Gower as a Sophisticated Storyteller: Narrative Qualities and Readership

Gower’s ideas about story and storytelling do not deviate from those of the Medieval artful writers like Chaucer in that a story is fiction and that the key to a meaning lies in a reader’s hand. Gower in the Confessio Amantis shows ambiguity, complexity, and the relativity of all meaning through the technique of irony, and he creates the dialogic discourse between the characters, even including himself and the audience. In his work, meaning or what might be seen as authorial intention is not given directly by the author, but it should be ferreted out by the reader’s intellect and agility. In this regard, Gower, although treating of ethics and with the ethical purpose of his poem strongly in his mind, was a poet, not a moral philosopher. Gower as a sophisticated poet and ironist allows his unreliable tale-narrator, Genius, to twist his tale-telling materials for his own comic purpose and to produce the gap between what is said and what is meant. It is through the ironic voice of Genius that Gower makes the reader and himself free from a seemingly authorial position that Genius assumes and from heavy obligation of moral pronouncement as an author respectively. Eventually, the truth among the fictions or lies depends solely on the audience’s capacity to penetrate Genius’ rhetorical nonsense. In addition to a tour de force of sustained humor and audience engagement through his narrative devices,Gower’s psychological treatment of Amans in Books III and IV enables us to label him as a sophisticated storyteller.