Chapter 16 - Irony v. Paradox in the Confessio Amantis

Summary

Some of the best of the recent published criticism of the Confessio Amantis has given us some challenging new ways of understanding both the structure of the poem and the nature of Gower's moral project. To cite only three examples: we have James Simpson's recasting of the entire dialogue between Amans and Genius as a kind of psychomachia between Will and Imagination; Diane Watt's argument, in Amoral Gower, that instead of advocating a single stable morality the poem actually offers a sustained critique of the possibility of any consistent moral principles; and J. Allen Mitchell's argument that what morality is provided in the poem is all contingent and conditional, depending as it does upon the circumstances and upon the active participation of the reader. These are three very different claims and in many ways they would be difficult to reconcile, but they do have some common threads. First, they are fundamentally ironic in nature: things are not what they seem in the Confessio; more specifically, they offer alternatives to reading the poem as a series of straightforward moral lessons addressed by a priest to his penitent. And, like earlier ironic readings, which saw Genius simply as a flawed priest offering a false morality, they are based upon the same perceived problems in the poem, notably what are viewed as its inconsistencies, either in its overall structure (comparing, for instance, the beginning to the end), or between lessons, or even within single passages, which are interpreted as reflecting either the inadequacies of Genius as moral instructor or as either the inability or the refusal of Gower himself to advance a coherent morality.

The charge of inconsistency is itself worth examining. The apparent contradictions may not be so great if one reads with a clear eye for distinctions and with a sensitivity to the argument that Genius presents, both about the nature of sin and about the bases of moral conduct, and while they may render that argument somewhat more complex, they do not for that reason necessarily undermine it. But it is also necessary to give some consideration to the justification for inferring a conceptual structure so different from the one that Genius himself presents.