Naughty by Nature: Chaucer and the (Re)Invention of Female Goodness in Late Medieval Literature
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NAUGHTY BY NATURE: CHAUCER AND THE (RE)INVENTION OF FEMALE GOODNESS IN LATE MEDIEVAL LITERATURE By JOANNA R. SHEARER A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSTIY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2007 1 © 2007 Joanna R. Shearer 2 To Marguerite A. English and Juanita J. Shearer, beloved grandmothers— May you both fly with the angels 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my committee, all of whom have been invaluable throughout this process, but special thanks and gratitude must go to Al Shoaf and Jim Paxson who have guided, challenged, and encouraged me into the medievalist I am today. To my best friend, Andrea Wood, who has been one of my most enthusiastic champions and the best sounding-board in all things academic and in life a person could ask for. To my extended friends and family, who are too numerous to name here, but each of whom possesses the uncanny ability to call or to write with supportive words at the moment when I need them most. To Jill, for being both a protective big sister and a dear friend, and for always having an answer when I ask, “So, what exotic location are you taking me to this time?” I need to offer profuse thanks to my patient and loving father, who always taught me that to live without laughter is in reality no life at all. His philosophy has saved me more times than I can count, and of course, I must acknowledge the fact that he did an excellent job of pretending that needing more financial support for an extra year of graduate school didn’t bother him in the least. Such supreme acting talent truly belongs on the stage! And, finally, but never last, I want to give my thanks to my amazing mother. In many ways, I owe her the greatest debt of all because, when all of the other mothers were teaching their little girls how to be lambs, she taught me how to be a tiger. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………………….…………4 ABSTRACT ………………………………………………………………………..……..….6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………..8 2 SUBVERTING RAPE, ROMANCE, AND RELIGION IN TROILUS AND CRISEYDE..………………………………………………………….36 3 “THE MAISTRESSE OF MY WIT, AND NOTHING I”: CHAUCER AND THE MISTRANSLATION OF LEGENDARY WOMEN..………………………………73 4 A VIRGIN, A WIFE, AND A MARTYR WALK INTO THE TALES . ………..116 5 CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………...…..157 LIST OF REFERENCES…………………………………………………………..…...…..164 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH……………………………………………………………….183 5 Abstract of the Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy NAUGHTY BY NATURE: CHAUCER AND THE (RE)INVENTION OF FEMALE GOODNESS IN LATE MEDIEVAL LITERATURE By Joanna R. Shearer August 2007 Chair: Richard Shoaf Major: English The women in Chaucer’s stories are not content to live life in the margins, and these characters are neither as good as they should be according to medieval standards of proper female behavior, nor are they as bad as these same standards would have one believe. In this sense, Chaucer is an author who is ahead of his time, and one can determine from his poems that women, in all of their myriad incarnations, are, for him, meant to be seen and heard. In “Subverting Rape, Romance, and Religion in Troilus and Criseyde,” I examine the most common mistranslation of Criseyde by modern scholars, namely I argue that Criseyde’s betrayal of Troilus for Diomede is as necessary as it is inevitable. Thus, Chaucer rehabilitates his heroine, a feat he manages without harming either her reputation or Troilus’ masculinity. In my chapter on The Legend of Good Women, I often disagree with contemporary critical reasoning as to why Chaucer-as-author would choose to (re)translate Classically “bad” women into rather dull examples of “good” womanhood. It is my contention that he uses these women and their tales to show that, no matter how much either sex tries to play the victim when “true” love sours, there are often few real victims to be had in such tragic scenarios. 6 My fourth chapter examines how The Man of Law’s Tale, when taken in conjunction with two other Canterbury Tales, provides the best answers to some of Chaucer’s most challenging questions. Indeed, he (re)invents Custance as the exception to many of the rules for proper female behavior in the fourteenth century, even as she is paradoxically the perfect embodiment of authority’s claim on women in general. In essence, this dissertation’s over-arching aim has been to show just how adept Chaucer is at (re)translating women from their often one-dimensional “Lady-like” portrayals in courtly literature into something that is wholly unique and, most important of all, memorable – even to a modern world. Few male authors (re)invent women as Chaucer does, and while many scholars argue that he was simply a man of his time, I contend that, in reality, his work remains timeless. 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Courtly love appears as simply the most radical strategy for elevating the value of the object by putting obstacles to its attainability. —Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment We only know if we truly want something when someone tells us we can’t have it. It’s what makes us strive for the “thing”. —Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love Why by the cow when you can get the milk for free? —Sandra E. Shearer, my mother Chaucer is one of the foremost observers of human life. For him, humanity in all of its myriad incarnations is the stuff of fiction, and even though he is not adverse to fantasy world building where chickens can speak in refined poetic meter, or where parliament can be composed of birds, or even where the spirit of a woman can dictate to a male author both the content of his own writing and the literary course of his imaginative ecstasy, the human realm often provides his most controversial material. Indeed, it is Chaucer’s all too perceptive observations of human life in general, and the interactions between the sexes in particular, that most directly informs this project, for it is my contention that Chaucer, while not a proto-feminist, was still more concerned than most male authors of his day with the accurate portrayal of women, wifehood, motherhood, and female sanctity.1 Even though he is not precisely feminist, at least not by any contemporary definition of this word, he goes a long way toward a more equitable treatment of 1 In arguing that Chaucer is not a proto-feminist, I mean to say that, as a person living in the fourteenth-century, he would have had no vocabulary to either comprehend or translate this term as well as its various meanings. However, in spite of this gap between medieval and modern, it is possible to assert that he would have been cognizant of the profound inequities that women faced both legally and spiritually compared to men. It is this perception that informs much of Chaucer’s writing in the sense that he frequently plays with notions of what constitutes “good” and “bad” as they are often falsely constructed by those in power, and it is in his humorous reversals of these categories that renders him more sympathetic than most towards women, even if he isn’t quite feminist in any modern sense of this term. 8 women in literature. But Chaucer, like all human beings, is far from perfect. He has his own flaws, one of which includes the much debated and rather disturbing accusation of raptus made against him by Cecilia Chaumpagne. While the charge is later dropped, one has to wonder why it was ever made in the first place. After all, the charge of raptus did not always mean sexual violence or violated virginity (Phillips 83). Around the late thirteenth and early fourteenth- centuries, it could be translated as “seizing,” “carrying off by force,” as well as “rape” within the common-law, and courts often asked accusers “‘what’ is being seized and ‘from whom’” (Phillip 83)? In essence, it was sort of a catchall term that applied to any questionable sexual advances towards a woman, whether she was abducted and ransomed back by her family, or whether she was caught in the throes of a consensual act, or whether she was in fact raped. Any of these scenarios could be classified as raptus. And, as one critic explains, these multiple translations lead to “the notoriously low rate of convictions for raptus throughout [this] period . Judges were reluctant to impose penalties of life and limb, but forcing payment of compensation for loss of virginity seemed more reasonable” (Phillips 86), which is a disturbing state of affairs on a number of levels. The foremost of which being the fact that the courts were letting actual and/or potential rapists off the hook with little more than a slap on the wrist and a fine that was calculated based upon a particular woman’s perceived level of purity. As a result, virgins were far more expensive to violate sexually than wives or widows. In turn, the woman herself received little compensation in return because any accusation of raptus no matter what the circumstances or the outcome would irreparably harm her reputation, and in the case of a young woman, it would seriously damage any chance for her to make an advantageous marriage, if such were her goal. The reason for this harm originates from medieval notions of both female purity and chastity as well as the professed need of the law to 9 regulate both, for while “marriage placed women in an inferior role” (Carson & Weisl 2), there was, in actuality, some small power to be had in both virginity and in a former virgin’s chaste widowhood.