7 - Violence without Warning: Sympathetic Villains and Gower's Crafting of Ovidian Narrative

Summary

In many of his tales, Gower seems to offer the reader contradictory morals, rendering the text's authority unclear. Gower's adaptations of Ovidian texts further exacerbate the tension between the text and reader, because Gower's text can contradict his readers’ expectations of Ovid's narratives. Gower's reader also knows these myths, at least through the plot summary available from the Latin glosses in the margins of Gower's own text, and for a wellversed audience, every reading of Ovidian retellings, even the first, is a rereading. The reader's informed position means that when reading moment by moment, the reader also stands outside of time, knowing a tale's past, present, and future—and so equipped can question Gower's retelling and supply the authority that the text doesn't seem to claim for itself. In Sciences and the Self, James Simpson encourages this type of reading, arguing that Gower writes in the ironic tradition of Ovid and offers an unreliable text requiring active readers. To him, readers are the ultimate site of authority, able to fill in the blanks that Gower leaves open.

Although Gower's retellings invoke this tension, readers who assert their authority and their own understanding of the Ovidian narrative will miss a key point of Gower's retellings: the absence of irony. I offer as a test case Gower's mode of depicting Ovidian villains who are known for their depravity. Gower writes sympathetically about them, and readers who deem such sympathy ironic ignore his strategy as a writer. To make my argument, I need to define two different forms of sympathy: Hugh White argues for Gower's sympathy for sexual predators like Mundus, Ulysses, and Nectanabus—by his analysis, Gower's villains seem sympathetic in ways that encourage “guiltily immoral” readings because the (male) audience can enjoy these men's cleverness at obtaining power and sex. This reading supports Simpson's thesis that the reader is called on to engage with and decide upon a text that paradoxically both condemns and celebrates sexual aggression. I will discuss a different kind of villain, arguably much less sympathetic, because this second set of villains rapes and kills in cold blood. However, the flavor of sympathy I focus on differs strongly from the “morally dubious sympathy” White describes, in that Gower underscores the villains’ initial goodness rather than foreshadows their evil deeds.