Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition

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T H E N E W M I DDL E AG E S BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.

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CONSTRUCTING CHAUCER AUTHOR AND AUTOFICTION IN THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Geoffrey W. Gust

CONSTRUCTING CHAUCER

Copyright © Geoffrey W. Gust, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN : 978–1–4039–7643–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gust, Geoffrey W. Constructing Chaucer : author and autoﬁction in the critical tradition / Geoffrey W. Gust. p. cm.—(The new Middle Ages) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–1–4039–7643–7 (alk. paper) 1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Technique. 3. Persona (Literature) 4. Authors and readers. 5. First person narrative. I. Title. PR1924.G87 2009 821⬘.1—dc22

2008047342

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To “my girls,” Kym and Kylee


CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 1 Persona and Personalities: Medieval Lineage, Modern Legacy 1.1 Unveiling the Mask: Historical Definitions of the Persona 1.2 Premodern Persona-Theory: A Brief History 1.3 “Self ”-Projections: Modern Persona-Theory, Chaucer the Pilgrim, and Chaucer the Man 1.4 Autofiction, Neo Persona-Theory, and Chaucerian Interpretation 2 Getting a Life: Biographical Constructions of Chaucer the Man 2.1 Early Praise for the “Fadir” of English Poetry and the Creation of the Chaucer “Legends” 2.2 The Early Modern Justification of Chaucer 2.3 Eighteenth-Century Changes and “Legendary” Continuations 2.4 Romanticizing Chaucer the Man 2.5 Fact or Fiction? Chaucer’s “Lives” from Nicolas to the Present 3

Chaucer Speaks: Memoirs of the Man? 3.1 The Man and His Familiars: Chaucer Talks to Friends 3.2 The Man and His Monarchs: Chaucer Talks to Kings 3.3 The Man and His Maker: Chaucer Talks to God

4

Lives of Their Own: The Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and Critical (Dis)Approval 4.1 Lives of Their Own: Scholarly Ethics and the Wife of Bath and Pardoner 4.2 The Wife’s “Wommanhede”: Alisoun, (Anti)Feminism, and Scholarly Acceptance 4.3 The Pardoner’s “Privetees”: Physiognomy, Perversion, and Scholarly Retreat

xiii 1 4 9 28 36 51 54 58 63 68 72 87 90 102 112 121 124 129 142

XII

5

CONTENTS

Claiming the “Popet”: Ethics, Evasion, and the Pilgrim’s Progress 5.1 The Divided Self: Poetic Play and Authorial Advice 5.2 The Divided Self in the Ghetto: Chaucer the Pilgrim’s Ambiguous Sexuality and How It Matters

159 163 177

Notes

199

Works Cited

257

Index

277

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

n essence, this project began on January 3, 2000—the day I moved to England to begin my Ph.D. at the University of York. Much has happened since that day, both personally and professionally. The roots of Constructing Chaucer are found in my doctoral dissertation, but the material has since gone through countless reconsiderations, rewritings, and revisions. It is now a far different piece of scholarship, and the number of people who have helped me along in this process are too numerous to thank here. Therefore, I have chosen to single out just a handful of individuals below, without whose help the book may never have come to fruition. On a personal note, to my friends and family, I can’t thank you enough for your humor, your curiosity, and your support. Professionally, I am indebted the librarians at the University of York Library, Leeds University Library, the Bodleian, the British Library, and Hayden Library for their assistance with rare books in particular. I received invaluable feedback from audience members at several conferences over several years, and I appreciate having the opportunity to present various forms of this research. Indelible marks were left on my life and my work during my time at both York and Arizona State University (where I was an M.A. student and, later, an Instructor), and to those who gave me assistance, encouragement, teaching opportunities, or simply collegial good will, I am much obliged. I also must acknowledge the aid given to me by the anonymous reader of this book, whose detailed report left me with significant amounts of work to do before the text could be called “complete,” but it was clearly time well spent since the monograph benefitted greatly from his/her thoughtful critique. Specific thanks must be given to Robert E. Bjork, my M.A. supervisor at ASU who has now been a consistent source of support for over a decade. Also from ASU, Neal Lester and Greg Glau advised me in key professional areas, and Dhira Mahoney and Robert Sturges kindly provided much insightful feedback on my manuscript. At York, I especially owe my gratitude to Nicola McDonald, who helped to guide me through

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AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

my doctoral work and oversaw my viva. Derek Brewer, too, deserves recognition for serving as the magisterial external examiner of my dissertation. Sadly, Prof. Brewer passed away just months before this book was to be published—may he rest in peace. Most significant of all has been the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis, my doctoral supervisor. Alastair is my greatest inf luence as a theorist, and my most steadfast supporter as a young scholar; in simple terms, without his help this book would never have seen the light of day. Finally, I would like to thank the editors at Palgrave Macmillan for their hard work and assistance, and particularly Bonnie Wheeler, a wonderful steward of the “New Middle Ages Series” who has never wavered in her enthusiastic support for this project. To one and all, I borrow from Shakespeare’s Sebastian in saying “I can no other answer make but thanks, / And thanks” (Twelfth Night 3.3.14–15).

CHAPTER 1 PERSONA AND PERSONALITIES: MEDIEVAL LINEAGE, MODERN LEGACY

I kan right now no thrifty tale seyn That Chaucer, thogh he kan but lewedly On metres and on rymyng craftily Hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan Of olde tyme, as knoweth any man. —Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, II.46–501 Disblameth me if any word be lame, For as myn auctour seyde, so sey I. —Troilus and Criseyde, II.17–18 I wot myself best how y stonde. —The House of Fame, 1878

I

n Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry, it often appears that the author is present in some way, shape, or form. But this seeming presence is a kind of narrative mirage, inconsistent and unreliable. The three well-known disclaimers selected to introduce this chapter are indicative of the shifting, elusive authorial technique manipulated by poet throughout his oeuvre. Chaucer frequently cultivates the illusion of authorial presence, sometimes to establish his own authority—“I wot myself best how y stonde”— and sometimes to defer to the authority of other authors and texts, as in the example cited earlier from Troilus and Criseyde. In other instances, he creates a different kind of illusion by downplaying his presence, to the extent that the Man of Law may enthusiastically speak of Chaucer the poet’s “rymyng.”

2

C O N S T RU C T I N G C H AU C E R

With the insertion of numerous variations on these epigraphs, Chaucer repeatedly pulls the proverbial rug out from beneath the feet of readers who have begun to feel confident that they have a firm grasp on the author or his text. This deliberate and playful evasiveness is part of the poet’s allure for many readers and is a prominent reason why critical consensus is so difficult to reach on key aspects of the Chaucer corpus. By initiating many complicated narrative moments of this sort, Chaucer himself seems to be at once present and distant in the verse. In such moments, he appears at one instant to be extremely authoritative, selfassured, and even confrontational, while immediately thereafter he may be construed as submissive and subordinate to his characters and literary predecessors; he seems both confident in his abilities as an auctor, and resigned to the inf luence other authorities and narrative constructs have over him. Explaining these paradoxical narrative poses has proven particularly difficult for scholars over the years, and for good reason. They are carefully crafted illusions. The interpretive challenges that result from Chaucer’s ambiguous narrative role and presence (or absence) probably will never be resolved. But one thing seems clear: however his illusory narrators are read, they are vital. It is apparent that the crux for virtually any understanding of Chaucer’s poetry is to be located in his self-conscious use and manipulation of diverse narrative personae. As the following pages will show, it is likely that Chaucer was well aware of interpretive issues surrounding the employment of personae, which were widely utilized and theorized throughout the Middle Ages. In the twenty-first century, however, there is considerable misunderstanding regarding the usage and ramifications of personae, and the concept itself has largely fallen out of critical fashion. This introductory chapter seeks to facilitate the theoretical recuperation of the narrative persona for the study of Chaucer, and beyond, by offering a comprehensive historical account of the persona-concept. It will discuss the construct’s etymology, theorization, and perhaps more importantly, offer a fresh theoretical concept that provides new insights into the persona by emphasizing the historical distance between author and narrator, “truth” and fiction. The notion in question is “autofiction,” which designates a “story of the self ” that is creative, unreliable, and essentially unreal. Autofiction is a theoretical response to the many readers of Chaucer who are inclined to believe in a certain kind of “truth,” a predilection that—at least to an extent—Chaucer’s characters are “real” in that they authentically depict the poet’s world or somehow reveal facets of his mind or convictions. It is a reply to critics who, to borrow from Stephanie Trigg, yearn for “an elusive, virtually forbidden moment of authorial

PERSONA A N D PERSONA LITIES

3

presence” and seek to affiliate with Chaucer by hearing his own voice speak through the utterances of his narrators.2 Constructing Chaucer arose from a need to address the ramifications of such belief for the continued study of the so-called “Father of English poetry.” As Trigg recognizes, Chaucer’s poetic presence is only a textual vestige, if an inviting one; “he” and his many narrative brothers and sisters are merely fragmentary “selves” that speak in the moment and on the page, but are neither “real” nor present beings. They are, in brief, personae. Trigg does very little with the persona-concept in her masterful study of Chaucerian reception titled Congenial Souls. I, however, would like to make the autofictional persona the centerpiece of my own critique of the poet’s scholarly legacy. Hence, section 1.4 below outlines the concept of autofiction and explains its relationship to, and implications for, the narrative persona; the concept will then be applied to various Chaucerian critical legacies in the book’s remaining chapters. But first the complex persona itself must be introduced. For roughly a quarter century, persona-based criticism has widely been regarded as out-of-date and has even been condemned outright in some quarters. This mainly is due to a backlash against New Criticism, and follows in the wake of Post-Structuralist theories that were rife in the late twentieth century—particularly Roland Barthes’s idea of the “death of the author.” In spite of such notions, the fact is that the primary poetic mode of the Middle Ages was first-person narrative voiced through the persona, and with this in mind I contend that the widespread disuse or disapproval of the persona-construct by contemporary medievalists is quite illogical. To be sure, the concept of personae never really disappeared from literary discourse, and there is some recent evidence of the persona coming back into prominent critical use. Yet it is apparent that when the term is used, it is often based on the problematic assumption that the meaning of this complex critical concept is clear or widely agreed upon notion. There appears to be a fundamental lack of understanding of the persona-concept, especially regarding its historical significance and interpretive ramifications. As George Wright has observed, “our criticism needs, more than anything else, a sense of the due importance of historical ideas to the mask”—critics must understand the persona’s “mask” in terms of its intellectual systems and traditions, in order to best understand what it veils, or reveals. 3 It is hoped that the following pages will help to “unmask” persona-theory and fill a significant gap in scholarship by tracing the persona’s meaning and development, and exploring its ramifications through the concept of autofiction. The etymological evolution of the persona will be considered first, beginning with evidence from ancient Greece.

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1.1 Unveiling the Mask: Historical Definitions of the Persona The term persona has a lengthy history that dates back to the classical period, making it one of the most long-standing literary tools for writers and readers alike. In the most extensive modern critical examination of the construct—The Literary Persona by Robert Elliott—the term is described as having one of the most complex etymological histories known to philologists, full of contradiction, controversy, and enigma. Elliott also asserts that “the most striking characteristic of the term is its polysemous nature, the contradictory range of its reference,” which may well explain much of the controversy that continues to surround the notion even today.4 Contemporary philologists generally believe that the term persona derives from the Etruscan character Phersu, a masked gladiator/executioner whose deeds are depicted on the Tomb of Augurs in Tarquinia. In Etruscan usage phersu came to denote a mask, and as Elliott notes, the likely derivation from the gladiator of the same name emphasizes the visual or physical aspects of masking, which contrast the strictly acoustic properties of the logically affiliated Latin verb personare, or “to sound through.”5 Whatever its precise derivation, it is evident that in early Latin usage the term persona originally referred to a device of transformation and concealment on the theatrical stage.6 In Greek and Roman theater, donning a mask probably was sacred or mystic in its origins and allowed a masked actor to identify with and represent mysterious and all-powerful gods. The persona would gradually take on additional connotations and usages, and especially became known as a secular device used by actors playing deliberately conceived roles. From this expanded application the mask became available for a variety of social purposes, to the extent that the classicist W. Beare suggests that “everywhere the Romans turned, they found established the tradition of masked performances.” 7 This is likely an overstatement, but it is evident that, as the usage of masks/ masking grew and increasingly varied, the Latin meaning of the term concurrently multiplied.8 Bearing witness to these changes during the classical period, the Oxford Latin Dictionary (OLD) offers the following definitions of persona: “a mask, esp. as worn by actors; a character in a play, dramatic role; a character in a speech, dialogue, or other literary work; an assumed character, pretense.” Connotations indicating an individual’s actual person also are presented, such as “the part played by a person in life (without idea of deception), a role; personal qualities or characteristics; the actual being of someone, individual, personality, one’s person; (speaking or acting) in one’s own


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person or name, on one’s own behalf.” The OLD also provides these related meanings for personatus: “wearing a mask, masked; a play performed by masked actors (for persona fabula); masking one’s true nature; or masked by an outward expression.”9 On the surface these definitions are fairly straightforward, with the primary, literal meaning being that of “a mask,” and the term being employed to connote roles played either on or off the stage. In its emphasis on the “dramatic” undercurrent of masking, the OLD provides important evidence for the idea of a split character or personality, or what I call the “divided self ”—a notion that emerges more fully in the Middle Ages, and plays a key role in later sections of this study. It is the challenging concept of the “divided self ” that has particularly created much confusion with literary critics. When personae are cited in a literary context, scholars primarily imply two main types, which I term “dramatic personae” and “I-personae.” The phrase “dramatic personae” echoes the Latin dramatis personae, and it is thus a general expression used to designate literary characters that are not meant to somehow represent the author and have, so to speak, their own distinct personalities. By their nature, all personae have a dramatic function, but the function of “I-personae” is very specific: I-personae are stand-ins for the writer that typically guide the narrative and may appear to embody the author him/herself. As a textual self-representation or bifurcated extension of the writer, it is this latter type of persona that functions as the “divided self ”—although it is essential to note that both types of personae are related and both types are, in fact, crucially separate from the author. When faced with personae marked by a kind of self-division—such as “Chaucer the Pilgrim” in the Canterbury Tales10 —it is difficult, or impossible, to determine what is “real” and what is not, to identify where one self begins and another ends. The “divided” I-narrator is indeed doubly challenging, for here a persona ostensibly portrays a particular individual in a fictional text that already, by definition, straddles the line between truth and fiction, so that this line becomes even more blurry and confusing. But this complexity becomes more manageable for the reader when it is realized that, as classical usage makes clear, any literary character who wears a mask is “assumed,” a mere “pretense” that does not depict the “true nature” of a given being, or a given author. This realization is critical because it demonstrates that in the classical age—when I-personae were relatively rare—masking was not perceived as being somehow real or even meant realistically. Rather, the persona represented a convenient literary trope, a “false face” (literally speaking) that would allow for the human discussion of certain cultural and religious topics, but nonetheless was viewed as inherently fictional and unreal.

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Like the OLD, medieval Latin dictionaries illustrate the ambiguity inherent in the very notion of the persona, which can represent a particular individual, mask him/her, or somehow double that person through the adoption of a fabricated “self.” J. F. Niermeyer, for instance, references one’s personal “identity” and acting “in person” (for personaliter), while also presenting the bifurcated possibilities of an individual’s “representative, proxy.”11 Albert Blaise, in turn, registers the possibility of a second self with the (French) definitions “caractére” and “représentation dramatique,” and notes the potentially deceptive nature of the persona with “en apparence.”12 What is particularly striking about the evidence found in these dictionaries is the fact that medieval Latin usage apparently does not specifically implicate authors and their speakers within the ambivalence of the terminology. Instead, the constituent dramatic notions seem to ref lect the voices/masks of the stage, but do not directly reference the speakers/writers lying behind them. This, it seems, is an all-important connection that was to develop over time, as theories of authorship and narrative became more explicitly concerned with narrative positioning and intentionality, and the difficult distinctions between fiction and reality. The view that eventually emerged was the idea that the various personae on stage and elsewhere in literature spoke not just in their own imaginary voices, but might voice the words of the author, who could potentially be present as his or her own narrative alter ego (an I-persona) or in the guise of another, wholly separate character (a dramatic persona). As the next section of this chapter shows, medieval scholars were aware of key issues surrounding literary personae and frequently sought to reconcile the author, his or her characters, and the accountability of both for their articulated ideas. But this does not seem to have been a prominent concern of the Greek and Roman grammarians and rhetoricians. Following on from the Latin understanding of the persona, its signification within the English vernacular utilized by Chaucer must be considered. Etymologists believe that the word “person” likely stems from the Latin persona, and thus it follows that the Middle English Dictionary (MED) lists “on his behalf ” as one notable connotation of the general term persoun(e), where the dramatic, or in fact divided nature of literary usage is apparent; conversely, the phrase “in person” is offered, which signifies the idea of the persona as an actual, present being.13 This common phrase is an obvious variant on the Latin in propria persona, a phrase which Chaucer himself uses twice in the Middle English vernacular of The Tale of Melibee.14 Chaucer’s use of this phrase by no means proves his awareness of persona-theory and its attendant controversies, but it might be noted that medieval exegetes and literary scholars often sought to determine when certain content was being voiced directly by an


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author “in his own person.” Hence, the fact that this phrase is uttered in a tale told by Chaucer’s divided narrative “self ” draws attention to issues of intentionality that are central to my analysis. The MED highlights these issues by defining personal(e) as “pertaining to the person as an individual; performed by the individual himself,” or “indicating actual physical embodiment, literal as opposed to figurative.” In contrast, the MED makes it clear that any presumed connections that might be drawn between author and character inevitably must remain tentative, because “persoun(e)” may allude to an individual’s complex “manifestation,” “representative” or a dramatic “role” or “character.” Collectively, the MED’s evidence points to a body of meaning that is relevant to both the literary uses of the term persona and the nontechnical usage of everyday speech, when the actions of “real” individuals are being described. But even in colloquial Middle English usage, the persona-concept seems to indicate the likelihood that any projected person/personality may not, in fact, be one’s “true” self. In effect, the MED reveals that masking (though not so termed), adopting poses and “roles,” is part and parcel of any self-presentation. And it is intriguing to note that, as seen with Latin dictionary definitions, so too with the MED: there is no distinct etymolgocial evidence for the use of the term persona in medieval England as signifying a direct connection to authorship. Yet as the next section shows, there is ample documentation that the complicated relationship between author and persona was not only recognized, used, and manipulated but also debated with a high degree of sophistication by medieval scholars across Western Europe. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) provides yet more helpful information about the English usage of the term persona by illustrating more recent connotations. The OED’s definitions generally echo those seen above, with the literary persona specifically designated (under the headword personæ) as “a character deliberately assumed by an author in his writing.”15 This definition most closely describes the primary use of the term in modern literary theory and illustrates the fact that the terms “character” and “persona” have historically been used interchangeably by many critics. That said, it may be argued that this definition does not adequately ref lect just how complex the persona is, since various possibilities for narrative “reality” or self-division may be identified as central to the persona-concept. As the notion has evolved, a literary persona may be a mere fictional character whose speech and designs are dictated by the story at hand. A persona also may serve as a complex speaking voice or representation that is not necessarily directly that of the author, but which sometimes speaks for him since he (or she) is the creator of the text.

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The most remarkable feature of the OED’s etymological discussion, however, is the idea that, at least according to the dictionary’s editors, “the sense mask has not come down into English.”16 It appears that in place of the classical notion of “masking” and its attendant theatricality, the term persona and its corollaries in English came to more overtly indicate a stable, trustworthy human identity or “personage”: “the actual self or being of a man or woman; presence or action ‘in person’ ” (definitions offered for person). If the OED is correct, then this may help to explain much of the critical estimation of Chaucer’s poetry, specifically the long-standing, widespread belief that the speaker of the poems is Geoffrey Chaucer himself. But even if there did develop a generally understood (direct) relationship between individual and persona, speaker and personage, there also remained in English usage a lexical undercurrent that rendered these connections as unstable, untrustworthy, or indeed unreal. Because even if the term “mask” did not follow from the Latin persona into the English “person,” there is no doubt that a sense of masking remained, as the OED itself suggests by offering such connotations as “to accept the face of ” and “a character sustained or assumed in a drama or the like, or in actual life; part played; guise, semblance; one of the characters in a play or story; personal agent or actor.” If the definitive dictionary in the English-speaking world offers definitions of the persona that are deficient, then it is hardly surprising that confusion abounds in literary scholarship that applies or is based on the construct. Though it is difficult to summarize such a complex notion, it may be said that all of the diverse usages cited above apparently have their fundamental basis in the idea of a real person, either being present or, alternatively, represented. This projected personality, if you will, may take a wide range of forms, but all have general connections to the classical idea of “masking,” with the mask functioning to identify, veil, alter, or divide the person who speaks and/or is spoken through. Whatever the level of affiliation implied by the mask, it is easy to see why the personaconstruct, and thus persona-theory, is indispensable for reading an author such as Chaucer, who writes in the first person but strikes a number of different narrative poses and speaks through a variety of characters. When treating such challenging first-person narrators readers are faced with a kind of duality of authorship that results, at best, in implied positions for author, narrator, and literary character, and makes it impossible to identify with any assurance the relationships between these entities. Due to the construct’s ambiguity, an unproblematic, autobiographical correlation between “Chaucer the Man”17 and Chaucer the Pilgrim—or his other characters and personae—is not plausible. The etymological evidence just outlined shows that, even if scholars were able to remove


9

one mask, this might not preclude another veil beneath, or in fact the adoption of another “face” altogether. And as I will emphasize further through the notion of autofiction, none of these poses struck by an individual are necessarily accurate, “real,” or truthful, which underscores the importance of reconsidering many critical assertions that have been made over the years that assume an unequivocal relationship between Chaucer and his narrators. 1.2

Premodern Persona-Theory: A Brief History

In his study of the personae of T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Ezra Pound, Wright observes that “although modern criticism may seem to have penetrated into some of the psychology of poem-making and poem-reading, we still tend, along with critics of other ages, to expend our industry rather on the mask than on how the mask reveals what it does reveal.”18 As Wright suggests, critics have long overlooked the subtleties of personae; they have failed to take into full account the persona’s diverse connotations and historical legacy. The goal of section 1.2 is to address the latter of these shortcomings. A useful starting point for a better understanding of the persona and its theorization is to note that in its various stages of growth the literary persona both ref lected and was the outcome of concomitant beliefs about language, theory, and philosophy.19 As Burt Kimmelman explains, the persona “came into being in response to philosophies of its time,” and it was theorized by a variety of philosophers, theologians, and literary auctores.20 Given the practice of masking in Greek and Roman theater, it is fitting that several thinkers of the classical period take an interest in the literary persona. On the most basic level, a series of grammarians and rhetoricians debated the precise dramatic origins of the personaconstruct. Diomedes and Cicero, for instance, posited that the actor Roscius Gallus, known for his squinting, may have been the first to use the mask extensively on stage. Diomedes states that “the distinguished actor who introduced the mask (on stage) was Roscius Gallus, because he squinted and his eyes were not seemly enough (for acting) unless he acted through a mask (in personis).” Cicero, in turn, adds that the new tradition of dramatic masking was not always well-received by the audience, as “the elder generation did not praise even so great an actor as Roscius when he played (on stage) in a mask (personatum).”21 Donatus, on the other hand, speculates that the dramatic persona may have been introduced at the funeral of Aemilius Paulus, where Terence’s Adelphi was first performed and the two main actors “were wearing masks (personati), along with their company.”22

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Despite evident interest in the construct, the term persona is not always so explicit in classical discussions of narrative perspective. Nonetheless, its function is identifiable in a number of important philosophical works, as figures such as Aristotle, Plato, Horace, and the aforementioned Cicero variously addressed the speakers and voices of literature. It appears that classical philosophers typically assumed no necessary or definitive connection between even the most intense personal poems and the lives or personalities of their authors.23 As Elliott has shown, “in ancient literatures it is the personality expressed in the poem, not the personality of the historical poet, that signifies.”24 This is a crucial point, because it demonstrates that the writer(s) and dramatic performer(s) of Greek and Roman theater generally were considered to be distinct figures, so that the persona was not perceived as being some kind of “real” authorial self-projection but rather functioned as an imaginary construct that told the diverse stories of gods and the world. This mindset may even have inspired one playwright to call a play Personati, which would suggest that the creative, imaginary employment of the mask was a live issue to at least some classical dramatists, if not their audience. According to Festus, “a certain play written by Naevius was called Personati,” and the grammarian goes on to note that the Attelani, who apparently performed this play, worked together on stage to create their credible personae.25 Additional evidence illustrates that the persona was not—or allegedly should not be—directly related to the author, but served as a type of dramatic impersonation of important cultural figures and their traditions, which would be reenacted by the performer(s). Hence, the famous playwright Terence passionately defended his dramatic method, and his own authorial beliefs, by emphasizing the imaginary roles played by the actors in The Eunuch.26 In view of such commentary, the common point of departure in the classical response to dramatic literary speaking is a distinction between performer and poet, with the persona of the writer offering a performative reenactment of mythical (or worldly) characters and events, the word for such literary impersonation being mimesis.27 As it generally is used and understood today, mimesis is a term that designates the imitation of earthly, human reality rather than the simulation of mythical or superhuman concepts, which were central to much classical drama. Thus, in modern theory there is a tendency not only to emphasize the notion of “imitation” when speaking of mimesis—which is the primary meaning of the Greek term—but to signify the imitative actuality of the work on a human level, the way in which the characters can be seen as representing (or imitating) the realities of mankind.28 As this concept of imitation developed, it widely inf luenced persona-theory—since personae act as the vehicles for dramatic mimesis—and has directly led


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to many of the controversies surrounding the use of the I-persona. For, if it is presumed that the persona is used to imitate reality, then questions may be raised concerning the author’s personal intention in representing significant facets of his/her culture, questions that are only intensified if the presented reality is socially divisive or controversial. If so, then it is only natural that additional questions about his/her supposed morality would arise. Due to such questions, authorial intention would become a central concern of some of the most inf luential thinkers of the classical and medieval periods. For example, in his Rhetoric Aristotle established narrative intent as a basis of criticism—commenting on the “quality of purpose” that determines the “quality of character depicted”— while Horace asserted the pervasive dictum that poets aim either to profit or delight, to benefit or entertain (aut prodesse volunt aut delectare, ars poetica 333), a distinction that would prove absolutely vital as a basis for categorizing different kinds of poets.29 Concerns with authorial intent naturally grew as greater numbers of poets manipulated their speakers in a variety of ways. Ovid, for example, thoroughly “explored the immanence of self and the plurality of voice” in his works, and this would play a key role in his extensive inf luence, especially during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. 30 But it is arguably in the proliferation of satirical poetry that the most explicit and widespread evidence is found for the manipulation of personae by classical writers. Simply stated, it is apparent that “the creation of the persona is an integral part of the literary endeavors of Roman satiric poets.”31 Among the satirical writers, Juvenal’s biting satire may have had the most profound inf luence on personae and their reception. Time and again, Juvenal chastised Rome’s deviants and railed against the ills of his society, which was so filled with problems that one of his many personae declared that “it is difficult not to write satire.” Claiming that “indignation leads to the making of poetry,” Juvenal freely adopted whatever rhetorical mask he found suitable and used his speakers to censure any area of human behavior that he deemed fit.32 By consciously exploring varieties of authorial masking, satirical authors ranging from Lucilius to Horace produced direct attacks on society behind a veil of fictionality that could help to protect them from negative reactions others might have to their harsh cultural criticisms. Disapproval and censure certainly could be directed toward the satirist, but the use of personae could presumably help them evade controversy through the def lection of blame, which might be placed on a separate speaker, an imaginary narrative situation apart from the author him/ herself. The possibility for authorial protection that the persona conveniently provided—and satirical authors happily manipulated—would

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play a significant role in many subsequent arguments regarding the construct throughout medieval Europe. Thus, having firmly established the persona’s theoretical foundations in classical Greece and Rome, attention will now be shifted to the persona-theory of the early Middle Ages, when narrative positioning increasingly was discussed by scholars and the persona-concept itself became a much more prominent feature of literary discourse. The classification of poetry in terms of personae can be traced back to the fourth-century commentary on Virgil’s Bucolics by Servius. In this commentary, Servius writes about the speaker(s) in Virgil’s work and makes a crucial distinction that would be applied by scholars to both secular and sacred writings. Specifically, Servius delineates the three styles of writing (or characteres scripturae) that can be found in the work of any one author.33 Describing the different narrative poses that an author might assume, Servius explains that the style of a work can be called “exegematic” when the author speaks in his own person, “dramatic” when he speaks in the persons of others, and “mixed” when both styles are used. Servius’s text provides a distinct point of departure for the theoretical discussion of the persona during the period, as his tripartite classification system would become prevalent in much medieval literary criticism. Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636) and “the venerable” Bede (ca. 672– 735) both drew on Servius’s theory of the characteres scripturae. Much like Servius, Isidore explains in the Etymologiae that in Virgil’s Georgics it is the poet who speaks, while in his dramatic tragedies and comedies it is the characters who speak. Furthermore, Isidore asserts that, in the Aeneid, Virgil speaks at times in his own person and sometimes through his characters (personae), this representing a mixture of the narrative and dramatic modes.34 In De arte metrica, Bede similarly describes the different styles of writing consciously used by poets, and states that “in the dramatic or active type the characters (personae) are presented without any intervention by the poet, as is the case with tragedies and fables.”35 Bede classifies the Song of Songs as having been written in a dramatic style in which the characters speak rather than (or apart from) the poet, because when the Old Testament author of this work does speak, it is in his own voice rather than through any personae (in quo poeta ipse loquitur sine ullius interpositione personae); on the other hand, in the “mixed” style found in poetic literature such as Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, sometimes the poet himself speaks and sometimes personae are introduced as speakers (in quo poete ipse loquitur et personae loquentes introducuntur).36 These comments exemplify early outlines of different types of personae and suggest different levels of authorial involvement and responsibility—and intimate the key problems of intentionality that the shifty persona-construct would


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create, since it is difficult (if not impossible) to determine the exact relationship between author and persona. Like Bede before him, the theologian William of St. Thierry (ca. 1085–1148) was particularly interested in the multiple speakers of the Song of Songs. William thus applies secular literary theory to the stylistic analysis of this sacred text, employing the characteres scripturae in order to show that the work is written in dramatic form and theatrical style, as if it were to be recited by various personae (tanquam per personas et actus recitandum). William proceeds to describe the four main personae of the Song and notes that “scarcely any other voice is heard, or utterance introduced, in this entire song but that of the central Bride and Bridegroom.”37 William’s qualifier “scarcely” (vix) is interesting, because it may do more than just recognize the existence of several speaking voices in the Song (recitandis personae diversae); arguably, the term may also indicate an awareness of the shifting multiplicity of voices, the subtle and sometimes inexplicit transitions in narrative perspective that may occasionally include the authorial speaking voice. Even if this is not William’s implication, he may be said to register more explicitly than Isidore and Bede the difficulty of accurately locating any given voice or moral intention as a result of carefully constructed textual multispeaking. 38 Though certain voices may dominate a given text while others are “scarce,” William’s observations underline the freedoms that use of personae could afford authors. This narrative freedom is evident in certain biblical texts such as the Song of Songs, but it would become prominent—and frequently problematic—in the speaking voices of secular literature. According to Gerald Bond, “arguably the most significant formal achievement” of the inf luential French literary culture during William’s era (roughly the late eleventh to early twelfth centuries) was the development of “a more complex attitude” toward personae.39 This claim is disputable, but it is nonetheless instructive to note that in the later Middle Ages, “the art of fictional self-inclusion was practiced by poets ever more widely and with ever greater acumen and imagination.”40 As Bond has shown, an excellent example of such creative self-inscription may be found in the epistolary writings of Baudri of Bourgueil (f l. 1078– 1107), who employs a type of “polyphonic composition” that allows him to escape blame for the content of his verse, which (among other topics) includes the lyrical portrayal of the “rapturous effects” of a boy’s body.41 Recognizing the sensitive nature of such content, Baudri uses his speaker(s) to assert that “I do not speak the truth but make it all up” (non uera loquor magis omnia fingo), contends that “nothing more than the material seed is mine” (nec plus inde michi nisi semen materiei), and, paradoxically, asks his reader to “please let the verbal meaning be mine, but

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the material intention be its own, not mine” (sodes mea sit sententia uerbi, / Et sua, non mea sit intentio materiei).42 This last comment is key, as Baudri creates a kind of rhetorical shield for himself by carefully utilizing the relative literary freedom that personae afforded. Authorial evasions of this sort are not uncommon during the period in question, and often would be controversial because writers and/or their supporters could thereby justify practically anything they might write.43 As Baudri’s self-conscious narrative commentary demonstrates, his was an age of gradual change in technique, with “autocitation” becoming more prominent, and in turn, authors experimenting with ever more complicated narrative “selves.”44 Largely through the efforts of Chrétien de Troyes and his fellow French “romanciers,” romance would become the major poetic genre in European aristocratic circles. Kimmelman identifies a modern sort of historical consciousness in medieval romance, which is highly debatable; however, it is apparent that these writers subtly experiment with their chivalric narratives and display an increasingly explicit type of self-ref lexivity, and therefore it may be argued that the romances of the period play a central role in an important stage of poetic transformation marked by a cognizant and complex manipulation of personae.45 Coinciding with these developments, the twelfth century would see much scholarly discussion of the use and ramifications of selfconscious narrative speech. The commentaries of this age are remarkable for their frequent recognition of the fictionality of literary characters and the (conventional) distance from the author of these characters. Literary decorum was also a regular topic of discussion, as many commentators concern themselves with the intentions of the literary texts discussed, and hence the aims and decency of a given writer. Although issues of intentionality are nothing new in medieval discussions of personae, interest in narrative intentions would grow in the later Middle Ages as authorial ethics become even more important in the eyes of scholars.46 Peter Abelard is one major twelfth-century exegete who references the author’s role(s) in order to explain the morals underlying several works. Abelard’s discourse on biblical literature neatly illustrates that views of biblical writing often would parallel, in language and theory, the interpretation of secular literature, since the methods being developed by exegetes to elucidate sacred texts “became, with slight modifications, those employed for secular texts,” as Brian Stock has noted. Medieval philosophers, theologians, and literary commentators alike drew on a “common fund of knowledge” and endeavored to understand what a writer said, how he/she spoke in the text, and why.47 One reason for these parallel interests is that medieval authors frequently sought to reconcile the apparently incompatible authorities of their texts by asserting


15

the distinction between reportatio and assertio. By announcing (typically through personae) that they merely were reporting the opinions of their sources or telling stories they had heard, writers were able to distance themselves from precise judgments or controversial material, whether in a poem, a historical work, or a religious treatise. For Abelard, the distinction between reportatio and assertio is crucial, so he offers several warnings in Sic et non that an author’s citations of other men’s books (and their views) should not be attributed to the author himself (or his intent).48 Abelard observes, for instance, that St. Jerome “said that he often dictated indifferently his own views or those of other men, so that he might leave it to the reader’s discretion as to whether they should be approved or rejected”; in addition, the theologian notes that poets and philosophers “make many statements in which they are similarly quoting another man’s opinion as if they were based on solid truth, yet is clear that they are completely at odds with the truth.”49 What is interesting here is that Abelard seems to believe that the distinctions between reportatio and assertio are clear, so that the intent, the moral “truth” is likewise evident. However, the ambiguous nature of the persona-construct makes this a very difficult argument to sustain, and subsequent pages will show that this is especially true in the context of secular narrative poetry. Abelard’s contemporary “Bernard Silvester” also was much concerned with authorial intention, and states that “some poets write with a useful purpose in view,” others write “to give pleasure,” while others still write “to a useful end and to give pleasure.”50 “Silvester” details the common, complex system of interpretation that most often was applied in accounts of allegorical works, where the reader sought the philosophical truth beneath a poetic text by deciphering what the author’s intention was, and how and why he wrote. He explains how, much like a mask, the integument (integumentum) veils the intention of the author (unde agat) since “the integument is a kind of teaching which wraps up the true meaning inside a fictitious narrative ( fabulosa narratio), and so it is also called ‘a veil’ (involucrum).”51 The language used here is compelling. Though few, if any, scholars made a direct connection between the idea of the persona and this allegorical “integument” and “veil,” the vocabulary does precisely echo prominent lexical connotations of the persona during the age. Indeed, critical discussions often were elicited by various kinds of “veiling,” as scholars sought to reveal the (allegorical) covering of literary works and focused upon the ramifications of narrative “masking” for the meaning that lay beneath.52 In his reading of Virgil’s Aeneid, “Silvester” perceives the author’s “mode and reason for writing” (modus agenda et cur agat) as being clear-cut and identifiable—despite the narrative “integument” that masks the poet’s intentions—and asserts that his aim was to

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“recount the experiences of Aeneas and the sufferings of other Trojans” and to convey “the knowledge of how to act properly.”53 In making this claim, “Silvester” confidently utilizes Horace’s dictum (noted earlier) that the purpose of poetry is to give “profit” or “delight.” There are, however, a number of provocative narratives that the exegete might have difficulty reconciling because they do not fit neatly within Horace’s oft-cited paradigm.54 Take, for example, a pair of poems composed by a near-contemporary of Abelard that focus on the controversial topic of male homosexuality. The first of these “amatory and queering lyrics” has been ascribed to Marbod of Rennes (ca. 1035–1123), while the second, anonymous work—found in a late twelfth-century German manuscript—may also have been written by Marbod, although this has not been proven decisively.55 Whether these poems give “profit” or “delight” is in the eye of the beholder, but for my purposes it is especially notable that to present such morally forbidden fruit as male homosexual love, each poem overtly manipulates the narrative persona. In fact, the titles given to both works specifically highlight the use of the personaconstruct, which likely was the primary way in which the author(s) sought to def lect the blame for the poems’ suggestive content: the verse ascribed to Marbod is titled “Satyra in amatorem puelli sub assumpta persona,” and the second poem similarly is called “Disuasio intempestivi amoris sub assumpta parabola.”56 In these poems, the deliberate distancing of author and narrator is emphasized through various descriptors of the speaker (such as “observer” or spectator) and his role (mihi ludo), as well as in phrasing that makes the self-division of the narrator clear, such as the comment that “I am divided in myself: part of me laughs at the other part” (in me divisus de me mihi concito risus).57 In the latter text, the speaker agonizes over his role and laments that his self-division does not actually allow him to escape his desires, which he indicates by commenting that “it would not be good, even if I desired it, to become again what I was” (nec bene, si cupiam, quod eram, tunc denuo fiam), and doubting his very role as a lover itself by asking “surely I won’t always want to betray myself to this old trap and step again into the snare once I have escaped?”58 The controversial nature of the verses is made explicit by Marbod when he, or rather his speaker, ends the first poem by beseeching his adored young man that “these words of my request, most beloved, are sent to you alone; do not show them to many others.”59 These words need not be taken at face value, yet their urgency illustrates that, although the persona could serve as a protective shield for taboo verse of this sort, the assumption of an evasive narrative pose did not preclude the dangerous possibility that a speaker’s illicit purposes would be linked directly to the writer himself. The very possibility of such connections


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explains why writers of the period frequently feel the need to defend their subject-matter—because, as the current examples clearly show, even if Marbod is trying to playfully “delight” his reader, does assume the voice of another and does not share the speaker’s desires, his own values must be justified and preserved since he has deliberately assumed his role and therefore the moral content and purpose of that role. The challenging narrative “selves” manipulated by Marbod and his contemporaries helped to keep the persona-construct at the scholarly forefront during the thirteenth century. As scholasticism’s reach expanded, growing numbers of theologians elaborately sought to defend the reputations and authority of divinely inspired authors in the face of certain unacceptable or dubious statements found in their writings. Hence, Saint Bonaventure (ca. 1221–1274) explains in his commentary on Ecclesiastes that sometimes its supposed author Solomon speaks in his own person and sometimes in the persons of others. When he speaks in the person of the foolish and vain man, he does not approve of this man’s foolishness but despises it; however, when he speaks as a wise man, his words, to be taken directly as his own, are to be seen as conducive to good behavior. According to Bonaventure, Solomon’s own views are made clear by the sententia expressed in the epilogue to the work, where the auctor provides his reader with a sense of how to judge the manner in which doctrine is being communicated throughout the text.60 Despite Bonaventure’s certainty it may be argued that this example—and many others like it—reveals that the distinctions between a writer and his/her narrators are never clear-cut or indisputable when the persona-construct is at issue. That said, when considering the hermeneutic strategies of St. Bonaventure it is perhaps even more important to note that, in his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the theologian precisely outlined the “modes of making a book” (modus faciendi librum), or the various roles a writer could fulfill.61 Of these four roles, only the auctor could claim a strong sense of literary autonomy; the other three roles were scribe, compiler, and commentator, which were marked by different levels of passivity and simultaneously endowed with varying degrees of agency.62 In narrative poetry, the generally subordinate nature of the writer’s prescribed roles commonly led to the use (or even appropriation) of material from other sources, which was then frequently presented as personal experience.63 The presentation of personal(ized) experience is vital here, since the individuality of the author and his/ her role becomes increasingly prevalent in the later Middle Ages, while the tendency to defer to past literature continues but appears to be less dominant. Rather than merely being reliant upon earlier auctores, writers in this period could be compared with these wise authors in a number of

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different ways.64 Recognizing this gradual authorial individuation helps to support the conclusion that there was a “subtle shift in mentality” around the thirteenth century, with more and more authors claiming positions of authority based on their own “sagacity” and experience65 — and it characteristically was through a creative use of the persona that these writers were able to more firmly assert their own authority. In hand with these changes, it is evident that growing numbers of late medieval writers “summoned literature to ref lect upon the self,” and utilized various masks to examine the functions of narrative and to address directly the frailties of mankind.66 It is not surprising that, in a textual culture in which writers more explicitly asserted their own authority, a central theme of the day became authority itself. Closely associated with this motif was a thematic concern with the words and deeds of the author, as narrative speaker. By “words and deeds,” I mean the question of whether an author’s deeds actually follow his/her words, and vice versa—an idea centered on moral honesty and textual “reality” that closely corresponds with the distinctions made between reportatio and assertio. The theme of words and deeds would figure prominently in the growing controversy over authorial intention and the role of the persona in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as the problem arises of whether a text and/or narrative “I” really means what is said, and whether an author’s words necessarily followed his/her ostensible deeds or views. During this period, it was widely believed that a textual “I” need not correspond to a unitary person or “reality.”67 Thus, the ambiguous persona-construct allowed authors to establish, so to speak, a narrative defense for critiquing their cultural surrounds as they saw fit; and it permitted literary writers to deal more freely and authoritatively with sexual, social, and political issues that previously would have been unacceptable under the prevailing literary theory. Such breach of tradition naturally incited controversy and, in fact, greatly worried some of the period’s scriptural exegetes, who were much concerned with authorial decorum and preserving the reputations (and hence authority) of inspired auctores whose characters voiced unacceptable content.68 Consequently, like the many contemporary authors who were becoming increasingly self-conscious while actively manipulating positions of authority, a number of late medieval theologians and scholars also took a greater interest in questions of authority, which they addressed by making use of hermeneutical principles that were apparently based on, and helped to develop, persona-theory in all its facets. This system of hermeneutics is well-documented and is especially prevalent in the many interpretive works concerned with Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae. Commentaries on the Consolatio illustrate how


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late medieval scholars built upon the theories of interpretation outlined above in order to analyze and describe various types of literary responsibility, and to place the responsibility for the diverse statements made in a given work where it allegedly belonged, whether to a specific character or the author speaking in propria persona.69 For instance, William of Aragon (f l. late thirteenth century) asserts that the author Boethius molds two personae (duplex persona confingitur): the learned and the learner, or the sufferer and the physician. It is through this divided man (homo in duo dividitur) that Boethius imparts his wisdom, seeking to cure his pain by finding philosophy and, as a result of this search, ultimately being rewarded with consolation.70 The term confingitur is particularly significant here, because it shows that William perceives Boethius’s fabrication of himself by assuming the mask(s) of another. The Latin confingitur signifies a feigned construction, a creative molding of a person with a sense of invention, fabrication, or indeed deception.71 Accordingly, William seems aware that the “divided” narrative “I” is not a realistic or reliable self-representation but a fictional speaker used for fictional purposes. Though William’s reading highlights Boethius’s authorial role and assumes a fundamental relationship between the writer and his two speakers, it views the characters as characters and thus demonstrates that medieval theorists unquestionably recognized the fictional aspects of narrative poetry. And the fact that William, among others, does not wholly fall prey to the “intentional fallacy”—the perception of a literary work as the direct expression of an author and his/ her ideals—attests to the sophistication of the period’s persona-theory, as scholars from the later Middle Ages evince a nuanced understanding of the interpretive ramifications personae might have for different authors and varied texts.72 It is striking that one of the writers who was especially interested in Boethius’s Consolatio was none other than Jean de Meun (ca. 1240– 1305), who profoundly inf luenced Chaucer and whose continuation of Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose would be hotly disputed in terms of authorship, morality, and the intentionality of his personae. In Jean’s apologia to the Rose, he employs evasive narrative tactics of the sort frequently made by many late medieval writers in defense of their works, asserting (through the I-persona) that he is merely repeating the words and ideas of previous auctores (i.e., reportatio) rather than affiliating himself with these ideas (i.e., assertio). In Jean’s words, “I merely repeat, except for making a few additions on my own account which costs you little. Poets do this among themselves, each one dealing with the subject that he wants to work on, for, as the text tells us, the intention is solely to edify and to please.” 73

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The high level of Jean’s narrative awareness is also apparent in the preface to his French translation of Boethius’s Consolatio, where he incorporates part of William of Aragon’s prologue and therefore similarly comments on the Boethian speaker who is “divided into two” (devisé en deuz), into the tormented man and the divinely elevated presence of Philosophy.74 Jean notes that Boethius (deliberately) establishes himself in the role (partie) of the troubled man while placing Philosophy in the role of man spiritually elevated.75 Jean’s notion of an author deliberately playing a role, or dividing himself, exemplifies the fact that within many exegetical writings and literary commentaries alike, the “distancingeffect” of the persona is recognized. This is crucial to the understanding of the persona’s theorization, because it further illustrates that discerning medieval readers perceived that personae were characteristically creative and imaginary rather credibly autobiographical—a key tenet for my own conception of autofiction. Although Boethius’s personae elicited much scholarly discussion, other noted medieval authors’ purposeful manipulation of “second selves” incited more heated debate and even outright controversy. Among these writers, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265–1321) stands out as a would-be auctor whose usage of the I-persona led scholars to dispute the meaning and methodology of the Commedia in light of “his” authorial presence in the poem. In Guido da Pisa’s (f l. 1327) commentary on the Commedia, the several “causes” of Dante’s text are considered, including the formal cause (causa formalis) and activating cause (causa agens), as well as the form of the treatise and its treatment ( forma tractatus and forma tractandi).76 Guido draws attention to the fictional nature of Dante’s masterpiece in his account of its styles and modes, saying that “the form or mode of treatment is poetic, fictional, descriptive, digressive, and transumptive”; in addition, he observes that “the Holy Spirit Himself, speaking through Dante’s mouth [i.e., his pilgrim-persona], has openly condemned the crimes of prelates and kings and princes of this world.” 77 This is a telling statement when it is recalled that the very term persona may derive—at least in part—from personare, or “to sound through.” Guido concludes that Dante’s characters (personae) are not present in reality, but represent imaginary examples of many things: “we must not believe that they are there in reality, but rather see them as being so many examples. For, when Dante treats of some vice, in order that we may better understand it he introduces a character who was full of that vice as an example.” 78 This is a fascinating comment, in view of the fact that the majority of the characters to which Guido alludes were based on reallife figures from Italian society whose earthly crimes Dante has chosen to condemn by placing them in his imaginary Inferno. Yet Guido clearly


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recognizes that these characters were not necessarily “real” or meant to be accurate descriptions, but played a crucial role in the poet’s fictional agenda. The aforementioned Jean de Meun was another vernacular writer whose use of personae elicited significant scholarly response, such as the account by Evrart de Conty (f l. late fourteenth century), who advanced a precise theory of poetic fiction by examining narrative method and technique. Commenting on the Eschez amoreux, which he compares at points to its primary inspiration, the Roman de la Rose, Evrart emphasizes the anonymous author’s intent and the work’s utilitas (moral utility) by observing that “the principal intention of the author (l’entente principal de l’acteur) in question and the end of his book, is to lead to virtue and good works and to f lee from all evil and all foolish idleness.” 79 Anxious to emphasize this utilitas, Evrart carefully distances the poem’s author from the personae he deploys in the text by explaining how the poet feigns his presence and participation in the story. Evrart contends that many of the things said in the narrative are not to be taken according to the literal meaning of the words (a la lectre), but instead should be seen as feigned ( faintes) in a reasonable manner and may, therefore, contain some hidden truth.80 As a result, he argues that the poet feigns and introduces several characters (personnes), each of whom speaks in his turn as is appropriate to his nature—in the manner of feigning used in the Rose—since it is possible that a writer can sometimes feign and speak figuratively in a way that may prove beneficial.81 Thus, Evrart makes a clear distinction between what the self-aware author makes up or feigns and what he really believes, or what actually lies behind the most obvious meaning of his statements. This commentary offers considerable insight into how an understanding of the first-person narrator might operate, and how moral (and other) interpretations often hinged upon conceptions of the I-persona.82 It especially highlights the lengths that may be taken by scholars to justify an author’s writing and/or values. Even today this remains true, and some Chaucerians—much like Evrart—take great care in using the persona as a means to demonstrate and defend their poet’s moral integrity. The disputants in what is known today as the querelle de la Rose also were interested in the narrative speaking of the Roman, concerning themselves with questions of whether, given the employment of fictional personae, Jean de Meun should be held accountable for certain controversial words spoken by the characters in his continuation of the poem. The querelle occurred during the years 1401–1403 and pitted the social dignitaries Pierre and Gontier Col and Jean de Montreuil against Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson, the chancellor of the University of Paris. Jean de Montreuil and the brothers Col strongly defended Jean de

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Meun and his characters, and cited the persona and its distancing-effect in his defense. In stark contrast, Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson rejected the would-be protection of the persona and held the poet personally responsible for alleged obscenities articulated by his narrators and for these speakers’ unacceptable views on love, marriage, nature, and other subjects.83 Hence, principles of persona-theory lie at the very heart of the dispute itself: both the supporters’ attempts to authorize certain comments in the text and the attackers’ efforts to refute this perspective are centered on shared ideas regarding narrative personae. The surviving documents of the heated querelle de la Rose offer perhaps the finest, and unquestionably the most extensive evidence for the various late medieval views regarding narrative voicing.84 Having occurred just years after Chaucer’s death, the querelle provides an illuminating depiction of the major issues Chaucer and his contemporaries worked with and around by utilizing personae in their verse. Therefore, this dialectic represents a vital, representative microcosm of the ideological wrangling by medieval authors and scholars alike over narrative positioning and authorial intent, authorship and authority, fiction and reality. On one side of the querelle debates are those disputants who, for the sake of their argument, disregard the “dramatic” nature of the Roman de la Rose and choose to make no distinction between the author and his characters. Instead, the two famous figures in question hold Jean directly responsible for everything that his characters say, as well as what he says in propria persona—he cannot hide behind his personae.85 Christine de Pizan condemns the poet for his lecherous talk and exclaims that “he speaks too dishonorably in some parts of the Roman de la Rose, even when he speaks through the character (personnage) he calls Reason, who names the secret members plainly by name.”86 For Christine, this is indicative of the moral corruption of Jean since, although one might expect such talk from a wanton old woman, a good character like Dame Reason would not (or should not) talk in so dirty a fashion. Christine also blames Jean for the Roman de la Rose’s supposed lack of utilitas by commenting that “many people attempt to excuse him by saying that it is the Jealous Man who speaks and that in truth Meun does no more than God himself did when He spoke through the mouth of Jeremiah! But whatever lying additions he may have made, he certainly could not have rendered worse or abased the condition of women more!”87 Christine herself was a poet who carefully used personae and whose narrative approach is notable for its “conscious and sustained interweaving of historical fact and poetic fiction.”88 Thus, there is little doubt that she recognized the creative capabilities of personae and was aware that many writers were quite calculated in their deployment. As a result it


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would seem that, while her reading is credible, Christine’s decision to condemn Jean is an ideological choice colored by her views on gender, a negative reaction to the poet largely because she disapproves of his portrayal of women. Indeed, it is interesting to find that Christine’s chastisement of Jean turns on her assertion of a typical pose rendered by poets who manipulated their personae: specifically, Christine claims that she knows “the truth” in part through her own experience, so that the harsh portrayal of women is proven false. In Christine’s words, “it is precisely because I am a woman that I can speak better in this than one who has not had the experience, since he speaks only by conjecture.” She later adds that “nothing gives one so much authority as one’s own experience” (vraiement je ne pouroie d’aucune chose respondre si proprement come de mon propre fait). Hence, in this case I can speak the truth from certain knowledge.”89 In discounting the validity of Jean’s personae to speak for women, we find a reader who clearly interprets the persona for her own agenda, perhaps to the extent that Christine chooses to wholly ignore the imaginative, fictional nature of a construct that she herself manipulates in her own creative writing. Like Christine, Jean Gerson also criticizes Jean de Meun’s continuation, especially in terms of its presumed lack of utilitas. Gerson condemns Jean by saying that “in his own person (en sa propre persone) and by his own examples, he counsels men to try out all kinds of women indiscriminately,” and adds that “in his own person (en sa persone), he uses holy and sacred words to name the dishonorable parts of the body and impure and shameful sins.”90 In response to such blatant narrative indiscretions, Gerson is careful to assert that “nor can you [i.e., Jean] be excused in your method of speaking through characters ( ja n’en yés a excusser sur la maniere de ton parler par personnaiges)” since “everything seems to be said in his own person (tout semble estre dit en sa persone); everything seems as true as the Gospel, particularly to those foolish and vicious lovers to whom he speaks.”91 In light of such statements, it is evident that for Christine and Gerson, the poet is (always) directly responsible for what his characters say—even in a fictional text the author cannot hide behind his personae because immoral speech is immoral speech, no matter who is talking. The defenders of the poet, on the other hand, worked under the opposite assumption and distanced the writer from his text, asserting that Jean and his characters were distinct entities to the extent that the author should not be held personally accountable for the words and ideas of his speakers. Jean’s sympathizers thus “excuse” the poet throughout the querelle in a fashion very similar to that described, or rather condemned, by Gerson. This is apparent in the response of Pierre Col, who answers vehemently that “the work itself is my shield” since “Master Jean de

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Meun in his book introduced characters (personnaiges), and made each character (personnaige) speak according to his nature, that is, the Jealous Man as a jealous man, the Old Woman as an old woman, and similarly with the others.”92 Jean de Montreuil, in turn, accuses his opponents of not understanding Jean’s narrative technique, asserting that “these detractors [i.e., Christine and Gerson], clearly, have no understanding of the variety of his characters (que de personatuum varietate non discernunt), and do not perceive by what emotions and passions they are driven, nor to what end or purpose they were made to speak.”93 Such statements reveal that Jean’s supporters staunchly defended him by upholding the fictional nature of the text, arguing that, since the Roman de la Rose is a fully “dramatic” work, the controversial statements found in the poem do not ref lect the views of the writer himself. Instead, the disagreeable content merely represents the expressions of personae of limited standing, or altogether reprehensible character; these are characters whose immorality and questionable pronouncements are to be located in the context of the story, ascribed to the requirements of the tale rather than the writer and his actual beliefs.94 The intensity with which the querelle disputants attacked each others’ views throughout this dialectic suggests that ethical issues surrounding narrative voicing were of real interest to a number of people.95 Such interest is supported by the fact that during this polemic, Jean Gerson addressed the subject in several of his public sermons, which has been said to indicate a “widespread interest in the debate.”96 This may be overstating the case, but when the querelle controversy as a whole is considered, it appears that this series of arguments demonstrates, at the very least, that by this era, a common, highly sophisticated body of ideas had been formed, disseminated, and accepted through the commentary tradition, resulting in the moral significance of poetry being increasingly contested in terms of the narrative positioning of the author and the voices of his characters. For the study of Chaucerian reception, it is also important to emphasize that the querelle illustrates how a common body of ideas were manipulated in various ways, in this case to serve two totally opposed and irreconcilable theoretical viewpoints. This running argument exhibits how critics not only concerned themselves with the sort of narrative evasiveness displayed by Jean de Meun, but also how this authorial elusiveness actually could be used to their argumentative advantage.97 In other words, the querelle reveals how critics of the age—or any age, for that matter—could lend themselves a measure of authority by appropriating the narrative persona so that the meaning of a text fits within their own ideological ideals. With the querelle de la Rose as a kind of terminus ad quem, I have now demonstrated the continuity and centrality in the Middle Ages of


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literary analysis conducted in terms of narrative poses and authorial selfconstructions. It goes without saying that the list of medieval authors who used and experimented with personae is a substantial one that includes the aforementioned Boethius, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, Jean de Meun, and other prominent authors from the continent such as Juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Giovanni Boccaccio; in England, the foremost examples are Chaucer and his contemporaries John Gower and William Langland. It is beyond the scope of this study to examine the diverse I-speakers utilized by these authors, but this list attests to the fact that the persona was at the very center of most medieval vernacular poetry. In view of the scholarly discourse outlined above, the medieval use of the narrative persona may be summarized by stating that the construct permitted poets to work with and manipulate the characteres scripturae, serving as a shifty device that allowed them to elusively mask/mark their own positions and avoid making explicit ideological commitments or judgments. In a politically tumultuous age, the persona-construct provided protection for authors who wished to address controversial issues of the day, and sought to draw the reader into challenging processes of cultural negotiation and discovery.98 Having established these key points, I will now move on to consider brief ly the theoretical discussion of personae in subsequent eras, when the prevailing views of the persona would be transformed. This is necessary because the scholarly discourse on persona-theory during these periods is insubstantial; and to completely apprehend my theory of autofiction, the changes in the persona’s theorization after the Middle Ages must be understood, since many (post)modern theorists—myself included—have been compelled to respond to these new critical perspectives. It was also during these periods that Chaucer’s critical legacy extensively changed and grew, with the poet’s “I” read in an ever-widening variety of ways. The remaining chapters of this study examine these diverse interpretations of Chaucer’s personae, and thus to lay the groundwork for those discussions it is imperative that the picture of persona-theory and its historical development is completed. Taking the Renaissance into consideration, Shakespeare’s sonnets alone are proof that fresh verse forms and narrative techniques provided “readily available paradigms for the development of authorial personae,” and it is clear that the sonnet was a genre “in which autobiographical and authorial selves could appear as safely figurative and rhetorical.” 99 There is no doubt that personae continued to be used and manipulated often during the Renaissance, but it does appear that the persona-construct was not as widely theorized in comparison to the extensive scholarly discussions of the Middle Ages. Despite this relative disengagement, certain

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Chaucer commentators from the period distinctly employ persona-theory to explicate the Middle English. Thomas Speght, for example, addresses Chaucer’s I-persona in his important comments on Sir Thopas from 1598. Speght argues that the tale was “purposely uttered by Chaucer, in a differing rime and stile from the other tales, as though he himselfe were not the authour, but only the reporter of the rest.”100 It is generally true that, as Alice Miskimin has observed, in Elizabethan criticism the actual man is usually taken to be the “Chaucer” in the poems, while the Canterbury pilgrimage is concurrently accepted as being based on fact.101 Speght’s comment, however, provides tangible evidence that there were some Renaissance scholars who recognized the fictional signification of Chaucer’s personae, or at least acknowledged that the persona-construct rendered the type of “autobiographical” readings described by Miskimin as theoretically problematic. A similar recognition is discernible in John Hoskins’s Directions for Speech and Style (ca. 1599), in which the noted scholar seems to warn his readers to be wary of the voices and masks used by Philip Sidney in the New Arcadia, particularly the fallen and implied characters through which the writer manipulates “ironia” (“which expresseth a thing by contrary”).102 Hoskins pays special attention to “ironious” “personages” that are said to represent “counterfeits of amplification” and uses the Arcadia as an example of a “figured story” which shows that it is most convenient sometimes for the bringing in of life and lustre to represent some unexpected strains beside the tenor of your tale, and act, as it were, your meaning; which is done either by feigning the presence or the discourse of some such persons as either are not at all or, if there be, yet speak not but by imagination.103

These are deeply meaningful words, since Hoskins’s pronouncement precisely echoes the observations of several medieval theorists who understood that while they may seem realistic, personae are nonetheless “feigned” figures carefully crafted by the author. In contrast to Hoskins’s acknowledgment of a distinction between author and narrator, the majority of Renaissance critics promoted a more explicit relationship between the writer and his/her I-speaker.104 In fact, in the Neoclassical and Romantic periods, scholars also tend to disregard the distinction between author/narrator, as the lyric persona becomes more and more directly identified with the writer. This is a crucial point for the remainder of my study, because it appears that by the early nineteenth century the typical persona has become distinctly personalized, as Wright has observed; although there were exceptions, such


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as the dramatic monologues of Browning or Tennyson, the characteristic I-speaker came to represent a particular individual, the actual poet who writes the verse.105 This development may have been aided by the growth of the novel as an art form, and with it the continued extension of narrative subject matter into private life and actual, personal experience. Regardless of the impetus, it is apparent that following the Renaissance readers evince a growing interest in the real persons and personalities of poets, while authorial sincerity is widely endorsed as a standard to which literary writers are expected to conform. This trend would culminate in the emotional verse and “sublime” criticism of the Romantic Age, when it appears that poets such as Wordsworth and Keats increasingly looked inward and used poetry to explore their own beings, while critics, in turn, came to more closely identify the speakers of poems with their actual authors, rather than perceiving these voices as separate and fictional.106 Despite these gradually constituted changes, nineteenth-century authors do manipulate diverse voices, and as a result it has been observed that “the Victorians, particularly within the first decades of their era, were at something of a loss to define and defend the role of the poet, his poetry and indeed, his persona.”107 This theoretical confusion is identifiable in Chaucer scholarship and may help to explain why several Victorian critics show particular concern with what Matthew Arnold described as the “bewildering” “multitude of voices” that continued to be found in all kinds of literary texts.108 Not all scholars were so confused, however, and later chapters will demonstrate that some “Men of Letters” sharply countered the literal readings of their contemporaries by astutely emphasizing the imaginary, creative employment of literary personae. Nonetheless, the sources I have examined indicate that the persona-construct was not a prominent component of the Victorian period’s critical discourse because it was most common to directly connect author and speaker. It is not until the mid-twentieth century that a widespread critical dialectic on the persona of the sort found in the Middle Ages is seen again. Although the narrative construct itself persisted and, indeed, flourished, it would only reemerge as a prominent critical tool through Modernist literature and criticism. As the historical outline provided in this section has sought to show, by coming to terms with the assumptions and usage of premodern persona-theory critics may better understand the works of past writers such as Chaucer who consciously reacted to the theories of their time in manipulating their personae. In addition, the theories of our own age and their place within the trajectory of history may be better understood. And thus to completely lay the foundations for the theory of autofiction, I must now focus upon the twentieth century, when new theoretical

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tenets were offered in response to the many complex voices being brought to the literary page, none more challenging than Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce’s alter ego who explains in a fascinating bit of metafiction that “the personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a f luid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak . . . The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”109 1.3

“Self”-Projections: Modern Persona-Theory, Chaucer the Pilgrim, and Chaucer the Man

When Pound used Personae as a title for volumes of his poetry and discussed the adoption of masks as a vital poetic technique, he helped return the concept to its old connotations—especially of “masking”—and refreshed its theoretical importance, so that the narrative construct again was widely recognized by the mid-twentieth century as one with much critical utility.110 Instead of emphasizing the literal, autobiographical possibilities of the narrative “I” like many literati from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pound, Yeats, and Eliot placed the notion of the fictional persona at the very center of the Modernist movement. Although the term itself was not always explicitly used by these writers, they took great care to emphasize that the “I” of the poem is always a dramatic “I.”111 Hence, in “The Three Voices of Poetry,” Eliot describes the third of these voices in the following manner: “the third is the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse; when he is saying, not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character.”112 Adopting this sort of dramatic conception, these three poets (and many of their Modernist fellows) used the persona to describe and experiment with the role a poet assumes when he/she pretends to have another speak in verse, and articulates his/her ideas through the feigned narrative mask.113 In light of the pervasive theoretical inf luence of Modernist thought, a parallel development can be traced in Chaucer Studies that also bolstered the idea of the persona and helped it to fully reemerge in the English literary tradition as a notion of particular critical importance.114 The criticism of G. L. Kittredge would appear to have been informed by Modernist ideals, and can be identified as one of the prime movers in what might be called the “persona movement” in Chaucer Studies. Though he did not extensively make use of the term persona, it is clear that Kittredge had an acute awareness of the narrative function of Chaucer’s speakers long


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before persona-theory was, once again, widely popular with critics. It is worth remembering that it was Kittredge who initiated the idea of the “dramatic principle,” so that many of his comments emphasize the dramatic aspects of the poetry in describing what he calls, appropriately enough, Chaucer’s “dramatis personae.”115 Kittredge specifically alludes to the narrative mask, and presumes that Chaucer himself was cognizant of poetic masks and their usage, as he indicates on the final page of Chaucer and His Poetry by saying, “nobody but Geoffrey Chaucer divined the tragic face behind the Satyr’s mask.”116 In Kittredge’s conception of Chaucer’s “Human Comedy,” the plan for the Canterbury Tales is that the stories grow out of the character or situation, while the digressive comments scattered throughout the text are made by the storyteller(s) and not the author.117 Regarding the Merchant, for example, Kittredge concludes that “Chaucer is not speaking, and there is no violation of dramatic propriety on his part. It is not Chaucer who is telling the story. It is the Merchant.”118 Kittredge contends that almost all references to Chaucer (as speaker) are ironic and, in turn, views his narrative method as being marked by a type of authorial detachment, both of which are indicators that the verse is not directly spoken in his own voice or person—as a reader of the Book of the Duchess sees, the narrator is a “purely imaginary figure,” as much a part of the dream vision’s fiction as the Pardoner or Host is part of the Tales’ fiction.119 Despite this perceived authorial detachment, Kittredge believes that in the House of Fame the dreamer is not a fictitious character but is “certainly the poet himself.”120 Kittredge similarly argues that, because the Canterbury Tales is a dramatic work, Chaucer makes himself one of the pilgrims (“this, beyond question, is the real Chaucer”) in order that we may accept the illusion that they are as real as he.121 The fundamental inconsistency seen in Kittredge’s comments is highly significant, because it underscores much subsequent critical controversy over the poet’s narrators. Regardless of Kittredge’s obvious awareness of narrative masking, it is E. T. Donaldson who generally is seen as the key figure in reintroducing persona-theory within Chaucer Studies. There is no doubt that Donaldson’s criticism played a key role in reinvigorating the discussion of Chaucer’s speakers by utilizing persona-theory to address the complexities of the author’s pose(s). However, as Donaldson himself knew well, his own scholarship was entering a debate that had been raging for centuries on the topic of first-person narration, and owed a debt not only to Modernist thinkers and Kittredge (whom he cites), but also to fellow New Critics and scholars from other literary fields who helped give “academic respectability” to the use of the term persona in critical discourse.122 Within this milieu, Donaldson’s famous essay “Chaucer the

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Pilgrim” had a profound impact on the study of Chaucer’s personae and remains inf luential to this day. Published in 1954, “Chaucer the Pilgrim” did much to establish the very name that is now customarily used to describe the narrator of the Canterbury Tales. More importantly, the essay categorically reestablished the persona-construct as an essential tool for Chaucer scholarship. In Donaldson’s conception of the persona, there are three altogether separate, yet closely related entities: “Chaucer the pilgrim” (the narrative speaker), Chaucer the man (civil servant and man of record), and Chaucer the poet. As he puts it, Chaucer the pilgrim “is in every physical respect [the same as] Chaucer the man” but with some distortion so as to be laughable—“this Chaucer [i.e., the Man] was telling them of another who, lacking some of his chief qualities, nevertheless possessed many of his characteristics, though in a different state of balance.”123 Donaldson goes on to assert that “the third entity, Chaucer the poet, operates in a realm which is above and subsumes those in which Chaucer the man and Chaucer the pilgrim have their being.”124 It is evident in these assertions that the presumed distinctions between these three “Chaucers” are difficult to glean. And this is just one of several problems that may be identified within “Chaucer the Pilgrim.” Donaldson operates on the assumption that the meaning of the persona-concept is clear and widely agreed upon. This is hardly the case, as section 1.1 has shown, yet he offers no basic definition of the term in his essay. This is problematic because those who have followed Donaldson’s lead have often misapplied or fundamentally misunderstood the personaconcept, which is already ambivalent and confusing by its very nature. A similar issue is that Donaldson is one of several critics who have failed to locate Chaucer’s persona historically, within the discourses of medieval persona-theory. Though Donaldson is not alone in creating a kind of historical discontinuity in the study of the persona, the lack of specificity contained in his quintessential scholarly essay has perhaps made this historical gap larger, which, at the very least, underscores the need for a more nuanced, accurate historicization of Chaucer’s personae.125 In section 1.2, it has repeatedly been shown that authorial intentions are typically at issue when scholars address the narrative persona. And despite his advancement of personae, it is interesting to note that Donaldson ultimately seems to favor a view in which Chaucer himself stands directly behind the mask. In other words, Donaldson appears to fall into what his friend William Wimsatt condemned as the “intentional fallacy.” To be fair, Donaldson does not wholly read the Chaucerian “I” autobiographically, but he does seem to be inclined toward such a possibility. Hence, Donaldson notes that “Chaucer obviously exploits his


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physical personality” and submerged “his own personality into the personality of a fictional substitute, who speaks for or instead of the poet and who resembles the poet in many ways and even bears his name.”126 Donaldson even goes so far as to suggest that “the pilgrim Chaucer and the poet occupied the same body and could at any time become the same person,” so that “the several Chaucers must have inhabited one body, and in that sense the fictional first person is no fiction at all.”127 If the “intentional fallacy” is evident in what is likely the most inf luential application of persona-theory in the history of Chaucer Studies, then it should come as no surprise that many other readers, before and after the publication of “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” have supported a similar viewpoint. In fact, it may be argued that the intentional fallacy, or what Elliot labels the “doctrine of sincerity,” is the single greatest critical problem that has arisen from Chaucer’s ambiguous personae.128 With issues of sincerity/intent in the theoretical foreground, critical accounts of Chaucer naturally project three primary ways of reading the persona: they contend that the poet and narrator are altogether divided, wholly separate entities so that Chaucer’s speaker is afforded no “realistic” significance whatsoever; a middle ground is alleged wherein the speaker(s) ref lects partly on Chaucer the Man but also functions partly as fiction; or, it is argued that the narrator represents the poet himself (and his beliefs). My research indicates that the last of these interpretive positions is the most commonly seen in Chaucer’s six hundred year reception history, yet it is also the most problematic because the fictional undercurrent of the persona-construct complicates or altogether undermines this “autobiographical” perspective. Nearly fifty years ago, George Kane shrewdly cautioned against such literal readings in his book The Autobiographical Fallacy in Chaucer and Langland Studies.129 But even today, in spite of such warnings, the “autobiographical fallacy” endures and has profound implications for the reception of Chaucer, and this is why the concept of autofiction is, I believe, so crucially important. Donald Howard was one of the earliest scholars to build upon Donaldson’s account of the persona-construct, and his pivotal essay on “Chaucer the Man” epitomizes the belief that the persona somehow speaks for the poet. In Howard’s eyes, the narrator points us toward the author; he leads us there because he is the author.130 Howard admits that the poet does “mask his personality” through his ironic role playing, but contends that Chaucer presents something of himself in everything he writes—he may choose to do so by fragmenting himself behind various masks, but he does not, and cannot, make himself disappear.131 To reconcile Chaucer’s narrative complexity, Howard fosters the notion of the implied author, asserting that because we so often doubt the narrator’s

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view we are required to intuit the writer’s own; thus, Chaucer makes the reader play his role.132 As an implied author, Chaucer’s presence is not explicit but dynamic—it exists through an implied relationship between himself and his audience, so that the Chaucer we know (through our own response to his works) “is no less the real Chaucer.”133 In recent years, the autobiographical inclination exemplified by Howard’s essay has been tempered significantly; for in the wake of “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” it is now more common to find discussion of Chaucer’s narrative detachment, rather than the kind of attachment adhered to by Howard. A belief in narrative detachment is variously manifest, but perhaps is most famously—and controversially—found in Chaucer’s supposedly ironic textual positioning and play. Donaldson’s scholarship is again crucial here, because his advocacy of the poet’s “ironic” pose fostered the possibility of a carefully detached author/speaker, which greatly opened up the interpretive potential of the text.134 In Chaucer’s Poetry, Donaldson describes the author as assuming an “ironic role” in the guise of Chaucer the Pilgrim, and states that “the way of indirection is generally the way of irony, and allows for a pervasive suggestiveness to which the reader is then free to assign any number of meanings.”135 Some scholars, however, strongly disagree with such contentions and make the counterargument that the premise of narrative irony allows, or encourages, a critic to say that virtually anything found in the text is “ironic,” and therefore the words on the page might come to mean anything a reader wants them to mean.136 Another important, controversial issue that has resulted from perceived narrative detachment is that some Chaucerians have used this sundering as a way to absolve the poet of responsibility for certain distasteful content; meanwhile, others have taken the opposite view and held the author culpable for questionable material in a manner reminiscent of the disputants of the querelle de la Rose. The ideologies that underline each of these perspectives will be examined at length in later chapters. A more immediate issue is that several critics have applied narrative detachment in such a way that the very function and usefulness of persona-theory is questioned. Take the criticism of C. David Benson, for example, which asserts that “Chaucer does not present himself in the Canterbury Tales as a fully developed and definable persona but as a teller of tales” who indicates how all of the pilgrims should be read—not as characters in a drama but as (individual) artists, figures that do not adhere to the dramatic principle.137 For Benson, the General Prologue shows how the poet uses his “f lexible but disembodied” voice to produce a series of narrative perspectives too diverse to ever coalesce into a single, definite personality. Therefore, Chaucer the Pilgrim is best understood as a “shadowy


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figure” who disappears after the General Prologue, only to reappear in the Thopas-Melibee link in confirmation of his elusiveness.138 As Benson puts it, bluntly, “I suggest that we dismiss the futile pursuit of Chaucer the pilgrim, who never becomes a real personality.”139 Few critics “dismiss” the poetic I-speaker as boldly as Benson, but his words highlight what is perhaps the most important, and in my view unfortunate, aspect of applied narrative detachment in recent years. Specifically, it is not the author’s persona that has been widely discussed of late, but instead a series of voices or tones that depend on the narrative context.140 This stance is evident in many scholarly accounts, including Barbara Nolan’s well-known essay on the General Prologue which argues that the I-speaker represents “a series of impersonations” that do not fully reveal the poet’s presence. In this view, Chaucer is “a quick-change artist, a shape shifter, a prestidigitator, a player with voices.”141 Hence, Nolan locates three distinct authorial voices in the General Prologue: Chaucer the Pilgrim, Harry Bailly, and the anonymous voice that declaims the spring opening and is said to represent a clerkly guise, the learned poet of the schools.142 David Lawton’s study Chaucer’s Narrators is the most significant recent account that upholds narrative detachment in the manner just described, as the book openly attempts to accelerate the critical movement away from persona to tone.143 Lawton takes a distinctively Bakhtinian approach to Chaucer’s verse, highlighting its oral nature and emphasizing different voices and tones. His primary argument is that Chaucer’s voice is reduced to parity with other voices in his poetry—ultimately, the audience is not left with a speaker, but a tone. As Lawton explains, “this tone is not single or unitary. It is a complex and multiple play of voices.”144 Lawton asserts that a voice of narration is not a narratorial persona, but the “index and prime mover” of a literary performance.145 Therefore, he argues that it is better to reserve the term persona for cases or texts in which there is a clearly identified ostensible narrator, since the Chaucerian persona is not a constant point of reference but occurs where it is seen to occur.146 Despite this view, Lawton does cite the persona-construct throughout his study (describing “open” and “closed” personae), but simply does not favor the term itself, as is seen in his discussion of Troilus and Criseyde’s complex narrator: It is unclear to what extent one may justifiably talk of a narratorial persona at all: unexpectedly, Chaucer retains a closed figure of some complexity, and makes it seem open, virtually transparent. It becomes the voice of performance, stressing both the fact and the fictional nature of the poem. It is not the author’s voice, but it is very near to being a neutral voice. It is

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the voice of an apocryphal author commenting on his own composition, almost the voice of the poem speaking from the time and continuum of its own performance.147

Here is the very notion—apocryphal voices—that Lawton prefers over the persona-construct, because he feels that “the multiple meanings of the modern adjective cover the permutations of narratorial voice, persona and literary strategy with which I deal,” as “narrators are always concealments, bookish secrets: apocrypha.”148 Upholding the notion of apocryphal voices, Lawton contends that “a babel of apocryphal voices is enacted, stylistically and rhetorically” by Chaucer, as readers are faced with a kind of performative multivoicing, a variety of voices and tones rather than a fully rounded narrator.149 Considering the entirety of Chaucer’s corpus, it is true that he uses a number of narrative voices and that his I-narrator, his divided self, is not wholly consistent across works ranging from the dream visions to the Tales. But even if these diverse voices are somehow “apocryphal” in their function, Chaucer invariably would have seen his speakers as personae, in view of the theories of his age. Contrary to these medieval theories, Lawton’s de-emphasis of the persona-construct is symptomatic of a widespread tendency in contemporary criticism that follows in the wake of Structuralist, Post-Structuralist, and Narratological theories. In large part due to these paradigms, there has been a turn in the theoretical hermeneutic that has led scholars to discuss a variety of narrative concepts instead of the persona. In particular, a proliferation of recent theoretical approaches have concentrated their attention on voices, tones, subjects/ subjectivities, the “text of Chaucer,” implied authors, polyphonic narratives, dialogism and heteroglossia, internal focalization and homodiegetic speakers, and so on.150 The critical agenda represented by this list would seem to be a widely accepted view that the persona has “had its day,” so to speak, that day being generally seen as the age of New Criticism, which lasted until roughly the 1970s. The belief in the sujet (or subject) is emblematic of this agenda and is perhaps its most prevalent embodiment, since several Chaucerians of late have concentrated on narrative subjects rather than personae, most notably H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. and Lee Patterson. In Leicester’s The Disenchanted Self, it is argued that the Canterbury Tales represent “a set of texts that are about the subjectivity of their speakers in the technical sense and that Chaucer’s subject is the subject, not, or only incidentally, the self.”151 Patterson, in turn, claims in Chaucer and the Subject of History that the poet’s writing explores “the dialectic between an inward sense of self hood—subjectivity—and the claims of the historical world.”152


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As Alastair Minnis has observed, the basic idea in such approaches is that the subject is an ideological product that is divided against itself, rather than something unified, self-determining, autonomous, and originary.153 According to Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, the subject (whether textual or otherwise) is, therefore, “constructed in language and discourse; and rather than being fixed and unified, the subject is split, unstable or fragmented.”154 Given such perceptions, modern criticism characteristically regards literary subjects/subjectivities as cultural “sites” rather than centers or real presences, to borrow Minnis’s phrasing.155 Or, in Jonathan Culler’s words, the (decentered) subject is “not the source or centre to which one refers to explain events. It is something formed by those forces.”156 Through such conceptualizations, contemporary scholars are able to detach a piece of writing from a living being, thus avoiding the intentional fallacy while allowing for interpretive struggle and negotiation. The problem, however, is that the focus on subjects often falls into its own trap, “more or less abolishing human subjects altogether,” as Terry Eagleton has noted.157 Whether scholars focus on subjects, voices, tones, or any other related notion, it may be said that these approaches often disregard the importance and vitality of the actual person who wrote the texts being analyzed. And, as Eagleton’s general view recognizes, critics cannot altogether ignore or “abolish” the poet Chaucer, although they are unable to definitively garner his thoughts. Thus, it is essential that Chaucerian scholarship pays due attention to many author-functions and/or cultural subject-positions—including the medieval author himself. This is not to say that the problematic notion of the “doctrine of sincerity” should be upheld; quite the contrary, as there is little doubt that the intentional fallacy is, indeed, theoretically fallacious. I contend that the personaconstruct deserves recognition as a more useful critical tool than subjects, voices, tones, or any other aligned contemporary practices because it allows readers to consider both the author—the originator of a text who must retain some measure of authority—and a variety of potential subjectivities that surround a given work as it enters into social transaction. And given its fictional resonance, the persona-construct encourages critics not to fall prey to the intentional fallacy. Moreover, the persona represents a historically viable critical concept that, in fact, explicitly serves many of the very functions implicated by modern ideas of the subject, voice, and so on. Hence, although the persona-construct is no longer prevalent in twenty-first century critical discourse, its ghost still hovers in/around a variety of notions that would seem to support its continued significance. Recognizing this endurance and utility, a strong case can be made in support of a historically based, neo persona-theory for use in

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literary studies today and in the future. I would now like to make such a case, by presenting the concept of autofiction in order to demonstrate what a refreshed persona-theory might look like and do for the study of Chaucer and his critical reception. 1.4 Autofiction, Neo Persona-Theory, and Chaucerian Interpretation As Elliott has observed, the issues surrounding the persona are deep and fundamental. At stake are questions about the nature of the self, about sincerity and its values, and about the truth-claims of literature.158 Faced with such issues, literary scholars have frequently contested the persona— yet the construct has stood the test of time. For those who would question this enduring legacy, consider the words of Langston Hughes as he coped with the pressure of potentially being labeled a communist during the infamous McCarthy hearings of the 1950s. Under great scrutiny about his views, Hughes explained his personal “feeling about creative writing” by stating that he did not necessarily believe in the allegedly communist perspective of the poem “Scottsboro Limited” “because I was writing in characters” and thus the ideas were appropriate to the narrative situation and speaker alone.159 Or more recently, take Salman Rushdie’s post-fatwa retractions, where he felt compelled to mitigate certain content found in The Satanic Verses by publicly announcing his Islamic faith and declaring “that I do not agree with any statement in my novel . . . uttered by any of the characters who insult the prophet Mohammed or cast aspersions upon Islam or upon the authenticity of the Holy Quran.”160 Both Hughes and Rushdie recognize the importance of various personae to an author, whether for purposes of self-defense or literary creativity. And their words make it clear that the persona-construct has not, in fact, “had its day.” In Chaucer Studies, there seems to be a prevailing view that Lawton’s account of Chaucer’s Narrators is perhaps the “last word” on the poet’s personae. But this could not be further from the truth. Chaucer’s Narrators is in many respects a commendable book, and Lawton does make an interesting case by subverting the persona-concept through the assertion of “the end of a critical tradition” (i.e., dramatic readings of Chaucer’s verse) because he feels that “not every narrator is a persona, and not every persona really amounts to more than a narratorial voice,” while “the narratorial persona supplies not a fully rounded character but a variety of responses and tones.”161 However, the fact that Lawton himself uses the term persona throughout the book signals the concept’s continuing importance. In essence, what Lawton and other critics are doing by using


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more recent terminology is presenting “old wine in new bottles,” given that, in Lawton’s own words, Chaucerian verse highlights the “duality of the narratorial persona, and this duality, in the style and tradition of the Roman de la Rose, is the sine qua non of the generous and unpredictable tonal range.”162 This comment neatly demonstrates that the persona, by definition, overlaps with and functions in a manner similar to “apocryphal” voices or tones—Lawton’s preferred terms—and also resonates with critical applications of dialogism, subjectivity, homodiegetic narration, performativity, and so on. Take, for example, Mikhail Bakhtin’s assertion of “polyphonic” narratives, wherein one finds “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices” that give the impression that “one is dealing not with a single author-artist who wrote novels and stories, but with a number of philosophical statements by several author-thinkers.”163 Bakhtin applies his “polyphonic” paradigm to the novels of Dostoevsky, which are “dialogic through and through” as “the genuine life of the personality is made available only through a dialogic penetration of that personality, during which it freely and reciprocally reveals itself.”164 Does this conceptualization not parallel the persona-construct, with its classical roots tied into dramatic characters, multiple (false) faces, and in fact dialogue? Like Bakhtin, Gérard Genette is critically acclaimed for his narrative theories, which include a belief in narrative “distance” and “focalization,” and resistance to the use of “inadequate” locutions for narrative perspective (i.e., first or third person) because the writer’s choice “is not between two grammatical forms, but between two narrative postures”: “heterodiegetic” texts are told by a narrator beyond the story, and “homodiegetic” works are offered by a speaker who is a participant in the story.165 In either case, Genette sees “distance” and “perspective” as “the two chief modalities of that regulation of narrative information that is mood.”166 Here again, it is difficult not to hear a distinct echo of persona-theory in these contentions, and this echo is undeniable in the following words on Stendhal’s complex narratives, which Genette describes as “highly variable” works told by a narrative “I” who “is rarely identical with the person” of the author: “the paradox of [narrative] egotism is more or less this: to speak of oneself, in the most discreet and unrestrained way, may be the best way of concealing oneself. Egotism is, in every sense of the term, a parade.”167 In a similar vein, several other recent examples could be cited, all pointing toward the same conclusion: whether an egotistic “parade,” a dramatic “charade,” or a literary “masquerade,” the persona is a key player. Whether the text was written in 1400 or 2008, the persona- construct

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is critical. And whether scholars choose to reference voices, tones, subjects, dialogism, or homodiegesis, the persona essentially serves the very same functions but merely assumes the “mask” of variant terminology. Although these recent concepts have been very useful in advancing the theoretical agenda, one might wonder why critics do not simply use the term with the most historical tradition and consistency: the narrative persona. This would allow for a more accurate comparison of different eras, different authors, and different ideas about narratives, and would not necessitate the elimination of other, related concepts; rather, these notions merely would be located within the long-standing scholarly hermeneutic of persona-theory. A recuperation of the personaconstruct would, in fact, not only span several theoretical paradigms but also encourage critics to pay close attention to history itself, because to retheorize the persona, its meaning and history must be understood, as well as its interpretive applications, analogues, and ramifications. To revitalize persona-theory, a historical focus is needed, which brings into play a broad historical palette to help illustrate that persona-theory is still fresh, compelling, and indeed vital today despite the fact that, in this case, “what is new is old.” An important aspect of persona-theory’s historical legacy is that—as Judith Butler’s theories of performativity have made eminently clear—we all adopt various “masks” and play any number of different roles in our daily lives, whether we are aware of them or not.168 Like the typical narrative “I,” our own “selves” constantly shift and change: as Wright puts it, “everyone assumes certain roles, which alter slightly as he moves from one situation to another. Our audience largely determines the face we shall put on.”169 In support of this view, contemporary sociological accounts describe how every individual enacts a multiplicity of roles in his/her capacities as a parent, friend, lover, employee, and so on—with the ritual requirements of each role being determined by society.170 Seen within this cultural context, it is apparent that the literary persona is a pivotal narrative creation that mimics/mocks our own multifaceted lives. The persona registers the inherent diversity, plurality, or instability of mankind, all of which may partially explain why the construct often proves difficult for critics to grasp. Today, we live in a world that “especially prizes individuality,” an individuality that narrative personae may uncomfortably undermine and question as a stable human ideal.171 Moreover, it is evident that humans habitually, if not instinctually, search for the “real” figure that hides behind the mask.172 Yet the fact is that this identity is evasive even when considering our own selves, as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others helped to establish for modern psychology.


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Narratologist James Battersby explains this elusive self hood by saying that like many sentient creatures, we have conscious selves, selves we are conscious with, and like a rather select few of those creatures, we have selves we seem to be able to be conscious of (we know what it’s like to be selfconscious), and, finally, like no other (or almost no other) creatures, we have the ability to be conscious of our consciousness of being conscious. What we don’t seem to be able to do is to ferret out the one and only self that is endowed with such powers and hold it up to the light and see it for what it really and truly is or is like.173

As human beings making our own history, we constantly grow, mature, and change—we are “both Diachronic and Episodic, evanescent and enduring, both other and the same, protean and persistent.”174 Consequently, when an individual speaks as an “I” that “self ” is different than any past “I” that is talked about; in Battersby’s words, the “I is and is only a now experience.”175 Battersby demonstrates that we can never fully know our own “selves,” but can merely portray them as we see best through a kind of self-interpretation that inevitably differs from the perspectives of others, and is in the moment, of the moment, and ideologically appropriate for the moment. If our own “selves” are inherently elusive, then the authorial “self ” is doubly so when enacted on the page as a narrative I-persona. The I-persona represents a detached literary “self ” that blurs the lines between fiction and “reality” and makes it impossible to pinpoint the “truth” of the text, the author, and his/her narrative stand in. These challenges also adhere with dramatic personae, which are not surrogates for the author yet may likewise seem “real” or purport to tell “the truth”— but that “reality” is feigned and unreliable, at best. Hence, like the history of mankind, the history of persona-theory is a complicated story, full of drama, masking, and individual theatrics. Both histories are marked by conf lict, ambivalence, discomfort, and outright confusion. These are among the traits that come together to make us uniquely human, and when seen in our literature, these characteristics lead to many questions and few answers. Yet the questions that humanlike personae elicit certainly are worth asking. By definition, any literary work is voiced by speakers with some sort of oblique relationship to the author him/herself. Whether written in the first, second, or third person, the material on the page is the direct result of the writer who has produced the text; whether presented in the form of hagiography, drama, or verse, the work is somehow connected

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to the author. This historical connection may very well be the major reason for the constant critical controversy surrounding the persona, but it is important to note that there is a “creative instinct which allows all intelligent artists and writers to distance themselves from their work,” as Leo Carruthers has observed.176 The persona, in fact, signifies this very distance by distinctly marking off poet and character, creative writing and historical fact; it is a sign of fiction, of storytelling, of narrative play. What is interesting here is that, following the rise of the novel and its techniques, countless critics have recognized the instinctual creative “distance” described by Carruthers and thus chosen not to read a given fictional I-narrative as authentic or autobiographical. But in Chaucer Studies, the opposite commonly has been true. And this disparity would seem to highlight a critical gap in logic, as more “ancient” literary narratives customarily are connected in various ways to their authors, while the same kind of direct relationship is not as frequently projected for other, more recent works (novels in particular). Whatever the date, it is fundamental to the creative writing process that “in all poems it is a persona, not a poet, who speaks the actual words.”177 And as I have demonstrated, the persona is not only historically consistent as a literary device but also theoretically f lexible as a critical device. The construct offers a logical counter to the so-called “death of the author,” serves subjectivity in its functioning, and forwards a variety of ideas that tie into theories of narratology and other relevant paradigms.178 The persona is not, therefore, merely useful as “a salutary contribution to what should be a central topic of Chaucer criticism: tone,” as Lawton has argued.179 Rather, the persona is and should be seen as a “central topic” of literary history, broadly conceived, and is crucial to Chaucer’s works. Recognizing and utilizing persona-theory allows both the author and the reader to retain their own (relative) authority; persona-theory permits readers to mediate between biographical criticism and the “death of the author”—while carefully avoiding the intentional fallacy; and it helps critics to reconcile the different voices, tones, characters, and content that must be addressed in any given textual reading. This chapter has done much to articulate and defend such notions, and in turn has sought to redress the recent critical backlash against the persona fostered by Lawton and others. But my work is not yet complete. For there is still more to be said about (neo) persona-theory and its implications to ensure that the advice of Evelyn Vitz is followed, and critics of medieval literature “keep revising [their] theories and paradigms to fit the data (the works, the culture) and not, as is so common, the other way around.”180 To conclude my reexamination of the persona, I must elaborate further on the notion of autofiction, a theoretical concept that helps to provide a


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more complete understanding of the persona’s narrative signification and interpretive ramifications. Autofiction is a response to several narrative paradigms, including its original usage by Serge Doubrovsky. His conception, however, had little or no impact on medieval studies, and my own usage of the term is meant to convey a more complete separation of author and artifice.181 More overtly relevant to my project is Lawrence de Looze’s notion of medieval “pseudo-autobiography.” In de Looze’s model, pseudoautobiographical texts are works that manipulate first-person narrative and insist on the identity between author and narrator, “while disjunction also obtains.” The hallmarks of pseudo-autobiography are that “one’s belief in the truth of signs seems to be affirmed and denied” as the author “plays with questions of truth, authority, and the relation between life in a book and life outside a book.”182 Though it is apparent that some critics hold fast to a sort of “mimetic ideology”—believing that all texts present certain worldly realities—the interpretive challenge of pseudo-autobiography lies in the fact that in such texts words may not follow deeds, even when they claim to.183 De Looze’s notion of pseudo-autobiography has much to recommend it, but I believe that an even better theoretical concept is autofiction, because it does not imply some sort of partial fictionality (or semi-fiction) and does not seem to suggest the same autobiographical register. Instead, autofiction explicitly denotes a “story of the self” and highlights the fact that first-person narration is necessarily contrived and categorically fictional; it is not a realistic self-presentation. As I use the term, Autofiction emphasizes that any literary self-presentation is a creative construction, a narrative doubling in which the fictional surrogate need not look, think, or feel like the author him/herself. The same may even be true of autobiography “proper” since “the I who speaks, speaks of himself as another. The me to whom the I refers is someone else: a past self, someone who no longer exists.”184 Some critics might dispute such a notion in reference to autobiographical writing, but it is difficult to contest the view that in fictional writing the gulf between the authorial self and his/her narrative “selves” is even larger. As Henrik Nielsen explains, in first-person narratives there “need not be an existential indexical continuity” between the I-speaker and the authorial voice; and there is little doubt that “ ‘the real world’ outside the text and ‘the real world’ as it is created in the text are by necessity not the same.”185 Accordingly, the concept of autofiction signifies that critics cannot hope to somehow recover “the facts” about an author’s life by reading his/her literary works, because what is found in such works is explicitly a fiction of the self, as the term implies. It is undeniable that the I-persona often gives the impression that social reality or experience makes itself felt in a text, and we need look no further than the Canterbury Tales for such enticing literary material. However, the presence of personae also means that this impression may be, and likely is, simultaneously “co-opted” by the author for his/her own

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narrative purposes.186 Seen within the aegis of autofiction, the I-persona is best perceived as a consciously applied literary device that should remind the interpreter that the fiction is fiction, urging him/her to “activate the critical intelligence, while deactivating the affectations.”187 Rather than functioning as autobiography or offering the direct views of the author, the I-persona serves as both a fictional device and a fictional warning, pointing out to the reader that there may be no “truth” in the “true” tales told by a given writer, and perhaps even questioning the possibility of authoritative “truth” itself. This may be taking the point too far, and none of the observations above are intended to suggest that authors do not present some part of themselves in their work. Inevitably, they do, but critics should be wary of overstating the supposed autobiograph-ality of a given I-narrative. An effective way to address this issue is to apply Michael Zink’s notion of the “mark of autobiography,” which recognizes that certain medieval authors may well have offered some accurate details and autobiographical f lourishes in their works.188 Yet readers do not learn much about the typical first-person speakers who leave their autobiographical “mark,” and the world they depict is far more imaginary than it is in any way “real.” Contemporary Chaucerians, in fact, generally recognize that the poet’s corpus does not provide a “real” account of Chaucer’s life, but they frequently betray this belief by perceiving the I-narrator as being somehow a version of the actual author.189 On the contrary, the evidence that has come down from the Middle Ages, including that offered in section 1.2 above, seems to indicate that most medieval readers were wellaware that a narrative I-persona had a literary and not autobiographical function. When scholars addressed such works as Dante’s Commedia, Boccaccio’s Decameron, or Chaucer’s Tales, the prevailing attitude apparently was to recognize that poetic narrators were, indeed, imaginary creations offered within an imaginary world. It even seems likely that an audience hearing an oral performance of first-person verse knew that the recital did not provide an “actual” representation of the author and his world, but a mere playful persona loosely related to the poet and his surrounds. Though they obviously did not use the term, the late medieval literary audience evidently perceived the contingencies of autofiction, and generally realized that, at most, a narrative “I” offered a mere “mark of autobiography.” Interestingly enough, the case for medieval autofiction is perhaps no better made than by looking at the historical realities of autobiography. As Elizabeth Heale has observed, the very notion of autobiography did not enter the English lexicon until the nineteenth century, during “the heyday of that search for a unique individuality.”190 The derivation of the


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term is Greek, and its antecedents date back to the classical age when various authors wrote personal orations and apologias. In the Middle Ages there was a series of confessions of the sort famously offered by Saint Augustine, but, in general, there does not appear to have been much interest in the autobiographical form. As Zink explains, even when he put himself at the center of his work, a medieval author was rarely writing autobiography in the modern sense, that is, not only a systematic account of his own life but an account conducted from his own life’s perspective, in which the world appeared through the dual gaze that he brought to bear on himself during his existence and on this gaze itself at the moment of writing. Autobiography as a specular account was little used in the Middle Ages.191

Although “autobiography” was not commonly featured in medieval writing, autofiction represents a type of creative first-person writing that was prominent in the Middle Ages. To underline the questionable nature of the very notion of medieval “autobiography,” one need look no further than The Book of Margery Kempe, which is arguably the most famous “autobiography” written in medieval England. But Margery was apparently illiterate, and she dictated her story to two different scribes who mediated and embellished the content. Hence, there is a significant element of fiction to Margery’s Book, and as a result, the “truth” of this extraordinary text must be questioned and the work itself may be labeled as offering a distinctive variety of autofiction. Characterized as such, Margery’s story demonstrates that “the fictional exhibition of the self . . . [is] based on an attention to the subject quite different than what is presumed by autobiography, the subject’s search for its own elucidation by going back over its past.”192 Margery’s example provides further evidence that the autofictional “I” should not be confused with the authorial or autobiographical “I,” and this is especially true of medieval narratives because autobiography itself was rarely found in the age. Filtered through the hands of two scribes, Margery’s I-narrator clearly illustrates the (auto) fictional nature of any given literary speaker, which dictates that he/ she “has to some extent escaped out of the poet’s life into an independent existence, so that the act of creation is also an act of separation,” as Richard Ellmann has noted.193 This holds true whether one is speaking of a twenty-first century novelist or a medieval mystic, and therefore “the first point almost anyone in the field of narrative will agree on nowadays with regard to narrators is that they should not be confused with authors.”194 In theory, this contention would seem difficult to argue against in the modern critical

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hermeneutic. But in practice, it is still broadly true that regardless of the context or the theoretical tools being used, some Chaucerians see in the narrator a kind of direct relationship with Chaucer the Man himself.195 Thus, one of the main intentions of Constructing Chaucer is to address the fact that Chaucer’s readers have consistently favored questionable autobiographical perspectives, and in so doing have frequently overlooked the narrative implications of personae, or the realities of what I call autofiction. Whatever the extent of a given critic’s autobiographical inclination, there is a long-standing view that “in all stories the characters are at one level splits of the total mind of the author” so that the persona “has, so to speak, a foot in both the subjective and objective world. He [or she] both is and is not the poet.”196 However, even if there is some kind of autobiographical mark in/on the text, this belief is problematic because, in simple terms, the persona is not the poet. Given all the evidence above regarding autofiction, the common (autobiographical) connection between Chaucer and character, poet and persona is highly dubious, and is rendered even more so when it is recalled that Chaucer’s poetic surrogate is not consistent across the works. Even in the Canterbury Tales, where we find “Chaucer the Pilgrim”—the narrative “I” who has most often been read as the poet’s autobiographical alter ego—the speaker is elusive and unstable, dramatically shifting and changing in the course of the fictional pilgrimage. At one moment he represents a dimwitted “elf,” at another a magisterial auctor; his presence is at once immediate and powerful, and shortly thereafter he may seemingly disappear or be subjugated by another voice. In other poems, such as The House of Fame or The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer’s I-speaker does not change as profoundly as “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” yet in either of these examples the audience learns very little about a given narrator, let alone the author who has inscribed him. Overall, the corpus contains many different narrative “Chaucers,” who are neither consistent nor especially revelatory. Hence, readers hardly are offered a precisely centered autobiographical self, whether considered collectively or within a single text. And in any of the examples just cited, it is difficult to definitively link the narrator with the “realities” of Chaucer the Man. More to the point, it is futile to make such connections, because a given Chaucerian “self ” is a mere fiction of the self. It is not Chaucer the Man who speaks, but various autofictional “Chaucers” who provide nothing more than a “mark of autobiography,” and may well give the reader even less. As an autofictional construct, the persona perpetuates the distance between art and reality, because no matter how close the relationship


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between author/text, this gap remains.197 In Ellmann’s terms, the presence of the narrative persona “distorts, heightens, simplifies, and transmutes.”198 As this phrasing implies, the persona creates complex challenges for the reader, but these challenges can be overcome through a careful, historically informed application of persona-theory, and specifically the theory of autofiction. For this neo persona-theory recognizes that the author is not “dead,” but counters the intentional fallacy by viewing his/her text as a literary fragment, in the most literal sense a figment of his/her imagination that speaks through multiple voices. The critic who applies this particular theory is prompted to recognize that the I-narrator does not provide autobiography or some kind of accurate social history, but is an artistic construct that renders the writer’s own beliefs, feelings, and obsessions forever unrecoverable. As a result, the scholar is encouraged to examine the I-speaker in terms of its literary function, its fictionality, while objecting provisionally to any perceived “realistic” statements made by any characters. In spite of critical fashion, it is somewhat surprising that very few contemporary critics have supported the premises and utility of personatheory just described. Cheryl Walker is one scholar who notably upholds the promise of the persona, and has proposed an elaborate system of “persona criticism” that aims to reconceive the author-function by recognizing that the narrative mask may be related simultaneously to the biographical author and to other cultural voices. This strategy, Walker explains, is an appealing one for those who are committed to talking about the author and do not want to fall into the trap of limiting the text, but instead hope to suggest avenues of potentiality.199 Walker, like many scholars before and since, might be read as being somewhat inclined toward the intentional fallacy, and her intricate application of “persona criticism” undeniably falls short from a historical perspective, failing to adequately address the meaning and usage of the persona from premodern to postmodern times. Nonetheless, as a vocal adherent of persona-theory swimming in a sea of critical dissenters, Walker deserves recognition for providing important ideas and a compelling theoretical approach. Primary among its merits is that Walker’s “persona criticism” views the narrative “I” as a creative application that has a literary, and not necessarily a literal (autobiographical) function. Walker also suggests a viable way to address the many problems that are inherent in the persona-construct, by examining the historical and theoretical context of a given narrative “I,” exploring the functions of the speaker in light of the time-period in question. As Walker’s chosen (Foucaultian) terminology indicates, when faced with a narrative persona scholars are best served by considering literary and cultural author-functions that might help to open up the text’s

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interpretive possibilities, and I would argue that critics must place these functions within their historical context. The current study, it is hoped, illustrates this approach and its utility by employing a historically based theoretical paradigm through which the transient space represented by the poet can be analyzed, alongside that of his characters and readers. By applying the type of persona-theory advocated on these pages, critics are able to consider authorial effect and the literary functions of various speakers, while usefully directing attention toward different levels of perception—historical, literal, figurative, and so on. This seems an especially worthwhile approach for Chaucerians, since the poet himself apparently manipulated the distance between author and persona(e) at different places, and for different effects. Therefore, by considering the Chaucerian mask in this way, examining its historicity and autofictional functions rather than simply attempting to identify the human figure behind the veil, the persona-construct is used to broaden the critical horizons and perpetuate numerous textual possibilities, with the author serving as merely a prominent—if theoretically distant—figure within a complex matrix of interpretive potentiality.200 The interpretive potential of the persona is crucial to my conceptualization, because the construct not only is central to medieval literary writing, but also functions as a facilitator of multiple meanings and is thus at the core of a great many scholarly discussions. As Lawton has observed, the vast critical process surrounding the Chaucerian persona—from the poet’s use of the construct to readers’ various responses to it—shows how and what scholars think of reading as an ideological relationship between text and context, writer and reader, literature and society, and ultimately brings to the fore the question of authority in literary and interpretive practice.201 Or put another way, critical perceptions of the construct are a result of, and have profound implications for, the history of Chaucerian reception. And persona-theory provides a f lexible tool that serves as a kind of “theoretical interface between narrative structures and strategies on the one hand and interpretive approaches on the other,” and allows scholars to mediate historically “between textual features and contextual and pragmatic aspects, as well as political, philosophical, anthropological, psychological concerns.”202 My theoretical model of the autofictional persona permits the critical reader to examine a given work within its textually inscribed limits, while likewise considering the “multiple perspectives, different critical metalanguages and didactic methods” that have been applied to the same text.203 By using the persona to read, and read historically, its usage can therefore be traced and its many interpretations compared, and in the process, scholars may “speak” with multiple voices from divergent eras.


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With this wonderful potentiality, however, comes a major challenge of both the persona and persona-theory: as Carruthers explains, the identification of multiple author-functions may result in “a sort of critical schizophrenia.”204 But this “schizophrenia” need not be a hindrance, because multiple meanings are arguably ideal, and perhaps even inevitable given the nature of Chaucerian verse. By presenting “himself ” in his texts—or a mere vestige thereof—Chaucer both resists and contradicts ideas regarding the Man in his poems, as well as ideas about the Man drawn by scholars from his poems. “Truth” in any case seems a notion that is not only unlikely, but in the end impossible because Chaucer appears to undermine any such contingency with the elusive persona, which creates such a degree of ambiguity that no single reading can unquestionably describe what the poet “really” intended. In fact, Chaucer’s manipulation of the persona seems to encourage such a wide range of interpretations and possibilities that it not only renders the search for a sort of Chaucerian “truth” to be an altogether impossible task, but perhaps also reveals this very possibility itself as being a critical pose that is fraught with deep ideological implications. If this view is correct, then it would seem that ideological consideration, mediation, and contingency are encouraged through the text, so that an important function of the autofictional persona is to serve as a constant reminder to writer and reader alike of the impossibility of ever knowing the “truth.” Chaucer’s narratives simply do not lend themselves to definitive answers, but this is precisely what many critics have sought to find. Time and again, scholars have made assertions of positivistic “truth” and understanding regarding Chaucer’s oeuvre, an absolutely vital point for the study of Chaucerian reception. And it is for this reason that I see queer theory as a promising corollary to my own vision of persona-theory, because queer theorists stress the inherent unpredictability of literary writing and have done much in recent years to question purported “truths” regarding sexuality, literature, and society. By focusing on autofiction and a wide variety of author-functions, the remainder of Constructing Chaucer will similarly critique a number of “truths” surrounding Chaucer the Man, Chaucer the Pilgrim, and other prominent narrators. By promoting a “queer” view of these personae, I am not primarily interested in raising questions of homo- and heterosexuality—although these ideas will come into play in the final two chapters of the book. Instead, the idea of “queering” persona-theory is intended to signify that “finding the queer is more than pointing to a homosexual character or act; it is a practice of reading that looks to the past and to the future as it negotiates what it means to read and live in the present.”205 Moreover, a “queer” use of persona-theory emphasizes that “literature

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and its techniques of reading explicitly resist the project of conceptual categorization and classification through the complex rhetorical displacements of subjectivity and the impossibility of closing off—delineating the boundaries of—the field of signification.”206 Actively pursuing a “queer” notion of the autofictional persona is my way of disrupting the interpretive status quo and seeking “more f luid, dynamic subject positions” for Chaucer’s speakers in particular, and narrative personae more broadly, in order to “open up new possibilities in the present moment and provide a different lens on that present’s dynamic relationship with the past.”207 In these words are found the deliberate purpose of my “queer” reading throughout this study, as I will strive repeatedly to unsettle, question, reenvision, and “open up” traditional views of the persona-construct. In light of the construct’s inherent ambiguity, it is possible to say that the autofictional persona itself has a “queer” function—a “productive indeterminacy” that willfully perverts a straightforward reading.208 Queer theory questions authoritative knowledge on several levels, and in effect the persona does the same by being elusive, divisive, and often discomfiting. An important result of the “queerness” inherent in the persona-concept, however, is that this ambivalence ultimately may encourage critics to assert their own ideological mastery upon/around a text. For, it may be said that the interpretive openness that adheres to the persona-construct often leads to scholars “blatantly re-working the authoritative text so that it is forced to yield, against the grain, explicitly oppositional kinds of understanding.”209 Such forceful assertions of interpretive autonomy can be suspect at times because the interpretive potential of these characters does have historical limits. Even if the personae in question are open to numerous “queer” possibilities, critics may occasionally jeopardize the integrity of the text by somehow disregarding the historical parameters of the writer’s words and/or attaching modern sensibilities to the medieval characters. These are the very types of issues that shall be addressed throughout this monograph. Recognizing these issues, subsequent chapters will apply the neo persona-theory outlined above in order to analyze how the Chaucerian persona has been read, shaped, and manipulated by critics over time. As these chapters will show, the interpretation of the poet’s autofictional “I” has resulted in an ever-increasing and seemingly infinite variety of “Chaucers” that variously ref lect the ideological sympathies of each individual critic and his/her school or methodology. Thus, in the annals of Chaucer scholarship, editorial, ironic, sociological, pious, pacifist, humorous, and gender-oriented “Chaucers” are found. Many other “Chaucers” also are identifiable, and it is clear that the wide assortment of interpretations that have been issued are largely a result of the shifting


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narrative pose seen throughout the Chaucerian corpus, the ambiguous persona that is employed in a variety of literary and social contexts. By considering Chaucer through the “queer” lens of persona-theory, the author is seen as a poetic agent and mediator, who thrived by both producing and responding to the diverse implications of his material, whether social or textual, satirical or sexual.210 And the “mask” of the autofictional persona reveals that the poet deliberately addressed many cultural contingencies and consciously created interpretive challenges by manipulating his speakers. The likelihood of this cognizant manipulation is made explicit when Chaucer’s I-persona famously interjects during the course of the Canterbury Tales by saying, “oure Hooste japen tho bigan, / And thanne at erst he looked upon me / And seyde thus: ‘What man artow?’ ”211 At this moment, Chaucer the Man, Chaucer the Pilgrim, and the other pilgrim storytellers are ideologically intertwined in a direct expression of the difficulties of interpretation and the equivocations of “truth” and fiction, writer and narrator, author and reader, authority and subjectivity. Critical tradition continues these intersections by acting much like Harry Bailly does in the Tales, with scholars interacting with tale and teller and serving as “juge and reportour,” appropriating the persona-construct to draw a variety of conclusions based upon their own beliefs and biases.212 The remaining chapters of this study focus more directly on the “juggement” of critics throughout the history of Chaucerian reception. By concentrating upon the controversial presence of Chaucer the Pilgrim, or whatever name the I-narrator is given, I have been able to illuminate particular subjects embraced as vital to the understanding of Chaucer the Man, and to highlight poems with reception-histories that illustrate important scholarly trends and constructions. These chosen texts represent instances where Chaucer seems in the eyes of critics to be, on one hand, a central player in his social and poetical environs, balanced against those where he has been said to project himself out of existence through his creation of vivid characters. Further complicating these contrasting perspectives are texts where the persona-construct is overt and the tensions of fiction/reality explicit, works where the difficulties of establishing authorial presence/absence are pointedly, and problematically, textualized due to the narrative ambiguity represented by the figure of Chaucer the Pilgrim or his equivalent. Chapter 2 will set the stage for these discussions by examining biographies and biographical accounts of Chaucer. Given that biographical scholarship was, for centuries, the most common critical approach to the poet, this second chapter provides an account of the ideological legacy of Chaucer in biographical writing, and shows (inter alia) that critics often read the I-persona both autobiographically and favorably, using the verse

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as “evidence” for the construction of the venerable author’s supposed life. This focus on the persona’s legacy in biographical writing helps to account for the various “Chaucers” that have concurrently emerged in nonbiographical criticism. Chapter 3 is the first of three chapters that builds upon this biographical discussion by examining the critical reception of particular works that best reveal the complicated nature of Chaucer’s autofictional personae. Here, I consider texts wherein the author “himself ” addresses actual contemporaries or utilizes first-person narration to confront the “real world” in which he lived. In these historically suggestive poems—including minor works addressed to Bukton, Scogan, and others, as well as Chaucer’s “Retraction”—Chaucer the Man often has been seen as presiding distinctly within or closely behind the text, with his own voice and ideals resonating through the verse. From this seeming “autobiographical” proximity, critics have constructed many different, approbative pictures of the poet: he is presented as a faultfinder of kings, a death-bed penitent, a Lollard sympathizer, a criminal debtor, a scorned lover, and nearly everything socially imaginable in between.213 Diametrically opposed to these more “historical” texts are poems in which the strong characters are conceded a greater authority and take on a rich “life” of their own apart from the poet. Chapter 4 analyzes the best examples of such vibrant characters—the Wife of Bath and Pardoner—and addresses the ways in which, within the critical tradition, the author frequently has escaped blame for any potentially distasteful or scandalous sentiments conveyed by the two dramatic personae, especially evident in various manifestations of what I call the “moral flinch” in Chaucer criticism. Finally, chapter 5 critiques the Thopas-Melibee link of the Canterbury Tales, where the author’s use of the persona-construct is rendered most problematic due to the ambiguous narrative inscription of his “elvyssh” alter ego, Chaucer the Pilgrim. In considering this conspicuously effeminate storyteller, I suggest the possibility of a provocative “queer” reading and urge critics to more actively respond to “Chaucer’s Challenge”—the poet’s call for recognition of the interpretive ramifications of the persona, including those that might seem undesirable or even shocking. Concluding the study by looking at the reception of the poet’s challenging narrative surrogate may help to heighten the perception of the tenuous connections between “reality” and fiction that appear in various guises/forms in the other poems, and ultimately aims to help critics better grasp how the persona-construct functions to question notions of ideology, authority, and “truth” itself, be it for a fourteenthcentury poet or a twenty-first-century scholar.

CHAPTER 2 GETTING A LIFE: BIOGRAPHICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF CHAUCER THE MAN

It is well known that a great work of art, or, as we say, the writer (meaning his works), shows different faces to different ages. —Derek Brewer1 Nothing is more natural than the wish to give genius a human face. —F. R. H. Du Boulay2

I

t has been thirty years since Roland Barthes announced the supposed “death of the author,” but even today there is evident resistance to the author’s hypothetical critical murder. One need only look in book reviews, newspaper articles, or in many scholarly studies to get a sure sense that the idea of the author remains very much alive and well in the twenty-first century. The reason for the concept’s endurance may be nothing more than the seemingly obvious fact that, as the novelist Malcolm Bradbury puts it, “in the common-sense world . . . writers have common-sense existences.”3 Although the call for the author’s demise has promoted much helpful discussion, it is apparent that the pronouncement was premature. The author lives, and thus literary biography, the focus of this chapter, remains a valid, useful tool for scholars.4 As Bradbury and many others have noted, the vital relationship between fiction and life, author and reader, simply cannot be disregarded. Even Stanley Fish, the famous proponent of Reader-Response theory, has recognized that meaning is a function of what a particular speaker in a specific set of circumstances intended to say, so that there is no such thing as a meaning that is drawn apart from the contextual circumstances of its production.5 Fish asserts that it is impossible to read without having received the text as the expression of an “intentional being” with a

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particular history—even if the author is dissolved into a series of functions, then he/she is still present, only relocated or displaced.6 As Fish explains, it does not matter whether the originating agent is a discrete human consciousness or an abstract notion such as the Victorian “spirit of the age,” because to read a text as a product of any type of “transcendental anonymities” is to endow that anonymity with intentionality and a biography, or with a sense of authorship.7 In short, even when a reader cannot know the author’s personal history, even when he/she merely exists as a sort of veiled, abstract ideal, he/she continues to be authoritative. However, it is wise to take a cautious course and resist endowing the writer with too much authority, which was an important lesson Barthes taught by theoretically “killing” the author. On one hand, it should indeed be acknowledged that the very existence of the work itself announces that it is the creation of a specific author, who has initiated a textual “system of controls” (to use Wayne Booth’s phrase) that effect the involvement of the reader.8 On the other hand, in Barthesian terms, it is clear that the work of a past writer is variously limited and transformed by the range of modern human interests. Hence, while the author’s voice itself remains ever-powerful, the ideas that are vocalized in/through the text can and will be negotiated and appropriated by subsequent readers. And whether or not Barthes was correct in claiming that the text’s meaning lies “not in its origin but its destination,” he was prudent in suggesting that scholars should not focus too much attention on the author of a literary work.9 The observations of Fish and Barthes bring to light the central focus of this chapter: the connection between the author and literary biography, as filtered through the narrative persona. Due in part to the attack on the author begun by Barthes, the utility of literary biography has been severely questioned in recent years and there is now an “intense suspicion” of the form in the Humanities.10 Yet despite this suspicion, scholars cannot avoid the relationship between the author as life-giver, and the text as life-given.11 Therefore, like the author, his/her biography lives and deserves recognition as a potent force in contemporary critical thought. Rather than discrediting biography, literary critics would be best served by accepting it as a unique genre with its own rules and assumptions that might help bring forth new readings and ways of reading. Chapter 2 attempts to follow such a path by carefully considering Chaucerian biographies, with the goal of critiquing traditional, “autobiographical” presentations of the poet’s narrative I-speaker. Donald Howard, who has written a major biography of Chaucer, has shown that “a biography is more than a life” because by definition, “a life moves, shapeless, from day to day,” and as it is experienced, textualized, and interpreted it becomes different things to different people, in different situations and different ages.

GETTING A LIFE

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Howard explains that biographers must interpret the material they find, bringing to it a favorable or unfavorable bias that necessarily colors the presentation of the life.12 This is critical for the discussion of Chaucerian biography because laudatory accounts of the poet are unquestionably the norm, and make it clear that “we get back the answers only to the questions we ask of a life—the picture lives only within the frame we have invented for it.”13 As John Worthen contends, it is also notable that the documentary “facts” of a given biography may be nothing more than certain materials manipulated to fit into an apparently and ideally “seamless web of cause and effect, of inevitable and seamless progression.”14 This is a particularly appropriate metaphor for biographers writing on individuals from the Middle Ages, who must create such “webs” from scanty and oft-confusing resources. Given the inherently fragmentary nature of medieval documentation, biographers considering figures such as Chaucer also have a tendency to treat and present information as important simply because it survives, rather than thoroughly questioning it and demanding to know what answers it really provides.15 These are just some of the issues that are central to biographical writing, and key to the historical discussion of Chaucer the Man provided in this chapter. In addition, there are certain problematic tendencies in life-writing that pertain specifically to eminent “Men of Letters.” One significant trend that frequently is found in biographies of writers, and well-represented below, is the desire to enact a sort of literary “monumentalization” through life-writing, a “canonization” of the life and works of a revered author.16 In essence, this “monumentalization” results in a sort of quasi-hagiography, whereby biographers tell the story of a figure admired and even loved—attempting to create a commendatory portrait and seeking “their own features in a kindred face.”17 Another impulse often at issue in biographies of literary authors is the degree to which their works can be used as sites for biographical evidence. This is crucially important for my analysis, and while it should be admitted that a literary work can potentially tell a great deal about an author, there is reason to be extremely wary of any “facts” drawn from texts that are creative and fictional. The variety of authorial poses enabled by the persona-construct is pivotal here, since there are occasions when the elusive I-persona may appear to speak for the author; but as an autofictional construct, a given persona may be intended solely for local purposes, may be shaped by the requirements of the story, or may function deliberately to create the writer’s “own myth.”18 In any case, the persona is not the poet, and autofiction is not autobiography. Yet in practice, the autobiographical connections cited above are veritable “truths” that many Chaucerian biographers have worked to establish.

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With the above issues serving as the theoretical backdrop for my discussion, there are several reasons why it is sensible to begin my analysis of Chaucerian reception with a chapter on biographical writing. One of the more important reasons is the fact that for hundreds of years lifewriting was the primary, if not sole representative of literary “criticism.” It was not until the eighteenth century that a “modern” type of Chaucer scholarship became prominent. Before that age, biographies were the very embodiment of interpretive criticism, and thus “lives” of Chaucer were crucial for establishing the early understanding of the poet and his works. They formed the foundations for other, nonbiographical readings, and their consideration helps to illustrate major premodern interpretive trends and to place historically the various “Chaucers” that emerged over time. Another important aspect of Chaucerian biographies is that that these works offer intriguing examples of the aforementioned tendency to read the persona literally, and therefore highlight important ramifications that neglecting the autofictional nature of the verse might have for the author’s legacy. In particular, some of the very best evidence is found for the many ways in which Chaucer has been shaped to fit the beliefs of his readership: explicit evidence is seen for the politicized idealization of the author, who consistently emerges as the lofty “Father of English poetry” rather than, say, a civil servant of perhaps dubious societal import during his age.19 Overall, “lives” of Chaucer reveal key aspects of the ideological coloring of the poet, as his biographers “overlook things that are there and put in things that are not there. [They] underread and overread” Chaucer’s personae.20 To paraphrase the epigraphs offered at the start of this chapter, these biographies essentially create different versions of the medieval author, different faces for different ages. For my designs, what is most significant about these different faces is that they commonly are based on fallacious views of supposed poetic autobiography. In addition, these constructed “Chaucers” are a symbolic product of scholars who seemingly wish to give the genius of Chaucer an appropriately praiseworthy human face. To begin my necessarily selective critique of these laudatory constructions, the age of Chaucer’s immediate successors must be considered, because in this era the poet was destined for greatness. As Nevill Coghill distinctively proclaimed, “when our language was in solution but at a temperature to crystallize, Fortune chose [Chaucer] as its nucleus.”21 2.1 Early Praise for the “Fadir” of English Poetry and the Creation of the Chaucer “Legends” No single author has been commented on in English as regularly and extensively as the “Fadir” of English poetry.22 To quote Derek Brewer,

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“the literary observations and discussions threaded together by their reference to Chaucer constitute a unique index to the course of English criticism and literary theory.”23 A major reason the poet has been widely considered since his death in 1400 is that “Chaucer—unlike most writers, I fear—led an interesting life,” and therefore “would be a good subject for a biography had he never written a line of poetry.”24 Though it was evidently his verse and not his life that eventually garnered high praise, the plain fact is that Chaucer was a legend almost from the moment of his last breath, and since that time “successive generations have refashioned that legend in their own terms.”25 The first formal biography of Chaucer did not appear until the midsixteenth century, but the vast tradition of Chaucerian reception commenced even before his death, seen in the work of Eustache Deschamps, Thomas Usk, and John Gower.26 And shortly after his passing, a chorus of reverential praise for Chaucer’s greatness, genius, and poetic inf luence would grow prominent through the efforts of such notables as Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, and William Dunbar. Chaucer’s earliest readers offer him “worshyp & reuerence bothe” and laud him as the initiator of the English literary tradition—even going so far as to praise him for the very invention of English as a poetic language.27 Although this chorus of praise did not serve a strictly biographical function, the assorted comments of Chaucer’s fifteenth-century admirers did lay the groundwork for future biographies. In fact, a fairly consistent figure of “Maister Chaucer” emerged in the period, a general representation that assumed the shape and dignity of the collective eulogies about him, merged into one cumulative, socially and politically central ideal: the noble patriarch and first maker of English.28 This era, in turn, also is important as the period in which Chaucer’s “writings, his name, and his example came to be pressed into the service of a variety of social practices,” as Seth Lerer has shown.29 This emergent pattern of scholarly appropriation is central to Constructing Chaucer, as it becomes a constant issue throughout the history of Chaucerian reception. In looking specifically at Chaucerian biography, it is readily seen that many, or indeed most, biographers continue the trend of Chaucer’s fifteenth-century followers by upholding the cultural centrality of the poet and projecting his life in accordance with their own high expectations. As Paul Strohm has shown, it is a significant historical paradox that the very texts that promise access to the lives of certain distinguished individuals actually screen them from view. In effect, these texts come to supplant the life by installing themselves in its place.30 Nothing could be more true of Chaucerian life-writing, and this is especially so of the early biographies and their desire to appropriate the laureate figure of

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“Father Chaucer” for political and cultural means. In response to such ideologically charged biographical manipulation, Jacques Le Goff asserts that “there is no clear dividing line between reality and the ideal.”31 This certainly is the case with the first “life” of Chaucer, written in Latin by John Leland ca. 1540. Leland’s biography appeared in his Comentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis, and catalogues certain noble traits that would become the foundation for Chaucer’s presumed life for at least the next two hundred years. Leland’s laudatory text has an obvious political undercurrent, since his catalogue of great Englishmen was commissioned by Henry VIII, who ordered a search throughout the land for records of past British glory— wherein a noble Chaucer would be a desirable and key construction.32 This royal commission demonstrates the king’s zeal to create a distinctly English cultural identity (with himself as its esteemed majesty), so that Chaucer becomes a primary focus for what has been called the “writing of England.”33 Consequently, and perhaps even more fervently than in the previous era, Chaucer is consistently portrayed in the Tudor age as the first bard of the realm, the first great English poet for Englishmen, an author of nationalistic and religious import whose verse is central to the land’s intellectual heritage.34 Leland’s rhetoric is full of such reverent and patriotic overtones, which are immediately evident when he asserts the grandeur and extent of Chaucer’s learning in a passage that would often be cited in the years that followed: Leland states that the author left the University of Oxford “an acute logician, a delightful orator, an elegant poet, a profound philosopher, and an able mathematician,” as well as having become a “devout theologian.”35 Leland’s politicized veneration is even more obvious in his proclamation that sometimes Chaucer strove with all his power to instruct the reader, and . . . took pains as sedulously to give him pleasure. Nor did he cease from his labors until he had carried our language to that height of purity, of eloquence, of conciseness and beauty, that it can justly be reckoned among the thoroughly polished languages of the world.36

Through such exaltations, Leland creates an ideal portrait whereby the author becomes “Father” Geoffrey Chaucer, poetic hero of Albion and well-spring of English cultural authority. These ideals would endure for centuries, both within and beyond biographical writing. For the analysis of Chaucer’s personae and their critical legacy, there is another, extremely important aspect of Leland’s reverent life-writing. Leland’s biography initiated “the legends” of Chaucer, which play an

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essential role in my critique below; these “legends” have been usefully defined by Eleanor Hammond as a series of false assertions about the author’s life, which underlined his presumably remarkable existence and would be built upon by succeeding generations of biographers. 37 For years, the following “legends” asserted by Leland would reappear frequently in Chaucerian life-writing: that the poet was born of a noble family; that he studied at Oxford, where he was taught by John Some and a Carmelite Friar named Nicholas; that he admired and imitated Gower as a master; that he had a sister who married William Pole, Duke of Suffolk; that he had a house at Woodstock, adjoining the king’s palace; that he lived in France in the last years of Richard II’s reign; and that he was personally known to and highly esteemed by Henry IV and Henry V.38 In her early twentieth-century critique of these “legends,” Hammond argued that the approach taken by Leland and his followers continued even into the modern era, since she still perceived a tendency “to repeat statements without examination, to welcome an attractive but ill-founded suggestion, and to accept poetic commonplace as autobiography.”39 Today, this statement no longer seems wholly accurate, but it is an apt description of Chaucerian biography until at least the nineteenth century, since Leland’s “legendary” perspectives would be incorporated by John Bale and John Pits, the next major Chaucerian biographers, and also would be found in a number of subsequent “lives.”40 There are several reasons that “the legends” of Chaucerian biography are dubious, not the least of which is the fact that the primary texts used to create the fallacious “legendary” ideas were not actually Chaucer’s to begin with. Usk’s Testament of Love was commonly ascribed to Chaucer in Leland’s age, and it was largely upon this apocryphal text that the biographer based his “legends.” This attribution brings us to what is, for my purposes, the more significant problem with Leland’s work. In creating his “legendary” account, Leland set the questionable precedent whereby details of Chaucer’s life would be extracted directly from his verse, with the persona read as an actual, literal representation of the author.41 This autobiographical approach would persist for centuries, to the extent that it became a veritable “fact” of scholarship. Biographer after biographer followed Leland’s lead by adhering to the belief that Chaucer himself is the narrator of the poems and is telling readers the truth about his existence. Given the autofictional nature of the persona outlined in chapter 1, and recalling the fact that many scholars from the Middle Ages forward recognized the construct’s fictionality, it is remarkable that this autobiographical perspective f lourished so long. But f lourish it did, and this was due in no small measure to Leland’s “legends.” Hence, Leland’s inf luential biography offers distinct evidence not only for autobiographical

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interpretations, but literal readings with a purpose: the agenda in question being to celebrate the purported “Father of English poetry.” Having illustrated the roots of this tendency, the other early “lives” of Chaucer need not be considered here because they follow the same “legendary” path as Leland and thus have little of substance to say about Chaucer’s persona. When it is remembered that biographical writing was the primary type of Chaucer scholarship until, perhaps, the Romantic Age, the fact that the I-narrator was assumed to depict the actual author represents a formidable tradition, one that would be difficult to overcome. And Leland’s instrumental account should make it clear that the tradition of autobiographical interpretation would have major consequences for the “Chaucer” that emerged in scholarly writing—an idealized “legend” who was “held to be the English Homer” because he “lifted our language with so much splendor and ornament, that no one has a place before us.”42 This was not Chaucer the Man but a version of the poet whose “life” was constructed on the basis of fictional texts, and apocryphal works at that. As a result, this early “Chaucer” was not only historically inaccurate but also theoretically unsound. 2.2 The Early Modern Justification of Chaucer If recent New Historicist criticism is followed, a pivotal inclination of the Renaissance is well-summarized by the concept of “self-fashioning.” “Self-fashioning” is a process of constructing one’s identity that has been hailed by some scholars as the very birth of the individual, which went hand in hand with the lofty Humanist perspectives through which art and the greater world were perceived.43 In light of this so-called “selffashioning,” it has been argued that critics, as individuals, consciously sought to separate their own positions from earlier theoretical viewpoints, to “fashion” their own singular critical “selves.”44 This yearning to establish a scholarly authority and superiority apart from their predecessors is well-illustrated in Chaucer criticism and helps to explain the fact that Renaissance scholars incrementally devalued the poet’s language—the chorus of praise grows fainter as Chaucer’s verse is seen to be more and more “remote and rebarbative.”45 A memorable example of this outlook is found in Philip Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie, where he famously wonders about his medieval forefather, “truly I know not, whether to meruaile more, either that he in that mistie time, could see so clearely, or that wee in this cleare age, walke so stumblingly after him.”46 Henceforth, I will refer to such commentary as the justification of Chaucer and his language, which represents a significant critical shift—or, in fact, a cautious intellectual distancing—that

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became prevalent in the Early Modern period. The justification in question serves as a type of apologia for the perceived f laws in Chaucer’s work, with the poet still valued and revered as the “Father of English poetry.” However, the continuing veneration for Chaucer commonly is offered in conjunction with lamentation for the supposed obscure and/or barbarous aspects of his writing—particularly his language—due to the unfortunate circumstance of his having been born in an age of poetry that had become outmoded. Chaucer’s literary greatness therefore required justification, an approach that grew during the Renaissance and was especially prominent in seventeenth-century biographies. The primary biography of Chaucer in the Renaissance was composed by Thomas Speght for his Workes of our Antient and lerned English Poet, Geoffrey Chaucer (1598). The significance of this edition cannot be overstated, because Speght’s Workes would prove to be the definitive text of Chaucer until well into the eighteenth century, used by such notables as Milton and Dryden.47 Indeed, Speght’s edition marks a watershed in Chaucerian reception, as does his biography—the first written in English, and the most extensive and careful to date. As Tim Machan has noted, Speght’s edition articulates a momentous, “distinctly Renaissance” outlook on Chaucer and his works, which valorizes the poet and his importance for English literary and cultural history.48 This is evident in Speght’s biography, which justified Chaucer’s verse and was highly inf luential in promoting “legendary” notions with particular consequences for the perception of the author’s persona(e). Speght undertook a diligent search of the public records to create his edition, and his “lives” (he slightly revised the biography for his 1602 edition) offer some fresh documents that contribute to a better understanding of Chaucer the Man. Speght was assisted in his research by John Stow, and together they unearthed Chaucer’s recorded titles (i.e., “armiger,” etc.), grant of land, controllership, employment abroad, and pensions received.49 But despite this research, Speght nonetheless falls into the common trap of basing his work on his predecessors’, even directly quoting them, so that he perpetuates many of the same “legends” as well as adding a few of his own, such as the suggestion that the poet actually met Petrarch in Italy.50 The most enduring addition Speght makes to Chaucer’s supposed life, however, is his assertion that the poet “was in some trouble in the daies of King Richard the second,” f led in exile to Holland, Zealand, and France (“where he wrote most of his bookes”), and eventually returned only to be imprisoned.51 This story was based on Usk’s Testament of Love, and Speght’s account takes the autobiographical slant of Leland even further. Speght’s troubling presentation of this material may be summarized as follows: Chaucer, as a Lollard sympathizer and

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supporter of his (alleged) patron John of Gaunt, got caught up in a series of political intrigues surrounding the mayoralty of London. Fearing for his life, he escaped to the Continent where he supported friends who f led for similar reasons. These same friends soon betrayed him, and he found himself alone and without money. Dejected, he decided to return to England and face his fate, and upon reentry he was immediately imprisoned. Eventually, the poet reluctantly decided to give in to the authorities and offer information against his friends, in return for his release. It is crucial to recall here that Speght apparently was aware of the fictional undercurrent of personae, as chapter 1 illustrated.52 Despite this recognition, Speght’s biography represents the first instance where many (or most) of the biographical “facts” that are presented are, rather, details drawn from the poetry. This is highly important, because it shows how deeply ingrained was the autobiographical inclination of Chaucer’s early readers. In Speght, we have a generally astute scholar who sought to improve the documentary foundations for Chaucerian biography, and who recognized the persona-construct. Yet as the “legendary” story above shows, Speght went even further than Leland and others in emphasizing the autobiographical “truth” of the verse, to an extent that could even mar the poet’s reputation. Counterintuitively, Speght’s “life” would come to represent the next major step in the progression of “the legends,” with the persona read autobiographically and in this case, in such a way that justification would be necessary not only for the poet’s barbaric language, but also for the supposed trouble he found himself in during his life. By extending and more firmly establishing the fallacious material drawn from the Testament of Love, Speght’s depiction perpetuated some of the most prominent and damaging untruths ever found in Chaucerian life-writing. In fact, Speght’s portrayal altered the view of Chaucer so drastically that biographers in subsequent years often felt the need to rationalize the author’s suffering, typically by associating him with the problems of his so-called “friend” and patron John of Gaunt and carefully explaining away the poet’s alleged treachery against his other friends. Speght himself took care to ensure that the “famous and learned poet” would retain his rightful legacy as one who “liued in honour many yeares both at home and abroad.”53 Speght’s work has been noted for its “pan-English,” nationalistic slant, which falls in line with the agenda of “monumentalization” described earlier, so that the biography seeks to promote a “preeminent, mythic status” for the poet.54 Speght’s “pan-nationalism” allows him to overlook any potential f laws that might be seen in the author’s purported life-history by accentuating the positive, so to speak. This is no better seen than in his explanation that all of England is “much beholden” to

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Chaucer because he “had alwaies an earnest desire to enrich & beautifie our English tongue, which in those daies was very rude and barren,” and his performance of this task was not at all “inferior” to that of other revered authors, including Dante, Petrarch, or Alan of Lille.55 Though Speght perceives the language of medieval England as being “rude and barren,” he takes care to emphasize Chaucer’s cultural significance and, by extension, to justify the poet’s honorable standing. This idea is clear in Speght’s preliminary address, where he questions how anyone could doubt the author’s merit, saying that “oure” Chaucer “in most vnlearned times and greatest ignorance, being much esteemed, cannot in these our daies, wherein Learning and riper iudgement so much f lourisheth, but be had in great reuerence, vnlesse it bee of such as for want of wit and learning, were neuer yet able to iudge what wit or Learning meaneth.”56 Through such comments, Speght is able to gloss over the possibility that Chaucer was some kind of political turncoat in favor of praise for his literary achievement. The project of ideological justification is bolstered in Speght’s edition by the inclusion of a letter written in 1597 by Francis Beaumont, who explicitly sets out to “defend” Chaucer against those who feel that his words “are growne too hard and vnpleasant.” Beaumont declares that there are “no sufficient causes” to withhold the poet’s rightful “desert of glorie” because languages inherently change, and his words were “pure” for “his owne daies” so that he should remain esteemed and be given “that honour that he most worthily deserueth.” Interestingly, Beaumont’s letter demonstrates how the persona-concept might directly come into play in the poet’s justification, as the epistle also rationalizes Chaucer’s presentation of such disreputable figures as the Miller and the Cook. Beaumont does not use the term persona itself, but it is clear that he has the construct in mind in his assertion that it was part of the author’s plan to depict his fellows accurately in the Tales, so that his presentation of their speeches was “in excuse of himselfe” as he maintained his own decorum and merely portrayed “the disposition of these meaner sort of men [by] declaring in their prologues and tales, that their chiefe delight was in vndecent speeches of their owne.”57 For both Beaumont and Speght, Chaucer’s cultural renown is easily justifiable, even if an apologia is necessary for certain aspects of his works, narrative approach, and life. Moving forward into the seventeenth century, one enters an era in which several more “lives” present Chaucer’s I-persona autobiographically, and similarly serve to justify his cultural value. The heated religious climate of the age would bring rise to the major change in the period’s biographies: the common creation of a Protestantized, didactic poet-preacher, a fresh construction that likewise was pervasive, in

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various forms, for centuries.58 For my aims, the persistent, literal reading of the I-narrator is most notable here, as scholars continue to disregard the autofictional persona while ensuring the poet’s justification and cultural import. Due to spatial constraints, a few brief references from the Latin biography of Henry Wharton must suffice to illustrate the primary tendencies of seventeenth-century Chaucerian life-writing. Wharton’s biography was written in 1687, and it justifies the poet’s status by assuring readers that Chaucer is a “worthy author” who is so extraordinary that “it is certain that we will not be able to find in Latin antiquity a poet of more merit.”59 Wharton adds that Chaucer was “truly an English poet to princes and his fatherland,” who endured the “somewhat rough language” and rendered it “melodious with elegance and pleasantness. For he should be excused as being the first in all our language who lifted it from darkness and enriched it with a great voice, made it milder and more ornamented than when he found it.”60 Wharton’s Chaucer, however, is not only the great forefather of English poetry, but of the Reformation itself—a man who recognized the virtues of Wyclif ’s doctrine and was “in Theological things exceedingly well-versed.”61 Wharton explains that the poet often bitterly criticized the most grave superstitions of the Roman Church and its frequent errors; he mourned its corrupt ecclesiastical teaching with its most inept lies; he castigated the luxuriousness and sloth of the clerics; however, he inveighs everywhere with the most forceful hatred against the Order of Friars, whose hypocrisy, ambition, and other vile vices he forcefully attacks several times throughout his whole work, but nowhere without having some reason for doing so.62

Wharton offers a variant form of justification, as he presents a man of religious distinction who has rightly criticized the church and deserves praise for doing so. This is a representative, Protestant “Chaucer”—one who is not documented in the historical records. Therefore, this pious figure apparently was created by reading certain personae (in the Tales in particular) through an ideologically-colored lens. Wharton’s biography is very short, but to draw the conclusions above it is evident that he would need to go beyond the surviving documents and Chaucer’s poetic alter ego, an I-narrator (or series of I-speakers) who has very little to say about religion throughout the corpus. Hence, though he does not mention the persona by name, Wharton tacitly brings other (dramatic) personae into play, using them to determine the “truth” about the poet’s life, to perceive the “real” thoughts that were in his mind on the subject of religion. As chapters 4 and 5 in particular will demonstrate, this selective

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type of autobiographical reading features prominently in nonbiographical Chaucer scholarship, although the nature of autofiction makes it difficult to sustain—or indeed justify—such readings. With Wharton, my brief consideration of the early years of Chaucerian life-writing has reached its conclusion. This pre-“Enlightenment” era is most significant biographically as the age that initiated, extended, and relied heavily upon the Chaucer “legends,” and created an idealized myth of the venerable auctor who, supposedly, began the English literary tradition and established many of the very traditions of the language itself.63 This conventional view of “Father Chaucer” continued for centuries, and the autobiographical “legends” also would endure. But these “legends” would be altered somewhat during the eighteenth century, a change that was initiated by John Dryden, one of Chaucer’s greatest admirers. 2.3

Eighteenth-Century Changes and “Legendary” Continuations

Dryden’s literary criticism carried much weight with his contemporaries. The Shakespeare scholar Ashley Thorndike has commented that during the Neoclassical period, “the criticism of Dryden led in the discussion of Shakespeare’s merits and defects and toward a full recognition of his dramatic and poetic greatness.”64 A similar assertion could be made with reference to Chaucer, and the point cannot be overemphasized: Dryden’s criticism profoundly inf luenced Chaucer scholarship throughout the eighteenth century, and his life-writing marked a significant period of change.65 This is why section 2.3 begins with Dryden, whose last major work—published shortly before his death in 1700—would be a catalyst for change, a starting point for much Chaucer commentary to come. Dryden’s major discussion of Chaucer’s life and works is located in the “Preface” to the Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), which includes modernized versions of several Chaucer poems.66 Arguably, the “Preface” represents the first critically self-conscious, theoretically cautious account of Chaucer and his verse. In Trigg’s view, it provides the first extended discussion of Chaucer that does not introduce a collection or edition of the poet’s works, “so it offers a new kind of space in which to write about Chaucer, as well as an inf luential, individualized refiguration of the voice of critical judgment.”67 Though some might debate the theoretical impact of Dryden’s “Preface,” it certainly merits recognition as a landmark critical text for those of us in Chaucer Studies, if not literary studies in general.68 Dryden’s admiration for Chaucer is obvious, as he holds his predecessor “in the same Degree of Veneration as the Grecians held Homer, or

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the Romans Virgil,” so that “I seriously protest, that no Man ever had, or can have, a greater veneration for Chaucer than my self.”69 The “Preface” also demonstrates the deep-rooted, nationalistic sentiment underlying Dryden’s work (here and elsewhere), and he thus creates a patriotic “Chaucer” that would resound in subsequent years.70 Dryden compares Chaucer’s work with classical literature—keeping in mind that the Fables also contained translations of Ovid and Homer—and aims not only to perpetuate Chaucer’s memory but also to assert English literature’s rightful place alongside the classics. He states that “with Ovid ended the Golden Age of the Roman Tongue: From Chaucer the Purity of the English Tongue began. The Manners of the Poets were not unlike: Both of them were well-bred, well-natur’d, amorous, and Libertine, at least in their Writings, it may be, also in their Lives.” 71 The nationalism evident in such words would become increasingly common through the Victorian age, and Dryden’s account also seems to ref lect the growing belief in the power of great literature to teach “proper” living.72 But there is far more to Dryden’s “Preface” than mere patriotism or “polite learning.” As a poet-critic Dryden cultivated a sophisticated intellectual program that largely arose from his concern with and reaction to classical literature and theory, and his thoughts frequently were occupied with the practical problems of writing, including questions of artistic methods and aims, narrative style, and function.73 The result was a critic who, for his era, was unusually aware of the individual, creative aspects of literary artifacts.74 Dryden believed that the distinctive character of poetry arose from and ref lected the character of its creator, a view that fits well with Neoclassical ideas of mimesis. In the “Preface” Dryden promotes critical appreciation of what may be termed Chaucer’s mimetic genius, seemingly anticipating the now-common notion of the poet’s realistic depiction of fourteenth-century England.75 For example, Dryden notes that “Chaucer follow’d Nature every where, but was never so bold to go beyond her,” and states that “he has taken into the Compass of his Canterbury Tales the various Manners and Humours (as we now call them) of the whole English Nation, in his Age. Not a single Character has escap’d him.” 76 The “realistic” poet constructed by Dryden would become pervasive in several eighteenth-century biographies that followed, and he also foreshadows things to come by making direct reference to the “novelistic” traits of the Tales and offering a sort of early conception of the “dramatic principle.” This is crucial because it illustrates that, although he tends toward a “realistic” reading of Chaucer’s verse, Dryden does not cultivate an autobiographical meaning for the poetry. Instead, he strictly maintains the imitative nature of poetry inherent in the notion of mimesis and emphasizes the dramatic, if not autofictional aspects of the verse. Hence,

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Dryden comments on the distinct “marks” the poet gives to each character, and suggests that the Matter and Manner of their Tales, and of their Telling, are so suited to their different Educations, Humours, and Callings, that each of them would be improper in any other Mouth . . . Their Discourses are such as belong to their Age, their Calling, and their Breeding; such as are becoming of them, and of them only.77

Through such carefully chosen words, Dryden recognizes that the verse may well imitate reality, but is not reality—he stresses the dramatic capacities of literature and promotes an awareness that the fiction remains fictional, while the characters serve as mere characters (or personae).78 Dryden knew classical forms very well, and was a noted satirist in his own right who utilized various personae to critique his society. Thus, it stands to reason that, although he does not specifically make use of the term, he did indeed recognize that personae were central to Chaucer’s works and that the medieval poet made conscious use of them. When it is recalled that personae were vital to classical satire, it may be significant that Dryden carefully distinguishes the “character” of the “Good Parson” from other “guilty” clergymen who “deserved the poet’s lash,” declaring that “a satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.” And when it is remembered that the terms “character” and “persona” have often been used interchangeably by scholars, it seems noteworthy that Dryden states that in his own translation of the Parson “I have followed Chaucer in his character of a holy man” and adds that some of his “persons”—or personae—are virtuous, while others are vicious; and “all his Pilgrims are severally distinguishe’d from each other; and not only in their inclinations, but in their very Phisiognomies and Persons.” 79 None of these “persons,” however, appear to equate directly to the poet himself in Dryden’s eyes. Through its subtle wording and critical nuance, Dryden’s approach to Chaucer’s life and works encourages an important shift of emphasis from strictly author-centered analysis to more text-based considerations. That is to say, Dryden’s “Preface” promotes a crucial change that would serve to temper the autobiographical trend seen thus far, by perceptively approaching the poetry as poetry and therefore encouraging a reading that does not rely so strictly on a literal view of the persona and does not presume that the verse somehow provides evidence for the author’s actual existence. As Trigg puts it, Dryden is “the first to take Chaucer’s authorship absolutely for granted as the starting point, not for biography or historical recovery per se, but for comparative, evaluative criticism.”80

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However, it was not until the nineteenth century that scholars substantially built upon Dryden’s fresh and sophisticated approach, and consequently “legendary” portrayals would persist. Although it took time for other biographers to pick up on the interpretive subtleties of the “Preface,” Dryden’s text should be recognized as having laid the foundations for biographical analysis that at least offers the possibility—through an awareness of the persona or its (autofictional) literary functions—that the verse is not autobiographical, but complexly fictional. Having examined Dryden’s important views, I may now proceed to outline brief ly some of the other biographical trends that were prevalent in the eighteenth century. In sum, the justification of Chaucer continued to proliferate, with various biographers addressing and excusing the poet’s perceived linguistic barbarity; and critics also continued to enlist Chaucer into Protestant service by presenting him as a sort of pre-Reformation poet-preacher. It is not necessary to consider further examples of these tendencies here, for they offer little that is new in terms of the biographical manipulation of the persona. But in order to more fully illustrate the historical trajectory of the persona in Chaucerian life-writing, another key trend deserves mention that I have not yet discussed. Specifically, the most frequent guise for the poet in the Neoclassical period may be identified as the construction of Chaucer the gentleman, with the author presented as an example of a cultivated man of leisure who teaches about important ideals such as taste and piety.81 This socially courteous construction, with its obvious designs on fostering virtue and the idea of poetry by and for gentlemen, would also be asserted by Victorian critics with similar sensibilities. Prominently supportive of such a poet-gentleman is John Dart’s Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, prefixed to the 1721 edition of John Urry, which was extremely popular in its time but has since been ridiculed by several textual scholars.82 Dart’s biography was the most elaborate to date and would prove to be the most significant Chaucerian life-writing of the eighteenth century. This is not only due to the popularity of Urry’s edition, but also because Dart’s text, unlike Dryden’s, was intended exclusively for biographical purposes, and thus its more extensive historical commentary would be relied upon by writers throughout the era. Kevin Pask has observed that Dart endowed Chaucer with his own character, recuperating medieval religious authority to “allow the author to become a cultivated gentleman living as a country squire.”83 Dart’s construction of a properly pious man of taste and leisure is vividly seen when he describes Chaucer by saying that “in one word, he was a great Scholar, a pleasant Wit, a candid Critick, a sociable Companion, a stedfast Friend, a grave Philosopher, a temperate OEconomist and a pious Christian.”84 Like any proper gentleman, Chaucer’s “Reading was deep, and extensive,

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his Judgment sound,” and he was a man whose temper was “a mixture of the gay, the modest, and the grave.” Fittingly, “of Friendships he selected the best, being familiar with, and received by all the Men of Learning at that time.”85 Dart is also careful to assure his reader that Chaucer wisely turned his attention to the Heavens, asserting that “towards the latter part of his Life, the gay Gentleman gave way to the grave Philosopher and pious Divine.”86 Here again, we have a “life” that is based on a selective reading of purported “autobiographical” verse, and is impossible to substantiate from the surviving documentary records. Nonetheless, Dart portrays himself as a perceptive, cautious biographer, openly criticizing the earlier work of Leland, Bale, Speght, and Pits, and outlining his own project as aiming to correct past mistakes through “the recovery of some parts of his History.”87 Though Dart did make use of a greater number of government records, he ultimately was unable to meet his own challenge since his biography typically offers restatements of the prior “legends” and actually further ingrains this material. Like previous “lives,” Dart’s account was profoundly inf luenced by the Testament of Love, but he also builds upon the spurious Court of Love; hence, Dart’s biography offers a much more full and detailed account of these fallacious “legends,” which more firmly establishes the poet’s alleged political troubles. In particular, Dart solidifies and elaborates Chaucer’s supposed complicity in John of Northampton’s political plot, the poet’s forced exile into Hainault, France, and Zealand, and his harsh imprisonment in the Tower of London where he would be forced to forsake his friends in return for his freedom.88 Dart ends his story by explaining how “Chaucer” had to disclose information against his former friends in order to earn his release, which “brought upon him the ill will of most people, who (as he says) called him false, lyer, base, ingratefull, &c. But the King regarding him as a person beloved by his Grandfather, and a faithful servant to himself, pardoned him.” Ignoring the fact that this story was based on erroneously attributed texts, Dart’s depiction plainly illustrates the biographical inconsistencies that might result from the fallible assumption that the I-narrator of the verse represents the author himself. For it is difficult to balance this “Chaucer”—a political pawn of sorts who appears to be a pathetic, unfortunate figure—with the noble gentleman depicted elsewhere in Dart’s biography. Dart himself failed to ref lect on this paradox, and “legendary” stories would remain central to the poet’s “life” throughout the eighteenth century—regardless of the ways in which these misrepresentations might serve to undermine “Father Chaucer” or create illogical biographical discrepancies. The enduring legacy of the “legends” is perhaps no better seen

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than in the brief biographical commentary offered by Thomas Tyrwhitt in his important edition of Chaucer, published in 1775.89 Tyrwhitt was a cautious scholar who was wary of life-writing because of its potential to depict incorrectly the medieval author, which he hoped to avoid at all costs. Consequently, Tyrwhitt condemns the lack of scholarly care taken by previous Chaucerian biographers, especially Leland, whom he reproves for the “inconsistencies” of his account and the untrustworthiness of his documentation.90 Ever mindful of his craft, Tyrwhitt makes note of various documentary patents and annuities granted to Chaucer and offers a sound discussion of the potential such records hold for outlining the author’s life, ultimately concluding his account by saying “these, I think, are the principal facts in Chaucer’s life, which are attested by authentic evidences.”91 Despite such circumspection, it is illuminating that Tyrwhitt still falls into some of the old biographical traps, especially by using certain verses as evidence of autobiographical “fact.” This is particularly troublesome when Tyrwhitt agrees with earlier accounts centered on spurious texts like the Testament of Love and argues that a “more attentive examination of his works might furnish a few more” autobiographical “facts” about Chaucer.92 In time, “the legends” of Chaucerian biography would wane. But Tyrwhitt’s call for more use of autobiographical readings demonstrates that even if the “legendary” stories eventually would come under attack, the assumption that Chaucer himself appears in the verse would continue to be widely accepted. Indeed, this dubious assumption based (whether consciously or not) on a literal reading of the persona-construct, might be labeled as the primary biographical trend in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.93 Hence, in spite of the earnest efforts of careful critics such as Dryden and Tyrwhitt, “the legends” continued to play a prominent role through the Romantic age, although the “legendary” stories themselves had gradually changed in form and detail over the years. 2.4

Romanticizing Chaucer the Man

It is well-known that during the Romantic period, a new appreciation for medieval literature developed. Antiquarian critics of the age, who fostered a substantial growth in historical scholarship, asserted that the medieval period was vital as the origin of the cultural ideals and social institutions through which “civilized” men lived, so that poets from the Middle Ages served as exemplars of taste, learning, and civilization.94 From a theoretical standpoint, the Romantic era is known for its assertion of emotionalism, and thus its cultivation of an idealized (or sublime)

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literature of feelings and personal self-expression.95 This was especially true with regards to poetry, as verse was increasingly seen as a kind of textual portal into the mind and inner life of a given author.96 To an even greater degree than their forebears, Romantic critics read literary narratives as the direct expression of an individual, as a sort of emotional, psychological case-study in words. This would consistently be evident in Chaucerian life-writing during the age. In 1803, the “monumentalization” of Chaucer reached its apex in William Godwin’s Life of Geoffrey Chaucer. I have introduced the concept of “monumentalization” at the start of this chapter, and the notion is no better illustrated than in Godwin’s laudatory, two-volume behemoth that spans well more than 1000 pages.97 For if ever there was a biographical “monument” created to venerate the paternity of an author, surely this is it, and Godwin openly articulates his reverent intentions by stating that “the first and direct object of this work, is to erect a monument to his name.” Godwin reveres his subject so much, and hopes to bolster the poet’s position so much, that he unabashedly announces (in a sentiment seen throughout the biography) that “no one man in the history of human intellect ever did more, than was effected by the single mind of Chaucer.”98 Overzealous though Godwin may appear to modern eyes, his Life was by far the most inf luential biography of the poet written in the age, and thus played a central role in the articulation of a distinctly Romantic “Chaucer,” shaped to fit the intellectual patterns of the age. For the reception theorist, Godwin’s spirited biography is an enticing document, full of colorful rhetorical f lourishes and vague, unfounded suppositions. Godwin not only includes much historical information wholly irrelevant to the poet’s life but is not averse to creative conjecture or outright manipulation. He frequently reconfigures the documentary material he has compiled and creates conjectural theories so that the records used are made to fit with his own biases and preconceived “facts.” 99 As a result, it is apparent that this “life” often records more fiction than fact—for Godwin, perhaps more than any other biographer, Chaucer the Man is whatever he wished the poet to be. Much of Godwin’s work is predicated upon the old “legends,” and he offers numerous speculations on the presumed thought and motivation of the poet based on the disputable evidence of the first-person narrator. What emerges is an evocative “Chaucer” with distinctly Romantic ideals, as the text is rife with comments that portray the author as an exemplary gentleman with a “frank and easy temper” and “lively, spirited and cheerful views of nature” whose works “act upon all our sympathies in turn, relieve us with pleasantry, melt us with sorrow, and work up our

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souls into tumults of resentment or exultation.”100 In all likelihood, few Chaucerians would quibble with Godwin’s declaration that there is no production of man that displays more various and vigorous talent than the Canterbury Tales. Splendour of narrative, richness of fancy, pathetic simplicity of incident and feeling, a powerful style in delineating character and manners, and an animated vein of comic humour, each takes its turn in this wonderful performance.101

However, what is debatable is Godwin’s underlying critical method. To create his favorable impressions of the poet, Godwin not only uses the old “legendary” biographical canon (i.e., The Court of Love and Usk’s Testament of Love) but also insists that “it is impossible however to entertain a rational doubt” about the authenticity of these works. Moreover, he openly states that Chaucer’s literary works are “the best materials for arranging his life.”102 There is no need to extensively range about this material here, because the obvious outcome is that the author depicted in Godwin’s biography is not only historically inaccurate, but also theoretically questionable according to the tenets of autofiction. Despite its shortcomings, Godwin’s Life deserves some measure of praise, since there are moments when he proves himself to be a more astute reader than some of his predecessors. Given his strict adherence to “legendary” stories and assumptions, Godwin naturally holds fast to the notion that Chaucer himself appears in the verse. However, it is important to note that the narrative persona has a resonance in the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer that, with the exception of Dryden’s “Preface,” we have not heretofore encountered. Though Godwin does not go so far as to categorically assert a notion of the divided self for the first-person narrator, there are certain instances in which he clearly implies the persona- construct and seems to register the inherent fictionality of the verse. Unlike Dryden, Godwin is not consistent in his views on Chaucer’s narrative approach, since he favors an autobiographical technique and perceives the poet himself as the dreamer of the Book of the Duchess; meanwhile, the narrator of the House of Fame is said to display “certain features of his own character,” as is true of other speakers (particularly those in the Tales).103 The qualification in this phrase is key, because Godwin suggests that the narrator both is and is not the poet; although Godwin generally is inclined to view the I-speaker as a literal representation of the writer, he acknowledges that this figure likewise serves the functions of an imaginary creation. In another notable moment, Godwin addresses the “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton” by saying that “it would be unjust however, from his playfully expressing an aversion to marriage in the character of a satirist, to

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infer that he had not lived in perfect harmony and happiness with the mother of his children.”104 Godwin unmistakably alludes to the “character” of the fictional persona in order to safely distance Chaucer from potentially damaging content in “Bukton,” a defensive view of this particular speaker that will be discussed more fully in chapter 3. The best example of Godwin’s tacit recognition of the I-persona is his remark that “when literature began to grow more common, one of the first effects was to detach in a great measure the character of the poet from that of the reciter of the verse.”105 Here, it seems, is the divided self, or at least a parallel concept that is exceptional within Chaucer’s scholarly reception during the period. And in this recognition, we are inching nearer to the suppression of the fallacious “legendary” tendency to read the verse autobiographically. The other prominent Romantic biography of Chaucer was written by Leonhard Schmitz, an important “life” that creates an even more explicitly “sublime” portrait and also seems to ref lect upon the personaconstruct in isolated moments. Schmitz’s biography appeared in 1841, in The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized. This volume marks a high point in the movement of modernizing Chaucer’s verse, and it is particularly noteworthy due to the prestige of its contributors, including its editor Richard Hengist Horne, as well as William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Leigh Hunt, and Robert Bell. Schmitz’s contribution to the volume is the last major biography that is centered squarely upon the spurious “legends,” and it is interesting that this account is perhaps even more definitive in its use of this material than some previous “lives.”106 For example, Schmitz comments that “one passage in [Chaucer’s] own works renders it incontrovertible that he was born in London,” and adds assuredly that “the first account we have of him is, that, at the age of eighteen, he was entered a student of the university of Cambridge. This information we derive from a passage in the ‘Court of Love.’ ”107 After relaying the “legendary” story of Chaucer’s exile and imprisonment, Schmitz contends that “all we know of it is derived from Chaucer himself, who in his ‘Testament of Love,’ excuses his conduct, and states that it brought upon him the charge of falsehood, and oppressed him with severe obloquy and censure.”108 Schmitz continually refers to the narrator of Chaucer’s poems as the author himself, who purportedly is ref lecting on his own experiences. However, Schmitz was a classicist by training, and his awareness of the satirical usages of narrative may help to explain why his life-writing echoes Godwin’s in its implicit articulation of the I-narrator’s fictional undertones. This is best seen in Schmitz’s discussion of the poet’s presumed self-description in the Thopas-Melibee link, where the author “hints

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that he was rather corpulent,” as well as giving the “impression of great delicacy.”109 Schmitz also seems to recognize the persona-construct (or its functions) when faced with the possibility of the poet taking a strong stand against the Church, and distances the writer from his characters by saying “his poems, indeed, abound in censure inf licted upon the licentious and worldly habits of the clergy, but no proof can be adduced of his having advocated the cause of any particular party, or of his having identified himself with any.”110 This phrasing recalls earlier debates over reportatio and assertio, which chapter 1 has established as central concepts in the medieval period’s persona-theory. I would argue that phrases of this type reveal that many Neoclassical and Romantic biographers were aware that a given narrative “I” was only reliable up to a point. Although it generally was presumed that the poet himself was present in his verse, select biographers distinctly perceived a sort of unnamed Chaucerian persona, tacitly recognizing the fictional functions of the narrative I-speaker. A fully embodied perception of the persona has not yet been encountered, but in the life-writing of Godwin and Schmitz important signs of progress are found, with subtle movement being made away from the f lawed autobiographical assumptions of the “legends” and toward a more historically accurate biographical technique. As Hammond has observed, “the work of killing the legend[s]” has been “difficult.”111 This is undeniably so, and it cannot be overemphasized how profoundly the “legendary” methods outlined above alter the view of Chaucer, since all the biographies encountered thus far depict a figure entirely different than would characteristically be described today. Schmitz’s account makes it clear that “legendary” views continued to be widespread as late as the mid-nineteenth century, and it may be argued that new manifestations of the “legends” have arisen since that time. However, the primary “legends” of Chaucerian biography did indeed come to an end during the Victorian period. So the question is what, exactly, did it take to deaden the major “legendary” assertions of yesteryear? The answer is not difficult to find: an all-important shift in Chaucerian life-writing was initiated by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas, whose biography has rightly been credited with advancing the critical separation of “Chaucer,” the poetic figure of “legend,” and Chaucer the Man, the civil servant who lived and breathed on English soil during the fourteenth century. 2.5 Fact or Fiction? Chaucer’s “Lives” from Nicolas to the Present Nicolas wrote his Memoir of Chaucer for the 1845 Aldine edition of the poet’s works.112 The Memoir stands as a major landmark in the history of

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Chaucerian reception and has been called “the first life of Chaucer drawn up on sound methods.”113 As Hammond explains, Nicolas took great care to ensure that his study was “entirely free from the extravagances of Godwin” and others, and cautiously utilized the documentary records to show that the supposed story of Chaucer’s life culled from the Testament of Love should not be regarded as true or autobiographical.114 Nicolas opens his account by explaining that although great trouble was taken to illustrate the life of CHAUCER by his former biographers, the yield of research was but imperfectly gleaned. Many material facts in his history have been very recently brought to light, and are now, for the very first time, published; but it is not from these discoveries only that this account of the Poet will derive its claim to attention. An erroneous construction has been given to much of what was before known of him; and absurd inferences have, in some cases, been drawn from supposed allusions to himself in his writings. A Life of the Poet, founded on documentary evidence instead of imagination, was much wanted; and this, it is hoped, the present Memoir will supply.115

In order to rebut the critically ingrained, “legendary” stories—and in the process alter the scholarly perception of Chaucer’s I-narrator—it was necessary for Nicolas to challenge directly the views of earlier biographers. Regarding Godwin’s Life, for instance, Nicolas comments that those who are satisfied with probabilities founded upon fanciful allusions to Chaucer himself or his contemporaries, in the Poet’s writings, or who are pleased with ingenious speculations as to time when, and the feelings under which his pieces were written, and what he may have said, or heard, or thought on different occasions, will have their taste amply gratified by a perusal of the most elaborate Life of Chaucer that has yet appeared, which work will also shew them upon what slight and unstable foundations theories may be built.116

This statement illustrates Nicolas’s desire to speak from a position of greater critical care, which is manifest in a thoughtful reliance on valid historical documentation; as he puts it, “in this Memoir, such facts only have been stated as are established by evidence.”117 This is a notable departure from the typical (auto)biographical approach, and in hand with this refreshing focus on the records the Memoir powerfully emphasizes the fictional rather than “actual” connotations of the I-narrator. Nicolas goes further than Dryden and others in his commentary on Chaucer’s narrative approach, and specifically addresses the I-speaker by arguing that “little reliance can be placed upon any of his remarks” for

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use as biographical facts. In addition, Nicolas apparently recognizes the persona and its functions in stating that readers may only hope to see f lashes of Chaucer in his writing, but nothing more—“glimpses which he himself affords of his taste, habits, and feelings.”118 Some might argue that these “glimpses” represent nothing other than Nicolas contradicting himself by reading the verse autobiographically. But for Nicolas, such “glimpses” merely offer f leeting impressions of the poet’s personality and cryptic images of his mind, which are not biographically reliable; in fact, Nicolas claims that it is “dangerous” to put much stock in any such poetic passages. Nicolas therefore distances the author from the verse, even going so far as to connote the very idea of the divided self, in this case a fabricated narrative surrogate who may appear to represent the writer in some verses but who shifts, changes, and is not a literal I-representative. In Nicolas’s words, “it is in his own character only, that Chaucer appears in the Pilgrimage, in the General Prologue, the Rime of Sir Thopas, and in the prose tale of Melibeus; and each of the other personages is individually described, and has a distinct existence.”119 Again, some might view this quotation as making an autobiographical claim on Chaucer’s writing, alleging that we have (in this case) an image of Chaucer himself as the speaker of the Canterbury Tales. I would disagree. As chapter 1 has indicated, the terms “character” and “persona” often are used synonymously in literary criticism. For Nicolas, the “character” of the I-narrator is a persona; it is a fictional character with a “distinct existence” that is appropriate for the narrative situation. It is not Chaucer the Man himself. This is made clear when Nicolas pronounces that “the creator of an imaginary hero can never be safely identified with his creation.”120 To further the point, it might be noted that Nicolas’s biography not only references the narrative “personages” of the Tales, but also contains several instances of the phrase in propria persona. By using the term itself, Nicolas becomes the first scholar to bring the persona explicitly into play in Chaucerian biography, another sign of his extraordinary consciousness of the minutiae of first-person narrative. Given the body of evidence presented above, Nicolas’s biography should be seen as making the vital move in Chaucerian life-writing toward a more clearly recognizable and fully embodied persona-construct. This was a change centuries in the making, and it was Nicolas who finally proved himself bold enough to definitively detach the poet from the verse and thus assert a more historically valid perspective on Chaucer based on the extant records rather than dubious literary texts and ambiguous fictional narrators. Nicolas did a great service by discounting the autobiographical “legends,” effectively minimizing the scope of the author’s life and closing down unsound avenues of thought that previously were seen

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as having great biographical potential. His biography helped to clarify the logical parameters of Chaucerian life-writing by calling into question faulty records and the pronouncements of erroneously attributed works and, in effect, disputing long-standing notions of biographical “truth.” By narrowing the documentary scope of Chaucer’s “life,” exposing historical gaps in the evidence, and persuasively demonstrating that scholars should draw their conclusions solely based on the scanty documentary records, the end result of Nicolas’s critique is that it may even have fostered a greater potentiality for the poet’s life. Thus, I would call Nicolas’s life-writing usefully “queer” in its function. Like the persona-construct itself, Nicolas’s biography perverts the stable traditions of the “legends” and undercuts unequivocal, positivistic readings of complex texts and records. It supports a “productive indeterminacy” that is a key characteristic of both the persona and persona-theory.121 If this “productive indeterminacy” is somehow queer, as I have argued in chapter 1, then the remainder of this section might be used to examine the effects that the newly rediscovered persona and its queer possibilities would have on Chaucerian biographies in the wake of Nicholas’s powerful account. As a practical extension of Hammond’s notion of the Chaucer “legends,” she offers the concept of the biographical “Appeal to Fact,” which is intended to define the second broad period in Chaucerian life-writing. In Hammond’s paradigm, the period of “fact” is initiated by Nicolas’s work and extends forward, “to the Life-Records gathered by the Chaucer Society, and subsequently”; it represents the “soberer” investigations of Nicolas and those that followed, which were “greatly augmented” by the discovery in the late nineteenth century of a number of official records that helped to form “the authentic foundation for a biography of the poet.”122 It should be acknowledged here that early Chaucerian biographers were sincere in their endeavors and simply saw the “facts” differently; that said, Nicolas’s “appeal” generally has been heeded by subsequent biographers, so that a more historically-sound view of the poet would emerge. But old habits die hard, and the “Appeal to Fact” would face a particularly formidable foe in the deeply ingrained tendency of reading Chaucer’s verse autobiographically, as if it offers reliable, “realistic” glances at the author. Nicolas’s scholarship is indicative of the fact that Victorian antiquarians fostered a growing interest in literary history, tended toward a more cautious historical method, and often worked to uphold patriotic poetic genius.123 Still treasured as the “Father of English poetry,” Chaucer remained a prominent figure throughout the period, frequently praised as an author who offered a realistic representation of fourteenthcentury life, who used his verse to present readers with an accurate record

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of societal truth as he saw it.124 Victorian critics also typically viewed Chaucer as an important representative of a bourgeois or middle class, emphasizing the poet’s “Englishness,” rational mind, even temperament, and genial personality.125 Due to a prevailing belief in the power of literature to serve as force for improving morality and promoting nationalism, Chaucer was perceived as a national poet par excellence “whose body and poetical productions become a kind of origin for an emerging secular statehood”—in practice, his life and works would come to serve as a “how to” guide to being properly English.126 The first noted Victorian biographer of Chaucer post-Nicolas was Henry Morley, whose life-writing accords with these tendencies. In his English Writers series of texts, Morley produced various biographical accounts of Chaucer over the years, and this work is compelling because the revisions that were made present evidence for the gradual critical acceptance of Nicolas’s modus operandi. Simply put, Morley eventually made an “Appeal to Fact” in his life-writing, as the “legends” are progressively diminished in each new account while the fresh records located and published by the Chaucer Society (founded in 1868) are incorporated to a greater extent over time.127 In his 1866 biography, the cautious approach ultimately taken by Morley is not evident since he, for example, states (á la Nicolas) that it is not known for certain where Chaucer was born, but then proceeds to advance (á la Godwin) a birthplace of London as culled from the spurious Testament of Love.128 At this early date, it is clear that Morley has not taken Nicolas’s critical advice to heart, and instead clings to a traditional belief in certain “legendary” perspectives. In the 1867 revision that immediately followed, Morley similarly indicates that the Testament can and should (still) be read autobiographically, even going so far as to conclude that the “legendary” story of the poet’s exile and imprisonment should be believed, but simply cannot be ascribed to the old dates due to the records unearthed by Nicolas.129 When we get to Morley’s 1890 revision, however, we see a biographer who has had to retrace his steps, reassess the evidence, and for all intents and purposes, create an entirely new “life” for the poet. This eventual change may be explained by the fact that, while Nicolas discounted autobiographical renderings and cast serious suspicion on the Testament of Love, he did not directly question its authorship or work to prove that the text was not Chaucer’s; that proof would eventually be provided by the German philologist Wilhelm Hertzberg in 1866.130 In his final Chaucerian life-writing, Morley evidently has been inf luenced by this later textual scholarship and thus has cause at this point to recognize, begrudgingly, that the Testament of Love “used to be ascribed to Chaucer, but is not by him.”131 Comments of this kind

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demonstrate Morley’s more careful reliance on the documentary records in his final account, so that his 1890 biography contains no mention whatsoever of any “legendary” imprisonment or exile.132 What Morley offers, then, in toto is evidence of critical resistance against abandoning the old “legends,” and as a result a “Chaucer” who undergoes a major biographical metamorphosis: at first, the (spurious) I-speaker is seen as an explicit, “realistic” self-representation, but later, the “life” is based more squarely on the actual historical documents while the fictional narrator is generally perceived as separate from the poet’s own “self.” Unlike Morley, William Minto was a biographer who apparently did take Nicolas’s lessons quickly to heart, and therefore Minto’s cautious, records-based “life” of Chaucer (published in 1874) may be said to represent the first substantial sketch that both “Appeals to Fact”—or, rather, accepts the newfound “facts”—and articulates an outright disbelief that the first-person narrator is “autobiographical” or “realistic.”133 Perhaps in reaction to the type of critical resistance represented by Morley, Minto made certain that his biographical method was in accordance with Nicolas’s new approach, and drew attention to the scholarly recovery of the documentary details of Chaucer’s life, a process that had recently quickened through the archival research of W. D. Selby, F. J. Furnivall, and other noted members of the Chaucer Society. Minto holds that the official records alone accurately render the poet’s existence, and recognizes the I-persona and/or its functions in cautioning readers that “we must be careful about filling in details of his inner history from supposed autobiographical references in his poems,” especially since “biographers too often take the poet literally” and ignore Chaucer’s use of conventional narrative tropes and ironic humor.134 In accordance with this view, Minto is the rare Victorian critic who believes that the self-description of the narrator in the Thopas-Melibee link is not a trustworthy account of Chaucer’s actual appearance.135 By distancing the author from his poetic creations through such contentions, Minto constructs a wholly different “Chaucer” than that described by his biographical predecessors, and the all-important theoretical turn away from the “legendary” texts and techniques has been realized at last. From this point forward, each Chaucerian biographer must consciously decide whether to rely more exclusively on the documentary records to depict Chaucer or continue to experiment with conjectural, “autobiographical” possibilities that are opened up by the poetry’s first-person narrator(s). With this difficult decision in mind, we might pause to consider the “life” of Chaucer written by Adolphus William Ward for the inf luential “English Men of Letters” series of publications. Ward’s biography undertakes a patriotic celebration of the poet’s “Englishness,” as is seen

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distinctly when he states that Chaucer “is English in his freedom and frankness of spirit; in his manliness of mind; in his preference for the good in things as they are to the good in things as they might be; in his loyalty, his piety, his truthfulness.”136 For my aims, however, Ward’s biography does not stand out due to its persistent nationalism, but because it may be identified as the earliest noteworthy exemplar of a “modern” life of the poet. Admittedly, this notion is slightly problematic so some elaboration is necessary. Like Minto, Ward has heeded the “Appeal to Fact” and generally banished the “legends” to oblivion; the main difference in Ward’s “modern” biography is that there is no longer any need for lengthy methodological discussions like that provided by Nicolas or Minto, because the validity of the documentary basis for the poet’s life finally has been accepted. Therefore, from Ward forward, what is found in Chaucerian life-writing is the widespread “Appeal to Fact,” with the author’s life colored on occasion by a slight deviation from the Life-Records, or more often a selective, literal reading of the persona. These are important moments where biographers have subtly appropriated the narrative speaker through some critical turn-of-phrase, and in so doing project ideals that may considerably alter the emergent picture of the poet. It is largely through such manipulation that Chaucer has been depicted in subsequent modern (or postmodern) biographies as a poet who is noted for his pacifism, lauded for his God-fearing piety, and so on. Ward himself acknowledges the sort of break in Chaucerian lifewriting just described, commenting that biographies of the medieval author are no longer merely a “mixture of unsifted facts, and of more or less hazardous conjectures” but instead are based upon the surviving documentary evidence, so that “we have at least become aware of the foundations on which alone a trustworthy account” of the poet’s life can be built.137 Later, Ward states that “in truth it is but a sorry makeshift of literary biographers to seek to divide a man who is an author into two separate beings, in order to avoid the conversely fallacious procedure of accounting for everything which an author has written by something which the man has done or been inclined to do.”138 Here, Ward recognizes the divided self, but is struggling with the inclination to read the narrative “I” in a factual rather than fictional manner. For Ward, biographies should be firmly based on the documentary evidence, yet the “autobiographical” possibilities of the verse ultimately prove too enticing at times, as he contradicts himself at points by enlisting the persona to promote the poet’s historical value as a writer who “realistically” depicts late medieval English life. In fact, Ward feels it necessary to address those biographers who have the audacity to disagree with his belief in Chaucer the Man’s bona fide narrative presence in key moments, explaining confidently

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that “it is thus, with a few modest but manifestly truthful touches, that Chaucer, after the manner of certain great painters, introduces his own figure into a quiet corner of his crowded canvas.”139 In the end, Ward’s account may not be wholly “trustworthy” because he periodically favors autobiographical readings that help support the author’s position at the British cultural pantheon, but are not substantiated by the archival records. This ideological coloring is evident in several places in Ward’s “life” and is perhaps no better seen than when he cites the Book of the Duchess as evidence for a “more or less intimate” relationship between Chaucer and John of Gaunt.140 This purported affinity between the poet and the inf luential Duke of Lancaster is commonly upheld by Chaucerian biographers. However, there is little actual historical evidence to support this supposed friendship, so we have here in Ward’s account (and others like it) a typical move that serves to foster the author’s cultural authority by associating him with powerful “friends.” In such instances, the persona-construct is read in a way suitable to the biographer’s ends—in this case, implicitly affording the writer a more prominent place in society than, in actuality, he may ever have attained. Hence, Ward seems to read the narrative “I” literally at points where an autobiographical view might conveniently bolster the poet’s stature, while there is ample distancing and reliance on the Life-Records at other moments. This inconsistent clashing of perspectives is characteristic of “modern” biographies, in which the persona generally is ignored or viewed as an unreliable fictional construct except on those occasions when it might be read in such a way that the venerable position of “Father Chaucer” is somehow promoted or his supposed outlook is upheld. Suffice it to say that there are a great many examples of the type of subtle ideological appropriation just described in “lives” of Chaucer since the late nineteenth century. Spatial constraints necessitate that I may only brief ly consider these recent manipulations, having established the “Appeal to Fact” and the tendency in subsequent biographies of generally denying the autobiographical possibilities of the I-narrator, unless a literal reading is more appropriate in an isolated moment, in support of a particular argument. In response to this blurring of the lines between fiction/ fact, several critics have rightly urged their fellows to be cautious with their biographical writing lest they fall into the trap of depicting Chaucer largely as they idealize him as opposed to the life that is revealed through a careful “Appeal to Fact.” Among the most vocal of these critics, past or present, were Thomas Lounsbury and Walter W. Skeat, both of whom were wary of straying too far from the documentary records and were progressive in their scrupulous scholarly approaches to Chaucer’s life and works. Lounsbury’s critical acumen is especially evident in his Studies in

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Chaucer (1892), the first volume of which specifically deals with the problems of Chaucerian life-writing—including an incisive chapter (titled “The Chaucer Legend”) that examines the types of fallacies outlined above.141 The American scholar Lounsbury firmly resisted the critical imperatives of British Victorianism and worked against the grain of much accepted interpretive practice through the employment of a rigorous historical method that was unique for its time.142 Lounsbury frankly acknowledges the intrinsic biases of the biographical craft, commenting that “the life of Chaucer is a field that blossoms luxuriantly with conjectures, and it is asking a great deal of him who enters it to abstain from plucking occasionally one of its f lowers.”143 However, Lounsbury attempts to avoid this problem by relying on the documentary evidence and, in turn, refraining from “introducing any guesses that have been or can be framed to fill in the gaps that exist in the information we possess.”144 This statement illustrates Lounsbury’s refreshing alertness to the inherent challenges of meaning/interpretation, as he is wary of the scholar who disregards the uncertainties of the “existing state of our knowledge, [and] presumes to give a decisive answer” when such answers are untenable due to the ambiguities of the poet’s life and works. The important result of such caution is Lounsbury’s view that the role of the critic should be to weigh “probabilities where certainties can never be assured.”145 Lounsbury favors this conservative approach because he believes that other biographers have too carelessly drawn autobiographical ideas from Chaucer’s verse, confidently seeing things that were never really there since “sentences, under torture, like witnesses upon the rack, can be made to confess almost anything that their persecutors desire to have admitted.”146 Lounsbury bluntly asserts that some scholarly contentions “are of the kind sure to be found in the statements of men who never succeed in gaining a full mastery of the difference that exists between the discovery of facts and their invention.”147 In the context of both reception studies and persona-theory this is a key statement, for Lounsbury thinks it ludicrous to believe that Chaucer intended his narrator to be taken literally, as a realistic mirror of his own person. Lounsbury may not speak of autofiction, per se, but he was acutely aware that the narrative “I” represents an “untrustworthy” fictional presence; even if we could presume that the author spoke in his own voice, his “true” thoughts and the “reality” of his situation would remain unclear because “the mind of the poet which makes him so sensitive to the objects that surround him . . . likewise makes him usually a worthless witness in his own case.”148 Lounsbury’s perceptive outlook on the imaginary nature of Chaucer’s I-speaker is wonderfully summarized by his terse statement that “as well might one hope to squeeze rain from a Saharic sand-cloud,

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as out of materials so empty and juiceless as these to gather the details for the narrative of a life.”149 Through such pronouncements, Lounsbury definitively separates the author from his work/narrator and promotes the view that everything that may be true of the poet must be culled from his life records alone, which the Chaucer Society began to publish extensively in 1875. Although the documentary records may have their own ideological undercurrents and may not be wholly accurate or reliable in their own right, they surely are preferable for biographical purposes to fallible readings of Chaucer’s personae. This notion would be supported by Skeat in the biography published in his distinguished Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, which is the remarkable nineteenth-century edition of the corpus that made the greatest use of the scholarly tools afforded by the Chaucer Society. Skeat admits that writing a biography of Chaucer is a difficult task because the records “tell us very little about the man himself,” but nevertheless favors these archives and emphasizes that the personal allusions in the poems are “a very sandy foundation on which to build up a serious autobiographical structure.”150 For those who would draw conclusions about Chaucer from his works, Skeat clearly recognizes the persona-construct in urging hesitance because, even if his works appear to “exhibit his thoughts and character . . . we must not always accept all his expressions as if they were all his own. We have to deal with a writer in whom the dramatic faculty was highly developed.”151 Perhaps even more telling is that Skeat goes on to explain that the uncertainty which adheres to personae (even when not so named) demands that the “truth” that is offered as biographical fact is nothing more than the biased vision of the scholar him/herself. As Skeat puts it, “when a poet complains of hopeless love, or expresses his despair, or tells us (on the other hand) that he has no idea as to what love means, we are surely free to believe, in each case, just as little or as much as we please,” but in any such instance, these inferences “may easily be wrong” due to the ambiguous I-persona.152 With these words, Skeat makes it clear that it is not necessarily Chaucer the Man who is revealed through accounts of his life, but rather the scholars themselves and their own personal viewpoints. As Louis Althusser has shown, ideologies can be extremely powerful, and it seems that despite the warnings of Lounsbury, Skeat, and others, a number of critics have found it difficult to resist the allure of projecting their own beliefs by citing purported Chaucerian “autobiography.”153 Consequently, in the many biographies of Chaucer that have been written since the nineteenth century, the result has been many different “Chaucers” painted with the ideological colors of a given critic, and at times marked by the f lawed “legendary” inclination to read

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the verse literally. These ideologies may or may not be conscious, but they are unquestionably impactful. J. M. Manly stands out as the biographer who has taken the “realistic” possibilities of Chaucer’s verse to their limits, and his conjectural method is characteristic of much twentieth-century life-writing. Manly is forthright about his technique, describing Some New Light on Chaucer as neither a formal critical treatise for experts nor a book of fact but “merely a collection of suggestions of a more or less speculative character” that represent the culmination of his view that “we shall never succeed in the interpretation of the past without the use of the constructive imagination.”154 Manly’s candor here is laudable and his point well-taken, but there is no doubt that the type of overtly “imaginative” construction he endorses frees him to manipulate the poet’s life as he sees fit. Manly uses his “imaginative” technique primarily to support two currents of biographical thinking about the poet. The most important and inf luential of these is the depiction of a consciously realistic author whose works show medieval life as it “really” was.155 Manly takes this viewpoint to its extreme, being particularly interested in proving the “truth” of the Canterbury Tales by identifying the actual, living people Chaucer supposedly based the pilgrims on. Manly argues that “some at least of the pilgrims were real persons, and persons with whom Chaucer can be shown to have had definite personal contacts.”156 He proceeds to offer some of these “definite” identifications, by locating such figures as the “real” Southwark innkeeper Harry Bailly, the “tricky Reeve of Baldeswell,” and so forth.157 These identifications disregard the fictional functions of the characters in question and help Manly to show that Chaucer is a “realistic” poet who portrays his culture “with all the solidity and colors of reality, [since] the men and women of his world are as vivid and familiar as those whom we see daily with our own eyes.”158 The “new light” Manly shone on Chaucer has proven quite inf luential, but his de-emphasis of the literary traditions surrounding narrative personae gives the verse and its speakers a “truth to life” that the author may never have intended within the fictional framework of the Tales. To be sure, there is much critical merit in seeking new meaning and attempting to open up the poet’s oeuvre to new possibilities. As I utilize the term in this study, such willfully provocative broadening of the interpretive horizons is usefully “queer”—and the ambivalent persona itself functions to forward a great many engaging “queer” possibilities. However, biographical analysis is not literary interpretation, and as real as they may seem the Canterbury Tales are poetic texts and not historical records. Hence, there is a danger in Manly’s “imaginative” reconstructions insofar as they may

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well take us further from the historical truth, which is presumably what biographical scholarship seeks to find. Although most recent biographers have taken care to utilize the documentary remnants of the poet’s life, the line between scholarly lifewriting and imaginative criticism has been crossed on several occasions. John Gardner’s biography is an especially intriguing case in point, as it represents a fusion of his scholarly and creative interests, resulting in a lively, self-consciously fictionalized sketch of The Life and Times of Chaucer. Gardner fully acknowledges his fictional inclination, declaring that he tried to be “judicious and relatively objective” as he “gathered the available scholarly materials in a heap, to make a stab at sorting them and finding out how much it is possible to say, or rather make up, about the character of Chaucer.” But because the historical records are so fragmentary, Gardner alleges that “we have no choice but to make up Chaucer’s life as if his story were a novel, by the play of fancy on the lost world’s dust and scrapings.”159 Gardner uses this approach to good effect and succeeds in “[making] the story interesting,” but at what cost?160 Outright fiction in biographical writing creates a “life” that is largely a construct of the imagination, so that the result may not be perceived as biographical scholarship at all, but historical fiction, or a popularizing novel of sorts. With these issues in the foreground, it is an interesting exercise to consider how Gardner utilizes the persona-construct in his fictionalized account. Gardner’s text follows in the wake of the midcentury reemergence of persona theory in Chaucer Studies, and his use of and reference to the I-persona is perhaps even more extensive than in any other recent Chaucerian life-writing. Discussing one of Chaucer’s “complaints,” for example, Gardner claims that “the poem’s speaker is some fictional persona or caricature of the actual poet,” which is significant because “as a rule . . . Chaucer’s ingenious [narrative] tricks contribute to meaning.”161 Brief comments of this sort are quite suggestive given that the biographer’s substantially fictionalized “Chaucer” is a figure predicated largely upon the poet’s “ingenious tricks” of narrative: the medieval author’s manipulation of his I-narrator(s) not only appears to contribute to meaning, but also encourages, or at least permits Gardner’s biographical freedom. Thus, Gardner’s book illustrates just how crucial the persona might be for those who favor a speculative approach to the author’s biography. In Gardner’s case, he variously underlines the “reality” of the speaker or emphasizes the narrator’s fictional aspects, depending on which seems more suitable for his storytelling purposes in a given moment. It is this ease of biographical appropriation that is most troubling to the reception theorist, because manipulations of the kind seen throughout Gardner’s text afford a biographer even more license to shape the “Chaucer”

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whose story is told. This is no better seen than in the vivid conclusion to Gardner’s “life,” which stems from an emphatically autobiographical reading of the Retraction as the author’s own pious, final words. In Gardner’s evocative conception, when [Chaucer] finished he handed the quill to Lewis. He could see the boy’s features clearly now, could see everything clearly, his “whole soul in his eyes”—another line out of some old poem, he thought sadly, and then, ironically, more sadly yet, “Farewel my bok and devocioun!” Then in panic he realized, but only for an instant, that he was dead, falling violently toward Christ.162

Gardner’s colorful Life and Times makes it crystal clear that, as Donald Howard noted in his own Chaucer biography, some element of fiction is almost inevitable because “we do not find anything without knowing first what we are looking for.”163 The point, then, is not to condemn Gardner but to consider the implications of his approach. From a critical perspective, it might simply be said that substantially based biographical possibilities are welcome, but theoretically unfounded suppositions are not. This chapter has shown that, historically, many (or most) of the baseless presumptions that have been made regarding Chaucer’s life are forged through unsound usage of the persona that downplays its autofictional resonance in favor of purported autobiographical indicators. In fairness, Gardner’s fictional creation helps us to see that the narrative persona actually invites biographers to apply their “constructive imagination” because Chaucer uses the I-persona to speak to readers across the gulf that divides medieval from modern, beckons us into his inner world, makes us want to think his thoughts and feel his feelings even as he masks these behind multiple ironies and leaves us guessing at them. This quality, which at once invites and eludes, is so much an aspect of his style that no literary biography focused on his works can escape an effort to see into his mind.164

Such is the temptation of the persona for the Chaucerian biographer. In response, where do critics draw the line between what is excessive biographical manipulation and what is not? Is there in fact such a line, or should there be? What is fact and what is fiction, and when should fictional texts be brought into the discussion of historical facts? The answers to these important questions are difficult if not impossible to determine, but the questions themselves deserve close attention. As time progresses, these questions will continue to arise, particularly in response

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to biographies such as Gardner’s, or Terry Jones’s more recent collaboration that speculates about Who Murdered Chaucer?165 One way of addressing these questions is by admitting their very intractability, frankly recognizing the contingencies of medieval information and its modern deployments and recuperations. Derek Pearsall’s Chaucer biography exemplifies this very approach, offering, as the title suggests, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography. Pearsall is careful not to make sweeping conjectures, present unsupported speculations, or draw absolute conclusions, and thus his “life” counters hundreds of years of autobiographical interpretations, “legendary” ideals, and outright appropriation by merely telling the reader what the poet may have been like. Faced with the allure of the persona, Pearsall candidly comments that the poet “did not make the biographer’s task any easier” since “he seems to have anticipated modern verdicts on the ‘death of the author’ by prudently absenting himself, leaving only his creations to deputize for him.” Pearsall is mindful that the I-persona has been appropriated by many biographers and therefore consciously seeks to avoid such manipulation, saying that “the emphasis on Chaucer’s presence within his poems has often been no more than a convenient fiction for those who wished to attribute their own interpretive activity to his supposed intentions.”166 By merely presenting the possibilities for Chaucer’s life, Pearsall encourages readers to consider the information for themselves and draw their own conclusions, rather than presenting the sort of ideological certainties frequently encountered earlier. Inevitably, there are moments where Pearsall does draw conclusions or indicate an authoritative viewpoint, but these moments are few and far between, and in such moments we usually are told that things are “likely” or “possible,” rather than “certain.” This is sensible, because the only thing one can be “certain” of with regards to Chaucer’s life is uncertainty itself. Pearsall also is wise to steer clear of the persona in his biography, because he realizes that while “the relationship between ‘life’ and ‘works’ may take many forms” and may cultivate our interests, the poet ultimately tells us “little about himself ” and his writings do not evince his actual existence. Hence, “it might be better to have no biography at all” than to create a fallacious “semi-fictional biography” based on “elusive,” unreliable references from Chaucer’s poetry.167 Pearsall naturally recognizes that there is value in Chaucerian biography, but merely yearns for a measured, theoretically sound account. Pearsall himself has provided such an account, and it is important to note that his conservative approach is not ultimately limiting, although it may appear to confine the possibilities for the poet’s life by sticking to the archives and generally being skeptical of the biographical utility of the verse. Instead of restricting Chaucer’s life, however, what Pearsall offers

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are possibilities themselves, powerfully indecisive biographical renderings based on the best available resources. In this uncertainty is potential itself, f luid meaning which invites a reader to draw his/her own conclusions and thus opens up the author’s life to numerous possibilities while, in turn, expanding the possible horizons of the poetic corpus.168 This would seem to be the theoretical ideal, and Pearsall’s biography epitomizes a widely accepted contemporary viewpoint that criticism— biographical and otherwise—is best utilized to ask questions and facilitate potential meanings rather than close down the interpretive contingencies.169 And by preferring possibility to positivity, Pearsall’s method significantly parallels the persona itself in its function as a “queer” construct that questions scholarly “norms” and creates compelling, productive inconclusiveness. To be sure, Pearsall’s Life of Geoffrey Chaucer is neither deliberately “queer” nor purposefully ref lective of the tenets of queer theory. Nevertheless, it is exceptional in its consistent advancement of such thoughtful open-endedness, its questioning of tradition, and especially its perceptive skepticism of personae for biographical purposes. Whether it is called “queer” or simply historically and theoretically astute, the utility of Pearsall’s approach seems unimpeachable. Admittedly one still does not, and cannot really “know” him, but in the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer readers are presented with historically viable, theoretically valid possibilities that illuminate who the author/civil servant might have been. In truth, this is all we can hope to discover for such a sparsely documented figure six centuries after his death. As this chapter has shown, in Chaucerian biography manipulations of the persona profoundly inf luence the portrayal of the poet—especially in ways that underline his laureate status. When Chaucer’s “life” is written, it is obvious that the author has been, can be, and will be constructed for various ideological purposes, and these ideals often are advanced through a questionably literal view of the narrative “I.” Of course, the shadowy figure of Chaucer does not just emerge in biographical descriptions. Constructions of the author and his life also have been a staple of interpretive scholarship since the earliest stages of Chaucer criticism, particularly based on favorable, autobiographical representations of the I-persona. The following chapters will analyze significant examples of this kindred critical appropriation of the persona, in the hopes of increasing scholarly awareness of just how much our own beliefs and preconceptions inf luence our comprehension of Chaucer, his narrators, and his narratives.

CHAPTER 3 CHAUCER SPEAKS: MEMOIRS OF THE MAN?

The voice, which is to say the question of the voice (who is speaking? is there a voice?) is not the form of, but the provocation to ethical decision. —Steven Connor1 To assess the character of criticism requires one to study the ethical attitudes behind critical claims as well as the attitudes engendered either consciously or unconsciously by particular theoretical stances. —Tobin Siebers2

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ince the classical period, poetry and morality have been intricately linked. As Horace noted, poets seek either to delight or profit, to entertain or benefit.3 Arguably, the moral dimension that has been a defining feature of literary writing since the Greeks is especially prominent in the Middle English corpus. The late Middle Ages was a time of profound political change, scholastic growth, and theological questioning, which led exegetes and poets alike to examine the ethics of the period. Chaucer was no exception. Although his verse is more varied in its content and approach than that of most late medieval poets, there is no doubt that moral concerns are at the very center of Chaucer’s major works. This is obvious, for example, throughout the Canterbury Tales, where the author “himself ” tells us that he will offer stories “of best sentence and moost solaas,” as well as tales of “moralitee and hoolynesse.”4 In a similar vein the minor works, which are the focus of this chapter, characteristically were written with an eye toward moral issues. Hence, in the texts under consideration below, the I-narrator not only laments “that al is lost for lak of stedfastnesse” but in Chaucer’s Retraction even goes so far as to revoke his “translacions and enditynges of worldly vanities” and seek remembrance for works of “moralitee, and devocioun” alone.5

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Citations of this sort prove that morality is all-important, and even unavoidable, for interpretations of Chaucer’s oeuvre. Without question, twenty-first century scholars are far less likely than, say, their Victorian or “Exegetical” predecessors to render explicit moral judgments on literary works or to read those texts primarily as repositories of moral insight. But as the distinguished scholar of ethics Tobin Siebers has emphasized, it remains true today that “the character of criticism emerges in its critical choices, and the nature of that critical choice reveals that literary criticism is inextricably linked to ethics.”6 More directly, Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods note that the critical practices of de Man, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida et al., have been enlisted over the last few decades in projects that are overwhelmingly motivated by ethical concerns—above all, in attempts to expose and to rectify the oppression or marginalization, through culture, of individuals and groups on the basis of race, class, sex and/or gender, or sexuality.7

This contention certainly holds true in the realm of Chaucer Studies, where the reading practices of critics typically involve applying their own “ethical codes” to the medieval corpus (to borrow from Wayne Booth).8 In the reception of the minor works, the “ethical codes” of critics are widely apparent. Chapter 2 has shown that idealization permeates Chaucerian life-writing, with biographers going to great lengths to portray the author favorably, working to establish and “monumentalize” the supposed “Father of English poetry.” Chapter 3 demonstrates that the same impulse is found in non-biographical scholarship on the minor works, where a moral propensity is often explicit since critics take great care to present the poet as an honorable and pious figure, in the face of material that includes problematic or even objectionable contents. Time and again a kind of moral value has been assigned to the minor works and the author who wrote them, for in the eyes of most readers Chaucer’s (presumably) virtuous, magisterial outlook is revealed in his epistles, and especially in the Retraction. Therefore, I contend that the reception of the minor works is inextricably bound up with issues of literary morality, as the desire to create an ideal, moral image of Chaucer is consistently identifiable. It is this inclination that will be critiqued on the following pages, because it is clear that the moral beliefs of scholars have skewed their depictions—or, rather, judgments—of Chaucer’s short works and their narrative personae. A pivotal issue for my discussion is the assumption that, in the words of Alfred David, the minor works “give us a more intimate glimpse of Chaucer’s mind than we receive in more formal and elaborate works.”9

C H AUC E R S P E A K S: M E MOI R S OF T H E M A N ?

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The short poems do have an extraordinary historical valence since the author addresses actual contemporaries and arguably offers a more direct political and social engagement than is typically found in the longer works. It is thus no surprise that the scholarly legacies of these minor works are marked by various historicizing approaches, with critics appealing to the author by connecting Chaucer, his life, and his supposed ideals directly to the texts in question. In other words, further evidence is at hand for the autobiographical impulse examined in chapter 2. In the context of the minor works, the problem with this autobiographical tendency is that these texts are neither documentary records nor historical discourse, but pieces of literature offered in the voice(s) of the autofictional I-persona. Consequently, Chaucer the Man may well be wholly detached from the text(s), his beliefs entirely different from those articulated by the firstperson speaker(s). The autobiographical reception of the minor works is therefore doubly revealing because it shows not only how the persona implicates, or is implicated by Chaucer criticism, but also demonstrates the degree to which the author is morally shaped by critics. To critique the appeal to the author described above, this chapter considers three primary categories of narrative speaking found in key shorter works. The first two categories, and the following sections, highlight David’s statement that “identifying the people to whom the short poems are addressed and the occasions behind them has been the object of much patient research.”10 Accordingly, I will examine Chaucer talking to friends and Chaucer talking to kings. To consider these two types of Chaucerian “talk,” the scholarly legacies of the following poems will be analyzed: “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton,” “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan,” “Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn,” “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” and “The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse.” Finally, the focus will be shifted toward the heavens in order to analyze an altogether different kind of “talk”: Chaucer talking to God. For this category of speaking I shall consider “Chaucer’s Retraction,” a short prose text with an alluringly tangible narrator that brings to a head many of the issues found in the reception of the lyrics, as controversy arises concerning the author, his intentions, and his religiosity. As Jay Ruud has asserted, Chaucer’s minor works provide a key to understanding the whole corpus because the poet’s mode of presentation and manipulation of narrative style in the shorter works adds much to our comprehension of the Chaucerian persona and the structure of the longer works.11 This crucial point highlights the importance of the minor works to my project, and articulates one of the main reasons I am brief ly considering selected short works before moving on to “major” texts in the remainder of the monograph. To borrow from this chapter’s

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opening epigraphs, the persona is the “provocation to ethical decision” for the minor works, and by examining its reception the moral attitudes “engendered either consciously or unconsciously” by scholars are clearly seen. The complex “voice” (or voices) of the short works consistently is downplayed in critical accounts, and hence this elision helps us to see the extent to which numerous scholars have chosen to ignore the fictionality of Chaucer’s personae. For it is apparent that the autofictional nature of the narrative “I” problematizes many accounts where the presumed ideals of the poet are upheld and a notably moral Chaucer is constructed. Nevertheless, time after time, critics of the short works project an auctor who offers authoritative truth and serves as a guide to virtuous actions. The persistent creation of this high-minded father-figure illustrates that, as Booth explains, “the virtues of narratives relate to the virtues of selves and societies, [and] the ethos of any story affects or is affected by the ethos—the collection of virtues—of any given reader.”12 3.1 The Man and His Familiars: Chaucer Talks to Friends In an early printed edition of the “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton,” the poem is introduced with the following headlink: “Here foloweth the counceyll of Chaucer touchyng Maryag &c. Which was sente te [sic] Bucketon &c.”13 The topic of marriage (and marriage counsel) has remained central to the poem’s reception ever since this rubric was written more than five hundred years ago. Closely aligned with this is the topic of friendship, which has likewise been highly important to scholars over the years. This holds true not only for “Bukton” but also the “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan,” while there are different questions of friendship surrounding the third poem to be considered in this section, “Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn.” A general assumption of intimacy between author and addressee has distinctly shaped the interpretation of these poems, and is part and parcel of the pervasive impulse toward literal readings and “autobiographical” possibilities. In the reception of these particular minor works, this predilection is perhaps best seen in the widespread tendency toward individualizing each poem’s content. For centuries, critics have sought to determine the kind of relationship that existed between Chaucer and his three fellows, and in light of these relationships, to draw firm conclusions about the “counceyll” being offered to each individual “friend.” To analyze this brand of historical individualization it is useful to first consider “Bukton” and “Scogan” collectively, because they are kindred works with parallel content that were written to identifiable members of the royal court. Whereas projected notions of friendship for


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“Scogan” typically tie into the general, universal motif of love, readings of “Bukton” primarily are centered upon the more specific theme of marriage. In particular, critics have sought to explain—or explain away—“Bukton’s” commentary on matrimony, which is easily read as being quite wary of “the sorwe and wo that is in mariage” (6), although the narrator does advise that “bet ys to wedde than brenne in worse wise” (18). One of the earliest accounts of “Bukton” was published by William Godwin, who defends both the poem and its writer by asserting that “it would be unjust however, from his playfully expressing an aversion to marriage in the character of a satirist, to infer that he had not lived in perfect harmony and happiness with the mother of his children.”14 I have previously cited this allusion to the functions of the persona-construct in chapter 2, which allows Godwin to justify the poem’s disparagement of marriage and ensure that the author’s own wedded state is not seen as somehow impure. By rationalizing the verse as satiric discourse, Godwin detaches Chaucer from the text’s controversial views, absolving him of any ill-feelings toward the holy rite of marriage, or indeed his wife. And the Romantic scholar Godwin is not alone in citing literary conventions to account for potentially unbecoming material found in both “Bukton” and “Scogan.” According to V. J. Scattergood, “Bukton” is a playful letter of advice that makes use of conventional wisdom (i.e., proverbs), and “it is not difficult to appreciate the main direction of Chaucer’s advice to Bukton”: the poet is interested in the difficulty of truth, of being “al trewe.” By asserting a kind of playful use of convention, Scattergood presents the poet’s own position on marriage as an ambiguous one, and perhaps deliberately so; like Godwin before him Scattergood implicitly reconciles the poem and excuses the poet, in this case by citing the conventional, comic nature of his advice that leads him to present marriage as the lesser of two evils.15 Both Godwin and, to a lesser degree, Scattergood place “Bukton” in the category of antimatrimonial satire, a genre common in the Middle Ages that has predictable, characteristically misogynistic content—and if this content is expected in such a work, it can safely be assumed as being distinct from the author and his own views. This has been the attitude of several readers, whose citations of conventions serve to disassociate the poet from potentially indecorous perspectives regarding those who “falle of weddynge in the trappe” (24). An interesting feature of such readings is that the satiric persona— itself a highly conventional narrative construct—rarely comes into play. Instead, the common view seems to be that the speaker of the poem is Chaucer, but he is merely speaking of/through conventional ideals. However, is it not possible, or even likely that Chaucer is manipulating his

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I-speaker here to playfully address the subject of marriage? Of course it is, and especially since this appears to be a satirical poem and not a straightforward friendly letter. Then why does the persona not play a key role in the poem’s reception? I believe the answer lies in the autobiographical inclination of critics, who characteristically yearn to hear Chaucer’s voice when another narrative “I” could be speaking. In the case of “Bukton,” this bent is signaled by the age-old, traditional title of the poem—we are not just reading an envoy to one Bukton but the “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton.” For those who accept that “Bukton” is conventional in nature yet hear the author’s voice rather than a persona, a typical move is to draw attention to Chaucer’s audience of courtiers to justify the contents of the poem. In this view, the poet is subtly divorced from the cynical sentiments of the text even if he “himself ” is the purported narrator. Kittredge, for instance, states that the poem “is no more significant of Chaucer’s views or experiences than a comic valentine,” given that “it seems to have been not uncommon to send a jocose message, in dispraise of wedlock, to a friend who had either just married or was on the point of taking such a step,” so that the text may well have been read at a farewell stag dinner amidst the “inextinguishable laughter of the blessed bachelors.”16 Pearsall concurs, and taking into account the historical relations between Chaucer and Bukton, states that the poem’s general, bitter tone indicates that it is “not too genial” but “would have given pleasure in an all-male company.”17 Some might consider “Bukton”—and the responses of male critics such as Kittredge and Pearsall—as evidence of the “obligatory heterosexuality” that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sees as central to male- dominated kinship systems, where there is a direct relationship between “male homosocial desire” and the various structures used to maintain and transmit patriarchal power.18 In fact, this perspective is surprisingly rare, and although few would deny that there is some degree of misogyny implied in “Bukton,” Chaucerians of all theoretical colors have ultimately freed the poet of responsibility for this material. Whether this is a conscious move is debatable, but it is clear that the conventions of antimatrimonial satire are convenient for this very purpose. Hence, by placing the poem within the context of Bukton and other male courtiers at the time, the text is presented as being for this historical audience and thus its questionable virtues not truly believed by the author himself. On the whole, interpretations of “Bukton” that cite literary conventions and/or antimatrimonial satire do sensibly engage the contents of the verse, especially by cautiously distancing the poet from the poem. But where these readings arguably falter is in failing to take the next step and


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more fully detaching the author from his creation by directly recognizing and utilizing the persona. As any reader of classical satire or Shakespeare’s sonnets knows well, there is no reason to assume that “personal” poems are emotionally accurate or straightforward in terms of their content, speaker, or addressee. The same is true of “Bukton,” where it may be that the alleged historical connection with the real-life courtier Bukton has proven too enticing for critics, not unlike the so-called “Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets.” An interesting method for reconciling these issues might be to attempt a reading centered on the following question: What if we did not have the traditional title here, and line one simply read “my maister” rather than “my maister Bukton”? If Chaucer’s “maister” remained anonymous, then perhaps critics might be inclined to offer more fully autofictional accounts. This would raise some intriguing questions, because a reader is thus faced with, at most, a “mark of autobiography” that is elusive throughout the poem. In the envoy, it may be argued that the text does seem more intimate than the preceding material, but even here the familiarity and personal sentiments are impossible to pinpoint with any accuracy. Collectively, the poem does present a kind of shared humor and appears to offer friendly advice, but the final implication remains unclear—maybe the narrator is disparaging of marriage, maybe not. But by distancing the poet through the persona, critics might be more comfortable exploring the likelihood that this poem is critical of the holy institution of marriage, and that the satire is potentially biting and acerbic. Even if it is not scathing in its critique, the presence of a persona underlines that this poem deals with universal sentiments and regards that could be sent from virtually any articulate medieval man to any kindred spirit, any literate male courtier to another. What an autofictional reading ultimately teaches is that the poem is an ambiguous work that need not—or should not—be taken at face value. Despite this marked ambiguity, critics of “Bukton” frequently individualize the poem and make the case for a personal text that addresses sensitive, private concerns. Here again, it is evident that even if the content itself is somehow questionable, most scholars take care to project an admirable epistolary writer noted for “always following artistic and moral truth.”19 This is identifiable in the reception of both “Bukton” and “Scogan,” with Chaucer customarily seen as a kindhearted companion who yearns to honestly dispense whatever advice is necessary in order to help his comrades in times of need. David’s reading of “Bukton” illustrates this tendency well. No matter which Bukton was the real-life recipient of the text, David contends that what is important is that he belonged to the same class as Chaucer, so the poem provides readers with

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“a rare insight into Chaucer’s relationship with members of his circle, men with whom he has outwardly much in common and who . . . also shared something of Chaucer’s outlook, his learning, his humor, and perhaps the complexity of his vision.” David argues that it would be “a serious distortion” of the poem to assert that Chaucer intended the verses to dissuade Bukton from marrying, because “what shines through the satire is his sincere wish for his friend’s happiness.”20 The poem may be satirical, but it is well-intended and sincere in its good-natured personal sentiments. Jane Chance goes even further, seeing “Bukton” as a wholly sincere account of marriage, as an epistle that highlights the virtues of love, matrimony, and even Christian piety. Chance argues that the text intimates the need for caution in heeding any condemnation of marriage—“in short, the poem actually means the opposite of what it seems to say: marriage is not folly but wisdom.”21 The logic here highlights the lengths that may occasionally be taken to ensure the poet’s moral standing. For Chance, the poem is not humorous but pious, as its words on marriage actually serve to direct the reader toward the ultimate friend, the goal of the sincere penitent: God the Father and his teaching. When sincerely pious men like Bukton or Chaucer understand and obey the Word of God, they realize the necessity of both literal and figurative marriage, living the spiritual life by binding themselves to their wives as Christ bound himself to the Church so that “paradoxically, true freedom derives only from bondage and obedience to the New Law of Christ predicated on love, both of neighbor and of self, for the sake of God.”22 The moralization on display here—a kind of interpretive cloistering of “Father Chaucer”—is encountered frequently in criticism of the shorter works, including the next focus of my attention, the “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan.” G. L. Kittredge once described “Scogan” as Chaucer’s only piece of “real autobiography.”23 Recalling that Kittredge was a scholar who clearly recognized the fictionality of the persona-construct, this is an intriguing comment. It seems probable that Kittredge favored a literal reading of this particular I-narrator because it helped him to foster an advantageous view of Chaucer-as-friend, with the amiable author giving sage advice to his compeer. Others have been far more overt in projecting such a view, and Chance’s account is again illustrative of the degree to which certain critics have gone to moralize Chaucer’s epistolary verse. Chance maintains that, while the surface level of “Scogan” concerns a topical situation involving a problem of courtly love, “its underlying level . . . concerns secular and religious means of circumventing the power of mutability and spiritual death.” She believes that Chaucer uses the text to show that both men, having avoided love, must realize that the stream of divine grace cannot bring forth proper fruit if they do not obey the law


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of God by following a higher form of love, the love of self and neighbor for God.24 Ruud would agree, and cites the Ciceronian material of the poem as evidence that it advises Scogan to obey Nature’s law and place his love where it best belongs. It is acceptable to love one whom nature would see as a fit object of love, but it is more important to direct one’s love toward the most fruitful end, the love of God.25 By reading the poem with such a moral view, these critics are able to gloss over the possibility—prompted by the famous lines in the envoy that beseech Scogan to “thenke on Tullius kyndenesse; / Mynne thy frend, there it may fructyfye!” (47–48)—that Chaucer is using the text to plead with Scogan for monetary assistance. Although few accounts of “Scogan” have upheld such an outwardly pious image of the author, several critics have, like Ruud, applied literary conventions to warrant the entreaty found in the poem’s envoy. For example, Scattergood finds the satirical male posturing of “Bukton” to have been replaced in “Scogan” with an ennobled notion of love as a kind of mirror in which a sensitive man may see himself. Scattergood acknowledges that Chaucer may have been in financial straits and possibly wrote the epistle to ask his well-connected friend to remember him in such a way as to benefit him materially; however, the Ciceronian content of the poem ultimately points to a suggestion that Scogan not separate himself from love and instead continue their (loving) friendship.26 Scattergood deems the metaphors associated with love to be offered from an ironic narrative perspective, with Chaucer stating that financially speaking Michaelmas is a particularly sensitive time for people like Scogan and himself due to rents and so forth having to be paid, and it is therefore not a time to be altering relationships or provoking the displeasure of those on whom one depends.27 Here is an illustrative example of the individualization of the minor works, as “Scogan” is placed in a precise personal context. Scattergood recognizes that a persona may be present in the poem, yet he seems to downplay its significance; he shrewdly discusses the classical undercurrent of the verse, but the persona (a classical construct) is functionally marginalized in favor of the poet’s own voice. Like Scattergood, David may be seen as citing conventions as part of a program of individualizing “Scogan.” David describes the poem as a sort of balade de bon conseyl that gives a young friend some humorous advice, which turns upon the similarities between Scogan and Chaucer. 28 David interprets the piece as a playful epistle that is neither begging Scogan for money nor asking him to put in a good word for Chaucer, but rather urges Scogan to remember the example of his old friend, and contrast their present fortunes in love as a remedy against future pride and recklessness since all the works of man and nature fade away, literature included.29

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This is a persuasive reading, but it is questionable whether the personal, private intentions of a conventional poem like “Scogan” are so neatly recoverable. By definition, conventions are public in that many people recognize and utilize them. And it is important to note that there have been a handful of critics who view both “Scogan” and “Bukton” as verse epistles that are not merely private but address “potentially disparate, and hence more public groups of readers alongside the coterie audience they ostensibly target.”30 In a literary culture in which poetry apparently was distributed in manuscript among courtiers, it is certainly possible that Chaucer assumed both texts would have some degree of public circulation and thus wrote with a wider audience in mind.31 This might well explain certain conventional features of each poem, but few critics have supported this reasonable position. Instead, private concerns rule the day. When literary conventions are cited, their public resonance commonly is tempered in favor of interpretive individualization, as scholars advance a private meaning for conventional material of a kind that may have been known and used far and wide. Though the conventional content of “Scogan” does seem to have a universal quality, there is a level of intimacy to the poem that cannot be overlooked. Thus, in seeking a more theoretically nuanced reading the notion that there is a familiar regard in the poem cannot be discounted, highlighted by the seven separate references to Scogan in the text. Considering these repeated references, a case could be made that “Scogan” is a more thoroughly intimate, personal poem than “Bukton.” However, the Ciceronian content and classical allusions may serve to undercut such a view, and what is more important for my purposes is the notion of intimacy itself. This is a belief that sidesteps the conventional nature of the I-speaker, a narrator who addresses classical figures and ageold ideals. This narrator is nothing other than a persona who may seem to speak for the poet himself but who may just as likely be speaking in a detached public voice for a broad courtly audience. I believe that many readers of this poem have been coaxed by the references to Scogan—not to mention the established title itself (“Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan”)—into autobiographical perspectives and precise, pointed advice. But the allusions to Scogan need not be read “straight,” and if the poem is understood as spoken by a persona and not the poet himself the conventional features may take on a different register and new interpretive possibilities may appear. “Scogan” offers conventional sentiments throughout: amorous desires, wariness for undercutting the laws of love, dread for one’s erroneous ways, and apprehension for old age and the passing of time. Collectively, these traditional motifs produce a kind of distancing-effect, or at least a sense that whoever the speaker


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is his feelings are in many ways universal. Seen within the text’s traditional schemes, the references to Scogan do appear pointed and perhaps even biting at times: “this is for thyn offence; / Thow causest this diluge of pestilence” (13–14). Here again, it may be that more fully utilizing persona-theory would help critics to temper their instinctual desire to establish (or uphold) “Father Chaucer” in the poem. As with “Bukton,” applying the persona to “Scogan” might encourage renewed discussion of the harsh criticism that is perhaps leveled at the recipient. On the other hand, the persona might underscore the fact that these references need not signify any particular “offence” but fit the general tenor of the text’s conventional discourse. When the autofictional persona is emphasized, the advice to Scogan becomes more obviously vague and noncommital. It may be eminently clear that the speaker suggests that one should never “Love dyffye” (49), but beyond that the suggestions are consistently equivocal; in particular it is not evident what the reader might do other than generally abide by the rules of love. And even when the implications are seemingly identifiable at points, they could be applied to virtually any “frend” and not just an individual named Scogan. The reception of “Scogan” not only tends to downplay such impersonal interpretive possibilities, but also is marked by the kind of pervasive seriousness, or indeed moralization seen in Chance’s reading cited earlier. Few go so far as Chance, but a number of critics overlook the poem’s humorous undercurrent, ranging from lighthearted comments on aging (“While I was yong, I put hre forth in prees; / But al shal passe that men prose or ryme; / Take every man hys turn, as for his tyme” [40–42]) to possible sexual innuendo (“Lest for thy gilt the wreche of Love procede / On all hem that ben hoot and rounde of shap, . . . Than shal we for oure labour have no mede” [30–33]). The presence of the persona does not necessarily alter these humorous f lourishes, but their general oversight has functioned within the individualizing tendency of the poem’s criticism. Rather than perceiving the persona, scholars prefer to see the poet. And in this case, critics have favored a broadly serious view when the humorous possibilities of the text—highlighted by the playful persona— might actually help to minimize any likelihood that Chaucer found himself in financial distress and was begging a “frend” for money. Hence, even if this poem was written in a strictly private context, as an epistle between two friends, the reception of “Scogan” is notable for its subtle historical evasiveness, with cited conventions helping to rationalize the poem’s petition and to foster a magisterial view of the author. Whether or not Chaucer truly was in need of money, he was, it would seem, never lacking in sage advice for his friends. If this is so, then what happens in scholarship on a text where the author is not addressing a close

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friend, but apparently is chastising an employee? Does the poet emerge as a similarly wise and caring advisor? The answer is yes, as the criticism on “Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn” makes clear. As is true of “Bukton” and “Scogan,” scholars typically view “Adam Scriveyn” as a private poem with personal concerns. But this is a very different work that conveys a wholly different type of friendship—if the term “friend” is even appropriate to describe Adam the scrivener. In this seven line poem a tangible sense of social hierarchy adheres, with the narrator addressing an inferior intimate rather than a man of similar class and employ. Nonetheless, the patterns of thought found in “Adam Scriveyn’s” reception are akin to those seen above, with critics again displaying an interest in historicizing the poem and individualizing its advice. The poem’s opening phrase and rhetoric makes it clear that it is addressed to a scribe with the name of Adam. This was a very common name in medieval England, and it is possible that the verse addresses scribes in general, given that there were doubtless many authors who were unhappy about having to “correcte” their works because of scribal “negligence” (lines 6–7). Yet the name Adam itself, like Bukton and Scogan, has proven very enticing to critics. This is particularly evident in the series of scholarly accounts from the early twentieth century that sought high and low to identify the Adam to whom the advice is offered; the answer remains inconclusive, although Adam Pinckhurst recently has been established as the most likely figure.32 In the identification of Adam Pinckhurst as Chaucer’s alleged scribe, we have a distinct historical narrowing of the poem and its interpretive parameters that may be seen as unnecessarily restrictive and limiting. Hence, I would like to (re)expand the text’s parameters, and persona-theory is the perfect tool to do just that. If it is assumed that this is an autofictional narrator speaking and not Chaucer himself—as the traditional, critically accepted title suggests—then the relationship between the speaker and Adam becomes far less precise and intimate. Rather than a brief condemnation of Adam Pinckhurst, the text emerges in a more general light—these “wordes” could be spoken by virtually any medieval writer to any scribe. A useful model for reading the poem is Carolyn Dinshaw’s well-known account in Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. Like most critics Dinshaw does, in fact, seem inclined to hear Chaucer’s own voice in/through the poem; but rather than focusing primarily on the historical relationship between author and scribe Dinshaw views the text more broadly, perceiving it as speaking to the “social enterprise” of literary writing. Dinshaw notes the conventionality of the verse—“it sounds like a classical epigraph”—and observes that the text may well articulate a real exasperation with the scribal reproduction of Chaucer’s works.33 However, rather than falling


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into the customary trap of precisely individualizing the poem, Dinshaw takes a cue from its explosive final word to consider possible implications the verse may have for the human body, gender, and even “rape” itself. Some might question Dinshaw’s gendered association of the scribe Adam with the biblical figure of Eve or feel uneasy with her argument that the poem may serve to feminize the writer or suggest his own literary “rape.” But surely there is merit in the idea that “Adam Scriveyn” may provide trenchant commentary on masculine acts and associations, as well as the “division, difference, fragmentation, and dispersal that characterize the condition of historical language.”34 Such commentary need not fit neatly with a particular historical relationship or even the specifics of manuscript production. Instead, Dinshaw’s reading urges scholars to look beyond the obvious surface matter of the text and seek fresh, challenging interpretive angles. In this way, the noted queer theorist demonstrates that there may be hidden, “queer” possibilities in “Adam Scriveyn” that remain unexplored, and this is still true nearly twenty years after Dinshaw published her account of the poem. The persona invites a similar view. “Queer” and ambivalent in its function, the unstable, autofictional persona signifies that the poem might be read as far more than a mere direct admonition, or even a conventional complaint with universal sentiments. In effect, the persona helps to temper the individualizing spirit surrounding “Adam Scriveyn,” and encourages readers to look beyond Chaucer the Man and his immediate situation and to consider suggestive “queer” connotations that may lie beyond the familiar circumstances of textual production. “Adam Scriveyn” is, in fact, the Chaucer text with a scholarly legacy that is most explicitly tied into specific textual issues. Motivated by the appeal to the author, the primary enterprise of scholarship has been to illuminate the advice—or anger—the poet directs at Adam the clerk, who is perceived as an identifiable, real-life figure who has worked on Chaucer’s personal manuscripts. Numerous examples of this specific brand of individualization could be cited, but a few must suffice. The most common approach is to legitimize the poem’s harsh words by depicting a careful writer understandably concerned with his text. For example, in the late nineteenth century Henry Morley observed that “some lines to Adam, his scrivener, express Chaucer’s care in correcting, rubbing, and scraping the bad copies of his works,” while Thomas Lounsbury stated that “this poetical address to the scrivener is evidence of an unmistakable character as to the anxiety that must have always burdened the mind of the author during the existence of the age of manuscript.”35 Recently, Britt Mize has similarly noted Chaucer’s “real anxiety about textual mutability” and legitimate concerns about transmission and the orthographic choices of

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his scribe, which could profoundly affect the poetics and language of his writing.36 These assertions, and many others like them based on a literal reading of the I-persona, justify the poet’s discernible anger by making the case that, as W. P. Ker suggests, Chaucer’s “appeal to the conscience of Adam, the ready writer, is the cry of an injured man who had suffered much and long without protest.”37 A common extension of these ideas is to reconcile the poet’s irritation by depicting Adam’s failings as broadly representative of medieval scribes’ typical shortcomings. This move would seem to temper the author’s resentment by directing it not exclusively at a lone figure but at a widespread problem. Scattergood’s reading is exemplary here, as he feels that the poet likely did have a specific copyist in mind when he wrote the text, yet “Chaucer’s stance in this poem—a slightly exaggerated irritation, a comically inappropriate ill-will toward the copyist—is common in other complaints,” since there is evidence from classical times onward of copyists being the subject of “outraged diatribes.”38 Here, convention is brought to the table in tacit defense of the author, which permits Scattergood to support the notion that, as in other conventional examples, “Adam Scriveyn” is a manifestation of the medieval writer’s seriousness about his art, which is to be respected in exact detail.39 Thus, Chaucer is not portrayed as an excessively angry and bitter old dotard, but instead emerges as a conscientious writer who is concerned with his art and whose magisterial words reasonably address a universal problem. Their autobiographical slant aside, any and all of these accounts are warranted. But in many ways, scholarship on “Adam Scriveyn” characteristically offers variations on the same theme. Although these readings should not be discounted since textual production is at the center of the poem, perhaps the time has come to see what else might be found if we “rubbe and scrape” (line 6) at the linguistic surface of this text. Realistically, there may be logical limits to the interpretation of this short poem. But by recognizing the persona, with its ambivalence and “queer” resonance, fresh connotations might be discovered in the proverbial cracks of “Adam Scriveyn’s” seven lines. For the purpose of opening up the poem’s prospective meaning, there is great promise in certain moral renderings that drive home the point that the primary current of criticism on “Adam Scriveyn” is to variously place the verse within “a field of associations that draw their force from their moral and philosophical gravity,” as Mize as observed.40 The very concept of gravity is a useful one here, because in scholarship on the poem Chaucer’s words are not only perceived as principled and grave, but the Man himself typically is constructed as a dignified auctor who has serious concerns about the world around him. The grave nature


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of “Adam Scriveyn’s” critical legacy finds its most explicit embodiment in the depiction of a Christian author whose poetics are designed for moral purposes, and whose art ultimately is meant to transcend art. Given its obvious biblical connotations, the very name Adam has helped to foster the devout strain of moralization for this brief poem. Here, interest in the historical personage to whom the poem is addressed is, as it were, translated into a search for Adam the First Man, and Chaucer’s relationship to that individual and his maker. In readings of this kind an appeal to the author remains, but in addition there is an appeal toward God on High that comes to eclipse the focus on textuality and earthly interests. The account of R. E. Kaske is among the most persuasive of this type. It argues that Chaucer is depicting sinful, earthly Adam the clerk writing about the sin of the first Adam.41 For Kaske, the poet is capitalizing on the “happy correspondence” between the name of his scribe and that of clericus Adam, and beseeching his copyist not to disfigure his handiwork the way his namesake disfigured the work of God.42 Chance’s moralization is even more overt, with the poem read as a very brief account of Original Sin and Redemption as witnessed through the relationship of the author and his word, and the scribe who copies his word.43 Like the original Adam, Chance contends, the copyist suffers from a darkened understanding, a sinful nature that leads to mistakes in copying, and the poet advises that only when he follows the word of his auctor—God or Christ, Chaucer if read literally—will his skill improve and will he attain redemption.44 Characteristically, these moral renderings are based on an autobiographical view of the text that the persona inherently problematizes. But the accounts themselves are intriguing, and offer some new interpretive directions for the poem. What might happen, then, if critics were to more fully use the autofictional persona to subdue the appeal to the author? The answer is that the poem might be opened up to further scrutiny regarding masculine interactions and anxieties, social hierarchy, textual authority, artistic piety, and so on. Whether moral or not, such fresh perspectives are welcome—and needed—and underscore that the persona is not only a theoretically sound concept but also an invaluable facilitator of interpretive possibility. Having analyzed Chaucer’s advisory discourse with friends, it is now time to move on and consider a second type of Chaucerian “talk”: the poet speaking to his superiors. Faced with a far different historical audience, what type of moral Chaucer is projected by critics? There is no simple answer to this question, although it is clear that the poet continues to take on a virtuous visage in scholarship on “Lak of Stedfastnesse” and “The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse.” However, in the legacies of

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these poems the author becomes more of a “political animal,” whose writing is morally bound up in the cultural politics of his day.45 3.2

The Man and His Monarchs: Chaucer Talks to Kings

In his analysis of Chaucer’s Jobs, David Carlson depicts the poet as an “official of the repressive apparatus of state” whose fame as an author was due in no small measure to the supposed fact that “he was servile, doing useful work serving dominant interests.” Carlson argues that as both a domestic servant and writer Chaucer was an ideological police officer of sorts who enforced the established order and actively fostered “a kind of myth-making, serving and protecting hegemony by representing as natural and inevitable . . . states of affairs that were not.”46 Carlson’s reading begs the question of just how servile Chaucer really was, which is of central concern with regards to the two short complaints ostensibly written to kings Richard II and Henry IV. To explain Chaucer’s relationships with his monarchs and rationalize how and why the poet could have presumed to address such powerful rulers, scholars have adopted many different positions. Whatever the favored perspective, the presence or (supposed) lack of the I-persona is vital in determining the level of intimacy present in these texts, and ultimately in defining the writer’s alleged political beliefs. It should come as no surprise that a historicizing tendency of the kind seen in section 3.1 would be found in the reception of Chaucer’s famous complaints, with numerous scholars drawing from the verse a direct, private relationship between the poet and his sovereigns. However, such projections are surprisingly inconsistent for the two works in question. Criticism of “Lak of Stedfastnesse” is, in fact, marked by a general downplaying of the poem’s potential as private discourse, while the opposite holds true for “The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse.” A handful of readers have drawn from “Lak” a personal relationship between the poet and his majesty, with the writer being seen as “firmly committed to Richard’s court” and “accepted there as one of Richard’s own,” so that the poem speaks to a “devoted though sometimes critical friendship” that developed between the two men.47 But such perspectives are rare in “Lak’s” reception, while readings of this type are common concerning “The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse.” In short, criticism of “Lak of Stedfastnesse” is characterized by several varieties of interpretive de-individualization, with scholars perceiving a socially centered authorial voice in lieu of a historically specific notion of the poetic “I.” As a result, the likelihood of direct, personal admonition is minimized in favor of more universal sentiments and literary purposes


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that might be expected in the work of a medieval court poet. In other words, a public voice is heard rather than a private one. This is a fascinating tendency, because the creation of a social, public narrative “self ” is essentially nothing other than the assertion of a particular kind of persona. However, the construct itself rarely is mentioned in criticism of “Lak,” which is a clear indicator of the widespread disregard for the persona (and persona-theory) outlined in chapter 1. Of additional interest here is that the assertion of the persona—even if not so named—significantly undercuts the possibility that “Lak” was written explicitly for Richard and may underscore a scholarly inclination to believe that Chaucer was on more intimate terms with Henry than his controversial predecessor. If, indeed, “Lak” represents a public-oriented document, then what does that mean for Chaucer and his supposed convictions? Paul Strohm has provided an answer to this question that exemplifies the scholarly tendency toward deindividualizing “Lak.” Rather than portraying Chaucer as a personal princely advisor, Strohm emphasizes his status as a court poet writing with broad public interests in mind.48 Strohm does claim that the poem inhabits a specific historical place in the continuing discussion between Richard and the Appellants regarding public order, new forms of retention, and the social responsibility of nobles and the king, so that the author might be seen as performing a general act of appropriation on Richard’s behalf.49 Despite its severe and hortative tone, the poem actually f latters and supports the position of the king by consistently aligning itself with Richard’s own program of self-presentation, through an emphasis on public order and the role of the sovereign as mediator; however, Chaucer does not address the king directly but assembles a body of powerfully suggestive statements about important social topics such as the honorable rule of law, and opposes these ideals with notions of greed and collusion.50 At a glance, Strohm’s account may seem to individualize the poem, but when his terms of analysis are closely examined—the concern with public order, social responsibility, honorable rule, and so on—it becomes evident that a deindividualizing strategy is at work. Strohm does not project private interests or a personal relationship but instead shifts the focus toward societal issues that would resonate with any reader familiar with courtly culture during the age. The poet does not appear as an outright “king’s man” but as a writer who addresses problems that are important for the entirety of mankind—he does not admonish Richard personally but offers shrewd advice that any good ruler, or indeed any good man, should heed. This is a thoughtful reading of “Lak’s” general, conventional advice. I am left wondering, however, what might result if Strohm went one step further in deindividualizing the poem,

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by utilizing the persona to more fully temper the text’s connection with both Chaucer and Richard. Obviously Chaucer did write the poem, but a more complete narrative disconnect might advance other new lines of thought. Much is at stake in such a move, however, because to downplay the author here may be to somehow downplay his magisterial wisdom or its cultural impact. And indeed, time and again the verse is made to tie in with the author’s sage perspectives on the world-at-large. In scholarship on “Lak,” a tempting variety of projected sagacity is the prototypical view that Chaucer’s commentary is not intended to inf lame the local political scene. Rather, the poem is said to display how Chaucer’s responses to political changes were repeatedly pragmatic and measured, since he was “not a man fanatically to espouse one party or another” in either his life or writing.51 However, England was filled with such greed and immorality that he felt obliged to protest and lament the many problems around him 52; in Brewer’s words, Chaucer had become so sickened by his society that “Lak” may even voice a measured acceptance of vice and puts on display “a kind of cheerful, certainly worldly, pessimism” that the poet had come to adopt.53 These readings represent a political decision of sorts that ensures that Chaucer is not seen as supporting any political thought that might be unfavorable to him. In making this assertion, I must take care to emphasize that this predilection likely is not conscious or overtly intended. But in the scholarly deindividualization of “Lak,” Chaucer frequently is portrayed as a “political animal” whose words highlight public issues and whose views are ethically sound and politically acceptable. One way to establish this position is to underline identifiable conventions and conventional thinking found in “Lak.” Characterized as a type of “abuses of the age” poem, the text’s conventional material allows and maybe even encourages critics to see the poet as a cautious, socially oriented writer whose implied narrative distance both detaches him from the controversial king and helps to foster the wisdom of his societal dealings. When seen from a traditional, conventional perspective, the work’s broad cultural commentary emerges as generically typical and politically subtle, and naturally leads to the assumption that we have in “Lak” a prudent poet who talks about the world surrounding his king rather than an author speaking directly to his king. Unconsciously, perhaps, critics are thus inclined to depict Chaucer as a tactful advisor based on the conventional material at hand, reading the narrative “I” in such a way that the writer is seen in a morally and politically favorable light. The speaker may be a kind of public persona, but nevertheless the conventional voice is shown to speak highly of “Maister Chaucer.”


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A fine example of convention being used to explain “Lak” is J. E. Cross’s essay that compares Chaucer’s poem with the Old Swedish Trohetsvisan (Song of Fidelity). Cross illuminates the characteristic discourse and political commentary found within these works (as well as others of a similar nature), which indicates the unlikelihood that Chaucer’s text makes a direct admonition to Richard since, among other reasons, a royal recipient would have been more specifically distinguished in the verse.54 In addition, Cross contends that the term “Prince” is a frequent conventional usage for addressing a patron, rather than ruler, and thus there is no conclusive evidence for the identity of the recipient, who may not even have been of royal blood.55 This is a convincing reading, and by connecting “Lak” with the traditional “Song of Fidelity,” Cross clearly shows how Chaucer’s poem generically addresses the “evils of the times” and takes into account such widespread societal ills as injustice, lies, and greed. By situating the conventional material historically, it is seen in a helpful new light, yet Cross’s discussion also demonstrates further that even when the poem is read as a broad, generic piece, critics tend to align the work’s conventional views with the actual virtues of the author.56 It may not equate to the “legendary” autobiographical depictions of “Father Chaucer” outlined in chapter 2, but it is evident that the appeal to the author has a strong pull in criticism of the short poems. This is even true in response to “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” in spite of the general critical deindividualization of the poem. Though Chaucer may have been doing nothing more with the work than offering a traditional account of his age through a conventional I-narrator, several critics have used the material in a precise fashion to construct a sage and moral author who addresses the rights and responsibilities of kingship or who believes in a mercantile nation led by a powerful and just monarch.57 The list of possible political meanings goes on, and here again it must be said that these perspectives are viable, worthwhile additions to the short catalog of scholarship on “Lak”; but here again, the autofictional resonance of the speaker often is ignored in favor of narrow perceptions of Chaucer’s own voice and the author’s own moral views. Ruud is one of the few critics who has largely kept the author out of his reading, and sees the speaker as an Everyman-figure who describes how harmony, stability, and the orderly adherence of natural law no longer exists due to widespread social dissension.58 Given the conventional nature of “Lak’s” lament for a lost Golden Age, a view of the persona as a traditional Everyman is sound. But what else might be found by pursuing this line of thought further? To date, there have been only a small number of scholarly works published on the poem. By using the persona to deepen the critical deindividualization of “Lak,” I believe that much more might

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be added to the critical canon on the piece. For starters, given the equivocal, playful nature of the persona, scholars might question whether it is necessary to read this text as a straightforward “abuses of the age” poem that offers characteristic advice. Chaucer’s verse is rarely clear-cut, and the ambivalent persona could serve as a sign that there are levels of irony or outright mockery that have yet to be considered. A greater emphasis on the “queer,” autofictional persona would help Chaucerians to read against the grain and unearth such new possibilities. If, for example, “Lak” represents a public work that does not truly offer a personal “Lenvoy to Richard,” then other worthwhile discoveries are possible regarding the poem’s view of the “fals and deceivable” (line 3) goings-on in late medieval Britain. In particular, there appears to be unrealized interpretive promise in the poem’s nationalistic sentiments and ideas of community, both of which were arguably evolving during Chaucer’s lifetime. Hence, the I-narrator’s thematic references to “estat” and “regioun,” “obligacioun,” social “dissensioun,” and wronging one’s neighbor all might raise fascinating questions about both the national rule of law and the contentious feudal system. In addition, critics would do well to explore further the fact that the poem—a piece of literary fiction that itself need not be taken at face value—is deeply interested in words and deeds, truths and falsehoods, concepts that are highlighted by the very presence of the persona, that resonate in other Chaucerian works, and are central motifs in vernacular literatures throughout Western Europe.59 In readings of “Lak” Chaucer, as public poet, is consistently depicted as wise, and his use of conventions as shrewd. Turning now to criticism of “The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse,” it is evident that when the author is read as a private advisor of princes, he is regarded as equally astute. Instead of the interpretive deindividualization encountered with “Lak,” criticism of “Purse” has largely undertaken a project of re-individualization, with this late Chaucerian text seen as an intimate, private correspondence between the author and Henry. There are several reasons for the widespread acceptance of this perspective, which assumes a literal version of the I-persona. One logical explanation is that critics have reacted instinctively to the contents of a begging poem, which by definition fosters a personal appeal. A successful begging poem must create an impression of intimacy, and “Purse” does this well. However, it is also true that “Purse,” like “Lak,” has a number of generic features that do not necessarily imply a personal relationship—yet it is “Purse” that typically is viewed as a private missive. Biographical considerations also may help to explain the divergent reception of these two works. The Chaucer Life-Records document the fact that the poet was affiliated with the courts of both Richard II and


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Henry IV. Chaucer began his career as a page and servant in Edward III’s court, and continued on in several capacities under Richard. Although it is possible that the poet was personally known to Richard, there is no surviving evidence to support this position and Pearsall’s well-respected biography sees an intimate association as being “extremely unlikely.”60 In contrast, Chaucer’s connection with the House of Lancaster is arguably more explicit, and biographers often have presumed a close relationship between the author and John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Chaucer’s purported wife Philippa served the Duchess Constance, Katherine Swynford apparently was Philippa’s sister, and the poet offered unforgettable emotional consolation for the death of Blanche in The Book of the Duchess. This is some of the primary evidence cited by scholars in support of supposed relationships Chaucer had with both John of Gaunt and his son Henry, and it is widely assumed that the bonds of affinity between these men began at a relatively early stage in the writer’s life. In fact, it is a distinct possibility that Chaucer had, at best, a limited, formal relationship with John of Gaunt. Furthermore, his relationship with Henry might have been marked by courtly ties and nothing more, so that a close friendship between the two would have been “extremely unlikely” (to reuse Pearsall’s phrase). Nevertheless, there seems to be a will to believe that Chaucer was more intimate and friendly with Henry than Richard. In addition to the generic and biographical explanations already offered, there may be another significant reason interpretive individualization commonly pertains to “Purse” and not “Lak.” Arguably, Henry may have been a more tolerable, more popular, and more effective ruler than Richard—and scholars have followed suit by aligning the poet with the preferable prince who established a dynasty. Richard’s reign was famously tumultuous, noted for popular unrest (i.e., the Peasant’s Revolt) and—especially toward the end of his regency—ample disagreement with the king’s extravagances, advisors, and rule in general (i.e., the Merciless Parliament).61 Henry’s reign was not without its own controversies, but in comparison, he eventually may have earned greater popularity with the commons and more extensive parliamentary support, and despite his usurpation of the crown his rule was arguably not marred by the same degree of political discord. Characterizing Henry’s reign, A. J. Pollard states that he was a king “genuinely concerned to work with and through the co-operation of his subjects” and was “never a would-be tyrant” which holds the “key to the durability of his regime.”62 If so, then perhaps the reception of “Purse” highlights a veiled desire to hitch the poet’s fortunes to the brightest star, so to speak, which would prove helpful in establishing an ethically prudent, politically astute, and historically important author.

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This is a highly speculative argument, and while history has favored Henry over Richard, there is no specific evidence that critics have indeed (re)individualized this poem as a result of an overt preference for Henry. In exploring this conjectural theory, I have deliberately worked on the historical and interpretive margins to make two important points. The first is that after centuries of scholarly discourse on Chaucer and his works, certain avenues of historical thought may now be worn thin. The time is right for new critical directions and fresh historical paths, and a heightened use of the ambivalent, “queer” persona might do much to destabilize the interpretive status quo. The purposefully divergent reading just offered thus represents the type of unconventional criticism that will help to facilitate future discussion by encouraging untried and unfamiliar interpretive possibilities. The second point here is to emphasize that, as Althusser has shown, ideologies are not only powerful but, perhaps more importantly, frequently unrecognized. Even if a scholarly predilection toward Henry is not in evidence, the very possibility underscores the power of ideology for the Chaucerian. Naturally, scholars who deeply respect Chaucer and love his writing are likely to manifest that admiration somehow in their criticism. It is usually not conscious or deliberate, but in the case of the minor works it is evident that critics do provide different forms of moral support for the poet. The ideologies underlying such scholarship merit further discussion, and a defining feature of my own ideology as a Chaucer critic is to work to unveil and resist the predilections of criticism. Whatever the actual ideologies underlying the (re)individualization of “Purse,” critics of this poem face a difficult challenge, for how does a reader reconcile an image of Chaucer-as-royal-advisor with certain documentary evidence that the writer was in dubious financial standing during the last years of his life? This question lends itself to interpretive historicization, which has left an indelible mark on the poem’s reception. It was not until the Victorian era that scholars began to take the writer’s fiscal (ir)responsibility seriously, with antiquarians viewing the contents of the poem through the lens of exchequer records that, according to Nicolas, “so strongly support the opinion that Chaucer was in distressed circumstances as to leave little doubt of the fact,” while the verse displays an individual who talked about poverty in terms of “such force and truth as would naturally proceed from one by whom its ills had been experienced.”63 James Lorimer, in turn, reads “Purse” as “proof ” of Chaucer’s poverty, but slightly tempers the author’s dire straits by describing the work as a “sportive production, written for the purpose of bringing his claims for an increase to his pensions in a light and graceful manner before the young king,” a petition that apparently


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proved successful since “probably the very day that he received the verses in question, he [i.e., Henry] doubled the poet’s pension.”64 Lorimer’s argument seems to stretch the bounds of logic and overstate the implications of the surviving exchequer records, all in an apparent effort to explain away the poem’s petition and closely align Chaucer with Henry. This tack is no better seen than in Marchette Chute’s mid-twentieth century account, which claims that “Chaucer had always been on excellent terms with Henry of Derby,” and thus the poem was not written to beg for money but rather proves their intimate relationship inasmuch as they could share a joke together.65 More recently, several critics have carefully examined the extant historical records and considered their implications for both the poem itself and Chaucer’s supposed financial status. The research of Sumner Ferris and Andrew J. Finnel is of particular importance here, with the former suggesting that although “Purse” is courtly, jocular, and probably comically exaggerated, it is still essentially a sincere begging letter.66 Ferris emphasizes that Chaucer’s annuity was not initially renewed when Henry took the throne, which points to the conclusion that the poet felt it would not be paid without further urging; hence, Chaucer appealed directly to the king, partly to amuse him and partly to gain his sympathy.67 Following up on this account, Finnel argues that the documentary evidence shows that Chaucer was hard-pressed in the winter of 1399 and found it difficult to attain his annuity when Henry assumed the throne, so the author likely took residence in Westminster Abbey because protection against creditors was the sanctuary right of Abbey residents.68 During this tenure, Chaucer wrote the poem to ask the king for the support necessary to settle his debts.69 It is interesting that both Ferris and Finnel ultimately blame the court’s pecuniary system—and not Chaucer himself—for his financial distress ca. 1399–1400. They also imply that the poet was securely positioned to address the king, whether friends or not, and used the poem to do just that. This assumption, autobiographical in nature, is common; but despite its prevalence, the autofictional I-persona renders this view suspect. In many ways, “Purse” offers a conventional complaint, and it is a long-standing poetic tradition to “write” to a king or queen in order to seek their support and/or patronage. Such poems might speak generally of a common authorial malaise (i.e., poverty), and in a manuscript culture these texts may never have been seen by the powerful individual whose financial “purse” was seemingly being sought. In fact, the persona underscores the possibility that the speaker’s alleged poverty is a mere conventional trope, and that this is not a personal poem. Moreover, the inherent distancing-effect of the

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persona illustrates that the text need not even be intended for the king, as is widely accepted. For scholars who hear the poet’s voice, these possibilities are essentially moot. Hence, many respondents to the poem have blatantly posited a close relationship between Chaucer and the English monarch, including the diligent literary historian Skeat, who was usually very cautious in his ruminations. Skeat believed that the change in regime brought the poet’s financial woes to an end, as Henry was quick to answer Chaucer’s “Complaint”: “it must have given him real satisfaction to be able to assist the old poet, with whom he must have been on familiar terms.” 70 E. P. Kuhl takes this view one step further, citing both the “open criticism” of Richard in “Lak” and “Purse’s” supposed defense of Henry and England as evidence that the latter poem shows us a writer acting as “the new King’s propagandist.” 71 According to Kuhl, Henry rewarded Chaucer for his efforts by swiftly awarding his grants and, following his death, giving him an appropriate burial in Westminster Abbey, this being “the least the new king could give to a relative who had aided him.” 72 There is no concrete historical evidence that the king himself had anything to do with Chaucer being granted his past-due annuity or being interred at Westminster Abbey. Yet Kuhl’s account is important because it is one of the few to look (albeit brief ly) beyond the entreaty and its historical backdrop to consider the politics of “Purse,” which might serve both to defend Henry and also to comment on England under his rule. Admittedly, there is very little, if any, overt political content in the text, which has led most scholars to concentrate on what the verse was for, rather than what it says. Thus, the general consensus seems to be a view of “Purse” as a lighthearted demonstration of the poet’s desire to trade his literary labors for money owed to him.73 However, perhaps more exploration is warranted regarding what the poem says, or might say. Certainly the poet and sovereign could have had a kindred sense of humor, as R. T. Lenaghan has argued, and the text might very well be based on shared knowledge and attitudes.74 But maybe the time has come to look beyond the supposed familiarity between Henry and Chaucer, especially since this intimacy is historically questionable and the poem’s narrator may very well represent the kind of generic public voice posited by critics for “Lak.” If the poem is read with more theoretical nuance by recognizing the I-persona, a useful starting point is found in the realization that “Purse’s” conventional refrain—“Beth hevy ageyn, or elles moote I dye”—articulates a universal sentiment for those struggling financially and need not be uttered in a specific context for a specific recipient. Robert Sturges offers a wonderful model for exploring what the “Purse” might reveal if a reader works beyond the typical individualization of the poem.


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Sturges analyzes the poetic details that might be said to articulate the gendered relations between a poet and a patron. Like Dinshaw’s account of “Adam Scriveyn,” Sturges provides a model “queer” reading that suggests new ways scholars might push the boundaries of the text. Sturges highlights a provocative erotic register that may be identified in “Purse,” to the extent that the verse is shown to hint at homosexual desire and even sodomy. Sturges emphasizes that he does not see these possibilities as being Chaucer’s actual intention, but his idea that the poem “unconsciously works against its own heterosexual presumptions” is an instructive one. As Sturges states, “the discourse of gender—and perhaps poetic discourse itself—is so slippery and ambiguous that it seems inevitably to deconstruct itself, to allow prohibited meanings to manifest themselves in the very language that attempts to silence them.” 75 Sturges superbly expands the interpretive potentiality of “Purse,” and I would agree that there are questions of gender and eroticism here that deserve fuller critical attention. For instance, if this poem was written to Henry, then how does one explain the narrator’s entreaty to the “Quene of comfort” and assertion that “ye be my lady dere” (lines 2 and 13)? If a conventional persona speaks these words, then these references might be easier to reconcile. If the speaker is Chaucer, as scholarly tradition generally assumes, then these feminine descriptors might be deemed inappropriate in a poem supposedly written to the king. There are several other important questions left unanswered by critics. If, indeed, Chaucer was intimate with Henry, then any supposed joking aside, where is the overt f lattery one might expect toward the new king? Where is the criticism of his f lawed predecessor? Why is there not a more extensive justification of his regime?76 These ideas are, at most, only f leetingly found in the poem, and the questions just posed would seem to be significant. Some would say that the answers to such questions are found in “Purse’s” status as a begging poem, but the omissions are provocative because they might very well undermine a belief in Chaucer’s “friendship” with Henry. The scholarly silence about these omissions is likewise suggestive, for it may lend support to my speculations concerning the impulse to link Chaucer with the ruler perceived by many as more effective, more deserving of admiration, and thus more worthy of the moral poet’s amicitia. Whether or not this argument holds, I hope to have shown on these pages that there is unrealized interpretive promise in the poem. As Sturges’s “queer” account proves, the content of “Purse” is notably “slippery and ambiguous”; and I contend that a more fully realized application of the “slippery and ambiguous” persona would aid critics in discovering a number of “prohibited meanings” or ways the text “unconsciously works against” its own presumptions.

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As this section has illustrated, whether speaking to his friends, his monarch, or a broad, public audience, critics have consistently constructed Chaucer as a magisterial auctor whose moral discretion shines through his words and whose sagacity has earned him the right to speak his mind. In fact, as the following section will show, Chaucer’s supposed prudence runs so deep that few critics have hesitated to declare the Retraction a final, ethical pronouncement by a sincere and pious man. For if the wise poet used his verse to talk subtly to kings, then why wouldn’t he judiciously talk to God in his masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales? 3.3 The Man and His Maker: Chaucer Talks to God In the mid-fifteenth century, Thomas Gascoigne famously described a scene in which a remorseful Geoffrey Chaucer, lying on his deathbed, lamented not only his sins but also his sinful writings. According to this account, before his death, Chaucer often shouted, “Woe is me! Woe is me! Because now I will not be able to revoke or destroy the wicked things that I have written about the most disgraceful and wicked love of men for women, which will now be continually passed down from man to man, whether or not I wish it.” And thus lamenting, he died.77

Gascoigne’s anecdote may be the single most blatant incarnation of the widespread desire to create, or ensure, an ideal, moral vision of Chaucer. With this vivid image of repentance, the Oxford chancellor wrote a script of sorts for the poet’s life based on the problematic text known as “Chaucer’s Retraction.” This account would prove highly inf luential for many biographers, who generally believed in the story’s veracity and followed Gascoigne’s lead by writing various scripts for Chaucer’s final days, based on the Retraction.78 A similar inclination is found in nonbiographical scholarship. For the study of Chaucerian reception, critical response to the Retraction is all-important because, as David Marshall has observed, it “provides a window through which we view the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s entire canon, and our own self-fictionalizations of their author.” 79 This last phrase is particularly illuminating in its recognition that the text has important ramifications for how readers perceive Chaucer’s other I-narrators, and especially if it is seen as a record of the poet’s repentant last words. The authorial plea to a higher power presumes a speaker generally unlike any other in the corpus, and thus the question of whether or not authorial distancing is involved in the Retraction is


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crucial. Faced with a challenging, exceptionally devout narrative “I,” consideration of the presence or absence of the persona-construct in this pious entreaty is unavoidable, indeed mandatory. Scholars have therefore sought to ascertain the sincerity or conventionality of the views expressed by the speaker, and examined the reasons for the Retraction’s placement at the (supposed) end of the Canterbury Tales. The result is that many of the issues and problems discussed above come to a head here, with the ideologies of critics writ large on the text’s reception. Every reader of the Retraction must reconcile the work with his/her personal image of Chaucer the Man, answering the question of why the author would write such a piece—or if he actually wrote these penitent words at all. Although the presentation of the “final” passage in such editions as the Riverside Chaucer may seem authoritative and unimpeachable to the casual observer, there is much unreliability beneath the surface that has led to great debate about the textual status of the Retraction. Questions about how, and whether, the prose is connected to the Canterbury Tales as a whole or just to The Parson’s Tale underscore deeper concerns with the repentant narrative voice, and thus, in the words of Joseph Dane, the Retraction’s final place in the canon “has little to do with its existence in manuscripts” but “has to do with ideology.” 80 A number of premodern textual critics actually argued that the Retraction was not written by Chaucer. This would seem to be a variant strain of scholarly deindividualization, a defensive gesture intended to separate the author from content that, in this case, was deemed inauthentic or “unlike” something Chaucer characteristically would write. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in particular, multiple scholars refused to accept the work at all—often attributing it to the intrusion of a hypothetical monk—or they accepted it as genuine, but deplored it and attributed its sentiments to old age or disease.81 For instance, Thomas Hearne argued in 1709 that the Retraction was written by monks, because “not only the Regular, but Secular, Clergy were exasperated against Chaucer, for the Freedom he had taken to expose their Lewdness and Debauchery.”82 John Hippisley agreed that “some pious catholic or schoolman” had “interpolated” the text, and proclaimed that there was “no ground” for believing the “highly improbable” circumstance that Chaucer revoked his former opinions and works at the end of his life.83 The Victorian antiquarian Ward was similarly skeptical, doubting the authenticity of the prose simply because it did not fit with his notion of Chaucer’s corpus, and therefore “it would be unbearable to have to accept [it] as genuine.”84 Subsequent textual critics have taken a more measured approach, generally accepting the Retraction’s authorship while seeking to reconcile its

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place in the canon.85 J. M. Manly, for example, concluded in 1928 that the “sermon” (i.e., The Parson’s Tale) and Retraction were authentic, but not intended for the Canterbury Tales; rather, they “may have been found in Chaucer’s chest after his death, and, on the inadequate ground that they were in prose, have been falsely supposed to have been intended for use as the Parson’s Tale.”86 James Work agreed with Manly, adding that the “casual mention” of the Canterbury Tales in the Retraction demonstrates that they were “not uppermost in Chaucer’s mind” when he wrote the text and, in fact, it was not written to be attached to the Tales. Instead, Work argues that the use of the term “tretise” indicates that Chaucer refers to the Parson’s “sermon” in the Retraction and not the Canterbury Tales as a whole, so the Parson’s Tale together with the Retraction must have been composed as a single, independent work.87 This view remains inf luential today, and establishes a “Chaucer” who was writing with a far different intent and frame-of-mind than if he were engaged in composing a conclusion for the Tales, or perhaps his entire oeuvre. Charles Owen, Jr. is prominent among the contemporary textual scholars who have been inf luenced by this stance, which he makes clear by rejecting the Parson’s Tale and Retraction as Chaucer’s actual ending for his “unfinished masterpiece.”88 Owen contends that by looking carefully at the manuscript evidence for the Canterbury Tales, we find two projected endings and evidence for the different final plans Chaucer worked with at different times. The manuscripts also show that Chaucer intended the Parson’s Tale as an independent work, with the Retraction serving as a fitting conclusion to that treatise in particular.89 Owen makes a convincing case, but it has been met with strong resistance. Larry Benson, for one, takes the opposite view, arguing that the manuscripts testify that the text belongs where it stands at the end of the Canterbury Tales, so that, unfinished as the Tales obviously were, the Retraction gives us Chaucer’s own word that he has finished with his work.90 This position is widely accepted today, yet the issue is by no means cut and dried. A lingering problem is the break that marks the “end” of the Parson’s Tale (at line 1080) and the “start” of the Retraction, traditionally separated in editions with the rubric “Heere taketh the makere of this book his leve.” It is largely on this partition that critics have based their assumption that Chaucer himself takes over from the voice of the Parson and offers some final words on the Tales and his entire literary output. As Míc˙eál Vaughan has emphasized, this division is a scribal construct that was progressively codified over time, while “the text of the Retraction seems quite comfortably continuous with the Parson’s Tale.” 91 Whether or not there is an intended textual break, it is suggestive that many scholars unf linchingly support the notion that there is an explicit


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point at which the author ultimately “taketh his leve.” In Vaughan’s eyes, it is illogical that critics openly accept that other Chaucerian works are incomplete or unfinished while they argue the opposite for the Parson’s Tale/Retraction, which indicates that “they do not wish his final masterpiece to be unclouded, even if it is demonstrably incomplete.”92 Vaughan seems to be onto something here, since a view of the Retraction as a “final” authorial pronouncement offers a convenient bookend to the poet’s life and works, helping to foster a morally inclined father-figure who, in his last breaths, wisely turns his eyes to the heavens and bows before his God. This perspective has long been sustained in interpretive criticism. Putting aside the textual issues surrounding the Retraction, scholars who have sought to decipher the meaning of these “final” words have responded by asserting different kinds of conversations, different types of talk with God. A common tack is to use identifiable conventional features in the text to explain Chaucer’s supposed thinking. Once again, this brand of criticism represents an individualized application of widely used literary conventions, with most scholars perceiving the I-speaker as Chaucer the Man himself and no mere persona. J. S. P. Tatlock’s important article published in the early twentieth century did much to foster this tradition. Tatlock compared the Retraction to other authorial “retracciouns” that offer parallels to Chaucer’s listing of works and his expression of dis/satisfaction with them.93 This comparison demonstrates that the kindred works of St. Augustine and others represent a wellknown literary tradition that, Tatlock suggests, makes Chaucer’s act of writing his own Retraction more intelligible.94 In response to Tatlock’s inf luential essay, Olive Sayce compared the Retraction with other medieval rhetorical conclusions, and showed that Chaucer’s passage is structurally in keeping with the general pattern of certain medieval prologues and epilogues, especially in the well-attested topos of regret for worldly works.95 However, she argues that thematically it ref lects a tension between traditional ecclesiastical teaching and the growing autonomy of secular literature, so that the poet seems to be viewing this problem with ironic and humorous detachment rather than a conventionally pious attitude, as frequently has been claimed.96 Sayce’s atypical view suggests a measure of authorial detachment and lighthearted fictionality, and plays down the depth of the poet’s regret. Few of her colleagues agree with this perspective, favoring instead a more properly “pious” use of conventions. Gale Schricker is one such scholar, who considers the Retraction in light of Chaucer’s other poetic endings, especially the conventions found in the dream visions and Troilus and Criseyde. Schricker argues

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that the Retraction ties up the concerns of Chaucer’s previous endings and finalizes his views as a poet, adding that it is especially appropriate as the closing words of Chaucer in this role, for a poet is a man well-accustomed to the concept of life as a kind of fiction.97 Rather than destroying his work, the text demonstrates and verifies the significance of fictions in a factual world, as premonitions of the final perceptual experience of salvation.98 This last turn is telling, because it illustrates the lengths that some critics may go to rationalize the conventions found in the Retraction, taking care to portray it as a “final,” pious literary declaration by Chaucer the Man. Any reading of the Retraction is bound to be questionable in some way, but it seems that Sayce’s line of thought deserves further consideration. I believe that Sayce’s essay offers one of the most perceptive interpretations of the Retraction to date. Rather than taking for granted that the text represents the poet’s God-fearing “final words,” Sayce questions this likelihood by noting that there is a potentially humorous undercurrent to the prose. And although she does not overtly bring the persona into play, Sayce does recognize that a level of authorial detachment may be evident. In essence, what Sayce does well—and others fail to acknowledge adequately—is that the Retraction could very well be playful and ambiguous rather than pious and straightforward. As a writer, Chaucer was nothing if not playful: he played with societal mores, with different styles and genres, and with readers’ expectations. He also played with narrative perspective, and when he did use conventional forms and ideas, he frequently did so playfully. All of these types of Chaucerian play might be identified in the Retraction. I have already commented on the rubric found at the start of the Retraction. The traditional rubric that concludes the text is also significant: “Heere is ended the book of the tales of Caunterbury, compiled by Geoffrey Chaucer, of whos soule Jhesu Crist have mercy. Amen.” This scribal rubric obviously was written about Chaucer and not by Chaucer. Like the rubric discussed above, it fosters the ideal that the Retraction draws the Tales to a close, and apparently represents the devout final words of the author. What I find most interesting about this rubric is the description of the poet as a compiler. As noted in chapter 1, being a compiler was one of the three primary roles a writer who was not a recognized auctor could play in the Middle Ages. Hence, the term “compiler” could arguably serve to devalue somewhat Chaucer and/or his achievement. But what is more important here is that if the poet is seen as a compiler, then there is absolutely no reason to assume that the Retraction speaks the words of the author himself. They might very well be the continued, “compiled” words of the Parson.


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More broadly, the rubric provides a signal that the speaker is a persona and not necessarily the poet. If critics would ref lect further on this apparent narrative persona, then the long-standing trend toward dubious autobiographical perspectives would be helpfully counterbalanced by more nuanced readings of narrative autofiction. Among other things, employing the persona would underline the fact that retractions are very conventional and widespread in the medieval period, and therefore perhaps the piety that is expressed is highly traditional in this instance. Although critics should not presume that Chaucer was not penitent and devout, they also should not assume that this prose articulates his impassioned “last words.” And even if it is accepted that Chaucer’s Christianity was sincere, that does not mean that the Retraction should be taken at face value. It is quite possible that the extreme level of piety and remorse has a tongue-in-cheek quality, or that there is a subtle criticism at work regarding blind faith. It is also possible that there is cynicism, amusement, or outright joking at hand when the speaker denounces his “translacions and enditynges of Worldly vanities” and purported books “that sownen into synne” (lines 1086 and 1088). As Sayce suggested, perhaps what we have here is an important instance of Chaucerian play. This potential playfulness merits more attention than it has received to date, and a more fully realized autofictional persona could (and should) invite future discussion of this narrative play. It is interesting to note that there is not only a lengthy tradition of writing this sort of literary apology, but it is also a time-honored convention of scholarship to perceive a given retraction as moral and personal rather than literary or aesthetic, with the textual contents frequently tied into a presumed religious conversion undertaken in old age.99 This tradition is no better seen than in response to Chaucer’s Retraction where, in contrast to the type of playful reading I have offered, numerous critics have, like Schricker, cited conventions in support of a devout Chaucerian “I.” Another useful example of this inclination is William Madden’s reading of the text in terms of conventional medieval views on “seemliness.” By looking at this subject historically, Madden shows that in Chaucer’s age what was considered “seemly” was inevitably dictated by the religion of the day, so the Retraction represents the tension the poet faced between the demands of art and the demands of prudence. In the end, Madden concludes, Chaucer gave precedence to spiritual considerations, and came to see certain creations as likely to do more harm than their entertainment value could alleviate.100 Gregory Roper has taken a similar approach, but considers the prose through the lens of penance and medieval penitential manuals. In accordance with these conventions, Chaucer—who “understood the rhetoric, theology, and psychology”

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of penance—ultimately decided to consider his verse, and himself, in a new light. Therefore, Roper insists that Chaucer applies his penitential knowledge in the Retraction and “drops the game of language, the play of rhetoric . . . to come to the shrine beyond human words and the shrine of the Word.”101 Other critics have gone even further in attempting to locate precisely the work’s piety and to historicize the author’s “final,” personal beliefs. James Gordon’s account exemplifies this strategy in its argument that Chaucer probably had doubts regarding the propriety of his writings due to criticisms of the kind offered by John Gower, who supposedly advised his fellow poet in the Confessio Amantis to reconcile himself to advancing age and write his “testament of love.” Gordon contends that as a direct result of such advice, Chaucer was encouraged to undertake a total reappraisal of his writing, which led him to renounce all his worldly achievements in the end.102 As Gordon’s reading shows, accurately historicizing the Retraction is a difficult task, and this may be why many readers have simply projected identifiable moral beliefs and pronouncements when addressing the Retraction, not wholly disregarding history but in furtherance of a view of Chaucer as a sincere penitent. Most critics today do recognize the unlikelihood of the kind of death-bed repentance described by Gascoigne and implied by Gordon; and contemporary scholars do generally register the fact that a persona (or multiple personae) has been speaking in the final fragment of the Tales. Yet when the Parson’s Tale “ends” and the Retraction “begins,” critics typically hear the voice of the Chaucer the Man taking over and presenting his penitent change of heart. Even scholars who pursue more overtly theoretical literary criticism have frequently projected the author’s supposed piety in their accounts. For example, in light of her interest in the role of the audience in interpretation, Judith Ferster argues that the subject of the Retraction is Chaucer’s relation to his wider, nonfictional audience, as he tries to affect our actions by creating an idealized image for us.103 Since the process of interpretation is perpetual, Ferster holds, the end of the Tales (in the Retraction) is only arbitrary—the pilgrims have not completed their game or journey, and interpretation can never be finished but only stopped; hence, Chaucer ultimately submits himself and his poem to God’s judgment, the only truly authoritative interpretation.104 Ferster’s reading, along with the textual and conventional accounts considered above, points to one important conclusion: regardless of a given critic’s interpretive interest or theoretical colors, it is here, in scholarship on the Retraction, that the moral dimension of Chaucer Studies is most evident. Given the devout nature of medieval “retracciouns,” it is natural that moral issues would


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be central to the text’s interpretation, that “ethical deliberation” would be encouraged by the prose.105 However, that fact alone does not fully account for the extent of moralization undertaken by Chaucerians in addressing the poet’s famous “last” words. There is no need to belabor the point, since it has, I hope, become clear that scholars pervasively assume that Chaucer, as the purported speaker of the Retraction, is sincere in his beliefs, is seriously renouncing his earthly transgressions, and is faithfully turning his eyes toward his heavenly maker. This is as true today as it was in the nineteenth century, when the lofty ideals of Victorians led to many vivid pronouncements of the following sort: one anonymous critic stated that a change of heart came over Chaucer at the end of his days, which “must come to all such . . . the cold wind of doubt in art—doubt whether art is religion after all— sweeps like breath, across that wondrous soul” and leads him to write the Retraction in sincere penitence.106 Though not as colorful in her rhetoric, today’s kindred perspective is perhaps best summed up in the words of Helen Cooper, who states that it is not illogical that there should be only one voice left at the end of the Tales, the nonfictional voice of the author himself that rejects the Parson as a fiction along with the rest—it is only when readers reach the Retraction that “the voice becomes unmistakably Chaucer’s own.”107 Cooper concludes that, while the Retraction may not actually have been the last thing Chaucer wrote, it demonstrates that “for all the different readings of the world embodied in the various tales and all his other works, he never lost sight of the Boethian belief that God’s vision was single.”108 Cooper’s comment is an appropriate way to end this chapter, because whatever Chaucer’s view of God, there is, in fact, a “single vision” that has been considered at length on these pages. That vision is a moral perspective, and resounding evidence has been presented that past and present critics alike tend to read the minor works with an eye toward morality and high-minded ideals, a tendency that is most explicit in the apparent wish to find authorial sincerity in the Retraction. In spite of this inclination, critics would do well to remember that “narrative for Chaucer is never just exemplification of moral principle; it is also a public performance for others, and so an exploration of the possibilities of ‘telling one’s tale,’ ” as Tony Davenport has observed.109 As I have argued in this chapter, one crucial “possibility” that has been consistently undervalued in reception of the short works is the likelihood that in these texts it is a playful persona, and not Geoffrey Chaucer himself, who speaks. This “possibility” deserves more support and exploration, and might inspire much future research. At least that is my wish. Having examined minor works where the narrator is customarily—and problematically—seen as

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being none other than Chaucer himself, the next chapter will consider longer works where morality shows itself in different guises. These are texts of a far different nature told by two vibrant dramatic personae that are not typically seen as speaking the words of the poet himself. This discussion will help to provide a more accurate and thorough portrayal of the varied scholarly construction of “Chaucer,” and further demonstrates how the interpretation of the narrative “I” profoundly shapes the supposed views of the living author. Let us, then, continue to travel through the history of Chaucerian reception by examining the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, whose provocative “lives” were inscribed by “a poet who insisted on mirroring the duplicity of human nature and existence in this world in the double levels of his art.”110

CHAPTER 4 LIVES OF THEIR OWN: THE WIFE OF BATH, THE PARDONER, AND CRITICAL (DIS)APPROVAL

Sexuality is an unstable construct in our societies, and hence produces endless textual work. Such an awkward issue has continually to be revisited, disavowed, rediscovered, reaffirmed. Closure, by definition, is always potentially unsatisfactory; even conservative texts are often to be found pushing representation to a breaking point where contradiction cannot plausibly be contained. In the face of such a performance, some audience members will retreat into conformity, while others will entertain more radical possibilities. These texts were, and are, sites of struggle; and their varying re-presentations are that struggle. —Alan Sinfield1

I

n her influential examination of the Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has illuminated the ways in which individuals are assignable to—or constrained by—a “binarized identity” of homo/heterosexuality that is “full of implications, however confusing, for even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence.”2 She contends that since its establishment in the late nineteenth century, this “reductive binary” has caused a “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” that profoundly affects self-identity in our modern culture.3 Sedgwick feels that the widespread belief in a diametrical conception of sexuality is misguided and has resulted in a disregard for historically significant and “unexpectedly plural, varied, and contradictory” possibilities for sexuality and gender.4 In recent years many gender theorists have joined Sedgwick in critiquing the function of such inhibiting thinking in notable cultural realms such as art, history, and literature. Yet as Karma Lochrie has shown, “reductive” binary thinking continues to taint

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contemporary scholarship, where accepted sexual and gender norms remain “potent” forces that commonly relegate variant sexualities and gender configurations to the “excluded penumbra of heteronormativity.”5 This exclusion is evident in Chaucer Studies, and the current chapter seeks to encourage further thought regarding the “normality” of key “definitional binarisms” found in criticism of the Wife of Bath and Pardoner. As Helen Cooper has noted, “rival views of Chaucer” and his verse date back to the fifteenth century, when the poet was first portrayed as either a man of strict Catholic orthodoxy or as a kind of antiecclesiastical protoProtestant.6 Cooper depicts Chaucer as a “master of duplicity” whose works represent a world of doubles and doubling, and when seen in this light it is unsurprising that the verse often has been read in antithetical terms, defined according to countless binaries including courtly/bourgeois, English/ French, male/female, past/present, orality/textuality, tradition/innovation, and earnest/game.7 Multiplicity and doubling also characterize Chaucer “himself” since he has created an elaborate series of bifurcated “selves,” personae that narrate his works and invite questions about such opposing forces as author/narrator and fiction/reality. Given his deliberate play with various types of duplicity, it is only natural that binary categories frequently serve as convenient tools for understanding Chaucer’s intricate verse. However, as Sedgwick might argue, meaning is multifarious, and the either/or qualities inherent in binary codes of interpretation too often serve as constraints to more complex constellations of thought. By limiting historical potentiality via narrow “definitional binarisms,” some scholars overlook critical subtleties of medieval literary culture, and this disregard is especially evident in studies relating to the topics of sex, gender, and sexuality. Like Sedgwick, Judith Butler has been instrumental in showing that many individuals fail to recognize “the complexity of what is at stake in any effort to take account of the conditions under which sex and sexuality are assumed.” To redress this oversight, Butler has outlined the “performative dimension” of gender construction, arguing that gender “cannot be understood outside a process of iterability” and is marked by an ever-changing performativity that represents “a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo.”8 In this penultimate chapter and the conclusion that follows, I am particularly interested in exploring what Butler describes as “the normative force of performativity—its power to establish what qualifies as ‘being.’ ” I will focus on the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and Chaucer the Pilgrim, three all-important personae whose gendered bodies have been precisely constructed by scholars and effectively demonstrate Butler’s notion that such gendering “only” endures within “the productive constraints of certain highly gendered regulatory schemas.”9

LI V E S OF T H E I R OW N

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Here, I will address the provocatively gendered bodies of the Wife of Bath and Pardoner to show how constructions of gender work “not only through reiteration, but through exclusion as well. And in the case of bodies, those exclusions haunt signification as its abject borders or as that which is strictly foreclosed.”10 In the first three chapters of this monograph, I have established that persona-theory and queer-theory overlap in significant ways, and exemplified the notion that the persona is productively “queer” in its indeterminacy and capacity as an agent that invites interpretive questions and critical resistance. As it is used by today’s theorists, the term “queer” registers a “desire for a more mobile, less stable” set of gender identifications, more f lexible subject positions, and more “dynamic” scholarly interpretations.11 Thus, a markedly “queer” version of persona-theory is the perfect tool for critiquing scholarly accounts where gender has been narrowly “reaffirmed” or “disavowed,” and illuminating instances where it is evident that some Chaucerians will quietly “retreat into conformity, while others will entertain more radical possibilities” (to borrow from Sinfield above). By focusing on the “queer” narrative persona, previous chapters have not only offered new insights into the ideological habits of Chaucer’s readers but also explored new ways of reading certain core texts and speakers. The current chapter has been written to further experiment with this idea, testing the limits of critical reception by deliberately reading the Wife of Bath and Pardoner through their interpretive legacies. I particularly aim to illustrate what can actually be learned about the two pilgrims from their scholarly legacies, to show how the study of their reception might help guide the interpretation and understanding of their characters. The Wife of Bath and Pardoner are central to my project not only because they have rich and fascinating critical legacies, but also because they are two of the most arresting personae in English literature. And in fact, these characters represent a fundamentally different (though equally important) type of persona than those examined in the preceding chapters. Given my interest in autofiction and the critical construction of Chaucer the Man, the majority of this book focuses on various I-personae, first-person narrative stand-ins for the author. This chapter is the exception, as it concentrates exclusively on what I have termed (in chapter 1) dramatic personae, figures that are not meant to represent the poet’s alter ego but rather are distinctive speakers appropriate to the story at hand. All personae are, by definition, theatrical performers of a kind, but whereas the I-persona stages the author’s narrative self-representative the dramatic persona enacts a far different and altogether distinct being, whether male or female, young or old. It might seem that these dramatic

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personae are inherently more distant from the author and his ideals than the I-persona, having been written for a specific fictional scenario and narrative purpose. But any persona is autofictional and detached from the writer, so the study of the heavily debated dramatic personae known as the Wife and Pardoner raises additional, important questions about the reception of Chaucer’s narrative speakers as a whole. Simply put, my account of Chaucerian narrators and their reception would not be complete without an in-depth consideration of major dramatic personae. The reception of the Wife and Pardoner highlights “the role played by desires, residues, and repetitions in the historical construction of sexuality.”12 And scholarship on these two challenging dramatic personae also speaks to the ambiguity of both characters, whose gendered meanings may not be as clear cut as many critics have assumed, for both pilgrims would seem to problematize convenient binary thinking regarding their sexuality and gender roles. Indeed, when seen through the lens of their scholarly reception, both the Wife of Bath and Pardoner might be said to embody Butler’s notion of “multiple identification,” with their bodies representing sites where meaning is merely a “temporary resolution of desire,” where the “ambivalent prohibition and production of desire occurs” and sex and gender are multiple, negotiable, and f luctuating.13 As suggestive bodies of this type, these two ambivalent dramatic personae demonstrate that “the relations of the known and unknown . . . have the potential for being peculiarly revealing,” because ignorance—or that which is ignored—“is as potent and as multiple a thing” as knowledge.14 By addressing both the known and the unknown, it is hoped that the following pages will shed new light on long-disputed problems of gender in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale.15 4.1 Lives of Their Own: Scholarly Ethics and the Wife of Bath and Pardoner For many years, it has been standard practice for readers to view the Wife of Bath and Pardoner as “realistic,” lifelike characters. This perspective is neatly summed up by James Rhodes, who states that “the Pardoner [is] one of Chaucer’s more realistic creations and, with the possible exception of the Wife of Bath, he comes to life as few other pilgrims do.”16 A more impassioned example of this typical outlook was offered a century earlier, when Adolphus William Ward made several comments about the supposed “reality” of Chaucer’s verse, observing that “in his poetry there is life” since the author conjured up “the very personality of his characters” that “are not mere phantasms of the brain, or even mere actual possibilities, but real human beings.”17 Addressing the Pardoner in particular,


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Ward remarked that “this worthy, who lays bare his own motives with unparalleled cynical brutality, is manifestly drawn from life.”18 Ward’s comments are especially interesting because they were offered in the context of literary biography, and illustrate that—if only f leetingly— the “life” of the Pardoner is at times treated in a way similar to that of the f lesh-and-blood author. In the history of Chaucer criticism, no one has more adamantly asserted the “reality” of the Canterbury pilgrims than J. M. Manly. In his inf luential 1926 discussion of the so-called “real models” for the Canterbury travelers, Manly argued that the Pardoner portrayed an individual who “could not fail” to have been recognized by Chaucer’s immediate courtly audience; similarly, the critic unearthed “facts” that were claimed to indicate the Wife of Bath’s actual existence and the poet’s personal knowledge of her.19 Manly’s conclusions are highly disputable, yet it is apparent that scholars engaged in widely divergent projects agree with the basic premises of his reading and project Dame Alice and the Pardoner as the finest examples of Chaucerian characters who stand on their own as “real” and/ or authoritative individuals. As a result, the reception of these crucial storytellers tends toward a unique type of historicization, whereby critics seem to have given biography to a fiction. In essence, the Pardoner and Wife frequently are granted “lives” of their own apart from the author, a significant critical tendency that lies at the heart of my analysis. As fictional characters afforded “lives” of their own, the reception of these two pilgrims provides valuable evidence for the assertion, or manipulation, of the persona-construct. In the case of these dramatic personae, we have a notably different interpretive tack than has been outlined in the previous chapters, where much evidence has been provided for the autobiographical reading of the Chaucerian “I.” Chapters 2 and 3 have made it clear that, time and again, Chaucer’s readers have resisted key implications of the autofictional persona by consistently favoring autobiographical perspectives. The customary view of the Wife and Pardoner is fundamentally different, and in fact, more theoretically appropriate in view of the tenets of autofiction, because here the distancing-effect of the persona is evident. However, the “life”-affirming readings of scholars are nonetheless problematic because they imply that a fictional character is not, in effect, fictional. Thus, another significant (and theoretically questionable) manner of reading the Chaucerian persona is on display, in which the presumed narrative “life” is transferred to the individual character in lieu of asserting the poet’s own supposed existence and ideals. Looked at logically, bestowing Alisoun and the Pardoner with their own “lives” does not fit with the theoretical contingencies of autofiction, because any persona is expressly fictional and not perceptibly “real.”

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Many medieval readers recognized this fact, but in practice, many subsequent readers have failed to do the same. To be fair, it must be admitted that “most readers instinctively understand literary characters as if they were real people,” as John Ganim has observed.20 Moreover, most scholars—Manly included—do not wholly ignore the fictional substance of the Wife and Pardoner. What is most common, in fact, is criticism that favors a partial separation between author and character, wherein the two storytellers are read as life-like and their revelations viewed as if they were their own. 21 This perspective would seem to be the legacy of the “dramatic” conception of Chaucer and his verse, which has been prevalent since at least the mid-nineteenth century and does not altogether disregard the underlying authority of the poet. Rather, the common thread in critical accounts of this sort is a concentration upon each narrator’s individual “self,” which is viewed as somehow dramatically distinct from the poet’s own being. The theoretical sophistication of “dramatic” readings varies greatly, but this approach deserves credit for generally recognizing the functions of the persona in the machinations of Chaucer’s verse. Nevertheless, the problems outlined above typically hold, because even if the persona-construct is recognized, whether tacitly or overtly, “dramatically” oriented critics of the Wife and Pardoner still tend to grant provisional “lives” to these characters. Though he does not directly address the projection of these characters’ own “lives,” per se, C. David Benson is one critic who has strongly denounced the time-honored scholarly focus on the Canterbury Tales’ narrators by stating that the continued “temptation to read the tales through their tellers” is “like the return of the repressed or of the undead in a horror movie.”22 Despite my own reservations, I do not wholly agree with Benson’s sarcastic condemnation because the tendency to afford Chaucer’s vibrant (yet fictional) characters their own “lives” is highly important and has fascinating ramifications for the legacies of Alisoun and the Pardoner. Before I move on to more fully consider these challenging narrative “lives,” there is another significant aspect of criticism that merits attention here. As indicated in chapter 1—and perhaps illustrated by Benson’s own scholarship—a truism of autofiction is that the reader is a powerful player in a given textual transaction, because he/she helps to make the ultimate determination of the identity (or identification) of the narrator. Accordingly, response to the two extraordinarily animated storytellers in question illustrates the ways in which lifelike dramatic personae often facilitate a wide range of critical opinion. Or, put more bluntly, it is apparent that asserting the “lives” of these vivid fictional creations allows scholars to presume a more potent interpretive authority, because locating the author in the textual distance permits


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readers to (more) freely appropriate the Wife and Pardoner for a wide variety of contemporary ideologies. In making this observation, I do not wish to suggest that I am condemning my fellow Chaucerians or their craft as it pertains to these dynamic narrative “selves.” The fact is that ideologies are inescapable: we are all products of our time and place, individuals shaped by our surrounds, experiences, and history. And in light of the poet’s complex narrative approach, it is quite reasonable that scholars would afford a measure of textual agency to these lively characters. What is problematic, however, are those occasions where a tacit critical move away from the author toward the cultural “life” of his characters bolsters politically charged claims with questionable textual relevance. Moments of this sort will play a central role in the following analysis, because it is evident that by exposing the supposed views of these characters, critics often reveal—or assert—their own true colors; whether deliberate or not, the personal interests of these scholars are (silently) brought to bear upon the “lives” of the Pardoner, Wife of Bath, and by extension, the author who has engendered the pilgrims’ very beings. Having established this point, a useful way to complete the background for my analysis of Chaucerians’ “life-”affirming inclinations is to consider brief ly the scholarship of Carolyn Dinshaw. As is the rule in the strain of criticism under investigation, Dinshaw views the performances of the Wife and Pardoner as personal projections through which their innermost thoughts may be gleaned. She also typically sees the characters as kindred spirits who are afforded virtually unparalleled narrative authority and who demonstrate their unique vitality in the Canterbury Tales by seizing the opportunity to address and disrupt the beliefs of their fellow travelers. Of course, the fact that the two pilgrims actually interact with (or confront) one another as autonomous beings within their narrative play only reinforces this frequently perceived connection.23 On the subject of Dame Alice’s exposé, Dinshaw holds that the Wife addresses the agendas behind the clerical (or male) regulation of gender behavior, her performance being a “veritable analysis” of the constitution of the female heterosexual subject in late fourteenth-century English culture.24 In response to the Pardoner’s poetic “life,” Dinshaw proposes that the character is best seen as an embodiment of “eunuch hermeneutics”: his performance urges his audience to think in terms outside of the established social/sexual categories, as he deepens the Wife of Bath’s critique of patriarchal discourse and shows the inadequacy of the restrictive (binary) categories by which such discourse proceeds.25 Taken together, Dinshaw sees the fictions of Alisoun and the Pardoner as “valuable queer histories” that can be appropriated and struggled with in order to fashion

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queer existences today, so that when the Pardoner interrupts the Wife’s speech, we are led to consider how such a personage confounds the fundamental categories of nature and sexuality.26 In light of my interest in “definitional binarisms,” Dinshaw’s performative interpretations might be considered doubly paradigmatic: not only does she bring these two controversial characters to “life,” but she also perceives them through the looking-glass of medieval social conventions and particularly focuses on the potent cultural binaries of masculine/feminine, and hetero/homosexual. By extension, Dinshaw’s criticism illustrates that the “lives” of both narrators characteristically are drawn with an eye toward morality and important moral issues, as their values are said to be revealed through their storytelling and interactions with their fellow pilgrims. This point is key to my analysis, because it further highlights the moral dimension of Chaucer criticism established in chapters 2 and 3. There, it was shown that scholars commonly read the poet’s own life and values through his works, a tendency that is best seen in the reception of the minor works. When it comes to the Wife and the Pardoner, a different type of moralization is found since the principles in question may not be traced back to the author but rather are imposed on his lifelike narrators. As Dinshaw’s comments demonstrate, even the most theoretically sophisticated critics fall prey to this inclination, making it clear that the legacies of these two characters are inextricably bound up with issues of literary morality. The moral-centeredness of scholarship on the Wife and Pardoner is only natural, since the characters “themselves” are undeniably interested in important cultural mores. To wit, the Pardoner responds to his fellows’ request for “som moral thing” by providing a thoughtful exemplum on earthly cupidity: “For though myself be a ful vicious man, / A moral tale yet I yow telle kan.”27 Meanwhile, the Wife of Bath offers her “owene juggement” on the patriarchal world around her, openly admitting her personal indiscretions and responding to “hem that wolde lyve parfitly” by saying, simply, “that am nat I.” 28 Given such comments, the analysis provided below is by no means intended to discredit the propensity toward moral issues found in accounts of the Wife and Pardoner. Instead, the study of these characters’ “lives” will attempt to uncover significant, underlying biases that are brought to the table in addressing both speakers, thus helping to fill out the picture of Chaucer’s personae and their critical legacy. Of particular importance here is the way in which response to these two dramatic personae reveals the tendency of contemporary thinkers to “think about otherness from the point of view of the other. What might be called the


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thought of the other has effectively displaced traditional paradigms and fertilized whole fields of inquiry, especially those in which questions of identity are at stake.” 29 Whether the “ethical programs” of readers are focused on the ideological “Other” or other moral subjects, recent scholarship on Alisoun and the Pardoner provides excellent case studies for the impulse of critics to variously moralize the Chaucer corpus. 30 To borrow from Annette Baier, the constructed “lives” of these dramatic personae demonstrate that “ethics is a polyphonic art form, in which the echoes of the old voices contribute to the quality of the sound of all the new voices.”31 Indeed, there is tangible evidence of prior values clashing with more recent ideals in criticism of the Wife and Pardoner, who are model characters that test “the forms, both ethical and political, of social life. This cognitive, moral process . . . gives fiction its literary shape, its ethical habituation, and its political force.”32 If this is so, then what are readers to make of the fact that Chaucer has, arguably, put his most sapient pieces of moral illustration into the mouths of his most corrupt speakers?33 This is a very difficult question to answer, and questions of this sort have resulted in diverse strategies of occlusion, erasure, marginalization, transference, or displacement within the reception of these complicated pilgrims. Therefore, the extent of separation that is projected within scholarly readings will play an especially important role in the remainder of this chapter, as the scope, and nature, of the separation between author and narrator will help to reveal just how deeply rooted are the moral concerns of Chaucerians when it comes to these characters. In particular, I will show how morality, sexuality, and the persona-construct are often complexly intertwined, and will apply the patterns of criticism to make a case for a deliberately fragmented view of the gender conventions underlying both narrative “lives.” If, indeed, an effective case can be made that both personae are marked in such a way that they similarly complicate gender roles, then another important question to ponder below is this: why has the “good wif . . . of biside Bathe” long been roundly favored by critics while, paradoxically, the “gentil Pardoner of Rouncivale” has (until very recently) been condemned?34 4.2 The Wife’s “Wommanhede”: Alisoun, (Anti)Feminism, and Scholarly Acceptance In The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, Alisoun famously begins her oratory by announcing that “experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me / To speke of wo that is in mariage.”35 Later

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in her narrative, Dame Alice questions the patriarchal dominance of literary discourse by asking, Who peyntede the leon, tel me who? By God, if wommen hadde writen stories, As clerkes han withinne hire oratories, Than wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse Than al the mark of Adam may redresse.36

By these two well-known exclamations, readers are led to consider key questions of textuality, authority, and gender, which have proven to be particularly fruitful topics for the understanding of the Wife of Bath’s performance. In response to Alisoun’s concerns with “who painted the lion?” scholars have written numerous “lives” that account for the character’s relationships with men, women, and the society in which they lived. As Priscilla Martin has observed, there are all sorts of ways in which one can look at her. She is a spokesperson for various kinds of marginal energy which were insisting in the late 14th century on being heard. She is female, English-speaking, probably illiterate, bourgeois, a business woman, a member of the laity. From these positions she questions the authority of the clergy, the Latin theological tradition, the courtly ideal, the aristocratic genre of romance, the male establishment.37

Martin’s statement attests to the fact that whether critics consider the Wife in terms of marriage, textuality, religion, or medieval business practices, their interpretations almost always return in some way to gender interests. The unabashed contents of the Wife’s discourse naturally foster such engagement, and since the rise of feminism many critics have championed “her” importance as a strong medieval woman. But this was not always the case. In 1700, the highly respected poet/critic John Dryden proclaimed the Wife of Bath as being “too licentious” for proper discussion.38 Although this remark may seem overly puritanical to modern tastes, Dryden was hardly alone in articulating such a pejorative view. In fact, early readers generally portrayed Alisoun as a wanton and stereotypically shrewish wife, which fits succinctly with her satirical textual origins and may help to explain Dryden’s hesitance concerning her character.39 As Cooper has noted, the Wife’s spreading fame during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (and beyond) was as a shrew or example of “promiscuous womanhood,” so that “every mention of her brings with it an implied frisson


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for the male of the species.”40 Many examples of this viewpoint could be provided, none better than the various musings of the Restoration scholar Richard Brathwait in “A Commentary Upon Chaucer’s Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale” (1665).41 Brathwait comments on the Wife’s shrewishness throughout this text, saying such things as “She will confirm her Attention with fresh remembrances of Correction: Whoever wears the Doublet, she means to wear the Breech,” and stating that Dame Alice “constantly holds to her old Tenet: She was not made for a maid. What she hath received, must be as freely used.”42 As history ran its course, the widespread view of Alisoun as a stereotypically shrewish wife eventually waned. Though pejorative comments continue to be found over the years in some—notably male—quarters, the Wife of Bath gradually was seen with increasing respect.43 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the “good wif ” customarily was read as an ironic and comical female figure who did not deserve the scorn of her early readers. To illustrate this generally more forgiving perspective, take the subtle remarks of William Hazlitt, the renowned Victorian critic who argued that her Prologue is “unequalled as a comic story,” and believed that the Wife of Bath should be esteemed for her warm, goodnatured femininity.44 Such observations may not seem particularly exceptional to readers today, but they wrought tangible changes by drawing on notions of Chaucerian humor to promote a more acceptable view of the character. Consequently, by the late nineteenth century, comments of the following sort became the norm, rather than a quiet exception: Matthew Browne argued that the Wife of Bath represents a “most distinguished mouthpiece” for “a vein of deliberate irony addressed to the notion of ecclesiastically excising certain of the facts of life,” while Henry Morley went so far as to claim that Alisoun illustrates “the beauty and honour of true womanhood.”45 Statements of this kind, based largely upon the character’s satirical origins, are crucial because they allowed her to be seen in a more socially acceptable and even authoritative light. It is through such comments that the Wife of Bath increasingly was perceived as having a kind of independent existence, or indeed a valuable “life” of her own. Due to length considerations, the previous paragraphs have only brief ly traversed the first several hundred years of Dame Alice’s reception, when some of the harshest criticisms ever leveled at the Wife’s character are found. The drastic change in perspective just outlined is significant because the relatively early emergence of a conception of the Wife as a generally good-natured and likable woman runs counter to the longstanding strain of moral apprehension—or outright condemnation—that remains evident to this day within criticism of the Pardoner. Rather than

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distaste for the Wife’s illicit conduct, there seems to be (with a few exceptions) a historically consistent scholarly acceptance of Alisoun and her behavior. This tolerance of the Wife of Bath is in stark contrast to the reception of the Pardoner, who often is denounced as an ethically devoid “scoundrel” and afforded little, if any, respect.46 Why is this so? Why is Dame Alice typically placed in a positive light—whether deserved or not—and read as a sprightly mouthpiece for medieval feminism, while the Pardoner is famously seen as the “one lost soul among the Canterbury Pilgrims”?47 The reasons for this discrepancy are difficult to determine, but under close scrutiny this conspicuous scholarly paradox may reveal powerful ideological agendas. A simple explanation for the customary approval of the Wife of Bath is found in her satirical or comedic nature. As a rule, well-wrought humor tends to draw an audience in, and readers are often favorably inclined toward those individuals who elicit their laughter. It seems logical that this common predisposition would help to explain the scholarly tolerance of the Wife. Many readers would agree that Alisoun’s discourse is funny, and thus it may be simply that “she” has an extremely likable personality despite “her” moral indiscretions. In Cooper’s words, the Wife may well be “every antifeminist’s nightmare come true. Chaucer’s triumph is to make her irresistibly attractive.”48 This is a valid point, but the reasons for the characteristic approval of the Wife of Bath must run deeper. A far more provocative reason, I would argue, is that the illicit sexual behavior of the Wife described in her Prologue is of a kind that many have accepted as a common, if unfortunate, aspect of humanity. Alisoun’s objectionable marital dealings and candid sexual promiscuity are improprieties that are by no means socially sanctioned, but at the very least have long been out in the open. In contrast, critics of the Pardoner are faced with a historically shunned behavior in the character’s alleged homosexuality, with its attendant sexual conduct that many over the years would prefer to keep a (closeted) secret. The Pardoner’s discomfiting behavior will be taken up more fully in section 4.3. For now, I would like to explore the third primary reason that the Wife of Bath has been championed by scholars, especially of late. A careful look at the recent history of English literary criticism is quite revealing when it comes to the altered scholarly perception of the Wife. Particularly illuminating is the fact that the character’s status has closely mirrored the development of the women’s movement and the relatively recent concept of gender equality. It is evident that, since the latter half of the nineteenth century, the rise of feminism has played a major role in Dame Alice’s improved critical fortunes. More to the point, the women’s movement has fostered the scholarly approval of the Wife of Bath’s


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“life” and has cultivated the widespread praise of the character that now predominates; thus, the legacy of gender theory is vital for understanding Alisoun’s perceived status as an unusually progressive medieval woman. Feminism has had a profound effect on Chaucer Studies, and it goes without saying that much has been gained from criticism that sees the Wife of Bath as an all-important model for the exploration of the “ethical and social consequences of women’s exclusion from the world of literature in particular and the world of men in general.”49 However, some key issues do arise when gender theory is applied to Dame Alice, and these issues merit critique. An especially significant consideration is the interpretive effect of feminist ideology, since a politicized emphasis on female power and independence that is part and parcel of a feminist agenda is common in scholarship on the Wife. Seen in the wake of the women’s movement, it is clear that Alisoun’s performance routinely is viewed—or appropriated—as a revelation of her “feminist” perspectives, with her words being intended to expose “phallocentric” discursive inclinations and to legitimize the female desire for cultural “maistrye.”50 Given the contents of her Prologue, it is only natural that many scholars have seen the Wife of Bath as a powerful female character who is able (or at least trying) to free herself from the chains of masculine dominance. But a close look at the criticism that supports this view reveals that few critics follow the lead of Dinshaw in recognizing and commenting on their own subjectivity and its interpretive impact, while questions of anachronism may be asked about certain readings that arguably project present gender or sexual norms.51 These tendencies have serious ramifications for the supposed meaning of the Wife, and are also evident in scholarship on the Pardoner’s “life.” In both cases, the issue at hand is the usage of contemporary values to judge each persona, while certain historical contingences and subtle aspects of the Middle English verse are overlooked, or even manipulated. Reception studies have recently begun to address such issues, but key questions remain when it comes to the legacy of the Wife of Bath—questions that a fresh “queer” view might help to open up and reconcile. Accounts of the Wife of Bath often feature a precise type of politically charged historicization whereby the authority of the male author is variously def lected or even denounced in favor of certain “feminist” ideals. These predilections have not been sufficiently critiqued by today’s Chaucerians and underline the persona-construct’s centrality in the character’s reception. For the all-important question arises here of where to place the onus of blame or responsibility for the Wife’s views—on the author, the narrator, or conversely, on their culture. Variants of this question have been encountered previously, especially in chapter 1 where

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it was shown that many thinkers over the years concerned themselves with the issue of responsibility when faced with complex literary personae. During the Middle Ages, heated debates arose over this very subject, as the example of the querelle de la Rose makes clear. Recalling the querelle is instructive, because there are striking similarities between the disputants’ opposing viewpoints regarding the writing of Jean de Meun and the primary arguments found in the reception of Chaucer’s Wife. In the case of Alisoun, the two sides of the polarized debate generally look something like this: some critics defend the poet and his female mouthpiece for touching on sensitive or objectionable ideals, while others— often by rejecting the protection of the persona—condemn the author for unacceptable views on gender. Criticism of the Wife of Bath does not always fall neatly into these two divergent categories, but they are prominent and if nothing else, the comparison with the querelle speaks to the fact that more than six hundred years after the famous controversy arose over the Roman de la Rose, scholars continue to grapple with the same issues concerning the persona-construct. In addition it is evident that, like Christine de Pizan, some Chaucerians appropriate the narrative speaker for their own agendas and predispositions, while the persona, gender issues, and intellectual discord frequently go hand in hand. Bearing the querelle in mind, determining the presumed locus of responsibility will be central to my analysis in the next several pages because this focus helps to reveal where scholars are morally evasive in their readings of the persona, or inclined toward a particular interpretive ethos. To assess the Wife’s legacy since the Victorian age, it is only logical to begin by examining criticism that supports Alisoun’s ascendant status as a strong medieval woman. For many, if not most, postmodern gender theorists, the Wife of Bath is not a helpless woman trapped within patriarchal society; instead, she is seen as an economically sound, selfmade businesswoman who uses her God-given gifts to carve out her own niche within the world of men, a view that is characteristically established by relating the character to others of her cultural and professional kind (such as bourgeois widows, pilgrims, and weavers). In the words of H. Marshall Leicester, the Wife of Bath is able to “woman-handle” authority (and the male authorities), altering it in a way that affords her some degree of power while making “the feminist message more pointed and polemical.”52 Leicester’s notion of “woman-handling” provides a useful descriptor for the manner in which certain feminist critics have treated the Wife, by working within and applying a political agenda that “handles” men and bolsters the place of women, both medieval and modern. This project virtually requires that Dame Alice be embraced as a self-reliant female


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ancestor who gives hope to others who yearn to liberate themselves from misogynistic discourse and masculine control. Obviously, the history of patriarchal politics represents a deplorable legacy of negativity and oppression, and feminists are only right to resist such tyranny by using the tools of scholarship to uncover and undermine the injustices against women perpetuated by men. But it bears mentioning that—however justified— the resentment of patriarchal structures is sometimes morally thrust on the poet and his works. This is significant, because the indignation in question frequently is veiled or simply goes unacknowledged, although it seems unlikely that the gender theorists in question are unaware of the bias behind their position(s). The transparency Ethan Knapp sees as a characterizing feature of feminist criticism on Chaucer is at times difficult to identify in scholarship on the Wife, where the agendas of critics are not always out in the open, and thus it is not wholly accurate to say that “feminism’s opposition to the currents of misogyny in the canon has led inevitably to an emphasis on making explicit the standpoint of the engaged critic.”53 There has been a recent turn toward greater scholarly transparency, but many critics today (feminist or otherwise) remain resistant to more fully acknowledging and embracing their intellectual desires in the manner suggested several years ago in an important article by Nicholas Watson. For Watson, historical research is an emotional and somehow even tactile endeavor, and he therefore urges medievalists to both recognize and address their inescapable “desire for the past.”54 Few have done so adequately, and in the case of feminist scholars, whether or not their ideologies are openly expressed there is little doubt that the emotional, politically charged nature of critical response has profoundly shaped the emergent view of Chaucer and impacted his (supposed) presentation of gender in the Wife’s narrative and elsewhere.55 Clearly, these are issues that deserve further discussion, and I have only been able to explore them in a limited fashion in this chapter. Importantly, those critics who see Alisoun as a character who seeks to assert an authoritative cultural position for women rarely include the poet Chaucer in any such empowering program. At a glance, this may not seem all that surprising, since the author invariably worked within patriarchal literary paradigms, we are dealing here with a detached dramatic persona, and it may be argued that other female characters are not allowed the same agency as the Wife of Bath. Nevertheless, Chaucer did bring the character to life, and if the Wife does somehow epitomize quasi-feminist views then surely the male poet deserves some credit for inscribing such perspectives. Yet, conspicuously, such credit is not consistently given in recent critical accounts. A case could be made that this oversight is simply

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the result of an aggressive feminist program that purposefully aims to subvert masculine power, counteract female oppression, and deny patriarchal historical conventions. But this view is not entirely satisfactory, because while this more confrontational type of feminist writing is found in some accounts of the Wife, it is not the interpretive rule. Another way of looking at this issue is to observe that we have here a significant and atypical manner of reading the persona in which the author is not credited with the character’s potentially “feminist” ideals. Instead, Dame Alice is treated as if she deserves to be held personally responsible for her forward-thinking regarding gender roles, a tacit assumption that fits succinctly with the tendency to afford the Wife her own “life.” Previous chapters have shown that critics characteristically read Chaucer’s personae both autobiographically and in terms that convey the poet in a morally favorable light. Hence, it is striking when Chaucer’s voice is not heard and he himself is not defended in some way. In the case of Alisoun, the extraordinary disparagement of the author that occasionally is found speaks to the strength of feminist ideology, and usefully highlights the powerful distancing-effect of the autofictional persona (even if only indirectly recognized). It is fascinating that one of the few scholars to recognize Chaucer’s potential role as a kind of feminist-sympathizer is E. T. Donaldson. Donaldson was by no means a “feminist” critic but his perspective is illustrative all the same. Donaldson was, of course, acutely aware of the persona-construct, but was prone to uphold a kind of literal connection between Chaucer and his personae.56 It follows that he depicts a female-friendly poet by connecting the author to his creation, the “gloriously immoral” Wife of Bath whose questioning of antifeminist doctrine should (Donaldson thinks) be taken seriously.57 According to Donaldson, Chaucer “conceived of the Wife as the antifeminist conception of woman come alive,” so that even “if the Wife of Bath is a satirical figure, the satire is directed less against women than against the antifeminists for the gross monstrosity they had substituted for the Eve that a benevolent God had created.”58 A number of critics would strongly disagree. Among those who believe that both Chaucer and his female storyteller adhere to the antifeminist beliefs of the age, Elaine Tuttle Hansen stands out. In one of her early accounts of Dame Alice’s “life,” Hansen emphasizes that the Wife of Bath is a male construct, so she is “not the full and remarkable presence we have normally invested her with, but a dramatic and important instance of woman’s silence and suppression in history and in language.”59 In this essay, Hansen also contends that Alisoun both consciously and unconsciously endorses the antifeminist stereotypes she cites, so that the


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end of her performance (i.e., her Tale) “reveals that the Wife herself, at some level, has little confidence in the female’s powers of speech.”60 Here, Hansen takes an interesting theoretical step back, choosing to direct the antifeminist blame at the ironic narrator rather than the author himself, a move that registers the detached nature of the persona and resonates with the critic’s earlier account of the Legend of Good Women in which she likewise places the onus of responsibility on the fictional speaker.61 In her subsequent accounts of the Wife of Bath, however, Hansen makes no such move. Instead, she invalidates this position by placing the blame squarely upon the shoulders of Chaucer-as-author. Given this explicit change of position, Hansen’s work provides a compelling example of the political undercurrent that frequently guides the depiction of the Wife of Bath in the present (post)feminist climate. In fact, Hansen’s considerable ideological turn may be seen as a microcosm of a similar transition within Chaucer Studies during the late twentieth century, when a shift toward a more politically charged écriture feminine is found.62 In Hansen’s later accounts of Dame Alice, this more ideologically forceful approach is evident as the critic presents a more openly condemnatory view of the poet, who is located within a deplorable program of antifeminism. In this view, the distancing-effect of the persona is disregarded, but rather than bolstering “Father Chaucer” (in the manner seen in chapters 2 and 3) the presumed connection between author and artifice serves to indict him. Hansen claims that Chaucer’s verse demonstrates that a “naive faith” in language does not serve women well because it is an instrument for reproducing the (antifeminist) conventions that constrain and deny both the experiences and representations of women. Consequently, the Wife of Bath represents a “feminine monstrosity” who marks the limits of literary representation as a product of the masculine imagination, so that she is an “embarrassment” to Chaucer’s good name and the humanist claim that the canonical male author speaks for all of humanity.63 The harsh views found in Hansen’s scholarship on the Wife may be said to represent the extreme feminist condemnation of the poet. Others whose criticism fits within the feminist paradigm seem reluctant to take this line of thinking so far when addressing the act of “medieval ventriloquism” undertaken in bringing Alisoun to “life.”64 Instead, it is more common for gender theorists to allow Chaucer to share the responsibility for any perceived antifeminism with his culture, with the discourses he was inevitably required to work with and within when composing his poetry. Interestingly enough, even the deliberately provocative queer theorist Dinshaw takes this type of more cautious, reconciliatory approach to the Wife of Bath; rather than wholly blaming the author for any supposed antifeminist tendencies underlying the character, Dinshaw

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favorably revaluates him by commenting that through his female speaker, Chaucer imagines the possibility of a masculine reading that acknowledges feminine desire in good faith and is not antifeminist.65 As Jill Mann puts, or rather morally justifies the matter, just because Chaucer uses antifeminist satire in portraying the Wife does not mean that he endorses it.66 For critics who subscribe to this perspective, there is an apparent unease with a conception of “Master Chaucer” as a kind of stereotypical, misogynistic male. This discomfort is highly significant, because even the most steadfast feminists (Hansen excepted) tend to take a reconciliatory tone toward the poet. The critical rule, in fact, appears to be that even if Chaucer’s verse is not read as empathizing with the plight of women, most critics seemingly would prefer to condemn the world in which he lived for any perceived misogyny rather than the poet himself. The inclinations just described are typically implicit and likely not part of a willful program of interpretive manipulation, but nonetheless the elisions in question are integral to the scholarly construction of Chaucer-as-poet. In an attempt to characterize reconciliatory accounts of this sort, Alastair Minnis has outlined the notion of “structural anti-feminism” that has been utilized by numerous Chaucerians in order to explain the supposedly negative views of women found in Alisoun’s performance. As its name implies, “structural anti-feminism” defines a scenario wherein the ideas in question are dictated and required by the structures of society, so that “it would be improper to condemn a writer for structural anti-feminism (phobic anti-feminism being, of course, a different matter)” since “he was following traditions, participating in discourses of sexual difference which were to outlive him long into the future.”67 This common, “structural” impulse is no better seen than in the concise view of Helen Phillips that the language in the Wife’s portrait may not indicate that Chaucer himself was “ribaldly antifeminist,” but that “his culture gave him no other language for envisaging a financially independent woman.”68 Given the pervasiveness of antifeminism in Chaucer’s era, the measured perspectives found in “structural” critical accounts are well-grounded. Yet it is apparent that, for some, this type of approach represents a convenient way to explain away the possibility that Chaucer was an antifeminist author whose poetry is often highly conventional in its depictions of the sexes. By shifting the focus—or the blame—from the author to society, it is understood that the narrator need not be connected directly to the poet. Regardless, the persona is rarely mentioned in such discussions, even though its very presence—and ambivalence—helps to facilitate “structural” readings and allows for a smooth shifting of interpretive blame. These “structural” renderings of the Wife, therefore, provide


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further evidence for the widespread scholarly disregard of the personaconstruct. In addition, the strain of veiled scholarly desire illuminated in previous chapters is identifiable—the virtual requirement to portray Chaucer as an admirable, progressive writer whose characters depict a world of change, growth, and hope. Hand in hand with this predisposition in criticism of the Wife, it seems, is another important predilection: whether Alisoun is understood through thought patterns that are somehow feminist, antifeminist, or otherwise, most critics are not only inclined to absolve the poet of any moral blame but also tend to exonerate his “gat-toothed,” libidinous character. Even the most infamous proponent of interpretive exegesis, D. W. Robertson, Jr., does not altogether condemn Dame Alice’s illicit behavior. True, Robertson certainly does not approve of the Wife’s “rampant ‘femininity’ or carnality” and is saddened by the fact that “she has little regard for the sacramental aspect of marriage. The ‘spirit’ of the institution escapes her completely.”69 But what is most intriguing is that this critic—widely known for his “preachy” scholarship—ultimately would provide a kind of historical justification for her behavior. In one of his later publications, Robertson notes the Wife’s land holdings, financial status, and legal backdrop, which suggests that the character was read in Chaucer’s time as a rural clothier, and perhaps a bondwoman, possibilities that offer “a reasonable explanation for her obvious and even ostentatious wealth.” 70 More importantly, Robertson contends that “Chaucer’s picture of Alisoun’s wealth, wandering, and intense interest in f leshly satisfaction is a caricature” designed to offer “a satire on the acquisitiveness of some of his contemporaries, the disruption of traditional hierarchies,” and a “concomitant decline in mores,” which are all attributable to the rise of the cloth industry.71 By returning to the concept of comedy/satire as an explanation for Alisoun’s “shrewish” behavior, Robertson’s words bring full-circle my discussion of the character’s primary scholarly legacies. But there is still one more essential lesson to be learned from the reception of this commanding female persona. The lack of consensus regarding the Wife of Bath’s gendered meaning(s) urges the critical reader to be sensitive to—and is the direct result of—the ambiguity of Chaucer’s foremost female creation. As the character’s reception history demonstrates, significant questions arise regarding the locus of responsibility for the controversial content, and especially concerning the issue of gender roles and their representation. Of particular importance is the question of whether the text is feminist or antifeminist. The answer is not clear, and this seems to be part of the author’s purposeful plan. Moreover, this ambivalence may in part be ascribed to her very nature as a storyteller. The Wife of

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Bath is not alive, she is not “real,” and she is by no means straightforward. She is, simply, a carefully constructed dramatic persona. I firmly believe that Chaucer was aware of the day’s persona-theory and deliberately experimented with his personae. And it is apparent that Alisoun was intended to play a key role in these experiments. It is, perhaps, inevitable that criticism of the Wife would prove to be contradictory and divergent over time. It is the nature of literary scholarship to question and debate. And, crucially, it is the nature of the “queer” persona to be unsettling and elusive. So, too, is the Wife of Bath, and I would argue that the variegated scholarly accounts of Alisoun’s “life” are the unavoidable result of her inherent ambivalence. The Wife seems to be a purposefully suggestive and equivocal female character. Rather than being decidedly antifeminist or unquestionably feminist, criticism on the Wife makes it clear that she does not fall neatly into either category. A strong case can, indeed, be made that the Wife of Bath is not the straightforward gender construct that many readers have assumed, but represents a consciously challenging creation—and the ambiguous persona is the vehicle for that challenge. This argument is strengthened by the fact that Chaucer appears to have been keenly aware of gender issues and their narrative representation, as section 4.3 will outline more fully. And Chaucer’s very design, it seems, was to use Dame Alice to transmit equivocal gender markers that would require readers to pause and think about important issues relating to gender roles and patriarchal structures. If so, then the Wife is powerfully “queer.” As Beverly Kennedy puts it, the Wife of Bath presents a “poetic of ambiguity” that serves the “profoundly moral intention” of inviting consideration about the complexities of gender in the Middle Ages.72 For most, the Wife of Bath presents readers with an either/or choice: either Alisoun is an early quasi-feminist, or she underscores the power of antifeminism in the medieval period. But like Kennedy, a handful of critics have usefully emphasized the fact that the character need not be seen in such neat, black-and-white terms. Anne Laskaya sums up the Wife’s ambivalence well, stating that in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, tale, voice, and body, boundaries become amorphous. Here, individual speech and cultural discourse, word and experience, self and others blur together . . . Here is Chaucer’s greatest challenge to the culture’s discourse surrounding femininity. Unlike his male pilgrim narrators, Chaucer embraces and enjoys the multiplicities of character, whether male or female. What attracts him to Dame Alysoun is the complexity of the human, not the simplicity of artificial social or cultural definitions.73


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S. H. Rigby is another notable scholar who has encouraged readers of the Wife to “reject both sides of the polarized debate” regarding the character’s (anti)feminism and sought a more nuanced view by recognizing her marked ambivalence.74 As Rigby acknowledges, it is a fact of literary scholarship that critics look for definitive answers, even if none are likely to be found. In the reception of the Wife of Bath, it is evident that many scholars have chosen to read as definitive a series of textual signifiers that are by no means clear-cut; despite years of scholarship to the contrary, it remains uncertain whether Alisoun represents a kind of antifeminist pawn, a quasi-feminist, neither, or both. Thus, I contend that a reasonable way to view the character is to see her as being carefully constructed to invite this very question, since she offers a range of (anti)feminist arguments and debates both sides of this issue in her Prologue. In making this case, I am not merely aiming to support scholars such as Rigby, but also to suggest that a logical next step in criticism of the Wife is to use the persona to deepen and more fully explore the character’s apparent ambiguity, her essential “queerness.” This is a female pilgrim that is extremely difficult to classify, categorize, or even summarize, so rich and complex is her “life.” Therefore, it is by no means an interpretive oversimplification to read the Wife of Bath as a deliberately ambivalent character that speaks to many different gender conventions and possibilities. And a more fully realized persona-construct holds great promise for further opening up Alisoun’s uncertain femininity and the ramifications of her deliberate indeterminacy. By returning the “queer” persona to its rightful place at the center of critical discourse regarding Dame Alice, scholars will be better positioned to investigate further what this combative female figure might have to say about medieval gender boundaries, gender norms, and gender discord. As a famous and deeply complex persona, the elusive Wife of Bath has great potential for questioning marginalized gender activities and ideals and “queering” accepted cultural practices and biases. This potential has yet to be fully realized by critics, who might use the persona of the Wife to ask new questions and further blur the lines of gender meaning for the Middle Ages. In bringing my discussion of Dame Alice to a close, there is an important final point to be made on the subject of critical oversights. Not only have most scholars failed to see the Wife of Bath as a usefully “equivocal, non-committal, and playful” character, but Rigby also convincingly argues that many readers today ignore the significant “gap which exists between her behavior and that prescribed for the estate of women by medieval moralists.” 75 Rigby contrasts Alisoun’s “self ”-presentation to the standards on display in the works of Christine de Pizan, and concludes that the Wife would have been viewed as morally deficient not only in

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the eyes of male authorities, but also is “profoundly problematic when judged against the ethical standards of the most forthright and systematic feminist thinker of the day (i.e. Christine).”76 As Rigby notes, there are several “parallels between the behavior of the Wife within marriage and that condemned by Christine.” 77 This is yet another subject worthy of further scholarly consideration, and it is particularly intriguing when it is recalled that, despite her undeniable improprieties, the historical tendency of scholars is to accept the Wife of Bath. If Kennedy is correct, such toleration may date back to the fifteenth century, when scribal alterations and marginal notations found in certain manuscripts suggest that “lay readers were able to see the Wife as a conventionally pious woman who chose to maintain her chastity by remarrying rather than attempting the higher degree of chastity exemplified by widowhood.” 78 Whether this is so, it is certain that a wide variety of critics, from schools as diverse as Exegetics and queer theory, have celebrated Alisoun’s “life,” in spite of the moral “gap” described by Rigby. Having addressed some of the major ideologies and oversights that characterize the Wife of Bath’s scholarly reception, it is now time to focus exclusively on the Pardoner, a false preacher whose legacy runs counter to that of Dame Alice since “his” moral indiscretions are rarely (if ever) overlooked and are often condemned by critics. Whatever a reader is to make of this unique, discomfiting character, there is little doubt that the Pardoner is an especially challenging pilgrim who elicits thought about sexuality and culture, greed and God, by leading his audience “into political deliberation about the ideals and institutional arrangements of society.” 79 4.3

The Pardoner’s “Privetees”: Physiognomy, Perversion, and Scholarly Retreat

Throughout the history of Chaucerian reception, many readers have openly despised the Pardoner for being a “Devil of the first magnitude.” This was the harsh descriptor used by no less a figure than William Blake, who also castigated the character as “the Age’s Knave, who always commands and domineers over the high and low vulgar. This man is sent in every age for a rod and scourge, and for a blight, for a trial of men, to divide the classes of men.”80 Blake’s contemporaries typically displayed a similar abhorrence for the Pardoner and his manipulative, self- serving preaching, describing him as a “huckster of holy ‘trumpery’ ” who offers “bargains of his soul-saving pedlary” and tells “sermons of vulgar cajollery.”81 Charles Dickens referred to the character as “a humbug, living on the credulity of the people,” and most early readers would seem to agree with such a negative assessment.82


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Though the overt distaste on display in these comments gradually would diminish, similar concerns have been voiced by more recent critics, who have thoroughly examined the character’s historical “life” in terms of greed, medieval theology, the abuse of relics and preaching, and so on. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine accounts of this sort at length, but suffice it to say that such criticism provides ample evidence for the aforementioned tendency to afford the (autofictional) Pardoner his own historically based “life.” This specific type of scholarly (mis)reading is significant, because in the case of the Pardoner, it conveniently shields the poet from undesirable associations with arguably his most depraved creation, a startling dramatic persona unlike any other in the Canterbury Tales. When critics construct the Pardoner’s “life” by historically rooting “his” existence in medieval culture, this allows the author and his values to be displaced, reduced, or somehow ignored. Thus, the Pardoner’s moral deficiencies emerge as character-f laws that have little or nothing to do with Chaucer and his own beliefs. If Chaucer the Man is brought into the interpretive picture, then he is often morally safeguarded in a different way. Scholars who focus on the Pardoner’s historical situation commonly portray “his” religious misdeeds as accurately ref lecting the improprieties of actual medieval pardoners; as a result, the character’s sinful conduct frequently has been perceived as a poignant example created in order to condemn manipulative preachers of his kind.83 In the context of medieval estates satire, few would question such a conclusion. But it is interesting to note that this perspective may belie a distinct unease with the possibility that a presumably good man such as Chaucer would choose to write the “life” of an utterly immoral figure. A particularly suggestive example of this apprehension is found in the criticism of G. L. Kittredge. Kittredge famously referred to the Pardoner as “the one lost soul among the Canterbury Pilgrims,” the “most abandoned” character of the Tales who exposes the “horrid hypocrisy of his professional life.”84 However, unlike numerous early readers, Kittredge is neither absolute nor unwavering in his rebuke of the Pardoner. Rather, when the remainder of Kittredge’s well-known critical sketch is taken into consideration, an important instance of what I call the “moral f linch” is seen. This concept signifies the fact that many recent critics not only exculpate the poet when addressing the Pardoner, but—despite their propensity for distaste toward the character—there also is an identifiable reluctance to condemn the Pardoner outright. The moral f linch therefore represents a crucial interpretive aversion, a typically abrupt or disjunctive ethical back-tracking when scholars are faced with (arguably) the most disturbing and problematic Chaucerian storyteller. Though many readers remain uneasy with the corrupt character, the moral f linch provides

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a sense of hope—hope for the Pardoner’s redemption, or at least tacit desire that “Father Chaucer” would provide some measure of hope for a lost fellow. In its latent optimism, criticism marked by a moral f linch may be guilty of a kind of age-old humanistic sentimentality. In any case, scholarship that features a moral f linch is, essentially, doubly hesitant: it not only vacillates in the face of the sinful Pardoner, but in so doing, takes care to avoid implying any harsh moral judgment on the revered author who gave the character “life.” This cautious scholarly “f linching” represents a compelling strain of ideological manipulation, for it is an act and action that makes it clear that most readers do somehow abhor the immoral Pardoner—yet of late, few have chosen to condemn him unequivocally. Hence, the moral inclination traced thus far in my monograph takes perhaps its most dynamic form here, as the moral f linch rationalizes the authorship of the reprehensible Pardoner and signals a thinly veiled desire to ensure that Chaucer retains his favorable magisterial status.85 Manifestations of the moral f linch may take slightly varied forms, but they are united in their effect. In Kittredge’s case, the moral f linch takes the shape of a belief in the possibility of the Pardoner’s redemption, for there appears (he argues) to be a moment in which the character displays “a very paroxysm of agonized sincerity.”86 Thus, Kittredge abruptly draws back from wholly damning a character he earlier described as a “lost soul,” by offering the hopeful possibility that the Pardoner’s “cynicism suddenly abandons him, and—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye—he becomes a changed man, reverting to the days before he lost his soul.”87 Though a sense of unease remains with regards to the corruption of the Pardoner (“an assassin of souls”), Kittredge changes tack by assuming a redemptive tone and implicitly supporting the notion that the (supposedly) benevolent, sagacious author simply could not create something totally evil or irredeemable.88 Therefore, the Pardoner ultimately escapes Kittredge’s judgment. Some critics, however, have not hesitated to judge. For most of the Pardoner’s reception history, those who have scorned the character have been especially troubled by his impious actions and seeming lack of regard for certain core Christian beliefs. This disapproval is neatly summed up in the words of Kemp Malone, who bluntly condemns the “most contemptible” Pardoner as a “scoundrel” who is representative of the “wicked, vicious clerics [who] make money hand over fist, by fraud, deceit, and trickery of the basest and most despicable kind.”89 Few would deny that the Pardoner is, at best, a morally dubious character, given his deception, greed, and blasphemy. But it is interesting that other, less obvious reasons may explain the disparagement of the character in some


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quarters. Returning attention brief ly to the nineteenth century, when the condemnation of the Pardoner was rife, the severe judgment rendered by C. D. Deshler is particularly illuminating. Deshler’s distaste is obvious in his declaration that the Pardoner represents one of “the most disgusting characters in Chaucer’s picture of his times.”90 What is striking here is that Deshler’s dislike, it seems, was largely a result of the character’s “lecherous disposition and effeminate appearance,” which was unacceptable to Victorian sensibilities.91 According to Vern Bullough, “males who demonstrated any feminine qualities could only be looked down upon” during the Middle Ages.92 Sedgwick has drawn a similar conclusion about Deshler’s own era, when a “gaping and unbridgeable homophobic rift” became a permanent feature of the sexual “geography.”93 Even if Deshler’s viewpoint is not truly “homophobic,” it illustrates that for some readers—past and present—the unease they have with the Pardoner may be ascribed to the faux preacher’s feminine appearance and undisclosed sexuality. In fact, the character’s greed and religious immorality are no longer of greatest interest to many critics, but increasingly the determination of his sexual “secret” has been central to the scholarly hermeneutic concerning the Pardoner. Although most critics are inclined to accept or even delight in the rampant (hetero)sexuality of the Wife of Bath, there has been some resistance to making a similar concession for the Pardoner and his alleged (homo) sexual behaviors. The case could be made that Chaucer himself was more sympathetic to the Wife of Bath, but there may be more deeply divisive sentiments at work in the scholarly disapproval of the Pardoner. As recent queer theory has shown, compelling explanations for the disparity in question may be uncovered by highlighting the generalizations, apprehensions, or outright phobias regarding homosexuality that are, or have been, present in Chaucer Studies. I would now like to focus attention on what such theories have to say about the Pardoner’s supposed “secret,” in order to reassess the character’s unusual gender markers. The roots of today’s dominant critical focus on the Pardoner’s “secret” may be traced to the highly inf luential scholarship of Walter Clyde Curry. Curry’s well-researched physiognomical study of the Canterbury pilgrims includes the contention that the Pardoner’s high voice and glaring eyes were associated with his “shameless impudence, gluttony, and licentiousness.” 94 More explosive is Chaucer’s infamous reference to the character in the General Prologue as “a geldyng or a mare,” which is said to reveal “the secret of the Pardoner; he is most unfortunate in his birth. He carries upon his body and has stamped upon his mind and character the marks of what is known to mediaeval physiognomists as a eunuchus ex nativitate,” who frequently are marred by “all kinds of depravity.”95

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Curry concludes that, since the Pardoner is “physically unfortunate” and thus “provided by nature with a warped mind and soul, he is compelled to follow the urge of his unholy impulses into debauchery, vice, and crime.”96 By claiming that the Pardoner had a secret, and offering a suggestive interpretation of what it was, Curry provoked a series of critical accounts of the character’s nature that have sought to solve the mystery that supposedly lies at the center of his identity. As John Halverson has noted, ever since Curry’s study (published in 1926), the Pardoner’s biological condition—or sexual predisposition—has been fundamental to virtually every attempt to understand the character’s complicated personality.97 The original line of criticism regarding the Pardoner’s sexual nature closely followed Curry’s physiognomical precedent. Hence, a series of accounts were written on the “physically handicapped” pilgrim’s hypothetical status as a scriptural eunuch or hermaphrodite.98 In recent years, other possible explanations for the Pardoner’s secret have been abundant: among other things, the character has been portrayed as a spiritually impotent simoniac and as “a negative prototype of the effeminate male in Western literature” who may be suffering from Klinefelter’s syndrome.99 However the Pardoner’s physical traits are interpreted, it is clear that ever since Curry’s account the pilgrim’s secret has become the key to unlocking his being—the secret of the character’s self. For many queer theorists, the Pardoner’s secret is his closeted homosexuality. The “queering” of the Pardoner was initiated by Monica McAlpine a quarter century ago, and it has been the most pervasive critical trend surrounding the character since that time. When applied to Chaucer’s verse, queer theory often features a tacit critical move away from the author toward his character or (sexual) culture, and thus the Pardoner’s visage, storytelling, and interactions with his fellow pilgrims have been said to ref lect his moral views and presumed (homo)sexual inclinations, as well as the gender values of late medieval society. Accordingly, in her indispensable analysis of “The Pardoner’s Homosexuality and How It Matters,” McAlpine cleverly proposed that the character emerges as a conglomeration of three sexual phenomena that frequently were confused with homosexuality in the Middle Ages: effeminacy, hermaphroditacy, and eunuchry. For McAlpine, it is “impossible to exclude the suggestion of homosexuality” in the Pardoner’s portrait because it is the only concept that can account for all of the sexual phenomena found in his description.100 More important for my purposes is the fact that McAlpine’s article ambitiously moves beyond critique of medieval perceptions of homosexuality to address the inner torment of an outcast despised by society and misunderstood by his church.101 Hence, a “queer”


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version of the moral f linch is found, as McAlpine proclaims the Pardoner to be a complex man who shows “signs of spiritual life” and who genuinely wants forgiveness and an “affirmation that he is in some sense holy”; Chaucer may be attempting to “challenge the sexual phobias” of his readers with the marginalized character and encourage them to consider how to give a balanced judgment of such a figure—in the context of cupidity or through a conception of Christian love.102 This last interpretive turn is critical, because this variant of the moral f linch underscores a desire to redeem the Pardoner despite his misdeeds (or misunderstood sexuality) by offering a sense of hope that he be treated fairly and received “as a pilgrim in the fellowship of other pilgrims.”103 McAlpine’s hopeful view represents a distinct, early version of a now familiar perspective whereby there is an attempt to identify (at least partially) with the Pardoner as a gay man and “claim” him as a misunderstood ancestor. The very notion of “claiming” is essential here, since this idea denotes a kind of overt political program seen in certain contemporary “lives” of the Pardoner that construct the character as a kindred ancestor within a transhistorical homosexual community. The explicit “claiming” of the Pardoner was first undertaken in an important essay by Steven Kruger, who believes that homophobia is a force operating within both Chaucer’s text and its critical reception.104 Kruger cautiously notes that critics should be careful not to project their own ideas of sexuality upon past sexual identities, but nonetheless proceeds to argue that Chaucer “certainly” wants to raise questions about the Pardoner’s sexuality and wants readers to at least see the possibility of homosexuality.105 By asserting, however tentatively, a gay “life” for the Pardoner, Kruger proposes that Chaucer’s text reveals the artificiality of narrow heterosexual paradigms and recognizes the power of the homosexual voice, which can present significant challenges to heteronormative thinking.106 Kruger’s study is arresting, but is it guilty of presenting a dangerous anachronism? Do critics who support the Pardoner’s supposed homosexuality “fetishize” the character to the extent that other crucial signifiers attached to the pilgrim are overlooked or ideologically suppressed?107 These are important questions, and the very fact that I am asking them here demonstrates just how powerful queer theory has become in Chaucer Studies. Twenty short years ago, Sedgwick declared that modern society was “brutally homophobic,” so much so that homophobia was said to represent a fundamental strand of contemporary culture’s very texture.108 In the twenty-first century, it may be argued that homophobia no longer represents a pervasive “mechanism for regulating the behavior of the many by the specific oppression of a few.”109 Yet it is certain that homophobic residues remain in today’s world—and unfortunately,

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Chaucer Studies is not immune to their continued presence. It is well beyond the scope of this monograph to broadly address the impact of queer theory on Chaucer criticism. However, given my interest in the persona’s “queer” and ambivalent narrative function, perhaps I may contribute something to that discussion by examining key ramifications of the now common “claiming” of the dramatic persona known as the Pardoner. Toward that end, the remainder of this chapter will consider notable silences and elisions found in recent criticism of the Pardoner, which have had much impact on the character’s alleged “secret.” At this point, numerous examples of applied queer theory could be offered, which have effectively “troubled” traditional assumptions about Chaucer and questioned the ways in which “presumptive heterosexuality has dominated” scholarship on medieval literature.110 Assuming that my reader is well-versed in the primary goals and perspectives of such readings, for the sake of brevity I will consider just a handful of Dinshaw’s observations, which again are illustrative of key critical trends. Generally speaking, Dinshaw’s Pardoner scholarship strongly agrees with Kruger’s claims, inasmuch as it refuses to judge the character—who is neither “man nor not-man,” both “the Same” and “the Other”—and demonstrates how his identity is constituted by a negation of, or alienation from, “androcentric” culture.111 In Dinshaw’s eyes, the Pardoner is “deeply disturbing” to the fellowship of Canterbury pilgrims because he reveals the unnaturalness of the (silencing) behaviors and desires of those around him.112 She perceives the Host’s famous threat to cut off the Pardoner’s “coillons” and enshrine them “in an hogges toord” as the first threatened gay bashing in English literature: the “unique severity” of Harry’s retort is an index of the danger the Pardoner poses, although the “denaturalizing power” of his (supposed) homosexuality is defused by the two narrative combatants’ subsequent kiss of peace.113 By applying her notion of the “queer touch” to the Pardoner, Dinshaw concludes that the character serves the useful function of making (hetero)sexuality visible because his “touch” carries a disillusioning or “denaturalizing” force that may be discomfiting, but can ultimately work to the social good as readers can use his example to contribute to the historicization and localization of particular sexualities.114 Dinshaw’s Pardoner criticism is both persuasive and important. But for the reception-theorist, it must be met with a certain degree of caution. For it is not, I trust, doing Dinshaw any disservice to claim that her various queer-theoretical accounts of the Chaucer corpus comprise the single most explicit program of appropriating the author and his verse for modern ideologies.115 Etymological history indicates that the very term “homosexual” did not appear until 1869, and a pervasive argument at


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present is that the notion of homosexual identity—though certainly not homosexual behavior—emerged long after the Middle Ages.116 If so, then the question arises of whether a homosexual Pardoner is anachronistic and therefore irrational, or altogether impossible. Dinshaw has asserted that “the judgment of anachronism” regarding Chaucer’s verse is “neither entirely easy nor automatically damning,” so that “a narrow concept of contemporaneity . . . should not inhibit us from seeking in Chaucer’s texts a ‘usable past.’ ”117 Many medievalists are likely to be wary of such a view, and thus in the figure of the Pardoner we have a provocative test case for the reception of a dramatic persona that, at minimum, may be labeled as historically problematic. In response to such disputable medieval personages, a number of scholars have recently sought to better understand the sexual perspectives of men and women living in the Middle Ages. This represents quite a daunting project, but as a result of much diligent research critics are now able to better situate the Pardoner’s sexuality. Elizabeth Allen, for example, has carefully considered the scribal legacy of the Pardoner in early manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, which show how the faux preacher was revised (or regulated) into being simply a negative moral example rather than a sexually ambiguous one.118 Allen’s research shows that subtle changes made by the scribes render the character’s disruptions and bodily appetites less challenging, so that the manuscript evidence indicates that “fifteenth-century readers did find a need to correct or pin down the Pardoner’s sexual identity, suggesting that the ambiguity of the famous lines in the Prologue was live to early readers.”119 Here, Allen is referring to the description of the character as “a geldyng or a mare,” a citation that has long fueled the interpretation of the character’s “secret.”120 The notorious line in question is truly eye-catching, but it is important to note that conclusive evidence has not been offered to prove that either “geldyng” or “mare” denoted a homosexual in Middle English—despite the assured views of some critics and the Riverside Chaucer’s confident gloss to that effect. That said, there is ample scholarly support for the general notion that various configurations for male sexuality—if not masculinity itself— were identifiable in the Middle Ages. Take the respected studies of Joan Cadden, which demonstrate that medieval scientific writers offered “gendered meanings” and not only made distinctions between men/women, male/female, but also discussed the differences between “masculine” women and “feminine” men—with the terms “masculinity” and “femininity” first utilized by scholars in the eleventh century.121 Cadden’s thorough research thus proves that ever-changing notions of gender were being disputed at a very early date, and indicates that despite constraints

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to their understanding—including an excessive reliance on binary language and perspectives—the views of late medieval men and women regarding “sex difference are much richer and more complex” than typically has been acknowledged.122 The fascinating account of Ruth Karras and David Boyd regarding one John Rykener provides strong evidence in support of this argument. Rykener was apparently a male transvestite prostitute in fourteenth-century London who was arrested for having sex with another man on the street. In analyzing the records of this case, Karras and Boyd conclude that it was “gender transgression” and not the act of sodomy, per se, that was officially perceived as wrongdoing. Karras and Boyd cite the Pardoner as another example of controversial “gender transgression and conf lation,” and even if this comparison does not fully hold, Rykener’s case does seem to register an awareness of gender activities that run counter to the “heteronormativity sanctioned by Nature and God” and highlights a concern with transgressions that disregard the “proper, gendered use of male bodies.”123 Historical evidence of this sort calls into question long-standing views of medieval gender roles and does seem to provide for the possibility of identifiable “medieval homosexuality”—although the term itself obviously was not in use. It would be ridiculous to criticize queer theorists for examining the very nature of gender practices in the Middle Ages, or for seeking out instances where same-sex desires may have been explored by medieval writers or somehow “smuggled into canonical works in recognizable ways.”124 Without a doubt, those who have sought to uncover such “smuggling” in the works of Chaucer deserve much credit for opening up exciting new ways of reading his oeuvre, and especially the Canterbury Tales. But some tough questions must be asked about certain readings of the Pardoner’s sexuality all the same. In particular, even if there were distinctly “homosexual” behaviors in the fourteenth century, these behaviors evidently were seen in different terms—considered as chaste/lecherous, “masculine” or “feminine,” and not straight/gay—and thus a question of anachronism endures.125 Leaving aside the key issue of relevance, another all-important question remains to be answered: what are the potential ramifications of “claiming” the Pardoner for Chaucer and his other narrative works? A cynic might simply discount “the ethical imperative to ‘tell the truth’ about homosexuality,” expose homophobia, and establish a queer community through and within literary studies.126 I would strongly disagree with such narrow-mindedness. Others might argue that certain “claims” that have been made about the Pardoner diminish the significance of the poet and his verse by overemphasizing the character’s sexual proclivities. This is a far more reasonable critique, especially since the


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character’s most obvious, undisputed transgressions have nothing to do with sexuality but instead tie into his spiritual hypocrisy. It is important to note that, in constructing the Pardoner as a culturally disturbing homosexual outcast, some critics appropriate the persona in such a way that Chaucer is marginalized, while certain sex and gender possibilities are disregarded or perhaps somehow “othered.” As a result, accounts that view the Pardoner as a homosexual may, at times, incorporate a problematic practice in which “gay” perspectives are ideologically favored over (all) other lines of thinking, while crucial historical contingencies in and surrounding the text are overlooked or even ignored. In particular, the focus is shifted from the Pardoner’s indisputable crimes—his avarice, deceit, and mockery of religious custom—to a preoccupation with his presumed homosexuality. The questionable nature of certain “claims” is exacerbated further when it is recognized that critics who underline the Pardoner’s supposed homosexuality commonly sidestep the character’s allusions to his ostensibly heterosexual practices, found in his comment to the Wife of Bath that he was “aboute to wedde a wyf ” and in his later exclamation that he has “a joly wenche in every toun.”127 In response to the “claiming” of the Pardoner, a few select scholars have, in fact, emphasized these comments and taken very seriously the possibility of the character’s heterosexuality. R. F. Green has been especially persuasive in this regard, arguing that the character’s marks of effeminacy are emblems of his (heterosexual) carnality—he is neither homosexual nor physiologically abnormal. Therefore, Green asserts, arguments that claim the Pardoner to be a eunuch, hermaphrodite, or homosexual ought to be replaced with a view of his “ordinary” sexuality—“ordinary in everything, perhaps, but its debilitating excesses.”128 Green’s stance has been powerfully supported by H. A. Kelly, who pushes the boundaries of what medieval science deemed “normative” and is in no doubt that the Pardoner should be seen as a hetero- rather than homosexual. By closely considering the perceptions of a number of medieval writers regarding effeminate men like the Pardoner, Kelly concludes that “as a ‘woman-oriented effeminate’ . . . we can see him as a sometimes hesitant or frustrated yet voraciously needful aficionado of the sex to which he is attracted and to which he has been assimilated.”129 Inevitably, rather than adhering to a view of the Pardoner as either distinctively hetero- or homosexual, some scholars have favored a more moderate approach that posits an ambiguous sexual “life” for the pilgrim. For instance, Derek Pearsall observes that suggestions of the Pardoner’s (homo)sexuality are evident “as a shocking and scandalous insinuation, rather than as the clue to the understanding of his whole nature and

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performance” since “the association of his atrophied state with his profession is the real secret of the Pardoner’s nature.”130 Cooper agrees, noting that “his looks are effeminate, and suggest sexual deviancy of some kind,” but although Chaucer implies some sort of “abnormality or perversion [he] refuses to predicate any specific “reality” behind it.”131 Skeptics might view such accounts as representing a kind of purposeful scholarly equivocation to avoid drawing firm conclusions about the character’s sexual appetites. On the contrary, I would argue that what we have here are two respected scholars who are attuned to the minutiae of Chaucer’s portrait. To quote Alcuin Blamires, contemporary criticism may be “in danger of mightily exaggerating the degree of entanglement with homosexuality in the case of the Pardoner.”132 An important result of this “exaggeration” is that critics have too often seen the character in distinct either/or terms—either he is homosexual or he is straight—and thus have ignored the possibility that other sexual configurations and subtleties of gender may be found in Chaucer’s thoughtful depiction of the Pardoner. As seen above with the Wife of Bath’s reception, the diverse scholarly responses to the Pardoner’s “secret” are both revealing and informative. In discussing this scholarship I am, again, not merely trying to review the trends of criticism, but aiming to show how the persona might help Chaucerians to discover new interpretive directions and encourages us to question key accounts that have been published to date. Considered in toto, the Pardoner’s varied critical legacy particularly urges further consideration of the possibility that the character’s sexuality is nothing less than indeterminate, and deliberately so. The Pardoner’s divergent reception history may indeed be read as a strong signal that “his” sexuality is, by design, equivocal and indefinite. And recognizing that the personaconstruct, too, is markedly ambivalent, there would seem to be much more to say about the Pardoner as an unsettled and unsettling narrative creation. This is no ordinary dramatic persona, but an enigma of great significance. The fact is that the Pardoner is deeply effeminate. And despite the recent progress that has been made in the study of medieval masculinity, effeminate males continue to pose a real challenge to scholarly notions of gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages—and no individual poses a greater challenge than the Pardoner. Based on physiognomical lore, the character’s f laxen hair, small voice, and lack of a beard leave his sexuality in question. The Pardoner is also some kind of “geldyng or mare,” and several scholars have pondered the nature of the relationship (and “stif burdoun”) between the character and his “compeer” the Summoner.133 In addition, the Host—who refers to the effeminate pilgrim derisively


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as “beel amy”—does seem to react with particular vehemence to the Pardoner, as recent queer theorists have emphasized. Whether Harry Bailly’s response is because the Pardoner is homosexual or otherwise devious, however, remains unclear, and the kiss of peace that the Knight orchestrates at the end of the Pardoner’s Tale only serves to further complicate the issue.134 Yet another problem is the plain fact that the character is an underhanded liar, which creates an even deeper interpretive conundrum: if we believe the Pardoner’s “own” words then he sees, or at least projects, himself not just as a lecher, but as an individual whose nature is “straight,” though libidinous (given that he claims to be engaged but has “a joly wenche in every toun”). Considering all of these bewildering possibilities, it is no wonder that there has been so much disagreement over the Pardoner’s purported secret. Could it be that these different aspects of the character’s inscribed sexuality indicate that Cooper and Pearsall are correct, and the poet’s actual intent was to create the very ambiguity just outlined? Is it possible that Chaucer deliberately construed the character as fitting comfortably on neither side of the hetero/homosexual binary divide, but wanted him to drift ambivalently among a variety of gender and sexual possibilities? I believe that is the point, and therefore agree with Sturges’s contention that the Pardoner’s “gender identity signifies in too many ways,” so that the character’s description “tends to dissolve sexual difference: he problematizes the very concept of sexual dimorphism because he makes it so difficult to decide where one sex begins and the other leaves off.”135 For those who would disagree with a view of the Pardoner as purposefully ambiguous, a likely explanation is that “homosexuality” as it is known today did not exist in the Middle Ages and consequently the poet could not offer it as a possible connotation. By name, this is true; but there certainly were homosexual behaviors and medieval society apparently recognized a variety of gender configurations and sexual practices, some being more culturally acceptable than others. So a homosexual Pardoner does seem to represent a viable interpretation, although it appears to be just one piece of the complex gender puzzle created by the poet. To further substantiate this point, it is helpful to look beyond the Pardoner to certain other men in Chaucer’s verse. In so doing, it becomes clear that the author was well-aware of male gender construction—or masculinity, if you will—and variously introduced and challenged the notion of “manliness” in the Canterbury Tales.136 In fact, Chaucer actually uses the term “manly” in the text—as well as related variants “manhede” and “mannyssh”—with a trenchant example being the description of the Monk as a “manly man,” which contrasts the character to other male pilgrims and supports the notion that the poet sought to actively critique

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such “manliness.”137 If so, then it would be illogical to assume that any ambiguity ascribed to the Pardoner was accidental; to the contrary, it is apparent that this ambivalence was intentional, so that Chaucer deliberately created a character who is notably effeminate, if not altogether (literally) emasculated. The Pardoner also could be, simply, “straight”— whether “manly” or not—and therefore readers are faced with a willfully challenging figure who does not fit neatly into any single gender/sexual category and thus “trespasses embodied definitions of masculinity.”138 Scholars have increasingly supported this conclusion in recent years, because if Chaucer really was “deeply responsive” to the full range of medieval sexual practices, then it follows that a consciously constructed “continuum of erotic possibility” is a sensible interpretation of the Pardoner.139 And if, indeed, the poet perceived masculinity as “a continuum that involves heterosexual and homosexual,” then a logical way to characterize the ambiguous Pardoner presents itself.140 Specifically, rather than stubbornly focusing on the Pardoner as a hetero- or homosexual, perhaps it makes sense to consider the character as representing a particular kind of ambivalence that registers his significance and suggestiveness as a cultural, sexual, and masculine creation. I contend that it is especially useful to see the Pardoner as an embodiment of the “male homosocial spectrum,” applying Sedgwick’s theories that have had such a profound effect on literary studies during the past quarter century. By definition, “homosociality” is a concept that designates male-male relationships that are not romantic or sexual in nature—although for Sedgwick, the term helps to blur the lines between homo- and heterosexual cultures and meaning. In my view, the concept of “homosociality” remains both important and useful more than twenty years after its inception—and perfectly summarizes the Pardoner and his role in the Tales. Thus, it is somewhat surprising that the notion has not been extensively applied to the character by scholars. As a fictional pilgrim who represents “male homosocial desire,” the Pardoner need not be deemed explicitly homoor heterosexual but instead may be seen as a figure whose actions are “either supportive of or oppositional to homosocial bonding” in that they subvert, bolster, or question male bonding, masculine behavior, and male sexuality—whether gay or straight.141 As Sedgwick observes, a “homosocial” perspective is helpful in revealing the oppressive power structures of patriarchal society and shows how “ideological homophobia, ideological homosexuality, or some highly conf licted but intensively structured combination of the two” functions in a culture (like the Pardoner’s) wherein “sexual meaning is inextricable from social meaning.”142 When the Pardoner is seen as this sort of “homosocial” embodiment, the ambiguity that remains serves as a vital interpretive springboard for


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further discussion. In effect, a “homosocial” Pardoner permits, or urges, readers to consider deeply—but perhaps not definitively determine—the nature of the character’s sexuality, physicality, and desires. A “homosocial” reading undercuts interpretive certainty by allowing for the possibility that the character somehow blurs the lines between homosexuality, heterosexuality, or even bisexuality, and thus represents a particularly provocative “queerness.” Indeed, the “homosocial” Pardoner invites us to understand “queerness not as narrowly sexual but as a phenomenon that shakes up, confuses, exceeds, or otherwise renders irrelevant” operant cultural categories.143 This is precisely the way I have sought to use the “queer” persona in this study, because it, too, creates valuable questions and confusion. By coupling the “homosocial” Pardoner with the “queer” persona, critics might do even more with the ways in which the character “resists reduction to a single sexual identity or to one set of sexual preferences.” Furthermore, this pairing signals that scholars need not settle for the moral f linch, or for neat, straightforward answers because this may be said to “travesty the complexity and contestation of [the Pardoner’s] constituent discourses.”144 Instead, by using the “queer” nature of the persona to help explore the equivocal nature of the “homosocial” Pardoner, new ideas may be found and long-standing possibilities may be reconsidered or entirely reimagined. For one thing, the f luidity and tension inherent in both the “queer” persona and the concept of “homosociality” might lead to a more thorough consideration of the ways in which the Tales represent a “homosocial competition” through which various men compete for sex, love, material goods, and power, while examining the possibility that the poet “seems to long for a unity of male with male beyond competition.”145 A “homosocial” perspective also encourages further insights into the manner in which “desire, emotional and sexual, was . . . a source of tension for medieval men” and invites debate as to whether “the medieval male was plagued by many of the same fears and anxieties as his modern counterpart.”146 Women, too, had their own yearnings and stressors, and a “homosocial” view of the enigmatic Pardoner raises important questions about patriarchal society and the interactions between the sexes in the Canterbury Tales and, more broadly, during the medieval period. In addition, a “homosocial” reading underlines the need for continued sensitivity toward the desires of critics, who sometimes utilize sexuality as a political tool and sometimes overlook or undervalue crucial interpretive possibilities, such as the character’s greed and glaring spiritual deficiencies.147 In fact, a “homosocial” viewpoint serves as an important reminder that gender, sexuality, and masculinity are vital to the “life” of the Pardoner, but they are not the only subjects of great significance.

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Among other things, the Pardoner’s spiritual corruption remains crucial, and there is room for even more research on this age-old topic, as well as the pilgrim’s lying, avarice, hatred, drinking, and so on. Moving forward, Chaucerians might (re)analyze such topics and counter any interpretive limiting of the character by using his “troubling body” to “spoil identity” and explore the ways in which “Chaucer uses the Pardoner to make a strong statement about the place of the perverse in life’s pilgrimage.”148 The “queer” persona is the perfect tool for examining this pilgrim’s “perverse dynamic,” and by brief ly presenting a “homosocial” view I hope to have shown that a theoretical coupling of the autofictional persona and the ambiguous Pardoner will only serve to increase the cornucopia of interpretive possibilities that surround the false preacher. By deeply “queering” this divisive and complex dramatic persona, critics might do much more with the Pardoner’s role as a man, outcast, lover, “compeer,” and problematic employee of the Church. In making a “homosocial” argument for the Pardoner, my own critical desires deserve mention. In my case, the desire for interpretive possibility reigns supreme, the desire for an open scholarly discussion of conceivable perspectives for the Pardoner and his travel companions. Recognizing that the meaning of a literary work is never fully revealed, a “homosocial” Pardoner emphasizes the need for critics to be (more) open-minded and to fully support the possibility of multiple possibilities, even in the face of interpretations that may cause significant dispute or discomfort. The character’s ambiguous sexuality and f luctuating reception history highlight the fact that scholars are well served by consciously moving beyond interpretive binaries of the kind that have been perused throughout this chapter, which seem restrictive rather than receptive when it comes to complex notions like the morality or sexuality of Dame Alice and the Pardoner. Challenging “bodies” like these characters serve as useful indicators that critics greatly benefit when the outer limits of possibility are endorsed, and interpretation is offered as indeterminate, ever-constructed, destabilizing, and f luid. When Chaucer Studies is persistently opened up to “radical rearticulations of the symbolic horizon” that run counter to accepted critical practices and cultural mores, the result is exciting new critical directions for the present and the future.149 In closing my discussion of the Pardoner with such a charge in mind, there is one more key subject that warrants further discussion but has generally been ignored by scholars. In the previous section, it has scarcely been necessary to mention Chaucer the Man, who created the Pardoner and alone knows the truth behind the character’s “secret.” This omission may be said to ref lect a final critical evasion—or moral f linch—with regard to the “lives” of the Wife and Pardoner, whereby the marginalization


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of the author again serves to shield the “Father of English poetry” from unwanted or potentially harmful interpretations. In this case, there is little scholarly discussion about the ramifications a “homosexual” Pardoner may have for the poet who brought the character to “life,” so that the author himself escapes the dangerous possibility of a “gay” reading.150 Even queer theorists are guilty of this circumvention, as they are inclined to critique the apparent homophobia of certain critics and specific critical accounts, but do not typically project any homophobia, or homosexuality, on the revered author. This is an especially suggestive omission when it is recalled that the poet embodies “himself ” in the Tales in the feeble figure of “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” who, like the Pardoner, appears to be quite effeminate.151 Maybe this nonvirile I-persona indicates that Chaucer the Man was somehow effeminate and thus uncomfortable with his own masculinity; maybe it suggests that he was actually homophobic; or maybe we have in the poet’s self-presentation yet another closeted, queer “secret.” We will never know for sure, but however doubtful these possibilities might be they at least merit open discussion. For if such possibilities go unexplored, then it will never be known what a “queer” Chaucer might look like and what it might mean for the Canterbury Tales, English literature, or the reading practices of critics. These are crucial issues that I intend to open up in chapter 5, which seeks to make fresh claims about the poet’s ambivalent alter ego. As I hope to show, the time has come to look forward to a history that might be, by initiating conversation on the “queer” possibilities of the author’s surrogate, Chaucer the Pilgrim, a seemingly stunted introvert who is in turn magisterial and merry, but also dubiously “manly.”152


CHAPTER 5 CLAIMING THE “POPET”: ETHICS, EVASION, AND THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

There is a cost in every identification, the loss of some other set of identifications, the forcible approximation of a norm one never chooses, a norm that chooses us. —Judith Butler1 The move beyond what is deemed to be ethically and politically possible at this current historical moment might well be achieved through unexpected connections. To refuse to acknowledge the productivity of all different kinds of textual relations is to thwart the very creative alliances that might actually bring about future change. —Sarah Cooper2

T

he title of this chapter recalls that of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), a text that explores the concept of life as a journey, a process in which everyman learns, changes, and experiences profound moral development.3 Bunyan’s vision of “man the wayfarer” provides a useful metaphor for considering “Father Chaucer’s” status as a complex cultural construction that has progressed through the ebbs and f lows of English literary criticism. In addition, the idea of moral progress is particularly appropriate for a discussion of the Thopas-Melibee link in the Canterbury Tales, since it contains an explicit shift whereby the author initially represents himself as a playful “elf ” who tells a ridiculous romance story, followed by a more sententious representation through which he offers the kind of authoritative wisdom that was expected of a revered medieval auctor. The title of this chapter also echoes that of Steven Kruger’s important study “Claiming the Pardoner,” in which Chaucer’s sexually ambiguous character is “claimed” as a homosexual ancestor.4 By so doing, Kruger

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illustrates how a problematic character of this sort may challenge the cultural restraints that are placed on gender and sexuality. And when the moment Chaucer the Pilgrim appears on the scene in the Canterbury Tales is recalled, Kruger’s depiction of a “queer” Pardoner becomes especially instructive. For it is highly suggestive that Chaucer’s narrative surrogate resembles the Pardoner in that he, too, has certain characteristics that may identify him as being sexually ambivalent, or somehow “queer.” In the words of Harry Bailly, Thou lookest as thou woldest fynde an hare, For evere upon the ground I se thee stare. Approche neer, and looke up murily. Now war yow, sires, and lat this man have place! He in the waast is shape as wel as I; This were a popet in an arm t’enbrace For any womman, smal and fair of face. He semeth elvyssh by his contenaunce, For unto no wight dooth he daliaunce.5

The Host’s description insinuates questionable virility, and epitomizes the emphasis on the body in the Thopas-Melibee link. Fragment VII as a whole is full of carefully constructed bodies, bodies that energize the fragment’s “desiring machine” and raise many questions about gender and sexuality.6 The sexually charged Thopas-Melibee sequence is arguably the centerpiece of Fragment VII’s narrative “machine,” may serve as the very heart of the Canterbury Tales and, by extension, the entire Chaucerian oeuvre. At minimum it is clear that the link’s “defashioning” of the poetic alter ego’s identity (or virility) is vital, for in the wake of Harry’s unforgettable description readers are offered a strategically placed and executed literary “diptych” that provides an essential instance of the author’s “doublings,” his insistence “on pursuing two poetic paths with totally different goals, and on presenting contradictory images of himself.” 7 If, indeed, Chaucer offers his bashful, unmanly surrogate in a textual sequence that functions as a “mobilizing point of entry into a mapping of multiple relations of the possible” for the author, his characters, and his poetics, then it may very well be that the link urges the audience to consider a “newly sexualized and gendered individual identity.”8 The sexually ambivalent figure of Chaucer the Pilgrim is the most pointed signifier in the sequence, and as Dinshaw has stressed, such signs “are not fixed” but rather “circulate, contact, disrupt, or . . . create new possibilities.” 9 Accordingly, a “queer” reading of the poet’s impish alter ego provides a unique opportunity to push the interpretive boundaries, which I hope

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to do in section 5.2 below. Throughout this monograph, I have used the “queer” nature of the persona to offer some fresh interpretive possibilities and posit new directions that future scholars may take in reading selected Chaucerian poems. But those discussions have necessarily been brief and are merely exploratory starting points for subsequent scholarly discourse. In this final chapter, however, my goal is to present a more thorough analysis of a particular, and particularly complex, narrative persona, the idea being to demonstrate more fully the great promise of the autofictional persona for creating new, fruitful avenues of critical thought. In section 5.2, I will aim to deeply “queer” Chaucer the Pilgrim, the narrative speaker that arguably best exemplifies the issues at stake throughout this book, and underscores the importance of an autofictional view of the persona-construct for bringing about interpretive change and moving beyond what is perceived by Chaucerians today as theoretically “possible” (to paraphrase Sarah Cooper’s earlier statement). In section 5.1, my more immediate concern will be to consider the Thopas-Melibee sequence as a whole, which sets the stage for my concluding arguments and offers explicit evidence for the interpretive centrality of Chaucer’s I-persona. Readers simply cannot avoid addressing the persona-construct if they hope to provide any kind of persuasive interpretation of Thopas and Melibee, because the writer overtly describes “himself ” through the words of the Host. When Harry asks “What man artow?,” the crucial moment for assessing Chaucer’s personae arises, as critics must confront both the fictional narrator and the historical author to whom the speaker is related. This fascinating metatextual moment registers the difficulties of interpretation and highlights the transient connections between “truth” and fiction.10 A close analysis of the “progress” of scholarship on the ThopasMelibee link is therefore extremely valuable, because it is here that Chaucer most overtly signals the calculated creation of his own narrative “self,” and in so doing, invites his audience to ponder key issues of interpretation that the persona-construct serves to question and complicate. The crucial moment of the “elvyssh” poet’s narrative self-description may indicate far more than mere physical feebleness or sexual ambiguity—although these subjects apparently have great significance in the author’s eyes. This complicated moment within the “progress” of the Tales also puts writing and reading on display through the judgments rendered by Harry Bailly, which may mean that the poet has resigned himself to the inf luence others will have over the ultimate meaning of his verse. Or it may be that this instance signifies a crisis of authority, in which the various kinds of authority that have been granted to Chaucer’s characters and readers are subverted, as the writer inscribes “his” very presence in order to

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(temporarily) reassert his own textual control, albeit with ironic humor. In either case, by indicating his awareness of the many issues pertaining to the use of first-person narration, the poet encourages his readers to be similarly aware and urges them to assess their own reading practices, especially the ways in which texts and their speakers are appropriated and (re)constructed. Bearing in mind Chaucer’s self-conscious experimentation with opposing principles from medieval literary theory throughout his oeuvre—such as profit and pleasure, “sentence” and “solaas”—the notably divergent Thopas and Melibee also seem to afford wonderfully explicit examples of the author’s use of competing critical discourses. As a result, a long-standing tradition has been to regard these tales as a significant microcosm of the poetics that permeate and inform the entire Chaucer corpus. This is a sensible perspective, but one could also perceive the sequence as a poetic trick of sorts, because of all the narrators who tell their tales Chaucer the Pilgrim is particularly complex, and may be the most fallible. Moreover, the intellectual challenge of the two tales is deepened further due to the fact that the sequence offers two quite different “Chaucers,” two very different tales, and thus a dizzying array of interpretive possibilities. Yet as I will demonstrate in section 5.1 below, many scholars have failed to sufficiently account for this fact, favoring straightforward interpretations that minimize the complications and contradictions created by Chaucer the Pilgrim. At close inspection, it does seem to be true that, taken together, the two inextricably linked tales provide a key that may help to unlock the author’s exploration of narrative poetry. However, the complex sequence offers the reader nothing short of a fragmentary embodiment of Chaucerian poetics, articulated through the voice of the equivocal I-persona. At first, the writer assumes the role of a minstrel telling a tale of mirth, but later he takes the form of a teacher imparting sententiae through the moral treatise of Melibee.11 Consequently, the sequence remains irresolvably divisive, its content contradictory, and its meaning ever elusive. To borrow from Helen Cooper, the Thopas-Melibee link presents a fragmentary world of morality and vice, “rhyme royal and rhyme doggerel,” high art and lowly artistry, or perhaps all of these (and more) at once.12 Therefore, it seems that a paradigm based on intellectual, interpretive, and ideological fragmentation—a disruptively “queer” model, if you will—is a useful way to consider the reception of this most important Canterbury sequence, especially when the ambiguous, bifurcated, or altogether fragmentary nature of the Chaucerian I-narrator is recognized. As the queer theorist Anna Kłosowska contends, “fragmentation gives permission to open up, expose, penetrate,” so that “the final result is a


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composite whole that may strike us as artificially constructed. However, that composite entity is exactly what was desired, what was aimed at in the act of dismembering and regrouping.”13 Kłosowska makes this observation in a discussion of the medieval romance Yde et Olive, but her words ring true with regards to Chaucer and his alter ego, and also may be applied to the work of Chaucer critics—where continued fragmentation inevitably occurs and where the discourses of fragmentation may sometimes represent discourses of desire (to paraphrase Sturges).14 To conclude Constructing Chaucer, I will concentrate on the fragmentary legacies of the Thopas-Melibee link, which will reveal alternate versions of the moral f linch and provide further evidence for the idealization of “Father Chaucer.” With an eye toward the future, a consideration of the fragmentary nature of Chaucer’s Canterbury performance will help scholars to better understand the link itself, its critical legacy, and the reception of other key works from the corpus. The application of a fragmentary paradigm is both symbolically representative of the fractional effects of scholarship, and illustrative of the ways in which the effects of poet and persona have been perceived, claimed, restricted, or shattered by critics. It is no accident that the writer “himself ” questions his own auctor-ial standing by offering multiple fragmentations through his divided self, Chaucer the Pilgrim, who is at once authoritative but also laughably limited in his literary prowess. Nevertheless, reception of the link provides distinct evidence that, once and for all, Chaucer and his writing tend to be portrayed in a number of morally favorable ways, in this case through a frequent unification of the divided self, a bridging of the intellectual gap between the whimsical Thopas and the wise Melibee; or, paradoxically, the author is idealized via a deliberate scholarly fragmentation, a type of ideologically charged oversight and evasion that separates the author from detrimental interpretive possibilities. As I begin the end, so to speak, by directing attention toward the link’s reception, I would encourage my readers to keep in mind the cogent advice of Paul Zumthor, who suggests that the rightful role of the critic of medieval literature is to “grasp the places of rupture, the points of breakdown: our own fragmentation brought about by reading.”15 5.1

The Divided Self: Poetic Play and Authorial Advice

More than four hundred years ago, the Elizabethan scholar Thomas Speght described the Tale of Sir Thopas as “a Northern tale of an outlandish Knight purposely uttered by Chaucer, in a differing rime and stile from the other tales, as though he himselfe were not the authour, but only

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the reporter of the rest.”16 This quotation has been cited previously as important evidence of an awareness of the Chaucerian persona- construct during the Renaissance. Yet despite this awareness, Speght otherwise adhered to critical tradition by tending to favor an autobiographical view of Chaucer and his verse.17 Speght’s insightful observation on Sir Thopas, however, highlights the manner in which the Thopas-Melibee link problematizes the traditional autobiographical line of interpretation, because Chaucer the Pilgrim represents a distinctly autofictional “I” who drives the fictional narrative by “purposely” telling his two “differing” tales, and is an imaginary “reporter” who may have nothing in common with the real-life poet. Speght’s brief statement is exceptional in its recognition of the divided self, since the tendency through the Victorian era was to favor autobiographical readings that went hand in hand with the assumption that the actual poet was being represented in the verse. In fact, Chaucer the Pilgrim and his presentation in the Thopas-Melibee sequence frequently played a major role in supporting this autobiographical viewpoint, because it was widely accepted that the author appears in the Tales “in his own person”—the very phrase used by James Lorimer in 1849.18 A common extension of this autobiographical tradition was a tendency toward physical description, with Harry Bailly’s famous characterization of the “popet” read as an accurate account of the poet’s visage. This crucial strain of “body criticism” will be considered more fully in section 5.2 below.19 For now, my primary interest is on a related set of scholarly trends that the divided self of the Thopas-Melibee sequence brings to the fore. A direct result of the propensity toward autobiographical readings is that, for years, the majority of commentary that was made on the link was focused on the (physical) I-narrator rather than the two tales he offers on the journey to Canterbury. This represents a notable type of critical division, or indeed fragmentation that highlights the tendency of scholars to return their attention to the author, which appears to be part and parcel of the tacit desire to uphold the status of “Master Chaucer” that has been critiqued throughout this monograph. Until nearly the twentieth century, there is only sparse documentation for any extensive scholarly negotiation with the Tale of Melibee, which is in stark contrast to the reception of Sir Thopas. 20 This comparative lack of criticism on Melibee underscores an even deeper interpretive division: the link frequently is read primarily in terms of humor or morality, so the two tales commonly are considered in isolation when they are discussed by scholars. This interpretive disconnect is problematic, if not altogether irrational. For despite their obvious differences, these inextricably linked texts must somehow be read together and must be read with reference to their shared speaker. Nevertheless, little critical effort has been made to


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examine these essential connections, which is telling because the blatant segregation of humor and morality, Thopas and Melibee, illustrates just how divided the Chaucerian self is, as scholars respond to the poet’s own self-division by rendering the gap textually explicit in their criticism. Hence, the historical/fictional binary known as “Chaucer,” who represents “himself ” in the link as either a laughable “popet” or laudable auctor, is clearly identifiable—though not sufficiently reconciled—in the manipulations and divisions of scholars. These critics therefore create an even greater, more questionable separation, as they sunder the two contradictory tales told by the (already) divided Chaucerian self and in so doing, limit the constellation of meaning. Due to this fragmentation, my examination of the link’s reception must proceed by concentrating upon the isolation of each tale by critics, and thus by essentially considering two distinct (but directly related) “Chaucers” who may be termed, respectively, “Chaucer the Humorist” and “Chaucer the Moralist.” To analyze this particular variety of scholarly fragmentation, I will first consider the construction of Chaucer the Humorist, which becomes standard critical practice in the eighteenth century. Before this era, there is little evidence of humorous readings of Chaucer the Pilgrim or Sir Thopas.21 As J. A. Burrow has shown, Sir Thopas was “consistently” read literally and treated as a serious romance in the early years of Chaucerian reception, so that the humor of the tale “loses its edge” when assimilated into the poetry and scholarship of the Renaissance in particular.22 Burrow rightly notes that the work of Edmund Spenser is especially illustrative of the earnest, no-nonsense view of Sir Thopas that persisted through the seventeenth century.23 To judge from the Faerie Queene, Spenser favored a serious interpretation of Sir Thopas, and his allegorical masterpiece draws on elements of Chaucer’s text in several places, with the very name of the poem apparently taken from Thopas’s dreamy run-in with the “queene of Fayerye” (ln. 814). It is well-known that Book I of the Faerie Queene draws directly on Chaucer’s romance, with Spenser’s Arthur, like Sir Thopas, having a vision of a beautiful “elf-queene” while he takes a break from riding, a vision that proves to be the character’s primary motivation in the epic story.24 It may be argued that Spenser’s somber incorporation of selected features of Sir Thopas culminates in Book VI, in the moral adventures of Sir Calidore. Like Thopas, Calidore is a gentle knight who rescues various victims from uncourteous beings, and there are also noticeable parallels between the visions, desires, and adventures of the two characters. However, Spenser’s exemplary knight betrays the Renaissance poet’s more solemn intentions by eschewing the jocularity of the Middle English story in favor of austere content that (repeatedly) presents serious

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moral lessons for the reader to ponder. For example, Calidore espouses “simple truth and stedfast honesty,” explains that there is “No greater shame to man then inhumanitie,” and demonstrates that “The gentle minde by gentle deeds is knowne. / For a man by nothing is so well bewrayed, / As by his manners.”25 Whatever the extent of Sir Thopas’ inf luence on Book VI of the Faerie Queene, it is evident that Spenser embraced a grave and indeed moralistic view of Chaucer’s story. Although it is possible that Spenser simply failed to recognize the humorous undertones of Chaucer the Pilgrim’s first, ridiculous literary offering, it seems more likely that he made a conscious choice to disregard the apparent levity and metrical awfulness of Sir Thopas. If so, then we have in Spenser an evasive reader who seems uneasy with the style and content of Sir Thopas, or uncomfortable with the fact that Chaucer “himself ” offers such f lawed verse. In other words, the dignified material found in Spenser’s Faerie Queene presents another important type of interpretive “f linch.” Chapter 4 has highlighted the moral f linch that is common in criticism on the Pardoner, with readers “f linching” from passing judgment on the immoral, sexually ambiguous Pardoner, hopeful that the author would, mercifully, not create a totally evil, irredeemable being. Here, Spenser “f linches” in the face of Sir Thopas’ playful poetics and rollicking content, favoring a morally proper view of the tale that better fits the Renaissance writer’s idealized conceptions of Chaucer’s verse, and indeed of the medieval poet himself. Though moral idealism appears to play a significant role in Spenser’s f linching, this is a version that may be designated as primarily an aesthetic f linch, a reaction against poetic material deemed somehow artistically disagreeable. A similar bent is identifiable within most of the (infrequent) citations of Sir Thopas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as most early readers seem to draw back from the possibility that Chaucer would deliberately write such apparently bad (and morally vacuous) verse. It may even be argued that in this period—a time of political and religious fervor, when the nationalistic construction of the “Father of English poetry” was at a highpoint—critics appear to be apprehensive with the very notion of Chaucer the Humorist, which might seem to run counter to the era’s characteristically lofty and magisterial view of the author. In fact, these early readers are not alone in their predilections, and it may be said that the reception of the link as a whole is generally marked by an aesthetic f linch. A careful analysis of Chaucerian reception from its earliest stages reveals a variety of scholarly “f linches,” several of which are at issue in the current study. Not all interpretive f linches are overtly moral, but a common thread in the various kinds of critical backtracking is an underlying concern with moral issues that may have


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a bearing on the accepted view of the poet. Such is the case with the aesthetic f linch that is found in reaction to the Thopas-Melibee sequence, as it is apparent that Chaucer the Moralist is customarily the preferred construction of the writer, although numerous readers have, in time, come to appreciate and esteem the artistry of Chaucer the Humorist. Put another way, it is as if the sequence is not collectively moral enough, so scholars tend to downplay the whimsical adventures and dubious aesthetics of Sir Thopas and instead stress the link’s more grave designs. Hence, like Spenser, many subsequent readers frame the link in such a way that it is seen as artistically powerful or indeed culturally and morally urgent, so that the isolated critical readings of each narrative commonly underline the virtues of the ridiculous Tale of Sir Thopas or the unquestionably principled Tale of Melibee. The scholarly legacy of the entire sequence therefore represents an important type of interpretive f linching, because numerous critics move away from an emphasis on Chaucer the Humorist and subtly retreat to the safety of Chaucer the Moralist—even when the focus is exclusively on the playful Tale of Sir Thopas. This f linching may or may not be deliberate, but even if it is an unconscious scholarly action it raises important questions about the legacy of this crucial narrative sequence. Some might argue that before the explosion of satire on the English literary scene during the eighteenth century, it is unlikely that critics would recognize the parodic significance of Sir Thopas.26 However, satire, parody, and the burlesque were prominent forms long before Chaucer’s own day, and consequently there must be another explanation for the serious view of the tale that has remained prevalent from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century. The parody of Sir Thopas works on the assumption that the reader will, in effect, f linch in the face of deliberately bad verse; so when this f linch does not occur it is either because the parody does not work, or the reader refuses to laugh at the joke, so to speak, because it is deemed unfunny or somehow unacceptable. This simple statement makes it clear that response to the tale most often is based on aesthetic preferences, and it helps to explain why a certain unstated hesitance remains, even in accounts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when critics came to embrace parody, in Sir Thopas, as an acceptable and even praiseworthy example of Chaucerian play. Joseph Dane contends that eighteenth-century critics refashioned Sir Thopas by invoking an idea of parody as a commendable appeal to authority and taste27; in so doing, these scholars directed their attention on the tale, in isolation, as a pointedly humorous historical document, thereby shifting the focus away from the “elvyssh” persona and the alleged “awfulness” of the tail-rhyme. Thomas Warton’s account of

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Sir Thopas is particularly illustrative of these patterns, as is evident in his explanation of the tale’s humor: Genuine humour, the concomitant of true taste, conf licts in discerning improprieties in books as well as characters. We therefore must remark under this class another tale of Chaucer, which till lately has been looked upon as a grave heroic narrative. I mean the RIME OF SIR THOPAS. Chaucer, at a period which almost realised the manners of romantic chivalry, discerned the leading absurdities of the old romances: and in this poem, which may justly be called a prelude to Don Quixote, has burlesqued them with exquisite ridicule.28

Note that Warton understood well the “grave” tendencies of his predecessors, given that he alludes to the prior emphasis on the tale’s supposed seriousness. Note, too, that for Warton, the concept of Chaucerian play is play with a purpose. In this case, Warton perceives Sir Thopas as being a clever text intended to undercut the “absurdities” of medieval romance. Nineteenth-century scholars widely favored a similar perspective, with critics like Henry Morley describing Sir Thopas as “a merry, musical burlesque upon the metrical romances of the day, the chief purpose of it being to caricature the profusion of tedious and trivial detail that impeded the progress of a story of tasteless adventure.”29 Morley’s observation illustrates that during this era, the concept of Chaucerian play was seen primarily in a focus on the humor’s function as cultural critique, rather than in regards to any possible relationship between the comedy and the pilgrim-persona. This is somewhat surprising when it is recalled that the nineteenth century was the age in which the idea of Chaucer’s divided self began to gain widespread critical acceptance. But during this period, critics frequently concentrate their attention on the comedic text articulated by the persona, rather than focusing on the persona and its implications for the humor of the tail-rhyme romance. This trend is, in fact, common even today, as recent scholars who emphasize Sir Thopas’ comedy typically do not closely analyze the rotund narrator’s role in/behind the humor found on the page. This may be perceived as yet another form of interpretive fragmentation, since these critics tend to ever-so-slightly marginalize the storyteller and direct their attention primarily upon the comedy within the tale itself.30 Whether conscious or not this evasion is intriguing, and especially because it raises the possibility—central to the discussion in section 5.2 that follows—that critics have chosen to overlook Chaucer the Pilgrim’s “deyntee” demeanor and draw back from the character’s playfully ambivalent gender markers by focusing on the humor of the tale alone.31 This avoidance also underlines problems inherent in an autobiographical reading of Chaucer the Pilgrim, who has


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proven himself to be a brilliant parodist but, if read literally, may create issues for those morally inclined readers who do not wish to criticize the distinguished author for any f laws or inconsistencies in his verse or portray him as some kind of “bad” writer. Indeed, a type of positive spin is commonplace within the construction of Chaucer the Humorist, as a narrow concentration on the comedic purposes of the tale frees the poet from judgment for his “drasty speche” and “rym dogerel” that “is nat worth a toord.”32 Many recent scholars not only follow the lead of their Victorian forebears by narrowly focusing on the tale’s presumed function as a playful burlesque, but frequently go even further than their predecessors in upholding the worth of the text (and poet) by viewing the parody as thoughtful cultural critique. They see Sir Thopas as being written for a reason much greater than mere ridiculous and exaggerated comedy. More forcefully than Warton, Morley, and their fellows, most modern scholars point to a single conclusion: Sir Thopas is a work that is not just playful, but purposefully playful. Take, for example, the account of V. J. Scattergood, which demonstrates the tendency of today’s criticism to treat Sir Thopas as a carefully constructed satirical work that illuminates or censures specific literary-critical issues, political institutions, and cultural practices. Scattergood suggests that the setting of the tale in Flanders gives it a specific satirical significance—exploiting the poor reputation of Flemish military capability—which he sees as emphasizing the “irrelevance,” or failure, of the values traditionally celebrated in medieval romance.33 Thus, Sir Thopas is representative of a literary movement against the values (and literature) that served the military ethos, since it seems to make a case against the war with France by ridiculing the possible advantages of an Anglo-Flemish military alliance, and ultimately argues against military glory and war in general.34 One could certainly question Scattergood’s interpretation, since Chaucer himself was once a soldier and his age was one in which warfare and chivalry generally reigned supreme. But viable or not, what is crucial for my purposes is the fact that—like other recent accounts that offer politically centered interpretations—Scattergood’s reading laughs off the tale’s deficiencies, so to speak, in constructing a wise, antiwar Chaucer that may be more satisfactory for modern, rather than medieval, sensibilities. Scattergood’s reading may not be deliberately pacifistic, but in terms of the author’s reception, it is an important example because this respected critic’s account ref lects the scholarly tendency (if not desire) to shape a more explicitly solemn, idealized poetpilgrim than the failed humorous performance might otherwise imply. It is this impulse that has arguably motivated the staid critical estimation of Sir Thopas, and highlights the major tendency in the tale’s reception.

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In short, the primary trend in the reception of Sir Thopas—nearly as prominent today as it was hundreds of years ago—is an “earnest in game” view that echoes the poet’s well-known verbal retreat in The Miller’s Prologue by asserting a serious undertone that effectively puts the writer “out of blame.” Although Chaucer “himself ” seems to believe that comedy may be used for mere playful, humorous purposes—so that readers need not “maken ernest of game”—his critical audience appears to be more comfortable in projecting solemn intentions for the satire.35 The evidence provided on the previous pages certainly supports this conclusion, and recent accounts have perhaps taken this view one step further by frequently considering Sir Thopas in terms of serious political ideals and cultural values. 36 In these accounts, a variant form of moral f linch is found. Rather than concern for the ethics of the Pardoner (as seen in chapter 4), there is unease with the implied amorality of Chaucer’s own narrative “self ” that the tale may seem to reveal; and rather than forgoing judgment of the Canterbury Tales’ suggestive faux preacher, scholars refrain from condemning Chaucer’s effeminate poetic surrogate. This moral f linch, then, belies an apparent resistance to depicting Chaucer the Humorist as a mere playful “elf,” as scholars withdraw from this possibility by favoring an “earnest,” principled view of the verse that is more appropriate for “Father Chaucer” and all that such an ideal implies. Ultimately, “earnest in game” readings of Sir Thopas bring rise to the possibility that the poet intended for all of Chaucer the Pilgrim’s storytelling to be considered in moral terms. For there is little doubt that the second story told by Chaucer’s alter ego has ethical designs, which “he” makes clear by assuring the Host that “he” will tell a “moral tale vertuous.”37 Whether Chaucer actually meant for Sir Thopas to have an “earnest” undercurrent remains unclear, but it is certain that scholars have been quick to bolster such a possibility. This may speak to a kind of seriousness or sincerity that seems to be central to the craft of literary criticism, in general, and if so, then the Thopas-Melibee link may perhaps function to encourage consideration of the place of humor within contemporary criticism. This is a highly important issue, but it is beyond the scope of the current study. More narrowly, the reception of the link begs the question of the venerable poet’s value if he is seen as merely a playful “popet,” since it is evident that Chaucer the Moralist takes critical precedence over Chaucer the Humorist. This moral figure is upheld in the poet’s symbolic reburial in Westminster Abbey during the unrest of the Reformation. 38 This figure has been seen time and again in this monograph, in the many morally ideal readings of the author and his verse. And, perhaps, Chaucer the Moralist is seen most explicitly in criticism of the sententious Tale of Melibee, where “earnest” readings of Sir Thopas


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are extended and standardized. It may, indeed, be argued that the poet consciously worked to foster such earnestness, since “he” seems to make an apologetic about-face in offering the “moral” Melibee. But this cannot erase the fact that Chaucer the Pilgrim appears to be physically laughable and has initially offered a failed romance that has been perceived by his fellow pilgrims as awful or frivolous. Try as critics might, Sir Thopas makes it very difficult to definitively establish Chaucer the Moralist in the link. For beneath the surface, there is always lurking a feeble “elf ”—Chaucer the Humorist—whose seriousness is questionable at best. Nonetheless, scholars who see Chaucer’s verse as a kind of “moral language, deployed more thoughtfully than by most philosophy,” have been happy to uphold the Tale of Melibee as evidence of the poet’s success as an earnest, ethically oriented writer.39 Therefore, Melibee has widely been accepted as a “noble” work that teaches about “patient and loving forbearance.”40 By turning attention brief ly toward this tale—considered in isolation, of course—the remainder of section 5.1 will illustrate how the author’s presumably magisterial speaker is emergent in scholarship, and show how Chaucer the Moralist highlights the “essential quandary” of Chaucerians when faced with the complexities of Chaucer the Pilgrim and his two divergent tales: the challenge “to oppose bardolatry, but to defend the poet—all without falling with an embarrassing crash between the two chairs.”41 The first documented reference to Melibee was made by John Lydgate not long after Chaucer’s death. In the Fall of Princes (ca. 1435), Lydgate praises the tale’s “gret moralite” and “gret sentence.”42 Placed within the historical trajectory of Chaucer criticism, this observation is exceptional because very few specific references to Melibee were made during the early stages of the Canterbury Tales’ reception. As such, I am skeptical of Seth Lerer’s assertion that in the conjunction of Thopas and Melibee, Chaucer’s fifteenth-century readers found “the ideal site for meditating on the issues central to instruction of the young—issues such as the cultivation of verbal decorum and the public presentation of the private self.”43 Evidence for such a contention seems wanting since there is sparse documentation for any direct negotiation with Melibee during this period, or, in fact, throughout the next several centuries.44 This is in stark contrast to the reception of Sir Thopas, which appears to have held a much more prominent place in the collective psyche of Chaucer’s critical readership. Why was this so? There are two likely explanations. First, early critics of the sequence were especially interested in the purportedly autobiographical representation of Chaucer the Pilgrim, which is most prominent in the initial section of the link (e.g., before and after Sir Thopas); I will take this point up in section 5.2, which will critique the fidelity to and

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“fetishization of Chaucer’s body.”45 More pressing for now is a second explanation, the sense of dullness that has been the experience of many readers of Melibee, who are surprised to find the revered poet tell such a ponderous story—and in his “own” person, no less! For those who would uphold the significance of Chaucer the Moralist, the Melibee poses a problem if seen as dull and ineffective. This may help to explain why—with the exception of a series of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critical accounts that considered the possibility that Melibee was written in blank verse—another specific reference to the tale in its own right does not appear until 1895. To put it mildly, this account is diametrically opposed to Lydgate’s approbative comments quoted above. W. P. Ker published the terse observations in question, lamenting the “oppression” of the tale, which may have been “introduced by Chaucer in his own person” but is nonetheless “an undistinguished and unmanageable block of the most hopeless commonplace: the ‘Tale of Melibeus’ is a thing incapable of life, under any process of interpretation, a lump of the most inert ‘first matter’ of medieval pedantry.”46 Although Ker’s condemnation is particularly harsh, his sentiments have been shared by a number of subsequent critics, who seem to agree that Melibee is a regrettably “dull” text—especially in light of the amusing Sir Thopas. Hence, in order to account for its supposedly tedious, moralistic material, critics of the last century often have found it necessary to defend Melibee’s contents and approach. Indeed, great care has been taken to ensure that Chaucer the Moralist’s prose narrative is a success, as scholars have framed the text in specific ways that justify the tale and emphasize its significance. It is important to note that for most critics who are wary of the tale’s “dullness,” the implication is not that Melibee’s moral status is irrelevant due to its presumed awfulness. On the contrary, what appears to be at issue is primarily a matter of taste, so that a common perception of late has been a view that Melibee is so moral, it is awful—although the moral content itself retains its importance. This, it seems, is yet another kind of aesthetic f linch with a moral undercurrent. Despite their dissatisfaction with the supposedly listless writing found in the tale, critics do not discount the value of the link, nor do they undercut Chaucer’s standing as an author of sincere sententiousness. Rather, they draw back from material that is considered uncharacteristically monotonous, while taking care that the moral author is not tarnished by a less-than-stellar performance. To illustrate this common apprehension, take the words of C. D. Benson, who bemoans the tale’s alleged dullness while maintaining its moral sincerity and value. Benson cautiously describes the “dull if worthy Melibee,” and stresses the Christian content of this “admirable but plodding” text that “threatens to undermine its didactic mission by putting its audience to sleep.”47


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The very fact that, after years of disregard, the “dull if worthy” Melibee regained a prominent place in scholarship speaks to its importance for the program of idealizing “Maister Chaucer.” If Melibee were not widely (if reluctantly) endorsed in recent years, critics would be left with the uninspiring “popet” rather than the revered auctor. In support of the latter, sagacious figure, scholars routinely argue that the Melibee is best understood within its historical context, as a text filled with ideas of great doctrinal value in the Middle Ages. What is interesting to note, however, is that those who situate the tale within its historical context typically fail to address the fact that the work is a translation, which might help to explain its supposed dullness (if the foundational text is seen as equally “dull”). Obvious though it may seem, it is intriguing that few scholars offer substantial comments on Melibee’s status as an exceptional Chaucerian text not only because it is written in prose, but also because it is virtually a direct translation of the Livre de Melibée et Dame Prudence by Renaud de Louens (whose own work was a less faithful translation of Albertanus of Brescia’s moral treatise Liber consolationis et consilii).48 For lack of space, the underlying problem of source materials is one that cannot be tackled at length here. But suffice it to say that in the criticism I have examined, translation, sources, and their deeper implications for our view of the author and his works frequently are left unconsidered. This is an evasive maneuvering that ignores crucial narrative issues and is especially important in the case of Melibee because its distinction as a remarkably faithful translation renders any direct linking of the tale, its advice, and the fourteenth-century English author to be highly problematic. Yet numerous critics disregard the filter of the autofictional persona and assert a chain of identification that overlooks the tale’s source materials, choosing to connect Chaucer the Man with the praiseworthy mores contained in the prose tract, though logic dictates that the ideals in question are equally assignable to Albertanus or Renaud. Deliberate or not, this is just one manifestation of the prevailing desire to read Melibee in such a way that Chaucer is presented as a magisterial author who offers wise counsel through the prose. Although Melibee’s status as a translation has largely been neglected, scholars have otherwise thoroughly historicized the tale’s moral contents. These scholars tend to emphasize the historical validity of the kind of writing Melibee contains, often by noting the popularity in the Middle Ages of tracts of proverbial wisdom. A representative and inf luential example of this approach is found in W. W. Lawrence’s concise 1940 reading, in which he contends that Chaucer wrote Melibee because it appealed to the tastes of the time, both in terms of matter and manner.49 More recently, Diane Bornstein has characterized the prose as an important example of

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the “style clergial,” while Derek Pearsall has asserted that the text’s first readers must “have enjoyed the remorseless good sense of this kind of schematised anthology of moral commonplaces, and we should be wrong to assume that Chaucer did not share that enjoyment.”50 Here, Pearsall justifies the “dull” text as an example of the currency of such sententious works during the medieval period. This represents a pervasive view in contemporary scholarship, as critics such as Bornstein and Pearsall pardon Melibee’s prose and, perhaps, evince a need to redeem the author (whose “own,” prior Tale of Sir Thopas might be seen as a brilliant parody or a bungling failure). The possibility does exist that the poet’s raison d’etre in telling the Tale of Melibee “himself ” ref lects a self-conscious desire to present himself as a morally authoritative writer—an auctor with credible auctoritas—by claiming as his own a story that contains much lofty moral advice. And in the decision to culminate the link by telling the decidedly moral Melibee through the voice of Chaucer the Pilgrim, his narrative stand-in, the poet overtly signals the tale’s importance to the meaning of both Fragment VII and the Canterbury Tales as a whole. But whatever its underlying purpose, it is clear that critics have been happy to seize on the tale and its wisdom, encouraged by the presence of the I-persona to trace the sage contents back to the venerable poet. A careful reading, however, reveals the irony of this sententious tale-telling, since the same “elvyssh” narrator who was condemned for offering “rym dogerel” in Sir Thopas hastily enacts an unlikely, profound literary transformation in successfully presenting a “moral tale vertuous.”51 So while the writer pointedly offers a text that takes the form of a wise, advice-giving treatise—a premise that is supported by Chaucer the Pilgrim’s reference to the work as a “litel tretys”— the reader aware of the autofictional “I” perceives the problematic nature of the pose being struck by the author in the sequence.52 These problems are heightened by the fact that immediately before he begins his “tretys,” Chaucer the Pilgrim apologizes to those who might “thynke I varie as in my speche,” and further undercuts his own would-be magisterial status by asking his audience to “blameth me nat” for any undesirable variations found in his prose rendering of his source materials.53 Given these disclaimers and narrative challenges, it cannot be said with any confidence that the poet did, in fact, see himself as a typically wise auctor, nor can it be assumed that he was trying to portray himself as such a figure in the telling of Melibee. Yet over the past century, the favorable, moral view of both tale and teller has only been strengthened. It should be noted that, by tacitly using Melibee to advance Chaucer’s status as a medieval auctor, critics do more than just undermine or contradict the view of the awkward “elf ” who tells Sir Thopas. They also render


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moot questions about the implications of an effeminate author/narrator, and by extension, limit the interpretive horizons of the text. The idealized limiting of Melibee’s meaning as a treatise of magisterial counsel frequently is supported or conveyed through specific interpretations of its advice, with political history invoked to explain the work’s teachings. In fact, this seems to be the most widespread tendency for the scholarly assertion of Chaucer the Moralist, since a number of political conclusions have been drawn from the prose in recent years that accentuate the work’s presumed significance within the corpus and validate the author’s standing as a politically astute writer. As Gardiner Stillwell noted in the mid-twentieth century, there are a “multiplicity of applications which might be made of the Melibee” since the tale contains a number of politically charged themes that may have been of interest to Chaucer and his fellows. Among the many possibilities, Stillwell highlights key issues of the age such as peace versus war, the economics of warfare, appropriate counsel, and female advisors, but in the end does not favor any one political reading because “analogyhunting in the Melibee could go on forever. And most of it would be legitimate, for the tale is a good allegory, in that its generalities are capable of wide application to particular cases.”54 Stillwell is quite correct here, and the tale’s recent reception makes it clear that scholars have indeed been prone to taking Melibee’s “generalities” and narrowly interpreting them, perceiving the text as a counsel-giving tract written by Chaucer to offer very specific advice. Seen in this light, one prevalent interpretive strain has portrayed the tale as a sort of speculum written by the poet to offer counsel to Richard II.55 In contrast, several critics have countered this view by arguing that Chaucer is not advising Richard directly with the tale, but rather is addressing other key political problems identifiable in England during the late fourteenth century.56 In any of these political readings, what is most significant is the implication that the author is offering his own advice through the tale. And of course, a virtually ubiquitous sentiment within scholarship of Melibee is that Chaucer is portrayed as being quite sage in dispensing this moral counsel. Accordingly, the reception of this tale offers especially convincing support for the notion that, whatever Chaucer is perceived as being— whether humorous, pious, political, or anything else under the sun—one thing is nearly always true: the author is shown in an admirable light, as a man wise and/or correct in his ideals. This tendency is even evident in gender-centered interpretations of Melibee, which contradict certain readings of the Wife of Bath by generally, if not exclusively, placing both the female character Prudence and the poet in a positive light. A common assumption seems to be that, in some sense, “Prudence expresses views

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which Chaucer himself . . . came to adopt,” through an identification with a strong woman’s voice that is fitting for a writer who “more than any other English medieval poet, was prepared to identify with women.”57 Though few take their accounts quite so far, several critics not only depict Prudence as a wise woman who ably fills the role of counselor, but by extension, portray Chaucer as a sympathetic writer/narrator who wisely supports her authority. Constructing Chaucer in such a way, these scholars have generally sidestepped the patriarchal undercurrent of the tale and disregarded the fact that a hierarchical societal structure persists since it is Melibee, and not Prudence, who continues to hold the primary position of power in the story; indeed, at the end of the tale Melibee emerges with even more power as a result of his enemies’ submission to his lordship. Still, critics interested in the tale’s supposed gender politics are prone to reading Chaucer, through Prudence, as judiciously seeking to illuminate the contradictions of patriarchal discourse and deny the injustices of antifeminism.58 Daniel Rubey takes a notably different view. He sees the prose as a critique of masculinity, suggesting that the tale “demonstrates the textually-constructed nature of masculinity in order to imagine the possibility of change from one mode to another.”59 By focusing on Melibee’s function as a text, Rubey encourages critics not to consider the tale in exclusively moral terms; rather, he urges scholars to perceive the so-called “treatise as a work” that purposefully draws attention to issues of authorship and literary theory. Furthermore, Rubey emphasizes the inherent tensions of being male in the Middle Ages, tensions undoubtedly familiar to the male poet, and argues that “Melibee’s reasons for not listening to Prudence are a catalogue of the gender anxieties of patriarchal masculinity: he is afraid he will look like a fool if he tries to change tradition and go against the male group decision.”60 Rubey stops short of tracing any of these anxieties back to Chaucer the Pilgrim, or Chaucer the Man, and his reading implicitly seems to project a poet who presents masculinity in an exceptionally “modern” way. Although this is a stretch from a historical standpoint, Rubey’s account invites us to dig even deeper. If Melibee’s significance is largely found in its questioning of fundamental narrative issues, and a key to the literary machinations of the text is male anxiety, then it seems that Rubey ultimately encourages us to return to the ambivalent tale-teller himself: Chaucer the Pilgrim, the shy, portly I-narrator who not only offers an outwardly authoritative allegory but also a mirthful jest. As is characteristic of scholarship on the ThopasMelibee sequence, Rubey’s account does not discuss the ramifications of this problematic pilgrim-narrator for his reading. I, however, would like to consider Chaucer’s complex masculine surrogate in closing. Contrary


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to the apparent opinion of most critics, it remains unclear at the conclusion of Chaucer the Pilgrim’s performance whether the speaker has truly become a formidable auctor or is yet an ineffectual “popet.” In addressing this problem, I am particularly interested in examining the curious fact that the link presents readers with a seemingly anxious and effeminate narrator who initially fails to offer an adequate romantic tale of adventure and love, and follows this up with a text that has been described as an “exploration of ‘female’ perspective, oscillating back and forth between the feminine voice and the masculine.”61 Previous pages have shown that anxiety also plays a prominent role in the reception of the sequence, as critics meticulously account for the “popet” persona (Chaucer the Humorist) and his rollicking performance in Sir Thopas, finding solace in the safety of Melibee and his authoritative counterpart (Chaucer the Moralist). Aside from the implicit desire to elevate “Father Chaucer,” the moral f linch that defines the link’s scholarly legacy is, arguably, attributable in part to the bashful, effete nature of the narrative “elf.” For the revered poet is quite literally diminished if he is seen as an inadequate, shy little dwarf, and thus it is notable that scholars have long worked to “stretch out the small and self-belittling Chaucer into the tall authoritative Chaucer,” as Cooper has observed.62 Although my own intent is hardly to “belittle” Chaucer, I would like to focus attention on “his” diminutive narrative body: Chaucer the Pilgrim who, like it or not, is curiously impish and doll-like, and who—to judge from Sir Thopas—seems to lack the vigor and potency that many would expect from a medieval auctor.63 To conclude this chapter, and the monograph as a whole, I would like to offer some final words on the possibility that Chaucer the Man’s concerns (or anxiety) with both masculinity and interpretation are embodied in the “strange little narrator” known as Chaucer the Pilgrim. By considering the suggestive presentation of this sexually ambiguous “elf,” I will demonstrate that this persona’s very embodiment seems to express “the frustrations Chaucer faced—the poet caught between making courtly amusements and writing didacticism, the poet yearning for ‘poesy,’ ” as Anne Laskaya has remarked. But I also intend to go much further than Laskaya in showing that, at the very least, the author’s dainty alter ego is an epicene character who “registers discomfort with the masculine codes and categories of a late medieval, chivalric society.”64 5.2 The Divided Self in the Ghetto: Chaucer the Pilgrim’s Ambiguous Sexuality and How It Matters Recently, John Bowers has asserted that after Chaucer’s death, the disorderly fragments of the Canterbury Tales were “gathered and transformed . . . into a

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vernacular classic that could ill afford the taint of sodomitic implications.”65 Bowers makes this observation in a theoretical discussion of the “queer” Summoner, and suggests that both this character and the Pardoner likely were written while the poet was carrying the “homophobic baggage” of being a courtier of Richard II, who apparently was effeminate and whose allegedly “open secret” was that he engaged in same-sex acts with Robert de Vere. Bowers contends that Chaucer’s characters offered him a “coded means for inscribing” the forbidden topic of homosexuality in the Canterbury Tales, while his readers felt the “need to mythologize a political patriarchy” that meant “squelching further rumors about Richard II’s sexual peculiarities.”66 This is an interesting reading, and especially when it is acknowledged that, like Richard and the Summoner, Chaucer the Pilgrim may be seen as a figure who represents “a self hood of some vast and borderless eroticism that transforms the ambiguity of betwixt-andbetween.”67 There is no way to know what, exactly, Richard’s sexual proclivities were, nor is there any way to know what Chaucer’s intentions were in creating the Summoner and his “stif burdoun,” or indeed his own ambivalent alter ego.68 Equally unclear is whether any “sodomitic implications” were truly under consideration when the Tales were arranged and rearranged in manuscript(s), and the author’s patriarchal status first “mythologized.” What is known, however, is that—while this textual work ostensibly was begun around the time of Chaucer’s passing—much of what we now recognize as the Canterbury Tales was edited and codified by Victorian antiquarians. This is significant because, if Kłosowska is correct, it is largely due to these scholars (and their twentieth century brethren) that the presence of homoerotic hints and same-sex desires in certain medieval texts becomes “an obscure footnote.”69 It was also during the nineteenth century that—despite the reemergence of persona-theory in Chaucer Studies—many intellectuals and artists “indulged themselves in producing, reproducing, and commenting on likenesses of the poet.” 70 Harry Bailly’s description of Chaucer the Pilgrim was central to these reconstructions, but it is important to note that the I-narrator’s “deyntee” visage would remain “obscured” by critics. In fact, this still generally holds true even today. In 1845, when Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas used the documentary records to demonstrate that “little reliance can be placed upon any of his [i.e., Chaucer the Pilgrim’s] remarks” as biographical facts, he provided the strongest evidence to date against the autobiographical assumptions of Chaucer’s readers, as discussed in chapter 2. Yet Nicolas’s Memoir illustrates just how deeply embedded were the old traditions, as he himself falls prey to certain long-standing assumptions by going on to state that the poet “probably” gives readers a faithful picture of his appearance


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in the Canterbury Tales.71 Nicolas’s allusion to Chaucer’s appearance also ref lects a common extension of the literal, “realistic” interpretation of the Thopas-Melibee link: a tendency toward physical description became standard practice and is especially prominent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century criticism. The primary motivation for this type of “body criticism” is the Host’s description of Chaucer the Pilgrim, which was read as an accurate portrayal of the poet’s semblance.72 Nicolas himself seems to agree with this view, and a myriad of critical remarks on the physical nature of the “popet” narrator are found during the period in question, which usually include comment on Chaucer’s supposed shortness, corpulence, tendency to keep his eyes looking toward the ground, and so on. In perhaps the earliest account of this kind, published in 1721, John Dart states that (as he has done with the other pilgrims) Chaucer has given readers “as just a Picture of himself ” from which it is learned that a noted characteristic of the poet was “his eyes inclining usually to the ground,” while it is revealed that he was “of a middle stature, the latter part of his Life inclinable to be fat and corpulent.” 73 Confident variations on this assumption are rife, including Arthur Gilman’s assertion that the best way of gaining knowledge of Chaucer’s character and personal appearance is through his narrative self-description, where the impression is given (via the Host) that the poet was “somewhat corpulent, with a small and intelligent face, and a meditative look, and that he was reserved before strangers.” 74 Gilman’s Victorian contemporary Stopford Brooke similarly contends that “we must conceive him as painted by the host,” whose words allow us to infer that Chaucer was “large-bodied, for the host jokes with him on his being as round in the waist as himself,” and suggest that the author had “features small and fair” since the “elfish” description betokens “that his features were small and delicate.” 75 Brooke’s remarks are highly significant. For starters, his comments are illustrative of the fact that during the early periods of Chaucerian reception the narrative implications of the author speaking within the Tales were not addressed, due to the autobiographical assumptions of scholars. Critics would eventually come to move away from a persistent focus on the physical Chaucer toward various manifestations of the author’s divided self, but the poet’s premodern legacy is marked by an attachment to Chaucer the Pilgrim and his supposed “reality.” Scholarship on the Thopas-Melibee link precisely documents the gradual and all-important shift in thinking whereby critics from the Victorian period forward would increasingly recognize the presence and function of the persona in the sequence.76 However, while later readers of the link tend to be more open to notions of narrative detachment, most continue to downplay

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the autofictional nature of the I-persona in favor of at least a measure of autobiographical “truth.” Brooke’s account is also especially noteworthy because it provides a rare, early instance of a scholar suggesting that Harry Bailly endowed Chaucer the Pilgrim with features that might be expected of a woman or a “feminine” man. By referring to the narrator’s “delicate” and “fair” appearance, Brooke registers an uncertainty concerning the problematic gender markers used to describe Chaucer’s poetic “I” that—to this day—have been addressed by few critics. In his recent study of Chaucer’s Dead Body, Thomas Prendergast outlines a “return to the body” that is visible in the nineteenth-century criticism of Brooke and his fellows. This turn toward “body criticism” is characterized by an increased interest in Chaucer’s burial site and bones, and a focus on the poet’s bodily features. It follows that the Victorian period would see frequent likenesses of the author produced and commented on by scholars, who evince a desire to participate in a “fantasy of completeness,” as the poet was both idealized and physically “fetishized.” 77 Prendergast demonstrates that critics were anxious not to lose the “authentic Chaucer” who had long been so widely revered, and thus the “fetishization” of the author.78 Particularly valuable is Prendergast’s evidence that scholars were invested in a project of connecting genius with Chaucer’s body, and therefore many actively downplayed the possibility of the writer being malformed or short by emphasizing his “normal” body.79 This is a deeply meaningful strategy, since the nineteenth century was the age that the notion of the “normal” was defined and “normativity” was codified; as Lochrie has shown, “norms” came to represent “an entirely new way of thinking . . . geared toward measurement that would naturalize certain qualities, behaviors, and groups at the expense of others.”80 The tendency of scholars to “naturalize” Chaucer would continue into the twentieth century, with critics choosing not to portray the author as stunted or somehow inadequate but rather consistently underlining his “normative genius,” which is identifiable in his physical body. By emphasizing Chaucer’s “normal” body (size and height), these critics depict the writer as a sort of poetic Everyman who is able to connect with and artistically represent “normal” mankind, his laudable ability to relate to the common man, to the high and the low, being a key to his principal position in the English literary canon.81 Take, for instance, the words of Kittredge, who asserts that Chaucer is “effacing himself ” with Chaucer the Pilgrim’s “fullness of figure,” and may appear “quiet-looking” or “demure” but “his quiet and abstracted manner on the road is for the nonce; he is keeping in the background, not because he is by temperament averse to sociability, but because . . . he has undertaken . . . the duty


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of reporting the pilgrimage, of rehearsing word for word every tale that shall be told.” In fact, Kittredge states, this narrator had “made himself so agreeable” at the Tabard Inn the night before the pilgrimage began, that his fellows “invited him to join the party”—and thus it becomes clear that his frequent self-effacement is intended ironically and is essential to the “Human Comedy” of the Tales.82 Cooper cleverly describes such readings as consciously avoiding “small legs syndrome,” with scholars aware of Chaucer the Pilgrim’s apparently “insignificant” stature and relative anonymity on the pilgrimage, but choosing to eschew these details by constructing the lofty “Chaucer who gives English poetry its self-consciousness, and its self-confidence.”83 The agenda outlined by Prendergast and Cooper is pivotal for my discussion since, once again, it illustrates that accounts of the divided self in Thopas-Melibee typically cultivate an elevated impression of the poet that is suitable for a socially eminent and morally valuable auctor. In the “body criticism” at issue here, the I-persona is read in a manner that diminishes any potentially negative connotations that may adhere to the seemingly reserved and portly “popet,” so the author is able to transcend his ineffectual, “elf ”-like body. As Cooper puts it, the desire to uphold and construct an authoritative view of “Father Chaucer” is evident in these accounts where the poet is given a physical stature appropriate for his central place in British culture, so that he “stands tall in every sense, as the man who authorizes English poetry.”84 Hence, these readings represent a kind of literal, physical embodiment of the ideological appropriation seen throughout this monograph, with critics not only returning to Chaucer’s body but working to ensure that it retains its ideal status/stature. By highlighting the ideologies of Chaucerian “body criticism,” Cooper and Prendergast register the performative nature of sex and gender, sexuality and identity. In particular, they recognize that in the reception of Chaucer’s provocative narrative body, evidence is found for what Butler describes as “compulsory” critical practices, or “forcible” interpretive productions in which the poet’s alter ego falls prey to “regulatory” scholarship that has “the power to produce—demarcate, circulate, differentiate—the bodies it controls.” In other words, we are privy to an “embodying of norms” that stabilizes the personality, physicality, or sexuality of Chaucer the Pilgrim, producing the effect of normality or fixity and in the process accumulating the “force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices.”85 Yet despite such gender-based practices, Butler has shown that “the ‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves.” It is this continuous f luidity that I am most interested in exploring here, because Chaucer the

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Pilgrim offers a compelling case study for Butler’s notion that identifications “can ward off certain desires or act as vehicles for desire; in order to facilitate certain desires, it may be necessary to ward off others: identification is the site at which this ambivalent prohibition and production of desire occurs.” By closely considering both the reception and performativity of Chaucer’s “I,” important evidence is seen that “to identify with a sex is to stand in some relation to an imaginary threat, imaginary and forceful, forceful precisely because it is imaginary.”86 In his assessment of the “regulatory” nature of Chaucer criticism, Glenn Burger discloses that the Chaucerian body “is one in which presumptive heterosexuality has dominated absolutely. Again and again, Chaucer has been constructed as properly virile, masculine activity.” This does seem to hold true when it comes to the author’s reception in general, and it is no better seen than in the critical legacy of Chaucer the Pilgrim, where evidence is found of a “dangerous” scholarly dominance of “the heterosexual.”87 To critique this particular type of scholarly restriction, it is instructive to look more closely at Chaucer’s poetic body itself, as well as its interpretation, by again consciously taking a cue from the kind of queer theory offered by Burger and others, which “emphasizes the provisionality and performative nature of identity” and “attempts to create a space to think sexuality and culture differently.” By conducting a fresh type of “anti-homophobic analysis” below, I hope to offer a final, allimportant example that demonstrates how and why a “queer transgressive reinscription of the strategies of canonicity” should continue to be a goal of criticism as scholars look forward to the future, because such fresh reading will help to perpetually reinvigorate the study of Chaucer.88 A close examination of Chaucer the Pilgrim’s critical reception highlights not only the dominance of “heterosexual” perspectives, but also shows that “a lot of people want to talk about ‘masculinity’ at the moment,” although at times “ ‘effeminacy’ remains too awkward to address,” as Alan Sinfield has observed.89 In addition, it may even be shown that certain critics of Chaucer “desire to protect him from what they imagine as anachronistically gay readings,” and perhaps fear that “any discussion of homosexual desires or literary content will marginalize him (or them?) as, simply, homosexual.”90 However the response of scholars is explained, there is no doubt that prominent literary voices exist that “articulate medieval queer subjectivity,” and as the example of the Pardoner in particular makes clear, Chaucer is a writer who may have knowingly planted “queer passions” in his verse.91 Furthermore, it is now widely accepted that “sexual identities are open to change in textual encounters” and are not only capable of being reconstituted again and again, but as Sarah Cooper notes “all sexualities can be queered,”


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although “not everyone would label all sexualities queer.” 92 With this in mind, the question must be asked whether the possibility that Chaucer the Pilgrim is somehow “queer” merits critical discussion. I would firmly answer “yes,” because a careful reading reveals that Chaucer’s narrative “I” is signified in such a way that he is unmistakably “queer” in terms of his elusive physicality. No one knows the limits of queer inquiry, and no one can be sure what may be discovered by deliberately pushing the interpretive boundaries. Hence, I believe that the time has come to “denaturalize” Chaucer’s narrative “elf ” and more fully “queer” his provocative body—in effect, to render less “destructively presumable” his equivocal (hetero)sexuality.93 In chapter 4, it has been exhibited that—although the term itself did not appear until the Victorian era—homosexuality was a recognizable concept in the Middle Ages, given that homosexual behaviors and acts were found and even discussed by some medieval scholars. And as Joan Cadden has persuasively demonstrated, the perception of sexuality during the Middle Ages was more rich and complex than frequently has been recognized.94 Assuming that this is true, then Chaucer the Pilgrim’s physical, sexual, and masculine natures may be understood within a “rich” array of perspectives and possibilities. If the Canterbury Tales are read as “a male-authored text containing representations which tell us much about late medieval constructions of masculinity,” then there is little doubt that Chaucer’s narrative double holds a key to understanding the author’s views on the male sex.95 Whether Chaucer the Pilgrim ultimately is straight, homosexual, “queer,” or somehow “Other,” this challenging persona supports the idea that, in the poet’s eyes, “masculinity is a continuum” that includes both homo- and heterosexuality, and relates to such central societal issues as marriage, work, and religion.96 Just as importantly, Chaucer’s bifurcated self underscores Jacqueline Murray’s notion that in the Middle Ages, “competing and contradictory messages about what it meant to be a man” were everywhere, which created “individual crises and social confusion among some men, and security and complacency among others.”97 The anxieties of medieval males frequently are ascribed to the era’s warrior values, but whatever the impetus, “maleness was somewhat fragile, and it was important for a man to keep demonstrating his maleness by action and thought,” as Vern Bullough has argued. In this period, men who failed to perform as properly virile men would likely have their very manhood questioned, so that the “superiority of the male” had to be constantly demonstrated or it would be lost.98 Jo Ann McNamara takes this idea one step further, asserting that the belief in male domination “forced men into an endless competition to prove their manhood to

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one another. This was a tragedy for women and the not-men, half-men, effeminate men” who became the objects of “relentless persecution.”99 The Host’s derisive treatment of Chaucer the Pilgrim, not to mention his harsh behavior toward the Pardoner, would seem to accord with this statement. Hence, the physical characteristics given to Chaucer’s “popet” may highlight the problems of effeminacy for medieval males, recognizing that “effeminacy is founded in misogyny: the root idea is of a male falling away from the purposeful reasonableness that is supposed to constitute manliness, into the laxity and weakness conventionally attributed to women.”100 The Tale of Sir Thopas might well be read as a conventionally “weak” text, its failed execution is decidedly unreasonable, and all signs seem to point to its narrator being “weak,” somewhat reserved (or “lax”), and hardly on par with those characteristics that typically “constitute manliness.” Admittedly, there is an inherent playfulness to Harry’s description of Chaucer the Pilgrim, and a whimsical undercurrent to much of the link (particularly the Prologue and Tale of Sir Thopas). But there does seem to be more at stake here than mere play alone, since notable anxieties and cultural tensions seem to boil beneath the surface. Chaucer the Pilgrim may not be “homosexual,” but he is clearly effeminate and indeed “queer” in his interpretive possibilities; and his characterization by the Host may signify the importance of being masculine for medieval males, or at least underlines the anxieties of Harry Bailly and Chaucer the Pilgrim. Inevitably, there will be readers who vehemently disagree with a “queer” reading of Chaucer the Pilgrim. In part, such disagreement may be ascribed to an uneasiness with any kind of direct link between the poet and a “queer” narrator, with all that such a connection might imply. It should be noted here that in “queering” Chaucer the Pilgrim, I am not, in turn, “queering” Chaucer the Man. On the contrary, it is important to stress, once more, that as a narrative self that is not real, the autofictional I-persona should not be read as autobiographical but explicitly fictional. Thus, I am by no means advocating a literal reading or trying to foster the futile search for Chaucer’s actual “self,” but I am simply exploring what may be found if the writer’s autofictional surrogate is theoretically “queered.” Collectively, the men in Chaucer’s verse make it clear that he was aware of the full spectrum of medieval masculinity, and strongly support the possibility of a “queer” interpretation. As chapter 4 has displayed, Chaucer critiques “manliness” in the Tales, and in fact, a reader needs to look no further than the Thopas-Melibee link itself to find tangible evidence for his interest in masculinity.101 This interest is seen particularly through the “manly” figure of Harry Bailly, about whom we are told


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in the General Prologue that “of manhood hym lakkede right naught.”102 This is a crucial comment, because as John Plummer has emphasized, the Host himself is “very interested in questions of sexual productivity and gender, especially masculinity”—interests that are identifiable in the Thopas-Melibee sequence.103 Mark Allen adds that in the Host a master of ceremonies is found “whose particular brand of masculinity is less elegant than domineering,” and for whom “sexuality is a recurrent concern”; Harry’s masculinity is a driving force on the pilgrimage, and the character shows that “in Chaucer’s mirror of society, bourgeois masculinity is a potent force, one to laugh at, one to be cautious of, but certainly not one to be ignored.”104 Put simply, “Harry Bailly is a man’s man” who seeks to establish the “primacy of his masculinity” and who “determines the relative merits of the manliness of many pilgrims.”105 Examples of Harry’s masculine interests are found throughout the Canterbury Tales, including his famous threat to cut off the Pardoner’s “coillons,” his teasing of the Clerk for riding “as coy and stille as dooth a mayde,” and his commenting on the Nun’s Priest’s virility and “braunes” by saying that he has “so gret a nekke, and swich a large breest” that if he “were seculer” he “woldest ben a trede-foul aright.”106 I will return to the example of the Pardoner below, but taken as a whole, the instances just cited underline Laskaya’s notion that competition between men is at the heart of the Tales, which consistently explore the “nature of masculine power and control, particularly calling attention to its achievements, its limitations, and its price.”107 Arguably, the Tales also include misogynistic and homophobic sentiments at times, and present certain male characters as “Others” who help to affirm other men’s masculinity.108 Whatever Chaucer’s views on the “price” of masculinity might have been, the “nature” of men was evidently on his mind as he wrote the Tales, and it seems unlikely that any ambiguity he ascribed to Chaucer the Pilgrim was unintended. To the contrary, it is very likely that Chaucer’s I-narrator was purposefully described by the Host as a visibly feeble, potentially effeminate “popet.” Therefore, it seems safe to conclude that this “elf ’s” physicality invites, and even requires close inspection. Yet few critics over the years have met this charge by carefully examining the character’s suggestive visage. The loaded terminology used by Harry Bailly to describe Chaucer’s alter ego holds the key to my reading, but the provocative nature of this ineffectual persona is best revealed through a gradual narrowing of perspective that includes a wider consideration of the Thopas-Melibee sequence and its context within Fragment VII—which Jeffrey Cohen describes as being “obsessed” with the “gendering of male bodies.”109 In this fragment, Harry acts politely toward most of the narrators: he

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praises the Shipman for his “wel seyd” story, courteously asks the Prioress to tell a tale, and applauds the (brawny) Nun’s Priest for his “murie tale of Chauntecleer.”110 Interestingly, the Host takes an altogether different tack in criticizing the Monk’s performance (which is interrupted by the Knight), by declaring it to be a “peyne” to “heere” such “hevynesse” that “anoyeth” the pilgrim collective.111 For those who read the Tale of Sir Thopas as an ironic statement on poetry, this blunt response to the Monk would seem to represent a distinct parallel to Harry’s request for “Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee” when faced with the “rym dogerel” of Chaucer’s first tale, which makes the Host’s “eres aken” because the “drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord!”112 With Chaucer in the background, the irony in these words is unmistakable, and the deliberate humor of the situation cannot be denied.113 However, it is fascinating to note that, despite the overlapping literary failures just cited, a significant divergence also obtains when it comes to Chaucer’s I-speaker and the Monk. In direct contrast to the Host’s derogatory comments about Chaucer the Pilgrim—a figure whose presence is so uninspiring that the inn-keeper apparently fails to notice him through most of the pilgrimage—Harry sees the Monk as a far more handsome, imposing, and manly individual. This is made absolutely clear when the Host enthusiastically describes the “worthy” Monk as being (like the Nun’s Priest) “of brawnes and of bones / A wel farynge persone for the nones.” Despite his failures as a storyteller, the Monk is perceived as a “myghty man” who “woldest han been a tredefowel aright. / Haddestow as greet a leeve as thou hast might / To parfourne al thy lust in engendrure, / Thou haddest bigeten ful many a creature.”114 Harry’s description of Chaucer the Pilgrim, on the other hand, is drastically different. For one thing, Chaucer’s I-speaker appears to be shy or perhaps lacking in confidence: “thou lookest as thou woldest fynde an hare, / For evere upon the ground I se thee stare.”115 Again, one must entertain the possibility that this observation is meant to be ironic or humorous, but if this shyness is placed in the context of medieval masculinity and male sexuality, then this feature becomes more conspicuous since a “keystone of medieval thinking” was that “male sexuality is essentially ‘active’ and female sexuality is essentially ‘passive.’ ”116 In any case, it is clear that Chaucer the Pilgrim lacks the presence of the Monk and hardly exudes the self-assurance of the more explicitly effeminate Pardoner. The character’s passivity is such that he has apparently gone virtually unnoticed on the pilgrimage until the Host asks him “what man artow?” This question is striking, because it may mean both “who are you?” and “what kind of man are you?”; thus, as Tison Pugh has pointed out, in these three short words to Chaucer the Pilgrim, Harry


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poses “a derisive question that both asks his identity and interrogates his masculinity.”117 From the Host’s perspective, Chaucer the Pilgrim apparently has a “shapely” waist, which is hardly exceptional since it is by no means uncommon for a man of middle age to become portly, and elsewhere, Chaucer laments that he has become gray-haired and fat.118 There is some debate as to whether the Middle English here truly portrays Chaucer the Pilgrim as fat, but however it is read, this reference again brings to the fore the underlying humor of the situation at hand. Far more suggestive for my designs is Harry’s choice of words in characterizing the Tale of Sir Thopas: he distinctly expects to hear “som deyntee thyng” that would accord with the narrator’s “cheere,” and after several hundred lines of “drasty rymyng” the Host becomes “wery of thy verray lewednesse.”119 The “lewdness” in question would primarily seem to be centered on the contents of the tale itself, and certainly it could be referencing a supposed lack of learning on display in the story. However, there is no avoiding the fact that Harry chooses to direct the term at the I-narrator, who may therefore be charged with being ignorant, but also somehow vile, obscene, or perhaps problematically lustful or lascivious. This becomes a more compelling possibility when it is recognized that the Host was anticipating material that would fit with Chaucer the Pilgrim’s “deyntee” appearance or features. In looking at the Middle English Dictionary, it is evident that Harry may be using this term to describe the narrator as “esteemed,” “elegant,” or a “delightful” thing to marvel at, but also as potentially “fine” or “precious”— which might be appropriate, pejorative descriptors if Chaucer the Pilgrim is, indeed, effeminate in the Host’s eyes.120 At first glance, the “elvyssh” “contenaunce” of the persona might appear to be a less sexually subversive reference. It is unsurprising to find that this characteristic defines Chaucer the Pilgrim as some sort of elf, a short, potentially “otherworldly” being who may have certain supernatural powers. But assuming that the Middle English “elf ” is derived from the Old English “ælfe,” then this becomes a powerfully suggestive characteristic if Alaric Hall is correct in stating that in the Anglo-Saxon period, “beliefs in effeminate ælfe helped to demarcate gender norms.” In Anglo-Saxon culture, these “ælfe” typically were male and were viewed as “sources of danger” or illness and associated with “effeminate” traits that made them “a model of unmasculine behaviour.” According to Hall, the Old English term ælfe may therefore be associated with “dangerous seductiveness” and “femininity,” as well as “behaviour which was normally considered transgressive of proper behaviour.”121 In and of themselves these connections are provocative, and their significance becomes even clearer when it is recalled that Harry uses the

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term “elvyssh” because “unto no wight dooth he daliaunce” (my italics). “Daliaunce” may simply refer to polite conversation, but as Pugh notes, in Chaucer’s lexicon the term “often connotes sexual f lirtations” and thus its usage by the Host may denigrate Chaucer the Pilgrim’s manliness through a reference to his “apparent celibacy.”122 As the MED outlines, an elf is “mysterious” or “strange,” and in the masculine world of these characters, it likely would have been “strange” for a man to refrain from amorous talk, f lirting, “coquetry,” and/or “sexual union”—all possible connotations for “daliaunce.” Hence, it may be that Harry believes that “Chaucer,” if shy, does not engage in small talk of various sorts; but it also may be that the Host finds in the poet’s narrative “elf ” a not-man who does not seem to adhere to the types of amorous behaviors expected of medieval males. This possibility is reinforced by one of the only other references to elves in Chaucer’s oeuvre, which may indicate that the poet was aware of the elf-figure’s perverse sexual implications described above. In a famous passage from the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the notion of the elf as a sexually rapacious being is plainly seen: “For ther as wont to walken was an elf / Ther walketh now the lymytour himself ” so that now “Wommen may go sauf ly up and down. / In every bussh or under every tree / Ther is noon oother incubus but he.”123 The joke here is that the randy elves have been replaced by randy friars, and this image of the elf-figure encourages us to ask of Chaucer the Pilgrim, what is an elf who does not do any “daliaunce,” who may not be interested in sex or love? Here is yet another sign that Chaucer the Pilgrim is depicted by Harry as a rather unnatural (or unmanly) creature, and thus taken as a whole, the evidence above renders it a distinct possibility that, like his narrative hero Sir Thopas, Chaucer’s “elvyssh” I-narrator embodies “diminishing masculinity in its attenuating extreme,” to borrow from Cohen. Or put more directly, “Chaucer the pilgrim is just as doll-like as Sir Thopas. To arrive at this miniaturization, sexuality has been subtracted from both men’s bodies.”124 The most persuasive evidence in support of a “queer” reading of Chaucer’s narrative ‘I’ is, in fact, the “doll-like” nature of the character to which Cohen alludes. As Harry explains, “This were a popet in an arm t’enbrace / For any womman, smal and fair of face” (italics mine). Ann Haskell contends that these lines are key to an understanding of Sir Thopas because Chaucer “separates the many creative layers of self and strings them together with the metaphor of puppetry,” as a puppetfigure (Thopas) is manipulated by a “diminutive” surrogate human being (Chaucer the Pilgrim), who in turn is operated by a real person (Chaucer the Man), who ultimately is controlled by the fate of the gods (since the poet was aware that he, too, was a puppet—“a puppet of his creator”).125


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Clever as this notion of Sir Thopas as a “literal puppet of the puppet” may be, Haskell fails to adequately address the deeper, gendered meanings that her interpretive metaphor might help bring to light.126 Naturally, the Chaucerian “popet” might appear to indicate some sort of puppet, but in fact the etymological evidence provided by both the MED and OED does not support this reading and instead suggests that the term may signify a “small person” or “youth.”127 These are intriguing connotations, and it may be instructive here to recall that the Prioress’s Tale is told immediately before Sir Thopas; hence, Cohen concludes that Chaucer’s narrative “popet” seems “eerily similar” to the “Little Clergeon” of the Prioress’s Tale in that he appears somewhat innocent, diminutive, and perhaps “exterior to the world of sexuality.”128 But this “popet” is no child, and as the narrator of the entire Canterbury Tales, Chaucer the Pilgrim is at least an interested observer of sex and sexuality. Consequently, an equally fascinating but ultimately more valid connection is made when it is understood that “popet” was frequently a derogatory usage, or a term of endearment—a la “darling”—for a child or woman. The term also may suggest a “doll,” “babe,” or “young girl”—hardly indicators of strong masculinity.129 Although these connotations do not ultimately prove anything and the possibility of underlying irony remains, they underscore the fact that the Host sees Chaucer’s autofictional substitute in “strikingly ambivalent gender terms.”130 The reference to the narrator as a “popet” thus lends compelling support to my contention that Chaucer the Pilgrim may be perceived as physically “queer”; he may well be a “heterosexual” character, but at minimum this is a man who is outwardly effeminate. To again quote Cohen, we have here a potentially “presexual,” “developmentally arrested” being, or perhaps an “asexual” man whose “doll-like” nature renders him “a perfectly safe love-object”—“a kind of toy or a tiny child that any woman can scoop up and hug.”131 Admittedly, the corresponding reference to “smal and fair of face” is somewhat problematic for my reading, because it may be argued that this phrase is meant to refer to the “womman” in the sentence and not the portly “popet.” Many women are, naturally, “fair,” so this would be a reasonable conclusion. However, the syntax in these lines is hardly straightforward, and as Plummer has observed, the passage offers an oddly passive image of Chaucer as doll, not embracing but being embraced by a woman, and the ambiguity of the syntax even allows “smal and fair of face” to be read as an appositive to Chaucer himself as well as the woman, all of which suggests that Harry’s expectations for Chaucer’s manly forcefulness and narrative vigor are rather limited.132

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If these lines are read in the way that Plummer suggests, then we have here further evidence for my “queer” interpretation. Though it is not absolutely certain, it is a distinct possibility that Harry refers to Chaucer’s narrative “popet” as being “fair,” a typical term for a beautiful woman—so that, taken together, lines 701–702 of the Prologue to Sir Thopas provide more extensive support for my view of an enigmatic character who is not sufficiently “manly.” Even if Chaucer the Pilgrim is not “homosexual,” this “popet” is somehow “queer” in that he differs from “normative masculinity,” counters ideals of mature manhood, and generally problematizes notions of Chaucerian sexuality.133 Considered in toto, it is decidedly clear that Harry’s description makes possible a reading of Chaucer’s alter ego as a not-man or elf, a “small” and “fair” individual who lacks amorousness, tells a “deyntee” tale, and might be cuddled like a dolly by a young woman. I believe that a “queer” view of Chaucer the Pilgrim usefully opens up a cornucopia of new interpretive possibilities. As is true of the Pardoner, Chaucer’s equivocal “I” helps us to see that the author was deeply engaged with the full range of medieval sexuality, and seems to invite an interpretation that ref lects a consciously constructed erotic continuum—a sexual continuum that would include the potential for a “queer” narrator.134 In recognition of this “queer” possibility, perhaps the time has come for scholars to view Chaucer the Pilgrim in a similar light as the Pardoner. Like the faux preacher, Chaucer the Pilgrim may effectively be read as another meaningful embodiment of the “male homosocial spectrum,” as a character that illuminates the various social bonds, anxieties, and divergent sexual relations of medieval men. By applying Sedgwick’s paradigm to Chaucer’s I-persona, “he” emerges as a figure whose gender markers are neither definitively “straight” nor in any way straightforward, and who thus urges readers to consider the complexities of “male homosocial desire” by evoking images that highlight complicated issues of male bonding and male relations.135 Given his “queer” characteristics, Chaucer the Pilgrim also seems illustrative of Sedgwick’s important notion that “obligatory heterosexuality” is built into male-dominated kinship systems, so that “queer” possibilities create discomfort because there is a “radically discontinuous relation of male homosocial and homosexual bonds.”136 If this is correct, then it might help to explain Harry Bailly’s derisive treatment of Chaucer’s narrative stand-in, because this sexually ambiguous “elf ”—like the Pardoner— may appear to threaten the bonds of masculinity on which many of the pilgrims’ interactions are based. Moreover, the possibility for humor notwithstanding, a “homosocial” reading may help to account for Chaucer the Pilgrim’s very shyness or anxiety: within the fictional community


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of pilgrims, he does not fit the masculine mold and therefore he does not want to be misperceived or maltreated—however his “queer” nature is viewed, he simply does not want to invite undue attention, derision, or conf lict.137 Even if this is not the poet’s specific purpose, his “queer” I-narrator raises additional questions about Chaucerian sexuality and masculinity, the playful intentions of Sir Thopas, the authoritative designs of the magisterial Melibee, and the potentially subversive nature of the link as a whole. And that is just a start. It is regrettable that, until quite recently, scholars have ignored the “homosocial” register of Chaucer’s narrative proxy, preferring to take Harry’s description at face value and variously evading the specter of “queer” possibility. Throughout the course of Chaucerian reception, there has been conspicuous critical silence on the provocative gender markers of Chaucer the Pilgrim, with the nineteenth-century comments of Brooke cited above being a notable exception. In the mid-twentieth century, George Williams did raise the controversial possibility that homosexuality plays a role in Sir Thopas. However, Chaucer the Pilgrim’s own sexuality is nowhere to be found in this discussion, as Williams merely suggested that the Tale of Sir Thopas contained many sexual innuendoes, and specifically proposed that (in the “very best joke in the Chaucer canon”) Thopas may have represented the allegedly homosexual Richard II.138 Several recent critics have echoed this view of a “queer” Thopas; for example, Helen Phillips has concluded that “part of Thopas’s charm and interest for the reader, as well as the reason he can never go on to win the elf queen, is that in many respects he is the elf queen.”139 This is an interesting point in light of Thopas’s connection with Chaucer the Pilgrim, but here, nothing is made of this relationship as Phillips focuses on the effeminate character in the tale rather than the effeminate narrator who tells the tale. With the onset of feminism and queer theory, occasional theoretical connections have, perhaps inevitably, been made between Chaucer’s persona and notions of gender or sexuality—many of which are cited above. What is especially interesting about these accounts is that the few critics who have linked sexuality and the Chaucerian “I” generally make only brief comments or oblique references, and in so doing, offer another highly suggestive strain of critical evasion. More to the point, we have here yet another meaningful version of the moral f linch, in which there is an apparent resistance to implying any “feminine” or sexually deviant characteristics for “Father Chaucer’s” poetic surrogate. To clarify this variety of the moral f linch, it is useful to apply Britton Harwood’s notion that silent distortions or narrative gaps provide evidence for repressed wishes or, in this case, a specific type of scholarly wish-fulfillment: the

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desire to refrain from questioning the poet’s sexuality or “queering” his alter ego, wishing to avoid the ethical ramifications that might result from such a move.140 In an early example of this type of evasiveness, Chauncey Wood explains that the irony of Sir Thopas is more extensive than usually is held, since the narrator seems to take on the “somewhat unexpected role” of a “lecherous” (heterosexual) speaker who tells a story with “sexual overtones.”141 From Wood’s perspective, the reader’s expectations are “aroused” by the poet through the potential “carnality” attached to Chaucer the Pilgrim and implied by the tale itself: Sir Thopas is funny because the “abundant sexual imagery” of the Prologue and Tale contribute to “interlocking ironies involving the poet, the pilgrim, and both of the tales told.”142 Despite the supposed “carnality” of Chaucer’s persona, Wood takes great care in using irony and humor to draw back from a reading that might imply that the author himself was in some way sexually lecherous. Hence, Wood’s construction of a frolicking, distinctly heterosexual storyteller may be said to suppress the potentially effeminate features of the poet’s self-representative. And Wood is hardly alone in making such a move. Even critics who are more overtly interested in Chaucerian sexualities have little to say about the effeminate features of the dainty “elf.” This is surprising, as it is these critics who might be expected to comment at length on the possibility that Chaucer’s poetic substitute represents a “double-gendered internal ‘I,’ ” or who would seem likely to read this persona like the Pardoner, as an important instance of medieval “gender confusion” that illustrates the assumption in the Middle Ages that something was wrong with effeminate men and shows how cultural prejudices inf luence the interpretation of such not-men (as in the case of Harry Bailly).143 What is typical, however, is that gender theorists may allude to the possibility that Chaucer the Pilgrim has “queer” attributes, but ultimately go no further. Take, for instance, the observations of Robert Sturges. Sturges is one of the few critics who has commented directly on the potential connections between sexuality and the narrator of the Thopas-Melibee link and has described an “undecidability” that is manifest in the writer’s self-representation since “the pilgrim Chaucer is himself both masculine and feminized.”144 But Sturges has little else to say on the matter, and the deeper implications of this reading are not addressed. Burger, too, notes that a “certain queerness” is evident in the description of the Chaucerian “I,” and momentarily compares the reactions of the fictional pilgrims to the Pardoner and Chaucer the Pilgrim, saying that their responses (and especially those of the Host) express “a similar uncertainty about the nature of the narrator and whether and how he will


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fit into the pilgrimage body.”145 Yet it is remarkable that Burger—who has written an essay entitled “Queer Chaucer” and a book that explores Chaucer’s Queer Nation—does not take his reading one step further by categorically “queering” Chaucer the Pilgrim or examining the ramifications such a view might have for the understanding of the author and his oeuvre. By working to more deeply “queer” Chaucer’s alter ego, this is precisely the step forward I have sought to take with these pages. Among the primary goals of any theoretical application are to resist closure by revisiting and disavowing beliefs that are unsatisfactory, and to open up the interpretive possibilities by uncovering potential connotations that are as yet unacknowledged.146 These aims are particularly important to the tenets of queer theory, and this is why it is so striking that Chaucer criticism still has not taken the interpretive leap of faith necessary to fully “queer” the author’s narrative surrogate. Returning to Burger as an example, we have here a critic whose scholarship has been invaluable in urging Chaucerians to reconsider their own ideologies. Burger has spoken eloquently of “queering Father Chaucer” and even asked “is there a gay Chaucer?,” so it is especially interesting that he does not wholly follow through with his own charge by comprehensively applying a “queer hermeneutic” to Chaucer the Pilgrim that would profoundly “trouble traditional assumptions about Chaucer and the Middle Ages.”147 Instead, Burger seems to stop short when faced with the challenge of Chaucer’s “fair” I-narrator, and other scholars have done the same. Whatever Burger’s own motivations, it appears that, to a large extent, the historical legacy of the venerable poet has “immobilized” many critics and seemingly required that they go no farther in “queering” the “popet.” This may be due to a “social imperative” to define the celebrated medieval author—who once was charged with raptus—as “sexually normal,” even when his own narrative I-persona might raise questions about such a view.148 This evasive critical maneuvering stands in stark contrast to the way in which the supposed homoeroticism of Shakespeare’s sonnets has been interpreted autobiographically. Without question, the Thopas-Melibee sequence is fundamentally different than Shakespeare’s widely varied sonnets, and as Sinfield notes, even in the case of Shakespeare there is “a persistent undercurrent of anxiety” when it comes to “queering” the writer.149 Nonetheless it is evident that, whereas Shakespeareans of late have tended to freely address the potential “vicariated desires” found in the verse, Chaucerians generally have been more prone to the “elision and subsumption” of potentially “queer” material—especially as it pertains to the authorial I-narrator.150 One could, perhaps, explain this dichotomy with reference to the more extensive homoerotic material of

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the sonnets or to certain historical considerations, but both poets were married, with children, and wrote passionately about love and the relationships between men and women.151 In any case, these facts would not altogether eliminate the possibility of homosexuality; and when one takes into account the work and reception of other renowned intellects, it is evident that Sedgwick is accurate in stating that “no one can know in advance where the limits of a gay-centered inquiry are to be drawn, or where a gay theorizing of and through even the hegemonic high culture of the Euro-American tradition may need or be able to lead.”152 Hence, the lack of a thorough “gay-centered inquiry” regarding Chaucer the Pilgrim is conspicuous. Put simply, an intriguing possibility—however doubtful—that has long been out in the open in Shakespeare criticism has long been silenced in Chaucer Studies. And this silence on “the love that dares not speak its name” may well speak volumes. The time has come to end the silence. In closing, a final comparison is worthwhile. However they ultimately are interpreted, the complexities of Thopas and Melibee greatly complicate any attempts to pin down Chaucer’s views, while the fragmentary nature of the link—and the dual, fragmented nature of the divided self—render the author and his ideals impossible to grasp. In accordance with this view, Judith Ferster has examined the idea that meaning is only partial or fragmentary, and concludes that Chaucer the Pilgrim’s final performance (i.e., Melibee) “perfectly” describes the author’s dilemma: he may have some effect on his audience, but he cannot hope to control that effect.153 Indeed, Chaucer scholars are able to control or contain the interpretive possibilities, and as this study has shown throughout, have frequently limited the textual meaning in specific, ideologically charged ways. Bearing this fact in mind, it is important to note that by using the persona-construct to implicate himself in the Thopas-Melibee link, Chaucer invites his audience to consider major issues concerning poetics and encourages an awareness of the reader’s effect on the construction of meaning (as audience members such as Harry Bailly clearly shape the text). More directly, by entering “himself ” as a physically ambiguous storyteller of two tales diametrically opposed within the prevailing medieval literary theory, the author seems to issue an outright challenge to his readers: he dares us to address the full implications of his narrative I-persona. Like the “Pardoner’s Challenge”—which forces readers to confront the troublesome act of an outwardly immoral narrator telling an exemplary moral tale— “Chaucer’s Challenge” requires the audience to address the fact that a highly sententious tale is offered by a figure who has been presented as a ridiculous and feeble “elf.”


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In fact, the connections between the challenges of the Pardoner and Chaucer run even deeper, as Burger has recognized by observing that the moment in Fragment VII that invokes the kind of questions of value and hierarchy associated with the Pardoner in Fragment VI is the narrator’s inscription as tale teller. The frame for the Thopas sets up a scene remarkable for its telling similarities to and differences from how the Pardoner’s audience attempted to manipulate, marginalize, and contain the Pardoner.154

In light of my previous discussion of the narrative “popet,” Burger’s words ring true since compelling evidence has been presented for a distinct type of critical containment. In a precise final variant on the moral f linch, a different kind of drawing back has been identified as a response to Chaucer’s poetic “I”: scholars evince a conspicuous tendency to avoid discussion of the seemingly effeminate nature of the Thopas-Melibee narrator. Even in the rare cases where Chaucer the Pilgrim’s dubious masculinity is mentioned, the “queer” characteristics of this I-speaker are by no means examined thoroughly or reconciled adequately with the highly moral tale he goes on to tell. Here, then, is another significant type of fragmentation, as the woman-like aspects of the “fair” poet-pilgrim are critically kept apart from the authoritative tract told by the revered auctor. Again, the connection with the Pardoner is telling, since it is interesting that the assumptions of nonmasculine characteristics for the false preacher have not had much critical impact on interpretations of his Tale, while the same is also true of Chaucer’s doll-like storyteller and both Thopas and Melibee. Furthermore, the obvious physical comparisons that may be drawn between the two characters have not come to fruition in scholarship, as the reception of the effeminate “popet” has had little inf luence on the legacy of the “queer” Pardoner, and vice versa.155 It may, in fact, be argued that the general scholarly refusal to bring together “popet” and Pardoner is part and parcel of a wider strain of evasive ghettoization that has long characterized critical response to these two figures. Another important manifestation of this ghettoization is found in the theoretical segregation of these “Others” not just from one another, but also from the rest of the pilgrim collective. Having been isolated from their fellows, critical treatment of these two problematic narrators allows scholars to separate the ostensible fallibility of the two tale-tellers from the overt morality of their tales, a scholarly sundering that is enabled by the persona-construct. This program of ghettoization permits critics to separate “Father Chaucer” from any possible weakness—physical, moral, or

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otherwise—that his characters may imply by aligning the revered auctor exclusively with the morality of the tales themselves. This tendency is present not only within critical reconstructions of Chaucer the Pilgrim, the Pardoner, and the other I-speakers examined in this study, but also in response to the stories told by the likes of the Prioress, the Miller, the Merchant, and so forth. The varieties of separation, fragmentation, and ghettoization just described all seem symptomatic of a wider theoretical trend: the failure, or outright refusal of critics to take up the gauntlet and fully address the implications of the persona-construct. This, too, is central to Chaucer Challenge, since the poet—in the form of Chaucer the Pilgrim— demands that his readers recognize and reconcile the deliberate use of the persona-construct in the Tales. But Chaucer’s Challenge simply has not been met by scholars, who have not fulfilled the need for a thorough consideration of Chaucer the Pilgrim’s apparently “queer” nature, and who have repeatedly failed to take into account the ramifications of the autofictional I-persona. And this, I believe, is symptomatic of a contemporary attitude that ref lects an apparent unwillingness to even acknowledge the significance of the persona for Chaucer Studies, and beyond. More deeply, the failure to meet Chaucer’s Challenge also underscores a general tendency to ignore the ideological effects of scholarly interpretation. Although countless critics have tried to unveil the author’s own (supposed) views, too few have attempted to uncover or critique the effects of their own perceptions and preconceptions. Despite the tremendous growth of reception studies during the past two decades, many scholars continue to avoid the ramifications of their reading practices for constructing a number of idealized “Chaucers” that, in various ways, fit the perceived mold of what the “Father of English poetry” should look like. Revealing this epidemic has been a central concern of this monograph, but it is important to admit here that I, too, bring my own ideologies to my research. In my case, there is an undeniable desire to rethink long-standing interpretive traditions and to try and push the bounds of Chaucerian interpretation to new limits. And of course, above all else my willful aim is to recuperate the persona-construct and reenergize persona-theory for future scholarship. It is primarily for these reasons that I openly respond to my peers by saying: whether he is straight, “queer,” and/or somehow physically “Other,” let us undertake to rescue Chaucer’s persona from the ghetto, returning it to the center of critical discussion—where it belongs.156 In so doing, we will (re)discover a more theoretically valid, engaging position from which to consider the complexities of the Thopas-Melibee link, as well as the remainder of the


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Chaucer canon. And we may also be encouraged to consider our own selves, our own ideologies, because like the poet—who consciously created his narrative surrogate—we, as critics, deliberately construct our arguments, bring our beliefs to the page, and mold our own scholarly personalities. As a writer, Chaucer had “an unusually large range of awareness of the choices available to him in the role of poet and in the function of narrators.”157 More to the point, Chaucer’s writing experiments with these narrators and is marked by a “continuing series of bifurcations,” so that readers are faced with many versions of the poet—“multiple Chaucers,” or a “bewildering series of multiple representations” that are “rooted in Chaucer himself.”158 To make sense out of this “bewildering” multiplicity the persona is, simply, vital. It is therefore crucial that critics come to better understand persona-theory and its importance for the study of Chaucer—and medieval literature more generally—and work to recuperate the persona as a means to discover altogether new “Chaucers” in the future. I have sought to advance this knowledge on these pages, and contend that the theoretical notion of autofiction might do much to help reinvigorate the discussion of Chaucer the Pilgrim and propagate fresh outlooks on other ambiguous first-person narrators. Given the multiplicity of Chaucer’s narrators and the very nature of the bifurcated, autofictional persona, it follows that the meaning of the corpus is and should be multiple, and thus strong support has been provided for Sedgwick’s assertion that “critics’ choices should not be limited to crudities of disruption or silences of orthodox enforcement.”159 Unfortunately, in Chaucer Studies it is evident that the critical choices have been confined at times in order to favorably depict the so-called “Father of English poetry,” often through “orthodox” readings of the persona-construct. With this in mind, I would like to end by encouraging Chaucerians to remember the advice of Roland Barthes, who warned that “the capital sin of criticism is not ideology, but the silence by which it is masked.”160 In Chaucer Studies this silence has had a profound effect, which is no better seen than in the scholarly response to the author’s personae. Much has been published to date on the ideologies of criticism, but there are still significant silences left to be filled by reception scholars. The words of Carl Jung, too, are worth bearing in mind, as it was Jung who emphasized that “every calling or profession . . . has its own characteristic persona.”161 The fact is that we all adopt masks in our own daily lives, we all present different personae to the world. Therefore, it is important that future critics not only address and apply the persona-construct in reading Chaucer’s Middle English, but also carefully consider their own critical

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ideologies and the impact of their chosen scholarly masks. In this way, persona-theory might effectively be used in order to expand the critical horizons and establish new constellations of meaning—rather than ideologically closing down the textual possibilities. The door to the future must remain open, and in Chaucer Studies, the key to that door is held by the persona.

NOTES

1 Persona and Personalities: Medieval Lineage, Modern Legacy 1. All quotations of Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1987). 2. Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. xv. 3. George T. Wright, The Poet in the Poem: The Personae of Eliot, Yeats, and Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 161 and 162. 4. Robert C. Elliott, The Literary Persona (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 18–19, 31. 5. Elliott, Literary Persona, p. 20. For my discussion of classical Latin definitions, I have drawn from the Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare, et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). The OLD defines personare as “to be filled with noise, resounding” and “to sound in every part, resound” (p. 1357). 6. Elliott, Literary Persona, pp. 21–22. 7. W. Beare, “Masks on the Roman Stage,” Classical Quarterly 33.3/4 (1939): 143 [139–146]. 8. Elliott, Literary Persona, pp. 22–23, 25. 9. Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare, et al., p. 1356. The concept of personification also is registered in “the attribution of personality to an abstraction, personification” (for personae fictio). 10. “Chaucer the Pilgrim” is the name most frequently given to the I-narrator of the Canterbury Tales. The title was used for years, but it is typically associated with E. T. Donaldson’s highly inf luential essay “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” which is discussed in section 1.3 of this chapter. For reference, see “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” PMLA 69 (1954): 928–936; rpt. in Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (London: Athlone Press, 1970), p. 10 [1–12]. 11. J. F. Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 2:790–792. 12. Albert Blaise, Lexicon Latinitatis Medii Aevi (Turnhout: Brepols, 1975), p. 679. 13. See the online edition of the Middle English Dictionary, ed. F. McSparran, November 23, 2001. http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med.

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NOTES

14. The Tale of Melibee, VII.985, 1026. In Chaucer’s usage, the phrase reads “in propre persona.” 15. I quote from the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, November 23, 2001. http://www.oed.com. 16. This statement is offered in a discussion of the term person. Interestingly, since I conducted my original research the statement quoted has been excised from the OED’s etymological discussion. It might be added here that, in its collective body of evidence, the OED effectively illustrates just how diverse (and complicated) are the possible connotations of a “person” in modern English. Moving beyond the realm of literature, it shows the multifaceted nature of the persona-concept by citing its prominent usage in a number of different intellectual paradigms, including its applications in Jungian psychology, its ties to the Christian idea of the Trinity, and its importance in grammatical theory. 17. Like “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” the concept of “Chaucer the Man” is a central one that shall be utilized throughout this monograph. The idea of “Chaucer the Man” particularly gained prominence as a result of Donald Howard’s essay of the same name and will hereafter be used to refer to the actual man of f lesh and bone whose poetic corpus is read and critiqued. As section 1.3 of this chapter notes, Howard was inf luenced by the persona-theory of E. T. Donaldson and perceived the I-persona as having a close relationship to “the Man” himself; see Howard, “Chaucer the Man,” PMLA 80.4 (1965): 337–343. 18. Wright, Poet in the Poem, p. 161. 19. A particularly important historical corollary to persona-theory that arose at a very early date was grammatical theory, given that “grammar is the map that traces and at times gives rise to self-enunciation.” In the rhetoric of medieval grammatical treatises, the term persona often was used to reference a (strictly) grammatical entity, but increasingly writers built on such discourse to address the identifiable speaking positions, and speakers, found within a literary narrative. On these points, see Burt Kimmelman’s discussion in The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), p. 134. As an example, in an early treatise on language, Priscian (f l. 500) explains that the use of a different persona—in this case, a different grammatical formulation for a noun/pronoun—is not only pertinent when discussing another person (id est non solum cum in aliam personam agit), but also when discussing oneself. Priscian relates the grammatical function of the persona to the narrative personae used by such authors as Homer and Virgil, and in addition, notes that a writer can speak proficiently by moving from one person to another without speaking in the same singular person or confusing the meaning of the speech (sive in transitione personarum intellegantur sive in una eademque persona). See Priscian, Institutionum Grammaticarum, ed. Martin Hertzius (Leipzig: Teubner, 1859), 3.18.15, 16. 20. Kimmelman, Poetics of Authorship, p. 27. Kimmelman’s study focuses on the uses of the persona by Dante, Langland, and Chaucer. However,

NOTES

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

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Kimmelman may be accused of too frequently presenting generalizations based primarily on the work of these three figures, and criticized for not sufficiently locating the persona historically by more thoroughly investigating the term’s use within the medieval commentary tradition. These are my own idiomatic translations of the Latin. The citations are drawn from Beare’s discussion of “Masks on the Roman Stage,” 139–140. In full, Diomedes’s original reads: “Antea itaque galearibus non personis utebantur, ut qualitas coloris indicium faceret aetatis, cum essent aut albi aut nigri aut rufi. Personis uero uti primus coepit Roscius Gallus, praecipuus histrio, quod oculis peruersis erat nec satis decorus in personis nisi parasitus pronuntiabat.” Cicero’s observation states “quo melius nostri illi senes qui personatum ne Roscium quidem magno opere laudabant.” Donatus’s Latin reads, “Haec sane acta est ludis scaenicis funebribus L. Aemili Pauli agentibus L. Ambiuio et L. qui cum suis gregibus etiam tum personati agebant.” Again, I draw the Latin from Beare, “Masks on the Roman Stage,” 139–140. On this point, see Elliott, Literary Persona, pp. 25 and 43. Elliott, Literary Persona, p. 45. See Beare, “Masks on the Roman Stage,” 139–140. In its entirety, Festus’s complex Latin reads, “Personata fabula quaedam Naeui inscribitur, quam putant quidam primum (actam) a personates histrionibus. Sed cum post multos annos comoedi et tragoedi personis uit coeperint, uerisimilius est eam fabulam propter inopiam comoedorum actam nouam per Atellanos qui proprie vocantur personati quia ius est iis non cogi in scaena ponere personam quod ceteris histrionibus pati necesse est.” See Gregory Nagy’s account of dramatic impersonation in “Early Greek Views of Poets and Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume I: Classical Criticism, ed. George A. Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 47. For Terence’s comments, see the forty-five line Prologue to The Eunuch, found online at the Latin Library. www.thelatinlibrary.com/ter.eunuchus.html. Nagy, “Early Greek Views,” pp. 62–63. For reference, see the brief explanation of mimesis in William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman, eds., A Handbook to Literature, 7th edn. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), p. 321. The work of Erich Auerbach and Northrop Frye has been particularly inf luential in the modern theoretical development of the concept of mimesis. Cf. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953); and Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). I quote from 3.16 of Aristotle’s Rhetoric; see also his discussion of just and unjust actions, moral intent and purpose, in Book 1.13. These sections from the Rhetoric are illustrative of the fact that, as George A. Kennedy explains, Aristotle focused his discussion on the question of how authorial intent is transmitted by artistic techniques to the audience. It should also be noted that the famous quotation from Horace does go on to suggest

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30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

NOTES

that poets might both benefit and entertain their audience, yet many later thinkers would build their own commentaries on the distinctions between narrative “profit” or “delight.” See Kennedy’s discussion of the literary contributions of both Aristotle and Horace in “The Evolution of a Theory of Artistic Prose,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume I, Kennedy, p. 191. See Gerald A. Bond, “Composing Yourself: Ovid’s Heroides, Baudri of Bourgueil and the Problem of Persona,” Mediaevalia 13 (1987): 84 [83–117]. See Martin W. Winkler, The Persona in Three Satires of Juvenal (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1983), p. 72. I quote and translate from lines 30 and 79 of Juvenal’s first satire, found at http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/juvenal/1.shtml. For discussion, see Winkler, Persona in Three Satires, p. 48. Servius, In Vergilii carmina commentarii, ed. Georg Thilo and Hermann Hagen (Leipzig: Teubner, 1881), 3.1. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911), 8.7.11. “Apud poetas autem tres characteres esse dicendi: unum, in quo tantum poeta loquitur, ut est in libris Vergilii Georgicorum; alium dramaticum, in quo nusquam poeta loquitur, ut est in comoediis et tragoediis; tertium mixtum, ut est in Aeneide. Nam poeta illic et introductae personae loquuntur.” “Dramaticon est vel activum, in quo personae loquentes introducuntur sine poetae interlocutione, ut se habent tragoediae et fabulae.” See Bede, De Arte Metrica, in Grammatici Latini, ed. Heinrich Keil (Leipzig: Teubner, 1880), 8.259. William of St. Thierry, Exposé sur le Cantique des cantiques, ed. J. M. Déchanet (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1962), pp. 80–82. “In toto hoc cantico, vix audiatur vox, vel locutio interseratur, nisi Sponsi ac Sponsae.” William’s primary source for this commentary was the translation of Origen by Rufinus, wherein it states that Solomon had written his song in the form of a drama, which is defined as follows: “we call a thing drama, such as the enaction of a story on the stage, when different characters are introduced and the whole structure of the narrative consists in their comings and goings among themselves.” See Origen: The Song of Songs, Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson (London: Longmans, 1957), pp. 21–22. Bond, “Composing Yourself,” 83. Bond views this attitude as being most clearly seen in the Ovidian writings of the age. See Kimmelman, Poetics of Authorship, p. 2. Bond, “Composing Yourself,” 101. The concept of “polyphonic” writing that Bond utilizes to describe the Baudri’s multiple voicing draws directly on the famous theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. Here, I also quote from Tison Pugh’s discussion of Baudri, which describes the poet as carefully using the persona in such a way that he might portray not only “the pleasures” of a boy’s body but ultimately concern himself more with

NOTES

42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

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“celebrating same-sex desire between men than condemning it.” See Tison Pugh, Queering Medieval Genres (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 30–32. K. Hilbert ed., Baldricus Burgulianus Carmina (Heidelberg: Winter, 1979), 85.35–46. Perhaps the finest example of the various types of authorial shielding to which I allude, pervasive throughout the Middle Ages, is seen in the commonplace “take the good and leave the evil” defense of literature, which resonates in Chaucer’s verse. See, for instance, the famous lines from The Miller’s Prologue that urge the reader to “demeth nat that I seye/ Of yvel entente, but for I moot reherce/ Hir tales alle, be they bettre or werse,/ Or elles falsen som of my mateere./ And therfore, whoso list it nat yheere,/ Turne over the leef and chese another tale” (I, 3172–3177). For a brief discussion of authorial self-defense of this sort, see Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar, 1984), pp. 205–206. I borrow the term “autocitation” from Kimmelman, Poetics of Authorship, pp. 40–41. See especially Kimmelman, Poetics of Authorship, pp. 63, 71, 77, 87; cf. David F. Hult, “Author/Narrator/Speaker: The Voice of Authority in Chrétien’s Charrete,” in Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989), pp. 80, 82 [76–96]. The focus on authorial intentions is no better seen than in a particular collection of anonymous accessus ad auctores that widely concerns itself with the aims of notable literary works. One anonymous author, in fact, is seemingly so obsessed with Ovid’s intentions in bringing his various personae to the page, that he uses the term intentio and its corollaries ad nauseam throughout his discussion. I refer specifically to the Accessus ad Auctores collection edited by R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden: Brill, 1970), p. 32. Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 32. Here, I borrow phrasing from A. J. Minnis’s Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 227. I utilize the translations of these passages found in A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c. 1375: The Commentary-Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 92. Reference from Minnis and Scott, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, p. 152. I have marked off the philosopher’s name in this section because it remains uncertain whether Bernard Silvester truly wrote the commentary on the Aeneid from which these passages are drawn. See Minnis and Scott, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, p. 152. On the concepts of integumentum and involucrum, consult Winthrop Wetherbee’s introduction to his translation of The Cosmographia of

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52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

NOTES

Bernardus Silvestris (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973); see also Stock, Myth and Science, pp. 42–58. See Stock, Myth and Science, pp. 52–53. See Minnis and Scott, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 151, 152. In discussing the purposes of poetry, “Silvester” focuses on Horace’s famous pronouncement. Pugh offers a useful discussion of Marbod’s “amatory and queering lyrics” in Queering Medieval Genres, pp. 27–30. Italics mine. The citations and translations of these works are taken from pp. 30–33 and 88–91, respectively, of Medieval Latin Poems of Male Love and Friendship, trans. T. Stehling (New York: Garland, 1984). The poems are numbered 46 and 87 in this book. Material from the anonymous manuscript in which the second poem is found has been transcribed by J. Werner in Beiträge zur Kunde der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters (Aarau: H. H. Sauerländer, 1905). Medieval Latin Poems of Male Love and Friendship, pp. 30–31, 90–91. “Num semper prisco cupiam me tradere visco,/ et semel egressus rursus laqueis dare gressus?” Medieval Latin Poems of Male Love and Friendship, pp. 90–91. “Haec mandatorum, carissime, verba meorum/ missa tibi soli multis ostendere noli.” Medieval Latin Poems of Male Love and Friendship, pp. 32–33. See Minnis’s discussion of these various points in Magister Amoris, p. 222. Bonaventure, S. Bonaventurae opera omnia, ed. R. P. Bernardini (Florence: Quaracchi, 1893), 6.5–6. Minnis offers a useful consideration of these roles in Medieval Theory of Authorship, p. 94. This idea was recognized long ago by Leo Spitzer in “Note on the Poetic and Empirical ‘I’ in Medieval Authors,” Traditio 4 (1946): 419 [414–422]. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, p. 217. Ibid., pp. 112–117, 156–159. See Michael Zink, The Invention of Literary Subjectivity, trans. David Sices (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 14. Zink designates the development of the “romance of the self ” as characterizing the thirteenth century in particular, seen in the “the birth of a personal poetry playing on narrativity . . . as the figure of the poet took shape and gained prominence” (p. 37). See A. C. Spearing, “A Ricardian ‘I’: The Narrator of ‘Troilus and Criseyde,’ ” in Essays on Ricardian Literature: In Honour of J. A. Burrow, ed. A. J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 19 [1–22]. Phrasing borrowed from Minnis, Magister Amoris, p. 230. Minnis, Magister Amoris, p. 221. “Il Prologo alla traduzione della ‘Consolatio Philosophiae’ di Jean de Meun e il commento di Guglielmo d’ Aragona,” ed. Roberto Crespo in

NOTES

71.

72.

73.

74.

75.

76. 77. 78. 79.

80.

205

Romanitas et Christianitas: Studia I. H. Wasznik oblata, ed. W. de Boer, et al. (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1952), p. 59 [55–70]. “Et ita ipse ex parte sui ipsius dolores et causas eorum motivas ostendit, et ex parte philosophie causas annullantes huiusmodi dolores et consolacionem ostendentes adducit.” According to the OLD, confingo denotes “to construct by shaping or molding,” and also “to invent, fabricate; to devise; with a feigned expression (for fronte confincta); to pretend.” The “intentional fallacy” was famously outlined by William K. Wimsatt, in “The Intentional Fallacy,” in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 3–18. “Je n’I faz riens fors reciter,/ se par mon geu, qui po vos coute,/ quelque parole n’I ajoute,’ si con font antr’eus li poete,/ quant chascuns la matire trete/ don il lip lest a antremetre;/ car si con tesmoigne la letre,/ profiz et delectaction./ c’est toute leur entencion.” For reference, see Minnis, Magister Amoris, p. 227. In a similar vein, Gower’s Latin gloss to the Confessio Amantis (presumably written by the poet himself ) might be recalled, wherein he states that he is conveying the emotions of other characters and is not speaking in propria persona but is “feigning himself to be a lover” so that he can write about the various passions of his personae one by one (“Hic quasi in persona aliorum, quos amor alligat, fingens se auctor esse Amantem, varias eorum passiones variis huius libri distinccionibus per singula scribere proponit”). See John Gower, John Gower: The English Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900– 1901), 1.37. Jean de Meun, “Boethius’ De Consolatione by Jean de Meun,” ed. V. L. Dedeck-Héry, Medieval Studies 14 (1952): 171 [165–275]. “Donc selonc ce est homme devisé en deuz, ce est a savoir en homme tourmenté et demené par passions sensibles et en homme devinement ellevé es biens entendibles.” “Et pour ce que seule philosophie nous ellieve par de don de dieu aus biens entendibles, Boeces establist et represente soi en partie de homme troublé et tourmenté et demené par passions sensibles et establist philosophie en partie de homme ellevé et ensuivant les biens entendibles.” I cite the translation of Guido’s text in Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory, pp. 469–476. For Guido’s use of these terms, see p. 471. Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory, pp. 472, 473. Ibid., p. 476. I use Minnis’s translations of Evrart located in Magister Amoris, p. 283. The original text can be found in Le Livre des eschez amoreux moralisés, ed. F. Guichard-Tesson and B. Roy (Montreal: CERES, 1993), p. 3. “L’entente principal de l’acteur dessusdit et la fin de son livre, c’est de tendre a vertu et a bonne oeuvre, et de fouir tout mal et toute fole oyseuse.” Minnis, Magister Amoris, pp. 283–284; Le Livre des eschez amoreux, p. 22. “Nous devons savoir premierement . . . que l’aucteur de la rime dessusdite

206

81. 82.

83.

84.

85. 86.

87.

NOTES

faint et dit moult de choses qui ne sont pas a entendre a la lectre, ja soit ce que elles soient raisonablement faintes, et qu’il y ait aucune verité soubz la lettre et la fiction secretement mucie, sy come il apperra se Dieu loysir me donne de declarier la chose.” Minnis, Magister Amoris, 284; Le Livre des eschez amoreux, p. 22. “Sanz faille, on peut bien faindre aucunesfoiz et parler par figure et fabuleusement.” Evrart’s commentary also usefully explains “the three ways in which fiction may reasonably be employed” (i.e., the ways in which authors might use and manipulate their personae, perhaps as narrative shields, and their rationale thereof ). Evrart summarizes these three ways as follows: in order to speak more safely and securely (which can be done by having a resuscitated corpse speak, using the “manner of a dream,” or using “imaginary vision”), in order to speak more secretly (“parler plus secretement”), and in order to speak more subtly, pleasantly, and delightfully (“parler plus subtilement, plaisaument et delectablement”). See Minnis, Magister Amoris, pp. 23–24 ; and Le Livre des eschez amoreux, pp. 23–26. On the querelle, see A. J. Minnis, “Theorizing the Rose: Commentary Tradition in the Querelle de la Rose,” in Poetics: Theory and Practice in Medieval English Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 13–36. Prof. Minnis has also considered the topic at greater length in Chapter 5 of Magister Amoris, pp. 209–256. The querelle, as it is known today, is located in a series of documents in which the disputants discuss many significant aspects of medieval literary theory. The documents in question are mostly made up of letters written back and forth between the opposing critical parties. On the two respective sides of the querelle debates, see Minnis’s discussion in Magister Amoris, pp. 224–230. All my citations of the querelle controversy are taken from the translation of the collection of documents by Joseph L. Baird and John R. Kane, “La Querelle de la Rose: Letters and Documents,” North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 199 (1978): 11–170. Here, I cite from page 48. The French documents of the querelle have been transcribed by Eric Hicks in Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose (Paris: H. Champion, 1977). In the original, Christine’s words read as follows: “Mais en accordant l’oppinion a laquelle contrediséz, sans faille, a mon avis, trop traicte deshonnestment en aucunes pars—et mes mement ou personnage que il claime Raison, laquelle nomme les secréz membres plainement par nom” (Hicks, Le Débat, p. 13). Baird and Kane, “La Querelle de la Rose,” 50. “Et la laidure qui la est recordee des femmes, dient pluseurs en lui excusant que c’est le Jaloux que parle, et voirement fait ainsi comme Dieu parla par la bouche Jeremie. Mais sans faille, quelxque addicions mençongeuses qu’il ait adjoustees, ne peuent—Dieu mercy!—en riens amenrir ne rendre empirees les conditions des femmes” (Hicks, Le Débat, p. 15).

NOTES

207

88. This is the view of Catherine Attwood in Dynamic Dichotomy: The Poetic “I” in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century French Lyric Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopoi, 1998), p. 221. 89. Baird and Kane, “La Querelle de la Rose,” 53, 143. 90. Ibid., 73. For the French, see Hicks, Le Débat, 62. Gerson voices his disapproval of De Meun’s supposed use of his narratives to incite his readers into sinful acts of the sort displayed by his characters, saying “he was not content simply to utter the above-mentioned affronts everywhere publicly,” but he also took care “to allure people into hearing, seeing, and holding fast to those things.” 91. Baird and Kane, “La Querelle de la Rose,” 77, 81. See also Hicks, Le Débat, pp. 67, 74. 92. Baird and Kane, “La Querelle de la Rose,” 93, 103. “Maistre Jehan de Meung en son livre introduisy personnaiges, et fait chascun personnaige parler selonc qui luy appartient: c’est assavoir le Jaloux comme jaloux, la Vielle come la Vielle, et pareillement des autres” (Hicks, Le Débat, p. 100). 93. Baird and Kane, “La Querelle de la Rose,” 154. “Sic detractionis . . . quos vivens solo nutu oppido compressisset, qui de personatuum varietate non discernunt, seu notant quibus passionibus moveantur aut induantur affectibus, et quem ad finem quave | dependentia aut quamobrem sint loquuti” (Hicks, Le Débat, p. 42). Jean de Montreuil also argues that Jean de Meun assumed the pose of the blunt satirist in his verse, and alleges that “they [i.e., Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson] simply do not understand how that teacher has fulfilled the function of the satirist and is therefore permitted many things which are prohibited to other writers.” See Baird and Kane, “La Querelle de la Rose,” 153. 94. Minnis, Magister Amoris, p. 223. Interestingly, in A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), D. W. Robertson clearly echoes the defenders of Jean de Meun in his discussion of the querelle. For instance, Robertson claims that Christine fundamentally misunderstood Jean’s deployment of personae, saying on page 361 that “Her accusation against Raison” refers to a passage “where the idea that it is better to deceive is attributed by Raison to lovers and certainly not advocated by Raison herself. La Vielle, Jalousie, and Genius all speak in character; no one of them represents the views of the author.” 95. Baird and Kane argue this point in “La Querelle de la Rose,” 11–12. The vehemence with which these points were, at times, asserted is no better seen than when Jean de Montreuil notes the “feminine limitations” of Christine, whom he then describes as sounding like the Greek whore discussed by Cicero, “who dared to criticize the great philosopher Theophrastus”; for reference, See Baird and Kane, “La Querelle de la Rose,” 153. 96. Baird and Kane make this assertion in “La Querelle de la Rose,” 12. 97. Phrasing for these lines has been borrowed from Minnis, Magister Amoris, pp. 222, 254.

208

NOTES

98. In making these points, I have drawn from Alfred David’s comments in The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer’s Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 219; Willi Erzgräber, “ ‘Auctorite’ and ‘Experience’ in Chaucer,” in Intellectuals and Writers in FourteenthCentury Europe, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1986), 67 [67–87]; George Kane, The Autobiographical Fallacy in Chaucer and Langland Studies (London: H. K. Lewis, 1965), pp. 16–17; and Barbara Nolan, “ ‘A Poet Ther Was’: Chaucer’s Voices in the General Prologue,” PMLA 101.2 (1986): 156 [154–169]. 99. See Elizabeth Heale, Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 9. For discussion of the use of personae by Renaissance authors, especially satirists, see Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959); and Alan Hager, Dazzling Images: The Masks of Sir Philip Sidney (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991). 100. Page numbers are not given in the text of Speght’s The Workes of our Antient and lerned English Poet Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed (London, 1598). These lines are found in the supplementary section titled “Arguments to euery Tale and Booke.” 101. Alice Miskimin, The Renaissance Chaucer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 83. Miskimin does note, however, that the pilgrims frequently are understood as veiled by fiction, which helps to protect the poet. 102. This definition of “ironia” is found in H. H. Hudson’s edition of Hoskins’s Directions for Speech and Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1935), p. 30. For discussion of Hoskins’s views and Sidney’s personae, see Alan Hager’s Dazzling Images. 103. See Hoskins, Directions, pp. 36, 41, 42. 104. Yet it should be said that, as Wright notes, the “I” of Renaissance poems never emerges as a complete portrait of the poet despite the fact that a distinction between the speaker and writer is not deliberately drawn; see Poet in the Poem, p. 37. 105. See Wright, Poet in the Poem, p. 37. 106. On the various points, see Elliott, Literary Persona, p. 86. 107. Joseph Bristow makes this assertion in his introduction to The Victorian Poet: Poetics and Persona (London: Croom Helm, 1987), p. 1. 108. The phrases are Arnold’s, which Bristow cites on page 7 of Victorian Poet. 109. This quote is drawn from Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 180–181. 110. See Wright, Poet in the Poem, p. 131–132. 111. See Elliott, Literary Persona, p. 16. 112. Eliot describes the first voice as “the voice of the poet talking to himself—or to nobody,” while the second is the voice of the poet “addressing an audience, whether large or small.” See T. S. Eliot, “The

NOTES

113. 114.

115.

116. 117. 118.

119. 120. 121. 122.

123. 124. 125.

209

Three Voices of Poetry,” in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), p. 96 [96–112]. Wright, Poet in the Poem, pp. 131–132. In fact, in his own recent study of Chaucerian reception, Steve Ellis has argued that Yeats was inspired by Chaucer, whom he saw as a “popular, oral performer” that the Modernist “applauded” for his variety and changes of voice. See Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 35, 37, 45. George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (1915; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 155. R. M. Lumiansky’s wellknown extension of Kittredge’s notion of the dramatic principle, which was written only a few years after Donaldson’s work (discussed in the following text), was also very inf luential in its emphasis on the fictional aspects of Chaucer’s narrative verse. In Lumiansky’s view, the author developed his narratives specifically for character portrayal; thus, many of the individuals we meet strike us as actors in a play whom we know about intimately from their performances (i.e., personae, though the critic does not specifically use this term). Lumiansky contends that Chaucer employed three stages or techniques of dramatic presentation, and describes the links as a sort of “movable stage” present throughout the Tales, with short dramatic scenes. See Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury Tales (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1955), pp. 1, 7–8, 27. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, p. 218. Ibid., pp. 25, 154. This statement is taken from Kittredge’s article (in which he initiates the idea of the Marriage Group) on “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage,” Modern Philology 9.4 (1912): 454 [435–467]. Kittredge also comments that the cynicism of the Merchant’s Tale is “in no sense expressive of Chaucer’s own sentiments, or even of Chaucer’s momentary mood. The cynicism is the Merchant’s. It is no more Chaucer’s than Iago’s cynicism about love is Shakespeare’s.” See Chaucer and His Poetry, p. 17. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, pp. 31, 38, 48. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., pp. 161, 184. On this point, see Elliott, Literary Persona, pp. 11–13. In particular, Dante critics working in the mid-twentieth century were utilizing a similar type of persona-theory, while there were also inf luential analogues in criticism of eighteenth-century satire. Especially important essays from these fields were written by Leo Spitzer and Donaldson’s colleague Maynard Mack, respectively. Reference to Spitzer’s article is given in note 63 above; see also Maynard Mack, “The Muse of Satire,” Yale Review 41.1 (1951): 81, 82 [80–92]. Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” in Speaking of Chaucer, p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. It should be admitted that Donaldson does at least make mention of the relationship of Chaucer’s persona to the personae of Dante, Langland,

210

126.

127. 128.

129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

137. 138.

139. 140.

NOTES

Gower, and even Swift; see Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” in Speaking of Chaucer, p. 8. For a more in-depth discussion of “Chaucer the Pilgrim’s” issues and ramifications, see my essay “Revaluating ‘Chaucer the Pilgrim’ ” and Donaldson’s “Enduring Persona,” Chaucer Review 41.3 (2007): 308–320. E. T. Donaldson, ed., Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader, 2nd edn. (New York: Ronald Press, 1975), pp. 1038–1040. Though Donaldson does seem to favor a direct sort of poetic intentionality, his observations are at times inconsistent or even paradoxical on this issue, as he also suggests that the poet and “Chaucer the Pilgrim” “are not by any means identical in all respects,” and states that “the enormous difference between the poet and the speaker in his poetry is the area in which Chaucer’s poetic vision is broadest and most manifold.” See Chaucer’s Poetry, pp. 1038, 1040. Donaldson, Chaucer’s Poetry, p. 1100; and Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” in Speaking of Chaucer, p. 10. See Elliott, Literary Persona, pp. 35–36. For Elliott, the “doctrine of sincerity” denotes the notion that the writer should be sincere, that he should, somehow, sincerely represent himself and his beliefs for his audience—just as a person’s actions should ref lect his inner being, so what a writer writes should somehow be consonant with what he essentially is or believes. For reference, see footnote 98 above. See Howard, “Chaucer the Man,” 342. Here, I also use phrasing from Howard’s The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 184. Howard, “Chaucer the Man,” 337, 340. Ibid., 343. Ibid., 342, 343. Donaldson particularly was building on Kittredge’s perception of the poet’s narrative detachment. Donaldson, Chaucer’s Poetry, pp. 1040, 1041. Derek Pearsall has been especially adamant in criticizing the notion Chaucerian irony, as is clear in “Epidemic Irony in Modern Approaches to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” in Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1984), pp. 79–89. C. David Benson, “Their Telling Difference: Chaucer the Pilgrim and His Two Contrasting Tales,” Chaucer Review 18.1 (1983): 65 [61–77]. These points are made in C. David Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style: Poetic Variety and Contrast in the Canterbury Tales (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 26–27. Benson, “Their Telling Difference,” 65. In Trigg’s view, recent years have seen a growing trend whereby professional Chaucerians seem willing to make it “more difficult” to hear Chaucer’s voice within his poetry. This may generally be true, but

NOTES

141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150.

151. 152. 153. 154.

155. 156. 157.

211

I would question her contention that these critics display an outright willingness to let go of the supposed “fiction of Chaucerian voice” that “may be the clearest indication yet of the closure, if not the final end, of the regime of authorial presence.” See Trigg, Congenial Souls, p. 14. These phrases are taken from Nolan, “A Poet Ther Was,” 154, 158. Ibid., 154. Lawton states this as his goal in Chaucer’s Narrators (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1985), p. 7. See Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, p. 4. Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., pp. 7, 74. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., pp. 4, 14. Lawton also states that he favors the term “apocryphal voices” to the “heteroglossia” Bakhtin projected for narrative fiction. Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, pp. 8, 47. For reference, see the following works: Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); and Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). Leicester, Disenchanted Self, p. 15. Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 11. See A. J. Minnis, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 3. This definition of the subject is given by Rice and Waugh in Modern Literary Theory: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1989), p. 119. Although Rice and Waugh’s definition is a useful and concise general one, it should be noted that in practice, subjectivity is variously manipulated by a number of critical schools for their own ideological ends. As Jonathan Culler has observed, “psychoanalysis treats the subject not as a unique essence but as the product of intersecting psychic, sexual, and linguistic mechanisms. Marxist theory sees the subject as determined by class position: it either profits from others’ labour or labours for others’ profit. Feminist theory stresses the impact of socially constructed gender roles on making the subject what he or she is. Queer theory has argued that the heterosexual subject is constructed through the repression of the possibility of homosexuality.” See Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 111. Minnis, Oxford Guides, p. 3. Culler, Literary Theory, p. 111. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 121.

212

NOTES

158. Elliott, Literary Persona, p. 17. 159. Quoted in Sheryl Stolberg, “Transcripts Detail Secret Questioning in 50’s by McCarthy,” New York Times May 6, 2003: A1, A20. 160. Quoted in Anita Obermeier, The History and Anatomy of Auctorial SelfCriticism in the European Middle Ages (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), p. 13. 161. Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, pp. 8, 47, 142. 162. Ibid., p. 100. Here, Lawton is specifically referencing the I-narrator of the General Prologue. 163. Bakhtin, Problems, pp. 5, 6. In the citations in this paragraph, I have taken the liberty of removing the frequent italics Bakhtin utilizes in his discourse and have done the same with references from Genette in the following text. 164. Bakhtin, Problems, pp. 40, 59. 165. Genette, Narrative Discourse, pp. 189–190, 243–245. 166. Ibid., p. 162. 167. Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 149, 173. 168. On Butler’s helpful notion of performativity, see especially Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 169. Wright, Poet in the Poem, p. 5. 170. For reference, consult Elliott’s discussion of sociological personae on page 94 of Literary Persona. 171. See Bond, “Composing Yourself,” 101. 172. A similar point is made by Judith Anderson, who observes that a mask typically has holes and therefore inherently implies someone behind it. See Anderson, “Narrative Ref lections: Re-envisaging the Poet in The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene,” in Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. Theresa Krier (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998), p. 94 [87–105]. 173. James L. Battersby, “Narrativity, Self, and Self-Representation,” Narrative 14.1 (2006): 41 [27–44]. 174. Ibid., 42. 175. Ibid., 33. 176. Leo Carruthers, “Narrative Voice, Narrative Framework: The Host as ‘Author’ of the Canterbury Tales,” in Drama, Narrative and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales, ed. Wendy Harding (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), p. 56 [51–67]. Carruthers adds that “It is not the characters who take over, but the author’s creative instinct . . . Great art requires a spontaneity that sometimes defies logic.” 177. See Wright, Poet in the Poem, p. 7. 178. Post-Structuralist theory has had an especially strong effect on the usage (or lack thereof ) of persona-theory by modern literary theorists. But it may be argued that notions such as the sujet or the “death of the author” somehow deny the writer a life apart from that given by his/ her textual readership, or even deny individuality itself. Many medieval poets, in fact, offer useful examples that contradict the writer’s outright

NOTES

179. 180. 181.

182.

183.

184. 185. 186. 187.

188. 189. 190.

191. 192. 193. 194. 195.

213

subjectivity or supposed “death,” since it seems highly irrational to deny the authority of authors who explicitly assert their undying textual affiliation and individuality by supposedly entering “themselves” in their poems as personae. Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, p. 103. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire (New York: New York University Press, 1989), p. 222. Doubrovsky first used the term “autofiction” to describe his novel Fils (1977), and the concept was subsequently taken up by several French writers. For Doubrovsky, autofiction is a fictionalized autobiography, and he uses the term to both highlight and problematize an autobiographical connection between the author and his work. My use of the term is, therefore, meant to respond to this deliberate ambiguity by more fully separating the fictional text from the human author and emphasizing that autofiction is a creative, unreliable story of the self, as the term suggests. See Lawrence de Looze, Pseudo-Autobiography in the Fourteenth Century: Juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), pp. 2, 12, 16, 35. De Looze, Pseudo-Autobiography, p. 37. I have taken the notion of “mimetic ideology” from Stephen Knight, “Ideology in ‘The Franklin’s Tale,’ ” Parergon 28 (1980): 25 [3–35]. We might recall here that mimesis has an important historical relationship to classical persona-theory. See Vitz, Medieval Narrative, p. 38. Henrik Skov Nielsen, “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction,” Narrative 12.2 (2004): 139, 145 [133–150]. Phrasing taken from Sheila Delany, Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 120. See Chauncey Wood, “The Author’s Address to the Reader: Chaucer, Juan Ruiz, and Dante,” in Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture, ed. Patrick Gallacher and Helen Damico (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 58 [51–60]. Zink, Invention of Literary Subjectivity, p. 158. De Looze makes the same point in addressing “Chaucer the Pilgrim” from the Canterbury Tales. See De Looze, Pseudo-Autobiography, p. 138. Heale, Autobiography and Authorship, p. 2. In actuality, the first citation of “autobiography” provided by the OED is from 1797, although the remainder of the early examples are drawn from the nineteenth century. Zink, Invention of Literary Subjectivity, pp. 157–158. Ibid., p. 157. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 164. See H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 63. Thomas Garbáty makes a similar assertion in “The Degradation of Chaucer’s ‘Geffrey,’ ” PMLA 89.1 (1974): 103 [97–104].

214

NOTES

196. See Derek Brewer, “The Reconstruction of Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer Proceedings, no. 1 (1984): 6, 13 [3–19]. 197. See Elliott, Literary Persona, 84. 198. Ellmann, Yeats, p. 5. 199. Walker has set forth her “persona criticism” in “Persona Criticism and the Death of the Author,” in Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism, ed. William H. Epstein (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991), pp. 109–121. I cite above from pages 109, 114, 119. 200. See Walker, “Persona Criticism,” 119. 201. Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, p. 142. 202. See Roy Sommer’s assessment of present-day narrative theories in “Beyond (Classical) Narratology: New Approaches to Narrative Theory,” European Journal of English Studies 8.1 (2004): 6 [3–11]. 203. Sommer, “Beyond (Classical) Narratology,” 11. 204. Carruthers, “Narrative Voice,” p. 56. 205. For this conceptualization, see Tison Pugh, Queering Medieval Genres (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 158. 206. See Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 47. 207. See Glenn Burger, “Queer Theory,” in Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed. Steve Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 436, 437 [432–447]. 208. See Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, p. 5. 209. See Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 22. Sinfield is not specifically discussing the persona with these words, but the ideological interpretation of various literary narratives. 210. Phrasing taken from Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. xii. 211. The Prologue to Sir Thopas, VII.693–95. 212. General Prologue, I.814. My usage of the term “juggement” in the following sentence is taken from line 818. 213. Among the lyrics, I find the narrative positioning and potential ramifications of autofiction most fascinating in “Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn,” “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan,” “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton,” and “The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse.”

2 Getting a Life: Biographical Constructions of Chaucer the Man 1. Derek Brewer, “Images of Chaucer 1386–1900,” in Chaucer and Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature, ed. D. S. Brewer (London: Nelson’s University Paperbacks, 1970), p. 240 [240–270].

NOTES

215

2. F. R. H. Du Boulay, “The Historical Chaucer,” in Writers and Their Background: Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Derek Brewer (London: G. Bell, 1974), p. 55 [33–57]. 3. Malcolm Bradbury, “The Telling Life: Some Thoughts on Literary Biography,” in The Troubled Face of Biography, ed. Eric Homberger and John Charmley (London: Macmillan Press, 1988), p. 135 [131–140]. 4. It is perhaps worth noting that Barthes himself has written a criticism of Chateaubriand’s life of Rancé, in which, interestingly enough, no mention whatsoever of the author’s “death” is made. Here, he argues that Chateaubriand’s biography carries a typically Post-Structuralist “double wavelength” of meaning, unstable and f luid, which represents two worlds at once united and separated. Although it would be quite a stretch to say that Barthes’s disregard of his earlier authorial theorem indicates that he had tempered his belief in the writer’s “death,” his evasion does at least seem significant. See “Chateaubriand: Life of Rancé,” in New Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), pp. 49, 52 [41–54]. 5. Stanley Fish, “Biography and Intention,” in Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism, ed. William H. Epstein (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991), p. 11 [9–16]. 6. Fish, “Biography and Intention,” pp. 12, 13. Of course, the “authorfunction” was a theoretical notion of Michel Foucault’s. 7. Fish, “Biography and Intention,” p. 13. “Transcendental anonymity” is a term Fish borrows from Foucault, which the latter uses in his discussion of “What Is an Author?” 8. See Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 123. 9. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 148 [142–148]. 10. See Eric Homberger and John Charmley’s Introduction to Troubled Face of Biography, p. xv. 11. Polhemus and Henkle have argued this point about fiction in particular, calling the relationship between fiction and life the “news of the novel.” See Robert Polhemus and Roger Henkle, eds. Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 19. 12. Donald Howard, Chaucer and the Medieval World (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. xv. 13. See Richard Holmes, “Biography: Inventing the Truth,” in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 19. 14. John Worthen, “The Necessary Ignorance of the Biographer,” in The Art of Literary Biography, Batchelor, p. 237 [227–244]. Humphrey Carpenter adds that it would be possible for a biographer to write several different “lives” of the same person, variously using the extant material to “tell a very different story.” See Carpenter, “Learning About Ourselves: Biography as Autobiography,” in The Art of Literary Biography, Batchelor, p. 274 [267–279].

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15. For a discussion of these issues, see W. L. Warren, “Biography and the Medieval Historian,” in Medieval Historical Writing in the Christian and Islamic Worlds, ed. D. O. Morgan (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1982), p. 9 [5–18]. 16. See Catherine Peters, “Secondary Lives: A Biography in Context,” in The Art of Literary Biography, Batchelor, p. 44 [43–56]. 17. See Paul Murray Kendall, The Art of Biography (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965), p. 6. 18. See Victoria Glendinning, “Lies and Silences,” in The Troubled Face of Biography, Homberger and Charmley, p. 57 [49–62]. 19. David Carlson is one scholar who has been very frank about the possibility that Chaucer was less important in his time than many have presumed, given that his famous ransom shows that he was “worth less than a horse,” for instance, and also the fact that in the early documentary records “Chaucer’s name always appears buried deep in long lists of other names, routinely well down such lists whenever there is a discernible prioritizing of them” so that “Chaucer’s significance is that he had no significance here.” See Chaucer’s Jobs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 2–4. 20. I quote from Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction, p. 79. I have removed Abbott’s original italics. 21. Nevill Coghill, The Poet Chaucer (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. ix. 22. The epithet “Fadir Chaucer” is one of the reverent phrases used to describe the poet in the years following his death. See, for instance, the description provided by Thomas Hoccleve in his Regement of Princes, which is cited in Caroline Spurgeon’s Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion 1357–1900, 3 vols. (1925; repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1960), 1:1.22. In the pages that follow, I rely heavily on Spurgeon’s vast resource, which ambitiously sought to collect all the references to Chaucer since his death and has provided us with invaluable information about the poet’s reception history. Recently, Jackson Campbell Boswell and Sylvia Wallace Holton have published a collection largely intended to supplement and emend Spurgeon’s project because “many allusions to Chaucer that do not appear in Spurgeon have come to light” since the publication of her massive study. Cf. Chaucer’s Fame in England: STC Chauceriana 1475–1640 (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2004), p. xi. 23. I quote from the eminently useful Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 1:1. Brewer designed these volumes as a response and supplement to Spurgeon’s work and sought to present the complete, significant passages from the texts he deemed to be properly “critical,” rather than simply providing a collection of any and all allusions to the poet (as per Spurgeon’s intent). 24. See Howard, Chaucer and the Medieval World, p. xii. 25. This comment is taken from George Kane’s important biography titled Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 1. 26. Deschamps may have been the first to praise Chaucer’s for his writing, as seen in a poem that asks for the “wise” and learned Chaucer to consider

NOTES

27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

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some verse of his own, and lauds the Englishman as “great translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer.” See Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 1:41. Here I cite phrasing from Usk’s Testament of Love, which praises (among other things) Chaucer’s “ymagynacion in wytte and in good reason of sentence” that surpasses all other poetic “makers,” and offers the now-famous description of the author as “the noble philosophical poete in Englissh.” For reference, see Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 1:43. Lydgate designated the poet “Maister Chaucer,” who put “the golde dewe dropes of speche and eloquence / Into our tunge.” See Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 1:46, 48. I also use phrasing from Miskimin, The Renaissance Chaucer, p. 90. Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 5. Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 153. Jacques Le Goff, “The Whys and Ways of Writing a Biography: The Case of Saint Louis,” Exemplaria 1.1 (1989): 215, 217 [207–225]. Le Goff does not, of course, specifically discuss Chaucer, but his ideas concerning the “lives” of noted medieval figures are appropriate for the poet. For a brief discussion of Leland’s life, see Eleanor Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (1908; repr., New York: Peter Smith, 1933), p. 7. See John Watkins’s useful discussion of this idea in “ ‘Wrastling for This World’: Wyatt and the Tudor Canonization of Chaucer,” in Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, Krier, p. 23 [21–39]. R. F. Yeager makes a similar observation in discussing William Thynne’s Workes of Geffray Chaucer, the edition of the corpus cited by Leland. See “Literary Theory at the Close of the Middle Ages: William Caxton and William Thynne,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 6 (1984): 151 [135–164]. The Latin reads “Hinc acutus dialecticus, hinc dulcis rhetor, hinc lepidus poeta, hinc gravis philosophus, hinc ingeniosus mathematicus . . . hinc denique sanctus theologus evasit”; I quote the Latin from Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 3:4.545. As Brewer notes, Leland’s view that Chaucer’s learning was garnered from an Oxford education is itself an ideologically loaded premise, since there is no extant evidence for any such schooling. It might also be argued that Leland’s “Chaucer” ref lects his wish to please Henry by establishing a pious figure that fits the king’s Protestant religious campaign, in addition to his nationalistic intentions (a possibility that the notion of Chaucer-as-theologian might fulfill). See Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 1:91. Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 1:93. In the Latin, “Nunc lectori ut prodesset nervis omnibus contendens, & vicissim ut eundem delectaret sedulo curans: nec antea finem fecit, quam linguam nostram ad eam puritatem, ad eam eloquentiam, ad eam denique brevitatem ac gratiam perduxerat, ut inter expolitas gentium linguas posset recte quidem connumerari” (Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 3:4.15).

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37. Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual, p. 1. The “legends” of Chaucer would alter and multiply over time, and thus I have favored the plural of this term to the singular “legend” referred to by Spurgeon. 38. See Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:cv. 39. Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual, p. 1. 40. John Bale’s subsequent biographies of Chaucer simply reproduce Leland’s conceptions, some word for word, and add a few more “legends,” including the poet’s so-called “disapproval” of monks; the assertion of knighthood for the author, which led to a strong belief in Chaucer’s nobility throughout the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries; and the importance of the perceived connection between Chaucer and Gower. See Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 3:4.21, 26. 41. Kevin Pask takes a similar position in The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 22. 42. This declaration is taken from the biography written by John Pits, who modeled his “life” on Leland’s “Legend.” I translate the Latin from Pits’s Relationum Historicarum de Rebus Anglicis tomus primus (1613), with the phrasing drawn from the following observations: “erat Poëta elegans, & qui Poësim Anglicam ita illustrauit, vt Anglicus Homerus meritò haberetur” and “attulerunt certè he duo viri nostro idiomati tantum splendoris & ornamenti, quantum ante illos prorsus nemo.” Quotations cited from Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 3:4.63, 64. 43. This description of “self-fashioning” is drawn from William J. Kennedy’s discussion in “Humanist Classifications of Poetry among the Arts and Sciences,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 91, 94 [91–97]. The term itself is taken from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 44. Glyn P. Norton, ed., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 3. 45. See J. A. Burrow’s comments on the poet’s reception during the period, in Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 35. I have used the phrase “chorus of praise” elsewhere in this chapter, a common descriptor in studies of Chaucer’s reception that Burrow himself prominently utilizes. 46. See Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 1:120. 47. See Clare Kinney, “Thomas Speght’s Renaissance Chaucer and the Solaas of Sentence in Troilus and Criseyde,” in Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, Krier, p. 66 [66–84]. 48. Tim Machan, “Speght’s Works and the Invention of Chaucer,” Text 8 (1995): 148, 149 [145–170]. As Helen Cooper puts it, Speght’s edition is perhaps the most notable of the sixteenth-century editions of Chaucer’s complete works that “indicate his canonization, almost as the patron saint

NOTES

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

219

of English poetry”; see Cooper, “Chaucerian Representation,” in New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2003), p. 12 [7–29]. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:cvi–cvii. It should also be noted that in addition to his use of documentary records, Speght was more circumspect than previous biographers, which is seen, for example, when he challenges the belief in Chaucer’s nobility by saying that (despite Bale’s assertion to the contrary), “in the opinion of some Heralds (otherwise then his vertues and learning commended him) hee descended not of any great house, which they gather by his Armes”; see Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual, p. 19. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:cvii. Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual, p. 28. In section 1.2 of Chapter 1, I offer words from Speght as distinct evidence for an awareness of persona-theory during the Renaissance. Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual, pp. 19, 21. This is Machan’s view in “Speght’s Works,” 155, 161, 169. Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual, p. 28. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:1.148. This quotation is from the preliminary address printed in the 1598 edition. Beaumont’s letter is presented in full in Boswell and Holton, Chaucer’s Fame in England, pp. 159–161. Apparently, this epistle was written by Francis Beaumont, the Master of the Charterhouse, and not the wellknown dramatist. A thorough discussion of the various manifestations of this perspective has been offered by Linda Georgianna in “The Protestant Chaucer,” in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 55–69. More generally, this period is marked by a series of modernizations of the poet’s “archaic” Middle English, a sort of poetic refurbishment that would become a mainstay of Chaucerian reception. The reason seventeenth-century writers felt the need to rewrite Chaucer’s texts is quite simple: his language, even more so than we have seen in the preceding era, was perceived as obscure and difficult to understand, so that critics felt the need to respond by “revitalizing” the archaic English literary past and refining it for future consumption. Italics mine. See Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 3:4.79. The Latin phrasing describes Chaucer as “dignitate auctus” and states “sanè is est, quem antiquis Latii poetis non immerito conferre possemus.” See Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 3:4.79. In the Latin, “licet id in Chauceri laudem haud parùm cedat, quod tam rudi aevo Priscorum Poetarum Veneres si non assecutus, saltèm imitatus fuerit, & horridiusculam linguae Anglicanae (qualis tunc temporis obtinuit) duriciem, Carmine ligatam, amoeniorem atque elegantiorem reddiderit; primus enim omnium Linguae nostrati sordes excussit, nitorem intulit, & largâ vocum molliorum aliundè invectarum supellectile ditavit.”

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61. See Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 3:4.79. The Latin reads, “in rebus denique Theologicis apprime versatus.” 62. Translation mine, from the Latin as printed by Spurgeon in Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 3:4.79–80: “hinc graviores Ecclesiæ Romanæ superstitiones & errores acerbè sæpiùs vellicat; corruptam ineptissimis commentis Disciplinam Ecclesiasticam luget; Cleri luxuriam & ignaviam castigat, in Ordines autem Mendicantes projectissimo ubique odio invehitur, quorum hypocrisin, ambitionem, aliaque vitia turpissima, aliquoties toâ operâ, nullibi vero non oblatâ quâvis occasione, acerrime insectatur.” 63. An engaging discussion of the creation of “Father Chaucer” by his early readers is offered by Christopher Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 179, 211. 64. Ashley Thorndike, “Shakespeare in America,” Proceedings of the British Academy 13 (1927): 156 [153–172]. 65. In Trigg’s words, “the terms of Dryden’s preface are echoed again and again. Its discussion of Chaucer’s language, his sensibility, his comprehensive interest in human nature, and his comic realism are all deeply inf luential in subsequent criticism.” See Trigg, Congenial Souls, p. 154. 66. Dryden’s comments do not amount to a full and comprehensive “biography,” as Spurgeon categorizes them, but they do include many biographical observations that merit their discussion on these pages. The following are the Chaucerian poems modernized by Dryden for the Fables (note the inclusion of a spurious text): the Cock and the Fox (NPT), the Flower and the Leaf, the Wife of Bath’s Tale, and the Character of a Good Parson (“imitated from Chaucer and Inlarg’d”). 67. Trigg, Congenial Souls, p. 145. 68. Trigg concurs, commenting that it is “widely accepted” that Dryden’s “Preface” “inaugurates modern Chaucer criticism,” as it “consolidates a number of strands in the late medieval and early modern response to Chaucer. It also provides a founding moment for modern criticism.” See Trigg, Congenial Souls, pp. xix–xx, 145. 69. See Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:1.276, 282. 70. Dryden has, in fact, been called an outright “poetic nationalist,” who sought to use classical criteria not just to criticize, but to refine and harmonize diverse traditions in order to construct an English canon rivaling the classics. On these points, see James Sambrook, “Poetry, 1660–1740,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 4: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 92 [75–116]; and Joshua Scodel, “Seventeenthcentury English Literary Criticism: Classical Values, English Texts and Contexts,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 3: The Renaissance, Norton, p. 554 [543–554]. 71. Dryden’s nationalism also is evident when he notes that “as I am, and always have been studious to promote the Honour of my Native Country,

NOTES

72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

221

so I soon resolv’d to put their Merits to the Trial, by turning some of the Canterbury Tales into our Language, as it is now refin’d.” See Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:1.272, 273. Franklin E. Court offers an insightful discussion of the study of English literature in the eighteenth century, which “was a way to teach conduct, not . . . as a measure of ‘polite learning’ designated for the sons of the aristocracy, but as a way to transcend class-based distinctions of refinement and to promote English citizenship.” See Court, Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750–1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 20. See Sambrook, “Poetry,” p. 88. Ibid., p. 90. See Scodel, “Seventeenth-century English,” p. 554. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:1.276, 278. Dryden proceeds to comment further on the “realism” of the pilgrims’ speech, and the “natural” comedy and pathos of their characters. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:1.278–279. However, in his very brief, purely biographical words about Chaucer the Man in the Fables, Dryden, too, has moments where he falls into the easy trap of perpetuating certain aspects of the “Legends.” Thus, he agrees that (among other things) Chaucer was a poet for, and hence “favour’d” by, Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV, an author who nonetheless took a political fall in conjunction with the fortunes of his “Brother-in Law” John of Gaunt. See Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:1.277. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:1.277–278. Italics mine. Trigg, Congenial Souls, p. 148. This idea of Chaucer as an example or teacher is appropriate within the common Neoclassical interest in the effects of literature on its audience. The full title of Urry’s edition is The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Compared With Former Editions, and Many Valuable MSS. Out of Which, Three Tales Are Added, Which Were Never before Printed (London, 1721). Pask, Emergence of the English Author, pp. 51, 52. The prefatory material in Urry’s Works is unpaginated. Dart specifically mentions Chaucer’s supposed interactions with Petrarch, Boccaccio, Lydgate, and others. This observation naturally brings up the poet’s religion, which usually goes hand in hand with biographical commentary about his cultivated position as a noble man of letters. Hence, Dart seeks to further ensure the poet’s prudent Protestantism, explaining that “there can be no doubt of Chaucer’s intimacy with Wickliffe,” so that the purported fact that he “was a Favourer of the Lollards” is clearly “evident from several places in his Writings, where he bitterly inveighs against the Priests and Fryers,” although “his resentments were chief ly against the personal Vices of the Clergy, not their Doctrines.”

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87. Dart states that “many particulars relating to our Author having, through the negligence of our fore-fathers, been suffered to sink in oblivion, it is the more necessary to preserve what remains of him, and to attempt the recovery of some parts of his History: I shall therefore digest the confused common places left concerning him in as regular a method as I can, and with such additions as have been rescued from Time endeavour to clear up his Birth, and by the assistance of such particular Æra’s as are on Record concerning him, trace him through the most remarkable Passages of his Life.” 88. Despite his promotion of these “legends,” Dart’s inf luential biography should be recognized as the first life of Chaucer wherein the poet’s key testimony in the Scope-Grosvenor trial is relayed, and also for providing a more accurate and detailed discussion of the poet’s parentage and administrative work. 89. I have used the second edition of Tyrwhitt’s opus, entitled The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. To Which Are Added an Essay on His Language and Versification, and an Introductory Discourse Together with Notes and a Glossary (Oxford, 1798). His biographical comments are offered in “An Abstract of the Historical Passages of the Life of Chaucer.” 90. In full, Tyrwhitt’s comment (which references the presumption of the author’s early educational travels broad) reads, “I must observe, that these travels in France rest entirely upon the authority of Leland, whose account is full of inconsistencies.” Similar sentiments are found elsewhere in Tyrwhitt’s writing. See “An Abstract,” in The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, p. xviii. 91. Tyrwhitt, “An Abstract,” p. xxii. 92. The pervasiveness of the “Legends” is undeniably seen here, despite the fact that Tyrwhitt employed a more rigorous editorial method than was the norm (especially in terms of manuscript collation), and rejected a number of spurious texts, including The Tale of Gamelyn and Beryn, Jack Upland, Lamentation of Mary Magdalen, The Testament of Cressida, as well as other longer works and several miscellaneous ballads. Though Tyrwhitt’s work does support some key “legendary” texts and notions, his general scholarly caution remains evident when he explains that a biographer should not freely deduce “fact” from fiction: “we must be cautious . . . of supposing allusions which Chaucer never intended, or of arguing from pieces which he never wrote, as if they were his.” See “An Abstract,” pp. xxiii–xxiv. Charlotte Brewer offers a useful discussion of Tyrwhitt’s editorial work in Editing Piers Plowman: The Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 54. 93. As I shall discuss in chapter 5, a common result of this viewpoint is to read the characterization of “Chaucer the Pilgrim” in the Thopas-Melibee link as a “true” self-description. 94. On these points, see Arthur Johnston’s Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London: Athlone Press, 1964), p. 218.

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95. As a result of the emergent belief in pure emotion, what mattered most for many Romantic critics was a sympathetic understanding of the individuality and creative spirit manifest in the writer’s mind, and thus we see widespread support for the notion of the “sublime.” See Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, “Language Theory and the Art of Understanding,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 5, ed. Marshall Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 163 [162–184]. 96. See Marshall Brown’s discussion in the introduction to The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 5, pp. 1, 2. 97. In fact, the title as it appears in full is indicative of both the scope of this biographical behemoth, as well as some of its ideological biases: Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Early English Poet: Including Memoirs of His Near Friend and Kinsman, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster: With sketches of the Manners, Opinions, Arts and Literature of England in the Fourteenth Century, 2 vols. (London, 1803). 98. Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1:vii. 99. In light of the recorded dates for some of Chaucer’s travels abroad, several of the newfound government documents Godwin was working with explicitly contradict the “legendary” story of the poet’s exile and imprisonment, so it is apparent that the biographer chose to change around dates and facts in order that the old story of exile and imprisonment would hold. 100. See Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer 2:299, 419, 567, 569. 101. This statement is offered in the very first paragraph of the biography (Preface, 1:v–vi). 102. See Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1:4, 205. It should be noted that in this instance, Godwin is referring to the spurious Court of Love. A useful discussion of Godwin’s biography and its method is provided by Hammond in Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual, pp. 38–40; see also Elena Yatzeck, “Godwin’s Life of Chaucer: Making Virtue of Necessity,” Charles Lamb Bulletin 84 (1993): 132 [126–135]. 103. Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2:80, 200. Italics mine. 104. Ibid., 2:558. Italics mine. 105. Ibid., 2:58. 106. The Schmitz life is entitled “A Life of Geoffrey Chaucer” and is found on pages cvii–cxxxvii of The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized, ed. Richard Hengist Horne (London, 1841). 107. Schmitz, “A Life of Geoffrey Chaucer,” pp. cvii, cviii. Italics mine. In the first reference, Schmitz is typically citing the spurious Testament of Love as evidence. 108. Schmitz, “A Life of Geoffrey Chaucer,” pp. xccviii–cxxix. 109. Ibid., p. cxxxvi. Italics mine. These comments are made in reference to Chaucer’s humorous self-presentation in the Prologue to Sir Thopas, which I discuss more fully in chapter 5. 110. Schmitz, “A Life of Geoffrey Chaucer,” pp. cxx–cxxi. 111. Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual, p. 1.

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112. Nicholas Harris Nicolas, Memoir of Chaucer, in The Aldine Edition of the British Poets: The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (London, 1845), pp. 9–107. 113. This is Hammond’s description of the work on page 40 of Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual. 114. Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual, p. 40. Nicolas showed that during the time “Chaucer” was supposedly in exile, the Man himself was living in London and regularly receiving his pension, that he held his customs offices throughout the duration from 1382–1386, and that in August 1386, when the poet was allegedly imprisoned in the Tower, he was in truth employed as a member of parliament for the county of Kent. Despite these welcome advances, we must note that Nicolas still believed in Chaucer’s authorship of The Testament of Love and other spurious works (including The Flower and the Leafe). For discussion, see Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:cxii. 115. Nicolas, Memoir, pp. 9–10. 116. Ibid., p. 70. 117. Ibid., p. 69. 118. Ibid., pp. 71, 90. Italics mine. 119. Nicolas, Memoir, p. 19. Italics mine. 120. Nicolas, Memoir, p. 19. 121. See my discussion of these terms and kindred concepts in section 1.4 of chapter 1. 122. Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual, p. 1. The thorough research of the Chaucer Society certainly merits recognition here, as it began periodically publishing the documentary records of the author’s life in 1875, which buttressed the type of life-writing called for by Nicolas. In 1900, these records were collectively published as Life Records of Chaucer, a work that was later augmented by the now-standard edition completed by Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, titled Chaucer LifeRecords (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). 123. This is the view of René Wellek in his comprehensive History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, Volume 3: The Age of Transition (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), p. 87. 124. See Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 14. 125. See Brewer, “Images of Chaucer,” 267, 269. The issue of Chaucer’s “Englishness” is usefully discussed in Pearsall’s “Chaucer and Englishness,” Proceedings of the British Academy 101 (1998): 77–99. Pearsall believes that it is not the imputation of national qualities by the Victorians that is most important, but the appropriation of Chaucer as a possessor of particular qualities and national pride (p. 77). 126. I quote from Thomas A. Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 69. I also draw from Franklin E. Court, The Scottish Connection: The Rise of English Literary Study in

NOTES

127.

128. 129.

130.

131. 132.

133.

134. 135. 136.

137. 138. 139. 140. 141.

225

Early America (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), pp. 46–47; and Court, Institutionalizing English Literature, p. 132. The following volumes contain Morley’s various biographical accounts of Chaucer: English Writers, Volume 1, Part 2, From the Conquest to Chaucer (London, 1866); English Writers, Volume 2, Part 1, From Chaucer to Dunbar (1867); and English Writers: An Attempt towards a History of English Literature, Volume 5, The Fourteenth Century (London, 1890). Morley, English Writers, 1:773. Morley, English Writers, 2:160. In a move that seems to typify this stage of Morley’s writing, the biographer chooses to work around the dates of the poet’s life (not unlike Godwin), which allows him to argue that Chaucer’s imprisonment did occur, it just happened after the Merciless Parliament rather than during the previous several years; see English Writers, 2:273. Hertzberg discounted that the Testament of Love was part of Chaucer’s canon in the extensive introduction to his German translation of Chaucer’s major works, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Geschichten (Hildberghausen, 1866). Morley, English Writers, 5:85. Though Morley has been compelled to correct his mistakes as a result of the new documentary records brought to light through Nicolas’s Memoir and the research of the Chaucer Society, he chooses not to discuss his previous misconceptions or prior approach. Minto’s biography is found in Chapter 1 of Characteristics of English Poets from Chaucer to Shirley, in a chapter entitled “Geoffrey Chaucer I. His Life, Character, and Works.” I used the second edition of this work (Edinburgh and London, 1885), where the biography appears on pages 1–17. Minto, Characteristics of English Poets, pp. 4, 8, 9. Ibid., p. 9. Adolphus William Ward, Chaucer (London, 1879), p. 46. As David Amigoni has observed, nineteenth-century life-writing—including, or especially, the famous “English Men of Letters” series of biographies— can be conceived broadly as a type of rhetoric that responds to, and hopes to patriotically shape attitudes toward, the language and ideals of culture. Cf. Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 24. Ward, Chaucer, p. 1. Ibid., pp. 145–146. Ibid., p. 145. Ibid., p. 66. Thomas R. Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer: His Life and Writings, 3 vols. (1892; repr. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962). Lounsbury presents his own biography in the first chapter, entitled “The Life of Chaucer.” Volume I contains the chapters in question, Chapter I spanning pages 3–126, and Chapter II (on the “Legend”) pages 129–224.

226

NOTES

142. Elsewhere, I have discussed Lounsbury as being a prominent example of an American critic who consciously sought to break from the traditions of British literary scholarship. See my discussion in “Worlds Apart? Chaucerian (Re)Constructions in Britain and America,” in Translaio, or the Transmission of Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Laura H. Hollengreen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 229–253. 143. Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, 1:xv. Lounsbury adds that “the biography of Chaucer is built upon doubts and thrives upon perplexities” and also comments that “what we call the lives of our earlier authors consists in most cases of little else than the discussion of disputed points that can never be settled, the weighing of probabilities where certainty can never be assured, or, if nothing better offers, the relation of events in which they have borne, or may have borne, a part.” See Studies in Chaucer, 1:4, 11. 144. Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, 1:xiv. 145. Lounsbury pointedly adds that “knowledge is the mother of confidence; but so likewise is ignorance.” On these points, see Studies in Chaucer, 1:4, 52, 175. 146. Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, 1:156. 147. Ibid., 1.156, 177. 148. Ibid., 1:217. 149. Ibid., 1:216. 150. Walter W. Skeat, ed., The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), 1:lii, liii. Skeat’s biography encompasses pages ix–lxi of the first volume. Despite such generally sage critical observations, it should be noted that Skeat’s life of Chaucer does, at times, confidently offer unprovable (and sometimes fallible) presumptions. For instance, he holds fast to the belief that Chaucer actually met Petrarch, and, concerning the poet’s alleged financial problems, remarks, “it is pleasant to think that, as far as money matters were concerned, he ended his days in comparative ease.” See The Complete Works, 1:xxv, xliv–xlv. 151. Skeat, The Complete Works, 1:lii. 152. Ibid., 1:liii. 153. Louis Althusser’s inf luential concept of ideology was proposed in his 1970 study titled “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” 154. John Matthews Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer (London: G. Bell, 1926), p. ix. 155. Brief ly, the other main current of Chaucerian life-writing that Manly supports pertains to the poet’s education and eventual courtly occupations, which, it is argued, can logically be explained by assuming that he was educated at the Inner Temple, as versions of the “Legends” asserted. In making this claim, Manly is reliant largely on the old record of “Master Buckley,” who had been cited many years earlier by Speght as offering proof of Chaucer’s “beating of a friar in Fleet Street” while serving at the Inner Temple. 156. Manly, Some New Light, p. 73.

NOTES

227

157. Ibid., pp. 83, 93. As Steve Ellis has noted, Manly’s study may be seen as “both a symptom and a stimulus to the empiricizing obsession” of this time-period, when several scholars showed an interest in “empirical” things like the topography of the Canterbury pilgrimage. See Ellis, Chaucer at Large, pp. 29, 30. 158. Manly, Some New Light, p. 295. Derek Brewer is one contemporary scholar who agrees with Manly’s conception of Chaucerian “realism,” stating that several of the characters “indisputably” refer to living people and arguing that “we will never get closer to ordinary fourteenthcentury life” than in the verse of Chaucer, whose Tales provide “a remarkable panorama of England in the fourteenth century as ref lected in the many facets of Chaucer’s mind.” See Brewer, Chaucer and His World (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978), pp. 197, 199, 200. 159. John Gardner, The Life and Times of Chaucer (1977; repr. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1999), p. 3. Italics mine. 160. Gardner, The Life and Times, p. 19. 161. Ibid., p. 213. 162. Ibid., p. 314. 163. Howard, Chaucer and the Medieval World, p. xv. 164. Ibid., p. xi. 165. Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery (London: Methuen, 2003) is a collaboration undertaken by Terry Jones, Robert Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher, and Juliette Dor that concedes that “most of what follows is speculation. The evidence is mostly circumstantial, and we have to admit that we shall probably never really know the truth” (p. 1). The study goes on to consider the possibility that Chaucer was murdered in the year 1400, concluding that “if Chaucer were, indeed, the victim of a state-arranged ‘disappearance,’ then we might do worse than point the finger of suspicion at . . . Thomas Arundel” (p. 360). 166. Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 3. 167. Ibid., pp. 2, 4, 5. 168. Though it is extraneous to the specific interests of this section, it is worth mentioning that Pearsall brief ly offers an interesting way of reading Chaucer’s life that might be useful for future biographical accounts. Pearsall admits the likelihood that he will find the poet a “decent sort of fellow,” and as a result, suggests that the best way to approach the author may be to consciously create a sort of negative prejudice against him, which, when balanced against the inherently positive bias of the biographer, may initiate a more “true” depiction, or at least some fresh biographical possibilities. See The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 8. 169. Paul Strohm recently has made a similar observation with specific regard to applications of critical theory, saying that “the right use of theory is not to ‘settle things.’ ” See Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 213.

228

NOTES

3

Chaucer Speaks: Memoirs of the Man?

1. Steven Connor, “The Ethics of the Voice,” in Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility, ed. Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 235 [220–237]. 2. Tobin Siebers, The Ethics of Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 2. 3. I have brief ly discussed Horace’s inf luential assertion in section 1.2 of chapter 1. In the Latin, his famous phrase (from the Ars poetica) reads “aut prodesse volunt aut delectare.” 4. General Prologue, I.789; The Miller’s Prologue, I.3180. 5. “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” 7; Chaucer’s Retraction, X.1085, 1088. 6. Siebers, Ethics of Criticism, p. 1. 7. Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods, “Introduction: Ethics and Intellectuals,” in Critical Ethics, Rainsford and Woods, p. 4 [1–19]. 8. Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 421. 9. Alfred David, “Chaucer’s Good Counsel to Scogan,” Chaucer Review 3.4 (1969): 266 [265–274]. 10. I quote from the introduction to Alfred David’s useful A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Volume V: The Minor Poems, Part One, ed. George B. Pace and Alfred David (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), p. 8. 11. Jay Ruud, “Many a Song and Many a Leccherous Lay”: Tradition and Individuality in Chaucer’s Lyric Poetry (New York: Garland, 1992), p. 13. 12. Booth, The Company We Keep, p. 11. “Ethical criticism” is a description used by Siebers in Ethics of Criticism, p. 220. 13. This headlink is taken from the edition printed by one Julian Notary ca. 1499–1502. I use the transcription from Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:1.47. 14. Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2:558. 15. These views are found in Scattergood’s examination of “The Short Poems” in the Oxford Guides to Chaucer, Minnis, pp. 497, 498; and his essay “Chaucer a Bukton and Proverbs,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 31 (1987): 106 [98–107]. 16. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, p. 34; I also draw from Kittredge, “Chaucer’s Envoy to Bukton,” Modern Language Notes 24.1 (1909): 15 [14–15]. 17. Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 184. 18. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 3, 25. Trigg cites Sedgwick’s theories in condemnation of patriarchal perspectives of this very kind, characterizing both “Bukton” and the “Envoy to Scogan” as supporting a Chaucerian reading community that is “interpellated as homosocial (masculine and male-identified)” by virtue of a “shared anxiety” and a “homosocial” kind of identification. See Congenial Souls, pp. 28, 33.

NOTES

229

19. See Arthur Gilman’s biography of Chaucer in The Poetical Works of Chaucer, 3 vols. (Boston, 1880), 1:lxxxviii. 20. David, A Variorum Edition, p. 140. 21. Jane Chance, “Chaucerian Irony in the Verse Epistles ‘Wordes Unto Adam,’ ‘Lenvoy a Scogan,’ and ‘Lenvoy a Bukton,’ ” Papers on Language and Literature 21(1985): 125 [115–128]. 22. Ibid., 126, 127. 23. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, p. 36. Howard similarly comments that the voice in “Scogan” is not a persona, “but Chaucer himself addressing a trusted younger friend.” See Chaucer and the Medieval World, p. 464. 24. Chance, “Chaucerian Irony,” 120, 122–123. 25. Jay Ruud, “Chaucer’s Envoy to Scogan: ‘Tullius Kyndenesse’ and the Law of Kynde,” Chaucer Review 20.4 (1986): 327, 328 [323–330]; see also Ruud, “Many a Song and Many a Leccherous Lay,” p. 107. 26. Scattergood, “The Short Poems,” p. 509. 27. John Scattergood, “Old Age, Love, and Friendship in Chaucer’s Envoy to Scogan,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 35 (1991): 99 [92–101]. See also Scattergood, “The Short Poems,” p. 510. 28. David, “Chaucer’s Good Counsel,” 266, 270. 29. Ibid., 272, 273. 30. This is the view of Richard Horvath in “Chaucer’s Epistolary Poetic: The Envoys to Bukton and Scogan,” Chaucer Review 37.2 (2002): 174 [173–189]. Horvath offers perhaps the most persuasive case for reading these two ostensibly private poems as public works, saying that the poet addresses “a private individual in terms that imply a wider audience may be listening” (p. 179) and arguing that “their ingenuity lies in their capacity to recreate an intimate bond between the speaker and a host of readers . . . recipients not of his actual friendship but of its simulacrum, a cultivated rapport between poet and audience in the broader sense” (p. 185). 31. As Paul Strohm has noted, “the dedicatee of a poem is not necessarily the sole member of its implied audience, or even very close to the center of that audience,” which makes the scholarly search for Chaucer and his friends in/surrounding this work (and others like it) an even more difficult critical task. See Strohm, “Chaucer’s Audience(s): Fictional, Implied, Intended, Actual,” Chaucer Review 18.2 (1983): 141 [137–145]. Strohm’s view apparently was inf luenced by Anne Middleton’s notion of “public poetry,” which describes a common poetic voice in the vernacular that “defined man as a social being, and unlike its private counterpart, was turned outward to public expression” and “is offered not as the realization of an individual identity, but as the realization of the human condition.” See Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum 53 (1978): 96, 109 [94–114]. 32. See Scattergood’s summary of these accounts in “The Jongleur, the Copyist, and the Printer: The Tradition of Chaucer’s Wordes Unto Adam, His Own Scriveyn,” in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed.

230

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

NOTES

Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1990), p. 499 [499–508]. In her important paper on “New Evidence on the Hengwrt/ Ellesmere Scribe and the City,” presented at the 2004 New Chaucer Society Congress, Linne Mooney provided persuasive evidence that linked Chaucer’s writing to the London scribe Adam Pinckhurst. Parts of this presentation have been published in “A Piers Plowman Manuscript by the Hengwrt/Ellesmere Scribe and Its Implications for London Standard English,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 65–112, written in conjunction with Simon Horobin; and “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81.1 (2006): 97–138. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 3–4. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, pp. 6–7. See also the continuation of her discussion on pages 8–10. Morley, English Writers, 2:283; Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, 1:229. Britt Mize, “Adam, and Chaucer’s Words unto Him,” Chaucer Review 35.4 (2001): 353, 356 [351–377]. See Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 2:235. Scattergood, “The Jongleur, the Copyist, and the Printer,” p. 506; Scattergood, “The Short Poems,” p. 501. Scattergood, “The Jongleur, the Copyist, and the Printer,” p. 506. Stephen Partridge suggests that the poet portrays himself in the poem as being actively involved in making copies and correcting scribal errors; see Partridge, “Questions of Evidence: Manuscripts and the Early History of Chaucer’s Works,” in Writing after Chaucer: Essential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, ed. Daniel J. Pinti (New York: Garland, 1998), p. 12 [1–26]. Mize, “Adam, and Chaucer’s Words,” 368. R. E. Kaske, “Clericus Adam and Chaucer’s Adam Scriveyn,” in Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives: Essays Presented to Paul E. Beichner C. S. C., ed. Edward Vasta and Zacharias P. Thundy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), pp. 114–115 [114–118]. Ibid., pp. 115, 117. Chance, “Chaucerian Irony,” 118. Ibid., 119. Jones and company use this common, Aristotelian phrase to describe the poet in Who Murdered Chaucer, p. 2. Carlson, Chaucer’s Jobs, pp. 1, 64. This is the view of Gardner in his Life and Times of Chaucer, a disputable perspective that smacks of the kind of idealized biographical pronouncements encountered in chapter 2; see The Life and Times, pp. 248, 262. David is one critic who tempers Gardner’s view yet agrees with his private reading, arguing that (depending on the dating of the poem) “Lak” may represent encouragement to the (young) king to cure the ills inf licted by previous regimes, or an effort to rally the (older) king to reform evils for which he is largely responsible; see David, A Variorum Edition, p. 78.

NOTES

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48. It should be noted that in an early account of “Lak,” Strohm affords it a direct, personalized significance by suggesting that Chaucer intended the work as advice for the prince rather than aiming it at his usual, core audience of courtiers—a view that he would come to temper in time, which may coincide with a more “personal” reading of “Purse” (see note 65 below). For reference, see Social Chaucer, p. 82. 49. Paul Strohm, “The Textual Environment of Chaucer’s Lak of Stedfastnesse,” in The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard, ed. James M. Dean and Christian K. Zacher (London: Associated University Presses, 1992), pp. 137, 142 [129–148]. 50. Strohm, “The Textual Environment,” pp. 139, 142, 143. 51. See Brewer, A New Introduction to Chaucer, p. 119. 52. See Marchette Chute, Geoffrey Chaucer of England (London: Robert Hale, 1951), p. 289. 53. Brewer, A New Introduction to Chaucer, p. 120. 54. J. E. Cross, “The Old Swedish Trohetsvisan and Chaucer’s Lak of Stedfastnesse: A Study in a Medieval Genre,” Saga-Book of the Viking Society 16 (1965): 299 [283–314]. 55. Cross, “The Old Swedish Trohetsvisan,” 299, 300. 56. Ibid., 289. 57. On these notions, see Scattergood, “Social and Political Issues in Chaucer,” 470, 472; Scattergood, “The Short Poems,” pp. 489–491; and Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales, p. 130. 58. Ruud also suggests that “Lak” represents a generic poem that presents a world where true nobility has ceased to exist, and with it the Golden Age of truth and gentillesse. In this view, the Golden Age might return again through a rightful king’s governance. On these various points, see Ruud, “Many a Song,” pp. 54, 56, 57. 59. In making these claims, I am particularly drawing from lines 2–4, 9, 11–12, 15, and 25 of “Lak.” 60. Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 179. 61. Historians have made it clear that, although he was apparently wellregarded by the populace before the Peasant’s Revolt (and even seen as a kind of benevolent father), Richard’s popularity waned at every level toward the latter years of his reign. For reference, see Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 62. A. J. Pollard, Late Medieval England, 1399–1509 (New York: Longman, 2000). See also Gwilym Dodd and Douglas Biggs, eds., Henry IV: The Establishment of the Regime, 1399–1406 (Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press, 2003). 63. Nicolas, Memoir, pp. 53, 82. 64. Cited in Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 2:93. 65. Chute, Geoffrey Chaucer of England, p. 292. Strohm makes an altogether different historical argument for the piece. With its garland of arguments supportive of Henry’s claim, “Purse” is apparently the first (extant) poem to emphasize that Henry does possess royal blood and the estates

232

66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

NOTES

of the realm did want him to rule. Strohm concludes that if Chaucer was granted his annuity as a result of the text, Henry was gaining more from the exchange. See “Saving the Appearances: Chaucer’s Purse and the Fabrication of the Lancastrian Claim,” in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 33, 34, 36 [21–42]. Sumner Ferris, “The Date of Chaucer’s Final Annuity and the ‘Complaint to His Empty Purse,’ ” Modern Philology 65.1 (1967): 46 [45–52]. Ferris, “The Date,” 47, 50. Ferris contends that Chaucer went through the proper bureaucratic channels to receive his money and waited until he badly needed it, and ascribes the lack of payment to an administrative mix-up due to the regnal transition. Andrew J. Finnel, “The Poet as Sunday Man: ‘The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse,’ ” Chaucer Review 8.2 (1973): 150, 151 [147–158]. Finnel, “The Poet as Sunday Man,” 153. It is interesting that Finnel describes “Purse” (on page 147) as the example par excellence of Chaucer the poet and Chaucer the Man coming together. Skeat, The Complete Works, 1:xlv. Recently, Brewer has agreed with such a “reasonable” explanation, seeing Henry as willing to be gracious to the old poet he had known all his life. Howard echoes this sentiment, concluding that Chaucer “won the favor” of Henry with the poem. See, respectively, Brewer, Chaucer and His World, p. 212; and Howard, Chaucer and the Medieval World, p. 478. E. P. Kuhl, “Chaucer and Westminster Abbey,” Journal of English and German Philology July 1946: 342 [340–343]. An interesting study relative to Kuhl’s argument has been undertaken by Thomas A. Prendergast, who discusses the entanglement of “Purse” with an early modern legend about Chaucer’s so-called “prodigality” (i.e., the supposed biographical account of the Testament of Love), which affected the poem’s reception— specifically in terms of a desire to absolve Chaucer from a reputation for political opportunism, traces of which (Prendergast believes) remain today. See “Politics, Prodigality, and the Reception of Chaucer’s ‘Purse,’ ” in Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. William F. Gentrup (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 63–76. Kuhl, “Chaucer and Westminster Abbey,” 343. I paraphrase from Carlson, Chaucer’s Jobs, pp. 43–44. R. T. Lenaghan, “Chaucer’s Circle of Gentlemen and Clerks,” Chaucer Review 18.2 (1983): 158 [155–160]. Robert S. Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 17–18. Jones and company essentially ask the same questions, but do so to suggest that the poem was originally written for Richard but altered when Henry took the throne. See Who Murdered Chaucer, p. 180. Translation mine. See Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life-Records, p. 547. The Latin reads as follows: “Chawcerus ante mortem suam sepe clamavit ve

NOTES

78.

79.

80.

81.

82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89.

233

michi ve michi quia revocare nec destruere jam potero illa que male scripsi de malo et turpissimo amore hominum ad mulieres et jam de homine ad hominem continuabuntur. Velim. Nolim. Et sic plangens mortuus.” James Dean recently has argued that the Retraction does seem to be what Chaucer wanted for the end of the Tales, and suggests that in light of other similar endings to Middle English works, the text at least shows us why Gascoigne’s story of Chaucer’s death-bed repentance is likely since such an anecdote harmonizes with both late medieval clerical sensibilities and common medieval English narrative patterns. See “Chaucer’s Repentance: A Likely Story,” Chaucer Review 24.1 (1989): 64–76. David Marshall, “Unmasking the Last Pilgrim: How and Why Chaucer Used the Retraction to Close The Tales of Canterbury,” Christianity and Literature 31 (1982): 72 [55–74]. Joseph A. Dane, Who Is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb?: Studies in the Reception of Chaucer’s Book (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998), p. 102. Trigg echoes Dane’s comments, adding that “the problems in reading the Retraction show how deeply implicated are questions of reception and transmission with the earliest response to the text, how hard it is to draw that secure line between (authorial) text and (editorial and critical) commentary, and how difficult it is to read Chaucer’s texts as completely closed.” See Trigg, Congenial Souls, p. 71. On these various points, see James D. Gordon, “Chaucer’s Retraction: A Review of Opinion,” in Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor Albert Croll Baugh, ed. MacEdward Leach (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), pp. 81–96; and Douglas Wurtele, “The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Viator 11 (1980): 335–359. See Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:1.307. See Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 1:319. Ward, Chaucer, p. 141. It should be noted that N. F. Blake is one contemporary scholar who has continued the tradition of skepticism about the Retraction’s very authenticity. Noting the vagaries of manuscript transmission, Blake suggests that the Retraction may have been an addition, not written by Chaucer, that was included to give the Canterbury Tales a more finished appearance. See N. F. Blake, The Textual Tradition of the Canterbury Tales (London: Edward Arnold, 1985), pp. 173, 200, 202. J. M. Manly, ed., Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (New York: H. Holt, 1928), p. 656. James Work, “Chaucer’s Sermon and Retractions,” Modern Language Notes 47.4 (1932): 257–259. Charles A. Owen, Jr., The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1991), p. 125. Owen specifically refers to the Parson’s “treatise” as the “Treatise on Penitence.” See Charles A. Owen, Jr., “What the Manuscripts Tell Us about the Parson’s Tale,” Medium Aevum 63.2 (1994): 239 [239–249]. Lee Patterson similarly considers the function of the Parson’s Tale and

234

NOTES

90. 91.

92. 93. 94.

95.

96. 97. 98.

99. 100.

101.

102.

Retraction as a penitential manual or treatise on penitence; see Patterson, “The ‘Parson’s Tale’ and the Quitting of the ‘Canterbury Tales,’ ” Traditio 34 (1978): 331–380. Larry D. Benson, “The Order of the Canterbury Tales,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981): 80–81 [77–120]. Míc˙eál F. Vaughan, “Creating Comfortable Boundaries: Scribes, Editors, and the Invention of the Parson’s Tale,” in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602, ed. Thomas A Prendergast and Barbara Kline (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 46, 47, 51 [45–90]. Vaughan, “Creating Comfortable Boundaries,” p. 68. J. S. P. Tatlock, “Chaucer’s Retractions,” PMLA 28.4 (1913): 521, 524 [521–529]. Tatlock, “Chaucer’s Retractions,” 525, 528–529. Tatlock nonetheless bemoaned the Retraction, saying (on page 528) that “Chaucer was no longer himself if he seriously would have liked to blot out entirely, on religious and moral grounds” the majority of his mature poetic output. Olive Sayce, “Chaucer’s Retractions: The Conclusion of the Tales and Its Place in Literary Tradition,” Medium Aevum 40.3 (1971): 232, 233 [230–248]. Sayce explains that this type of text often served the purpose of recapitulation to capture the listener’s sympathy, and included the motifs of reemphasizing the moral message, admonishing sinners to take heed, offering prayers and requests for intercession, and mentioning the poet’s name and the title of the work. Sayce, “Chaucer’s Retractions,” 237, 245. Gale C. Schricker, “On the Relation of Fact and Fiction in Chaucer’s Poetic Endings,” Philological Quarterly 60 (1981): 13, 14, 23 [13–27]. Schricker, “On the Relation,” 24. Schricker also claims that in no other of his endings is the speaker so manifestly Chaucer himself, nor the motivation for speaking so profound as personal salvation (p. 14). In making this point, I am drawing from Obermeier’s History and Anatomy of Auctorial Self-Criticism in the European Middle Ages, p. 17. See William A. Madden, “Chaucer’s Retraction and Mediaeval Canons of Seemliness,” Mediaeval Studies 17 (1955): 178–179, 182, 184 [173–184]. Gregory Roper, “Dropping the Personae and Reforming the Self: The Parson’s Tale and the End of the Canterbury Tales,” in Closure in the Canterbury Tales: The Role of the Parson’s Tale, ed. David Raybin and Linda Harte Holley (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2000), pp. 173, 174 [151–175]. Gordon, “Chaucer’s Retraction,” 93. More specifically, Gordon contends, Gower’s supposed advice to Chaucer in (the first recension of ) the Confessio is initiated by Venus, who urges Gower to encourage his friend to resign himself to his age and write his final “testament of love.” For reference, see The Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 2.8.2941–2957.

NOTES

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103. Judith Ferster, Chaucer on Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 155, 156. 104. Ferster, Chaucer on Interpretation, p. 156. George Petty and Peter W. Travis are among those who likewise offer theoretical readings of the Retraction. Petty wonders if the Retraction is a sort of “performative misinterpretation” that would permit Chaucer to escape the final condemnation of a Christian judgment against his soul for the sinfulness of his creations. Travis, meanwhile, sees the Retraction as a Derridean “parergon” that raises questions about its own status, as well as the status of the poetry it frames—the prose seems to reside inside and outside of the Tales, serving as both marginal gloss without and essential constituent within. See George R. Petty, Jr., “Power, Deceit, and Misinterpretation: Uncooperative Speech in the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review 27.4 (1993): 413–423; and Peter W. Travis, “Deconstructing Chaucer’s Retraction,” Exemplaria 3.1 (1991): 135–158. 105. Elizabeth Fowler discusses how Chaucer evokes certain (conventional) “social persons” in the Retraction, and thus “presents us with a process of ethical deliberation.” See Elizabeth Fowler, Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 90. 106. See Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 2:111. 107. Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 410. 108. Ibid., p. 412. 109. Tony Davenport, Medieval Narrative: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 268. 110. See Chance, “Chaucerian Irony,” 128.

4 Lives of Their Own: The Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and Critical (Dis)Approval 1. Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics—Queer Reading (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 56. 2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 2. Especially important, Sedgwick argues, is that this “binarized” conception of homo/heterosexuality, codified in the late-Victorian era, “left no space in the culture exempt from the potent incoherences” in self-identification it created. 3. Sedgwick, Epistemology, pp. 11, 12. Sedgwick also describes several important, related “definitional binarisms,” including such opposed concepts as natural/artificial, secrecy/disclosure, same/different, in/out, and art/kitsch. 4. Sedgwick, Epistemology, p. 48. 5. Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 24. Lochrie’s book offers a helpful discussion of the development and cultural impact of sexual “norms,” as well as their implications for medievalists.

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6. Helen Cooper, “Chaucer’s Self-Fashioning,” Poetica 55 (2001): 57 [55–74]. 7. Ibid., 60, 69. 8. On these points, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 94, 95. 9. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. xi. 10. Ibid., p. 188. 11. See Burger, “Queer Theory,” pp. 436, 437. 12. This quotation is taken from Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero’s “Introduction: Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History,” in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Fradenburg and Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. xix [xiii–xxiv]. 13. Butler, Bodies That Matter, pp. 99, 100. 14. Here, I quote from Sedgwick, who is specifically considering the known/unknown of the closet, as it relates to homo/heterosexuality. See Epistemology of the Closet, pp. 3, 4. I have corrected a typing error in the original text. 15. See Fradenburg and Freccero, “Introduction,” in Premodern Sexualities, p. xvii. 16. James F. Rhodes, “Motivation in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale: Winner Take Nothing,” Chaucer Review 17.1 (1982): 41 [40–61]. 17. Ward, Chaucer, pp. 183, 185, 188. 18. Ibid., p. 36. 19. Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer, pp. 123, 227. Though Manly did admit that the Tales’ characters were, indeed, fictional constructs, he held fast to their so-called “reality.” With regards to the Pardoner, he comments that “on the whole, the evidence seems to indicate that so striking a person as the Pardoner, with his long f laxen hair, his new Italian fashions, and his glaring eyes must have been nearly as familiar to Chaucer’s readers as was Rouncival itself, which they passed daily as they journeyed between London and Westminster” (p. 130). On the Wife, Manly adds that “although Chaucer borrowed from the Roman de la Rose . . . there are many touches which indicate that Chaucer had a particular person in mind,” such as her name, her “striking costume,” and her personality, while “Chaucer writes as if he had seen her in her native place” (p. 231). 20. John Ganim, “Identity and Subjecthood,” in Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, Ellis, p. 224 [224–238]. 21. Derek Pearsall’s scholarship is characteristic of this tradition, as is evident in his assertion that with the Wife of Bath, Chaucer “creates so powerfully the illusion of spontaneous mental activity that we have the impression of penetrating to a layer of consciousness usually concealed” so that the sense of life “is irresistible.” Similarly, Pearsall states that the poet “gives such dramatic vitality, such individuality of expression, and so many suggestions of autonomous motivation to the Pardoner that he tends to burst through the cardboard of convention.” Italics mine. See The Canterbury Tales (New York: Routledge, 1985), pp. 84, 96.

NOTES

237

22. C. David Benson, “Trust the Tale, Not the Teller,” in Drama, Narrative and Poetry, Harding, p. 21 [21–33]. The barb I have quoted is indicative of Benson’s firm belief that “it is Chaucer’s poetry, more than the elusive personalities of his pilgrims, that deserves our trust and attention” (p. 23). 23. See The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, III.163–187. 24. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 112, 128. 25. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, p. 160. In a later reading, Dinshaw articulates her notion of the “queer touch,” positing that the Pardoner’s interruption of the Wife of Bath sends into a “queer skid” what previously was represented confidently as being natural (the “robust heterosexuality” of the Wife), and exposes it as a pose that is learned and exploited; see Getting Medieval, p. 113. 26. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, pp. 130, 131, 141. In this view, what is exclusively perceived as “natural” in the Middle Ages is heterosexuality and its attendant behaviors. 27. The Introduction to the Pardoner’s Tale, VI.325; and The Pardoner’s Prologue VI.459–460. 28. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, III.68, 111, 112. 29. This is the view of Geoffrey Galt Harpham in “Imagining the Centre,” in Critical Ethics, Rainsford and Woods, p. 42 [37–52]. I have removed Harpham’s italics. 30. Booth discusses the “ethical codes” of scholars, as mentioned in chapter 3, and also concerns himself with their “ethical programs”—a notion I have borrowed here. See The Company We Keep, p. 5. 31. In making this comment, Baier is distinctly drawing on Bakhtinian theory. See Annette C. Baier, “Ethics in Many Different Voices,” in Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory, ed. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, and David Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 268 [247–268]. 32. This is Elizabeth Fowler’s view of what she calls “social persons” in literature. See Fowler, Literary Character, p. 31. 33. Cf. Davenport, Medieval Narrative, p. 67. 34. General Prologue, I.445, 669–670. 35. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, III.1–3. 36. Ibid., 692–696. 37. Priscilla Martin, “Chaucer and Feminism: A Magpie View,” in A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fouck, ed. Juliette Dor (Liège: Universitè de Liège, Département d’Anglais, 1992), p. 241 [235–246]. 38. Quotation taken from Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 1:171. Dryden used this description for the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, which he chose not to translate in the Fables because of his reservations regarding its content (though he did include the Wife of Bath’s Tale). 39. For a particularly helpful reading of the Wife’s satirical background, see Jill Mann’s Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social

238

40.

41.

42.

43.

NOTES

Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 121–127. Helen Cooper, “The Shape-Shiftings of the Wife of Bath, 1395–1670,” in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 171, 172 [168–184]. It is worth noting that, as Cooper contends, “almost all the modern readings of the Wife are foreshadowed in these early responses to her” (p. 170). Arguably the most controversial early text that built upon the tradition of Dame Alice as a stereotypical shrew was a ballad entitled “The Wanton Wife of Bath,” which was published (and quickly censured) in 1600. In this poem, Alisoun is depicted as one who lives lewdly, “who did in pleasure spend her dayes, and many a fonde delight.” The perceived blasphemy of “The Wanton Wife of Bath” led to an order (recorded in the Stationers’ Register) that all copies of the ballad be burnt, and that its printers be fined. See Cooper’s citations and discussion of the poem in “The Shape-Shiftings of the Wife of Bath,” pp. 180–182. Richard Brathwait’s commentary on the Wife is located on pages 60–149 of A Comment Upon the Two Tales of Our Ancient, Renowned, and Ever Living Poet Sr Jeffray Chaucer, Knight (London, 1665), pp. 72, 73. Perspectives of this sort were, in fact, firmly entrenched long before the Restoration, as is seen clearly in John Skelton’s Philip Sparrow (ca. 1507), where the reader is told how the shrewish Wife “controld/ Her husbandes as she wold,/ And them to dispise/ In the homeliest wise/ Bring other wiues in thought/ Their husbandes to set at naught”; see Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:1.69. William Blake and Walter Clyde Curry represent two notable, later examples of male critics who continue to condemn Alisoun’s wanton, shrewish behavior. Blake compared the “two classes” of women that Chaucer portrayed in the Tales—represented by the Prioress and Wife— and scorned those whom Alisoun seemed to represent. In his words, she is “a scourge and a blight. I shall say no more of her, nor expose what Chaucer has left hidden; let the young reader study what he has said of her: it is useful as a scarecrow. There are of such characters born too many for the peace of the world.” See Blake, Sir Jeffery Chaucer and the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims on Their Journey to Canterbury, in A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions (London, 1809), p. 24. Moving forward to the early twentieth century, Curry’s inf luential physiognomical account pejoratively argues that the Wife’s “large hips indicate excessive virility,” while her round face and complexion “indicates that the woman is immodest, loquacious, and given to drunkenness.” Furthermore, Dame Alice’s voice displays her “voluptuous and luxurious nature,” while being “gat-toothed” can indicate the envy, boldness, deceitfulness, and faithlessness of this “fair Venerian figure.” See Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences, 2nd edn. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), pp. 108–113.

NOTES

239

44. See Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 1:283. 45. Matthew Browne was a pseudonym for William Brightly Rands; see Matthew Browne, Chaucer’s England (London, 1869), 1:248. Morley’s comment is offered in a comparison of the Wife of Bath to Emily from the Knight’s Tale, whom the critic sees as the other primary example of “true womanhood” in the Chaucer Corpus; see Morley, English Writers, 2:285. 46. D. W. Robertson uses this pejorative descriptor for the Pardoner in A Preface to Chaucer, p. 45. 47. This is the oft-cited declaration of Kittredge in Chaucer and His Poetry, p. 180. 48. Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer, p. 149. 49. These words represent Siebers’s definition of Feminist criticism that, he adds, often results in “a powerful dialogue between life and literature”; see Ethics of Criticism, p. 186. 50. On these ideas, see Barrie Ruth Straus, “The Subversive Discourse of the Wife of Bath: Phallocentric Discourse and the Imprisonment of Criticism,” ELH 55.3 (1988): 529 [527–554]; see also Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 91. 51. Dinshaw openly remarks on both of these aspects of her own criticism in “New Approaches to Chaucer,” in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2nd edn., ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 274, 281 [270–289]. 52. H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., “Of a Fire in the Dark: Public and Private Feminism in the Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Women’s Studies 11.1–2 (1984): 160, 175 [157–178]. When Leicester uses the quoted phrasing, he uses Middle English spelling conventions (i.e., “woman-handel”) that I have taken the liberty of altering. 53. Ethan Knapp, “Chaucer Criticism and Its Legacies,” in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 350 [324–356]. 54. See Nicholas Watson, “Desire for the Past,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 59–97. 55. Here, I borrow phrasing from Siebers, Ethics of Criticism, p. 187. 56. For Donaldson’s work with persona theory, see my remarks in chapter 1, section 1.3. 57. E. Talbot Donaldson, “Designing a Camel; or, Generalizing about the Middle Ages,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 22 (1977): 4 [1–16]. 58. Ibid., 7. 59. Elaine Tuttle Hansen, “The Wife of Bath and the Mark of Adam,” Women’s Studies 15 (1988): 400, 407 [399–416]. 60. Ibid., 404, 405. 61. Cf. Elaine Tuttle Hansen, “Irony and the Antifeminist Narrator in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 82.1 (1983): 11–31. In this essay, Hansen asserts that “Chaucer’s irony is directed not, indeed, at women, but at Cupid, at the narrator of the

240

62.

63.

64.

65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

NOTES

Legend of Good Women, and at the antifeminist tradition to which both unwittingly perhaps but nevertheless certainly subscribe. Both Cupid’s views of female virtue, in accord with the canons of his Religion of Love, and the narrator’s treatment of women in his Legends are . . . inherently antifeminist” (p. 12). Écriture féminine is a concept famously developed by the French critic Hélène Cixous, who praised the subversive possibilities of such writing for the purpose of exposing the oppressiveness of male structures. See, for instance, Cixous’s essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Linda Cohen, Signs 1 (1976): 875–899; and her book (with Catherine Clément) The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 35, 39, 56. In a later essay, Hansen continues this line of thought by emphasizing that it is “problematic” to see the Wife of Bath as a “feminist” in the modern-day sense of the term, since it is Chaucer as male poet, not the Wife as female character, who escapes the constraints of gender and enjoys the privileges of maleness. Furthermore, by focusing on Chaucer’s intentions, critics fundamentally repeat the antifeminist move made possible by the Wife’s narratives—placing the focus on the “dangerous male” and his beliefs, while the woman in the picture fades into the background. See Elaine Tuttle Hansen, “ ‘Of His Love Daungerous to Me’: Liberation, Subversion, and Domestic Violence in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” in The Wife of Bath: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, ed. Peter Beidler (New York: Bedford Books, 1996), pp. 276, 288 [273–289]. “Medieval ventriloquism” is a useful term utilized by Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson to describe medieval writing in which female voices proceed from male authors. See their Introduction to Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 2 [1–21]. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, p. 117. Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, pp. 78, 82. The feminist critic Ruth Evans has described Mann’s Chaucer as “a good old-fashioned liberal humanist”; See Evans’s review of Geoffrey Chaucer in Textual Practice 7 (1993): 85–89. Minnis offers this category in a discussion of the Legend of Good Women, but it is clearly applicable to reception of the Wife of Bath as well. See Minnis, Oxford Guides to Chaucer, p. 427. Helen Phillips, An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales: Reading, Fiction, Context (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 36. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer, pp. 319, 321. D. W. Robertson, Jr., “ ‘And for My Land Thus Hastow Mordred Me?’: Land, Tenure, the Cloth Industry, and the Wife of Bath,” Chaucer Review 14.4 (1980): 403 [403–420]. Robertson’s essay demonstrates that

NOTES

71.

72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85.

241

widowhood would have afforded the Wife her money and a certain amount of power and freedom, and argues that inheritance laws therefore explain the attractiveness of Alisoun’s lands to her husbands (see also pp. 406, 414). Robertson, “And for My Land,” 415, 416. Stewart Justman has provided a similar reading, arguing that, in effect, Alisoun is a trader who multiplies husbands as a usurer would money; thus, Chaucer presents a thoughtful image of the commercial class, which mocks the “clamorous economic desires of men.” Cf. Stewart Justman, “Trade as Pudendum: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath,” Chaucer Review 28.4 (1994): 345, 347, 349 [95–111]. Beverly Kennedy, “ ‘Withouten Oother Compaignye in Youthe’: Verbal and Moral Ambiguity in the General Prologue Portrait of the Wife of Bath,” in Chaucer and Language: Essays in Honour of Douglas Wurtele, ed. Robert Myles and David Williams (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), p. 32 [11–32]. Anne Laskaya, Chaucer’s Approach to Gender in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1995), p. 187. S. H. Rigby, “The Wife of Bath, Christine de Pizan, and the Medieval Case for Women,” Chaucer Review 35.2 (2000): 135 [133–165]. Ibid., 135, 154. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 147. Kennedy, “Withouten Oother Compaignye in Youthe,” p. 23. See Fowler, Literary Character, p. 73. Blake, Sir Jeffery Chaucer, pp. 16, 17. These are the words of an anonymous Romantic critic on “The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer,” in Retrospective Review 14.2 (1826): 341 [305–357]. Dickens’s comments are cited in Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 2:3.82. The following list represents some of the more notable scholarly accounts of the Pardoner and his “life” of preaching. These accounts serve as suggestive examples of the ways in which historical readings tend to place the locus of accountability primarily on the shoulders of the Pardoner himself, which may allow the poet to be quietly absolved when it comes to certain moral issues and perspectives. Cf. A. L. Kellogg, “An Augustinian Interpretation of Chaucer’s Pardoner,” Speculum 26.3 (1951): 465–481; Alan Fletcher, “The Preaching of the Pardoner,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 15–35; Siegfried Wenzel, “Chaucer’s Pardoner and His Relics,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 37–41; David K. Maxfield, “St. Mary Rouncivale, Charing Cross: The Hospital of Chaucer’s Pardoner,” Chaucer Review 28.2 (1993): 148–163; and Alastair Minnis, “Reclaiming the Pardoners,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33.2 (2003): 311–334. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, pp. 180, 211, 212. In certain “queer” versions of the moral f linch, which are detailed later in this chapter, there is a sense that Chaucer is not sensitive enough to his outcast character—yet that is typically as far as the criticism of the author goes.

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NOTES

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98.

99.

100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, p. 217. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 216. Kemp Malone, Chapters on Chaucer (1951; repr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 16, 177, 185. C. D. Deshler, Selections from the Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (London, 1847), p. 65. Ibid., p. 67. Vern Bullough, “On Being a Male in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 32 [31–45]. Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 201, 207, 216–217. Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences, p. 58. Ibid., pp. 59, 60. Curry adds that the Pardoner represents “a complete psychological study of the mediaeval eunuchus ex nativitate and a mordant satire on the abuses practiced in the church of his day” (p. 64). The famous description of the Pardoner as a “geldyng or a mare” is located in The General Prologue, I.691. Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences, pp. 68, 70. John Halverson, “Chaucer’s Pardoner and the Progress of Criticism,” Chaucer Review 4.3 (1970): 190 [184–202]. For the main, successive readings of this kind, see especially the following pages from these three important accounts (and I quote from p. 203 of Lumiansky’s inf luential study): Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk, pp. 201–203; Robert P. Miller, “Chaucer’s Pardoner, The Scriptural Eunuch, and the Pardoner’s Tale,” in Chaucer Criticism Volume I: The Canterbury Tales, ed. Richard J. Schoeck and Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1960), pp. 225–226 [221–244]; and Beryl Rowland, “Chaucer’s Idea of the Pardoner,” Chaucer Review 14.2 (1979): 143–145, 148–149 [140–154]. On these points, see, respectively, Lee Patterson, “Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies,” Speculum 76.3 (2001): 664, 668, 670 [638–680]; and Vern Bullough and Gwen Brewer, “Medieval Masculinities and Modern Interpretations,” in Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York: Garland, 1999), pp. 94, 96, 101, 105 [93–110]. Monica E. McAlpine, “The Pardoner’s Homosexuality and How It Matters,” PMLA 95.1 (1980): 13 [8–22]. Ibid., 11, 16. Ibid., 17, 18, 19. Ibid., 10. Steven F. Kruger, “Claiming the Pardoner: Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale,” Exemplaria 6.1 (1994): 121 [115–139]. Kruger cites the Pardoner’s Tale as evidence of homophobia in Chaucer’s verse, because the rioters “clearly” illustrate the homophobic construction of male sexuality in the Middle Ages (pp. 128–131).

NOTES

243

105. Kruger, “Claiming the Pardoner,” 124, 125. 106. Ibid., 137, 138. 107. Here, I use terminology from John Bowers’s “Queering the Summoner: Same-Sex Union in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” in Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve, ed. R. F. Yeager and Charlotte C. Morse (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2001), p. 301 [301–324]. Bowers believes that one result of the critically “fetishized” Pardoner is that many scholars have overlooked the “queer” resonance of the Summoner (p. 302). 108. Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 3, 4. 109. Ibid., p. 88. 110. See Glenn Burger’s essay “Queer Chaucer,” English Studies in Canada 20.2 (1994): 160, 163 [153–170]. 111. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, p. 158. 112. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, p. 135. 113. Carolyn Dinshaw, “Chaucer’s Queer Touches/A Queer Touches Chaucer,” Exemplaria 7.1 (1995): 90 [75–92]; Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, p. 134. The Host’s well-known threat is located in The Pardoner’s Tale, VI.952–955. 114. Dinshaw, “Chaucer’s Queer Touches,” 77, 91, 92. 115. Dinshaw openly articulates her political program of theoretical “claiming” by commenting that critics who actively create relations with (or touch) the past are able to build coalitions and communities in the present in which abjected figures (such as queers and medievalists) are empowered within the “culture wars” and not just tolerated with free speech. See especially Getting Medieval, pp. 182, 206. 116. I am borrowing here from Alastair Minnis, “Chaucer and the Queering Eunuch,” in New Medieval Literatures Vol. VI, ed. David Lawton, Rita Copeland, and Wendy Scase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 107 [107–129]. 117. Dinshaw, “New Approaches to Chaucer,” p. 275. 118. Elizabeth Allen, “The Pardoner in the ‘Dogges Boure’: Early Reception of the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review 36.2 (2001): 92, 98 [91–127]. Allen also considers manuscripts that include spurious continuations such as the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn, a text that constructs a lewd figure noteworthy for a “frankly mercenary, heterosexual promiscuity” (p. 107). 119. Allen, “Pardoner in the ‘Dogges Boure,’ ” 92. 120. Interestingly, Allen cites the correction of this line in the Northumberland MS, where the scribe has entered “I trowe he had a geldyng or a mare” (Allen’s italics), which “avoids the question of his sexual anatomy by eliminating his comparison to a horse of any kind, suggesting the unreadability of the metaphor to begin with.” See Allen, “Pardoner in the ‘Dogges Boure,’ ” 115. 121. Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 6, 8, 169, 201.

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122. Ibid., pp. 165, 212. 123. See Karras and Boyd, “ ‘Ut cum muliere’: A Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London,” in Premodern Sexualities, Fradenburg and Freccero, pp. 106, 108 [101–116]. 124. Here, I quote Anna Kłosowska’s observation from Queer Love in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 144. 125. See Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, 281; cf Bowers, “Queering the Summoner,” p. 302. As Glenn Burger reminds us, “neither ‘the homosexual’ nor his more optimistic ‘gay’ younger brother will likely be found reproduced exactly in medieval systems of representation because such categories are ‘born’ out of modern, not premodern, axes of difference”; see Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 126. 126. These words are drawn from Colleen Lamos’s observations on “The Ethics of Queer Theory,” in Critical Ethics, Rainsford and Woods, pp. 141, 143 [141–151]. 127. See The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, III.166; and The Pardoner’s Prologue, VI.453. 128. Richard Firth Green, “The Sexual Normality of Chaucer’s Pardoner,” Mediaevalia 8 (1982): 357 [351–358]. More recently, Green has continued this line of thought by considering Harry Bailly’s reference to the Pardoner’s “old breech” (VI.948). Green believes that the Host’s comment may contain a previously unrecognized allusion to the folktale tradition of the “Friar’s pants”; if so, then he is not referring to the Pardoner as a eunuch, hermaphrodite, or homosexual, but rather as a type of (heterosexual) cuckolder. Cf. Green, “The Pardoner’s Pants (and Why They Matter),” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993): 132–133, 145 [131–145]. 129. Henry Ansgar Kelly, “The Pardoner’s Voice, Disjunctive Narrative, and Modes of Effemination,” in Speaking Images, Yeager and Morse, p. 428 [411–444]. Kelly additionally notes that “if there is anything of the gelding or mare about him as he hopes for a wench in each town, we can take it to be the effeminacy of his appearance, which, far from signaling a lack of ability to indulge in the vice of lechery that he boasts of, seems to indicate practice, if not success, and insatiability, if not satisfaction.” 130. Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales, pp. 97, 100. Douglas Wurtele similarly emphasizes that moral assumptions can be made about the Pardoner without specifying his sexual abnormality—the character’s physiognomy suggests a variety of pejorative traits, not only hermaphroditism and perhaps even sodomy, but most importantly, deceitfulness and dishonesty. Cf. Wurtele, “Some Uses of Physiognomical Lore in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review 17.2 (1982): 137, 139 [130–141]. 131. Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer, pp. 58–59. Dewey Faulkner cogently comments that the Pardoner’s description seems to say “ ‘I believe he was either a eunuch or a homosexual,’ although critics have been quick to seize upon one or the other possibility as a fact and use it as a

NOTES

132. 133.

134. 135. 136.

137.

138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

144.

245

psychological entrance into—or club to beat—the tale.” Cf. Faulkner’s Introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Pardoner’s Tale, ed. Faulkner (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973), p. 8. Alcuin Blamires, “Sexuality,” in Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, Ellis, p. 219 [208–223]. See The General Prologue, I.670–674, 676, 688–690. Among those who posit a homosexual relationship between the Pardoner and the Summoner, Bowers’s recent article represents the most comprehensive application of queer theory to explain the relations between these two characters, whom he believes are “clearly a couple.” See Bowers, “Queering the Summoner,” pp. 306, 307. The Introduction to the Pardoner’s Tale, VI.318. Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, pp. 40, 41. I borrow phrasing here from Laskaya, who asserts that the Canterbury Tales “both reinscribes and challenges the category of ‘manliness’ ”; See Chaucer’s Approach to Gender, p. 199. The Monk’s description is found in The General Prologue, I.167. Michael Sharp discusses this reference at length in his essay “Reading Chaucer’s ‘Manly Man,’ ” in Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter G. Beidler (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 173–185. Other similar citations include: the description of King Lycurgus (in The Knight’s Tale) as having a “manly” face; the Green Knight-type entrance of a warrior who, though come from the land of Fairies, had a “manly” voice (in the Squire’s Tale); and the Parson’s citation of “manly” deeds. Cf. The Knight’s Tale I.2130; The Squire’s Tale V.99; and The Parson’s Tale X.601. See Laskaya, Chaucer’s Approach to Gender, p. 191. On these points see, respectively, Bowers, “Queering the Summoner,” p. 301; and Minnis, “Chaucer and the Queering Eunuch,” p. 129. Quotation taken from Peter Beidler’s “Introduction” to Masculinities in Chaucer, p. 3. See Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 1, 2, 6. Ibid., pp. 25, 214. Here, I cite from Dinshaw’s comments on the Man of Law’s Tale, which seem to be equally applicable to the case of the Pardoner. See Dinshaw, “New Approaches to Chaucer,” p. 283. These quotations are drawn from Minnis, “Chaucer and the Queering Eunuch,” pp. 110, 120. Minnis has recently elaborated on these ideas in his extensive, masterful account of the Wife of Bath and Pardoner titled Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). David Raybin offers an example of a reading that supports a view that the Pardoner’s perversities “incorporate multiple categories of interpretation,” yet also illustrates the moral f linch because the poet himself is said to project this “multiplicity” to offer the “astoundingly tolerant suggestion” that—however it is manifest—“moral and sexual deviation may be reconciled rather

246

NOTES

145. 146.

147. 148.

149. 150.

151.

152.

than condemned.” See Raybin, “Poetry and Play in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the Pardoner’s Tale,” in Drama, Narrative and Poetry, Harding, pp. 216, 224 [213–226]. See Laskaya, Chaucer’s Approach to Gender, pp. 78, 200. See, respectively, Jacqueline Murray’s “Introduction” to Conflicted Identities, p. xii; and Bullough’s “On Being a Male in the Middle Ages,” p. 43. See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, pp. 157, 197. See, respectively, Glenn Burger, “Doing What Comes Naturally: The Physician’s Tale and the Pardoner,” in Masculinities in Chaucer, Beidler, pp. 129, 130 [115–130]; and Raybin, “Poetry and Play,” p. 222. In these sentences, terminology is drawn from Butler’s Bodies that Matter, pp. 9, 10, 23. To borrow from Bowers, a fair question to ask is who is being most coy in this scenario and who is saving whom from being implicated in any potentially controversial sexual politics—is it the medieval poet or his readers who seem more wary of “betraying the sort of sexual knowledge that would amount to self-recognition”? See Bowers, “Queering the Summoner,” p. 311. This conclusion is based primarily on Harry Bailly’s remarks to/about “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” who is said to stare feebly at the ground, to be small and fair of face, and who looks like a chubby, “elvyssh” “popet.” See the Host’s words in Prologue to Sir Thopas, VII.696–704, which will be discussed at length in chapter 5. In making this statement, I am inspired by the title of Jonathan Goldberg’s essay “The History that Will Be,” in Premodern Sexualities, Fradenburg and Freccero, pp. 1–22.

5 Claiming the “Popet”: Ethics, Evasion, and the Pilgrim’s Progress 1. Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 126. 2. Sarah Cooper, Relating to Queer Theory: Rereading Sexual Self-Definition with Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig and Cixous (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), p. 214. 3. The full title of Bunyan’s allegorical masterpiece is The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come. The definitive edition of Bunyan’s text was edited by Roger Sharrock (London: Oxford University Press, 1966). 4. See Kruger, “Claiming the Pardoner,” 115–139. As chapter 4 explained, Kruger’s essay was among the first to “claim” or “queer” the Pardoner, and remains one of the finest such accounts to date. 5. Prologue to Sir Thopas, VII.696–704. 6. Phrasing and ideas drawn from Glenn Burger, “Mapping a History of Sexuality in Melibee,” in Chaucer and Language, Myles and Williams, p. 70 [61–70].

NOTES

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

247

See Helen Cooper, “Chaucer’s Self-Fashioning,” 58. See Burger, “Mapping a History of Sexuality,” pp. 63–64, 70. Dinshaw, “New Approaches to Chaucer,” p. 283. Harry’s famous question is found immediately before his description of Chaucer the Pilgrim cited previously, in Prologue to Sir Thopas, VII.695. On this point, see Ann Astell, “Chaucer’s ‘Literature Group’ and the Medieval Causes of Books,” ELH 59 (1992): 270, 276 [269–287]. Helen Cooper comments on the contradictory nature of the Chaucerian corpus in “Chaucerian Poetics,” in New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, Benson and Ridyard, p. 50. Kłosowska, Queer Love in the Middle Ages, p. 95. Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, p. 135. Paul Zumthor, Speaking of the Middle Ages, trans. Sarah White (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 83. This quotation is found in the (unpaginated) “Arguments to euery Tale and Booke” from Speght’s Workes of our Antient and lerned English Poet Geffrey Chaucer. I have brief ly discussed Speght’s words in chapter 1, section 1.2. See my account of Speght’s autobiographical tendencies in section 2.2 of chapter 2. James Lorimer, “Chaucer,” North British Review 10 (1849): 306 [293–328]. It should be noted that subsequently, many critics have used variants of the same phrase uttered by Lorimer. “Body criticism” is a helpful term utilized by Thomas Prendergast in his excellent study of Chaucer’s Dead Body, where he describes a suggestive “return towards the body” within nineteenth-century Chaucer scholarship. Aside from a series of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critical accounts that considered the possibility that Melibee was written in blank verse, I have been able to identify only one specific reference to the tale in its own right before the later years of the Victorian age. As discussed later in this chapter, on those rare early occasions that Melibee is mentioned by critics, it is usually as part of a discussion of the “elvyssh” Chaucerian I-narrator. An example of a humorous reading of Sir Thopas during the early stages of Chaucerian reception is found in an anonymous poem from 1611, where the writer comments on the character Sir Thopas and states that “Yet would he not play Cupids Ape/ In Chaucers jest lest he should shape/ A Pigsnye like himself.” For reference, see Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 1:1.185. In his study of “Sir Thopas in the Sixteenth Century,” J. A. Burrow also cites the references to and usage of Sir Thopas by such writers as John Skelton and William Dunbar as evidence for a humorous/ satirical understanding of Chaucer’s text before England’s Neoclassical era; see Burrow, “Sir Thopas in the Sixteenth Century,” in Middle English Studies Presented to Norman Davis in Honour of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. D. Gray and E. G. Stanley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 69–77.

248

NOTES

22. Burrow, “Sir Thopas in the Sixteenth Century,” p. 81. 23. Burrow also cites the work of Michael Drayton as an example of the serious interpretation of Sir Thopas, but admits that both Spenser and Drayton likely were at least aware of the burlesque nature of Chaucer’s text, and apparently chose to read it as a sincere romantic model on which to base their own verse. 24. For reference, see Edwin Greenlaw, et al. ed., The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1938), 1.9.8–15. J. A. Burrow brief ly discusses the connection in question in “The Canterbury Tales I: Romance,” in The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 113 [109–124]. Of course, it is also widely recognized that Book IV of the Faerie Queene is based on Chaucer’s verse, but in this section Spenser largely draws on plot elements of The Squire’s Tale, a fiction which Chaucer interrupts and leaves incomplete, much like Sir Thopas. 25. See The Works of Edmund Spenser, 6.1.3, 6.1.26, and 6.3.1. 26. Joseph Dane contends that the very language and category of parody/ burlesque was established in the eighteenth century, and accordingly, suggests that the notion of Sir Thopas as a playful burlesque was an eighteenth-century creation. That is a somewhat dubious assertion, but the evidence does, at least, indicate that it was during this period that critics began openly discussing Sir Thopas with an eye toward parody, and Dane is likely correct in his assumption that our modern understanding of parody “is still strongly rooted in the critical assumptions of these eighteenth-century scholars.” On these points, see Joseph Dane, “Genre and Authority: The Eighteenth-Century Creation of Chaucerian Burlesque,” Huntington Library Quarterly 48.4 (1985): 345–357. 27. Dane, “Genre and Authority,” 356, 357. 28. Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry (London, 1774), 1:433. 29. Morley, English Writers, 2:330. For similar accounts, see J. H. Hippisley’s comments in Chapters on Early English Literature (London, 1837), p. 69; and also an anonymous contribution to The Retrospective Review 14.2 (1826): 342, 343, 353 [305–357]. 30. John Major and Thomas Garbáty are among the few critics who discuss at length the idea of Chaucer the Pilgrim as a deliberately ironic, playful narrator who deprecates his own intelligence and literary skill. Cf. John Major, “The Personality of Chaucer the Pilgrim,” PMLA 75.3 (1960): 160–162; and Garbáty, “The Degradation of Chaucer’s ‘Geffrey,’ ” 97–104. 31. Immediately before Chaucer the Pilgrim begins his first tale, Harry Bailly conspicuously comments that “now shul we here/ Som deyntee thing, me thynketh by his cheere.” This comment seems to indicate the feeble or even effeminate nature of Chaucer’s “I,” and thus will be taken up more fully in section 5.2 below. See Prologue to Sir Thopas VII.710–711. 32. Prologue to Sir Thopas, VII.923, 925, 930. 33. V. J. Scattergood, “Chaucer and the French War: Sir Thopas and Melibee,” in Court and Poet, ed. G. S. Burgess (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1981),

NOTES

34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

249

pp. 290, 293 [287–296]. Scattergood’s account responds to an earlier reading by J. M. Manly, who felt that the tale could be read as satirizing the Flemings for the pretensions of their bourgeois knighthood (so that the verse is doubly parodic, as a criticism of social and poetic conventions). Cf. J. M. Manly, “Sir Thopas: A Satire,” Essays and Studies 13 (1928): 52–73. Scattergood, “Chaucer and the French War,” pp. 291, 294, 295. Scattergood also cites Melibee in support of this argument, which is a rare case in which both tales are critically drawn together, rather than separated—though the connection thereof is not thoroughly analyzed. I quote from the famous disclaimer in which Chaucer the Pilgrim urges his readers to “blameth nat me if that ye chese amys” (I.3181). The specific lines in question are offered after he blames the “harlotrie” of the Miller’s Tale and The Reeve’s Tale on the two “cherls” themselves. In the poet’s words, “Avyseth yow, and put me out of blame;/ And eek men shal nat maken ernest of game” (I.3185–3186). For instance, R. F. Yeager offers an antiwar argument that is similar to Scattergood’s account cited previously; cf. R. F. Yeager, “Pax Poetica: On the Pacifism of Chaucer and Gower,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987): 97–121. The Tale of Sir Thopas, VII.940. On the politics involved in moving Chaucer’s tomb, see Derek Pearsall’s discussion in “Chaucer’s Tomb: The Politics of Reburial,” Medium Aevum 64.1(1995): 51–73. The quotation here is from Simon Haines, who does not address Chaucer in particular but who clearly supports the value of literature as “moral language” for the masses. See Simon Haines, “Deepening the Self: The Language of Ethics and the Language of Literature,” in Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory, ed. Jane Adamson, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 30 [21–38]. See Barry Windeatt, “Literary Structures in Chaucer,” in The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, Boitani and Mann, p. 208 [195–212]. This idea is drawn from Tobin Siebers’s discussion of the problems inherent in the New Critical paradigm, but it seems to me more broadly relevant in the context of Chaucerian reception. For reference, see Ethics of Criticism, p. 55. See Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 1:54. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, p. 94. Lerer’s account is offered in response to a political reading by Lee Patterson of the sort we shall examine in the following text, in which it is argued that Melibee represents a specific kind of “mirror”—one for noble children, a general rule book for royal princes (i.e., a fürstenspiegel). See Patterson, “ ‘What Man Artow’: Authorial SelfDefinition in The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 139, 147 [117–175]. Although few readers commented on the tale, it should be admitted that the text was copied independently in five manuscripts, and thus was

250

45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

NOTES

apparently a popular text for some genteel readers—which may be the basis for Lerer’s argument. However, the lack of scholarly commentary on the work from the medieval period forward may suggest that while certain readers saw its advice as being worthwhile, few seemed to enjoy the text enough to address it in any deep fashion. See Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body, pp. 134, 141. See Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 2:246. Italics mine. C. D. Benson, “The Canterbury Tales: Personal Drama or Experiments in Poetic Variety,” in The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, Boitani and Mann, p. 105 [93–108]. A few readers have sought to explain away the alleged dullness of Melibee by defining it as an elaborate (if tedious) literary joke. R. M. Lumiansky in particular argued that Chaucer “certainly” presented the “most routine literary fare” in Melibee, in contrast to the “highly original” Sir Thopas. In this view, the prose tale represents the purposeful second half of the joke by which Chaucer the Pilgrim makes evident the Host’s lack of literary taste and critical ability; see Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk, pp. 88, 94. It might be noted that, generally speaking, interpretations of this kind have not been well received. For a brief discussion of Melibee’s relationship with its source materials, see Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer, pp. 314–314. W. W. Lawrence, “The Tale of Melibeus,” in Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1940), pp. 101, 110 [100–110]. See Diane Bornstein, “Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee as an Example of the Style Clergial,” Chaucer Review 12 (1978): 236–254; and Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales, p. 287. Sir Thopas, VII.925, 930, 940. Ibid., VII.957. Ibid., VII.954, 961. Gardiner Stillwell, “The Political Meaning of Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee,” Speculum 19.4 (1944): 434, 444 [433–444]. In an inf luential account of this kind, R. F. Green has noted that there is a “strong likelihood” that Chaucer wrote Melibee for (the young) Richard. Green explains that the tale exemplifies a court poet’s role as a royal advisor, since it was through works like Melibee that a writer in the familia regis might demonstrate his worth and claim a more substantial position than that of mere entertainer; see Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 143. Lynn Johnson and Ann Astell have offered corollaries to this view, seeing the tale as being aimed directly at the king himself and not just at the general political situation. Cf. Lynn Johnson, “Inverse Counsel: Contexts for the Melibee,” Studies in Philology 87.2 (1990): 149, 150, 154 [137–155]; and Ann Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 102. Notable accounts concerned with the text’s presumed political interests include the following: Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and

NOTES

251

Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 102–107; Phillips, An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales, pp. 177–179; David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 220–222; Strohm, Social Chaucer, pp. 161– 163; and Stephen Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 138–139. 57. These quotations are drawn from Wolfgang Riehle’s article “Aspects of Chaucer’s Narratorial Self-Representation in The Canterbury Tales,” in Tales and Their Telling Difference: Zur Theorie & Geschichte der Narrativik, ed. Herbert Foltinek, Wolfgang Riehle, and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag, 1993), 140, 141 [133–147]. 58. This is the view, for instance, of Celia Daileader in “The Thopas-Melibee Sequence and the Defeat of Antifeminism,” Chaucer Review 29.1 (1994): 27, 35 [26–39]. 59. Daniel Rubey, “The Five Wounds of Melibee’s Daughter: Transforming Masculinities,” in Masculinities in Chaucer, Beidler, p. 159 [157–171]. 60. Ibid., p. 167. 61. See Laskaya, Chaucer’s Approach to Gender, p. 166. 62. Helen Cooper, “Chaucerian Representation,” p. 24. 63. I borrow phrasing from John Plummer, “ ‘Beth Fructuous and that in Litel Space’: The Engendering of Harry Bailly,” in New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, Benson and Ridyard, p. 113 [107–118]. 64. This paragraph offers several quotations from Laskaya, Chaucer’s Approach to Gender, p. 197. 65. Bowers, “Queering the Summoner,” p. 318. 66. For Bowers’s discussion of these points concerning Richard, Chaucer, and his readers, see “Queering the Summoner,” pp. 315–318. 67. Bowers, “Queering the Summoner,” p. 313. 68. General Prologue, I.673. 69. Kłosowska, Queer Love in the Middle Ages, p. 120. 70. See Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body, p. 103. 71. Nicolas, Memoir of Chaucer, pp. 71, 72. 72. Again, the term “body criticism” is drawn from Prendergast’s study of Chaucer’s Dead Body, p. 10. 73. From Dart’s unpaginated Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, found in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. 74. Gilman, The Poetical Works of Chaucer, 1:li, liii. Previously, J. H. Hippisley had similarly highlighted the supposed shyness of the poet, noting that from the Prologue to Sir Thopas “we may infer that he was of a meditative and absent turn of mind.” Cf. Hippisley, Chapters on Early English Literature, p. 109. 75. See Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 2:159. 76. For examples that illustrate the gradual recognition of the divided self, see, for instance, the progression evident in the following accounts: John Saunders, Cabinet Pictures of English Life: Chaucer (London, 1845),

252

77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

94.

95. 96. 97. 98.

NOTES

pp. 30, 33, 188, 198; Ward, Chaucer, pp. 118, 145–146; and Minto, Characteristics of English Poets, pp. 8, 9. On these points, see Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body, pp. 8, 10, 103, 116. Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body, pp. 8, 134. This tradition was largely in response to Harry Bailly’s description of Chaucer the Pilgrim, as well as the famous portraits of the poet (or his alter ego) in the Ellesmere Chaucer or Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes (Harley 4866). Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies, p. 3. See Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body, pp. 118, 122, 132, 133. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, pp. 182–185. Helen Cooper, “Chaucerian Poetics,” p. 46. Cooper is here describing criticism broadly conceived, rather than merely addressing scholarship of the nineteenth century, which underscores that these ideas are not only applicable to the Victorian era but also earlier periods and even our own day and age. Helen Cooper, “Chaucer’s Self-Fashioning,” 56, 57. In this instance, Cooper’s comment is offered in the context of the reception of Chaucer in the Renaissance, but once again, her notion seems to hold for later ages as well, including the Victorian era. See Butler, Bodies that Matter, pp. 1, 227, 231. On these points, see Butler’s Bodies That Matter, pp. 7, 100. See Burger, “Queer Chaucer,” 160, 161. Ibid., 159, 163; see also Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, p. xvii. Sinfield, Cultural Politics—Queer Reading, p. 15. I have removed the italics from this quotation, taken from Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, p. 197. Sedgwick is actually referencing criticism of Henry James with these words, but they also fit well the elisions of Chaucerians. For these quotations, see, respectively, Kłosowska, Queer Love in the Middle Ages, p. 5; and Sinfield, Cultural Politics—Queer Reading, p. 36. Sarah Cooper, Relating to Queer Theory, pp. 104, 206–207. Here, I borrow from Sedgwick’s vital scholarship, which attempts to “denaturalize the present” and reimagine homosexuality “as we know it today.” See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, pp. 48, 53. Indeed, Cadden provides examples of medieval writers addressing such notions as hermaphrodites, eunuchs, women dressing as men, and men engaging in sexual activities with other men. See Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, p. 165. See Laskaya, Chaucer’s Approach to Gender, p. 13. See Peter Beidler’s introduction to Masculinities in Chaucer, p. 3. Quotations drawn from Murray’s introduction to Conflicted Identities, pp. x–xi. Bullough, “On Being a Male in the Middle Ages,” pp. 34, 41.

NOTES

253

99. Jo Ann McNamara, “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150,” in Medieval Masculinities, Lees, p. 22 [3–29]. Additional, useful studies of medieval masculinity include Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); and Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1997). 100. See Sinfield, Cultural Politics—Queer Reading, p. 15. 101. For my earlier comments, see chapter 4, section 4.3. 102. The General Prologue, I.756. 103. Plummer, “Beth Fructuous and that in Litel Space,” p. 107. 104. Mark Allen, “Mirth and Bourgeois Masculinity in Chaucer’s Host,” in Masculinities in Chaucer, Beidler, pp. 13, 16, 21[9–21]. 105. See Tison Pugh, “Queering Harry Bailly: Gendered Carnival, Social Ideologies, and Masculinity under Duress in the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review 41.1 (2006): 39, 44, 59 [39–69]. 106. The Pardoner’s Tale, VI.952, 955; The Clerk’s Prologue, IV.2; and Epilogue to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, VII.3452, 3453, 3455, 3456. It should be noted that in Middle English, a “mayde” could apply to both genders, though it seems to be a pejorative descriptor for the male Clerk in the mouth of the Host. Also, the reference to the Nun’s Priest as a “trede-foul” echoes the earlier description of the Monk, and as the Riverside Chaucer’s explanatory notes state, Chaucer may have intended to cancel out the second usage (although there is some debate on this point). 107. Laskaya, Chaucer’s Approach to Gender, pp. 44, 51. 108. Laskaya makes a related case in Chaucer’s Approach to Gender, pp. 4, 192. 109. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 97. 110. The Shipman’s Tale, VII.435; and The Epilogue to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, VII.3449. 111. The Prologue to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, VII.2786, 2787, 2789. 112. Sir Thopas, VII.923, 924, 925, 930. 113. The possibility of humor and/or irony would seem to be underscored by the fact that, comparatively speaking, Harry offers a positive assessment of the Tale of Melibee, by stating his wish that his wife Goodelief had heard the story of the patient Prudence. See The Prologue to the Monk’s Tale, VII.1889–1925. 114. The Prologue to the Monk’s Tale, VII.1941–42, 1945–1948, 1951, 1965. 115. Prologue to Sir Thopas, VII.696–697. 116. See Blamires, “Sexuality,” p. 214. Ruth Mazo Karras has recently considered at length the concept of “active” male vs. “passive” female sexuality in the Middle Ages; cf. Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others (New York: Routledge, 2005). 117. Pugh, “Queering Harry Bailly,” 59–60. Cf. Ganim, “Identity and Subjecthood,” p. 236.

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118. In “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan,” the poet mentions his “figure” (ln. 27) and puts himself among those who are “hoor and rounde of shap” (31). Meanwhile, in the House of Fame, the Eagle complains that Geffrey is “noyous for to carye” (ln. 574), while in “Merciles Beaute”—which may or may not have been written by Chaucer—the writer references the notion that he has become “fat” (ln. 27). 119. Prologue to Sir Thopas, VII.711; Sir Thopas, VII.921. Italics mine. 120. The Middle English definitions in this chapter are taken from the online edition of the Middle English Dictionary, ed. F. McSparran, June 10, 2005. http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/med. 121. I quote from Hall’s dissertation from the University of Glasgow. See Alaric Timothy Peter Hall, The Meaning of Elf and Elves in Medieval England, Ph.D., University of Glasgow, October, 2004, pp. 2, 190, 191, 195, 203. Much of this material has now been published in Hall’s Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity (Cambridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2007). 122. Pugh, “Queering Harry Bailly,” 60. 123. The Wife of Bath’s Tale, III.874–875, 878–880. 124. Cohen, Of Giants, 101, 112. For Cohen, The Tale of Sir Thopas “fundamentally transforms the romance formula” through its omission of “any kind of sexual menace,” thereby working against the traditional, sexually charged “gigantomachia” of these romance adventures, which often are motivated by “sexual violence and unauthorized aggression.” In Chaucer’s tale, on the other hand, “masculinity is inscribed as diminutive” as the male body is diminished “to keep it safe from the possibility of sex”; thus, “Chaucer’s reductive poetics drain romance of its libidinal force, transforming the genre from an exercise in the excitation of desire to a comic demonstration of the body’s innocuous innocence.” On these points, see Of Giants, pp. 97, 100, 101, 102, 108, 109. 125. Ann Haskell, “Sir Thopas: The Puppet’s Puppet,” Chaucer Review 9.3 (1975): 253, 259 [253–259]. 126. Ibid., 253. 127. It is interesting, if surprising, that the MED does not offer “puppet” as one of the connotations for a “popet.” The OED, too, suggests that our modern term “puppet” was a later etymological development. 128. Cohen, Of Giants, pp. 99, 115. 129. For these connotations, I am drawing on both the MED and the OED. 130. See Plummer, “Beth Fructuous and that in Litel Space,” p. 112. 131. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Diminishing Masculinity in Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas,” in Masculinities in Chaucer, Beidler, pp. 149, 150, 151 [143–155]. 132. Plummer, “Beth Fructuous and that in Litel Space,” p. 113. 133. I quote from Pugh, “Queering Harry Bailly,” 60. 134. Here, I am inspired by the phrasing used, respectively, by Bowers in “Queering the Summoner,” p. 301; and Minnis in “Chaucer and the

NOTES

135. 136. 137.

138.

139. 140.

141. 142. 143.

144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151.

152. 153. 154.

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Queering Eunuch,” p. 129. I have previously quoted from these same passages in chapter 4, section 4.3. Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 1, 2. Ibid., pp. 3, 5. According to Laskaya, Chaucer the Pilgrim “tries to avoid being drawn into the limelight. He feels vulnerable to the judgments of others, so he frequently turns to us either to excuse himself or to justify himself.” See Chaucer’s Approach to Gender, p. 197. George Williams, A New View of Chaucer (Durham, NC: Duke University Pres, 1965), pp. 145, 147, 150. Writing in a far less politically correct age, Williams described Sir Thopas as “what an undergraduate would call a ‘pansy’ or perhaps a ‘queer,’ ” thus representing a figure with characteristics that “would naturally invite ribald jokes about homosexuality” (p. 147). Phillips, An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales, p. 176. See Britton J. Harwood, “Same-Sex Desire in the Unconscious of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls,” Exemplaria 13.1(2001): 106 [99–135]. As this title implies, Harwood is not actually referring to the ThopasMelibee link, but is interested in the repressed wishes of the poet within the Parliament of Fowls. Nonetheless, the comment seems logically applicable to the reception legacies in question. Chauncey Wood, “Chaucer and ‘Sir Thopas’: Irony and Concupiscence,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 14.3 (1972): 389 [389–403]. Ibid., 390, 392, 403. In making these observations, I borrow from the work of Catherine Attwood, who comments on Christine de Pizan’s usage of a “doublegendered” persona in her writing; see Attwood, Dynamic Dichotomy, p. 186. I also apply ideas from Bullough and Brewer, “Medieval Masculinities and Modern Interpretations,” p. 95. Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, p. 148. Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, pp. 176, 177. I am inf luenced here by a kindred set of remarks made by Sinfield in Cultural Politics—Queer Reading, p. 56. Burger, “Queer Chaucer,” 158, 163. I borrow phrasing from Bowers’s “Queering the Summoner,” p. 305. Sinfield, Cultural Politics—Queer Reading, p. 10. Phrasing here taken from Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, pp. 157, 197. According to Burger, a “queer” Chaucer is a different situation than is found with Shakespeare because “what little evidence there exists about the historical Chaucer’s own sexual desire—most notably and controversially the ‘rape’ of Cecily Chaumpaigne—is clearly directed toward women.” See “Queer Chaucer,” 158. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 53. Ferster, Chaucer on Interpretation, p. 19. Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, p. 176.

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155. The General Prologue, I.691. One of the few critics who draw a connection between the Pardoner and Chaucer the Pilgrim is Laskaya, who asserts that “although Chaucer seems to cast doubt on his own virile masculinity—writing his body as small, elfish, childish, like a ‘popet’—he distances himself (and his audience) from the Pardoner, the pilgrim who most trespasses embodied definitions of masculinity”; see Chaucer’s Approach to Gender, p. 191. 156. I borrow phrasing here from Geoffrey Harpham, whose aim is to encourage scholars to leave the “ghetto” and return to a more central interpretive position where a more broadly agreeable critical hermeneutic can be established; see Harpham, “Imagining the Centre,” pp. 50–51. 157. See Davenport, Medieval Narrative, p. 50. 158. Helen Cooper, “Chaucerian Representation,” p. 20; and also the continuation of this essay titled “Chaucerian Poetics,” p. 31. 159. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 197. 160. Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 123. 161. Jung, Carl, “Concerning Rebirth,” in The Collected Works of Carl Jung, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, 2nd edn. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 9:1.113–150.

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INDEX

Abelard, Peter, 14–15, 16 Albertanus of Brescia, 173 Allen, Elizabeth, 149 Allen, Mark, 185 Althusser, Louis, 81, 108 anti-feminism, 132, 136–138, 139, 140, 141, 176 anti-matrimonial satire, 91, 92 Aristotle, 10, 11 author-function, 35, 45, 46, 47, 52 authority, and literature, 1, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 35, 40, 41, 46, 49, 50, 52, 56, 101, 126, 127, 130, 133, 134, 161, 174, 181 authorship, theories of, 6, 7, 8, 19, 22, 52, 176 autobiography classical conceptions of, 5, 6, 10, 11 in the Middle Ages, 7, 8, 18, 19, 20, 22–23, 42–43, 57 see also autofiction; Chaucer Studies, autobiographical interpretation in autofiction, 2, 3, 9, 20, 25, 27, 31, 36, 40–48, 49, 50, 53, 54, 57, 62, 63, 64, 66, 70, 80, 84, 89, 90, 93, 97, 98, 99, 101, 105, 109, 117, 123–124, 125, 126, 136, 156, 161, 164, 173, 174, 180, 184, 196, 197 and autobiography, 20, 31, 41–44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 53, 57, 62, 63, 64, 66, 70, 80–81, 84, 89, 90, 93, 98, 101, 105,

109, 117, 123, 124, 125, 126, 136, 164, 174, 180, 184 and Chaucer’s narrators, 2, 3, 9, 31, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48–49, 50, 53, 54, 57, 62, 63, 64, 66, 70, 80–81, 84, 85, 89, 90, 93, 97, 98, 99, 101, 105, 109, 117, 123–124, 125, 126, 136, 156, 161, 164, 173, 174, 180, 184, 196, 197 coinage by Serge Doubrovsky, 41 implications for biographical writing, 49, 53, 54, 57, 62, 64, 66, 70, 80–81, 84–85 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 33, 37 Barthes, Roland, 3, 51, 52, 197 see also “death of the author” Battersby, James, 39 Baudri of Bourgueil, 13–14 Beaumont, Francis, 61 Bede, 12–13 Benson, C. David, 32–33, 126, 172 Benson, Larry, 114 Bernard Silvester, 15–16 binaries/binary sexual categories, see gender theory biographies/biographical writing on Chaucer, see under Chaucer, Geoffrey, biographies of on individuals from the Middle Ages, 53 on literary authors, 51, 52, 53, 54 “monumentalization” in, 53, 60, 69, 88

278

IN DEX

biographies/biographical writing— Continued theories of, 51–54 use of literary works as (auto)biographical evidence, 52, 53, 57–58, 59, 60, 64–65, 67, 68, 70–71, 72, 73–75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, 84–86 utility of, 51, 52, 85 Blake, William, 142 Boethius, 18–19, 20, 25 see also Consolatio philosophiae Bonaventure, 17–18 Bond, Gerald, 13 Booth, Wayne, 52, 88, 90 Bowers, John, 177–178 Boyd, David, 150 Brathwait, Richard, 131 Brewer, Derek, 51, 54–55, 104 Brooke, Stopford, 179, 180, 191 Bullough, Vern, 145 Bunyan, John, 159 Burger, Glenn, 182, 192–193, 195 Burrow, J.A., 165 Butler, Judith, 38, 122, 124, 159, 181–182 performative theories of, 38, 122, 181–182 Cadden, Joan, 149–150, 183 Carlson, David, 102 Chance, Jane, 94, 95, 97, 101 characteres scripturae, 12, 13, 25 Chaucer, Geoffrey and (literary) authority, 1, 2, 22, 40, 46, 49, 50, 56, 101, 118, 126, 133, 159, 161, 163, 174, 177, 181, 195 biographies of and alleged Protestant sympathies, 61–62, 66 “appeal to fact” in nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, 75–79 autobiographical interpretation in, 49, 52, 53, 54, 57–58,

59–60, 61, 63, 64–68, 70–71, 72, 73–79, 80–81, 84–86 basis on apocryphal works, 57, 58, 59–60, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 76 during the eighteenth century, 63–68 establishment of “Father Chaucer”, 55–56, 58 justification of Chaucer’s writing, 58–63, 66 “legends” of Chaucerian biographies, 56–58, 59–60, 63, 66, 67–68, 69–70, 71, 72–78, 80, 81, 85, 105 during the Renaissance, 56–61 during the Romantic age, 68–72 characters “Chaucer the Pilgrim”, see “Chaucer the Pilgrim” Harry Bailly (i.e. ‘the Host’ of the Canterbury Tales), 29, 33, 49, 82, 148, 152, 153, 160, 161–162, 164, 170, 179, 180, 184, 185–190, 192, 194 description of Chaucer the Pilgrim, 50, 157, 160, 161, 164, 177, 178–182, 185–196 and masculinity, 183–190 Melibee, 176 Monk, 153, 186 Nun’s Priest, 185, 186 Pardoner afforded a “life” by scholars, 50, 124–128, 133, 143, 144, 147, 155, 157 alleged homosexuality of, 124, 127, 128, 132, 145–152, 153, 154, 155, 157 disapproval by scholars, 129, 131–132, 142–143, 144–145 as homosocial embodiment, 154–156, 190 interruption of Wife of Bath, 127, 128, 151

IN DEX

and “moral f linch” of scholars, 50, 143–144, 147, 155, 156, 166, 170 moral interests of, 128–129, 143, 144, 145, 146, 156, 194 sins, greed, preaching, and relics, 142, 143, 144, 145, 151, 155, 156 Prudence, 175, 176 Sir Thopas, 165, 188, 191 Summoner, 152, 178 Wife of Bath afforded a “life” by scholars, 50, 124–128, 131, 133, 135, 136, 140, 141 and anti-feminism, 130–131, 132, 136–139, 140, 141 approval by scholars, 129, 131–132, 133, 134, 135, 139, 142, 145, 175 feminist readings by scholars, 130, 132–138, 139, 140, 141 moral interests of, 128–129, 132, 133, 136, 139, 141–142 satirical nature of, 130, 131, 132, 136, 138, 139 sexual nature of, 124, 127, 128, 132 “shrewishness” of, 130–131, 139 as “Father of English Poetry” (or “Father Chaucer”/ “Master Chaucer”), 3, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63, 67, 75, 79, 88, 94, 97, 104, 105, 137, 138, 144, 157, 159, 163, 164, 166, 170, 173, 177, 181, 191, 195, 196, 197 idealistic portrayals by scholars, 54, 58, 63, 79, 88, 163, 166, 169, 173, 180, 196 narrators/narrative technique awareness and understanding of personae, 2, 6, 22, 34, 140, 194, 196, 197 playfulness of, 1–2, 33, 42, 70–71, 91, 92, 97, 106,

279

116–117, 119, 122, 159, 167, 168, 169, 170, 184, 191 self-division and binaries/ doubling, 5, 7, 8, 31, 34, 70, 71, 74, 78, 120, 122, 153, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 168, 181, 183, 192, 194, 197 use of personae, 2, 3, 5, 8–9, 25, 29–34, 40, 42, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53, 62, 65, 70–71, 74, 77, 80–81, 84–85, 89, 91, 93, 96–97, 99, 101, 102, 105–106, 109, 110–111, 113, 116–117, 118, 119, 123–124, 125, 129, 133–134, 136, 137, 139–140, 149, 152–153, 157, 161, 162, 168, 173, 174, 177, 180, 183, 184, 186–191, 194, 196, 197 relationship to Henry IV, see Henry IV relationship to John of Gaunt, see John of Gaunt relationship to Richard II, see Richard II religious views and piety, 61–62, 66–67, 78, 84, 88, 89, 94, 95, 101, 112, 115, 116, 117–119 scholars of, see Chaucer Studies, works theme of masculinity in, 99, 101, 152, 153–154, 155, 157, 176–177, 182, 183–185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 192 themes of sentence and solaas (profit and pleasure) in, 87, 162, 171 Book of the Duchess, 29, 44, 70, 79, 107 Canterbury Tales, 5, 29, 30, 32, 34, 41, 44, 49, 61, 62, 64, 70, 74, 82, 87, 112, 113, 114, 116, 119, 125, 126, 127, 143, 149, 150, 153, 155, 157, 160, 161, 164, 171, 174, 177–178, 179, 181, 183, 184, 185, 189, 196

280

IN DEX

Chaucer, Geoffrey—Continued “dramatic” readings of, 29, 32, 36, 64–65, 81, 126 “Chaucer the Humorist” in, see under Chaucer Studies “Chaucer the Moralist” in, see under Chaucer Studies Thopas-Melibee sequence, see Prologue; Tale of Melibee; Tale of Sir Thopas under Chaucer, Geoffrey “Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn”, 89, 90, 98–101, 111 “Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse”, 89, 101, 102, 106–111 General Prologue, 32, 33, 74, 145, 185 House of Fame, 1, 29, 44, 70 Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, 1 “Lak of Stedfastnesse”, 87, 89, 101, 102–106, 107, 110 “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton”, 50, 70–71, 89, 90–94, 95, 96, 97, 98 “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan”, 50, 89, 90, 91, 94–97, 98 Miller’s Prologue, 170, 196 minor poems autobiographical interpretation of, 50, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 98, 100, 101, 105, 109–110, 112, 114, 116–117, 118, 119, 120 conventional features of, 91–92, 95–97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104–105, 106, 109, 110, 111, 113, 115–117, 118 and friendship, notions of, 89, 90–91, 92, 93–94, 95, 97–98, 101, 107, 109, 111, 112 historicization and individualization by scholars, 89, 90–91, 93, 95,

96, 97, 98, 99, 102–103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 113, 115, 118 morality in (and moral readings of ), 87–88, 89, 90, 93, 94–95, 97, 100–101, 104, 105, 108, 112, 115, 117, 118–119, 128 Pardoner’s Prologue (specific references), 124, 128, 144, 147, 156 see also Pardoner under Chaucer, Geoffrey Pardoner’s Tale, 124, 128, 153 Parson’s Tale, 65, 113, 114–115, 118 Prioress’s Tale, 189, 196 Prologue to Sir Thopas, 184, 190, 192 description of Chaucer the Pilgrim in, see “Chaucer the Pilgrim”; Harry Bailly under Chaucer, Geoffrey Retraction, 50, 84, 87, 88, 89, 112–119 as Chaucer’s pious “final” words, 84, 112–113, 115–119 textual issues and, 113–115, 116–117 Tale of Melibee, 6, 50, 74, 159, 160–163, 164, 165, 167, 170–177, 179, 181, 184–185, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196 alleged dullness of, 172–173, 174 and moral issues, 159, 162, 163, 164–165, 167, 170–177, 181, 194, 195–196 political readings of, 174, 175–176 as translation, 173 Tale of Sir Thopas, 26, 50, 74, 159, 160–163, 164, 165–170, 171, 172, 174, 177, 179, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196 satirical readings of, 167–169

281

IN DEX

and scholarly “f linching”, 166–167, 170, 177, 195 serious interpretation of, 165–170 Troilus and Criseyde, 1, 33, 115 Wife of Bath’s Prologue (specific references), 124, 129–130, 131, 132, 133, 140, 141 and gender issues, 122–123, 124, 127, 129–141, 145, 152, 175 see also Wife of Bath under characters Wife of Bath’s Tale, 124, 131, 137, 140, 188 Chaucer Life-Records, 75, 78, 79, 106 Chaucer Society, 75, 76, 77, 81 Chaucer Studies autobiographical interpretation in, 1, 8–9, 26, 29, 30–32, 40, 41–42, 44, 49–50, 52, 53, 54, 57–58, 59–60, 61, 63, 64–66, 67–68, 70–75, 76, 77, 78–79, 80–81, 84–86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 99–100, 101, 105, 108–110, 114–117, 118, 119, 125, 136, 164, 168, 171, 173, 174, 176, 178–180, 184, 193 “body criticism” in, 164, 179–181 elision of “Chaucer the Humorist”, 165–167, 169, 170–171, 177 emphasis on “Chaucer the Moralist”, 167–168, 170–171, 172, 177 evasions and oversights in (general), 44, 54, 62, 77, 79, 82, 90, 96, 97, 103, 105, 122, 126, 133, 135–136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143–144, 147, 148, 151–152, 155, 156, 163, 166, 168, 173, 176, 181, 191, 192–193, 195, 196 and homophobia, 132, 145, 147, 148, 150, 157, 182, 185

ideologies of Chaucerians, 24, 32, 41, 46–47, 48, 49, 54, 56, 61, 62, 79, 81–82, 86, 108, 113, 126–127, 129, 132–133, 135, 136, 137, 144, 147–149, 151, 154, 163, 181, 193, 194, 196–197 interpretive fragmentation in, 129, 162–163, 164, 165, 168, 194, 195–196 moral dimension of criticism, 21, 24, 87–89, 90, 94–95, 101, 104, 105, 108, 112, 117, 118–120, 128–129, 135, 136, 139, 143–144, 155, 163, 165, 166, 167, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 191, 195–196

see also “moral f linch” and personae/persona-theory, 2–3, 5, 6–7, 8–9, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28–36, 40, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48–50, 53, 54, 56–58, 59–60, 61, 62, 65–66, 68, 70–75, 77, 78–86, 88–90, 91–97, 98–101, 103–106, 109–111, 113, 115, 116–117, 119–120, 122–124, 125–127, 128, 129, 131, 133–137, 138–141, 143, 148–149, 151, 152, 154–156, 157, 161–162, 163, 164, 167– 169, 170, 172, 173, 174–175, 177, 178–181, 183–198 “Chaucer the Man”, 8, 31–32, 44, 47, 49, 50, 53, 58, 59, 69, 72, 74, 78, 81, 89, 99, 113, 115, 116, 118, 123, 143, 156, 157, 173, 176, 177, 184, 188 “Chaucer the Pilgrim” and “body criticism”, see Chaucer Studies, “body criticism” in and “Chaucer’s Challenge”, 50, 194–195, 196–197 effeminate and “queer” features of, 50, 157, 175, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185–190, 191, 192–194, 195, 196

282

IN DEX

“Chaucer the Pilgrim”—Continued and “ghettoization” by critics, 195–196 homosocial reading of, 190–191 interpretation by E. Talbot Donaldson, 29–31, 32 and male anxieties, 176–177, 183, 184, 190–191 and “normalization” by critics, 122, 180–181, 190, 193 and queer theory, 47, 50, 157, 161, 178, 182–183, 184, 186–194, 195, 196 similarities to the Pardoner, 157, 160, 184, 186, 190, 192, 194–196 Christine de Pizan, 21, 22–23, 24, 134, 141, 142 Cicero, 9, 10, 95 Cohen, Jeffrey, 185, 188, 189 Col, Gontier, 21 Col, Pierre, 21, 23–24 Connor, Steven, 87 Consolatio philosophiae, 18–19, 20 Cooper, Helen, 119, 122, 130, 132, 152, 153, 162, 177, 181 Cooper, Sarah, 159, 161, 182 Court of Love, 67, 70, 71 Cross, J.E., 105 Curry, Walter Clyde, 145–146 Dane, Joseph, 113, 167 Dante Alighieri, 20–21, 25, 42, 61 Dart, John, 66–67, 179 David, Alfred, 88, 89, 93–94, 95 de Looze, Lawrence, 41 “death of the author”, 3, 40, 51, 52, 85 Deshler, C.D., 145 dialogism, 34, 37, 38 Dickens, Charles, 142 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 98–99, 111, 127–128, 133, 137, 148, 149, 160 Diomedes, 9 “doctrine of sincerity”, 31, 35 Donaldson, E. Talbot, 29–31, 32, 136 and “Chaucer the Pilgrim”, 29–31

Donatus, 9 Doubrovsky, Serge, 41 dramatic personae, see under persona/ personae Dryden, John, 59, 63–66, 68, 70, 73, 130 Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, 63–65, 70 Du Boulay, F.R.H., 51 écriture feminine, 137 elf/elves, medieval views of, 187–188 Eliot, T.S., 9, 28 Elliott, Robert, 4, 10, 36 Evrart de Conty, 21 Fables Ancient and Modern, see Dryden, John Faerie Queene, see Spenser, Edmund Feminism/Feminist theory, 130, 132–138, 140–141, 191 see also gender theory Ferris, Sumner, 109 Ferster, Judith, 118, 194 Festus, 10 Finnel, Andrew J., 109 Fish, Stanley, 51–52 Gardner, John, 83–84, 85 Gascoigne, Thomas, 112, 118 gender theory, 99, 111, 121–123, 124, 127–128, 132–138, 140–141, 145, 146–150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 175, 176, 181–182, 190, 191–194 and binaries/binary sexual categories, 121–123, 124, 127, 128, 150, 153, 156 on gender roles and sexual “norms” in the Middle Ages, 124, 134, 136–139, 140, 141, 147, 148–151, 154, 155, 183–185, 190, 192 and the Wife of Bath, see under Chaucer, Geoffrey Genette, Gérard, 37

283

IN DEX

Godwin, William, 69–71, 72, 73, 76, 91 Gordon, James, 118 Gower, John, 25, 55, 57, 118 Green, Richard Firth, 151 Guido da Pisa, 20–21 Hall, Alaric, 187 Hammond, Eleanor, 57, 72, 73, 75 Hansen, Elaine Tuttle, 136–137, 138 Haskell, Ann, 188–189 Heale, Elizabeth, 42 Henry IV, 57, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111 homodiegesis/homodiegetic narration, 34, 37, 38 homosexuality, in the Middle Ages, 16–17, 145, 146–151, 153, 154, 178, 182, 183, 194 see also Pardoner under Chaucer, Geoffrey homosociality, 92, 154–156, 190–191 see also Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky Horace, 10, 11, 16 Hoskins, John, 26 Howard, Donald, 31–32, 52–53, 84 and “Chaucer the Man”, 31–32 Hughes, Langston, 36 integumentum and involucrum, 15 “intentional fallacy”, 19, 30, 31, 35, 40, 45 see also “doctrine of sincerity” I-persona/I-personae, see under persona/personae Isidore of Seville, 12, 13 Jean de Meun, 19–20, 21–24, 25, 134 see also querelle de la Rose Jean de Montreuil, 21, 24 Jean Gerson, 21, 23, 24 John of Gaunt, 60, 79, 107 Joyce, James, 28 Jung, Carl, 38, 197 Juvenal, 11

Kane, George, 31 Karras, Ruth, 150 Kaske, R.E., 101 Kelly, H.A., 151 Kempe, Margery, 43 Kennedy, Beverly, 140, 142 Ker, W.P., 100, 172 Kimmelman, Burt, 9, 14 Kittredge, George Lyman, 28–29, 92, 94, 143–144, 180–181 Kłosowska, Anna, 162–163, 178 Knapp, Ethan, 135 Kruger, Steven, 147, 148, 159–160 Kuhl, E.P., 110 Laskaya, Anne, 140, 177, 185 Lawton, David, 33–34, 36, 37, 40, 46 and Chaucer’s Narrators, 33–34, 36 “legends” of Chaucerian biographies, see under Chaucer, Geoffrey, biographies of Leicester, Jr., H. Marshall, 34, 134 Leland, John, 56–58, 59, 60, 67, 68 Lerer, Seth, 55, 171 Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography, see Pearsall, Derek Lochrie, Karma, 121, 180 Lorimer, James, 108–109, 164 Lounsbury, Thomas, 79–81, 99 Lydgate, John, 55, 171, 172 Madden, William, 117 Manly, J.M., 82–83, 114, 125, 126 Marbod of Rennes, 16–17 “mark of autobiography”, 42, 44, 93 masculinity, in the Middle Ages, 99, 101, 149–150, 152, 153–154, 176, 177, 182, 183–184, 185, 186, 188, 190–191

see also gender theory mask/masking, see under persona/ personae McAlpine, Monica, 146–147 Memoir of Chaucer, see Nicolas, Nicholas Harris

284

IN DEX

Middle English Dictionary, 6–7, 187, 188, 189 mimesis, 10–11, 41, 64 Minnis, Alastair, 35, 138 Minto, William, 77, 78 Miskimin, Alice, 26 Mize, Britt, 99, 100 Modernism, 27, 28, 29 “moral f linch”, in Chaucer criticism, 50, 143–144, 147, 155, 156–157, 163, 166–167, 170, 177, 191–192, 195 see also Chaucer Studies, moral dimension of; Pardoner under Chaucer, Geoffrey Morley, Henry, 76–77, 99, 131, 168, 169 Narratology, 34, 39, 40 New Criticism, 3, 34 Nicolas, Nicholas Harris, 72–75, 76, 77, 78, 108, 178–179 Memoir of Chaucer, 72–75, 178 Nolan, Barbara, 33 Ovid, 11, 64 Owen, Jr., Charles, 114 Oxford English Dictionary, 7–8, 189 Oxford Latin Dictionary, 4–5, 6 Patterson, Lee, 34 Pearsall, Derek, 85–86, 92, 107, 151, 153, 174 Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 85–86 performativity, 10, 34, 37, 38, 122, 128, 181, 182 see also Butler, Judith persona/personae and authorial protection/defense, 11–12, 14, 16–17, 18, 19, 22, 25, 36, 134, 143 autobiographical interpretation of, see under Chaucer Studies, autobiographical interpretation in

and concept of the “divided self ”, 5, 34, 70, 71, 74, 78, 163, 164, 168, 179, 181, 194 and classical satire, 11–12 derivation of, 4, 9, 20 disregard by scholars (general), 2, 3, 8, 25, 26–27, 33–34, 35, 36–38, 40, 44, 45, 61, 103, 119, 137, 138–139, 173, 196, 197 dramatic personae, definition of, 5, 123 etymology of, 4–9 everyday human use, 7, 8, 38–39 in propria persona, 6, 19, 22, 74 see also I-persona/I-personae intentions/intentionality of, 6, 7, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 30, 31 I-persona/I-personae, definition of, 5, 123 and masks/masking, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 18, 25, 28, 29, 31, 38, 39, 45, 197 and narrative detachment, 29, 32–33, 35, 39, 71, 74, 89, 91, 93, 96, 115, 116, 124, 135, 137, 179 psychological theories of, 38–39 “queer” nature of and relationship to queer theory, 47–48, 49, 50, 75, 82, 86, 99, 100, 106, 108, 111, 123, 140, 141, 155–156, 160–161, 196 ramifications for literary interpretation (general), 3, 5, 6, 7, 8–9, 14, 19, 41–44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 54, 125, 194, 196 relationship to concept of mimesis, 10–11, 64 relationship to term “character”, 7, 65 and theories of voice or tone, see tone, theories of; voice, theories of theorization of, see persona-theory

IN DEX

persona-theory and Chaucer, see under Chaucer Studies in classical Greece and Rome, 5, 9–12 connections to theology and philosophy (general), 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14–15, 17, 18, 19 disregard by scholars, see under persona/personae during the Middle Ages, 6, 7, 12–25 and Modernism, 28–29 during the Neoclassical period, 26–27 during the Renaissance, 25–26 during the Romantic and Victorian periods, 26–27 and queer theory, see persona/ personae Personati (play by Naevius), 10 Phillips, Helen, 138, 191 physiognomy, 145, 146, 152 The Pilgrim’s Progress, 159 Pinckhurst, Adam, 98 Plummer, John, 185, 189, 190 Pollard, A.J., 107 polyphonic narratives, 13, 34, 37 Post-Structuralism, 3, 34 Pound, Ezra, 9, 28 Prendergast, Thomas, 180, 181 pseudo-autobiography, 41 queer theory and alleged homosexuality of the Pardoner, see Pardoner under Chaucer, Geoffrey and “Chaucer the Pilgrim”, see “Chaucer the Pilgrim” and personae/persona-theory, 47–48, 49, 50, 75, 82, 86, 99, 100, 106, 108, 111, 123, 140, 141, 155–156, 160–161, 196 see also gender theory querelle de la Rose, 21–24, 32, 134

285

reception studies and theory, 3, 24, 31, 46, 47, 49, 50, 52–54, 55, 59, 69, 71, 80–81, 83–85, 88, 89, 90, 98, 107, 112–113, 123, 124, 125, 129, 132–135, 138, 141, 147–149, 152, 156, 163, 166, 169, 170, 175, 179, 181–182, 191, 196–198 and anachronism, 133, 147–149, 150, 182 and Feminism, 132–135, 138, 141 and queer studies, 47, 147–149, 182, 191 see also Chaucer Studies Renaud de Louens, 173 reportatio and assertio, 15, 18, 19, 72 Richard II, 57, 59, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 175, 178, 191 Rigby, S.H., 141–142 Robertson, Jr., D.W., 139 Roman de la Rose, 19, 21–24, 37, 134 Roper, Gregory, 117–118 Roscius Gallus, 9 Rubey, Daniel, 176 Rushdie, Salman, 36 Ruud, Jay, 89, 95, 105 satire, use of personae in, see persona/ personae Sayce, Olive, 115, 116, 117 Scattergood, V.J., 91, 95, 100, 169 Schmitz, Leonhard, 71–72 Schricker, Gale, 115–116, 117 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 92, 121, 122, 145, 147, 154, 190, 194, 197 homosocial theories of, see homosociality “self-fashioning”, 58 Servius, 12 Shakespeare, William, 25, 63, 93, 193, 194 Sidney, Philip, 26, 58 Siebers, Tobin, 87, 88

286

IN DEX

Sinfield, Alan, 121, 123, 182, 193 Skeat, Walter W., 79, 81, 110 Song of Songs, 12, 13 Speght, Thomas, 26, 59–61, 67, 163–164 Spenser, Edmund, 165–166, 167 Stillwell, Gardiner, 175 Strohm, Paul, 55, 103 structural anti-feminism, see anti-feminism Sturges, Robert, 110–111, 153, 163, 192 subject (or sujet) and subjectivity, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 43, 48, 49, 123, 133, 182 Tatlock, J.S.P., 115 Terence, 9, 10 Testament of Love, 57, 59, 60, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 76 theater, classical, 4, 5, 9–11 see also persona/personae, masking tone, theories of, 33–34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40 Trigg, Stephanie, 2, 3, 63, 65 Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 68

Usk, Thomas, 55, 57, 59, 70 utilitas (moral utility), 21, 22, 23 . Vaughan, Míceál, 114, 115 voice, theories of, 28, 32, 33–34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 87 Walker, Cheryl, 45 Ward, Adolphus William, 77–79, 113, 124–125 Warton, Thomas, 167–168, 169 Watson, Nicholas, 135 Wharton, Henry, 62–63 William of Aragon, 19, 20 William of St. Thierry, 13 Williams, George, 191 Wimsatt, William, 30 words and deeds, theme of, 18, 41, 106 Work, James, 114 Wright, George, 3, 9, 26, 38 Yeats, William Butler, 9, 28 Zink, Michael, 42, 43 see also “mark of autobiography” Zumthor, Paul, 163

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Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature)

The philosopher's child: critical perspectives in the Western tradition

Richard II (Shakespeare, the Critical Tradition)

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Geoffrey Chaucer: The Critical Heritage Volume 1 1385-1837

Reason and Imagination in Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and the Cloud-author: Seeing from the Center (New Middle Ages)

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Geoffrey Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, Volume 2, 1837–1933 (The Collected Critical Heritage : Medieval Romance)

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Author and Audience in Latin Literature

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