The Legend of Good Women is one of few medieval texts centrally concerned with gender issues. Many other important works reveal both medieval misogyny and the complexities of gender in this period. A few interesting examples of complex women include the Lady Meed in Piers Plowman, the depiction of the Virgin Mary in medieval religious theater, and Chaucer’s own Wife of Bath. However, none of these works spend as much time talking about men, women, and how they relate to each other as The Legend of Good Women.
There are a few ways to go about writing a feminist analysis of a text. The most obvious is to argue that a certain work is saying something accurate and politically valuable about gender in a way that aligns with your own views. This is easy to do with contemporary literature—think essays you might have written about Toni Morrison or Adrienne Rich. It’s a little harder in the Middle Ages, because it is anachronistic to impose contemporary feminist ideals on texts written so long ago, and you might end up missing a lot if you go looking for familiar politics in works from a radically different social context. However, it can be effective to acknowledge your own contemporary perspective and see what unexpected resonances you can detect between our era and the Middle Ages.
Another option is to research medieval views on gender, and see to what extent a given work resists or reinforces those ideas. For example, throughout The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer references the idea that men provide “form,” while women provide “substance.” The belief originated in classical philosophy, and suggested that a baby’s flesh comes from the mother, but its human shape and soul come from the man who impregnates her. At the beginning of the Legend of Philomela, Chaucer imposes this narrative onto the story of creation, writing that the male Christian God gave form to the world’s matter. It would be interesting to think more about how that context changes Tereus’s horrible violation and mutilation of Philomela’s body.
Finally, some contemporary critics “read against the text,” or seek interpretations that likely go against the author’s intention. This might seem weird, or just inaccurate. However, as contemporary readers, we can’t know exactly what the author intended. Although it’s sometimes useful to guess what they might have wanted to say, ultimately we are analyzing the text in front of us, not the imagined author. That text will always have some ambiguities, perhaps ambiguities that make visible the flaws in violent ideologies like patriarchy. When it comes to The Legend, Chaucer’s express intentions are “pro-women,” but on what we today would recognize as misogynistic terms—his women are victims without much autonomy and interiority, and most of them end up dead. However, there are moments when his skill as a poet brings these women to a more complicated and human kind of life, as when Ariadne spares Theseus out of a sense of ethical duty, or when Phyllis addresses Demophon directly.
These moments don’t negate the misogyny of the text, but they do make it more complicated. A feminist approach to the Legend can look at the book from several angles, thinking about it in the context of either modern or medieval patriarchy, and either seeking to better understand Chaucer’s intentions, or to see where the text seems to escape his control, despite his best efforts.
