Chapter 18 - The Woman’s Response in John Gower’s Cinkante Balades

Summary

In John Gower's Anglo-French lyric cycle, the Cinkante Balades, the fivepoem woman's series marks a critical moment. Gower positions the woman's response within the last fifth of the cycle, grouping her apparently contradictory poems together as a self-contained series, Balades 41–44 and 46. Mathematically one-tenth of the whole, the woman's response to the male speaker nevertheless occupies much emotional space in the cycle. Gower's male speaker begs for, describes and reacts to the woman's poems repeatedly in his own Balades. Comparing her and her replies to diamond, marble, rock and crystal, the male speaker learns to praise his beloved's stony resistance. He tries to use his poems to wear her down, but, ultimately, her Balades polish and refine his: in fact, the woman's response reflects and corrects his poetic vocabulary. Only in the wake of the woman's series can the male speaker find poetic honour and comment on love's virtue. Thus Gower suggests that the woman and her reply illuminate and clarify whole text.

Yet, while the woman's response has attracted some critical attention, it has not received a thorough treatment. Lynn Wells Hagman claims that the woman's poems ‘tell a little story of her own’, but she concludes that the ‘mistress’ section does not end on a particularly strong note’. Instead she argues that, as the male speaker has ‘progressively less and less to do with the actual love situations’ involving the woman, ‘Gower himself’ emerges and leads the cycle to ‘progress in moral tone toward the climax’ in the unnumbered Marian coda Balade following the numbered cycle in the manuscript. In Hagman's reading the Virgin replaces the earthly woman of the male speaker's poems as the object of Gower's own desire. Likewise, Russell Ralph Cressman argues that the male speaker's initial fascination with the woman and ‘fin amour’ gives way to Gower's increasing emphasis on ‘vrai amour’, what he calls ‘brotherly love’.