Difference and the Difference it Makes: Sex and Gender in Chaucer's Poetry

“My indecision is final,” the movie magnate Sam Goldwyn is reported to have said, and I find the malapropism suitably expressive of Chaucer’s attitude toward sexual difference. My concern is not simply to decide whether Chaucer was or was not “woman’s friend” (as the Scots poet Gavin Douglas put it in the early sixteenth century), but to look at the systems within which a late-mediaeval courtly writer was permitted to be woman’s friend, and the systems within which he was not so permitted. My argument will be that Chaucer both “is and is not” the friend of woman. Some of you will recognize the phrase I borrow from Salman Rushdie, who in turn borrows it from ancient Arabic storytelling. I use it in order to articulate the deep-rooted ambivalence about women that is a structural feature of latemediaeval culture, providing a terminus ad quem beyond which even the most well-intentioned writer cannot pass.