In the 1380’s, before Geoffrey Chaucer began his most famous Canterbury Tales, he completed a similar compilation of stories through a frame: The Legend of Good Women. Like his other early works, the story’s frame is a dream of the first person narrator (presumably Chaucer) who, upon waking writes down everything he has dreamed. Good Women’s frame is that Chaucer is lying in a field of daisies in springtime and witnesses a parade of the God of Love, his queen, and thousands of “good women” who follow. The God chastises Chaucer for complaining about women and tells him that true love is the path to heaven. He then orders that Chaucer create a book of the stories of history’s great ladies, for which he will be rewarded by finding true love.
Although the piece is ostensibly about good women, historians often quip that it is more focused on “bad men”. The stories focus mostly on the actions of men who hurt the female characters, who are relatively helpless victims of circumstance. Their “goodness” doesn’t seem to help them much at all. In fact, the work is actually most often viewed as a satire of the preferred “feminine” values of the time, such as humility and purity, because all of the characters who exhibit such traits end up unhappy (and often dead). Even the title of the work is satirical - he is saying that so-called "good women" only exist in legend and not in fact. Many Chaucer scholars believe that the author used these stories to subversively attack the prominent anti-feminism of the time and ideals of romantic love. Others, however, view the work as genuinely emphasizing the weakness of women and proof of Chaucer’s anti-feminism.
Within Good Women, Chaucer tells the stories of ten women in nine tales. The majority of the stories he tells differ from the original stories from with they were drawn, both in plot and theme. He begins with Cleopatra and somehow manages to portray the powerful queen as weak and plagued by the deaths of her brother Tholome (whom she poisoned) and her lover Antony Antony
Chaucer thus abandoned the work and published it without truly finishing it. It was ultimately unsuccessful and criticized for its inaccuracies and lack of consistency. However, it is widely studied today for both its views on women and the fact that it was possibly the first English work written in iambic pentameter with heroic couplets. While it is unclear whether he intended it as a satire or legitimate collection of stories (speculated to have been commissioned by a princess or lady at the time), The Legend of Good Women provides insight into Chaucer’s and all 14th century views on women. (674)
