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New Studies in Medieval Culture Ethan Knapp, Series Editor INTERVENTIONS: NEW STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL CULTURE Ethan Knapp, Series Editor All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. DesIRE G in the G CANTERBURY TALES Elizabeth Scala THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Copyright © 2015 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scala, Elizabeth, 1966– Desire in the Canterbury Tales / Elizabeth Scala. pages cm. — (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1278-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9383-6 (cd-rom) 1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, –1400. Canterbury tales. 2. Desire in literature. I. Title. PR1875.D47S33 2015 821'.1—dc23 2014043500 Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. For Doug All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. contents Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION Mobility and Contestation 1 CHAPTER ONE “We Witen Nat What Thing We Preyen Heere”: Desire, Knowledge, and the Ruse of Satisfaction in the Knight’s Tale 43 CHAPTER TWO Misreading Like the Reeve 85 CHAPTER THREE Symptoms of Desire in Chaucer’s Wives and Clerks 123 CHAPTER FOUR Disfigurements of Desire in Chaucer’s Religious Tales 153 CONCLUSION Reading and Misreading Chaucer 203 Bibliography 207 Index 219 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. acknowledgments his book has been very long in coming; the debts I have accrued are extensive. My first one is, and will always be, to my husband, T Douglas Bruster. He reads everything that I write numerous times and always makes it better: sharper, clearer, and crisper in its articulations. It is no overstatement that I owe my entire career to him. To the press’s two readers I own an incredible debt. Since they both for- tunately signed their reader’s reports, I can thank them here by name and in very specific ways. They offered two incredibly different responses to the book and made very different demands on it, both of which were impor- tant to the way I thought about my project. That they both were positive about the book and “got” what I was trying to do in it was incredibly grati- fying and motivational. They diverged from each other in the very best of ways. Karla Taylor kept me philologically honest. Her comments made me articulate the historicist and philological stakes of the psychoanalytic argu- ment concretely and emphatically. Mark Miller was an ideal reader of a different kind. He asked for a more Lacanian account of desire and stopped me from overindulging at the level of pilgrim intent. He always encouraged me to go further with my reading of Chaucer’s tales in productive ways. A number of friends, colleagues, and students discussed this project with me and read various parts of it. Patricia Clare Ingham probably read the entire book in pieces a number of times. She has been the very best of academic friends and has always kept me sane when associate professor ix All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. x • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS life just seemed too difficult. Daniel Birkholz, Coleman Hutchison, Cathy Sanok, Christopher Bradley, Jonathan Lamb, Meghan Andrews, Brooke Hunter, Charlotte Mark, and Noah Guynn read different chapters and offered good advice. All of the students I have taught in my Canterbury Tales course over the past ten years have heard this material in some form or another. Their tolerance, enthusiasm, and good-humored questions have been much appreciated. A version of the third chapter appeared as “Desire in the Canterbury Tales: Sovereignty and Mastery Between the Wife and Clerk,” in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 81–108. A small portion of the first chap- ter on the Knight’s Tale overlaps with material first published in an essay, “Desire,” in Marion Turner’s A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Mal- den and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 49–62. I thank the publishers of these essays for permission to reprint. I also want to thank the University of Texas and the chair of the English department, Liz Cullingford, for supporting my work with various kinds of leave time and research assistance. Finally, a big thank you to my kids, Madeleine and Claire, who have heard more about desire and the Canter- bury Tales than any children really want to know. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. introduction MOBILITY AND CONTESTATION his is a book about the pilgrimage frame of the Canterbury Tales and its means of generating stories by gathering disparate fig- T ures together. It is thus a study of the relations among tales in the poem. Pilgrimage is situated, of course, within important historical and cultural contexts specific to medieval Christianity and the work of redemption. It is also a literary trope and thus an occasion for exploration, especially self-exploration, of various narrative kinds. Chaucer invokes the pilgrimage frame lightly, as part of an ordinary world of experience in the late fourteenth century. As the surround for his stories and their narrat- ing figures, it does not impose itself as a strict grid of intelligibility that anchors a rigid moral framework. Rather, pilgrimage provides the meeting ground for a diverse group of figures and an occasion for divergence itself, as the group forms a “compaignye” (1.717) to do nothing so emphatically as to depart.1 And once they get going, leaving the suburb of Southwark for the Canterbury road, they continue to depart, finding ways to diverge from what others have said as each of them tells his tale. The pilgrimage forms a site of continued mobility and a productive metonymy of stories. 1. All quotations from the Canterbury Tales throughout this book are taken from The Can- terbury Tales, Complete, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000) and will be noted by fragment and line number parenthetically. Other Chaucer quotations, as well as material from the textual notes, come from its parent text, The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 1 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. 2 • INTRODUCTION In calling this a book about the pilgrimage frame, then, I do not mean that it’s a book about medieval pilgrimage so much as about what happens when Chaucer conjoins pilgrimage and contest, journey and competition, as a framework for a tale collection. Doing so sets a number of things in motion, not just his pilgrim narrators. He assembles this varied group of speakers; he gives their journey purpose and direction without explanation; he pretends a unity that then gets tested and discomfited; he allows for spontaneous generation, open conflict, and diversion as the stories propel the journey and its narrating figures along. My interests are in the genera- tive entanglements of the stories as competitive fictions, sometimes directly so as in the tales of the first fragment or the so-called marriage group,2 where certain stories are set in open conflict with a particular narrative or claim, at other times more indirectly as the products of the social contract the Host, later named as Harry Bailly (1.4358), has organized. Of course, they all originate in the agreement he formulates in the General Prologue and to which each of the pilgrims assents. It is only reasonable to tell tales to pass the time, or so the Host claims. Where silence might have enabled or encouraged one to consider one’s spiritual condition, no such thing is ever mentioned. For Bailly it makes little sense “to ride by the weye doumb as a stoon” (1.774) because neither “confort ne myrthe” would be at all pos- sible (1.773). The pilgrims are reminded throughout the journey of what they have agreed to do “as forward is” (2.34)—“For whan a man that is entred in a pley, / He nedes moot unto the pley assente” (4.10–11). They are continually threatened with the cost they must bear in breaking their “biheste” (5.698). This initial pact explains why each comes to tell a tale; they agreed to it before they even had an idea what they were agreeing to: “Us thoughte it was noght worth to make it wys, / And graunted hym withouten moore avys” (1.785–86). But it does not explain what happens when those tales are set in their competitive context and within particular fragments or against generic conventions and constraints. Both within and across fragments, Chaucer posits more subtle relations between tellers and their stories and between stories and their situations: as taunts, rebuttals, departures, continuations, or remedies over and against the tales that have been told before. The pilgrimage is not a fixed system that installs meaning but a point of dramatic departure from which different tales and interpreta- tions can proliferate. As a contest, the Canterbury Tales sets the stories against one another, making comparison and contrast inevitable.
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