, the priesthood, and (with a few exceptions) government.

Ideologically, Christian myth performed a similar double take on women. On the one hand, Christian ethics maintained the equality of men and women with respect to grace, free will, and salvation. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Jesus Christ," Paul admonished (Gal. 3:28). On the other hand, the story of Eden specifies several sorts of difference as permanent consequences of the Fall. One is the difference between human beings and animals; as Jahweh says to the serpent, "I will put enmity between ¼ your brood and hers. They shall strike at your head, and you shall strike at their heel" (Gen. 3:15). Another is labor, and with it (according to Catholic theologians) implicitly class difference, for Jahweh destines Adam to "gain your bread by the sweat of your brow". And there are also differences of sex and gender—that is, both biological and social differences between men and women—for to Eve, Jahweh says, "I will increase your labor and your groaning, and in labor shall you bear children. You shall be eager for your husband, and he shall be your master." These differences are not correctable historically, according to Catholic doctrine; hence utopianism, which would erase the consequences of the Fall, is potentially heretical.

My discussion begins with the apparently gender-blind balade that is one of the poetic high points of the Prologue and appears to adumbrate the question of gender role shortly to be raised by Eros. The lyric praises a lady ("My lady" in F, "Alceste" in G); its catalogue of ladies surpassed by the object of praise includes eight of the ten figures treated at greater length in the poem proper (omitting Medea and Philomela), as well as nine more ladies who are not written about (but who might have been in a fuller version).

It is curious, therefore, that at the head of this catalogue of women there stand two men. They are Absolon and Jonathan, in the first and third lines of the poem. Two more men, Demophon and Jason, are introduced in stanza 3, balancing the two men of stanza 1 with approximate formal symmetry. What are these male figures doing here, and how do they affect our response to the lyric? They do so, I suggest, in two different and competing ways, de-

pending on our method of interpretation. One effect of their presence is to minimize gender difference; this occurs in a semantic register. The other is to reaffirm gender difference and female subordination; it occurs on the level of syntax. I shall begin with the former as the more usual way of reading a lyric.

Absolon, the son of David, is adduced as an exemplar of beauty for his "gilte tresses clere" (F 249; cf. 2 Sam. 14:25–26), and Jason was also distinguished for his golden hair, as Medea will later note (1672). In stressing the physical beauty of men—and particularly their golden hair, a primary desideratum for the aristocratic woman—the balade reverses conventional expectations. It makes a gender-blind point, reminding us that since physical beauty is not limited to women, neither are the attendant difficulties. Men have to take responsibility for their sexual attractiveness, to ensure its proper use, and to resist exploiting the power it confers: these are not merely the problems of femininity.

As for Jonathan, David's intimate friend, he embodies "frendly manere" (F 251; cf. 2 Sam. 18:1), again a quality that, while not exclusively feminine, tended in the courtly tradition to be associated with women largely through the example of Bel Acueil (Fair Welcome), one of the Lady's most important personified qualities in the Roman de la rose. The friendship of Jonathan to King David was both personal and political. It transcended family, for Jonathan has constantly to resist instigation to treason by his father, Saul. The example of Jonathan shows that loyalty, like beauty, is not the property of either sex, and therefore neither is disloyalty. (The legends themselves will amply demonstrate these principles.)

On a semantic level, then—considering only the associative or historical meaning of the men's names—the presence of these names in the balade minimizes sexual difference in the interest of moral egalitarianism. Far from "feminizing" the male figures by including them in this catalogue, the effect is, rather, to deconstruct gender (the social mediations of sex) by suggesting its irrelevance as an ethical category. This procedure is consistent with Christian ethics and eschatology.

But how gender-blind really is the balade? The moral life may well be gender-blind, but social life is not, and the balade manages to convey both aspects of that dialectic simultaneously. Looking now at the structure, or syntax, of naming in the balade, we find that it reasserts hierarchies that limit the moral egalitarianism of its

references. This is because the names constitute a referential network, analogous to the acrostic sometimes concealed in the initial letters of the lines of a medieval poem and revealing the author's or translator's or recipient's name. In this case, we have a syntax, not of letters, but of names, whose relations within standard medieval theories of classification, both social and historical, carry the structure of repressive ideology in this short and apparently innocent lyric. Let us first consider historiography, specifically the profoundly influential Augustinian representation of history.

One notes, first, that there are seven names in stanza 1. I shall attach a significance to this number only because it seems contextually justifiable to do so. Seven is the number of historical periods in one of Augustine's historical schemes, the one he borrowed from hexameral millennialism: it represented history as a week of ages paralleling the week of creation. This theory appears throughout The City of God, most prominently and most dramatically in its final paragraph:

The first age, as the first day, extends from Adam to the deluge; the second from the deluge to Abraham¼ . From Abraham to the advent of Christ there are ¼ three periods ¼ . There are thus five ages in all. The sixth is now passing¼ . After this period God shall rest as on the seventh day, when He shall give us ¼ rest in himself¼ . Suffice it to say that the seventh shall be our Sabbath, which shall be brought to a close not by an evening, but by the Lord's day, as an eighth and eternal day, consecrated by the resurrection of Christ, and prefiguring the eternal repose not only of the spirit, but also of the body. (22.30)

Not only did Nicolas Trevet and Thomas Waleys comment on The City of God during the fourteenth century, but Ranulf Higden employed the six-ages scheme as the organizing principle for his immensely popular and influential encyclopedic world-history, the Polychronicon : "In the whiche work, by the ensaumple of the firste worchere, that wroughte alle his werkes in sixe dayes and reste in the seventhe (for his doynge is oure lore), this werke I departe and dele in sevene bookes" (1.3). It was a common topos, and there can be little doubt that Chaucer was well aware of it. Despite these antecedents, this would be a weak argument were it not for other evidence that Augustinian historiography was very much on Chaucer's mind here, as evidenced in the positioning of the seven names.

In accordance with its title, a second historical scheme structures

Augustine's great book. This is the parallel alignment, imitated from Eusebius, of the cities of God and man. The development of the city of God can be traced in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, while the city of man is manifested mainly in pagan/classical history, each phase of which is contemporaneous with and antithetical to a phase in the city of God. We have, therefore, three major cultural traditions to reckon with in the Augustinian periodical schema: Hebrew, pagan/classical, and Christian. This periodization is incorporated in the structure of the "nine worthies" topos, which always includes three Jewish, three classical, and three Christian heroes; it can be seen in Chaucer's Monk's Tale as well.^[3]

This is the progression followed in the first stanza of Chaucer's balade. We begin with three Old Testament figures; there follow two classical ones; last come two Christian romance heroines, Isolde and Helen. There is no reason to assume, as scholars have always automatically assumed, that this "Eleyne" is Helen of Troy. I propose that we think of her instead as "la belle Hélène" of Constantinople, eponymous heroine of an extremely popular French romance of the fourteenth century.^[4] The work exists in verse and prose versions in several languages; it had, according to A. H. Krappe, "un retentissement très considérable." Helen's story is a variant on the suffering-queen saga, of which Chaucer's tale of Constance is another instance. We might think of "La Belle Hélène" as the hyper-Christian version, for it is framed in the struggle of Catholicism against the Saracens; it features papal politics and, besides the pope, includes hermits and priests as characters. The heroine is daughter to a Roman emperor and niece to a pope; she is named after the St. Helen, Constantine's mother, who found the true cross, and her sufferings (which include the loss of a hand)

[3] Lucifer provides an archetypal prologue to the series; Hercules (grouped with Adam and Sampson) was often seen as a type of Sampson; the middle or pagan section mixes "Assyrian" and Latin figures; and the modern instances should come at the end, as Donald K. Fry has cogently argued. This is their placement in the best group of MSS, including the Ellesmere.

[4] A. H. Krappe gives a summary and discusses problems of origin and filiation. He characterizes the tale as "un de ces interminables romans qui caractérisent le déclin du moyen âge" (324) and concludes that "le poète inconnu était ¼ un loyal sujet des rois angevins, maîtres de l'Angleterre et de la plus grande partie de la France" (353). A much more detailed resumé appears in the comparison of MSS by Rudolf Ruths. As far as I am aware, the romance has not yet been edited. On the evolution of the Helen cycle, see Linder, 84–85; and Mulligan.

equal those of many a saint. Her twin sons are Martin and Brice; the former becomes archbishop of Tours, while Brice becomes father to St. Brice, another archbishop. Given the unsavory reputation of Isolde, we might see the two heroines—courtly adulteress and saintly progenitor of holy men—as representing unredeemed and redeemed versions of womanhood in Christian literature.

There is, moreover, a specifically English component to the story, for Helen, like Isolde, marries an English king (Henry). Her son Brice also becomes king of England and of Constantinople, after making a crusade to Jerusalem. The progression of names thus asserts both ecclesia and patria, orthodox Augustinian historical periodicity culminating in a subtle compliment to the English monarchy. It is a stance, as Chaucer well knew, not always so easy to maintain as in the structure of a short lyric.

Of course there is no explicit textual assertion about how to interpret this Helen, Hélène, or even Elaine: all depends on our interpretive grid. If the Augustinian historical schema is granted, then Hélène fits. Two considerations persuade me of the validity of that schema in connection with the balade. One is the pervasive presence of Augustinian ideas and references throughout the Legend. The other is that the schema holds for six of the seven names, so that it seems to me the burden of proof is on those who would propose any other Helen than the one suggested here. Nevertheless, indeterminacy of this sort serves to highlight the role of interpretation, the necessary subjective activity of the reader. This becomes a prominent theme in the legends to follow, so that the balade is again paradigmatic of what it precedes: not only in content but in method.

Besides chronological structuring, a hierarchy of social values may be discerned in the placement of names in the balade. This social syntax reaffirms gender relations as a kind of subset to the doctrinal hierarchies already posited in the historical periodicity of the names. I used the metaphor "headed" earlier on, and I now want to literalize that metaphor, suggesting that the positioning of male and female figures at the start of the poem represents a "correct" organic structure resembling that of the traditional descriptive blazon of the human (not only the female) body. The blazon always begins with the head and works systematically downward. This is because what is highest is most important and therefore comes first.

In the human organism, the position of physical and conceptual primacy is filled by the head, seat of reason, the highest intellectual capacity. As in the body biological, so in the body politic: what is highest rules. As the head rules (or should rule) the body, so reason rules the passions, king rules state, and man rules woman.

Hence the balade opens with a man, expands to a man followed by a woman, and then gives a pair of men enclosing—constraining, if you will—a woman. The cluster of three names thus offers a tiny linguistic image of proper leadership and proper control. The poem opens also with the image of a head—Absolon's head of gilt tresses—as does the traditional blazon. It opens with three Old Testament figures representing temporal priority; they are, moreover, inseparably linked to monarchy, or headship of state. This power-packed opening movement is immediately followed by two examples of marital fidelity (Penelope and Marcia Cato), which extend the political principle into the domestic sphere.

The image of Esther is especially rich in this context, touching as it does all three areas of concern: state, marriage, and individual self-control. (Here I revert to a semantic mode of analysis.) The Book of Esther opens with an act of disobedience: Queen Vashti refuses to come forth at the command of her husband, King Ahasuerus. This misconduct carries potentially disastrous results:

For this deed of the queen will be made known to all women, causing them to look with contempt upon their husbands¼ . This very day the ladies of Persia and Medea who have heard of the queen's behavior will be telling it to all the king's princes, and there will be contempt and wrath in plenty. (Esther 1:17–18)

The insubordination feared here is at once domestic and political: not only will other women follow Vashti's example against their husbands, but princes may do so against their superior the king. Royal advisors therefore urge that a "better" queen be found so that "all women will give honor to their husbands, high and low." The successful candidate is the Jewish maiden Esther, a paragon of obedience, tact, and modesty. Esther does assert herself eventually on behalf of her people, but always using feminine wiles: food, wine, appearance, tears. She achieves a writ of indulgence, the promotion of her deserving relative, and the death of her people's enemies. On every level—political, marital, ethical—Esther is rep-

resented as a model of proper female conduct. Her story reasserts the importance of gender-role difference (that is, of specifically feminine behavior); it reaffirms authority both sexual and social. Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and Man of Law's Tale adopt a similar narrative strategy of sexual politics.

If the first stanza of Chaucer's balade gives us images of headship, rule, and rational behavior, the second stanza shows what is to be ruled. It opens with the image of a body:"Thy faire body, lat yt nat appere, / Lavyne" (F 256–57). At its heart—that is, in its central line—passion appears: just where it ought to, for the heart is, in medieval medical lore, the seat of passion and particularly, though not only, of sexual passion. (We recall the opening of the Canterbury Tales with its birds pricked by nature in their "corages.") The "passyoun" here is that of Cleopatra, one of the most negatively charged figures in all medieval history and legend, as Taylor shows conclusively. Playing on the hagiographical matrix and the passio (suffering) of martyrs, Chaucer also avails himself of the already-acquired (and now predominant) subjective meaning of "passion" (cf. OED , s.v.). Death dominates this stanza as it does the natural body, for of the five ladies named, three were suicides and one was killed as a sacrifice. Moreover, all five are closely associated with warfare or family feud. One might add further that all these ladies are pagans, but I would not want to lean too heavily on the "spiritual death" notion. The figures in stanza 2 therefore lead us to consider the ways of irrational or excessive behavior both personal and social. In doing so, they contrast with the heavily charged onomastics of control in stanza 1.

Stanza 3 adds nothing to the dialectic of control and subversion already established, but illustrates it in a fairly pedestrian way: the feet, I suppose, of this small literary body whose structure does, after all, mime that of the conventional courtly blazon. (Nor is it necessary to apologize for etymological wordplay, a standard rhetorical device in classical and medieval literatures.)

In such subtle ways does the balade introduce the legends to come, not simply by naming several of the heroines to be represented there, but by showing, in its miniature poetic practice, the stress-ridden and paradoxical relations of men and women, reason and nature, eschatology and social life, form and content, syntax and semantics.

My analysis of the "Absolon" balade proposes a more schematic and more ideologically conscious poet than Chaucer is often conceded to be: a more medieval Chaucer if you will. As Georges Duby has shown in The Three Orders —his meditation on equality and hierarchy in high-medieval social theory—the thematic elucidated here became, after the twelfth century, absolutely central to conservative thought of the period. If the Chaucer portrayed here is less like ourselves than we thought, less different from his scholarly—indeed, clerical—contemporaries and antecedents, his work is by the same token all the more capable of revealing some dominant intellectual concerns of his day. Other of Chaucer's poems could be analyzed to disclose a similar pattern of first undercutting and then reasserting gender difference. The Franklin's Tale begins by inverting the traditional relation of husband and wife, but ends by affirming it. The knight Arviragus at first swears never to exert social or sexual control over his wife ("he, day ne nyght, / Ne shoulde upon hym take no maistrie" [V.746–47]). In the end, he must not only resolve her dilemma about honorable behavior, but threaten her with death if she breathes a word of it (1481–83). The Wife of Bath's recital allows its speaker, in her Prologue, to offer a radical critique of male appropriation of cultural production and to seize that right for herself. Yet it also lets her reaffirm both traditional textuality and traditional masculine fantasies about and behavior toward women, with her quotations that turn against themselves and her tale of a rapist who beats the rap.

The themes I have discerned in the balade resurface in the individual legends, to which I turn now and in Chapter 5 in order to indicate how they carry the dialectic of same and different, equal and subordinate.