Transgressive Desire in Chaucer's Legend of Thisbe

Abstract

Abstract Chaucer's Legend of Good Women is famous for its proposal to celebrate “good” women and expose faithless men, carried out through the rewriting of classical women's stories in ways that truncate unlikely figures into suspiciously anodyne passivity. Yet his tale of Pyramus and Thisbe has seemed to preclude even this possibility, for the original version depicts innocent and devoted lovers, and such subtext as has been found has been widely dismissed as merely comical. However, this ignores the narrative's established potential as an exemplum of the relationships between desire, grammar, and interpretation. For Chaucer, startling innuendos that cast Pyramus as a hapless, feminized misreader and Thisbe as his queerly authoritative lover also prepare for serious interrogation of the patristic tradition of gendered hermeneutics.