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A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details 1 Chaucer and Prejudices: A Critical Study of The Canterbury Tales Hsiang-mei Wu Doctor of Philosophy, English Literature University of Sussex September 2015 2 WORK NOT SUBMITTED ELSEWHERE FOR EXAMINATION I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be submitted in whole or in part to another University for the reward of any other degree. Signature……………………………………………………… 3 UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX HSIANG-MEI WU DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAUCER AND PREJUDICES: A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE CANTERBURY TALES SUMMARY This thesis investigates the prejudices in Geoffrey Chaucer‘s The Canterbury Tales. There are thirty pilgrims and twenty-two tales in this grand work. As it is unlikely to discuss all of them in one thesis, I focus my research on four pilgrims—the Miller, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, and the Pardoner—to demonstrate Chaucer‘s prejudices in various aspects. The chapter on the Miller analyzes how men and women interact in sexual terms in the public domains and private spaces, investigating the poet‘s sexual discrimination in his final distribution of punishments for the characters as well as his chauvinistic disregard of the female body and its autonomy; Chaucer‘s punishment is not entirely of ‗poetic justice‘ as it is dispensed at the cost of class victimization and the vilification of the female body. The Prioress‘s chapter discusses the poet‘s prejudices against female religious, exploring how Chaucer is affected by conventional descriptions of courtly ladies and contemporary conception of female religious‘ sexuality when he contradictorily glosses the Prioress as a romantic beauty; Chaucer‘s language prejudice and his innuendo of the Prioress‘s sexual attraction reflect his contempt and mis-evaluation of the Prioress‘s status, social function, and professional abilities. The chapter on the Wife of Bath examines ‗The Wife of Bath‘s Prologue‘ as a manifestation of a medieval woman‘s life education, demonstrating how Alisoun is molded by mercantile marriage transactions, the tradition of misogyny, and the auctoritees‘ ill-meant religious instruction through garbled texts; the Wife‘s deafness does not signify her resistance or inability to understand men‘s ‗truth‘, but an undeserved punishment from her frustrated educators. The Pardoner‘s chapter examines 4 the Pardoner as a feminized and marginalized figure, exhibiting the narrator‘s, the Host‘s, and the Canterbury pilgrims‘ fear and hate of the ‗different‘, the ‗perverse‘, and the non-heterosexual; the Pardoner is treated as ‗Other‘ of the Canterbury group and is brutally ‗Othered‘ by the pilgrims despite his efforts in heterosexual identity and conformity. My study of Chaucer‘s prejudices will naturally extend to the investigations of modern readers‘ prejudices, particularly critics‘ false interpretation of the Miller‘s Alisoun‘s ‗escape‘, denial of the Prioress‘s beauty, misconception of Jankyn‘s violence, and unconscious siding with patriarchy in the ‗Othering‘ of the Pardoner, among others. 5 ABBREVIATIONS ANQ American Notes and Queries EETS Early English Text Society ELH English Literary History JEPG Journal of English and Germanic Philology MLQ Modern Language Quarterly PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS SUMMARY 3 ABBREVIATIONS 5 INTRODUCTION 8 CHAPTER 1 The Miller‘s Tale: Female Autonomy and Class Victimization 35 1. Privee Nicholas and Apert Absolon 43 2. Public Moral and Private Desire 57 3. Alisoun‘s Punishment 74 4. Conclusion 81 CHAPTER 2 Ther Was Also a Nonne: Chaucer‘s Prejudiced Observation of the Prioress 83 5. A Rose in the Wild 91 6. Beauty and Piety 98 7. Parlez Vous Francais? 115 8. Conclusion 124 CHAPTER 3 ‗The Wife of Bath‘s Prologue‘: A Manifestation of a Medieval Woman‘s Distorted Education 127 9. The Medieval Marriage Law, and the Wife‘s ‗Carnality‘ 133 10. The Garbling of the Story of ‗the Samaritan Woman‘ 146 11. His Mouth, Her Ears: The Conflict between the Teaching and the Taught 152 12. Conclusion 164 7 CHAPTER 4 The Pardoner‘s ‗Coillons‘: A Prejudiced Discourse of Medieval Sexual Normalcy 166 13. How Should a Man Look? 172 14. Where are the ‗Coillons‘? 180 15. Who is the Most Homophobic? 187 16. Do ‗Al the Peple Lough‘? 195 17. Conclusion 200 CONCLUSION 203 BIBLIOGRAPHY 210 8 INTRODUCTION This thesis aims to investigate Chaucer‘s prejudices in The Canterbury Tales. What is prejudice? According to Oxford English Dictionary, ‗prejudice‘ means a ‗preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience‘, or a ‗dislike, hostility, or unjust behavior deriving from preconceived and unfounded opinions‘. Specifically, the word is often used to refer to ‗preconceived, usually unfavorable, judgments toward people or a person because of gender, political opinion, social class, age, disability, religion, sexuality, race/ethnicity, language, or other personal characteristics‘. The Canterbury Tales exhibits almost all the aspects of the word indicated. For example, when the Miller at the end of his tale concludes: ‗Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf, / For al his kepyng and his jalousie‘ (I. 3850-51),1 he is not executing ‗poetic justice‘ as readers often think, but flaunting a prejudice against different class and gender, since he brazenly snubs a ‗lewed‘ husband‘s marriage right and declares a chauvinistic hostility toward the female body and its autonomy. As indicated above, prejudices commonly exist in cultural, racial, sexual, social as well as religious and legal domains. The Prioress‘s portrait demonstrates a good example. When the narrator taunts Madame Eglentyne‘s provinciality by indicating ‗[f]or Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe‘ (I. 126), he not only displays a priggish assessment of the Prioress‘s language ability, but also reveals a preconceived opinion of what a religious woman should/not be. Similarly, when the Host threatens to cut off the Pardoner‘s ‗coilloins‘, he is not only punishing the Pardoner‘s vicious offense, but also sexually bullying his seemingly homosexual fellow pilgrim. The existence of prejudice—even in the subtlest way—causes damage, injury, and injustice. The Wife of Bath‘s loss of hearing is an obvious case. Alisoun‘s 1 All quotations are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically by fragment and line numbers. 9 deafness does not indicate her inborn deficiency as many critics have alleged—since she was not deaf before forty—but an undeserved, brutal punishment from her frustrated, misogynistic educators. Another well-known instance is the death of the ‗litel clergeon‘ in the Prioress‘s tale: anti-Semitism, the cause of the death, connotes at least racial and religious prejudices. Do those prejudices belong to the characters Chaucer creates, or are they mainly Chaucer‘s own? When some critics rebuke the Prioress for being anti-Semitic, others might say: even if the prejudices belong to the characters, they (the characters as well as their prejudices) are after all the poet‘s creations. The complication of answer may increase when we perceive that the word ‗homosexual‘ did not appear until 1892 and that there are more than ten definitions of the measurement ‗spanne‘ in medieval times. Namely, in defining the Pardoner‘s sexuality and accusing Madame Eglentyne of wearing her wimple too high, modern critics may have revealed prejudices, too. Likewise, when critics maintain that the Wife of Bath‘s deafness indicates her inability to understand well or resistance to accept truth, they show prejudices in presuming that whatever the male auctoritees say is ‗truth‘ and women should listen. Obviously, prejudices are not just unfounded opinions that appear in certain ages or places; they may never change as time goes by or the world turns around, but only draw out more derivatives, causing similar injury and injustice. Since much criticism of The Canterbury Tales might also appear biased, this thesis will include examinations of modern scholars‘ prejudices as well. Chaucer shows numerous prejudices in his portraits of the pilgrims and the tales they tell. As the Canterbury pilgrims are from different ‗estates‘,2 the poet‘s prejudices naturally reflect what people generally think and behave in his age. Therefore, my study 2 In the Middle Ages, the orders of society are commonly distinguished as the ‗three estates‘: the clergy (those who pray), the nobility (those who fight), and commoners (those who work). 10 of Chaucer‘s prejudices in effect comprehends explorations of the diverse aspects of culture in Chaucer‘s time. There are thirty pilgrims and twenty-two tales in The Canterbury Tales.3 Since it is impossible to discuss all of them in one thesis, I have focused my investigations on four pilgrims—the Miller, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, and the Pardoner—to demonstrate my in-depth studies of the prejudices I have observed in this great work and the modern scholarship of it. Certainly, in the course of discussion, other pilgrims and tales will be brought in for parallels, contrasts, or comparisons when necessary. * * * At the end of ‗The Miller‘s Tale‘, Chaucer distributes his punishments for the characters according to their sins: John, the old jealous carpenter, is cuckolded by his young pretty wife and has a broken arm; Absolon, the squeamish parish clerk, is humiliated by a mis-directed kiss; and Nicholas, the scheming ‗scoler of Oxenford‘, is scalded by a hot coulter in his ‗ers‘.