ABSTRACT
Delany also shakes her readers out of too complacent a reading of Chaucer. She gives extended consideration to Legend in her book The Naked Text (Delany 1994), but a more widespread application of her view of medieval literature (which is informed by both Marxisim and feminism) is to be found in Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (1990). Over half this book is given over to Chaucer, while the rest usefully provides a way into his literary context. As the title suggests, Delany looks at not only the systems of rules, laws and expectations which create a society (ie. the politics) but also the belief systems and concepts of what it means to be, for example, a woman, or a king, what the moral basis is and how it is created and sustained (ideology). She also pays great attention to individual words and the language of texts in general, relating texts to other texts of a similar kind, highlighting differences in expression, additions or omissions and interpreting their cause. Her discussion of The Physician’s Tale [132] is a case in point (Delany 1990: 130-40). By comparing the story of Virginia as it is found in Livy (its ultimate Roman source) and in Chaucer’s contemporaries, Delany illustrates Chaucer’s silent reworking which markedly alters the significance of the story. By making Virginius a knight, not the common soldier of the original, and by removing much of the action from public to private settings, the revolutionary possibilities of the Tale are markedly reduced. The theme becomes one of personal response, not public reaction. Delany’s confident explanation for such alteration is that the glorification of popular rebellion, which the original version of the story espouses, ‘is utterly alien to Chaucer’s world-view: our poet is a prosperous, socially conservative, prudent courtier and civil servant, directly dependent for his living upon the good will of kings and dukes’ (Delany 1990: 137). While her confidence and her readings are in many ways persuasive they are also, as the above quotation shows, based on very strong opinions about Chaucer himself. These extend to provocative speculations on artistic development: ‘if the project [telling Virginia’s story] taught him something as an artist, it was the importance of choosing material more suitable to his own temper. For us it suggests that poetic failure may be as instructive as poetic success, as productive a field for criticism’ (140). Delany’s comments here illustrate the interaction between biography and criticism.
