Transgressive Desire in Chaucer's Legend of Thisbe

Abstract

Chaucer's Legend of Good Women is famous for its proposal to celebrate “good” women and expose faithless men, carried out through the rewriting of classical women's stories in ways that truncate unlikely figures into suspiciously anodyne passivity. Yet his tale of Pyramus and Thisbe has seemed to preclude even this possibility, for the original version depicts innocent and devoted lovers, and such subtext as has been found has been widely dismissed as merely comical. However, this ignores the narrative's established potential as an exemplum of the relationships between desire, grammar, and interpretation. For Chaucer, startling innuendos that cast Pyramus as a hapless, feminized misreader and Thisbe as his queerly authoritative lover also prepare for serious interrogation of the patristic tradition of gendered hermeneutics.

Queerly productive: Women and collaboration in Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.1.6

“…Even the pronoun 'he' is omitted from a prominent position in one text, as the scribe copying Chaucer's 'Legend of Thisbe' mistakenly writes 'sche' for 'he' in the final line of the text: 'a woman dar and can as wel as sche' (Benson, 1988, 923). Before the scribe reemends the text back to 'he,' the inversion temporarily confuses the gender of Pyramus, Thisbe's lover, who can be seen as a feminized figure (Allen-Goss, 2018). Even the crowning celebration of reproductive desire, the song of the birds in honour of 'Saynt Valentyn' (683) at the end of the Parliament of Fowls, is omitted, leaving an oddly unexplained absence following the narrator's promise to reproduce it, and depriving that notoriously ambivalent text its usual attempt at a heteronormative resolution.…”