Any title focusing on "exemplary narrative(s)" would seem to promise amplification-an extended spinning out of examples and their meanings-but compactness of style rules J. Allan Mitchell's important new book. In a very few words and with a small number of judiciously chosen samples for analysis, it has caused me to rethink the purpose of exempla, not only in Chaucer and Gower, but also in the myriad of medieval genres, such as penitentials or sermon handbooks, in which they abound.
The general purpose of this book is to bring ethical criticism to the study of medieval literature and to do so with concentration on Gower's Confessio Amantis and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Ethical criticism, a literary branch of pragmatics, investigates the ways in which literature encourages the reader to do good and locates interpretation in the moment of reaction to the text. Throughout, Mitchell wonders what readers might do with the Chaucerian and Gowerian exempla he examines, what better actions they might take in response to reading.
To establish an ethical orientation for the Confessio Amantis and Canterbury Tales, Mitchell begins in Chapter 1 with a rebuttal of common contemporary views of didacticism in medieval literature-views that exempla illustrate a repressive norm, reduce human experience to formulas or tyrannically enforce ideologies. In these perceptions, exempla are monolithic, representing a totalized Truth, but in medieval fact, argues Mitchell, they are more flexible and aimed at individuated interpretations by readers in different circumstances. In this chapter, Mitchell quickly but thoroughly rehearses the aesthetic and political concerns that have disenchanted literary critics with paradigmatic narratives and names the philosophers and scholars, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein or Peter Von Moos, who can help us recover what medieval readers would have recognized as the tropological or moral level of the text. According to Mitchell, the tropological voice of any exempla is hardly univocal.
Chapter 2 recuperates an often maligned, but formerly respected process of reasoning-casuistry-that facilitates identification of the tropological. Since the moral must be understood and applied in fluid human situations, casuistry, or case-based reasoning, allows the author and reader to adapt the text to various cases, to portray or enact the lesson differently for different circumstances. Mitchell traces the classical and medieval tradition of this "Rhetorical Reason" based on probable logic and aimed at determining the best alternative in current contingencies. He asserts, "[I]t is to Aristotle and his legacy that we must look for the history of rhetorical reason and its connections with exemplary narratives" (26). Unfortunately, the state of scholarship on Aristotle's reception in fourteenth-century England does not allow Mitchell as cogent a connection as one might wish between this Aristotelian context and fourteenth century authors. Through the work of Charles Briggs on the De regimine principum (Cambridge, 1999) and on late medieval English manuscripts of Aristotle's Rhetoric, medievalists have a better understanding of how concepts from Aristotelian rhetoric came to fourteenth-century courts in mirrors for princes and a glimmering of Aristotle's presence in English centers of learning. The English medieval history of Aristotle's Rhetoric remains to be written, however, and Mitchell must assume what may well be established eventually, that is, the cultural currency of concepts from the Rhetoric. Although one could wish for a tighter connection between classical philosophy and medieval authorship, this chapter successfully reorients the purpose of exempla by characterizing them not as monolithic narratives with a fixed significance, but as multifaceted stories interpreted differently through the probable reasoning of various readers who must situate the moral in their own lives.
This reorientation is the most important contribution of Mitchell's book, and when he turns to Gower and the Confessio Amantis in Chapters 3 and 4, one can see why. Critics of Gower, including myself, have struggled with the inconsistencies in Genius's confession of Amans and have either flattened out the "bumps" in the narrative or located a general meaning in this uneven road. For instance, one infamous motif pointing in opposite directions in the Confessio Amantis is that of incest; the "Tale of Canace and Machaire," seems sympathetic toward sibling lovers while "Apollonius of Tyre" severely punishes an incestuous father and daughter. Critical responses to Genius's vacillations on consanguineous liaisons have many times sought a unifying framework, as in my own monograph on these narratives (ELS, 1993) or Maria Bullon-Fernandez's analysis of the political significance of fathers and daughters in the Confessio Amantis (Boydell & Brewer, 2000). Mitchell's book, on the other hand, encourages more consideration of how Amans reacts to exempla in their localized context and how we as readers necessarily participate in the Confessio's meaning. By accepting the slippages in the poem and constructing meaning according to the audience's ethical constraints, Mitchell rides a new wave in Gower scholarship that washes over generalizing readings and deconstructs an even more complicated text. Mitchell leaves behind a sense that the significance of the Confessio Amantis inheres, not in a holistic statement, but in reader's choices about particular episodes. It is interesting that the publication of both Diane Watt's Amoral Gower and Mitchell's work come within a year of each other, both employing postmodern methodologies to discover significance in Gower's irresolvabilities. Although Mitchell's project, in contradistinction to Watt's, is not to unseat "Moral Gower," he does prove Gower's morality to be more contingent and dependent on the responses of individualized readers. As Mitchell summarizes:...I propose that in Gower we are thus invited to think of moral coherence less as a formal or a psychological matter than a tropological question yet-to-be determined in personal deliberation. In the strongest terms, the audience stands-like Amans before the end-in the moral center of the work, where they are asked to decide on its significance for them in the 'meantime' of everyday practice. (51) One interesting place where Mitchell demonstrates how a narrative crux is resolvable only through reader response is in his discussion in Chapter 4 of a constellation of tales that focus on sense perception, memory and evaluation. In these tales such as that of King Nebuchadnezzar or Acteon, when Genius highlights the misperception and misjudgment of a king who believed himself unassailable and of a lover who saw too much, the priest reveals the unreliability of all human means of observation and insight-including his own. In a unifying reading of the Confessio Amantis, there would be a crisis of signification: how is the reader to understand an untrustworthy narrator's presentation of untrustworthy behavior? On the other hand, if we take Mitchell's ethical way, no metaphysical principles can be forced from Genius's lessons, only the impression that conscience (Amans's or the reader's) must draw its own conclusions about the evidence presented in narrative exempla, and conscience is informed by experience and situation. Through these tales, the text throws the responsibility for discernment upon the reader, not to iron out the narrative, but to make the best judgment that she can. This seems to me a very sensible and fruitful approach to the Confessio Amantis, a text that elaborately sets contexts for the reader's judgment, from the prologues to the confessional framework and the rubric of each mortal sin for exempla.
Whereas an ethical reading goes a long way to complicate the Confessio Amantis, its reductive process of homing in on the moral chosen by the reader may, as Mitchell admits, "coursen" the Canterbury Tales (142). For our understanding of the function of exempla, this coarsening is not a bad thing, but a refashioning that approximates Chaucer to Gower. Thus, Mitchell entitles Chapter 5 "Moral Chaucer." Given a critical heritage that emphasizes the irony, affability, indirection, and playfulness of Chaucer's narrator, Mitchell confronts a difficult task in assimilating Chaucer's use of exempla to Gower's. The commonplace is, of course, that where Gower is a straightforward preacher, Chaucer is an elusive storyteller. However, just as an ethical reading calls into question Gower's straightforwardness, it casts doubt upon Chaucer's moral hedging. Mitchell contends that the tropological is there for the reader's discovery in the Canterbury Tales and that the variety of interpretive possibilities serves not to underscore relativism, but instead to place the duty of judgment upon the reader.
Mitchell applies rhetorical reasoning first to Chaucer's Wife of Bath's tale, illustrating the power of misogynist exempla upon Alison and reciprocally her powerful appropriation of them. In Chapter 6 on the Friar, Summoner, and Pardoner, Mitchell argues that Chaucer's use of the "wikked ensample" hardly provides a case against the use of paradigmatic narratives, but instead demonstrates the great need for them. The Friar's, Summoner's and Pardoner's tales all convey concrete warnings about wickedness, since these narrators so aptly illustrate the faults against which they preach. Serving his argument about the rhetoric of exempla well, Mitchell's analyses of the Wife of Bath and these ecclesiastical characters show Chaucer's narrators as readers who must situate the exemplary tradition to their own needs. Mitchell does not, however, provide new readings of these tales. His treatment in Chapter 7 of the Clerk's tale, on the other hand, is ingenious and compelling for its own sake. Mitchell argues here that the polyvalence of Griselda's story, existing on a number of literal and metaphorical plains, is not an encouragement for interpretive relativism, but instead a strong challenge to the reader to determine her own position on monstrous possibilities. When the Clerk follows up his tale with a warning against interpreting it as a parable for wives, according to Mitchell, he only highlights the tendency to do so, and indeed, Harry Bailey wishes that Godelief were of Griselda's ilk. Griselda's humility and obedience, however, are at once admirable and horrible: her assent to Walter's wishes may have a Marian resonance, but her sacrifice of her children in the completion of this bargain is extreme. As Mitchell notes, it is Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac without God's command as an excuse. Therefore, Griselda presents us with a seemingly undecidable model, but as Mitchell argues, the difficulty of determining the heroine's meaning is Chaucer's way of emphasizing the reader's responsibility in response. Although we may be tempted to present possible readings of the Clerk's tale in our classes as relative and equal, an ethical response to this text takes a stand and defends it.
Since Mitchell's book stresses the function of the narrative and the obligation of the reader, my final question is what I should do with Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower. As someone who invests more research in Gower than Chaucer, I plan on evaluating more exempla from the Confessio Amantis according to the pragmatic approach Mitchell describes and historicizing them, a move Mitchell does not have the scope for here, to inquire into a history of ethical receptions. Mitchell is to be commended for bringing the contemporary movement in ethical criticism to Chaucer and Gower and for provoking readers to think about the consequences of interpretive actions.