The Legend of Good Women Literary Elements

The poem is narrated by Chaucer from a first-person perspective.

Iambic pentameter

When Cupid prepares himself to punish the narrator, he is stopped by Alceste, who claims that it is not fitting for a God to waste his energy on someone so meaningless. In order to convince him, she compares Cupid to a lion, proud and strong, and the narrator to an annoying fly who has nothing else to do than fly and bother people. By using this comparison, Alceste convinces Cupid to forgive the narrator for his actions, letting him understand the fact that the narrator is doing only what comes natural to him and nothing more.

Several times, the narrative compares innocent women to lambs or other prey animals. For example, he writes that Philomela quakes for fear "Right as the lamb that of the wolf is bitten / Or as the deer that of the eagle is smitten." The simile emphasizes her vulnerability, in contrast to Tereus's brutality.

Compared to other medieval poetry, The Legend of Good Women has relatively little alliteration, but there are examples throughout. For example, in the Prologue, Chaucer employs alliteration in line 6, "That either has in heaven or hell been," and line 118 "Upon the small, softe, sweet grass."

The story of Pyramus and Thisbe centers an incident of extreme dramatic irony. Pyramus convinces himself that Thisbe is dead, and kills himself out of grief, even though the audience knows she is alive. Ironically, his suicide is what actually causes her death.

The prologue is a dream vision. The rest of the text is narrative poetry.

The prologue is set in the countryside in spring. The settings of the other stories vary, but they all take place during the classical period.

Variously tragic and satirical.

In the prologue, Chaucer is the protagonist, and Cupid, who condemns him, is the antagonist. In the stories, the various unfaithful men are antagonists, and the women are protagonists.

The major conflict in the poem is between men and women. Chaucer depicts female desire as all-consuming. Women fall in love and remain faithful at any cost. Men, however, have other obligations, which leads to conflict.

The Legend does not have one individual climax. The climax of the prologue occurs when Chaucer agrees to write the collection of stories Alceste assigns to him. In the various stories, the climax often occurs when a woman kills herself (Dido, Thisbe), or when a man commits an act of exceptional violence (Lucrece, Philomela).

In the Legend of Philomela, Chaucer puns on the words "foul" and "fowl" to foreshadow Philomela's expected transformation into a bird, but this transformation is never actually mentioned in the text.

In the Legend of Ariadne, Nysus's daughter's betrayal of the king foreshadows Ariadne's betrayal of her own father, King Minos.

Chaucer often describes tragic events in an understated tone that makes them appear ridiculous. For example, in the Legend of Cleopatra, he writes that she "received her death with good cheer." The understatement suggests the poet's satirical attitude towards the melodrama of love.

Chaucer alludes to classical literature throughout the Legend. His major sources are Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses and Heroides. He repeatedly refers to both Ovid (sometimes also as Naso) and Virgil, directing the reader to their work if he wants to hear more of the story. The allusion illustrates his learnedness.

The structure of the Legend is also an allusion to the Golden Legend by Jacob de Voragine. The Golden Legend was a popular collection of stories about the lives of saints; the Legend borrows this form to instead collect stories about the lives of wronged women from classical literature.

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In the prologue, Chaucer personifies the earth: "The earth had forgotten his poor estate of winter, which had made him naked and dejected and with the sword of cold had struck him sorely.’’

At the conclusion of the Legend of Thisbe, Chaucer writes that Pyramus was the only "true and kind" man in history, even though other good men appear in the Legend, like Lucrece's husband.

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