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The Dragon of Love: Chaucer’s Jason and the Cycle of Consumption in the Legend of Good Women

abstract:In the Legend of Hypsipyle and Medea, Jason is portrayed as a predator whose compulsive need for sex with new women lays waste to all around him. Chaucer’s sequence of imagery explores the continuums of lust and desire, of form and formlessness, providing insight on sexually predatory men, the currency of love, and the deep lack that spurs avarice. This reading of the legend highlights some recurrent motifs— dragons, foxes, gold, and emptiness—and discusses what these interlinked signs tell us about Chaucer’s philosophy, his aesthetic and moral plan for the Legend of Good Women, and his continuing fascination with predatory masculine sexual behavior and compulsive infidelity, which he reads as a kind of shapeshifting. This legend presents a pessimistic and cautionary vision of a recurring human behavior, a biological urge that becomes unstoppable when it is couched behind gentility, as it was in the “first” seducer, Jason.