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And we need to understand the feminine so that we can identify May's eventual divergence from it, and, more specifically, January's eventual occupation of it. Simone de Beauvoir's reading is instructive in this regard. In Beauvoir’s reading, women “appear essentially to the male as a sexual being . . She is defined and differentiated with reference to man . . She is the Other” (54). Or, as Kara Donaldson puts it, as the other, women’s words are “divorced from power and her body is subject to the interpretation and mediation of the men who .

In Hansen's reading of Chaucer's Good Women, for instance, women who try to occupy those conventional male spaces are either killed or socially marginalized, a punishment impressed upon them by the narrator for their transgression of gender lines. Yet, in the Merchant’s Tale, there is gender crossing, and it does extricate May from her betrayal of January. To this end, a connected subtext of Hansen's thesis I will argue against is her position that “for women, the crossing of gender lines is often fatal” (170).

Yet, is the principle of transgression or subversion, which can be located in the moment that Hansen defines as “the destabilized notion of integral maleness . . opened up by the inversions and subversions of courtly love” (13), namely the lover’s feminization, the same as the principle that identifies both the social and the political problems posed to the state by courtly love? That is, does Hansen’s reading put at stake the philosophical concerns opened up by courtly love and −39− role reversal, including but going beyond, the disclosure of the inherent instability of masculinity?