Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender

by Elaine Tuttle Hansen

Hansen challenges both the long-standing myth of Chaucer as the tolerant, wise Father of English poetry and the recent arguments that Chaucer was a protofeminist, subversive of the misogyny of his day. Hansen argues that these mistaken interpretations inhibit readings of Chaucer that respond to feminist and other poststructuralist critiques of traditional literary scholarship.

Hansen suggests that the woman's voice in Chaucer reflects an urgent problem of gender identity for two kinds of men, both feminized by fourteenth-century courtly those who love women, and those who traffic in stories about women. She maintains that Chaucer destabilizes the notion of fixed gender difference but then privileges masculine identity by reconstructing the feminine in orthodox ways. Hansen exhorts readers of Chaucer, and students of the history of gender, to approach Chaucer's fictions with a more sophisticated awareness of their complexity and timeliness.

Genres: Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 10, 1992

Reviews

[Nicky · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not terribly useful to me, in terms of what I was looking for, but an interesting perspective on gender in Chaucer's works. I wasn't too impressed by some of it -- you know the way everyone says English Lit students read too much into it? Well, sometimes they do, and I think this was one of those cases.

[Jenna Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ""Women-as-the-Same" in the A-Fragment" was an interesting perspective on gender identity in The Knight's Tale and The Miller's Tale.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

The review above makes me laugh. As a professional medievalist, let me just say that this book is one of the definitive texts on Chaucer, and is used in graduate courses all the time. It is articulate and well researched, and provides an excellent counterbalance to the traditional white male perspective that dominated Chaucer studies for years.