Abstract
This chapter discusses the Knight’s remarkable anxiety about nonhumans. The Knight’s Tale represents nature as a scary place, the object of ecophobia. The tale imagines humankind forever endangered by bestial chaos. Yet while Chaucer aggravates the luridness of his main source, Boccaccio’s Teseida, he also emphasizes the artificiality of the Knight’s storytelling. The artificiality renders the tale’s ecophobia ironic. A close reading reveals that fear of nonhumans is predominantly irrational in this tale: humans emerge as by far the most violent species, an extravagant threat to nonhuman life. Chaucer’s allegorical description of visual art works arouses fear of nature but also discloses the arbitrariness of such fear. The tale’s puns and play with letters further undermine ecophobic ideology.
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Notes
- 1.
Parenthetical citations of Chaucer refer to line numbers in Chaucer (1987). Citations of the Canterbury Tales will refer to fragment and line numbers; citations of Troilus and Criseyde will refer to book and line numbers; citations of Boece will refer to book, meter, and line numbers.
- 2.
Medieval writers were aware of the ecological consequences of cremation and burial (Steel 2012, 190–91). Burying the dead was the seventh work of corporal mercy, though unlike the first six, it did not derive from Matthew 25.35–36 (Mounts 1939, 975). In fact, Christ expresses some contempt for burial: “Sine ut mortui sepeliant mortuos suos” [Let the dead bury their dead ] (Luke 9.60); “dimitte mortuos sepelire mortuos suos” [let the dead bury their dead ] (Matthew 8.22); parenthetical citations of the Vulgate Bible refer to Edgar and Kinney (2010–13); accompanying English translations derive from the Douay-Rheims text in this edition.
- 3.
In the Thebaid, we learn that his son died during the war, a misfortune that motivates Creon’s refusal to let the Argives bury their dead (12.60–104); parenthetical citations of the Thebaid refer to book and line numbers in Statius (2003). In Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and its main source, Boccaccio’s Teseida, Creon’s refusal is all the more horrific for being unmotivated. Since Chaucer drastically abbreviates the Teseida’s account of Theseus’s war against the Amazons, in the Knight’s Tale Creon’s inhumanity becomes the First Mover of the plot.
- 4.
Wheatley (2009) traces the contemporary relevance of porcine violence.
- 5.
Pluskowski observes that one of the horrors of the Christian hell, “conceptualized as an immense bestial mouth,” is its “reversal of the normative food chain.… Relations between humans and animals were therefore a fundamental aspect of what it meant to be Christian” (2010, 202).
- 6.
For the differences between Chaucer’s beast imagery and Boccaccio’s , see Grimes (2012, 354).
- 7.
An “insecure humanity” can envy as well as fear the nonhuman; J.J. Cohen notes that Palamon envies nonhuman animals for their unrestrained fulfillment of desire and for their immunity to divine judgment (2008, 40–41).
- 8.
Even in the description of Emelye’s May rituals (1.1033–55), the Knight’s most biophilic moment, he “prefers the domesticated version of nature” (Douglass 2000, 154). Leicester examines how the “the lady’s hair moves into a braid, and the flowers into a garland; the pricking of the seasonal urge is contained in a courtly garden and a May song, and the lady herself is etherealized away from her wakeful stirrings into an angel” (1990, 232–33).
- 9.
For Rudd, the anthropocentrism of the Knight’s Tale is characteristic of Chaucer. She finds that in the Parliament of Fowls, he uses trees for their erotic significance, not because he takes “delight in the woodland per se” (2007, 70). The forest in the Book of the Duchess becomes a sign of the human characters’ “emotional tangle”: “The trees, once so directly acknowledged, fade first into metaphor and finally disappear from the poem altogether” (74). Chaucer’s “Truth ” “allows the actual wilderness to melt away from the text, leaving us again with the familiar terrain of human constructs” (127).
- 10.
Grimes presents a more optimistic interpretation of the duke’s final speech (2012, 364).
- 11.
Douglass advises ecocritics to reverse the priorities of Bakhtin , who “tended to see time as the more important element of the chronotope . An ecocritic would want to turn this around, asking about the ‘problem of space’ instead of the ‘problem of time’” (2000, 151). By “space,” Douglass seems to mean the literary text’s representation of space, while I am just as much concerned with the text’s own material space—its status as a series of inscribed pages, permitting a user to turn backward as well as forward.
- 12.
Grimes’s reading of the boxtree image emphasizes the vulnerability the Thebans share with trees (2012, 355).
- 13.
Parenthetical citations of Ovid refer to book and line numbers in Ovid (2004). Vincent J. DiMarco traces the Knight’s simile to Ovid’s Thisbe (Chaucer 1987, 831n1301–02). Like Thisbe, Ovid’s Halcyone turns pale as boxwood when Ceyx tells her he must go (Metamorphoses 11.417–18). Their story appears in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess (62–230).
- 14.
According to Grimes, “the Knight’s Tale reveals a deep skepticism about humankind’s ability to exist peacefully within nature, or elsewhere, for that matter” (2012, 343).
- 15.
Rudd acknowledges the “hart/heart pun ,” which shows that the “apparently clear-cut hierarchical opposition of human/animal is as artificial a construct as the courtship convention of the love-hunt allegory” (2007, 57–58).
- 16.
The Knight’s references to human labor are “unusual in the ekphrastic tradition. In general, poets encounter an art object of unknown or mystical origins” (Epstein 2006, 55). Leicester argues that “The Knight’s concern is to make clear the human origin of the lists and the temples, to keep them from looking natural or inevitable” (1990, 264). See also Van Dyke (2005, 124).
- 17.
Parenthetical citations of Boccaccio refer to book and line numbers in Boccaccio (2005).
- 18.
The banner displaying the “rede statue of Mars” (1.975) is “doubly a construct, an image of a statue” (Van Dyke 2005, 123).
- 19.
The later description of the temple of Mars (1.1982–94) begins with its exterior, not its interior; if we follow the Riverside Chaucer’s gloss of “estres,” then the passage could mean that the “interior apartments” of the Athenian temple look like those of the Thracian temple. But the word “estres” could also have a more general meaning (“an estate, mansion, dwelling, building”), which would suggest the entire structure, not just its interior; Middle English Dictionary (hereafter abbreviated MED), s.v. “estre (n.),” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED14559.
- 20.
- 21.
While I oppose ekphrasis to ecomimesis , Morton uses ekphrasis to mean “descriptio, vivid description”—not necessarily description of art works (2007, 44).
- 22.
MED, s.v. “clenchen (v.),” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED25944. Though at the beginning of the passage the “entree” is apparently open wide enough to let loose a “veze” (1.1983–85), the end of the passage emphasizes the impediments to entry.
- 23.
Garrard discusses the importance many ecocritics attach to literal language (2004, 9).
- 24.
For an ecocritical attempt to defend allegory, see Warren (2016).
- 25.
De Man maintains that allegory can never entirely dispense with representation (1983, 185).
- 26.
Not all of art history upholds this generalization (Bryson 1983, 89–96).
- 27.
Hunter draws attention to the importance of memory in the tale (2011, 136).
- 28.
Of course, paintings and sculptures change over time, and their materials have a history. Nonetheless, a finished painting usually changes at a rate imperceptible to a human observer, while any reader of a narrative can observe it changing from start to finish: a narrative is change.
- 29.
Howes speculates that the grove is big enough to contain the immense amphitheater “with space left over,” and the trees in this leftover space become fuel for the pyre (2014, 131). The MED defines “grove” as “a small wood; a grove, thicket”; s.v. “grōve (n.(1)),” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED19621. Unfortunately, “small” is a relative term.
- 30.
Morton has passionately criticized the “Law of Noncontradiction” (2016, 47). His arguments, however, are unpersuasive, and reading them I cannot help but think of the rhetorical habits of the 45th U.S. president, a man whose incessant violation of this law is no doubt related to the environmental destruction he is accelerating.
- 31.
Though knights were privileged human subjects, their identity depended on nonhumans —the “cheval” embedded in “chivalrye” (1.878). The knight is only part of “a complex assemblage capable of catching up human, animal , objects, and intensities into what also might be called a nonhuman body ” (Cohen 2003, 46). Bringing Cohen’s ideas to bear on Chaucer, we can understand Arcite’s deadly fall from his horse as an image of chivalric “self-dissolution”: “the chivalric exemplar was in fact a creature composed of flux rather than essence, a centaur sustained through malleable alliance, a fantastic becoming-horse” (47). The Minotaur penoun commemorates (or anticipates) human conquest of the nonhuman. Since knights, however, are periodic centaurs, the penoun is also a disguised emblem (bull rather than horse) of knighthood’s more-than-human nature. For a compelling examination of chivalry’s resistance to anthropocentrism, see Erwin (2017). We should not, however, forget the oppression inflicted by the knight-horse assemblage (Haidu 1993, 51–52). The “interspecies” intimacy of knight and horse enabled one group of humans to distinguish themselves from their supposedly bestial counterparts: peasants. Erwin touches upon the “conservative” effects of “equine agency” (2017, 53). However refreshing we may find this agency, chivalry entails speciesism: horses don’t spur humans.
- 32.
Pierre de Ronsard claims that God, disdaining to write with pen and ink, “Par les astres du ciel qui sont ses caractères, / Les choses nous prédit et bonnes et contraires. / Mais les hommes chargés de terre et du trépas / Méprisent tel écrit, et ne le lisent pas” (1964, 357–58). The Man of Law’s Tale explicitly describes the heavens as a “book,” though “no wight kan wel rede it atte fulle” (2.190, 203). This tale also apostrophizes the “firste moevyng” as a “crueel firmament” (2.295) in a passage whose “tormented but magnificent darkness” has become illegible to those Chaucerians committed to an orthodox, Boethian understanding of the poet (Spearing 2005, 123). However pseudoscientific by modern standards, astrology is a form of ecology , concerned about the degree to which humans are non-autonomous beings, whose acts, emotions, and destinies may be determined by distant nonhumans (stars ). Chaucer’s fascination with astronomy and astrology merits further ecocritical research.
- 33.
Most critics favor the term occupatio. Like the persistence of Thebes and the grove , praeteritio violates the law of noncontradiction: “If a person says ‘I will refrain from telling you that it is raining,’ then ‘you’ have been told” (Estok 2011, 149n5).
- 34.
Douglass also remarks that the pyre consists of “the trees of rural England,” and she indicates that the tale’s “May-blooming flowers” are appropriate to England, not Athens, which “has an earlier blooming season” (2000, 155).
- 35.
Schildgen notes the discrepancy, but for her the tale illustrates a British historical development, “how emparking led to deforestation” (2013, 95–96).
- 36.
According to Douglass , “most Middle English romances with exotic settings … seem to have specifics of vegetation and natural resources that are purely English” (2000, 156).
- 37.
Goldberg (2015) discusses the importance of affect in ecocriticism.
- 38.
Using “deforestation” to designate the felling of a grove is a catachresis. But the grove may be a forest in the medieval sense of “land reserved for the use of the king, above all for his hunting,” since Theseus, the monarch, hunts in the grove (1.1673–95). Medieval forests were “not necessarily” woodlands (Wickham 1990, 485).
- 39.
- 40.
Grimes links this passage to the widening “scope of forest legislation in Chaucer’s England”; while Boccaccio’s grove is a place of healing for Arcita, Chaucer’s version “only exacerbates the man’s anguish” (2012, 351, 352).
- 41.
Finnegan points out that “this grove is neither violent in se, nor does it self-destruct. The ferocity is imported; it is not a natural growth” (2009, 292).
- 42.
MED, s.v. “agasten (v.),” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED819. Grimes notes the ground’s “fear of the bright sunlight” (2012, 362). Ovid mentions the damage Phaethon caused the ground when he lost control of the sun’s chariot: “dissilit omne solum, penetratque in Tartara rimis / lumen et infernum terret cum coniuge regem” [Great cracks yawn everywhere, and the light, penetrating to the lower world, strikes terror into the infernal king and his consort] (Metamorphoses 2.260–61). This passage may have given Chaucer the idea that light could terrify the ground’s darkness, though he demythologizes Ovid’s imagery. See also Metamorphoses 5.356–58.
- 43.
In fairness to Virgil, we should note that Aeneas sympathizes with the treeman Polydorus (Aeneid, Book 3). The sky-gods also earn scorn in Haraway’s recent work (2016, 35, 69n32).
- 44.
It is tempting to root for Diana. One may feel that the death of Actaeon is payback for the violence human males so often perpetrate on their environment and on women (Leicester 1990, 287). Yet, however well-intentioned, such portrayals of the dangerousness of women or nature are themselves rhetorically dangerous ; see Estok (2013b).
- 45.
Like Chaucer’s ekphrasis, Ovid’s story accentuates the first-person singular pronoun. Having been turned into a stag, “clamare libebat: / ‘Actaeon ego sum: dominum cognoscite vestrum!’ / verba animo desunt” [He longs to cry out: “I am Actaeon! Recognize your own master!” But words fail his desire] (Metamorphoses 3.229–31). Actaeon dies, in part, because he cannot say I (ego). Ovid offers a long list of the names of his hunting dogs (3.206–24), as though to mock Actaeon’s inability to name himself. Such radical helplessness may shed some light on de Man’s infamous remark that “death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament” (1984, 81).
- 46.
On the surprising congruity between Chaucer’s anti-mimetic ploys and Brecht’s alienation effect, see Delany (1992).
- 47.
- 48.
Similarly, Arcite’s reference to “positif lawe” (1.1167–68) implies that “Nature, at least in the sphere of love, stands for chaos” (White 2000, 255).
- 49.
- 50.
Hansen notes the recursive effect of the marriage of Emelye to Palamon: “the conquest of Femenye that we were told we were not going to hear about is actually reenacted inside the gates of Athens” (1992, 223).
- 51.
See MED, s.v. “rēden (v.(1)),” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED36308. The word can also mean “to order,” which accommodates interpretations of Theseus that play up his authoritarian aspect.
- 52.
Chaucer’s so-called “marriage group” gives abundant evidence of the unlikelihood of a marriage free from “jalousie or any oother teene.” See also the Man of Law’s Tale (2.1132–38).
- 53.
Recent critics stress Emelye’s aversion to heterosexuality (O’Brien 1998, 163; Fumo 2013, 106–7; Pugh 2014, 112–13). Spearing links Emelye’s desire to stay a virgin to the dangerousness of “pregnancy and childbirth” in the Middle Ages (1993, 168). See Kelly and Leslie (1999, 19). Grimes reads the marriage as a positive development, a shift in Thesean policy away from Mars and toward “Diana, who in the tale reifies an ideal of woodland use that finds harmony between humans and the natural environment” (2012, 363). But Diana is a polemically virgin goddess.
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Normandin, S. (2018). Ecophobia and the Knight’s Tale. In: Chaucerian Ecopoetics. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90457-3_2
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