Chaucer's tell-tale lexicon: romancing seinte cecyle - Geoffrey Chaucer

Style, Fall, 1997 by Judith A. Weise

Troilus and Criseyde and the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, also associated with the first part of the Cecilia poem because of similar Romance percentages, seem to be thematically linked to the Cecilia poem. Is the aim of the project of writing poems about good women a penance for his sins against them, echoed in Chaucer's translation of the life of Saint Cecilia? And why does he choose St. Cecilia? Out of the hundreds of saints' legends, hundreds of saints' lives and hundreds of saints' passions, why does Chaucer choose to translate the life of a virgin martyr, Saint Cecilia? Is it just a stunning coincidence that the one saint's life Chaucer writes concerns a virgin martyr with the same name as the woman who undoubtedly caused him great personal and financial pain when she released him from all charges "in respect of her raptus as well as of any other matter" (Benson xxi)?

Could the lyf of Seynt Cecile be a self-imposed literary penance resembling that assigned to Chaucer the poet by Alceste in the prologue to the Legend? Could this penance be undertaken in a truly remorseful spirit? Or could Chaucer's praise of Cecilie's virtue be consciously or unconsciously less than genuine? If so, it is similar to what Robert Frank called "Chaucer's mock role as a sinful penitent performing an act of penance" (210). Nothing in the entire Prologue and Tale is offensive or even disrespectful except, perhaps, for the line describing Cecilie's wedding night: "The nyght cam, and to bedde most she gon / With hire housbonde, as ofte is the manere" (VIII.141-42).(2) Literary penance for crimes against women was not exactly the rage, but as Derek Pearsall points out, "the pretext for writing a poem is itself a court game of a kind that Machaut had provided a precedent for in his Jugement dou Roy de Navarre; there too the poet is accused of defaming women, is arraigned before a lord sympathetic to ladies, offers his defense, submits to his literary penance" (191). Clearly influenced by Machaut's work in his other poems, Chaucer embraces this courtly position in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, and might have seen its usefulness earlier in his situation with Cecilia.

The conventions of Ricardian poetry might also explain why Chaucer would translate a poem about the namesake of the woman who caused him real harm. Indirection and/or the art of obliqueness abound in conventional Ricardian poetry, and a pattern of avoidance behavior has been found in Chaucer's life and works by R. T. Lenaghan, especially in "Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse" (45-46) and Envoy to Scogan (46-61), and by John Scattergood in Lak of Stedfastnesse (469-75). Scattergood concludes that conventional genres sometimes serve Chaucer as covers for personal concerns: "It seems to me that many of Chaucer's shorter poems are genre pieces in which personal statement emerges by way of a treatment of conventional matters[;] a traditional poem is invested with particular significance" (470).

Lenaghan and Scattergood have also shown how genre pieces, at least in Chaucer's hands, can develop into something quite different, as Envoy to Scogan demonstrates. It is certainly a begging poem, and in which Chaucer asks for help from Scogan, a fellow civil servant, with a problem common among civil servants, arrearages in payment of royal annuities. Six stanzas pass before the final Envoy, where Chaucer finally gets around to business. The poem begins, as Lenaghan notes, with the persona's "deadpan assertion of the preposterous" (48), that the recent heavy flooding has been caused by Venus' tears because you, Scogan, have given up your lady. Cupid will not take his usual revenge on fat old men like us, and, although you will say I am joking, you, Scogan, should remember me where it will help, that is, with the king. As this bare summary indicates, Chaucer's plea for financial help is easy to miss, and the summary includes none of the courtly finery. To make the poem even more dense, Chaucer uses the conventions of no fewer than four genres - the complaint, the ballade, the lyric, and the envoy or letter. Finally, the speaker shamelessly uses Scogan's unnamed and never-described lady merely as a literary conduit in his attempt to forge a relationship to Scogan, thence to the king, and ultimately to cold cash, assuming, of course, that the lady wasn't always just a fiction. This little poem does in fact raise the suspicion that in Chaucer's poetry the lady is always a fiction, a pretext for initiating a communication, a conduit through which homosocial desire is fulfilled, a pretext similar to that found in Renaissance poems by Eve Sedgwick in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Chaucer's petition through the agency of Scogan's "woman" is consonant with the male homosocial desire Sedgwick finds in Shakespeare's later sonnets and patriarchal discourse in general, "a form of desire to consolidate partnership with authoritative males in and through the bodies of females" (38). Chaucer's plea is through a woman, but to Scogan, an authoritative male, or at least a male with a position at court. The poem also displays a secondary characteristic of such literary traffic in women, that the "commodification" of women in this system makes the specific identification of any one woman irrelevant. Finally, Envoy to Scogan provides a clear example of Sedgwick's conclusion that, in patriarchies, "Levy-Strauss's normative man uses woman as 'a conduit of a relationship' in which the true partner is a man" (26).