Abstract
To recognize the elements of cultural critique inscribed within the Canterbury project, it is thus crucial to register constructions of rhetoric that violate a tale’s dominant modes of coherence. The Clerk’s tale of Griselda makes clear that this “deconstructive” rhetorical praxis is not a matter of disinterested amusement, for these moments of rupture and discontinuity set in relief the social and subjective consequences of dominant cultural ideals. In this sense, The Clerk’s Tale obeys the same logic as The Physician’s Tale, which enacts a certain crisis of legitimation with respect to the discursive construction of chastity. Only recently, as part of a fundamental reorientation of medieval studies toward the politics of gender and sexuality, has critical commentary begun to situate the tale of Virginia’s beheading within the larger parameters of Chaucer’s guiding concerns. Prior to this disciplinary realignment, traditional categories of critical commentary led earlier critics to regard the tale as an obvious and regrettable concession to popular medieval taste. Writing seventy years ago, George Cowling was among the first modern critics to dismiss the tale as catering to a medieval appetite for stories about the suffering of the virtuous: “Chaucer saw only its pathos and its moral, and consequently his characterization is slight.”1 Three decades later, E. Talbot Donaldson imagined a similarly perfunctory engagement with the material: “on the whole it shows Chaucer working rather routinely, without his characteristic originality.”2
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Notes
George Cowling, Chaucer (London: Methuen, 1927), p. 165.
E. Talbot Donaldson, Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York: Ronald Press, 1958), p. 927.
Nevill Coghill, “Chaucer’s Narrative Art in The Canterbury Tales,” in Chaucer and Chaucerians, ed. D. S. Brewer (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1966), p. 126;
Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 255; and
Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 277. Cooper also admits that “if the tale as a whole is an exemplum, it is very hard to see what it exemplifies” (249).
For other details that illustrate “the incongruence between motivation and action,” see R. Howard Bloch, “Chaucer’s Maiden’s Head: ‘The Physician’s Tale’ and the Poetics of Virginity,” Representations 28 (1989): 114–15.
For Jill Mann’s argument from typology that “the event that unites human experience with the divine,” see Geoffrey Chaucer (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991): p. 144. See also Richard Hoffman, “Jepthah’s Daughter and Chaucer’s Virginia,” Chaucer Review 2 (1967–68): 20–31.
Readings that touch on elements of moral allegory include P. M. Kean, Chaucer and the Making of English Poetry, Volume II (London: Routledge, 1972): pp. 179–85;
Brian Lee, “The Position and Purpose of the Physician’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 22 (1987): 141–60; and Marta Powell Harley, “Last Things First in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale: Final Judgment and the Worm of Conscience,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1992): 1–16.
Hagiography figures prominently in Frederick Tupper, “Chaucer’s Saints and Sinners,” JEGP 15 (1916): 59–67;
Karl Young, “The Maidenly Virtues of Chaucer’s Virginia,” Speculum 16 (1941): 340–49;
Huling Ussery, Chaucer’s Physician (New Orleans: Tulane Studies in English, Monograph 19, 1971);
J. D. W. Crowther, “Chaucer’s Physician and its ‘Saint,’” English Studies in Canada 8 (1982): 125–37; and
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “The Virgin’s Tale,” in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and all her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 165–94.
In this regard, Anne Middleton writes: “The literary limits of the exemplum are themselves held up for inspection by the reader.” See “The Physician’s Tale and Love’s Martyr: ‘Ensamples mo than Ten’ as a Method in the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review 8 (1973): 26. See also Lee Ramsey, “‘The Sentence of it Sooth Is’: Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 6 (1972): 185–97.
For a discussion of the tale’s ironic treatment of the Physician, see D. W. Roberstson, Jr. “The Physician’s Comic Tale,” Chaucer Review 23 (1988): 129–39, who refers to the “singular ineptitude” (136) of the Physician. See also Richard Hoffman, “Jepthah’s Daughter”;
Thomas Hanson, “Chaucer’s Physician as Storyteller and Moralizer,” Chaucer Review 7 (1972): 132–39; and
Emerson Brown, Jr. “What is Chaucer Doing with the Physician and His Tale?” Philological Quarterly 60 (1981): 129–149. For a reading that stresses the ironies in Chaucer’s representation of Virginius, see Ann Middleton, “Love’s Martyr.”
Linda Lomperis, “Unruly Bodies and Ruling Practices: Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale as Socially Symbolic Act,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 22–23.
Glenn Burger, “Doing What Comes Naturally: The Physician’s Tale and the Pardoner,” in Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter G. Beidler (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1998), p. 124.
Chaucer’s Approach to Gender in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), p. 159. Several other recent book-length studies of gender in Chaucer’s works have also made passing mention of the tale. See Margaret Hallissy, Clean Maides, True Wives, Steadfast Widows (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), pp. 49–54;
R. Allen Shoaf, Chaucer’s Body: The Anxiety of Circulation in the Canterbury Tales (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001), pp. 47–53.
Christine M. Rose, “Reading Chaucer Reading Rape,” in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 35, 44.
For other critics who see Chaucer participating in the misogyny she represents, see Sheila Delany, “Politics and the Paralysis of Poetic Imagination in The Physician’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981): 51; Bloch, “Chaucer’s Maiden’s Head,” 124; and
Robin L. Bott, “‘O, Keep Me from Their Worse than Killing Lust’: Ideologies of Rape and Mutilation in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus” in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 189–211.
The fact that the Nun’s Priest tells a barnyard fable makes him a potential addressee for the Physician’s slight of fable. For a valuable discussion of fable in the tale, see Andrew Welsh, “Story and Wisdom in Chaucer: The Physician’s Tale and The Manciple’s Tale,” in Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton, ed. Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000), pp. 76–95.
For discussions of Nature in the tale, see Kean, The Making of English Poetry, pp. 178–79; Middleton, “Love’s Martyr,” 17–18. For Nature’s vicissitudes in earlier literature, see C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936);
John V. Fleming, The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 194–249. Chaucer uses this figure in The Parliament of Foules as well.
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 11. 20, 884–88.
In the most explicit treatment of incest in The Canterbury Tales, The Man of Law’s Prologue, the outraged narrator refers to the crime of incest in Gower’s Appolonius of Tyre as a crime of the maidenhead: “How that the cursed kyng Antiochus / Birafte his doghter of his maydenhede” (II, 81–83). In Gower’s own version of the Apius story, the incestuous signification is yet more oblique because Virginius thrusts his “naked sword” into the side of his daughter rather than cutting off her head, as in Le Roman de la Rose. See John Gower, Confessio amantis, ed. Russell Peck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 7:5131.
Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 373.
Regarding this case, see Christopher Cannon, “Raptus in the Chaumpaigne Release and a Newly Discovered Document Concerning the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, Speculum 68 (1993): 74–94.
Robert Worth Frank, Jr., “Pathos in Chaucer’s Religious Tales,” in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 43.
For a sustained treatment of typology, a form of biblical exegesis that posits a latent system of symbolic correspondence between Old and New Testament scenarios, see Jean Danielou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers, trans. Wulstan Hibberd (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960).
See also Morton Bloomfield, “Allegory as Interpretation,” New Literary History 3 (1974): 301–17;
Richard Emmerson, “Figura and the Medieval Typological Imagination,” Typology and English Medieval Literature, ed. Hugh T. Keenan (New York: AMS Press, 1992), pp. 7–31; and
James J. Paxton, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 70–78.
“Tantost a la teste copée” (5637). Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: H. Champion, 1965–66).
For a reading of the ritual aspect of this sacrifice, see Sandra Pierson Prior, “Virginity and Sacrifice in Chaucer’s ‘Physician’s Tale’” in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, ed. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), pp. 165–80.
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© 2012 John A. Pitcher
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Pitcher, J.A. (2012). Chaucer’s Wolf: Exemplary Violence in The Physician’s Tale. In: Chaucer’s Feminine Subjects. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137089724_5
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