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Pity and Poetics in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Anne Schuurman
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Abstract

Modern critical reception of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women has been unequivocal in its resistance to the pathos of the text, but, despite this resistance, the Legend makes us feel pity regardless of our rational intentions. To this end, the Legend and its prologue are thematically and structurally unified, and together they provoke an unsettling awareness that our emotions do not belong entirely to us. For Chaucer, the art of feeling pity maps onto the art of writing poetry in that both involve performed sincerity that is not insincere for being performed, a kind of authentic inauthenticity. The paradox of emotional experience is thus the paradox of poetic creation: what feels most uniquely yours is in fact learned, acquired, and imitative.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 5: Special Topic: Emotions , October 2015 , pp. 1302 - 1317
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

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