Several Canterbury Tales besides “The Knight’s Tale” explore the problem of making appropriate decisions in situations where there can be no certainty about the best choice. In such cases careful deliberation, based on the wisdom to be garnered from prior experience and trustworthy counselors, leads to prudent decision-making, while imprudent choices, driven by the passions of the moment and applauded by sycophantic subordinates, can issue in folly and disaster. The long prose “Tale of Melibee”* told by the pilgrimage narrator (hence some version of Chaucer) consists of an extended dialogue between Melibee, a mighty lord outraged by an assault on his home and intent on vengeance, and his wife, Prudence, who, true to her name, argues for patience, good counsel (especially hers), and full consideration of possible consequences before Melibee takes action.
More purely narrative than the “Melibee,”* but like it seriously concerned with the processes and outcomes of decision-making by those who possess domestic or political power (and in some cases those who do not), are the tales told by the Clerk (graduate student) of Oxford, the Merchant, and the Franklin. “The Clerk’s Tale” is the great enigma of The Canterbury Tales; its story of Griselda, the humble peasant girl chosen as wife by Walter, a rich marquis, who then brutally tests her obedience to him, even to the point of her acquiescing when she’s told of his apparent murder of their young children, was one of the most widely known stories of fourteenth-century Western Europe. Each version of the story differs in how it seeks to explain Walter’s behavior, his motivation for testing Griselda, and her choices in obeying him. The happy ending, in which Griselda is reunited with her children and her husband (who had also feigned divorcing her so he could marry someone of a more appropriate social rank), does nothing to efface the air of psychological mystery and extreme human imprudence that hangs over the story. In the end, the greatest mystery is whether Walter or Griselda has the greater power in their relationship—he by his ability to impose harsh trials on her, or she by her ability to endure the trials and to force him finally to suspend them.
“The Merchant’s Tale” is a quasi-allegorical fable about the high price of imprudence. Lecherous old January decides to marry beautiful young May, ignoring the reservations of his counselor, Justinus, in favor of the enthusiastic support given by his time-serving lackey, Placebo (literally, “I will please”). When January cannot satisfy May sexually, she decides to accept the importunate advances of his squire, Damyan. January, long blinded by his imprudent passion, is suddenly struck literally blind and seeks, in his jealousy, to enjoy his wife in exclusivity in a beautiful walled garden he has built—a symbol of the paradise he has expected his marriage to be. But his garden harbors a serpent, Damyan, hidden by May in a tree into which she climbs with her blind husband’s assistance, a symbolic enactment of how his imprudence and impercipience have contributed to his being cuckolded. The ensuing argument between the god Pluto and his consort Proserpina, improbable residents of the garden, over May’s culpability leads Pluto to give January back his sight, an advantage that Proserpina immediately neutralizes by giving May the persuasive speech she needs to convince January that his restored vision in fact results from her “strugle with a man up-on a tree.”
So if the tale’s message is that January’s imprudence makes him the certain victim of May’s schemes and mendacity, it seems also to be saying that blind or sighted (that is, imprudent or prudent), men cannot escape the wiles of women (especially their verbal wiles). Justinus and Pluto know the bitter truth about women and marriage, but they cannot open January’s eyes to his folly; by implication, the misogynistic, misogamous message of “The Merchant’s Tale” will go similarly unheeded. This is the ultimate cynicism of the tale: Its teller has ultimately wasted his time telling it.
“The Franklin’s Tale” uses the kind of short romance called a lai Breton (Breton lay) to pose several questions. The first is what prudent choice a wife should make when her earlier imprudence (setting a supposedly impossible task for a would-be lover in order to discourage him) comes back to torment her (when he accomplishes the task and asks for his reward)? Should she acquiesce? Refuse? Commit suicide? This leads to the second question: What prudent choice can the husband make when he learns of the wife’s situation? Should he allow her to leave him, in order to fulfill her imprudent promise, or forbid her to go, thus saving his honor as her husband while simultaneously ruining hers as a breaker of contracts? The Franklin’s resolution of this double dilemma reflects a point of view grounded in his social status as a wealthy, but not gently born, landholder: Acts of generosity, reflecting nobility of spirit that is not the exclusive property of any one class, can solve even the most difficult problem and, in effect, efface the contrast between prudence and imprudence, but from an idealistic, rather than a cynical, perspective. The three such acts he depicts save the chastity of Dorigen, the wife; the honor of Averagus, the husband; and the money that Aurelius, the would-be lover, had contracted to pay to the magician who accomplished, for a hefty fee, the impossible task. This improbable ending leads to the tale’s last, unanswerable question: Which man (husband, lover, or magician) was the most “free” (generous)?
Having showcased domestic prudence in action, Chaucer parodies it in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” a barnyard fable about Chauntecleer, a colorful, libidinous rooster with seven hen-wives. Chauntecleer’s terrifying dream (a strange animal grabs him with murderous intent) prompts a debate between himself and his number one paramour, Pertelote, over the veracity of dreams, with exemplary stories, recipies for herbal laxatives, and mutual recriminations flying thick and fast. Having rejected his wife’s counsel, only to reject his own rejection out of lust for her body, Chauntecleer encounters a fox, who tricks the vain rooster by challenging him to sing as well as (that is, compete with) his dead father (eaten by the same fox). The fox is outwitted in turn by heeding some very bad advice from his captive. This is a world in which, despite immense expenditures of learning and counsel, prudence is very little in evidence.
The other tale besides that of the Nun’s Priest to use avian protag onists to offer a tart commentary on human, especially domestic, relationships is that of the Manciple. There a bird distinguished by its bright plumage and ability to communicate directly with humans runs afoul of its powerful owner, Phoebus Apollo, by revealing that his wife is cuckolding him with a lover of much lower status; the distraught god kills his wife in jealous anger, too late experiences remorse for his hasty reaction, and wreaks vengeance on the tattletale by stripping him of his voice and colorful feathers. The lesson usually drawn from this exemplary tale, of which several versions exist, is not to be the bearer of bad news, even if it is true. Other obvious morals—don’t take pleasure in revealing other peoples’ faults; don’t allow your emotions to get the better of you in ways you’ll later regret; don’t blame others for your own lack of self-control—seem rarely, if ever, to be drawn. Chaucer takes the cynical and incomplete nature of this tale’s traditional moralization as the starting point for his placement of it within his Canterbury collection. He gives it to the Manciple, a dubiously honest purchasing agent, who, after verbally trashing another pilgrim (the helplessly drunken Cook) and being warned by the Host of the latter’s potential retaliation (he could reveal some of the Manciple’s shady dealings), tells the tale as a caution against plain speaking, but in a manner so parodically excessive as to make clear his scorn for the story’s traditional exemplary function. Phoebus’s jealous near-imprisonment of his wife (she is almost as caged as his bird) and his behavior in first killing and then idealizing her cost him our sympathy, while the bird, al though speaking truth to power, does it with such obvious malice and pleasure that it too forfeits the consideration it might otherwise earn as the innocent victim of a distraught husband’s misdirected violence. Along the way, the narrating Manciple reveals his misogyny, comparing women to animals in heat, and his complete disenchantment about the role of language in perpetuating class distinctions and protecting th
e powerful from the opprobrium they deserve for their wrongdoing: An adulterous wife of the upper classes is someone’s “mistress,” while her equivalent of humbler status is a mere “wench” or “lemman.” His final exhortation to silence, put in the mouth of his loquacious mother, puts the seal of insincerity on the supposed moral dimension of the tale.
Various Canterbury Tales are connected by, but also contrasted within, shared literary types, rhetorical modes, and thematic elements. For instance, both “The Squire’s Tale” and the Chaucerian narrator’s “Tale of Sir Thopas”* are loosely structured adventure tales, or “romances”; they also share a dubious distinction as two of the three tales rendered incomplete thanks to interruptions by other pilgrims (the Squire by the Franklin, who clothes his disruptive move in flattering words; the narrator by the Host, who minces no words in telling the narrator, “Thy drasty ryming is nat worth a tord”). The respective matters and settings of the two tales diverge widely; the Squire evokes an “orientalized,” exotic Mongolian court where rituals of courtesy familiar to all readers of French chivalric romance provide a setting for marvelous happenings and artifacts, including a ring that allows its wearer to understand animal speech and a mechanical, flying horse whose movements are governed by a kind of control panel. The Mongolian courtiers, unaware of this simple mechanism for putting the horse into orderly motion, offer a range of opinions, all irrelevant, as to the creature’s nature and function; the result is a sly metaphor of the young Squire’s inability, through inexperience, to shape his own miscellaneous fund of romance motifs and conventions into an effective narrative trajectory. Analogously—and with thoroughly Chaucerian irony—the poet’s surrogate narrator shows his complete inability to construct a credible tale about a Flemish knight whose feminized appearance and pointless wanderings constitute Chaucer’s parody of many popular English romances of his day, and also (as William Askins has recently argued) a sharp satire on the economic and military policies of a duchy (Flanders) whose rulers at that time were bitter rivals of the English monarch and English merchants.
A very different kind of romance narrative, known since classical antiquity and based on the many risks and perils inherent in Mediterranean travel and commerce, organizes “The Man of Law’s Tale,” in which Custance, the beautiful and pious daughter of a Roman emperor, endures hardship and victimization in places as far apart as Muslim Syria and Anglo-Saxon England, but is protected throughout her trials by the Divine Providence. The special agents of her persecution are the stereotypically cruel and jealous mothers of the two men she marries and converts to Christianity: the Syrian Sultan and the English king.
Narratives that repeatedly place a beautiful woman (like the famous Pauline of silent movie serials) in situations of great personal danger, often involving or suggesting rape, appeal to their audience by evoking feelings of compassion (and, by extension, of self-pity), but also, and less overtly, sado-masochistic responses to the spectacle of a virtuous heroine threatened with violation and destruction. The Man of Law’s version of this story attempts further to manipulate its audience’s response by embracing a form of rhetorical expansion quite divergent from the irrelevancies and ineptitudes of “Thopas” or “The Squire’s Tale”: an amalgam of apostrophe, lament, and other forms of self-conscious narratorial intrusion that demonstrates both the lawyer’s forensic skill in defending his “client,” Custance, against her persecutors, and the learning, wisdom, and moral stature that should (in his own opinion) earn him the storytelling prize.
“The Physician’s Tale” of the Roman maiden, Virginia, killed by her father to prevent her ravishment by a lustful and corrupt judge, and “The Prioress’s Tale” of an innocent Christian child brutally murdered by Jews, who object to his singing a song in praise of the Virgin as he passes through their ghetto each day on his way to and from school, share with “The Man of Law’s Tale” reliance on situations of helpless, victimized virtue and a narratorial voice designed to manipulate audience emotions. The anti-Semitism and blood thirstiness of “The Prioress’s Tale”—the Jews cut the child’s throat and throw him in a privy, and are themselves later punished by being torn apart by wild horses, then hung—has occasioned much controversy about Chaucer’s attitude toward Jews (who had been expelled from England in 1290 and were thus not part of his normal experience) and toward his character, the Prioress, whose refined behavior (as described in her “General Prologue” portrait) may disguise strong feelings of resentment toward, and victimization by, men that surface in the sado-masochistic elements of her tale.
“The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” is absent from the earliest extant manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, leading some recent scholars to question its place in the Chaucer canon. It may represent a late entry into Chaucer’s plan for his collection, a fact perhaps alluded to in the belated arrival among the pilgrims of the Canon and his servant, whose frantic haste to overtake the compaignye leaves the master so perspired as to prompt the narrator’s almost admiring comment, “But it was joye for to seen him swete.” The tale proper, a fairly conventional story of how a phony alchemist runs a con on a priest whose greed matches his gullibility, is preceded by two more unusual segments, an introduction and a prologue. (Unfortuntely, these have been mislabeled, respectively, “Prologue” and “Part One” [of the tale].) The former of these is a reconception of “The General Prologue” in which the narrator, instead of recalling the impression made on him by specific pilgrims over the whole course of their journey together, vividly recapitulates the appearance of Canon and Yeoman at the precise moment of their arrival on the scene and the Host’s penetrating interrogation of the Yeoman, which forces the latter to confess that the initial salvo of praise he delivered to the compaignye on his master’s behalf is a tissue of lies, since he and the Canon are failures in their alchemical quest to turn base metals into gold. His inhibitions destroyed and frustrations liberated by Harry Bailly’s cross-examination, the Yeoman proceeds, in his prologue, to launch into an obsessive cataloguing of the materials (mostly noxious) among which he passes his days in the Canon’s laboratory, in the process reducing himself to a barely human piece of alchemical detritus. The pandemonium of regrets and mutual accusations that ensues, according to the Yeoman, when an experiment misfires, spewing broken crockery and its contents across the room, would have strongly reminded the tale’s medieval audiences of the panic and recriminations among the devils when Christ comes in glory before his Resurrection to liberate the virtuous dead from hell, a popular scene in the English mystery plays.
Perhaps the most striking feature of The Canterbury Tales is the “confessional” prologues that precede (and dominate) the tales told by the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner. Both these monologues contain so many outrageous and mutually inconsistent statements that making secure judgments about their speakers becomes extremely difficult. As a result, much ink has been spilled, through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, about their motivations and moral status, and about Chaucer’s goal(s) in creating them: Is the Wife of Bath a protofeminist or simply an anthology of misogynist and misogamous stereotypes? Does she represent Chaucer’s indirect comment on the contention of religious reformers that women should be allowed to teach and preach, and if so, on which side of the question? Is the Pardoner a eunuch, or what we would today call a homosexual? When, after having revealed the tricks and phony relics by which he takes money from congregations, he invites the pilgrims to come and pay to kiss what are presumably those same relics, is he drunk? Or just adding a final twist to his deliberately over-the-top performance as stage villain? Or is he moved by some deep impulse of self-loathing that desires the cruel rejoinder of the Host, who proposes to cut off what the Pardoner may already lack, his “coillons”?
To ask such questions seems appropriate, even inevitable. On the other hand, to seek clear-cut answers to them risks misunderstanding, and diminishing, Chaucer’s achievement. The nature of that achievement is to explore, seriously but also comic
ally, the important role of self-construction and performance as strategies of successful participation in the competition for justification and mastery central to social existence. In creating his great prologues, Chaucer in effect anticipated the theorization of social behavior as performance in the works of sociologists such as Erving Goffman (whose books include The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life). Chaucer was, of course, familiar with the performative rituals and spectacles—tournaments, royal entries, coronations and crown wearings, state banquets, etc.—by which nobility and royalty constructed images of their power and hegemony. But the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner undertake their respective self-constructions and self-presentations from much less powerful and secure positions. As a woman, Alison of Bath played the game of life on a distinctly unleveled playing field; as for the Pardoner, both his body and his profession made him suspect: the first because of widely (but not universally) recognized medical and physiognomic theories that equated physical “deformity” with moral failings, and the second because the offer of indulgences (guarantees of the diminution or elimination of purgatorial suffering after death for sins committed during life) in return for acts of piety, including contributions to the building of bridges and the maintenance of hospitals, was widely regarded in late-medieval Europe as an ecclesiastical practice rife with corruption—nothing less than the selling of salvation.
Canterbury Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 4