Men Behaving Badly: Linguistic Purity and Sexual Perversity in Derrida's Le Monolinguisme de l'autre and Gower's Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz

Abstract

Late medieval Anglo-French literature has received relatively little critical attention and, in particular, is rarely studied by French specialists. This essay sets out to show how recent work on modern francophone, non-metropolitan writing yields interesting insights into such earlier literature and to offer new perspectives to modernists by reading together a late twentieth-century and a late fourteenth-century work which share a concern with linguistic purity and sexual perversity. Derrida's practice of an erotic, resisting language politics in Monolinguisme throws light on the strategies employed by Gower, a writer better known for his English-language works, in his French-language love poetry. In contrast to the traditional reading of Gower as a conservative poet, I argue that the Traitié poses significant challenges to literary norms. On the other side, Gower's exploration of perverse heterosexuality reveals some of the conventions and limitations which constrain Derrida's writing and make it less open to gender and sexual difference than is sometimes claimed.