Abstract
According to Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, women “are the most precious of gifts,” and the “regulation of the exchange of women between families and groups is the very basis of social organization.”1 In light of this, Criseyde’s transgression suits the “best interests of Troy in the repair of its losses in battle and in the reestablishment of truce or temporary equilibrium of the siege. She acts, that is, in the best interests of patriarchal society itself.”2 The principle of reciprocity that structures honor-bound gift economies is built around a triangle of power relations in which the female object that is fought over in war and exchanged in peace serves to unite two male subjects, both in their rivalry and in their reconciliation. In other words, Criseyde acts a sacrifice—the scapegoat who is sent into the wilderness—in order to secure an uneasy and temporary peace. What is significant and disruptive about Chaucer’s telling of the same old story (Troilus’s woe, Criseyde’s inconstancy) is not that the narrator suddenly “withdraws” from Criseyde but that he represents her in the first place, the interchangeable object of triangulated desire, as also a subject with her own desires and fears, and shows too how that subjectivity is effaced in shame—that he represents the internal, felt reality of shame as both the affective dimension of and the private cost at stake in cultural systems of honor and exchange.
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Notes
Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 57.
Thomas Malory, Complete Works, 2nd ed, ed. Eugène Vinaver (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 520.
Chrétien de Troyes, “The Knight with the Lion,” in Arthurian Romances, trans. William W. Kibler (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 370–75.
René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 11.
Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” in Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J. G. Peristiany (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 29.
This helpful summary comes from Rey Chow, “Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood,” Representations 94.1 (2006): 131–49, at 141.
On this point, and regarding my discussion of Theseus’s character in general, cf. Stephen Rigby, Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Medieval Political Theory, Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts, vol. 4 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009). Rigby summarizes the variety of positions in the “running battle” over interpreting the tale (pp. 1–10 273–89).
On the idea of disenchantment in Chaucer, see H. M. Leicester, The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in The Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
On the lineage of Palamon and Arcite, see David Anderson, “Theban Genealogy in the Knight’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 21 (1986–1987): 311–20. Anderson sorts out Chaucer’s hints about the parentage of Palamon and Arcite, and in the process demonstrates that at least one of Oedipus’s sons seems to have imitated his father’s incest (making sure that “royal blood” is not intermingled with any other).
On the idea of “the double” in literature, see René Girard, Deceit Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966); and “To Double Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). Girard’s use of the term differs somewhat from its use in studies of romantic literature, as a kind of doppelgänger or projection of the individual’s dual nature. Analyses of “the double” as a literary motif typically focus on the nineteenth-century novel, most notably in connection with the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky;
see, e.g., Laurence M. Porter, “The Devil as Double in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Goethe, Dostoevsky, and Flaubert,” Comparative Literature Studies 15.3 (1978): 316–35.
As far as I am aware, to date there are only four article-length studies tracing Girardian themes in Chaucer, and only one of these looks at mimesis in The Knight’s Tale: Laurel Amtower, “Mimetic Desire and the Misappropriation of the Ideal,” Exemplaria 8.1 (1996): 125–44.
See also Curtis Gruenler, “Desire, Violence and the Passion in Fragment VII of The Canterbury Tales: A Girardian Reading,” Renascence 52 (1999): 35–56.
Ann W. Astell (“Nietzsche, Chaucer, and the Sacrifice of Art,” Chaucer Review 39 [2004–2005]: 323–40) demonstrates the extent to which Girardian ideas illuminate the way in which Chaucer encourages “antisacrificial” reading practices. I discuss Astell’s essay in connection with the Manciple and the Pardoner (see chapter 6). John M. Bowers makes use of some Girardian terms to theorize the concept of ritual violence in his article “‘Dronkenesse is ful of stryvyng’: Alcoholism and Ritual Violence in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale,” English Literary History 57 (1990): 757–84.
Much work has been done on Chaucer’s use of Boccaccio, and the points I make here about the differences between them are widely recognized: see, e.g., Dominique Battles, The Medieval Tradition of Thebes: History and Narrative in the Roman de Thébes, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate, Studies in Medieval History and Culture 26 (New York: Routledge, 2004);
John Burrow, “Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ and the Three Ages of Man,” in Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Tübingen and Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1984), pp. 91–108.
One of the earliest critics to advance this interpretation was William Frost, who argued in 1949 that, through the characterization of Arcite and Palamon, The Knight’s Tale “develops a conflict between an ethic of battle and an ethic of love” (“An Interpretation of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” Review of English Studies 25 [1949]: 295 [289–304]). Variants of the “poetic justice” thesis persist: in addition to Amtower’s comments cited here, see also William Woods, “‘My Sweete Foo’: Emelye’s Role in the Knight’s Tale,” Studies in Philology 88 (1991): 276–306. Frost argues that Theseus’s and Emelye’s acts of mediation between the knights represent “a choice between justice and mercy, or between arms and love” (288).
See, e.g., Lorraine Kochanske Stock, “The Two Mayings in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale: Convention and Invention,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 85.2 (1986): 206–21.
See William E. Coleman, “The Knight’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 2 vols. (Cambridge and Rochester, NY: D.S Brewer, 2002–2005), 2:87–247.
See, e.g., William H. Brown, “Chaucer, Livy, and Bersuire: The Roman Materials in The Physician’s Tale,” in On Language: Rhetorica, Phonologica, Syntactica, ed. Caroline Duncan-Rose and Theo Vennemann (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 39–51;
Emerson Brown Jr., “What is Chaucer Doing with the Physician and his Tale?” Philological Quarterly 60.2 (1981): 129–49.
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 113–15.
John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck. Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 9 (1968; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).
The Physician’s Tale has long been considered a problem tale, in large part because of its generic oddness. Sheila Delany, e.g., has argued that Chaucer intentionally depoliticizes the context of the tale, transforming a pagan political narrative into a static Christian exemplum: “Politics and the Paralysis of Poetic Imagination in The Physician’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981): 47–60. Others have wondered at the apparent “incongruence between motivation and action” that results from this depoliticization: see, e.g., Howard Bloch, “Chaucer’s Maiden’s Head The Physician’s Tale and the Poetics of Virginity,” in Chaucer: Contemporary Critical Essays, New Casebooks Series, ed. Valerie Allen and Ares Axiotis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 145–56. Sandra Pierson Prior sums up critical response to the tale this way: “[I]t is, by virtually any critical judgement, a badly told story: inconsistent in tone, inept in story line, incoherent in sentence, and devoid of solaas” (“Virginity and Sacrifice in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale,” in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, ed. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999], p. 165).
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966. London: Routledge, 1991), p. 159.
For a full discussion of early Christian and medieval responses to the story of Jephthah, see John L. Thompson, Writing the Wrongs: Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Catherine Sanok, “Reading Hagiographically: The Legend of Good Women and its Feminine Audience,” Exemplaria 31 (2001): 324 [323–54].
See, e.g., Kathleen Coyne Kelley, “Useful Virgins in Medieval Hagiography,” in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, ed. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (New York: St Martin’s, 1990), pp. 134–64.
Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), p. 126.
Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 352–53.
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne points out that most collections of hagio-graphical texts in medieval England were produced for women in religious houses; see Wogan-Browne, “Saints’ Lives and the Female Reader,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 27 (1991): 314–32.
Alcuin Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics, Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 138;
Robert W. Hanning, qtd. in Blamires, from “Telling the Private Parts: ‘Pryvetee’ and Poetry in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” in The Idea of Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Howard, ed. Christian K. Zacher (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), p. 122.
See Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1995), p. 170.
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© 2012 Anne McTaggart
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McTaggart, A. (2012). Honor, Purity, and Sacrifice in The Knight’s Tale and The Physician’s Tale . In: Shame and Guilt in Chaucer. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137039521_3
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