Abstract
This chapter argues that Chaucer in The Franklin’s Tale deploys wonder as an affective script that enfolds shame and creates its own reality. As a complex affective phenomenon that is somatic and cognitive, suspensive and mobile, stupefying and animating, wonder provides a strategic alternative to paradigms of shame or hope in reading premodern queer subject formation and futurity. Wonder as a queer temporal strategy suspends the present but also gestures toward an inscrutable future that is neither anti-relational nor utopic. Premodern queerness, in this instance, resides in the subject’s non-coincidence with declensions of the first, second, and third person. That is, the queer occupies the position of the fourth-person singular: the space of maximum attention and singular vitality that counters the disciplinary regime of marriage.
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Notes
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In this essay, I use “affect” and “emotion” interchangeably to include pre-discursive bodily responses, sentient emotional states, linguistic performance of feelings, and philosophical conditions of being. Terminology in affect studies is complicated by disciplinary differences and historical variations. While some scholars have used “affect” as an umbrella term generically, others insist on maintaining more rigid distinctions to denote different physiological, psychological, and philosophical models and/or historical periods. Thus, “affect” may signify a pre-cognitive bodily response, and “emotion” a cognitive state that requires linguistic mediation and performance. Holly Crocker, in contrast, argues that in premodern contexts, “emotion” is an immediate bodily response to sensation, whereas “affect” is a feeling formed over time that involves ethical identity formation (2017, 95n.3). And Sarah McNamer proposes “feeling” as the compromise between affect and emotion, as well as the more appropriate term for Middle English texts. For discussions of affective terminology, see McNamer (2007, 242–46), Trigg (2014), and Crocker (2017).
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Spinoza’s theory of affect, on which Massumi’s thinking is based, also links affect to wonder: “This affection of the mind, or this imagination of a singular thing, insofar as it is alone in the mind, is called wonder. But if it is aroused by an object we fear, it is called consternation, because wonder at an evil keeps man so suspended in considering it that he cannot think of other things by which he could avoid that evil” (1994, The Ethics, III. “On the Origin and Nature of Emotions.” Postulates. Porp. LII. Note).
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Aurelius’s brother is “queer” in Tison Pugh’s sense that the term “need not be limited to the sexual, as it also describes relations of power predicated upon relations of sexuality” (2004, 5).
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Affects form assemblages with one another because they are “sticky” by nature, as Sara Ahmed points out. Expanding on Edmund Husserl’s concept of the “near sphere,” Ahmed argues that an affect adheres to objects and signs around it to form an intimate bodily horizon (2010, 32).
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For assessments of the disciplinary tension between the history of emotions and literary approaches to affects, see McNamer (2007, 242–46; 2010, 3–7; 2015, 1435–36) and Trigg (2014, 5–8). A foundational survey of medieval history of emotions is Barbara H. Rosenwein’s Generations of Feeling (2016). McNamer counters the distrust among some historians, such as Daniel N. Stearns and William Reddy, of literary texts as providing reliable historical evidence of emotional praxes in the past, arguing that Middle English texts, as affective scripts, “vigorously enlist literariness as a means of generating feelings and putting them into play in history” (2007, 242–46).
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Tomkins uses the concept of “nuclear scripts” to describe, for example, psycho-linguistic attempts by individuals to reverse the damaging effects of negative affects in traumatic “nuclear scenes” in life (1963, 299).
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I have argued elsewhere that the coherence of Dorigen and Arveragus’s conditional marriage contract is predicated on the characters’ negotiations with the disciplinary powers of shame, which are coded along class and gender lines (see Kao 2012). For useful studies of the history of marriage in the medieval West, see Sheehan (1996), Cartlidge (1997), McCarthy (2004), and D’Avray (2005).
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Late medieval conduct manuals for young women and wives, such as the Book of the Knight of the Tower and Le Ménagier de Paris, are filled with examples of male counsel followed by threat of violence toward women if they disregarded the advice.
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For the “inexplicit I” in queer performativity, see Sedgwick (1993, 4).
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See also Massumi’s formulation that affect “would seem to be associated with nonlinear processes: resonation and feedback that momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future” (2002, 26).
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Kao, WC. (2019). The Body in Wonder: Affective Suspension and Medieval Queer Futurity. In: Ahern, S. (eds) Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97268-8_2
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