Hypsipyle And Medea

It has been noticed before that this tale is really about Jason: the women are paired because they share him. He has, in fact, a little prologue all his own: formal recognition of a tendency, already pronounced in the openings of the first three legends, to concentrate on the anti-hero. This mini-prologue makes no bones about its subject: Jason is clearly the exemplary figure here, albeit in negativity. For Jason is a hunter, a "devourere ¼ of gentil wemen" (1369–70). In fact, he is a fowler, whose appearance, words, and pretended emotions are his "recleymyng and ¼ [his] lures" (1371). It is the imagery of falconry; Chaucer uses it elsewhere both without sexual implication (Manciple's Tale IX. 72), and with (Friar's Tale III. 1340). To reclaim is to call back the hawk, usually after it has taken its prey;

the lure is a contraption made of leather and feathers that can be shaken to imitate a bird and attract the falcon or hawk. This picks up the memorable image of birds and fowler from the Prologue, recalling the network of values and attitudes represented there.

But the birds in question here are not those of the Prologue: no chirping songbirds, but rather themselves hunters of lesser prey. And, while the falconer is a superior and controlling figure, the relation of hawk to falconer is not that of prey or victim, but of trained partner in a hunting team. Given what Chaucer chooses to omit from his accounts of these two ladies, the predatory imagery is fully justified, for both women have participated in particularly grisly and violent events (see Chapter 4 above on Hypsipyle). Toward the end of Chaucer's version of this legend, the reader is left dangling uncomfortably with the Narrator's remark that Jason "with hire [Medea] lafte his yonge children two" (1657). Although the slaughter of her children is clearly the one thing Medea is best known for, the material is resolutely excluded as narrative event, to be as conspicuous in absence as it could be in presence, surely a deliberate cliff-hanger. Once again, as with Antony and Cleopatra or with Dido, we see that one can be a passionate and faithful lover, yet entirely inadequate on the ethical or social level. "Trewe of love, for oght that may byfalle" (F 561) does not suffice for much. The deconstruction of desire is well under way, and of gender stereotypes. Violence and brutality are not exclusively masculine behavior, nor is being victimized an exclusively feminine fate.

Animal imagery continues a few lines further on in the miniprologue, with the rather inept comparison of Jason to a fox stealing the farmer's tender capons at night. The image is inept in several ways, not least because a capon is a castrated cock. However, let us grant that the tenderness, not the gender, of the stolen flesh is the salient point here. Beyond this, however, the little allegory does not work because Jason does not steal another man's wife. Since he is married, he may be an adulterer, but he fornicates with a single woman. It is a curiously uncontrolled scenario, with its enigmatic "good-man that therfore hath payed" (1391), whose point is perhaps less to speculate on real-life candidates than to call attention to its own procedures.

At the beginning of the Jason and Medea legend, there occurs another odd gender-shift, another curious apparent ineptitude.

Jason, passing from woman to woman, is likened to "mater" that "apetiteth forme alwey / and from forme into forme it passen may" (1582–83). The reversal here is that while the gender-linkage of matter and form is a classical and medieval commonplace, matter is conventionally identified with woman, form with man. Chaucer seems to suggest once again that gender does not matter in sexual ethics, because the demands of morality are the same for either sex. It is, I suppose, to Medea's credit that she takes responsibility for her choice: "Whi lykede me thy yelwe her to se / More than the boundes of myn honeste?" (1672–73). Perhaps this is why she does not kill herself: having articulated her fault, she is able to express anger at Jason rather than turn it against herself: she does, in her letter, more or less wish him dead (1676–77), and the conspicuously missing murder of the children is a gesture of revenge against him, undoing the marriage that he has already undone by betrayal. In her aggressive behavior, Medea leaves behind the socially defined "feminine" role of passive suffering, so that the myth itself, even apart from Chaucer's representation of it, already incorporates a gender-shift.

A third animal image, with a third gender-role reversal, comes at the beginning of the Medea portion of the story: Jason is "of love devourer and dragoun" (1581). But the dragon is distinctively Medea's beast: she was able to tame dragons (she boasts of this in her Ovidian letter), and in the Ovide moralisé (7.1358–9), as in Bersuire's earlier version of Ovidius moralizatus ,^[4] she is borne away triumphant in a dragon-drawn chariot. Yet though she could tame dragons and bulls, she writes, she was unable to tame Jason (Her . 12. 163–64, 195–97). By using the dragon for similarity with Jason rather than contrast, Chaucer accomplishes another ambivalence. Is Jason, like the dragon, tamable (through sensuality), or is Medea's boast of power revealed as hollow? In either case, the dragon is a traditional Chris-

[4] Ovidius moralizatus , ed. Engels, bk. 7, fol. 55, p. 111. This, the so-called "A" version (for Avignon, where the work was completed before Bersuire went to Paris and produced the revised "P" version), was printed under the name of Thomas Walleys in 1509 and several subsequent editions. The "P" version, which adds material from the Ovide moralisé and other sources, has not yet been printed in entirety, although it has circulated in manuscript form and its introduction ("De formis figurisque deorum") to chapter 15 was edited by Joseph Engels in 1966. The dragon-borne chariot does not appear in Guido's Historia destructionis Troiae (although much else does that Chaucer used here and in Troilus ).

tian emblem of the devil, and if the she-devil is now transformed into a he-devil, we are reminded once again that neither sex has a monopoly on malfeasance.