Confining the Daughter: Gower's 'Tale of Canace and Machaire' and the Politics of the Body

Abstract

Bullon-Fernandez offers not just one but several provocative new ways of reading Gower's already well-read story of Canace and Machaire. Invoking a feminist model of patriarchal society and of the power relations between fathers and daughters, she opposes Eolus' attempts to confine Canace (repeatedly alluded to in the tale) with two gestures of independence: choice of own lover (albeit brother), which signifies her father's loss of over (p. 77); and composition of letter, in which she tries to define life in own terms (p. 77), an attempt that is quickly thwarted. Parallels are drawn in the tale between two acts of creation, letter and child; between tears and the ink; and thus between writing and body. The horrific scene of the baby bathing in his mother's blood, Bullon-Fernandez observes, paradoxically blends an image of parturition with one of death, echoing the paradoxes of letter. The multiple parallels in the tale suggest that death represents not only Eolus' assertion of his over body, but also his desire to terminate a narrative . . . over which he himself had lost authorial control (p. 79). That Eolus' attempt to Canace is incestuous in origin is suggested by the attribution of his wrath to Melancholy, the typical lover's sickness in the Middle Ages, from which Amans himself suffers because of his unfulfilled desire. Eolus' desire to have of his daughter's body provides a better explanation of his wrath — and of Gower's evident sympathy for his victims — than does the immorality of the children's union. It also refers the issue of patriarchal to that of kingship, continuing the analogy between home and kingdom that runs throughout CA. In both cases absolute power must necessarily be restrained, and Canace's tragic death highlights the sterility and self-destructiveness of any type of absolute patriarchal authority that . . . denies the subordinate body a certain degree of independence (p. 76). Bullon-Fernandez' essay appears with nine others in a special issue of Essays in Medieval Studies entitled Figures of Speech: The Body in Medieval Art, History, and Literature, edited by Allen J. Frantzen and David A. Robertson. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.2]