The Squire’s Tale: Romancing Animal Magic

  • Lesley Kordecki
Chapter
Part of the The New Middle Ages book series (TNMA)

Abstract

The “problematic” concept of an exclusive human subjectivity may well be revealed in stories that link the animal with the woman, Plumwood’s “feminine sphere,” as we see in this chapter on Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale.1 The emphasis in the tale becomes one of comfort and subsistence, two areas defined by gender and now by species. With the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer moves from the psychological schema inherent in dream visions to the overtly representational, dramatic genre(s) of the story within the story, and this move affects the experimentation that Chaucer conducts with voice, most interestingly, once again with the voice of the nonhuman. And with the Squire’s Tale, we enter into the romance genre, the highly self-conscious accounting of the “other” world, the exotic world, with its social dimensions intact and valuative. Romance demands a more externalized perspective than the highly psychological dream vision with its internal self-conscious obsession. This genre has also given us the ultimate mediator of magic, the character of Merlin, wizard and eagle guide to Arthur, for the merlin, like the falcon of this tale, is another bird of prey. Arthur’s guide is both similar and dissimilar to Geffrey’s eagle in the House of Fame.

Keywords

Peregrine Falcon Stylize Idealization Canterbury Tale Courtly Love Sick Bird 
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Notes

  1. 2.
    See Jill Mann, From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), pp. 200–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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    All Chaucer citations are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), by line number. Carol Heffernan tells us that we reenter the “world of men,” “Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: The Poetics of Interlace or the ‘Well of English Undefiled,’” Chaucer Review 32.1 (1997): 39–40.Google Scholar
  3. 4.
    Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” (1985); rpt. in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), pp. 2190–220; But we may see “a problem in privileging the allegorical reading,” as Sandy Feinstein tells us about Bayard in the Reeve’s Tale. “The Reeve’s Tale: About That Horse,” Chaucer Review 26.1 (Summer 1991): 99.Google Scholar
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  33. 45.
    For a review of scholarship on this encounter, see David Seaman, “‘The Wordes of the Frankeleyn to the Squier’: An Interruption?” English Language Notes 24.1 (1986): 12–18.Google Scholar
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    Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 178.Google Scholar

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© Lesley Kordecki 2011

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  • Lesley Kordecki

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