Heir to Innocence: Gender and the *Legend of Good Women*

Hello, Everyone. Here is an abstract of my paper, which is an excerpt from the book I am currently completing, *Remembrances of Things to Come: Chaucer, Gower, and the Beginnings of English Literature*. Best, Lynn P. Arner

Heir to Innocence: Gender and the *Legend of Good Women*

This study argues that a central concern of Chaucer's *Legend of Good Women* is the issue of art and social responsibility, a discussion instigated narratively by Cupid's complaint. In what could be viewed as a Chaucerian treatise on poetics, the *Legend* launches a full-blown investigation of the problem of poetry and accountability and conducts this investigation primarily at the site of gender. The *Legend* examines the conundrum of where culpability for suspicious gendered practices in, and surrounding, poetic production lies. The legends and the dialogue among Cupid, Alceste, and Chaucer's persona raise multiple possible sites to locate accountability for inscriptions of gender in Chaucer's poetry and in his Greco-Roman and medieval antecedents. The individual poet, the textual tradition in which he writes, social praxes surrounding literature, and structural forces are all scrutinized as potential contributors to gender inequities in the field of cultural production. Through its investigation of the culpability of these various loci, the *Legend* helped to establish the terms for which conversations about literature could occur in late fourteenth-century England and in the subsequent history of English letters. Producing poetry that later anchored the English literary canon, in the *Legend* Chaucer deployed contestations surrounding gender as a means of laying out the terrain of debate for appropriate responses to poetry and acceptable categories of analysis through which to understand and assess literature. This article maps out this ideological terrain and the sophisticated mechanisms through which Chaucer's *Legend* worked to construct the parameters of debate.