Chaucer’s Viragos: A Postcolonial Engagement? A Case Study of the Man of Law’s Tale, the Monk’s Tale, and the Knight’s Tale

Abstract

Amazonian women and eastern viragos (‘manly women’) recur in the literature of late medieval Europe. There are several virago-types in Chaucer’s work and, in each case, their Otherness is not limited to a simple binary gender issue. All of them are enmeshed in complex intersections of gender, religion, and ethnicity.¹ Chaucer seems to highlight the instability of such categories of difference through time and place and this essay will draw out his apparent deconstruction of the medieval racial and racist clichés concerning Oriental women.² Except for a few clear-cut cases of either pejorative or positive attributions (such as monstrous females versus Christian crusaders), Chaucer has an enigmatic attitude to most viragos. He builds on the typology of the virago, which will be discussed first, but as his viragos are not repetitive copies of a single template they must be considered individually, which means that there is only space here to concentrate on a few case studies. Taking the Canterbury Tales as its focal point, this essay examines the two mothers-in-law of the Man of Law’s Tale, Zenobia of the Monk’s Tale, and the Amazon figures of the Knight’s Tale.³