Lucy Allen-Goss's far-ranging and exciting monograph offers a provocative way of recuperating the often-occluded representation of female desire in medieval texts. Further, Allen-Goss's project is interested in discerning female desire that is explicitly not structured in relation to or shaped by male desire. This kind of desire can be—and often is—represented as heterosexual, but it subverts representations of traditionally feminine and masculine behaviors as those are coded in other medieval texts; presents women as emulating homosocial and/or homoerotic male behaviors in their heterosexual relationships; flips traditional Aristotelian tropes of female bodies as cold, wet, and penetrable, and male bodies as hot, hard, and impenetrable; and draws on cultural anxieties over same-sex female desire and autoeroticism.
Allen-Goss's project addresses Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and three late medieval romances: the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Sowdone of Babylon, and Undo Your Door. These works, Allen-Goss argues, have been marginalized by scholars for their inchoate qualities of incompleteness, aporia, lacunae, and fragmentation; yet it is precisely through these qualities that their subversive representations of female desire are most potently represented. Drawing on contemporary queer theory that reads lesbian, same-sex, and nonheteronormative desire articulated most forcefully in and through textual disjunction, Allen-Goss rehabilitates these texts as rich sites of female desire.
Allen-Goss's book is structured as three chapter diptychs, each split between Chaucer's Legend and a romance. Chapters 1 and 2 investigate Chaucer's legend of Philomela and the Alliterative Morte Arthure as responding to the trauma of rape. Philomela's weaving of a tapestry to identify her attacker after he has cut out her tongue offers a pointedly feminine mode of survivor speech that decisively departs from traditional gendered metaphors of textual production in which male authors, from Jerome on, repeatedly imagine penile pens incising yielding feminized skins. Meanwhile, in the Morte, a heterosexual rape perpetrated early in the story disrupts gender relations so categorically as to haunt the remainder of the narrative, which is filled with scenes of male feminization that lead to the Round Table's downfall.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on anxieties over feminized men and masculinized women with Chaucer's legends of Medea and Hipsiphyle and the Sowdone of Babylon. In Chaucer's Legend, Jason successfully seduces women through a “studied performance of male femininity [that] exposes the latent deviancies of the women he encounters” (83); this performance is especially effective with Medea, who assumes the threatening masculinized role of his military advisor only to be betrayed, thus accentuating the Legend 's play with gender-fluid characters and its ultimate need to put them back in their properly gendered places. In the Sowdone, the Muslim heroine Floripas is keeper of Christian relics, which she hands over to crusader knights upon her baptism and incorporation by marriage into the Christian community. In the Sowdone's French source, however, Floripas is a hyper-sensualized, eroticized character, whose conflation with relics raises concerns over excessive and inappropriate idolatry of inanimate objects. The Sowdone keeps Floripas's close association with inanimate objects but startlingly rewrites it: unyielding, agential, impenetrable, and Marian, Floripas becomes a nonbinary “stone butch” (130) character.
The final two chapters extend an earlier thread tracing gendered depiction of the architectures enclosing female characters in these texts. Allen-Goss begins with Chaucer's gender-fluid treatment of the infamously sexualized wall separating Pyramus and Thisbe in his legend of Thisbe, and the female genital associations of the labyrinth, through which Ariadne's unspooled thread, the polar opposite of Philomela's woven tapestry, guides Theseus in Chaucer's legend of Ariadne. The final chapter offers a gorgeously rich analysis of Undo Your Door, pulling together discussions of the mechanisms of medieval window fastenings, embalming techniques, Marian ivory statues, and the emergence of diptych paintings. Allen-Goss demonstrates how Undo Your Door's female heroine is wholly in control of her enclosed bedchamber and thus her sexuality. Yet that same sexuality is coded as disordered through her excessive attachment to an embalmed corpse kept in the same room, reiterating twinned concerns over idolatry and autoeroticism.
Through deep readings weaving together sociocultural history, materiality, and contemporary theory, Allen-Goss recuperates female desire, whether visible and expressly disordered or invisible yet haunting the text, as the animating core of works too long unrecognized for their radical exploration of nontraditional femininities.
