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Masculinity in Femininity in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales Unicentre CH-1015 Lausanne http://serval.unil.ch Year: (2019) (Masculinity in Femininity in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: the Rehabilitation of Chaucer’s Emelye as a Heroine in the Light of Boccaccian and Chaucerian Androcentric Representations of Femininity) (Wellan Bolanga) (Wellan Bolanga) (2019) (Masculinity in Femininity in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: the Rehabilitation of Chaucer’s Emelye as a Heroine in the Light of Boccaccian and Chaucerian Androcentric Representations of Femininity) Originally published at: Mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Lausanne Posted at the University of Lausanne Open Archive. http://serval.unil.ch Droits d’auteur L'Université de Lausanne attire expressément l'attention des utilisateurs sur le fait que tous les documents publiés dans l'Archive SERVAL sont protégés par le droit d'auteur, conformément à la loi fédérale sur le droit d'auteur et les droits voisins (LDA). A ce titre, il est indispensable d'obtenir le consentement préalable de l'auteur et/ou de l’éditeur avant toute utilisation d'une œuvre ou d'une partie d'une œuvre ne relevant pas d'une utilisation à des fins personnelles au sens de la LDA (art. 19, al. 1 lettre a). A défaut, tout contrevenant s'expose aux sanctions prévues par cette loi. Nous déclinons toute responsabilité en la matière. Copyright The University of Lausanne expressly draws the attention of users to the fact that all documents published in the SERVAL Archive are protected by copyright in accordance with federal law on copyright and similar rights (LDA). Accordingly it is indispensable to obtain prior consent from the author and/or publisher before any use of a work or part of a work for purposes other than personal use within the meaning of LDA (art. 19, para. 1 letter a). Failure to do so will expose offenders to the sanctions laid down by this law. We accept no liability in this respect. Faculty of Arts Masculinity in Femininity in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: the Rehabilitation of Chaucer’s Emelye as a Heroine in the Light of Boccaccian and Chaucerian Androcentric Representations of Femininity Wellan Bolanga ([email protected]) Under the supervision of Prof. Denis Renevey ([email protected]) and Prof. Caterina Menichetti ([email protected]) Master Thesis of Arts in English Language & Literature | December – 2018 English Department | University of Lausanne | www.unil.ch/angl Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................................... I Chapter I - Something like Misogyny and Feminism through Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s Experiences? ......................................................................................................................................... 1 I.1. Gender in Boccaccio’s Works and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Previous Scholarship .............. 3 I.2. The Disgrace of Chaucer’s Emelye as an Inflexible Commonplace for Modern Scholars ............ 7 I.3. The Problematic Question of Chaucer’s Androcentric Intentions in the Twentieth and in the Fourteenth Centuries ........................................................................................................................ 12 I.4. A Third Level of Intertextuality between Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s Writings ............................ 19 I.5. Chaucer’s and Boccaccio’s Portraits of Zenobia, Chaucer’s Emelye and the Perceptions of Gender that the two Authors Convey ................................................................................................ 22 I.6. Chaucer’s and Boccaccio’s Portraits of Cleopatra ...................................................................... 26 Chapter II - Chaucer’s Polemical Androcentrism in The Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Inflexible Androcentrism in the De Mulieribus Claris .......... 34 II.1. The limits of the Access of Modern Approaches to Chaucer’s Representations of Gender Roles in the Canterbury Tales ..................................................................................................................... 36 II.2. The “Manciple’s Tale”, The Legend of Good Women and the Nature of Chaucer’s Androcentrism ................................................................................................................................... 38 II.3. Androcentric Generalisations about Genders in De Mulieribus Claris ....................................... 41 II.4. Dido’s Gender in De Mulieribus Claris ....................................................................................... 46 II.5. The Virile Name of Boccaccio’s Dido ......................................................................................... 48 II.6. Types of Androcentric Perceptions, Feminism or Misogyny? A question of Terminology ......... 50 II.7. The Ambiguity of Boccaccio’s Androcentrism ............................................................................ 54 II.8. The Major Distinctions between Chaucer’s and Boccaccio’s Types of Androcentrism ............. 55 Chapter III - Androgyny in the Decameron and in the Canterbury Tales ....................................... 58 III.1. Six Bold Female Figures of the Decameron ............................................................................. 60 III.2. Extremely Distinct Images of Masculinity in the Canterbury Tales ........................................... 66 III.3. The Wife of Bath and Madonna Filippa ..................................................................................... 69 III.4. A Closer Look at the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” ................................................................................ 73 Chapter IV - The Freedom and the Captivity of Chaucer’s Emelye’s as Opposed to the False Rebellion of Six Boccaccian Female Characters of the Decameron .............................................. 82 IV.1. Masculinity in Femininity in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales .................................... 84 IV.2. Docility as a Guarantee of Andreuola’s Virtue in the Decameron ............................................ 85 IV.3. Women for Men in the Decameron ........................................................................................... 86 IV.4. The Constant Restriction of Female Autonomy in the Decameron .......................................... 89 IV.5. A Closer Look at Madonna Filippa ........................................................................................... 91 IV.6. The Ambiguous Giletta di Narbona .......................................................................................... 94 IV.7. Giletta di Narbona and Zinevra ................................................................................................. 97 IV.8. Giletta di Narbona and Zinevra’s Resources at the Service of Their Husbands .................... 100 IV.9. Boccaccio’s Zinevra, Chaucer’s Emelye, Authority and Masculinity ...................................... 104 IV.10. Boccaccio’s Zinevra, Chaucer’s Emelye, Courage and Physical Freedom .......................... 108 IV.11. Boccaccio’s Zinevra, Chaucer’s Emelye, an Asymmetrical Love Story as Opposed to a Symmetrical One ............................................................................................................................ 111 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................... 118 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................................... 122 INTRODUCTION The first point of interest of the present research is the question of Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s representations of genders. This study relies on five major observations. Firstly, gender analysis has been one of the major concerns of various comparative studies on Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s writings since the twentieth century. Secondly, Chaucer’s and Boccaccio’s works have been compared through various types of intertextualities. Notably, on the one hand, many scholars have based their studies on the types of transformations Chaucer brought to Boccaccio’s Teseida when he drew on it to write his “Knight’s Tale”. On the other hand, researchers have also made comparisons between Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris in terms of gender issues. Thirdly, whereas Robin Kirkpatrick (1983) and other scholars have admitted that Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were two works with similar narrative and thematic structures, they have not found any proof that the two works could be directly linked to each other. As Kirkpatrick himself points out, even the famous story of Griselda, which appears in the two collections, is not a story for which Chaucer drew on Boccaccio’s writings. Such a story had become famous in the fourteenth century thanks to Petrarch’s Latin text about it and Chaucer had had access to Petrarch’s writings. Therefore, while scholars have evoked the possibility of comparing the Decameron with the Canterbury Tales, they have neglected an area of research grounded in the idea that Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s respective representations of gender could be explored and compared through these two collections. Fourthly, such scholars as Susan Crane (1994), Patricia Clare Ingham (1998) and Peter Godman (1983) have compared Chaucerian texts with the Boccaccian works on which Chaucer had (effectively or supposedly)
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