Introduction

Summary

What is to be done about monsters? Can and should we love their work?

Claire Dederer

“What do we do with the art of monstrous men?” Clare Dederer asks in a 2017 Paris Review essay about watching Woody Allen films in the era of #MeToo. Charmed by Annie Hall, she is nevertheless repelled by the spectacle of Isaac's relationship with high-school-age Tracy in Manhattan, unable to separate the film from Allen's seduction of his teenage stepdaughter Soon-Yi, doubtful that the humor, elegance, and balance of his film outweigh its binary treatment of female characters as either nubile, complaisant sex partners or middle-aged shrews.

By the measure of twenty-first-century intersectional feminism, Chaucer might well be constructed as a “monstrous,” privileged white male. In the Harvey Weinstein era, for instance, it is increasingly easy to imagine Cecily Chaumpaigne being pressured by Chaucer's powerful friends to officially relinquish grounds she might have for a sexual assault charge against him. Despite the many and varied ventriloquized female voices in his work, Chaucer's credentials as a pro-feminine writer, even “for his time,” have long been controversial. As the “father of English Poesye,” Chaucer is the original dead male author: the founding figure of an all-white, misogynist, anti-Semitic, hetero-normalizing, Christian canon privileged for centuries at the expense of other literary voices. Late medieval and early modern male authors and printers, as Seth Lerer and Stephanie Trigg, among others, have shown, set in motion the idea of this “father Chaucer” as an elite, white, male writer writing for other elite (or aspiring elite) men.

This study offers an analysis of the short poems manuscript tradition that may help to explain why these late medieval and early modern men felt compelled to construct this patriarchal, misogynist Chaucer: they were refuting the idea that Chaucer was pro-feminine. When Gavin Douglas justified his 1513 translation of the Aeneid by dismissing Chaucer as “evir womanis frend,” he was not creating a straw man.