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O'hanlon 1 MEDIEVAL VIEWS on AGING and THEIR MODERN

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O'hanlon 1 MEDIEVAL VIEWS on AGING and THEIR MODERN O’Hanlon 1 MEDIEVAL VIEWS ON AGING AND THEIR MODERN IMPLICATIONS: ANALYZING CHAUCER’S PARDONER THROUGH THE LENS OF A SECOND MIRROR-STAGE By Kelsie O’Hanlon A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate Studies Division of Ohio Dominican University Columbus, Ohio in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH December 2017 O’Hanlon 2 Introduction The questions of personal identity—who am I, who do I want to be, and how can I get there—are often considered to be defined in adolescence and young adulthood. Personality traits are established, careers are chosen, families are born; a person’s life appears to be mapped out early in life, and people expect to follow a certain path as they age. Yet, on paper, such a journey is much simpler than in reality. Aging is a difficult process for many people. Unexpected crises arise, friends are made and lost, and love can be elusive. Yet, this is not a modern phenomenon. While people can expect to live longer in the modern era, the problems associated with aging have always existed. This journey of finding oneself can be much more uncertain than one would initially believe. People struggling to define who they are have long turned to literature as a way of representing and of understanding the challenges of aging. While modern medicine and psychology have allowed for greater longevity and for a better understanding of personality development in today’s society, the medieval world was not without its insights into the human condition. In his most acclaimed work The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer speaks to the heart of humanity through his characters. Indeed, Harold Bloom in his The Western Canon terms Chaucer’s creations as “the virtual reality of literary characters” (105). Chaucer’s memorable cast is comprised of people of all ages, classes, professions, and genders. However, certain characters are more defined by their age than others. Readers learn of the noble Knight who is juxtaposed with his young, lusty squire; of the deceitful Pardoner who interrupts the aging Wife of Bath, who is herself on the pilgrimage in search of one more husband; of the grumpy old Reeve who is at odds with the more vigorous (and often drunken) Miller. Each of these characters tells his or her tale, and these tales reveal truths O’Hanlon 3 about the characters themselves. Of all of the characters and tales Chaucer creates, the one that best reveals the struggles of growing older is the Pardoner. In order to truly understand how the Pardoner reveals insights into medieval and modern views on aging, I will first establish how similarly medieval and modern peoples view the aging process. In addition, before scrutinizing the Pardoner through a psychological lens, I will define who the Pardoner is—analyzing who he is based on what he thinks, how he acts, and what he says. Having established these views towards aging and having defined the Pardoner, I will then reveal how the Pardoner’s tale is reflective of the Pardoner himself. By doing so, I can then establish through a psychoanalytic lens how the reflective nature of the Pardoner’s tale lends itself to revealing how the Pardoner is struggling with his second mirror-stage. This idea of a second mirror-stage builds on Jacques Lacan’s notion of an adolescent mirror-stage and involves the adult re-imagining himself as he ages. Such a revelation will finally give further insights into both medieval and modern outlooks on aging. “The Pardoner’s Tale,” in particular, is fascinating for its insights into human nature and medieval views on aging—though, interestingly, the tale the Pardoner tells is not original to Chaucer. Instead, it predates Chaucer by centuries. In his article “Jean Gobi’s Pardoner Tales” Richard Firth Green sheds light on the fact that there were four tales similar to the one that Chaucer tells about a pardoner that predate The Canterbury Tales by over a century, and a fifth that was published shortly after Chaucer’s death, that were compiled by a French Dominican Jean Gobi sometime between 1323 and 1330. About each of the tales Green notes, “while none is a direct source for Chaucer’s own portrait, these exempla provide strong evidence that the pardoner was already a type of the avaricious trickster long before The Pardoner’s Tale” (341). The fourth tale, specifically, was an O’Hanlon 4 analogue for Boccaccio’s tale Fra Cipolla, whose resemblance to Chaucer’s Pardoner has been noted as striking (343). Knowing that the pardoner was a “type” prior to Chaucer, analyzing the character of the Pardoner that Chaucer specifically creates, along with the tale he has his Pardoner tell, can provide insight into Chaucer’s purpose in using such a character. Chaucer holds to the typical qualities of the pardoner: “all five stories are concerned with avarice (the pardoner’s winnings) in some form, and in four of them the pardoners are shown preaching” (Green 341). Some of the pardoner-preachers even tell tales to convince their listeners to buy relics, just like Chaucer’s Pardoner. However, Chaucer gives his Pardoner a specific tale to tell that has its own origins in other tales, a story that is dissimilar to the pardoners of Chaucer’s predecessors. In his article “Some Comments on the Sources of Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’s Tale,’” Henry Seidel Canby researches the initial source for the tale the Pardoner tells about the three revelers. The basis of the plot for each of the tales that historically precedes “The Pardoner’s Tale” is, according to Canby, “easily reduced to two essentials: x, the virtuous man who warns, and yy, a group of characters who carry through the poisoning story” (477). And while Canby has traced this line of descent of a story with these characteristics to Italy, and further back to Persia and even India, he notes that Chaucer made one specific change: “the hermit, be it observed, becomes an old man who seeks death instead of fleeing it” (482). The hermit Canby mentions, or as he is usually referred to, the Old Man, has been a topic of speculation for over a century of critics. Who is he? Why is he important? What is his purpose? And, why has Chaucer changed a tale that is centuries older than his own? Arguably, Chaucer had an explicit reason for transforming the character of a virtuous man to one whose only key feature is being old, creating the Old Man to be just O’Hanlon 5 that—old. Doing so allows Chaucer to reveal psychological insights about both the character of the Pardoner and the society in which the Pardoner and Chaucer live, ones that transcend Chaucer’s medieval era and permeate the world today. However, before analyzing the age of the Old Man and how such a distinction reveals truths about the Pardoner, it is important to first understand how both medieval and modern societies view the aged and the aging process in order to allow for a fuller understanding of the implications of aging and what it means to grow older. O’Hanlon 6 Chapter 1: Aging in Adults: A Modern and Medieval Approach Of all of the processes that connect humanity across millennia, aging is one of the most universal. Yet, questions arise as to how similarly people have viewed aging and those who are older. While life expectancies have changed over the centuries, there have been distinctions, whether patently recognized in society or not, in how people view the process of aging and the aged. One specific era that begins to classify age brackets into more defined categories is the late Middle Ages. In order to determine how (dis)similar medieval society viewed the aged, it is important to understand how today’s world does so in relation to the Middle Ages. Doing so will allow for the application of more modern psychoanalytic techniques to older works that predate this type of literary analysis, allowing readers to better understand the Pardoner’s transformation of the Old Man. One way to categorize modern aging is the age brackets given to time periods in a person’s life. However, multiple age brackets exist. In his book Adult Development and Aging, Philip F. Rice visits the studies of multiple psychiatrists to determine how various researchers have categorized the stages of aging. One such psychiatrist is Roger Gould, who argues that adults aged 35-43 find “increasing awareness of time squeeze, realignment of goals, increasing urgency to attain goals; realization that control over children is waning” (Rice 12). For Gould, then, middle age begins around 35, and it is at this stage that people begin to question who they are. Moreover, in his research, Rice also looks at a study done by Levinson who breaks down age ranges differently than Gould. Levinson has a category called “mid-life transition,” where he asserts that adults in their forties and fifties experience a mid-life crisis or “mid-life transition” where these adults “adjust psychologically to the final half of life” and “question every aspect of life” (Rice 14). O’Hanlon 7 Levinson’s age bracket overlaps slightly with Gould’s and both seem to suggest that adults go through a questioning stage during their mid-thirties to late forties. Another aspect of research pertaining to aging involves how the aging view themselves. In her book, The Adult Years, Dr. Dorothy MacKellar Rogers examines the various stages of adulthood, looking at the young adult, the middle-aged adult, and older adults.
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