Abstract
In the previous two chapters, I have made the case that Chaucer’s representations of pagan antiquity center on the ethical problems created by honor competition and the need to avoid, avenge, or purge shame. Chaucer approaches these problems in an anthropological spirit, a spirit of critical, historical distance insofar as the expected, medieval theological solution to these problems is conspicuous only by its absence. This solution is broached as a question that cannot be answered within the metaphysical parameters of the texts. I suggest, therefore, that Virginia’s plaintive “Is there no grace?” offers an implicit commentary on the paradoxically arbitrary and fixed structures of exchange and sacrifice governing legendary Troy, Athens, and Rome. In literary terms, the distance between the world of Livy, Ovid, Statius, and Virgil, on the one hand, and the world of the medieval poet, on the other, is felt most of all in the marvelous sympathy, built by the double narrative perspective (showing versus telling), for the hapless humans caught in the cycles of violence born of their own conceptions about the dangers of shame.
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Notes
Robert R. Edwards, “The Franklin’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 2 vols. (Cambridge and Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2002–2005), 1:216.
Anne Scott, “Considerynge the Beste on Every Syde: Ethics, Empathy, and Epistemology in the Franklin’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 29.4 (1995): 391 [390–415].
Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Filocolo, trans. Donald Cheney and Thomas C. Bergin, Garland Library of Medieval Literature 43 (London and New York: Garland, 1985), p. 264.
On the first of these elements, that Dorigen threatens but does not carry out suicide, critics in the mid-twentieth century tended to see Dorigen and her complaint not only as hysterical but as morally suspect. See, e.g., Edwin Benjamin, “The Concept of Order in the Franklin’s Tale,” Philological Quarterly 38 [1959]: 119–24;
Gerhard Joseph, “The Franklin’s Tale: Chaucer’s Theodicy,” Chaucer Review 1 (1966): 20–32;
and Robert Burlin, “The Art of Chaucer’s Franklin,” Neophilologus 51 (1967): 55–73. At the more outrageous end of the critical spectrum, Benjamin sees evidence of Satan’s influence in these “neurotic fancies of a pretty woman” (“The Concept of Order,” 124). Similarly, Joseph calls Dorigen a “willful Eve,” while Burlin reads her “hysteria” as evidence of Chaucer’s “high comic mode” (“The Art of Chaucer’s Franklin,” 69, 64). On the second and third points (Arveragus sending Dorigen to Aurelius, and Aurelius’s forgiveness of Dorigen’s debt to him), more recent scholars have criticized Chaucer’s apparent complicity with a social model that treats women as objects to be exchanged between men, and thus leave no room for a noncynical reading of the “grace” that concludes the tale.
See, e.g., Felicity Riddy, “Engendering Pity in the Franklin’s Tale,” in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, pp. 267–92.
It has become conventional in Chaucer studies to refer to the unnamed old woman in the tale as the “loathly lady,” a folklore figure known to medieval readers through the Middle English romance The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell and the “Tale of Florent” in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, among others. But while the Wife’s tale shares several points in common with these analogues, most notably the knight’s forced marriage to an ugly and low-born old woman, Chaucer’s is the only version in which the knight who faces this predicament is a rapist performing a kind of penance for his mistreatment of women, and who is being held accountable by a supreme court of women. For critical studies of the loathly lady motif and comparative studies of The Wife of Bath’s tale and its sources and analogues, see S. Elizabeth Passmore and Susan Carter, eds., The English “Loathly Lady” Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007).
H. Marshall Leicester, “Of a Fire in the Dark: Private and Public Feminism in the Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Women’s Studies 11 (1984): 159.
William F. Woods, Chaucerian Spaces: Spatial Poetics in Chaucer’s Opening Tales (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), p. 129.
That the parallels between prologue and tale are based on this basic analogy (Wife-Wyf) is assumed in countless interpretations. In addition to Scala see, e.g., Carolyn Dinshaw, who writes of the tale’s conclusion, “This is the Wife’s fantasy of the perfect marriage” (Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989], p. 129); Elaine Tuttle Hansen, in contrast to Scala and Dinshaw, attributes agency (and blame) to Chaucer rather than to the Wife for her ultimate endorsement of medieval antifeminism, but similarly aligns the Wife with the Wyf (“‘Of his love daungerous to me’: Liberation, Subversion, and Domestic Violence in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” in Geoffrey Chaucer: The Wife of Bath, ed. Peter G. Beidler [Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1996], pp. 273–89; and Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender [Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992], esp. pp. 35–40, 56). See also Louise Fradenburg, “The Wife of Bath’s Passing Fancy,” SAC 8 (1986): 31–58; and H. Marshall Leicester, “‘My bed was ful of verray blood’: Subject, Dream, and Rape in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” in Geoffrey Chaucer: The Wife of Bath, ed. Beidler, pp. 234–54.
Robert J. Meyer, in his article “Chaucer’s Tandem Romances: A Generic Approach to the Wife of Bath’s Tale as Palinode” (Chaucer Review 18 [1984]: 221–338), comes closest to my point here, although he considers the tale on its own and not in connection with the prologue, when he observes that what “Chaucer achieves in the Wife of Bath’s Tale is nothing less than a remarkable experiment in romance narrative: back-to-back, or tandem romances—mirror images reflecting ironically on each other—each of which treats a distinct phrase in the growth of the bachelor (and, to a certain extent, the storyteller) toward a moment of truth. […] His quest to find out what women most desire is only part of a larger quest, vicariously shared by the Wife, to discover the meaning of love” (pp. 225–26). I argue, however, that when we consider the mirroring effect created by both prologue and tale together, we do not discover the meaning of love so much as we discover the deconstruction of desire.
René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 12.
Susanne Sara Thomas, “The Problem of Defining ‘Sovereynetee’ in the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale,’” Chaucer Review 41 (2006): 89 [87–97].
For a Girardian reading of The Shipman’s Tale and Fragment VII as a whole, see Curtis Gruenler, “Desire, Violence, and the Passion in Fragment VII of The Canterbury Tales: A Girardian Reading,” Renascence 52 (1999): 35–56.
Jill Mann, Feminizing Chaucer, rev ed. Chaucer Studies 30 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), p. 66.
On this point, it is helpful also to keep in mind the various meanings of rape or “raptus” in medieval English law. “Raptus” could just as easily refer to abduction and forced marriage as it could to forced intercourse. On the medieval understanding of the term, see, e.g., Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2001), pp. 33–75. The fact that the knight commits himself to the old woman freely in order to get the answer he seeks does not, in my view, mitigate the sense in which Chaucer emphasizes the idea of reciprocity in the marriage rather than the quest, as a clear instance of shaming the knight in return for the maiden’s shame. See also The Franklin’s Tale, in which Dorigen freely “promises” her love to Aurelius but, when he fulfills her conditions, she understands her supposed obligation to him in terms of rape and dishonor.
Karla Taylor, “Social Aesthetics and the Emergence of Civic Discourse from The Shipman’s Tale to the Melibee,” Chaucer Review 39.3 (2005): 298 [298–322].
Dolores Palomo (“What Chaucer Really Did to Le Livre de Mellibee,” Philological Quarterly 53 [1974]: 304–20)
and Carolyn Collette (“Heeding the Counsel of Prudence: A Context for the Melibee,” Chaucer Review 29 [1994–1995]: 416–33) both make this point about Chaucer’s domestication of Prudence.
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© 2012 Anne McTaggart
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McTaggart, A. (2012). Structures of Reciprocity in Chaucerian Romance. In: Shame and Guilt in Chaucer. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137039521_4
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