Abandoned Women: Rewriting
the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. By Suzanne Hagedorn.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Pp. ix + 220. $60.
In this witty, readable, and useful book Susan Hagedorn traces the theme
of abandoned women from Ovid and Statius through their medieval amatory
disciples, Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. Each chronologically arranged
chapter offers close critical reading of the primary text, studying influences,
the art of adaptation, and the intertextuality between and among the authors.
Avoiding a facile presentism that would interrogate the past to find only
oppression, Hagedorn takes the texts on their own terms, examining the
varied and absolutely central roles that speaking women are given in each
of them. Her thesis is that the medieval amatory authors, in reacting
to some of the classical paradigms they read in school and culturally
inherited, attempt to explore the hidden costs of abandonment and suffering
in their Classical sources, making "the reader reexamine the values of
the male-oriented epic world and question the human cost of ‰heroic' action.
" "In these texts, " she continues, "Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer employ
figures of abandoned women to expose the darker side of epic adventure
and to express their disapproval of heroic forgetfulness " (p. 18). "Disapproval
" sounds broad, but she makes it a viable premise with which to begin
deeper inquiry. The individual chapters deliver very satisfying and artful
analyses that flesh out this general paradigm, and thus, despite the simplicity
of Hagedorn's formulation, she productively explores how the medieval
authors continue Ovid's art of voicing abandonment, suffering, and ruin.
This disapproval, further, is not just an Ovidian vestige in these medieval
authors but becomes a part of the ethical poetics of each author¾part
of the way, for example, that Dante sees the glib Ulysses in Inferno
26, who never makes it home to his anxious wife. Hagedorn argues effectively
that listening to female voices in these texts gets us to the heart of
the works' major themes and deepens our understanding of the medieval
author's uses of the gendered, fictive past.
Michael A. Calabrese
California State University Los Angeles |
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