Abstract
In the Clerk’s Tale of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Griselda’s silence has long been the subject of intense scholarly interest; however, neither Griselda’s speech nor her silence is the focus here. Rather, I am interested in a particular facet of Chaucer’s rhetorical brilliance, namely, the way a male author (Chaucer) uses a male narrator (the Clerk) to employ the strategies of women’s speech, thereby confronting an understanding of maleness itself, and, at the same time, endorsing women’s speech as a means of their gaining discursive authority and some control of their identity in the public narrative.
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Notes
Wendy Allman points out that the sophyme was “the prestige academic discourse of the fourteenth century”; “Petrarch,” she says, “engages in virulent objection to sophymes originating in England,” leading her to propose the Clerk’s Tale, particularly the Prologue and the Envoy, as Chaucer’s humorous response to Petrarch. Wendy Allman, “Appropriating Genres: the Clerk’s Tale as Sophisma,” Paper presented at the 33rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, The Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, 10 May 1998. A similar objection seems to lie behind Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo’s remark in his first Disputation dedicated to Pier Paolo Vergerio in 1401: “What is left in logic which is untouched by British sophisms?” Cited in Stephen Read, ed., Sophisms in Medieval Logic and Grammar (Dordrecht, NLD: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), xi.
Fallacies appear to be the commonest form of sophismata in current textbooks on logic. However, S. Morris Engel distinguishes a sophism from a fallacy thus: “A sophism is an argument that though correct in appearance is nevertheless invalid.” S. Morris Engel, With Good Reason: An Introduction to Informal Fallacies, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 164.
Alexander Murray writes, “In the fourteenth century… the proportion of tonsured clergy [clergy in orders] among students at some new universities … [was] astonishingly low—for instance, 35 per cent at Cologne, and 20 per cent at Heidelberg.” Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 264.
The Lateran decrees of 1123 and 1139 that “transformed clerical marriage from a legally tolerated institution into a canonical crime” come to mind immediately: these were a direct consequence of the reformers’ zeal for making sex and sexual desire the barrier between the worthy priest and the unworthy one. James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 220. Heterosexuality itself has long been argued to be a socialization that took place historically under conditions of patriarchy whereby the male ruling-class dominance asserted “sexual control over women and dominated men while the dominant men themselves remain[ed] sexually invulnerable.” Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Homophobia, Heterosexism, and Pastoral Practice,” in Homosexuality in the Priesthood and the Religious Life, ed. Jeannine Gramick (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 31 [21-35]. Ruether continues: One of the ways to establish this system of sexual control was “to create a celibate elite that [became] regarded as above sexuality, morally and spiritually superior to the lower class of sexual people” (31); eventually, the “celibate elite not only [held] itself aloof from sexuality, but also defin[ed] everyone else’s sexuality by strictly delimiting what they [could] do, and when and with whom they can do it” (31–32). Samuel Laeuchli’s study, Power and Sexuality: The Emergence of Canon Law at the Synod of Elvira (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1972), 88, reveals how the Church used sexual legislation as a way of creating Christian identity. By setting exceptionally rigorous sexual taboos for the clergy (as distinct from sexual legislation for the laypeople), the Elvira synod meant to associate clearly the clergy’s Christian identity with their sexual conduct.
See also Pierre J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993)
Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
The problem of eliding author, narrator, and character voices is especially endemic to Greek plays in which the voice of the chorus narrator/persona and the voice of the poet are frequently perceived to be the same. It naturally raises the question: “Whose voice do we hear in a choral ode?” Judith Fletcher, “Choral Voice and Narrative in the First Stasimon of Aeschylus Agamemnon,” Phoenix 53.1/2 (1999): 29 [29-49]. Paul Strohm observes of the Clerk’s Tale, that “this tale, like all of Chaucer’s tales, embraces many voices, including those of predecessor texts, of Chaucer the poet-narrator, of the Clerk himself. But… the predominant voice of the tale is that of the Clerk, and he is presented to the audience as conservative satirist, elaborately deferential to authority in his own conduct and in his literary imagination.”
Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 159. In fact, so dominant is the Clerk’s voice that Strohm consciously blurs it with Chaucer’s voice in noting the tale’s critique of ideal obedience: “Whether we view this critique as issuing from Chaucer or from his Clerk, it calls into question many features of the hierarchical ideology that the tale seems to advance” (160). Elizabeth D. Harvey notes the slippage between characterological and authorial voices not only in the Wife of Bath’s being paired “repeatedly” with “female characters created by female authors,” but also in later female characters such as Molly Bloom who in the writings of some theorists such as Hélène Cixous “comes to stand for the irrepressible female spirit.”
Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), 16. Even Erasmus, adopting a female voice in The Praise of Folly, ascribes a reality to the character’s voice that displaces his own authorial voice: “‘But if you think my speech has been too pert or wordy,’ he says at the end of Folly and then reminds us again in the letter to Dorp, ‘keep in mind that you’ve been listening to Folly and to a woman.’ “Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices, 63
citing Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 138, 160. Interestingly enough, Chaucer himself in his poem to Bukton cites the Wife of Bath as though she were an authoritative voice on the sorrows of marriage (along with his having characters in the Tales cite the Wife of Bath, as well). See Strohm, Social Chaucer, 73.
For “hybrid voices,” see Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–423.
J. Burke Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale (1942; repr. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972), 268, Pars III, translation mine.
Ruth Evans, “Vulgar Eloquence? Cultural Models and Practices of Translation in Late Medieval Europe,” in Translating Others, ed. Theo Hermans, vol. 2 (Manchester: St. Jerome Press, 2006), 301 [296-313].
John Finlayson, “Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale,’” Studies in Philology 97.3 (2000): 268 [255-75].
Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 223.
Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London: Routledge, 1996), 8.
Rita Copeland, “The Fortunes of ‘Non Verbum pro Verbo’: or, Why Jerome is not a Ciceronian,” in The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. Roger Ellis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), 35 [15-35].
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, a translation of Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato (ca. 1335) is characterized by Barry Windeatt as a process of “composition through adaptive translation.” Barry Windeatt, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 54.
Elaine Treharne, “The Stereotype Confirmed? Chaucer’s Wife of Bath,” in Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature: Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts, ed. Elaine Treharne, Essays and Studies 55 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 109 [93-115].
Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, ed., Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 12. The text, “The Schoolhouse of Women,” occurs on pp. 137–55.
Seth Lerer, “The Canterbury Tales,” in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 288.
Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 136.
Emma Campbell, “Sexual Poetics and the Politics of Translation in the Tale of Griselda,” Comparative Literature 55.3 (2003): 212 [191-216].
Roxy Harris and Ben Rampton, “Creole Metaphors in Cultural Analysis: On the Limits and Possibilities of (Socio-)Linguistics,” Critique of Anthropology 22.1 (2002): 31–51.
Roger Hewitt, White Talk, Black Talk: Interracial Friendship and Communication Among Adolescents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. Chapters 4 and 5.
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination; and Michael McKeon, ed., Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
Nikolas Coupland, Style: Language Variation and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Nikolas Coupland, “Language, Situation, and the Relational Self: Theorizing Dialect-Style in Sociolinguistics,” in Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 185–210.
Gerry Philipsen, “A Theory of Speech Codes,” in Developing Communication Theories, ed. Gerry Philipsen and Terrance L. Albrecht (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 119–56.
Bill Manhire, Dirty Silence: Impure Sounds in New Zealand Poetry. Cited in Elizabeth Gordon and Mark Williams, “Raids on the Articulate: Code-Switching, Style-Shifting and Postcolonial Writing,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 33.2 (1998): 75 [75-96].
Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 364–65n92, notes that “yerde” as “penis” “is not a slang usage.”
He cites R. H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), who includes documentation of a text that “describes in sober legal prose the tests to which a husband’s ‘yerde’ or virga was subjected to demonstrate impotence (89n53).”
Cecelia Cutler, “Hip-Hop Language in Sociolinguistics and Beyond,” Language and Linguistics Compass 1/5 (2007): 520 [519-38], notes that “Researchers often use the term ‘language’ in a loose sense to describe the linguistic variety associated with hip-hop and its relationship to AAE, but the degree to which the linguistic features of HHL overlap with those of AAE actually makes it difficult to argue that it constitutes a language unto itself. Perhaps ‘language style’ is a more appropriate designation.” She repeats this point, noting that “over the past two decades sociolinguistics has identified a language—perhaps more accurately termed a ‘language style’—associated with hip-hop consisting of a range of phonological, grammatical, and lexical patterns” (528).
Cutler cites, among others, Lanita Jacobs-Huey, “Is there an authentic African American speech community: Carla revisited,” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (1997) 4.1.331–70; Mary Bucholtz, “Borrowed Blackness”; H. S. Alim, “Hip Hop Nation Language,” in Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century, ed. Edward Finegan and John R. Rickford (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 387–409; Nikolas Coupland, “Language, Situation, and the Relational Self,” 185–210.
Michael McKeon, ed., Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 350. The translation of Bakhtin’s theory is by McKeon. See also Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Social stratification has the power to exploit and inflect language. There are languages even within the stratifications, particular to “any given moment of verbal-ideological life” (290). “Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the coexistence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between different epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These ‘languages’ of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying ‘languages’” (291). “Literary language is in effect a dialogue of languages, a ‘highly specific unity of several ‘languages’” (295).
Ken Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 213, citing Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel.”
Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 188. Cooper points to “the blisful ende” as indexing a romance.
Ibid., 100, citing Elinor Ochs, “Indexing Gender,” in Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, ed. A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 340 [335-58].
As Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall succinctly put it, “identities may be linguistically indexed through labels, implicatures, stances, styles, or linguistic structures and systems.” Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, “Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach,” Discourse Studies 7.4-5 (2005): 585 [585-614].
That the Griselda story was “one of the most familiar and popular in European literature” can be inferred from manuscript testimony. Warren Ginsberg, notes in The Riverside Chaucer, 880. Charlotte C. Morse mentions knowing of “188 manuscript copies of Petrarch’s Latin Griselda.” Charlotte C. Morse, “What to Call Petrarch’s Griselda,” in The Uses of Manuscripts in Literary Studies: Essays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen, ed. Charlotte Cook Morse, Penelope Reed Doob, and Marjorie Curry Woods (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), 265 [263-303].
M. C. Bodden, “Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale: Interrogating ‘Virtue’ through Violence,” in ‘A Great Effusion of Blood’?: Interpreting Medieval Violence, ed. Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, and Oren Falk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 218–19 [216-40].
Griselda Pollock, “Feminism/Foucault—Surveillance/Sexuality” in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994): 9 [2-41]: “The will to know and the resultant relations of power are furrowed by the more unpredictable and destabilizing plays of fascination, curiosity, dread, desire, and horror.”
Daniel Poirion, Le Poete Et Le Prince: L’evolution Du Lyrisme Courtois De Guillaume De Machaut a Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1965), 373, here as paraphrased in Ginsberg, notes in The Riverside Chaucer, 883.
Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 102.
See also Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike’s “critique of cultural nationalism’s entrapment in a reverse-discourse” and its relation to counter-identification mentioned in Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004), 41.
A frequently cited example of such reinvestment is that of Gay Pride’s public appropriation of the pink triangle used by the Nazis to separate and signify sexual deviants. Homophiles and sexologists of the late nineteenth century used the medical category of inversion to argue for “naturalness” of certain forms of gender or sexual deviance. For “reverse” discourse, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 1:101.
I am borrowing John Stephens and Marcella Ryan’s description of the prevalent and limiting views that dominated the scholarship on the “marriage group” in the twentieth century. John Stephens and Marcella Ryan, “Metafictional Strategies and the Theme of Sexual Power in The Wife of Bath’s and Franklin’s Tales,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 33 (1989): 57–58 [56-75].
W. Flagg Miller, “Metaphors of Commerce: Trans-Valuing Tribalism in Yemeni Audiocassette Poetry,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34.1 (2002): 29 [29-57].
Karen A. Winstead, “Saints, Wives, and Other ‘Hooly Thynges’: Pious Laywomen in Middle English Romance,” Chaucer Yearbook 2 (1995): 153 [137-54].
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Bodden, M.C. (2011). Code-Switching: Male Crossing into Female Speech Domain. In: Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337657_6
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