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COPYRIGHT 1993 University of Illinois Press
This is an enormously bracing and stimulating book, well and closely argued, sensitive to the text, full of surprises and revisions that will fundamentally change the way we read Chaucer's representation of the sexes. Hansen's is a deeply feminist reading of Chaucer, but not the standard sort that focuses on the male author's rendering of women or that oversentimentalizes his protofeminism. Hansen's interest is rather in Chaucer's men and in a somewhat misogynistic masculine anxiety about women, frequently manifested in the feminized male character. Generally speaking, Hansen identifies a pattern in Chaucerian narrative: initially the P&t appropriates the female voice with some sympathy and understanding of its historical circumscriptions. As Hansen suggests, the medieval poet himself, in danger of being misread and exploited by his readers, in possession of uncertain professional authority, is a feminized figure, "unsure of his gender and how to avail himself of the putative privileges of masculinity" (p. 84). Ultimately, however, his narrative strategy is one of evasion and differentiation. The male narrator or hero turns out to have resources beyond the female, which may emerge in the palinode, a transcendence of the problems and limits entailed in his confrontation with the feminine.
Hansen traces this narrative structure in an impressive variety of Chaucer's poems, both early and late: the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame,...
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