Bridling at Halters: Equine Bodies and Double Binds in John Gower's "Tale of Rosiphelee."
- Author/Editor
- McGregor, Francine.
- Title
- Bridling at Halters: Equine Bodies and Double Binds in John Gower's "Tale of Rosiphelee."
- Published
- McGregor, Francine. "Bridling at Halters: Equine Bodies and Double Binds in John Gower's 'Tale of Rosiphelee.'" The Chaucer Review 60.1 (2025): 108-29.
- Review
- McGregor approaches Gower's "Tale of Rosiphelee" by contextualizing and rethinking its most striking visual image: the figure of the abject revenant "horse knave" ("Confessio Amantis" 4.1399), sporting an array of halters around her waist, as she and her lean, ill-kept, hobbling black horse, trail a group of elegant women mounted on "amblende hors . . . / That were al whyte, fatte and grete" (4.1309-10). The woman explains her reduced state to Rosiphelee as punishment for resisting before turning late to love, a partial redemption marked by the horse's bridle of gold and precious stones. The overt lesson of this encounter is to submit to Venus's "betre reule" (4.1264) in good time and thereby outwit contingency and misfortune. McGregor finds in the image a social dimension that extends beyond the injunction for women to love, with the promise of marriage and maternity. The key to it is the identification of the horse and rider as effectively one body under the control represented by the bridle. McGregor turns to contemporary manuals for keeping horses to establish that the composite rider and horse suffer from "myskeping"--a term that denotes inadequate care or mistreatment, apart from the ordinary dangers and injury that animals face. Such neglect, she observes, is roundly condemned in the literature and the culture at large. In this way, she suggests that the corollary to subjection, obedience, and domestication (symbolized by the bridle) is an ethic of care and nurture (symbolized by the halter). McGregor notes earlier that Gower diverges from his likely source, the thirteenth-century "Lai du Trot," by creating a story populated only by women. The "horse knave" inhabits the lower rung of this mysterious, uncanny female world, oppressed by the labor signified by the "twenty score / Of horse haltres and mo" (4.1356-57). In positing an alternative space of care and nurture, Gower's poem does not, therefore, eliminate the prospect of neglect. McGregor argues, "The maiden and her horse have submitted to the strictures of haltering, yet the domestic agreement is violated and both reap abuse rather than nurture (128). [RRE. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1]
- Date
- 2025
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations