Summary
The Legend of Phyllis recounts the dishonest actions of Demophon, the son of Theseus, whose own wickedness is the subject of The Legend of Ariadne. After the destruction of Troy, Demophon sails back to his palace in Athens. Caught in a tempest, he happens upon an island ruled by queen Phyllis. Demophon and his men are sick and weak, and he asks her for assistance.
She agrees, and Demophon ends up following in his father’s footsteps and promising to marry her. However, he tells her he must go home to prepare for the wedding, and that he will return in one month. Yet he never returns, and Phyllis kills herself. Before she dies, she writes a letter, condemning his dishonesty.
The Legend of Hypermnestra was to be the final story in The Legend of Good Women, but oddly Chaucer never completed it. The story begins by describing two brothers, Lyno and Egiste. Egiste was a serial womanizer who had many children. However, Hypermnestra, his youngest daughter, was born of Egiste’s lawful wife. Egiste decides to marry her to Lyno, her own uncle.
After the marriage, Egiste summons Hypermnestra and tells her that she must kill Lyno as he sleeps, because Egiste has been warned in his dreams that Lyno will be the one who kills him. Hypermnestra agrees. However, when Lyno falls asleep, she cannot bring herself to kill him. She warns him, and he escapes from the castle, without taking Hypermnestra with him. She stays in the room after he has left, and Egiste imprisons her.
Analysis
Both the Legend of Phyllis and the Legend of Hypermnestra seem as concerned with the relationship between fathers and children as with that between husbands and wives. The Legend of Phyllis repeatedly emphasizes Demophon’s relationship with Theseus. In the opening, the narrator declares that “I never knew a falser heart in love / except for his father Theseus.” At the end of the story, Phyllis declares to Demophon, “you are like your father.” When Demophon does not get back when he promised, she readily decides he has betrayed her. She never considers that he might be delayed or hurt, because she is certain her lover will act as his father did.
Father-child relationships are even more central to the Legend of Hypermnestra. In the context of the previous eight stories, the plot is unique. If there is a false lover, it is Hypermnestra herself, who considers killing her husband in order to appease her father. However, she ultimately chooses her husband instead, sparing him as Ariadne spares Theseus from her father’s wrath in the Legend of Ariadne.
Reading the stories in their totality, these two depictions of father-child relationships draw out one of the most consistent themes of the Legend: women choose lovers over family, while men choose family over women. In this, the book is patriarchal in the most literal sense. Just as the family name passes down from father to son, so also do morals and duties in the Legend. Conversely, female desire, as well as a feminine reluctance to engage in violence, isolates women from their fathers.
Hypermnestra articulates her refusal to kill her husband on gendered terms. As she declares, “Alas! and shall my hands be bloody?/ I am a maid, and, as by my nature / And by my appearance and my clothing, / My hands are not shaped for a knife.” For Hypermnestra, her status as a “maid” overrides her promise to her father, and even her desire to save his life. She is motivated not by a feeling of affection for her husband—we never see their relationship to each other, and it's hard to believe that she felt much desire for her own father’s brother—but rather by a natural inability to clasp the bloody knife.
The Legend’s focus on familial relationships feels especially important in these last two stories because the treatment of the love relationships themselves is shallow. The Legend of Phyllis so utterly corresponds to previous stories that it seems almost superfluous. It is yet another story of a classical hero leaving behind the daughter of a queen, in the vein of the Legend of Hipsipsyle and Medea, the Legend of Dido, and the Legend of Ariadne. However, each of these previous stories had its own unique attributes—Hipsipsyle was an especially vivid character, Dido especially passionate, Ariadne unusually complex.
Conversely, we learn basically nothing about Phyllis. The story is one of the shortest in The Legend, especially if we do not include Phyllis’s long letter at the end. Chaucer’s emphasis on Demophon’s resemblance to his father, whose story we just read, makes his actions feel predetermined, as though he is just going through the motions.
However, the Legend of Phyllis is the first to include the text of a woman’s letter at any length. Both the Legend of Dido and the Legend of Ariadne mention letters written by the titular heroes. This is an allusion to Ovid’s Heroides, which related the stories of female heroes as letters written by the women themselves. Chaucer’s women do speak in most of the stories, but he tends to refer the reader to Ovid for the letters themselves, often cutting them off after a few lines.
Phyllis’s letter lasts for fifty lines. She not only laments the loss of her lover, as many of the women do at the end of the legends, but also articulates that she has come to the conclusion that she has been betrayed, and equates Demophon with his father Theseus. She recites her own faithfulness, and, most memorably, questions “How could you weep so by craft?” The question cuts to the heart of Demophon’s dishonesty, identifying an essential difference between her selfhood and his: she cannot even understand the strategies he employed to beguile her.
Thus, although Phyllis’s suicide conforms to the patterns established by the Legend, her final action in the story is not her suicide, but rather her questioning, analyzing, and condemning address to her unfaithful lover. This is the last ending we get, because Chaucer never completed the Legend of Hypermnestra. The final line announces that the story is near its conclusion, but the poem cuts off in the middle of a sentence.
The last few lines of the stories often express a moral, and it’s possible this was all Chaucer had left to write. Because these lines are pretty separate from the story, it makes sense that the author might have left off and never had a chance to return. Perhaps he also intended to write a longer conclusion to the Legend as a whole, and did not know what to write. Some critics have suggested Chaucer was unsatisfied with the Legend, and thus chose not to complete it in order to maintain plausible deniability about its flaws, as though to say, well, I would have fixed that if I had a chance. However, Chaucer also never finished The Canterbury Tales, his most famous and critically acclaimed work, as well as The House of Fame, one of his best-loved dream vision poems. Unless we think he also considered those works failures, the lack of an ending to The Legend of Good Women remains unexplained.
We may never know why he never wrote those last few lines of the Legend. However, the incompleteness is actually in line with the rest of the poem. As we’ve emphasized throughout this guide, the entirety of the Legend is punctuated by things that are left out. Philomela’s revenge and Ariadne’s marriage to Dionysus are probably the most memorable, but even the simple Legend of Phyllis has Chaucer cutting out portions of her letter and skipping past Phyllis and Demophon’s initial courtship (2454-2458). The lack of an ending becomes just one more hole in what Chaucer has been presenting as an intrinsically partial and biased record of history.
