SOURCE: Olsson, Kurt. “Love, Intimacy, and Gower.” Chaucer Review 30, no. 1 (1995): 71-100.

[In the following essay, Olsson considers Gower's works in light of his presentation of intimacy and love and the many different forms that each can take.]

Recent discussions of intimacy and the “terrible desire for intimacy”¹ reflected in our culture often center on questions about sexuality, and that tendency should not surprise us. Throughout its history as an English word, “intimacy” has been used as a euphemism for sexual intercourse, and since Freud, we have become accustomed to looking for sexual undercurrents in other forms of interpersonal relationship, nowhere so commonly as in settings of intimacy. To be sure, the term may be understood differently and without such complication. Some observers have claimed, for example, that “between individuals, intimacy becomes the goal of the relationship, the joining of innermost feelings and qualities, an emotional closeness and knowledge of each other that is deep [and] reciprocal.”² In our era, however, we have come to appreciate the sometimes daunting complexity of establishing an intimate relationship even in this latter sense. The memories and attitudes that go into forming an individual “can never be accessible to someone else, if for no other reason than that the individual … has no access to them.”³ This seems to be a postmodern quandary: an inaccessible self and a fragile, potentially non-existent relationship, where a lack of knowledge and emotional closeness intensifies the need to establish contact, and where the very intensity of desire causes irresolution and even threatens the survival of the relationship itself. As we might expect, this need sometimes expresses itself as an urgent and “relentless … instinct for self-exposure,” the premise being a belief that identity and relationship, such as they are, are “created out of nakedness.”⁴ What begins in the expression of need through a physical, even sexual metaphor effectively reconnects intimacy with sexuality, and that, when coupled with “terrible desire,” tends to situate intimacy in a field of hidden, sexual needs which we are often loath to confess, but which, when we confess them, confirm intimacy.

John Gower, we may suppose, would have understood little of this. Whereas he treats sexual questions, he does so in very different terms, and never does he cluster these questions as originating in a deep and “terrible desire for intimacy.” The word “intimacy” was not invented until the seventeenth century, and if Gower is at all interested in the matter of close human relationships, he must use other terms to express it. But we cannot even assume that he is interested. A very basic problem may be suggested by my title, or by a related sequence of terms that has the ring of a course title: love, intimacy, and power. “Gower” and “power” are equally unsettling terms in these triads. Linking Gower with love and intimacy is problematic because he is a poet who, to borrow terms from Carolyn Dinshaw, appears to have a penchant for “reading” and thence writing “like a man.” We may well doubt that questions about relationship or facets of intimacy would be a concern of an author preoccupied, as Gower is thought to be, with power, hierarchy, order, and univalent meanings. These concerns have been identified, of course, with a “gendered response” to experience: the male tendency to be controlling and “totalizing,”⁵ presumably a tendency of Gower, does not seem likely to yield a particularly useful insight into our question. Gower has been recognized for his tidiness,⁶ but intimacy in its modern senses is not a very tidy subject. Nevertheless, as this poet has been known to surprise us on other subjects, so he might surprise us on this one as well.

Let us begin with the term “intimacy.” Certain of its meanings were available to Gower and his readers in its Latin roots, and the range of ancient meanings sets the parameters of the issue I propose to explore:

intimē, adv. 1 In a most familiar fashion, intimately. 2 Deeply, profoundly. intimo, tr. To impress deeply (upon); to make familiar (with). intimus, a. 1 Furthest from the outside, most remote, inmost. b the inmost part of. c the inmost part. 2 The inmost part of (the mind, or the breast, etc., as seat of the feelings). b (of sensations, emotions) inmost, deepest. 3 Remotest from public knowledge, most secret or private. 4 Most abstruse, recondite, or profound. 5 (of friends) Most intimate, closest; (also, of friendship).⁷

Meanings of intimacy and the intimate, even to the present day, emanate from this grouping of possibilities, and as the catalogue shows, the terms can refer either to an inmost nature, quality, or feature of an individual, or to a quality of relationship. In the late fourteenth century, Georges Duby has found, writers display a growing interest in describing what occurs behind the “wall around their private life,” and this extends to the “ultimate redoubt where [a person] locks away [his or her] most precious … thoughts.”⁸ That mental domain is Gower's chief concern: while intimacy is found in private spaces and the poet, as we shall see, often sets the scene of discovery in a particular kind of physical location,⁹ he is more interested in exploring what happens in mental spaces, in psychology: his concern extends to both individual and relational aspects of what we term intimacy. The Confessio Amantis represents a quest of the “intimate preserve”¹⁰ of the self, a quest of relationship, and an exploration of their interconnection.

In this story about a confession, the lover reveals to a priest the secrets of his heart. Amans knows he needs help: to discover his inmost thoughts and feelings—to come to understand himself—he must speak to another, none better than a knowing confessor who can question him, probe his mind, distill statements, and absolve him of his sins. This intimate conversation is private and founded on trust: Genius encourages the lover to “Tell me thi Schrifte in privite” (6.104),¹¹ and throughout this exercise, Amans complies:

                                        in privete
To you, mi fader, that ben hiere
Min hole schrifte forto hiere,
I dar min herte wel desclose.

(5.4486-89)

The two speakers agree that the purpose of this confessional exercise is to restore the lover to health. They differ, however, in their perception of what that signifies, and the difference is reflected in the double sense of intimus. Amans's statements are framed, interpreted, given meaning, and challenged by Genius, who, as a confessor, seeks to uncover Amans's inmost character, the “privetes of [his] herte.” Amans' quest for intimacy, on the other hand, centers on the beloved: he has not achieved as close a relationship with her as he desires, and seeing that as his problem, he presents his “sins” largely as failures of approach in his suit. While the lover confesses moral lapses in his action or “herte,” he stresses his amatory conduct. While the priest touches on lapses in amatory conduct, he ultimately focuses on a loftier profit that Amans can achieve only through close moral self-examination. In both cases, the end of the quest is Amans's psychological health, and, as we shall note, it is represented as a return home, as a recovery of that most basic setting of intimacies.

1. STOLEN LOVE AND MORAL CAPITAL

Amans's claim to intimacy—or a close relationship with his beloved—is based on the truth of his love, and in that presumed truth, he would appear to belong to a select company. In a wonderfully descriptive section of the Confessio dealing with Sacrilege, Genius considers the case of lovers who go to church looking for women to love. A portion of this statement is related distantly to Ovid's Ars amatoria and immediately to thirteenth-century French recastings of Ovid's advice about where to find love-prospects.¹² Genius notes how “In grete Cites” the “lusti folk” “In cherches and in Menstres eke / … gon the wommen forto seke” (5.7056-60). The potential lover dresses to be noticed, but Genius doubts his purpose: this man “loketh on the fleissh, / Riht as an hauk which hath a sihte / Upon the foul, ther he schal lihte” (5.7070-72). Gazing at these women, “On hire and hire,” and making their “hertes flitte” (5.7079, 7076), he chooses one “wher as evere his chance falle” (5.7084).

Unlike this churchly exemplar, Amans does not ogle “hire and hire,” but is devoted to one person alone. That is his license for intimacy. As a self-anointed exemplar of true love, he belongs to a group of lovers who, when “thei no leisir fynden elles” (5.7035), seek in church their already chosen love. Having found her, these lovers neglect the service: they speak in her ear and ask of God “non other grace” (5.7041) than that their love should bestow on them a good word, a promise, or a love-token: “Thus halwe thei the hihe feste” (5.7051). In this fashion, Amans hallows his lady. Certainly he is not a fickle or cynical lover who courts women willy-nilly and “loveth non of alle” (5.7083),¹³ but he has another problem. In his supposed “truth,” he betrays a passion which, to the extent that it denies “women's essential humanity,”¹⁴ makes the attainment of an intimate relationship impossible.

Through “gentil” speech and action, Amans does all in his power to achieve a closeness with his lady.¹⁵ “Riht as sche wole or so or thus,” he states, “I am al redi to consente” (4.2796-97). As a never-absent “gentil man,” he declares his love in “Rondeal, balade and virelai” (1.2727) and sets his “pourpos alofte” in carols (1.2731). She, however, rejects the gift, remarking that he did not make these songs for her: she does not want to hear them or even know “what the wordes were” (1.2742). Amans's desire is not a reality to her, but neither is she a reality to him. She presumably does not recognize herself in his flattery, and he, in his passion, cannot respond adequately to her.

For Amans, the lady's chilling response to his poems is not the exception, but the rule of her behavior. When he approaches her more boldly to tell her “a part” of his desire, “Anon sche bidt me go mi weie / And seith it is ferr in the nyht” (4.2802-03). In fact, the lady never gives Amans a chance to be alone with her at all.

The lover's choices are therefore limited: he thinks about love-theft, but, as he confesses,

                    dorste I nevere in privete
Noght ones take hire be the kne,
To stele of hire or this or that.

(5.6565-67)

He dares steal nothing, he tells us, because the lady has a warden, Danger, who holds “under lock and under keie” (5.6621) the treasure “That unto love mai belonge” (5.6624). Danger “englue[s]” (3.1553) the lady and keeps Amans from doing what he would.

Nevertheless, Danger cannot prevent him from committing love-theft in thought. At home, Amans torments himself with a fantasy regarding his heart, who “lith to wedde” (4.2876) with his beloved, who sneaks into her chamber because “no lock mai schette him oute” (4.2879) and then crawls into her bed, “be hire lief, or be hire loth” (4.2883). Again later, Amans describes his rising at night, looking out his window, and finding the house and the chamber where his lady “Lyth in hir bed and slepeth softe” (5.6665); he then imagines himself transformed, entering her “chambre forto se / If eny grace wolde falle” (5.6678-79).

These fantasies of stolen love set the parameters of the intimacy Amans desires. That he should crave the privacy of a meeting with his lady is to be expected: for lovers in general, the knowledge “in privete” (4.3203) of love and its duty “asketh noght to ben apert” (4.3205). But his love, including the fantasy of sexual aggression, takes privacy to another level, and it follows Andreas Capellanus's famous distinction between love and marital affection. Married couples “may be united in great and boundless affection,” Andreas writes, but “their feelings cannot attain the status of love.” Love—“the uncontrolled desire to obtain the sensual gratification of a stealthy and secret embrace”—cannot “take place between a married couple, since they are acknowledged to possess each other, and can fulfil all the desires that they will from each other without fear of opposition.”¹⁶ In this context, of course, love is a carnal passion fueled by the very titillation of its “stolen, secret quality.”¹⁷ Amans, driven by a love of this kind, is confused about the beloved and himself, about relationship, about privacy and violations of privacy, and about a lover's rights. The confusion stems from Amans's idea of love. It is a notion confined to his brain, a fiction he creates, a private thought he can indulge without “fear of opposition.” That privacy allows him to overstate the worth of the fiction and to protect his illusion that what he suffers, in the central and deepest part of his being, is true love. The deeper and more secret the truth of that love, the more worthy it seems to be.

Curiously, Amans's strange logic, with its premise of the worth of his love, has a counterpart in modern discussions of intimacy. In a controversial essay in the Yale Law Journal, Charles Fried argues that intimacy is based on giving up privacy, or on sharing “information about one's actions, beliefs, or emotions which one does not share with all, and which one has the right not to share.”¹⁸ Privacy, in short, creates moral capital that we spend in friendship and love. Appropriately, Jeffrey Reiman has challenged this “market conception of personal intimacy.”¹⁹ Before him, however, Gower questions a like conception in Amans.

Amans's claim to love, in one of its many aspects, is economic. He is no respecter of his lady's privacy, as something over which she should have control. True love gives him a presumed right of dominion over her. He has something worth sharing: his intimate desire, his closely held love, is significant moral capital, and it forms the basis of his claim to his due, a repayment. It is not even that he “gives” his heart to the beloved and expects her to reciprocate; rather, he sees her as a thief who “takes” his heart and refuses to give him one look in return. Obviously, there is a presumption of value in the intimacy that he is ready to share with her, exclusively on his terms. He expects the lady to accommodate his “true” and secret desire, denying her own privacy, “be hire lief, or be hire loth.”

That presumption of value obviously leads to behavior inconsistent with its source in “true love.” Promises of intimacy may win trust, and such trust, for Amans as much as for the fickle or cynical lover, may form the basis for doing whatever he wishes: intimacy can become, in short, a device to control, possess, indeed injure the beloved. In the Confessio, Gower exposes that danger in a variety of settings. In tales taken from Ovid's Heroides, for example, he describes the treacheries of such figures as Aeneas, Demephon, Jason, and Theseus, all of whom forsake the women whose trust they have won. Dido, moved by Aeneas's words, “dede al holi what he wolde” (4.91). Phyllis, believing Demephon “To be for evere hire oghne knyht” (4.758), “granteth him al that he wolde” (4.770). Medea, persuaded that Jason “scholde of riht fulfille / The trouthe” (5.4190-91), accedes to his will. Ariadne, accepting Theseus's promise that “He scholde hire take for his wif” (5.5385), yields to his wishes. Each of these women succumbs to the false intimacy of her seducer, taking his proffered “trouthe” as a guarantee of an enduring relationship.

The power of intimate speech lies partly in the fact that it is uttered “in a prive stede” (5.5376) where the hearer, “solein,” is most vulnerable. Beneath the secret—usually an endearment uttered confidentially, without a threat of exposure—can lie another secret, unrevealed and undetected, indeed inaccessible to the victim. In the Confessio more generally, agents of sin are masterful not only at winning trust while masking that deeper intention, but also at planting seeds of doubt in their victims. Nessus uses a “sleihte / Of frendschipe and of alle goode” (2.2178-79) to gain the trust of Hercules and Deianire: he “the privete / Knew of here herte what it mente” (2.2190-91) and sets out “to dissevere / The compaignie of hem for evere” (2.2229-30). Knowing that secrecy holds an allure of power, he gives Deianire his shirt and instructs her to keep it “Al prively to [the] entente” (2.2247) of winning back the heart of Hercules, should it ever be set “To love in eny other place” (2.2249). Nessus plays on Deianire's fears to destroy her trust, replacing it, supposedly, with a gift of power over her lover. Deianire keeps Nessus's secret, confident that with his shirt she can recapture the love she fears she will lose. The result of her secrecy, of course, is disastrous.

This story is among those perceptively discussed by Russell Peck in a recent essay on Gower's representations of a “relativistic epistemology,” whereby the human mind, always separated from “what is,” can approach reality only by devising and revising fictions about materials presented to it.²⁰ As the tale of Deianire, Hercules, and Nessus reveals, of course, the crafting of fictions need not be directed to acquiring knowledge. One can just as easily create fictions to obscure “what is,” usually with the intent of seizing power, but often with the result, as in Amans's case, of greater self-delusion.

If, as Peck suggests, Gower sees love as the surest intention for getting to “what is,” Amans can arrive at that “entente” only through an exchange of fictions, or the “cumulative what-is-not fiction” of this entire shrift.²¹ The potential for love and intimacy in an enlarged and enriched sense will become an issue and reflect a “reality” to Amans at the confession's end. Before then, however, he manipulates “what is seen” to advance his passion, not to discover love, and in the process he carries to an extreme Andreas Capellanus's idea of the stolen and secret embrace. As a mere wish, that idea exists on the surface, distant from Amans's greater secret, the “privetes” of his heart. Even in the supposed depth of his passion, the lover misses a truer potential for intimacy, which Andreas, without expressly acknowledging it, has presented in his contrast between “love” and marital affection.

2. MARITAL AFFECTION AND HIERARCHY

The ideal of marital affection is unknowable to Amans, not only because he has no experience of marriage, but because he cannot imagine it or “write” a good fiction about it. Marriage is a concern of the Confessio, nevertheless, and it will eventually surface as critical to the work's resolution. Moreover, its representation in this and Gower's other poems reflects a larger problem, one of knowing “what is,” as well as knowing, representing, and effecting “what ought to be.” This problem has many aspects—epistemological, moral, poetic, and rhetorical—and these surface in various contexts throughout Gower's career.

They arise, for example, in the poet's separate presentations of Adultery and Matrimony in the Mirour de l'Omme [MO]. We expect Adultery, a daughter of Lechery, to indulge the flesh, but Matrimony, a daughter of Chastity, to restrain it. While these figures are opposed, the representation of each is problematic. In the story of Adultery (MO 8749-9084), the guileful, adulterous wife devises stratagems to rule her husband, keep him off-guard, and win a place in his house for her lover (MO 8809-8976). The husband, for his part, seems all too willing, even eager to be deceived, and the lover, while he experiences short-lived carnal pleasure, has no assurance that the deceitful wife, who becomes fearless in her lies, will not eventually behave toward him as she does toward her husband. With these characters, every speech and action, even when possibly truthful, is suspect: in their world of unsecured truths and shape-shifting fictions, the only constant is an unstable carnal appetite that willy-nilly fosters physical intimacy.

Gower presents this case as if he, indeed the entire species, were tainted by it. Speaking quasi in propria persona, he protests that because he is sure of his wife, he can reject reports about her as mere gossip about others, which he chooses not to hear (MO 8793-96). The wife in this “fiction” may be innocent of adultery, of course, but the poet, in then describing the behavior—and introducing the multiple denials—of the adulterous wife and cuckolded husband, sets himself up to be disbelieved. He has no sure defense against personal attack. Nor does he find for his argument a needed support in moral doctrine. He argues, for example, that a husband is a fool to commit adultery because he always has at his side a wife who is his subject and servant, a person ready to do his will (MO 8977-88). This doctrine, shifted in supposition from a teaching to a promise to an invariable historical fact, is undercut even in the context of the argument by the author's preceding assertions about wives, husbands, and lovers.

The treatment of Adultery promotes yet another fiction through its gender statements. While the initial emphasis on the adulterous wife affects the attempt to dissuade a husband from adultery, the larger impact is even more unsettling. The author's case seems to be grounded on a premise of women's fallen nature. As heirs of Eve, women, not men, appear to be the ultimate cause of sin and thence of all marital troubles: the vices of married men—credulity, infidelity, dishonesty, and cynicism—would, on this basis, seem to originate in women's duplicity. The point is paradoxical, however, for if the male speaker is subjected to the same principle, then his testimony may itself be a lie, serving only to excuse men for perpetuating their tyrannies over women.

The statements of this section thus resonate with the consequences of Eve's sin. The treatment of the counterpoised virtue, Matrimony (MO 17137-748), at first seems to confirm the bias of that earlier section, but now with the expressed support of authority. From his reading of Genesis,²² Gower concludes that the woman, “less perfect,” is not permitted to lead, but must be guided “by sober and just government”; she “owes honor to her husband, just as a subject to his lord.”²³ The woman is also a companion, to be sure, but the man “takes with good will a wife for his pleasure,”²⁴ and in this hierarchy, the pleasure appears to be exclusively his. The good wife, “modest and gracious” in her obedience, will not do “anything displeasing to her husband.” Although she may “speak and take action when she sees it is time to do so, and when she thinks best,” she still must not do “anything contrary to the pleasure of her husband.”²⁵

With traces of cynicism about woman's capacity to respect the order that subjugates them, Gower suggests that a good wife is a rarity: “a woman is good to take as a companion provided a man can find one who is well brought up,” and “a good wife is the most needful thing to the man who can get one.”²⁶ To be sure, the poet finds good wives in the Bible—Judith, Esther, Susannah, Abigail, Jael, and Deborah—but the search underscores the basic point that the man who finds such a wife is very lucky: “a well-brought-up wife is the gift of God,” and “he who by divine Providence is destined to such a spouse should rejoice greatly in his heart.”²⁷

These statements do not hold much promise that affection is generally possible in marriage. Indeed, Gower's “celebration” of Matrimony sometimes appears to run the opposite course: drawing upon several of his auctores—Aristotle, Cato, and Seneca respectively—he indicts all women for their evil counsel, acerbity, and refusal to learn. Enlarging on the last point, the poet writes, “No more, I assure you, will women retain the counsel that you give them. If you search for the record of their memory, you shall find it written in the wind.”²⁸ Whereas later, in tales of the Confessio, Gower counters this assertion, he here accedes to the perceptions of authorities: “Learn, take counsel, and be warned by the teachings of wise people.”²⁹

The reliance on experts, however, does have another side, even in the Mirour, Gower argues that the husband, finding a good wife, “should love her without deception” and “cherish her in friendship as his companion and well-beloved; for they are one body (as the law of Holy Church teaches us), so they should have in unity only one heart without any difference.”³⁰ This ideal has traditional support: a good marriage is a “personal relationship,” a “joining of souls,” and a “secure friendship,”³¹ and the affection upon which it is based is more than “purely sexual love,” more than “intellectual esteem.”³² The “bon amour loyal et fin” (MO 17248) that unites a married couple includes an intimacy that we find in friends, those “to whom we can fearlessly entrust our heart and all its secrets” and who, “in turn, are bound to us by the same law of faith and security.”³³

Cherishing a wife “in friendship as [a] companion and well-beloved” poses a difficulty, however. Although one might wish to challenge the assertion of Chaucer's Franklin that “Love wol nat been constreyned by maistrye,”³⁴ it is a principle that obtains in medieval treatments of friendship. Friendship is based on a principle of equality,³⁵ but marriage is not. It now seems, however, that Gower qualifies the principle of marital hierarchy that he promotes in other contexts. The ideal compaignie of marriage, he writes, is based on a likeness between the sexes: “we are all made of similar members and reasonable heart.”³⁶ Further recalling from Genesis that woman was created not from the head or foot, but the rib, the middle part of the side of Adam (MO 17521-32), he contends that in marriage neither should the woman become the superior, nor should she be despised as an inferior: she is a companion.

This contention is traditional. Hugh of St. Victor argues that the woman “was given as a companion, not a servant or a mistress. … She was made from the middle, that she might be proved to have been made for equality of association.”³⁷ In another reading of this scriptural passage, Aelred of Rievaulx takes the argument a step further. “As a clearer inspiration to charity and friendship,” he writes, the Lord God “produced the woman from the very substance of the man. How beautiful it is that the second human being was taken from the side of the first, so that nature might teach that human beings are equal and, as it were, collateral, and that there is in human affairs neither a superior nor an inferior, a characteristic of true friendship.”³⁸

By taking this side as well, Gower appears to contradict himself. It should be noted, however, that neither is a double stance regarding the structure of marriage unusual in the period; as Dominique Barthélemy has remarked, medieval “marriage was supposed to be both egalitarian and hierarchical.”³⁹ Reconciling these principles is no small assignment, nevertheless, and medieval writers approach the task differently. In the twelfth-century Jeu d'Adam, Georges Duby sees a vocabulary that “makes the marriage contract parallel to the vassalic one: both unite two parties equal in nature but necessarily unequal in power, so that one must serve the other.”⁴⁰ Gower does not develop the metaphor of the vassalic contract, but looks instead for a bridge between likeness in nature and difference in power. Eventually, he will present his fullest response in a region of make-believe: particularly through stories of the Confessio, he will address contingencies—and a “reality”—in the interstices between the doctrines on either side of the issue.

What begins to yoke the two perspectives, however, is the notion unstated though implied in the teaching of the Mirour, that the Fall has had a double consequence. While Eve's action effectively forces woman's subjection to the “maistrye” of another, original sin taints both partners. A marriage might therefore fail not only because the wife refuses to “consent to her subjugation,”⁴¹ but because the husband refuses to be just in his dominion. Gower never tires of exposing both kinds of refusal and the false hierarchies or tyrannies of relationship that result. In the Mirour, he treats the first three of Isidore of Seville's four bases for choosing a wife—beauty, status, and wealth—as incitements to those tyrannies, while reminding us that the fourth—moral probity—provides the only sure foundation for an enduring relationship.⁴²

This distinction extends to the Confessio, where, for example, the poet recounts the story of the king's steward who weds a “lusti ladi” (5.2686) because of her riches and then sells her to his king for “yiftes grete” (5.2715). The steward's wife objects to this plan, as well she might, protesting that she is prepared to do whatever “he bidde wile” (5.2740), so long as it is “honeste.” In response, the steward abuses her with the “strengthe of his manace” (5.2748). With “wordes felle” (5.2744) and “gastly contienance” (5.2745), he orders her to “folwe his will in every place” (5.2747), and she, “so sore adrad, / … his will mot nede obeie” (5.2750-51). In the absence of virtue, neither friendship unconstrained “by maistrye” nor marriage hierarchically arranged constitutes an acceptable relationship. In this example, the woman is the moral superior: she has good reason to speak, but is forced to keep silent. And through her case, we are reminded of Gower's statements in the Mirour about the nature of male dominion: while it is true that “the man will have great merit if he delights in governing [the woman] justly,” his practicing justice is no less problematic, in a postlapsarian world, than a woman's accepting it: “Only God, who provides the virtues, can produce by His grace a man of such good disposition, so virtuous that he will be truly gentle and with good right.”⁴³

In the simplest terms, virtue is Gower's collateral principle, the source of an “equality of association” within the hierarchy of marriage. His treatment of this principle in the Confessio requires that he do more than merely extol the virtues of the good husband, as he does in his famous statement about the “honeste” love of Apollonius of Tyre (8.1993-98); it requires that he also celebrate the virtues of the good wife. Before the Confessio ends, he does so, and he thereby not only grounds the principle of “equality of association,” but also adds a depth and completeness to his exploration of questions of intimacy.

3. THE “FOURE WYVES”

When Amans falls into a swoon after Venus rejects him from her court, he envisions two companies of lovers, led by Youthe and Elde respectively. Though Amans is old, he has displayed a particular affinity with those lovers in the pageant of Youthe who “laghe and pleie, / And putten care out of the weie” (8.2491-92). Like them—and despite what Venus has just told him—he is not yet interested in the passage of time or in “olde daies passed” (8.2835). These “blithe” lovers reject past sorrow and seek new pleasure, the immediate gratification of desire. Many of those who are named carry histories, now forgotten, of lost “feith” toward earlier loves, and although their present joy may be a delight to Amans, it too, were their full stories told, is fleeting, a precursor of eventual wretchedness and despair.

At the end of this procession, however, there appears a group of four women who, unlike these other lovers, do not forget their histories or their loves. Penelope, Alceone, Alceste, and Lucrece exemplify “alle goode / With Mariage” (8.2617-18), and by their presence this entire “Court” of Youthe stands “amended” (8.2608). Regarding these exemplars of married love, women “Whos feith was proeved in her lyves” (8.2616), the poet intimates that their “feith” has allowed the development, over time, of virtues that contribute to marital friendship,⁴⁴ and that the long maturation of that affection has nourished and been nourished by intimacy. Obviously, the growth—the slow, difficult, and often painful maturation—of a relationship is not Amans's interest, and the example of these four women, it would appear, has little relevance to what he thinks important.

In another place, I have discussed four other women in the Confessio whose stories are fashioned as direct responses to aspects of Amans's desire.⁴⁵ Those women—Amans's beloved, Venus, Araxarathen, and Pygmalion's wife—obviously differ from these four wives celebrated in the vision of Youthe. Since the latter, as exemplars of the good in marriage, represent something far removed from Amans's desire, we must eventually ask why Gower features them at so critical a juncture in the lover's experience. Here the poet represents their “feith” and a range of related virtues, such as patience, integrity, self-sacrifice, and constancy, that also express and support their love. Penelope “kept hir wommanhiede” (8.2629) while Ulysses “lay / … / Upon the grete Siege of Troie” (8.2623-25). Lucrece, raped by Tarquin, died “for drede of schame / In keping of hire goode name” (8.2637-38). Alceste “deide hirself” to give her husband life (8.2645). And Alceone, faithful to her drowned husband, “lepte” into the sea and, transformed into a sea bird, “with hire wenges him bespradde / For love which to him sche hadde” (8.2655-56).

These stories, fully recounted elsewhere in the Confessio, reveal that these women have a command of memory that contributes significantly to their strength of character: in them, this faculty is not “written in the wind” (MO 17664), but variously becomes a sustaining power, broadening, enriching and deepening their relationships with others. Through its power, they remain faithful to absent or soon to be absent husbands; they cope in “trouthe” with being alone or with inevitable separation; they deepen their affection and reveal a capacity for intimacy that includes more than “purely sexual love” or “intellectual esteem.”

During the presumed absence of her husband Collatin, Lucrece, joined by the women under her charge, is “abandoned / To werche” (7.4810-11) in support of her husband's war. Her “herte is evere upon debat” (7.4820) because she wants Collatin home, but only “if it scholde him noght displese” (7.4816). She and her husband, in their everchanging memory of relationship, display a love undiminished by separation. In contrast to Lucrece, whose actions manifest a “trewe herte,” Arrons' wife “spak noght of hire housebonde” (7.4801) during his absence; indeed, “of glad semblant” (7.4798) and “full of merthes and of bordes” (7.4799), she appears to have forgotten him completely.

The stable memory exemplified by Lucrece, as well as by Penelope, Alceone, and Alceste, raises a larger question about Gower's perception of women and ultimately of their place in marriage. The four good wives serve their husbands, but it can hardly be said that they do so only because they are “less perfect.” Nor is their behavior consistent with the poet's earlier perception, as in the Vox Clamantis, that women are naturally frivolous and inconstant.⁴⁶ In the Confessio, story-telling appears to free the poet from assertions of this kind; as he works in narrative settings with the particulars of a relationship, he is more inclined to question gender-typing and its products.

The point may also be illustrated by his treatment of power and the kingly virtue of truth. The single exemplary narrative he uses to champion this virtue, a story taken from 3 Esdras, argues that woman is more powerful than wine and king, but that truth is more powerful than all three. In Esdras, the sage Zorobabel tells a story about the concubine, Apame, and her lover, King Cyrus, to demonstrate woman's power. The tale, which Gower also tells to much the same point—the capricious Apame “doth with [Cyrus] what evere hir liketh” (7.1895)—makes Zorobabel's final assertion easy: truth always does justice, but woman does not.

Gower presents a more complex argument. Before retelling the story of Apame, his Zorobabel introduces a series of other proofs that women are mightiest. The story of Apame demonstrates such “maistrie,” but Zorobabel, wanting to establish more, also tells the story about the good and kind Alceste—a story that does not appear in Esdras—to show that women, in their truth and love, are “myhtiest upon this grounde” (7.1948). That praise of Alceste, however, leads beyond gender issues to a final assertion that truth itself is “most behoveliche” (7.1975). To be sure, Genius also describes the truth of women, as embodied in Alceste, as “most behovely” (7.1949), but the earlier case of Apame provides a caution. We may or may not be able to see truth in a particular woman, and that is Gower's point. He is freeing up a moral ideal, but also freeing women—indeed all human beings—to make their choices. Before Zorobabel champions truth as mightiest, he claims that woman is man's “lif, his deth, his wo, his wel” (7.1913): his later argument, however, displaces his originally stated intention “To schewe of wommen the maistrie” (7.1881). In effect, the prerogative ultimately rests with the virtue. Alceste exemplifies truth, but in this context the story about her is told not for women, but for Alexander, who as a prince must learn to practice the virtue, one of the five critical “pointz” upon which “worthi governance” depends.

4. DOMESTIC ROLES AND VIRTUE

The case of Alceste raises another gender issue, however. Whereas Apame unjustly gains and exercises power over Cyrus, Alceste, as an exemplar of truth, relinquishes “maistrie” in order to save her husband's life. The power she gives up even as she exercises it is considerable: in a particular sense, she is for her husband “His lif, his deth, his wo, his wel.” As noble as her virtue is, however, one may argue that it effectively helps keep her in her place within the marriage hierarchy. Does the celebration of such goodness then reflect an outlook that would have women develop only certain virtues, those that reinforce their subjugation, or their particular social, economic, legal, and political status in medieval society?

In writing about marriage, Gower does not eschew the question of roles or of virtue in relation to those roles. Nor does he reject out of hand the traditional power structure of marriage. At the same time, however, he often appears to claim more for women than a strict marital hierarchy might warrant. Indeed, he frequently implies through his examples and emphases that women “center” the marital relationship. They repeatedly provide the focus of a good marriage, of fidelity, and, we might also note, of marital intimacy. What the poet says about the duties of both partners in a marriage is, in that regard, instructive. For him, the good wife models relationship and practical competencies in domestic life. Gower's final statement on matrimony in the Mirour, based on a passage in Tobias, enunciates the five pieces of advice that Raguel and Anna give their daughter Sara about being wise in her marriage: 1) she should “be friendly without transgression toward her neighbor”; 2) “cherish her husband above all others with good heart”; 3) “not be idle”; 4) “be intent on economy in her house”; and 5) “watch over her family and rule them in such a way that each one should do his duty well and fittingly.”⁴⁷

The roles assigned to Sara fit into a medieval notion of marital friendship. In a rare use of the Latin noun that forms the root of the modern English term of my title, Pierre Bersuire judges the ideal marriage union to be founded on intimitatem charitativam. The husband and wife who are intimate through charity, who love each other mutually, fear God, and keep faith with each other, also affirm their union through the performance of particular offices: the wife oversees domestic matters, and the husband oversees matters extending beyond the household.⁴⁸

It would appear from tales in the Confessio that such an arrangement reduces the prospect of intimacy. Although a good husband may cherish his wife, he seems rarely to stay at home to manifest it. Nor is he encouraged to do so. Ulysses must learn to leave Penelope and the “sotie of love”—of married love—for chivalry. Lucrece wants Collatin to come home, but she accepts his need to be absent. Prothesilai, called to the siege at Troy, must reject his wife's plea “That he with hire at home abide” (4.1921).

In contrast to these other male figures, Sardanapalus is a king who actually stays at home, there showing a greater love of sexual pleasure and handwork than of governing his kingdom. In Genius's terms, his “sotie effeminat” (7.4304) derives from a total submission to the will of women (7.4326-27):

                    ther he keste and there he pleide,
Thei tawhten him a Las to breide,
And weve a Pours, and to enfile
A Perle.

(7.4331-34)

While Sardanapalus stays at home, he is not present to himself or his regal office, and eventually, for his incompetence, he is deposed.

In this earlier literature, wives at home seem to have accepted what one modern writer has called a “culture of waiting.”⁴⁹ A woman who loves her husband as “hir lif,” although she “wot nothing” of his affairs, will accept his absence and yet “sitt alday wisshinge / After hir lordes hom comynge” (5.6119-22). Penelope, even while writing to urge Ulysses to “take the viage / (4.218-19), accedes to his delays, and Lucrece, “at hom sittinge” (7.4808), similarly waits patiently for her husband's return. There may be an assumption here that women have nothing better to do than sit “alday” waiting. To be sure, Gower's stories do not dwell on such duties as the wife's management of the household economy, for example, but it is clear from his final statement about marriage in the Mirour that he sees such responsibilities as a necessity. His interest in the English poem lies elsewhere, however.

Concerning the “foure wyves,” the poet is chiefly interested in their character, but to return to the earlier point, his celebration of their goodness, to the extent that the latter is defined within a set of gender roles, may serve only to perpetuate the status of women as “less perfect.” This paradox is not unique to Gower, of course. Lee Patterson has noted Chaucer's attempt to address it in the Legend of Good Women: “The Legend argues that the goodness and moral authority of women is not merely defined but created by male tyranny, a dialectic that reimposes the encompassing authority of the very antifeminism it seeks to evade.”⁵⁰ Gower sees in the four women of the vision a reflection of something more than a set of role-determined virtues, however. When these characters appear before Amans, he still has something critical to learn about himself and about love, and they can teach it best, better even than the group of other women, his lady among them, who reflect aspects of his desire. Before we finish, we shall return to these wives, summarize how their agency, even as centered at home, gets presented by the poet, and note how their stories have a particular relevance to Amans, as well as to the Confessio as a whole. Because the centering at home is important to their stories, as well as to many others in the poem, we shall do well initially to identify the poet's major premises in treating this setting, theme, and concept of home.

5. HOME, INTIMACY, AND REPOSE

At home, a secured and private place, one may, as Duby notes, enter the “intimate preserve” of the self and, on a supposition of trust, also discover or reaffirm a closeness of relationship with others. The father of Peronelle, forced upon pain of death to answer a seemingly impossible riddle, “Goth hom to take avisement” (1.3121): privately he can do what he cannot do publicly, “caste his wit aboute” (1.3123) with one he trusts, on a matter whereof “he stant … in doute” (1.3124). Over the course of his poem, Gower presents a rich diversity of situations where characters at home explore, question, and divulge the secrets of their heart. In casting scenes in this setting of intimacy, Gower exemplifies principles of interioritas, itself described by Pierre Bersuire as a “secret region,” the central or deepest part of a place or thing. Interiority may be represented in the sharing of confidences, when characters, drawn together in the depth of love or friendship, reveal their hidden thoughts and feelings, as these emerge from interior faculties of the heart—conscience, intention, and affection, for example.⁵¹ For Gower, the protection and “inwardness” of a home provide a critical setting for the experience of his characters: the effect of their intimate dialogue at home, whether their “Semblant” is true or feigned, is almost always significant. Because of that intimacy, the home often proves to be, in narrative and moral terms, the center of major choices, a point from which the resolution or conclusion of actions emanates.⁵²

This setting also centers the experience of characters in a related temporal sense. Gower's stories often end at home, as it were in repose, with time stopped and characters at rest, situated so that the totality of their experience can be drawn together, made whole, and rendered meaningful. Reality is never so neatly ordered, of course, and Gower knows it, but he adapts that knowledge to the common human expectation of what a home should be. He uses the image of home to convey the “sense of an ending,” exploring aspects of the latter phrase that have been identified by Frank Kermode:

[M]en in the middest make considerable imaginative investments in coherent patterns which, by the provision of an end, make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle. That is why the image of the end can never be permanently falsified. But they also, when awake and sane, feel the need to show a marked respect for things as they are; so that there is a recurring need for adjustments in the interest of reality as well as of control.⁵³

The poet's formulaic representation of characters turning “homward” or “hom ayein” prepares for an ending, and it is often advanced in the interest of control. In pointing to a given tale's conclusion, the image signals a satisfying consonance, a katastasis or relaxation of concern⁵⁴ about characters who, for the greater part of the tale, have devoted their energies to dealing with troubles in distant places. In a sense, of course, this is nothing more than a convention of good storytelling. At home, characters, after distant trials, receive a “glad” welcome (6.1504), bring an action to a close, and put their cares to rest. As the longest story in the Confessio ends, for example, Apollonius and his family are reunited with each other and with the people of Tyre: “Echon welcometh other hom” (8.1895), and so, in resolution, “Alle olde sorwes be foryete” (8.1906).

A like ordering occurs in the poem's frame narrative, which focuses ultimately on the individual aspect of intimacy, on the inmost thoughts and feelings of its main character. As tales end at home, so Amans's story ends there, when the lover, an old man now also known as “John Gower,” goes “Homward a softe pas” (8.2967), rejecting “the lif which y hadde usid” (8.2964), pondering Venus's gift of beads inscribed with Por reposer, smiling, and resolving “whil y live” to pray “with al myn hol entente / Uppon the point that y am schryve” (8.2968-69). Unlike the ending of most of the stories in the Confessio, this one pictures the waning of a life, and with it a renewal of the interior man.⁵⁵ Having that particular significance, the frame narrative provides a “satisfying consonance” because a literal homecoming follows Amans's recovery of mental faculties, presented figuratively as beckonings home. The metaphor is introduced several times in the concluding books of the Confessio. In Book 6, it appears in the priest's advice to Amans: “Wherof thi wittes ben unteid, / I rede clepe hem hom ayein” (6.598-99). In Book 8, it recurs in Venus's advice: “Forthi tak hom thin herte ayein” (8.2421). It is not surprising, then, that the lover himself should later use this figure to describe his transformation:

Wherof I sih my wittes straied,
And gan to clepe hem hom ayein.
And whan Resoun it herde sein
That loves rage was aweie,
He cam to me the rihte weie,
And hath remued the sotie
Of thilke unwise fantasie.

(8.2860-66)

In this old man, with his “wittes,” “herte,” and “Resoun” again at home, Gower opens a new world and defines a new “entente,” one that Thomas of Ireland pictures in his distinctio “solitudo, et tumultus” with a quotation from Gregory the Great: “Indeed, if exterior wandering is closed to the soul's intention, interior access is opened.”⁵⁶ Amans-“John Gower,” before he is cured of his “sotie,” remains homeless, a wanderer who fails to get his bearings: now that the interior man has been restored, he sees “the ryhte weie” (8.3148) and like the Midas who is morally transformed in one of the poem's earlier narratives, he “goth him hom the rihte weie” (5.316). Home is often represented in the ending of Gower's stories as a place of repose, rest, or stasis, a vantage point from which the teller can reorder histories, actions, and intervals of psychological time. The same image of home, as employed at the end of the Confessio, takes the measure of an entire life and describes a renewal whereby “John Gower,” the former lover, can recompose his life from an even higher vantage point. In this place, he will reflect on his experience, he tells us, not through poetry, but through prayer.

The combined elements of old age, the return home, the advice of his Muse “Fro this day forth to take reste” (8.3142), and the “hol entente” to examine, in solitude, important moral questions—these elements are not unique to Amans-“John Gower” in the Confessio: they have been modelled in Books 3 and 7 in stories about the philosopher Diogenes. In old age, when Diogenes “ne mihte / The world travaile” (3.1204-05), he “schop him forto take his reste, / And duelte at hom” (3.1206-07), and near his house, he sits “To muse in his philosophie / Solein withoute compaignie” (3.1219-20).

This patterned ending, while it realizes one of the meanings of intimacy in its Latin roots—a recovery of the inmost part of the mind or “herte”—may at the same time undermine the concept of intimacy itself. The “satisfying consonance” of the frame narrative is predictable by conventions of story-telling in general and medieval love poetry in particular: the lover leaves home at the start, alone takes a springtime walk to reflect on love and his failures as a lover, and, after his vision, returns home. The ending is also predictable because it follows a “pattern” of what a wise and learned person does late in life, whether it be an aged Diogenes or an aged “John Gower”: in leisure and usually in solitude, such people read, study, and, as in the case of “Gower,” pray. Assigning to matters of intimacy this kind of consonance, however, is to accede to the interest of control, to the set patterning of a life. The problem may be a failure to make “adjustments in the interest of reality.”

A further problem with the end of the Confessio is just the reverse: that ending is “obscured” by the struggle of the interior man who, throughout this confession, has forgotten—as we have not been adequately informed or reminded—that he is old. While it may be the case that “the more daring the peripeteia, the more we may feel that the work respects our sense of reality,”⁵⁷ we might feel that this poem, in falsifying our expectation, has left us instead with a sense of being cheated. If in a powerful peripeteia “the end comes as expected, but not in the manner expected,”⁵⁸ it might be argued that Gower has not built sufficient expectation for the ending he provides.

We may, however, recast this problem in terms of intimacy, again as reflected in the image of home. In relation to the case of the “Gower” who emerges at the end of the work, we might recall a Latin gloss near the outset (at 1.59) which introduces the author's strategy for the whole: “Hic quasi in persona aliorum, quos amor alligat, fingens se auctor esse Amantem.”⁵⁹ The glossator, taking a stance outside the fiction, relates that fiction to a “reality.” Amans-“John Gower,” inside the fiction, does not do so until the very end of the work. In one sense, of course, the confession represents a self-contained world of game and “pley to hem that lust to pleye” (P.85). In another sense, however, the fiction of this separate region may cross over, approach a reality, and become “wisdom to the wise” (P.84). Indeed, that fiction carries a moral assumption about a character assuming a role or becoming a single “identity,” a type: in this “psychology,” assuming the persona of others is analogous to entering the house of a stranger. In a distinctio for “domus,” Nicholas de Gorran explains the biblical counsel “Go into thy house” (Matt. 9:6) by separating that house, a “domus propria,” from the house of another, a “domus aliena.” The proud, envious, lustful, and others of this kind always inhabit the latter sort of dwelling; they go as guests—and strangers—from house to house and as a result lead a miserable life.⁶⁰ One's own house should represent the more desirable “reality,” and in the Confessio, the lover comes to recognize it. Over the course of the confession, it becomes progressively more apparent that Amans is not going to get what he wants—or return to the home he would prefer—on the basis of his defense, the case he argues. The resolution must rest on something more radical, on his becoming someone other than the persona aliorum he has assumed; it turns on his becoming a propria persona restored to his own house, a “domus propria”; in his case, that means becoming “John Gower.”

This ending of the Confessio, in keeping with late medieval practice, may represent a retraction, but it is unusual in being effected by means of the “pley” of the fictional confession, particularly as the poet, through perspectives generated in his stories, attempts to discover the “reality” of home. In one traditional doubling of the image of home, we might find an illustration of Kermode's principle that “ends are ends only when they are not negative but frankly transfigure the events in which they were immanent.”⁶¹ As repeatedly noted in medieval distinctiones, “domus” refers, in its loftiest sense, to “patria coelestis.”⁶² This latter meaning is reflected in Gower's ending prayer, his plea “that above in thilke place / Wher resteth love and alle pes, / Oure joie mai ben endles” (8.3170-72). Over against this concept is another, aptly presented in Pierre Bersuires's distinction regarding the “house of this world” where, he argues, one finds “no perfect rest.”⁶³

Bersuire's “domus huius mundi” suggests a broad field for the poet's transfiguring of events of his work. To this point, we have proceeded on an assumption that in the Confessio, endings at home provide a settling, a re-establishment of right relationship, a recovery of self, and with these, a fulfillment and possible “joie.” In a good many stories, however, Gower challenges that assumption: indeed, to borrow Kermode's phrase, because these homes are “in the middest,” they are not free of conflict or tension, and the quest for order never ends there. Gower exploits that uncertainty, and while indirectly affirming the principle that one cannot discover perfect repose in the “house of this world,” he uses the image to project differing moral outlooks in his characters.

For Amans before his conversion, love means control, an ordering of another life according to his wishes. In a sense, the lover's desire to stay at home reflects that deeper premise. Amans asks what he can win “over the Se, / If I mi ladi loste at hom?” (4.1664-65), or what he can gain in strange lands while losing “at hom therwhile / Mi love?” (4.1708-09). This extends beyond the common sense notion that home is where his beloved is, and where his love must be secured. The deeper sense appears to be, as we shall see, that home permits him to do whatever he will. Ultimately, Amans's attitude is a counterpart to that of the jealous husband, who “At hom … wol wone” (5.467) in order to secure completely what is presumably his. Again, this is economic, an assumed property right whereby the jaloux exercises his will freely over what he thinks he owns. In another vein, but with a like presumption of limitless freedom, Ulysses prefers to dwell at home, where he can “welde his love at wille” (4.1828), and similarly, each of the weaker soldiers in Gideon's army “wolde after his oghne wille / In his delice abide stille / At hom” (7.3651-53).

While home is the place where one seeks to find or regain control, ease, stability, and comfort, and where, by extension, one strives to discover and maintain “coherent patterns” in one's experience, the reality is often very different. A home is not exempted from tyrannies, as we see from a variety of cases, including that of the king's steward abusing his wife, or of Antiochus in his hidden “private life” raping his daughter and then killing those who try to guess his secret. Domestic security is also threatened by external forces, reaching, in the stories Gower retells, to the power of the gods: Leucothoe, “warded streyte” (5.6722) and kept close within her chamber, is sexually assaulted by Phoebus, who through “hir chambre wall / Cam in al sodeinliche, and stall / That thing which was to him so lief” (5.6749-51).

Nor can a home be presumed to be a refuge or a comfort to those who return there. Some of Gower's warrior kings survive distant battles, but die by violence at home: such is the case, of course, with Agamemnon, slain “at home abedde” (3.1915) as soon as he returns from Troy.⁶⁴ Gower's falsifying of expectation—as in showing the Greeks who, when they “tornen hom ayein” (3.977), fall upon “harde time after the softe” (3.980)—extends to other actions as well. In the tale of Constance, Elda comes home late at night and enters his chamber with “prive lyht” so as not to “awake / His wif” (2.836-38); he cannot anticipate the horror of what has happened to her, whom he had left “wel at ese” (2.783). Home does not provide the ease that Jephthah expects when he rashly promises to sacrifice the first person he encounters, “Anon as I come hom ayein” (4.1517). He wrongly assumes a painless sacrifice; it does not occur to him that at his house the first person he will meet could well be a family member, perhaps even his daughter.

Life at home can be disrupted or destroyed by domestic tyranny, external assault, random misfortune, and, perhaps most tragically, betrayal. This place where one should be most secure can readily become a place where one is least so, for where trust is taken for granted it is more easily violated. In Gower's stories, characters at or close to home repeatedly let their guard down or conversely, to win an advantage, get others to do so. Perseus, “At hom in Grece” (2.1644), complains about his brother Demetrius “In privete behinde his bak” (2.1651), claiming to their father that Demetrius has sold them to Rome: Perseus gains the advantage of supposed trust, a revelation of a secret that the father, at home, is inclined to believe. In another context, the women I have already introduced from stories of the Heroides, at home and “in a prive stede,” trustingly succumb to the advances of false lovers. In yet another context, Lucrece, in the last and perhaps most memorable of Gower's tales about one of the “foure wyves,” shows a kindness to Arrons not as a lover—for she cannot know his intent—but as a guest, “cousin,” and friend in her house. Whereas she expects “al honour” (7.4925) from him, he masks “slih tresoun” (7.4936) under “goodli chiere” (7.4924). Nothing, it appears, can prevent her rape or eventual death. Indeed, this represents a large question in the Confessio, the incapacity of characters like Lucrece, who “mente alle goode” (7.4937), to find a safeguard against such betrayal. In the instances of such vulnerability, however, Gower finds a powerful, unexpected ending for his poem, one that “respects our sense of reality” while also providing a satisfying consonance.

6. HUMANITY AND POWER

The four wives' experience at home is not what Amans projects domestic life to be. The lover fantasizes for this place a certainty, a localization or concentration of power, an assurance that he has secured completely what he is convinced he owns. In “reality,” the wives' experience is literally centered at home, but whatever power they may exercise there as dominae, they are also committed to intimate relationships in which they are, in an important sense, powerless. In the events that define the status of their absent—or, for Alceste, mortally ill—husbands, these wives must learn to deal with their own aloneness, uncertainty, pain, and mortality. They remain faithful, of course, and what powers their fidelity is not only love, but, as I have suggested, memory, a memory that also fully acknowledges their own unsettled condition and their suffering. They understand their humanity, and they also understand what it means to be rooted in relationship: their lives “at home,” for all they must remember, help give them, unsentimentally, both constancy and stability.

Given that strength—a firmness of mind, proven in tests of their humanity—it is appropriate that these wives are grouped together and set above the great court of lovers in the last major episode of the work, the vision that occasions Amans's conversion. By their example and in their suffering, these women not only teach fidelity in marriage, but also teach what intimacy, in individual and relational aspects, should be. The context is also significant. When Gower represents their cases in this new setting, he poses questions related to, yet distinct from those raised within the carefully delimited moral categories of the confession where their stories first appeared. Now we are invited to consider these tales in a new domain of uncertainty, in relation to issues of youth and age, life in time and extension through time, endings, and, by extension, endings at home, perhaps even in the “house of this world.” These cases transfigure events, by pointing not to an ultimate consonance in the “place / Wher resteth love,” but to the more immediate, temporal, and fragile, yet also meaningful consonance of relationship.

Before his conversion, Amans's life at home is one of secret wishing and fantasy, of denying the passage of time, contingency, and difference that threaten but also potentially enrich human experience. In his secret life, the self-absorbed lover seeks an exclusive intimacy. Late in the work and in a more serious vein, this problem of exclusivity becomes a major focus for the poet, specifically in his treatment of incest. Incest originates at home, of course, in the secret life of the family. The partners, like by nature and by nature drawn to their like, “al day togedre duelle” (3.162) and, in the privacy of domestic life, share intimacies. The wicked king Antiochus takes “what thing comth next to honde” (8.163): he violates his daughter; he rejects both his and her capacity to discover relationship with a true other, someone unlike them; he gains nothing more than fleeting and unstable carnal pleasure, which he then attempts to secure by keeping it hidden perpetually. The desire to preserve an increasingly constrictive “fiction” becomes a compulsion, a need to protect it with a violence that itself manifests the same aversion to human society.

Like this in kind, though obviously not in degree, is Amans's desire for control and his aversion to whatever might threaten control. Before he discovers what it really means to be a physical creature, subjected to time—before he draws into remembrance his “olde daies passed” (8.2835)—he can only envision the goal of love as timeless and tireless sex. He wants physical satisfaction immediately and perpetually: “If I that swete lusti wif / Mihte ones welden at my wille” (5.76-77), he confesses, “For evere I wolde hire holde stille” (5.78), “And yit no friday wolde I faste” (5.81). In effect, his “paradis” of control, total domination, and possession is the hell that Santayana perceived so vividly portrayed in Dante's depiction of Paolo and Francesca. It is union without relationship, without remembrance. Such life at home, private and secure, becomes progressively constrictive: reason departs, the “wittes” stray, and madness sets in.

A modern might wish to defend absolutely the right to privacy; privacy, after all, confers on a person his or her “moral title” to existence.⁶⁵ Gower sees things differently. The title to existence, moral or otherwise, is not a person's own, and neither are his or her secrets. Existence and the “privetes of mannes herte” (1.2806) belong to God. He gives “every creature / … his beinge and his nature” (7.89-90), and also knows “alle thinges” (1.2804), and that sets a context for human actions. The upright, even with their secrets, move beyond their private lives. In confession, a person relinquishes privacy by laying his or her secrets before a God who already knows. In a close relationship, the partners give up secrets and maintain the privacy of their shared intimacy, again with the important proviso that God knows their secrets, which “sounen in his Ere / As thogh thei lowde wyndes were” (1.2807-08). That principle—a theological principle—requires that the secrets of the heart be taken seriously, that they be interpreted in ever-widening contexts and checked against the memories and pointed to the realities that situate people in the world. The alternative is self-indulgence; it is the privacy represented in the wishing and fantasy that have oppressed Amans and trapped him in his particular love-sickness.

Against the bondage of such passion, Gower celebrates the liberation of married love, which can be “wel at ese” (4.1476) because it “dar schewen the visage / In alle places openly” (4.1478-79). That turning or opening outward, however, also begins to occur in Amans's case, in an action that transcends his particular love-confession. With the lover's discovery and admission that he is old comes a sense of possible wholeness and redemption. With his memory restored, he can begin to imagine a totality of human experience that extends through ages. The “privetes” of his heart now become something more than his secret or only partly stated desire for his lady. They become all his secrets, all that God knows about him, and these form the basis for recovering his inmost nature, natura intima, and thence for rediscovering a oneness with other human beings.

While modern intimacy is thought by some to be organized around “the moment-by-moment nature of sexual life,”⁶⁶ Gower has come to express a potential much greater, a power glimpsed by Amans as his confession ends, and a power displayed by Penelope, Alceone, Alceste, and Lucrece in their lives. This is the power to remember; it is a power to admit to the secret that one is vulnerable; it is a power to learn the meaning of a “trewe herte” and of interdependence; it is a power to find compaignie. As the individual and relational elements of intimacy coalesce, that power can be identified with love, in senses that the unconfessed Amans could not have understood.

Notes

1. I borrow the phrase from Geoffrey H. Hartman, Easy Pieces (New York, 1985), 5.

2. Lee Combrinck-Graham and Lawrence Kerns, “Intimacy in Families with Young Children,” in Intimate Environments: Sex, Intimacy, and Gender in Families, ed. David Kantor and Barbara F. Okun (New York, 1989), 74.

3. Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 13.

4. Hartman, 45, 9.

5. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Madison, Wis., 1989), 28-29.

6. See, for example, C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford, 1935), 198-201.

7. Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford, 1982), s.v. “intime,” “intimo,” “intimus.”

8. Georges Duby, “Introduction,” A History of Private Life, II: Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 7.

9. For a difference in Chaucer, see Sarah Stanbury, “The Voyeur and the Private Life in Troilus and Criseyde,” SAC 13 (1991): 141-58.

10. Duby, Private Life, xii.

11. Quotations from Gower are from The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1899-1902); translations of the French are from William Burton Wilson, trans., Mirour de l'Omme (The Mirror of Mankind), rev. Nancy Wilson Van Baak (East Lansing, Mich., 1992).

12. For a translation of selections from these texts, see Norman R. Shapiro, trans., The Comedy of Eros: Medieval French Guides to the Art of Love (Urbana, Ill., 1971), 5, 6, 19.

13. See Gower's attack on the inconstant lover in the Traitié pour essampler les Amantz marietz, 17.8-9, 13-14. In such statements, Gower joins Chaucer in his distaste for what Richard Firth Green describes as “erotic duplicity” in Continental texts of the period: “Chaucer's Victimized Women,” SAC 10 (1988): 3.

14. Green, 18.

15. In effect, the lover follows the steps in a procedure outlined by Andreas Capellanus, On Love, 1.353, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (London, 1982), 143.

16. Andreas, 1.368 (147).

17. Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1968), 1:155.

18. Charles Fried, “Privacy,” in Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology, ed. Ferdinand David Schoeman (Cambridge, Eng., 1984), 211; repr. of article in Yale Law Journal 77 (1968): 475-93.

19. Jeffrey Reiman, “Privacy, Intimacy, and Personhood,” in Philosophical Dimensions, 304-05.

20. Russell A. Peck, “The Phenomenology of Make Believe in Gower's Confessio Amantis,” SP 91 (1994): 253.

21. Peck, 256. As Peck remarks, Genius may offer the lover sage counsel: “Let thi Semblant be trewe and plein” (2.1912), the priest admonishes Amans, and use “thi conscience” (2.1926) as helpmate, “If thou were evere Custummer / To Falssemblant in eny wise (2.1928-29). In the context we have already considered, this advice, based on an economic metaphor, makes good sense. But Amans can question and recreate every major term—truth, conscience, semblance—according to his own pleasure: his “conscience” has manifestly convinced him that his love and his “semblant” are true. Given Genius's ambivalence in speaking both as a champion of Venus and as a priest, it is no wonder that such terms can be interpreted differently. The poet's decision about Genius, however, allows a fuller, more finely nuanced inquiry into the ambiguities of love. Indeed, Gower's argument is not designed finally to reject love out of hand, but to explore, redefine, and redirect it, even allowing its “courtly” manifestations when these fit morally into a vision that gains its greatest clarity and power as the work concludes.

22. “To the woman also [the Lord God] said: I will multiply thy sorrows … thou shalt be under thy husband's power, and he shall have dominion over thee” (Gen. 3.16). Gower writes,

    Et nepourqant l'origenal
    Pecché dame Eve estoit causal,
    Dont dieus voet femme estre soubgite
    A l'omme en loy judicial.

    (MO 17533-36)

    See Gratian, C. 15, q. 3. princip. René Metz, “Recherches sur la condition de la femme selon Gratien,” Studia Gratiana, 12, Collectanea Stephan Kuttner, ed. J. Forchielli and A. M. Stickler, 2 (Bologna, 1967): 390-91.

23. “Par sobre et juste governage” (MO 17604). “Femme a son mari doit honour, / Sicomme soubgite a son seignour” (MO 17605-06).

24. “du bienvuillance / Prent une espouse a sa plesance” (MO 17239-40).

25. “Sanz faire ascune displaisance / A son mary” (MO 17693-94). “Et qant voit temps, parler et faire, / Sicomme meulx sciet, a la plesance / De son mary sanz nul contraire” (MO 17696-98).

26. “Qui la puet avoir bien norrie / Bon est de femme acompaigner” (MO 17207-08). “Molt est a l'omme necessaire / La bonne, qui la puet tenir” (MO 17447-48).

27. “La femme q'est du bonne aprise / Est doun de dieu” (MO 17685-86). “Molt doit joÿr en conscience / Qui par divine providence / Au tiele espouse est destiné” (MO 17509-11).

28. Nient plus, je t'en fais asseurance,
    Les femmes ont en retenance
    Le consail quel tu leur dirras:
    Si voels sercher sanz variance
    Le papir de leur remembrance,
    Escript au vent le troveras.

    (MO 17659-64)

29. “Par ce q'ai dit om puet aprendre / Et aviser et guarde prendre / De la doctrine au sage gent” (MO 17665-67).

30. “Ainçois la dois sanz decevoir / Amer”

    (MO 17503-04).

    Comme sa compaigne et bien amée
    Cherir la doit en amisté;
    Car un corps sont, comme nous ensense
    Du sainte eglise le decré,
    Dont bien devont en unité
    Avoir un cuer sanz difference.

    (MO 17515-20)

31. James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 1987), 273 and n., 274 and n. For Huguccio, “Matrimonium non est nisi coniunctio animorum,” and this union is a “personalis relatio.” For Sicard of Cremona, “Nam idem uelle et idem nolle firma est amicitia.”

32. The latter is the position taken by Henry Ansgar Kelly, Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer (Ithaca, 1975), 247 n. John T. Noonan, Jr., points out that the canonists use the term marital affection in a range of meanings, including “a quality of consent … not to intercourse or procreation but to the other as spouse.” “Marital Affection in the Canonists,” Studia Gratiana, 12, Collectanea Stephan Kuttner, 2: 481; see also 486-87, 492-95, and Jean Leclercq, Monks on Marriage: A Twelfth-Century View (New York, 1982), 1-38.

    In a series of three stanzas (17197-232), Gower introduces reasons for marrying; these derive ultimately from Isidore of Seville: “Tribus autem ob causis ducitur uxor: prima est causa prolis … ; secunda causa adiutorii … ; tertia causa incontinentiae.” Etymologiae 9.7.27, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1911). The second of these—“causa adiutorii”—is the basis for the poet's celebration of compaignie.

    Whereas Gower notes the importance of love and compaignie to a good marriage, he also stresses the need for moderation, in contrast to Andreas's statement that love is an “uncontrolled desire.” On the one hand, the husband should not be “besottedly in love with his wife as if she were his concubine” (MO 17428-30); on the other hand, the wife “should give herself freely, to do all [her husband's] will,” but “not like a common whore” (MO 17433-36). In a somewhat different light, a man should not love his wife “too much, for too much loving is a vain thing, which brings foolish pain, so that the heart falls into jealousy” (MO 17559-62).

33. Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, 1.32, trans. Mary Eugenia Laker (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1977), 58. See also Ambrose, De officiis ministrorum 3.131: “Solatium huius vitae est ut habeas cui pectus tuum aperias, cui arcana communices, cui secreta tui pectoris committas, ut colloces tibi fidelium virum, qui in prosperis gratuletur tibi in tristibus compatiatur, in persecutionibus adhortetur.” Quoted in full by Thomas of Ireland, Manipulus florum, or Flores doctorum pene omnium, tam Graecorum quam Latinorum (Geneva, 1622), s.v., “amicitia,” 40.

34. Canterbury Tales, V (F) 764, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson et al., 3rd ed. (Boston, 1987).

35. In medieval distinction collections, one can find numerous passages about friendship that stress likeness, equality, and oneness as principles of this type of relationship. Thomas of Ireland cites authors from Saint Ambrose to Diogenes Laertius and Aristotle to argue that friends defer to each other as to equals; that friendship is nothing other than an equality of souls; and that friends are drawn to each other as like to like. See Manipulus florum, s.v. “amicitia,” 41, 45, 43. In his treatment of friendship, Pierre Bersuire argues similarly: “similitudo rerum secundum antiquos est causa amicitiae.” Dictionarium, seu Repertorium morale (Venice, 1583), s.v. “amicitia,” 1:157.

36. “des membres resemblable / Et du corage resonnable / Tous susmes fait” (MO 17389-91). As Georges Duby has remarked, the medieval Church “attributed decisive value to consent (consensus) between the spouses” and “asserted the equality of the sexes in concluding the marriage pact and in the accomplishment of the duties thereby implied.” Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France, trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore, 1978), 21, 17. On marital consent theory, see Brundage, 262-69.

37. Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith (De Sacramentis), 2.11.4, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), 329; see also Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV Libris distinctae, 2.18.2, Spicilegium Bonaventurianum, 4-5 (Grottaferrata, 1971-81), 1.2:471. In commenting on Genesis 3, Hugh of St. Cher presses further on the matter of equality, noting the condition of the race before the Fall: “De costa vero viri non de terra formata est mulier: ut eam vir plus diligeret. De medio autem non de capite, non de pede: ne domina vel omnino subiecta putet, sed socia. Erat autem parum agit de statu hominis ante peccatum: quia parum fecerunt.” Textum Bibliae, cum postilla Domini Hugonis Cardinalis (Paris, 1533-39), 1: fol. 11r.

38. Aelred, 1.57 (63).

39. Dominique Barthélemy, “The Aristocratic Households of Feudal France: Kinship,” in Private Life, 143.

40. Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, trans. Barbara Bray (New York, 1983), 214.

41. Barthélemy, 144.

42. MO 17245-437. “Item in eligenda uxore quattuor res inpellunt hominem ad amorem: pulchritudo, genus, divitiae, mores. Melius tamen si in ea mores quam pulchritudo quaeratur. Nunc autem illae quaeruntur, quas aut divitiae aut forma, non quas probitas morum commendat.” Isidore, Etymologiae 9.7.29. The same four reasons appear in Robert Holkot, In librum Sapientiae regis Salomonis praelectiones CCXIII, lect. 45 (Basle, 1586), 160.

43. “grant merite / … / Om puet avoir, s'il se delite / En governance bien loyal” (MO 17538-41).

    Ainz dieus qui les vertus envoit
    Cil puet bien de sa grace attrere
    Un homme de si bon affere,
    Si vertuous, tanq'il en soit
    Verrai gentil et a bon droit.

    (MO 17355-59)

44. Gower does not expressly develop, as a group, the three goods of marriage identified by St. Augustine “as all the goods on account of which marriage is a good: offspring, fidelity, sacrament.” The Good of Marriage, 24.32, trans. Charles T. Wilcox, Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects, Fathers of the Church, 27, ed. Roy J. Deferrari (Washington, D.C., 1955, repr. 1969), 48. Although Gower works with a different triad (see note 32 above), he treats fidelity as essential to the friendship or compaignie he defends in the Mirour and elsewhere. Cicero remarks that a “foundation of stability and constancy is characteristic of that fidelity that we seek in friendship, for nothing is stable that is unfaithful.” On Friendship, 65, trans. Harry G. Edinger (Indianapolis, Ind., 1967), 67.

    Gower's Jason and Medea both appear to seek the “sikernesse of Marriage” (5.3483), and at their exchange of promises, effectively their betrothal, “Here hertes bothe of on acord / Ben set to love” (5.3390-91) and “Thei hadden bothe what thei wolde” (5.3499). The relationship does not endure, however, and its deeper instability is manifested first in Jason's defection, then in Medea's. Their tale gives us no clear sense of a workable or enduring oneness of consent, affection, and virtue.

    Implicit in the poet's statements about good marriage is the notion of sacramentum or the “inseparability of the married couple.” This is a critical concept in late medieval discussions. Brundage (270 n.) recounts Joannes Faventinus' perception: “marriage can exist without children and even without fidelity … but it must have stability. … The stability which is the essence of the sacrament of marriage must be capable of surviving temporary separations.” This latter notion is relevant to Gower's treatment of these four exemplary wives. The term sacramentum is usefully discussed by Brundage, 270-71.

45. John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the Confessio Amantis (Cambridge, Engl., 1992), 131-46.

46. Vox Clamantis 4.557-62, 4.611-14. This perception never becomes a set principle in Gower's thought. As he composes particular rhetorical arguments in the Latin poem, he co-opts the “language” of his selected groups of readers. In urging clerics and knights to avoid whatever distracts them from their respective duties—and in this perspective, women distract—he categorizes women in a fashion imitative of authors of a literature familiar to and respected by these groups.

47. “elle a son voisinage / Soit amiable sanz oultrage” (MO 17707-08). “Doit son baron du bon corage / Avoir sur tous le plus cheri” (MO 17711-12). “femme n'ert oedive” (MO 17713). “Ensi la femme ert ententive / Pour saulf garder deinz sa mesoun” (MO 17717-18).

                        sa famile bien survoie,
    Et les governe tielement,
    Qe chascuns bien et duement
    Le fait de son mestier emploie.

    (MO 17739-42)

    Compare Tobias 10.13.

48. “Ad denotandum, quod illi qui per charitatem sunt intima, per societatem facilius debent iungi.” Bersuire notes also that the partners in a marriage “debent se inuicem diligere, et unum corpus et una anima simul esse. … Ubi quilibet timet Deum, et coniunx servat fidem coniugi, et uxor regit illa, quae ad familiam et domum pertinent, vir vero ea regit, quae ad exteriora spectant.” Dictionarium, s.v. “coniunctio, coniungere” and “coniugium,” 1:348.

49. David Kantor, “Mythic Contracts and Mythic Journeys in Intimate Sexual Relationships,” in Intimate Environments, 252 (see note 2 above).

50. Lee Patterson, “For the Wyves love of Bathe: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales,” Speculum, 58 (1983): 691. The paradox survives in modern gender studies: see Rachel T. Hare-Mustin and Jeanne Maracek, “The Meaning of Difference: Gender Theory, Postmodernism, and Psychology,” American Psychologist 43 (1988): 462.

51. “Dico ergo primo, quod est interioritas munde custodienda, et ista significat interiora cordis nostri, scilicet, conscientiam, intentionem, affectionem.” Pierre Bersuire, Dictionarium, s.v. “intus, interior, intrinsecus, intra,” 2:320. The association between individual and relational elements of intimacy and “home” as a center of intimacies is suggested by Thomas of Ireland in a distinctio for “amicitia” combining passages from Seneca: “Non est quod amicum tantum vel in foro vel in curia quaeras si diligenter attenderis, domi invenies. … in pectore, enim amicus non in atrio invenitur.” Manipulus florum, s.v. “amicitia,” 50. The Senecan passages are from Ad Lucilium epistulae morales 47.16 and 19.11, and De beneficiis 6.34.5.

52. Gower usually records intimacies to sharpen an issue, advance a plot, or frame a judgment. When the moral status of characters has been established, or when those characters, within the narrative, have no further “moral” decisions to make, the poet does not, as a rule, report their private conversation. He tells us nothing about Alceste's dialogue with Admetus, for example, after the gods approve her request to die in his place:

                        hom sche wente.
    Into the chambre and whan sche cam,
    Hire housebonde anon sche nam
    In bothe hire Armes and him kiste,
    And spak unto him what hire liste.

    (7.1936-40)

53. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford, 1966), 17.

54. I borrow the term from Elder Olson, The Theory of Comedy (Bloomington, Ind., 1968), 36-37, 50.

55. A Latin gloss at 8.2749, next to the account of the company of aged lovers who gather around Amans “To se what ende schal betyde / Upon the cure of my sotie” (8.2758-59), reads: “et sic tandem prouisa Senectus, racionem inuocans, hominem interiorem per prius amore infatuatum mentis sanitati plenius restaurauit.”

56. “Intentioni quippe animae si exterior euagatio clauditur, interior accessus aperitur.” Manipulus florum, s.v. “solitudo, et tumultus,” 932.

57. Kermode, 18.

58. Kermode, 53.

59. “Here as it were in the person of others whom love binds, the author, pretending to be a lover. …”

60. “superbi, invidi, et luxuri et huius modi … semper habitant in domo aliena.” Nicholas de Gorran, Distinctiones, s.v. “domus,” Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 71, fol. 99v. Nicholas bases a portion of this argument on Ecclus. 29:30: “It is a miserable life to go as a guest from house to house.”

61. Kermode, 175.

62. See, for example, the entries for “domus”—“celestis patria” and “coeli habitaculum,” respectively in Nicholas de Gorran, fol. 98v, and Alain de Lille, Liber de distinctionibus dictionum theologicalium, s.v. “domus,” PL 210: 773 (hereafter Distinctiones).

63. “Ista est ergo domus laboris, quia ibi nulla perfecta requies inuenitur.” Dictionarium, s.v. “domus,” 1:503. For paired meanings of “domus” analogous to those introduced in this paragraph, Alain de Lille finds support in 2 Cor 5:1: “Domus etiam significat corpus et coelum, unde Apostolus: Scimus quod si domus nostra terrestris dissolvatur, habemus domum non manufactam in coelis.” Distinctiones, s.v. “domus,” PL 210: 773.

64. Similarly, Alexander conquers “al this Erthe under the Sonne” (3.2450) and expects to be honored in Macedonia, but there, at home, he is “Most sodeinliche” (3.2456) poisoned.

65. Reiman, 311.

66. Michael Kahn, “Through a Glass Brightly: Treating Sexual Intimacy as the Restoration of the Whole Person,” in Intimate Environments, 55 (see note 2 above). Brundage (581) has identified a medieval perspective on “marital sex as a source of intimacy and affection, as both a symbol and a source of marital love.” In the Confessio, by contrast, Gower situates marital sex in the larger context of the full conjugal relationship: out of this discussion emerges the idea of “honeste” love.