Abstract
This chapter considers how the commonplace and often violent interplay between humans and nonhumans can be affected by the cultural dictates of both gender and, now, domestication. Thus, the status of the tamed rooster Chanticleer, the epitome of barnyard masculinity, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s delightful Nun’s Priest’s Tale, becomes essential to the tale’s message of controlling the voices of others. Herein we see the formula unfolding in Chaucer’s adapted tale: the tame male (Chanticleer) must surpass the tame female (Pertelote) and the wild male (Russell the fox). The three speaking animals, the rooster, the chicken, and the fox, each reveal a stage in the discursive human appropriation of the nonhuman. Also crucial is the tale’s inclusion of visionary dreams folded into a fabular story that exhorts us ultimately to “Taketh the moralite, goode men” (3440).1 Even the dream, the most liberating of mental landscapes, traditionally conducive to animal discourse, as in Chaucer’s earlier poems, undergoes a program of “agriculture” as animals are farmed by the human self-interest in deciphering dreams. Still, the speech of these creatures has, as we will see, discordant elements that threaten the hierarchy, for this tale uses the language of nonhumans to undermine human dominance over words.
Tame animals have a better nature than wild, and all tame animals are better off when they are ruled by man; for then they are preserved. Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind.
Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle. Politics, Book I, Chapter 4, trans. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1132.
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Notes
All Chaucer citations are from Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), by line number.
Willene B. Clark, ed., The Medieval Book of Birds: Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarium. (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1992), pp. 142–43.
Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990), p. 189.
Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Who Comes after the Subject ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (Princeton: Routledge, 1991), p. 113.
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham UP, 2008), p. 104.
See Bruce Holsinger, “Of Pigs and Parchment: Medieval Studies and the Coming of the Animal,” PMLA 124.2 (March 2009): 616–23, where he argues the material effects of our manuscripts made from the skins of dead animals.
Plumwood defines “devourment” as “the project of the totalising self which denies the other’s difference.” Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 193.
Susan McHugh argues that animals “emerged as significant figures in English literature only in terms of metaphor,” and “the perforation of species boundaries … casts literary aesthetics in a pivotal moment in which it has become both difficult to critique anthropocentrist models and imperative to elaborate creative new forms of agency,” Susan McHugh, “Literary Animal Agents,” PMLA 124.2 (March 2009): 488, 489.
But we should worry about animals still being all about our agency, since they function ambiguously in our texts. See also Susan Griffin’s article in the same issue where she asserts that Mary Wilkins Freeman’s 1901 short story collection “traces the stories of individuals, animal and human, at the same time locating them in the long history of animals’ and humans’ mutual domestication.” She adds: “The humanness of beasts unsettles, rather than reinforces, the integrity of humans,” Susan Griffin, “‘Understudies’ Miming the Human,” PMLA 124.2 (March 2009): 511, 514.
See Larry Scanlon, “The Authority of Fable: Allegory and Irony in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Critical Essays on Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Thomas C. Stillinger (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998), pp. 173–94.
Sue Hum, “Knowledge, Belief, and Lack of Agency: The Dreams of Geoffrey, Troilus, Criseyde, and Chauntecleer,” Style, 31.3 (September 1997): 500–22.
Andre Crepin, “The Cock, the Priest, and the Poet,” Drama, Narrative and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales, ed. Wendy Harding (Toulouse, France: PU du Mirail, 2003), pp. 227–36.
See Lesley Kordecki, “Let Me ‘telle yow what I mente’: The Glossa ordinaria and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1992): 365–85.
Paul R. Thomas effectively argues the gendered nuances of the cock, “‘Have ye no mannes herte?’: Chauntecleer as Cock-Man in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter G. Beidler (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 187–202.
Jill Mann argues persuasively that the sources of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale derive from the beast epic tradition, not the fable tradition, in that the story elaborates the characterizations and does not evoke the iconic nuance of fable. Jill Mann, From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), pp. 16–20, 238–42, 250–61. Her extensive source study of the plotline and its extensions are essential for a nuanced look at the beast material of medieval England. My focus is more on how this material is adapted by yet another genre, the dream vision, which helps illuminate Chaucer’s innovations in voice.
Shirley Sharon-Zisser, “The Squire’s Tale and the Limits of Non Mimetic Fiction,” Chaucer Review 26.4 (1992): 377–94.
See also Peter W. Travis, “Learning to Behold the Fox: Poetics and Epistemology in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Poetry and Epistemology: Turning Points in the History of Poetic Knowledge, ed. Rolan Hagenbuchle and Laura Skandera (Regensburg: Pustet, 1986), pp. 30–45.
W. Travis, “Chaucer’s Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor,” Speculum 72 (1997): 399–427.
See Thomas, “Have ye no mannes.” Also see John Finlayson, “Reading Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale: Mixed Genres and Multi-Layered Worlds of Illusion,” English Studies 86.6 (December 2005): 493–510.
Peter W. Travis, Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (Notre Dame, Indiana: U of Notre Dame P, 2010), p. 135.
See Carolynn Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents: Cause and Representation in Chaucerian Narrative (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2006), pp. 87–97, for a discussion of this line and the tale itself as a form of animal agency. Also, consider the following fable, “Man’s Loquacity,” which explains animals’ loss of language: Originally, animals spoke the same language as men and lived together in harmony in the time of Kronos. Later, under Zeus, animals wanted immortality. The swan and fox petitioned, and Zeus took away their speech and bestowed it on men, Babrius and Phaedrus: Fables, ed. Ben Edwin Perry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1965), #431, pp. 505–56
See Doron Narkiss, “The Fox, the Cock, and the Priest: Chaucer’s Escape from Fable,” Chaucer Review 32.1 (1997): 46–63.
Stephanie Trigg, “Singing Clearly: Chaucer, Dryden, and a Rooster’s Discourse,” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 5.2 (1993): 365–86.
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000), pp. 163–64.
See also Sue Hum, “Knowledge, Belief, and Lack of Agency: The Dreams of Geoffrey, Troilus, Criseyde, and Chauntecleer,” Style 31.3 (September 1997): 500–22.
Cn addition to the ecofeminist writings cited above, see H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., “The Voice of the Hind: The Emergence of Feminine Discontent in the Lais of Marie de France,” Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning, ed. Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior (Notre Dame, Indiana: U of Notre Dame P, 2005), pp. 132–69.
See Sheila Delany, “Mulier est hominis confusio: Chaucer’s Anti-Popular Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Mosaic 17 (1984): 1–8; and Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents, p. 93.
See L. A. J. R. Houwen, “Flattery and the Mermaid in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Animals and the Symbolic in Mediaeval Art and Literature, ed. L. A. J. R. Houwen (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1997), pp. 77–92.
U. Eco, R. Lambertini, C. Marmo, and A. Tabarroni, “On Animal Language in the Medieval Classification of Signs,” On the Medieval Theory of Signs, ed. Umberto Eco and Costantino Marmo (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989), pp. 3–41. See also Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents, p. 81, and Travis, Disseminal Chaucer, pp. 241–42 and 326–34, where he examines this zoosemiotic work and suggests the tale’s ability to “anticipate the presence of a future Other whose nature cannot now be known” (334).
Marie de France: Fables, ed. and trans. Harriet Spiegel (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987).
Renard the Fox: The Misadventures of an Epic Hero, trans. Terry, Patricia (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1983). Many over the years have traced the sources of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale; see Mann, From Aesop to Reynard; Kate Petersen, On the Sources of the Nonne Prestes Tale (New York: Haskell House, 1966).
Robert A. Pratt, “Three Old French Sources of the Nonnes Preestes Tale,” Speculum 47 (1972): 422–44, 646–68.
N. F. Blake, “Reynard the Fox in England,” Aspects of the Medieval Animal Epic, Proceedings of the International Conference, Louvain, May 15–17, 1972, ed. E. Rombauts and A. Welkenhuysen (The Hague: Leuven UP, 1975), 59–61.
Edward Wheatley, “Commentary Displacing Text: The Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the Scholastic Fable Tradition,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 18.1 (1996): 119–41.
Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 127.
Rosi Braidotti, working with the becoming-animal comments of Deleuze and Guattari, discusses the permeable intersection between human and animal, besides noting how “minoritarian” categories arise from both gender and species. Rosi Braidotti, “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others,” PMLA, 124.2 (March 2009): 526–32.
Arthur Chapin, “Morality Ovidized: Sententiousness and the Aphoristic Moment in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Yale Journal of Criticism 8 (1995): 16.
Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1992), pp. 34–39.
The critical commentary on the Wife’s use of this fable is extensive; see especially Sheila Delany, “Strategies of Silence in the Wife of Bath’s Recital,” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2.1 (1990): 49–70.
Catherine S. Cox, Gender and Language in Chaucer (Gainesville: UP of Florida), 1997.
Mary Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” PMLA 94 (1979): 209–22.
Marjorie Malvern, “‘Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?’: Rhetorical and Didactic Roles Played by an Aesopic Fable in the Wife of Bath’ Prologue.” Studies in Philology 80 (1983): 238–52.
Alastair J. Minnis, “Repainting the Lion: Chaucer’s Profeminist Narratives,” Contexts of Pre-Novel Narrative: The European Tradition, ed. Roy Erikson (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 153–84. The Wife makes a small exception to her blanket statement, noting that perhaps men could write well about women in saints’ lives, but the gist of the statement is clear and aggressive. See Hansen on the “deconstruction” of the Wife herself, and Minnis on how easily the fable allusion becomes a feminist assertion.
E. Talbot Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (London: Athlone P, 1970), p. 149.
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© 2011 Lesley Kordecki
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Kordecki, L. (2011). Domesticating the Fable: The Other in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. In: Ecofeminist Subjectivities. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337893_5
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