Making Masculinity Visible

Whilst early work on gender history focused on representations of women and on their social experience, in recent years masculinity has gradually emerged, not without some difficulty, as a legitimate category of historical analysis. Studying John Gower's works through the lens of masculinity poses many of the same methodological difficulties which have attended the historical study of masculinity as a whole. Whilst women can seem to be a clearly identifiable object of study, masculinity is more difficult to define. This is partly because many of our sources take a male point of view for granted, dealing with women as an exception from an assumed male norm. Paradoxically, this can make it easy to forget when it is in fact adult males who are at issue.

In the case of John Gower, although his works often deal with women, and can be sympathetic to their plight, a number of scholars have argued that his moral and literary project is focused on masculine experience. Women are far from forgotten in Gower's works, but if his major poetic works are united by a common moral enterprise, as many scholars have argued, this project does seem to entail the formation of a certain kind of subject who is usually male. In the Vox Clamantis and the Mirour de l’Omme, for example, women figure less prominently than the male estates, the clergy, knights, lawyers and merchants, whose sins occupy the bulk of the estates satire parts of these poems. When Gower cites women as the occasion for the sexual sins of male priests (VC: III.20.1581–1622), monks (VC: IV.11.431–490; MO: 21048–21060), kings (MO: 22779–22824) and knights (VC: V.1.19–6.468), it is the correction of male morality which concerns him. He does deal with nuns on their own account, regarding them as more likely to fall into sin than men, and consequently as being more meritorious if they succeed in resisting it (VC: IV.13.547–676). Women also figure amongst Gower's urban sinners (although not, interestingly, amongst noble miscreants) with female bourgeois being targeted for wearing finery which would be more appropriate for a countess (MO: 25681–25704).