“Whil thilke mirour laste”: Virgil’s Mirror and the Work of Avarice in Gower’s Confessio Amantis

ABSTRACT In the “Tale of Virgil’s Mirror,” Gower shows the titular mirror to be remarkable not because it functions as a miraculous device but because of the way it is simultaneously central and tangential to the tale. The mirror appears as an agentic object that resists neat relegation to an allegorical system of meaning, yet, at the same time, it functions exactly in this way, symbolizing sight, wisdom, and self-reflection. Acknowledging this agentic “thingness” of Virgil’s mirror and its paradoxical “tangential centrality” allows us to see how the Confessio Amantis registers the systemic problems that Avarice, the subject of Book 5, poses both to society and to the efficacy of narrative, and, furthermore, how Gower’s particular mode of exemplary instruction in the Confessio attempts to provide an analogic remedy to these systemic problems.