SOURCE: Introduction to Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, University of California Press, 1992, pp. 1-25.

In the following essay, Hansen analyzes the “feminization” of men in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women. Hansen contends that Legend is more about men than it is about women, and that in it Chaucer emphasizes a sense of “feminine absence and masculine anxiety.”

False Men in the Legend of Good Women

A decade or so ago, my emerging interest in what it might mean to approach Chaucer from a feminist perspective took me to a poem that seemed to focus most exclusively on images of the female: the Legend of Good Women. If I could argue from the evidence of this recalcitrant work, one that other feminist scholars had already despaired of understanding, I thought I might pin down the elusive author and determine whether he was or was not a friend of...