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Essays in Medieval Studies 11
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6. Confining the Daughter: Gower's "Tale of Canace and Machaire"
and the Politics of the Body

María Bullón-Fernández

Gower's "Tale of Canace and Machaire" (Confessio Amantis, III.143-336) is based upon Canace's farewell letter to her brother Macareus in Ovid's Heroides, Book 11. In the Heroides, Canace recounts her plight: she fell in love with her brother and had a child by him. Her brother fled, and her father Æolus, full of wrath when he learned about her pregnancy, ordered her to kill herself and the child to be taken to the woods. As the only narrator, Ovid's Canace tries to draw our sympathy towards herself and her child and against her father, lamenting his cruelty and wrath.1

Gower's version of the story follows Ovid's plot closely, but, while in Ovid's version Canace's letter is the only source for our knowledge of the events, in the "Tale of Canace and Machaire" the letter is confined within Gower's narrator's own version of the events. In this respect, A. C. Spearing has stated recently that "the letter which in Ovid makes up the whole poem is in Gower only an incident in the narrative."2 I will argue here that precisely the incidental character of the letter noted by Spearing points to a distinctive feature in Gower's tale. The letter seems a mere incident in the tale; so too Canace's other act of creation, her child, seems an incident in her father's life or so he would have it. Throughout the tale, Canace remains in her father's house, within her "chambre." By choosing her own lover and becoming pregnant, Canace takes some control over her own body, and by writing a letter, she tries to take control over her own life. These two assertions of independence, though, are finally thwarted by the absolute control of a tyrannical father. Gower's "Tale of Canace and Machaire," I will argue, explores the incestuous aspect of fathers' control over their daughters' bodies in patriarchal families. And, in this sense, the confinement of the letter parallels the confinement of the daughter's body within her father's house.

The private plight of this daughter, moreover, has a clear political dimension in Gower's tale. Critics have generally remarked on Gower's interest in politics as shown in his three major works.3 In particular, they have noticed that

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the English author sees a correspondence among political rule within the state, familial rule within the household, and the rule of the individual over the self. As Robert F. Yeager, for instance, has put it, "[f]or Gower and his audience, successful `kingship' began most intimately at home."4 Gower's notion of this correspondence, interestingly enough, concurs with recent feminist theories about the politics of the private, and more specifically about the politics of the private body. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, for instance, have recently edited a Volume of essays in which "the signifiers `gender' and `body' [are considered] not simply as object designations, but rather as socially based categories that are eminently and inextricably connected with questions of power."5 Thus, these scholars have further remarked, "the critical task of making the body intelligible . . . demands that one regard it as a politically charged discursive construct, a representational space traversed in various ways by socially based power relations."6 In the "Tale of Canace and Machaire" Canace's body is also a site for the enactment of tensions between political forces. It is, indeed, no coincidence that, whereas in the Heroides Æolus is the mythological god of the winds, in Gower's tale this pagan god is turned into a king. Thus, Gower's tale is not only about the confinement of the daughter within her father's house, but also about the confinement of the body politic by the absolutist king. And Canace's tragic death highlights the sterility and self-destructiveness of any type of absolute patriarchal power that, at the familial and, at the same time, at the state level, denies the subordinate body a certain degree of independence.7

The sense of confinement plays a prominent part in Gower's version of Ovid's story and the father is the one responsible for this confinement. Genius, the narrator of the tales in the Confessio Amantis, emphasizes the children's isolation from the rest of society: Canace and Machaire are confined to the private family space. They have been brought up in the same chamber, and they have had no contact with the outside world: "Be daie bothe, and ek be nyhte, / Whil thei be yonge, of comun wone / In chambre thei togedre wone."8 They also kiss for the first time, Genius says, "Whan thei were in a prive place" (168). This sense of confinement and isolation is even more acute in the case of Canace. Ovid's Canace had a nurse that she could talk to and trust.9 In Gower's story, Canace does not relate to anybody else apart from the male members of her family. Moreover, unlike Machaire who escapes, Canace remains and finally dies within her "chambre." She is in "hire chambre clos" (191), Genius observes, when she gives birth to her child. She is also in her "chambre" (218) when her father, full of rage, looks for her. And it is in her "chambre" that she has to kill herself.

The confinement of Canace's body within her father's house is a condition of daughters in a patriarchal society. Lynda Boose has pointed out that in spatial terms,

the daughter the liminal or 'threshold' person in family space symbolically stands at the boundary/door, blocked from departure by

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the figure of the father (and/or the son or other male heir to the father's position).10

Only when a daughter is given to another man does she leave her father's house. For the father, moreover, that moment when he gives up his daughter is a moment of loss, as Boose has remarked:

[T]he daughter's movement to cross [the] threshold and move out of the father's house, whether into the house of another man or into the world of paternal institution, threatens the father, familial or cultural, with loss.11

Canace never comes out of her father's house literally. Moreover, the fact that her lover is her own brother that is, the heir to her father makes her separation from her father only relative, since in a sense, as Boose has noted, father and son are "structurally homologous"; the son is a replacement of the father.12 Nevertheless, I would argue that Canace still crosses the threshold in one sense. The moment she chooses her own lover, the moment she joins her brother, without her father's knowledge, signifies her father's loss of control over her body. What is more, the limited character of Canace's gesture of independence stresses the tyranny of the father's reaction.

p> Similarly, Canace's letter becomes a significant and tragic gesture as an analogously brief and limited assertion of independence. The letter is also significant as a moment in which, figuratively, the daughter breaks out of her father's confinement and tries to define her life in her own terms. In the letter, Canace evokes an image, taken from Ovid, that epitomizes her position: "In my riht hond my Penne I holde, / And in my left the swerd I kepe" (300-01). Pen and sword represent each of the male figures in Canace's life: the pen evokes her brother, for whom she is writing the letter, and the sword represents her father, who has ordered her to kill herself. The letter, however, gives Canace an opportunity to exert some control over her own self. The text of the letter, in fact, is not a simple, informative piece of writing, but a very contrived text that calls attention to its rhetorical status. Its first seven lines are especially rhetorical with the use of anaphora and paradoxes:

O thou my sorwe and my gladnesse,

O thou myn hele and my siknesse,

O my wanhope and al my trust,

O my desese and al my lust,

O thou my wele, o thou my wo,

O thou my frend, o thou my fo,

O thou my love, o thou myn hate

For thee mot I be ded algate. (279-85)13

The elaborate style of Canace's letter, I would argue, asserts its status as a literary

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creation, authored by Canace. Just as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that the male author's literary creation represents a form of ownership and possession, I would suggest that, as the author of her letter, Canace, though a woman, owns her text and her reader's attention, and she also owns and possesses the subjects of her text.14 Her act of writing the letter represents an attempt to gain some authorial control over her life and over the characters in it, although this attempt is finally thwarted by her father.

The notion of writing as a form of creation is reinforced in the tale by means of the child. In this respect, Gower modifies slightly but significantly Ovid's account. In the Heroides, as she writes to her brother, Canace has the roll of paper on her lap: "dextra tenet calamum, strictum tenet altera ferrum, / et iacet in gremio charta soluta meo."15 In Gower's version, however, she has her son in her lap: "And in my barm ther lith to wepe / Thi child and myn, which sobbeth faste" (302-3). While this may seem a melodramatic touch (notice that the child's sobs parallel the sobbing "O"'s in the letter), the image also serves to link Canace's act of procreating the child through her body with her act of creating the letter with her pen. The link between her writing and her body is further emphasized by the fluids that come out of her body and out of her pen as she writes: "Now at this time, as thou schalt wite, / With teres and with enke write / This lettre I have in cares colde" (297-99). As if writing through her body, she spills tears from her eyes, as she spills ink from her pen. When she finishes her letter, Canace stabs herself, following her father's command.

The scene after her death is Canace's final sublime moment of creation. This scene has provoked some horror among critics Spearing calls it "the tale's moment of supreme horror."16 After stabbing herself, Canace spills a pool of blood in which her child, Genius notes, innocently bathes:

Sche fell doun ded fro ther sche stod.

The child lay bathende in hire blod

Out rolled fro the moder barm,

And for the blod was hot and warm,

He basketh him aboute thrinne. (311-15)

Spearing has pointed out that in this moment "the identification of the unnatural with the natural is fixed in an unforgettable image that has no equivalent in Ovid: the child innocently and pleasurably bathing in his mother's warm blood."17 But I would observe here another, more intense, paradox. The blood once again is a fluid coming out of Canace's body and this fluid expresses a different kind of paradox. The baby bathing in his mother's blood reminds us of the moment of parturition, of giving life; at the same time, the unstoppable flow of Canace's blood is a sign of death. This final paradox of life and death, which echoes the paradoxes in Canace's letter, seems to be eliminated by Eolus through his final action: he orders the child to be taken to the woods, thus attempting to destroy any sign of independent life that has originated in his daughter. (It is interesting, though, that since the father does not actually kill

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the child, we do not know if he really terminates the paradox.) Thus, the parallels between Canace's act of writing and her body and between her letter and her child suggest that Canace's death represents not only Eolus' assertion of his control over Canace's body, but also his desire to terminate a narrative (the story of Canace) over which he himself had lost authorial control.

Gower, moreover, hints at the incestuous aspect of Eolus' control over his daughter's body by making him a personification of the typical lover's sickness, Melancholy, and by hinting at the similarities between Eolus and Amans, the lover in the Confessio, with respect to the sickness. Before starting the tale, Genius engages with Amans in a discussion about Melancholy, which he considers a branch of the capital sin of Wrath. The lover admits he becomes melancholic and wrathful when he thinks he "mai noght spede" in love (40). His unfulfilled erotic desire, he continues, provokes his wrath, making him, "distempred and esmaied" (58), as a result of which, he says, "Thus be my wittes as forlore" (62), and "I wode as doth the wylde Se" (86). Similar words and images resonate throughout the "Tale of Canace and Machaire" in connection with Eolus. The king's melancholy reminds us of Amans' condition. Like the lover, Eolus falls "into Malencolie, / As thogh it were a frenesie" (209-10), when he learns that his daughter has given birth to a child.18 And using the same sea metaphor that Amans used previously, Genius says that, when Eolus entered his daughter's room, he was "Betwen the wawe of wod and wroth" (217).

Medical and literary texts from antiquity and the early Middle Ages, as Mary Wack has shown, have depicted melancholy mainly as a form of lovesickness and have linked melancholy with anger, a link which was also evident in the later Middle Ages.19 In modern time, Freud has also shown the correlation between melancholy and love: "[m]elancholia may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object . . . The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love."20 The melancholic's response to the loss, according to Freud, is "an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale."21 Once the object is lost "the free libido [is] not displaced on to another object; it is withdrawn into the ego."22 Thus, as Wack also concludes, "the depression and self-abasement characteristic of melancholy or lovesickness is nothing other than hostility toward the object redirected to the self."23

In the "Tale of Canace and Machaire," Eolus turns melancholic when he realizes that his daughter is pregnant and thus that he has lost her. Eolus' reaction seems unlike that of the typical melancholic: he does not direct his hatred towards himself, but towards his love object, Canace. However, if we consider that Eolus' love object is the flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, his own daughter, he turns out to be somewhat typical. Like a melancholic lover, Canace's father also destroys part of himself when he orders his daughter to kill herself. By making the father Eolus an example of Melancholy, Gower suggests that the father's reaction to Canace's pregnancy stems from his disappointment at the loss of his daughter, rather than from a moral impulse to punish her for her incestuous act with her brother. In this sense, the way Eolus orders Canace

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to kill herself is significant. As Spearing has noted, it is "as though [he] is proposing incest at a double remove, substituting the knight for himself and the sword for the phallus."24 Thus, Eolus' melancholy manifests the incestuous aspect of fathers' control over their daughters' bodies in patriarchal families.

In addition to reading the "Tale of Canace and Machaire" as a denunciation of the incestuous aspect of male control of female sexuality within the family, I would also like to point here to the political implications of the tale. Indeed, as I argued at the beginning of this essay, the body is a politically charged discursive construct which, as such, also becomes the site for the analysis of power relations. This does not deny the relevance of the daughter's situation. Quite to the contrary, I wish to show the ways in which, particularly in Gower's Confessio Amantis, the private inevitably alludes to the political.

In Social Chaucer, Paul Strohm has argued that "the Aristotelian/Thomistic view of the natural state . . . was to dominate fourteenth-century English thought."25 This view sees the state as an organic whole composed of interdependent parts, and more specifically, as a body whose members (the people) are subject to the head (the king).26 The head guides the diversity of interests of the different members of the body towards the common good. Gower himself uses this metaphor in the prologue to the Confessio: writing about the king and the state, he remarks that "unto him which the heved is / The membres buxom scholden bowe" (152-53). Even though this system is strongly hierarchical with the king as the head, Strohm remarks that the king's rule "is not . . . ordained by God but based on the consent of the people," and thus that there are some limits to the king's power over the body. Strohm adds that, according to Aquinas, when the king acts in regard only to his own well-being rather than to that of the commonwealth he becomes a tyrant; his people then have the right to remove him from power.27

It was a king, Richard II, who commissioned Gower to write the Confessio Amantis.28 Richard II, as Richard Jones has observed, had the reputation of being a tyrant: "The most widely publicized contemporary tradition of Richard [II] is that of the tyrant, a tradition, substantially documented by the charges of the parliament roll."29 According to this tradition, which contributed to his deposition, Richard saw himself as the absolute owner of his country. In his Annales Ricardi II et Henrici IV, Thomas Walsingham, for instance, attributes the following line to Richard: "The lives, lands, properties, goods and chattels of my subjects are mine."30 Walsingham also reports him to have said that he was the origin of the law: "laws were within his own breast and . . . he alone could change and make the laws of his realm."31 It need hardly be pointed out, of course, that Walsingham's Annales are unambiguously anti-Ricardian. However, whether these accusations of tyranny were true or not is irrelevant for my argument. What is interesting to consider is that those accusations of tyranny did circulate, that tyranny was seen in terms of selfishness, and that a king's alleged tyranny was seen as a valid reason for his deposition.

Richard II, moreover, was also renowned for his anger.32 And Anger was often represented in medieval books of vices and virtues as a self-destructive

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force. In the Psychomachia, Prudentius allegorizes Wrath as a feminine figure who, unable to defeat Patience, kills herself.33 In The Book of Vices and Virtues, a fourteenth-century translation of Somme le Roi, and a kind of penitential treatise on which Gower's Confessio heavily depended, the angry man is said to make four wars, the first one being a war with himself:

Þe first is þat he haþ werre wiþ hymself, for whan wraþþe is ful in a man, he turmenteþ his soule and his body so þat he may haue no sleep ne reste; and oþerwhile it . . . makeþ hym falle . . . in-to suche a sorwe þat he takeþ his deþ.34

The result of this first war is his own death. He kills his own body. Following this allegorical representation, if the state is represented as an organic whole composed of a head and a body, a wrathful king, as the head of the state, is especially dangerous to his own body, that is, to his own country.

Hence, to return to the "Tale of Canace and Machaire," I would argue that it is no coincidence that Gower's Eolus is a king, rather than a pagan god. I must say, though, that I am not trying to prove that Eolus is some kind of allegorical representation of King Richard II. Rather, I want to point to the intersection of familial and political power relationships as it is manifested in Gower's tale. Fathers in patriarchal society have rights of ownership over their daughters. Society, however, limits the extent of their rights by compelling them to exchange their daughters. A medieval monarch was considered, in Hutchinson's terms, "the father of his subjects and the fountain of law and justice."35 But like the father, a king cannot have absolute power over his subjects and the law. Society and the parliament as its representative have the right to put certain limits on that power. The tyrant who looks only after his own well-being and who uses his subjects as if they were his property, a simple extension of his self, resembles the father whose selfish desire for his daughter leads him to exert absolute power over her by keeping his daughter to himself and, in the worst case, by taking possession of her body and committing incest.

Like the "Tale of Canace and Machaire," many of the tales in Gower's Confessio Amantis center on fathers and daughters. Only one of the fathers in the Confessio, King Antiochus, in the tale of "Apollonius," actually commits incest with his daughter. Other fathers avoid committing incest and comply with society's rules: they rule over their daughters, and they also let themselves be ruled by society. But fathers like Virginius in the "Tale of Virginia," or Orchamus in the "Tale of Leucothoe," also act like Eolus. Even though they do not actually commit incest with their daughters, these fathers react violently and kill their daughters when the fathers lose control over their daughters' sexuality. In these tales, as in the "Tale of Canace and Machaire," the daughters become the victims of their fathers' sense of absolute ownership over their bodies.

Critics of the "Tale of Canace and Machaire" have been puzzled by Genius' condemnation of the father, and his sympathy towards the two incestuous siblings and, especially, towards Canace.36 This sympathy turns out to be more

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understandable in the light of contemporary politics. By presenting Eolus' wrath as melancholy, Gower suggests that his violent reaction does not stem from a sense that Canace's incest with her brother is immoral. Rather, Eolus' melancholy suggests that he resents having lost absolute control over his daughter's body, a body that he had confined within a "chambre." Richard Jones has argued that, "[t]he self-sufficient monarchy to which [Richard II] was committed could only become a reality through the suppression of inherent particular rights."37 Like the absolute monarch, Eolus, in confining his daughter to his private family space and exerting an absolute control over her sexuality, suppresses her rights as an individual. Thus, Gower's "Tale of Canace and Machaire" suggests that the structures that define the ideology of the family mirror the structures that define the ideology of the state. Or, we could also reverse the last sentence and state that Gower's tale suggests that the structures that define the ideology of the state mirror the structures that define the family.