Jill Mann, Feminizing Chaucer

Mann, Jill. Feminizing Chaucer. Cambridge: Boydell, 2002. Print.

Reading Mann's text was an interesting experience for me. Feminizing Chaucer is a relatively foundational text for gender studies in Middle English literature, not only for its coverage of the period's most well known poet but for reading his texts for their unique perspective in regards to gender rather than discussing what they fail to cover (3). This text is a 2002 reprint, with some added material, of Mann's original 1991 monograph, and her according preface does a fair job of discussing the progression of feminist and gender studies in Middle English literature from its inception on. Seeing this tradition, the role Mann identifies herself as taking in it, and this text's response to those responding to her was nearly as intriguing as Mann's chapters themselves. 

As an early feminist text, I was surprised at how much of Mann's positions were already part of my gender theory readings and how much still seemed fresh interpretations thereof. Mann's text, both in its early and later forms, is interesting in breaking down the binaries of male/female and active/passive, arguing that Chaucer himself sought to challenge those binaries by building female characters and feminized texts that defied such disparate positions.  For example, Mann suggests that Chaucer's use of the classical pro-feminist example of Constance in The Merchant's Tale and anti-feminist tirade of Jerome in The Wife of Bath's Tale  is an intentional move to subvert the standard binaries in medieval discourse on women, having Alisoun use Jerome's arguments to subvert the passive perception of women. 

Furthermore, Mann's suggestion that Chaucer strained against the prison of these binaries leads to some interesting points. Most related to my interests, Mann once again points to the Wife of Bath to show how the more that Alisoun directly challenges patriarchal authority the more she caricaturizes herself according to anti-feminist dialogues as the "rebellious, nagging, domineering" woman (66). As Mann points out in her conclusion, "It is part of Chaucer's clear-sightedness that he sees gender-steretyping as part of these traditional patterns imposed on events. But it is equally part of his clear-sightedness that he recognizes the impossibility for human beings to divest themselves of this ideational clothing entirely" (151).