The Clerk’s and Franklin’s Subjected Subjects

Abstract

The Clerk's and Franklin's Subjected Subjects Carolynn Van Dyke Lafayette College M,nyofthe best re=t stuilies ofCb,ncec explore hls IDcon­ sistencies. Beginning perhaps with E. Talbot Donaldson's deft explications of Chaucerian paradox, criticism has uncovered multiplicities of multi­ valence: conflicting authoritative judgments, "Gothic" cultural pluralism, inorganic disunity, narrative "heteroglossia," systematic formal incon­ clusiveness, ludic parody, a "dance of the signifiers" intermittently and incompletely contained.1 The revelation of thematic and structural incon­ sistencies may end by rendering Chaucer's texts unreadable. On the other hand, analysis of inconsistencies can itself be a way of reading, particularly if textual disunities show common patterns and if those patterns reflect historical and ideological tensions. I intend here to pursue such a reading of two stubbornly controversial Canterbury Tales, arguing that they display similar thematic and structural incoherence because they both equivocate about a venerable riddle of Western culture: the possibility of female agency. 1 E.Talbot Donaldson delineates Chaucer's paradoxes in, for instance, Chaucer's Poetry: An Anthology /Qt' the Modern Reader (New York: Ronald, 1958), pp. 873-901; and "The Ending ofTroilus," in Speaking ofChaucer (London: Athlone Press, 1970), pp. 84-101. On conflicting authoritative judgments, see Sheila Delany, Chaucer's House ofFame; The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). Gothic disunity and cultural pluralism are discussed by Derek Brewer, "Gothic Chaucer," in Derek Brewer, ed., Writers andTheir Background: Geoffrey Chaucer (London: G.Bell & Sons, 1974), pp. 1-32. Robert M. Jordan explores Chaucer's inorganic form in "Lost in the Funhouse of Fame: Chaucer and Postmodernism," ChauR 18, no.2 (1983): 100--15, and elsewhere."Hetero­ glossia," a term of M. M. Bakhtin, is applied to Chaucer by David Lawton, Chaucer's Na"atQt's, Chaucer Studies, vol. 13 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), p.xii.Larty Sklute argues in Virtue ofNecessity: Inconclusiveness andNa"ative Form in Chaucer's Poetry (Colum­ bus: Ohio State University Press, 1984) that Chaucer's texts are formally inconclusive.My reference to ludic parody is from Laura Kendrick,Chaucerian Play: Comedy andControlin the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1988). Finally, "dance of the signifiers ... " comes from H.Marshall Leicester,Jr., The DisenchantedSelf Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: Univer­ sity ofCalifornia Press, 1990), p.415. 45 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER To call The Clerk's Tale and The Franklin's Tale incoherent requires expla­ nation, for both exemplify, to a degree not always recognized, a semiosis of order. Both are what Tzvetan Todorov called "ideal" narratives, beginning in "a stable situation" (here a marriage) "which is disturbed by some power or force" and then returns to "a second equilibrium" similar but not identi­ cal to the first. 2 Both, moreover, are structured symmetrically.The Clerk's Tale inherits ritualistic repetition from its folktale origin, and Chaucer further articulates the pattern with a division into parts and with verbal parallels.Carole Koepke Brown has recently shown The Franklin's Tale to be a "well-modulated and finely disciplined whole," structured as three triplets whose first element is always "a major trouthe," the second a "com­ plainte," and the third help from a compassionate character.3 More important, although the tales' meanings have been much debated, their narrators generalize explicitly about their plots and themes."This storie is seyd," according to the Clerk, "...for that every wight, in his degree, / Sholde be constant in adversitee / As was Grisilde" (CIT 114547 ).4 Griselda's deprivations and humiliations represent every Christian's ordeals, sanctioned by God: "For sith a womman was so pacient / Unto a mortal man, wel moore us oghte I Receyven al in gree that God us sent" (lines 1149-51).That conclusion is no mere didactic appendage but a reformulation of the story in more abstract terms.As is weil known, allu­ sions throughout The Clerk's Tale have "impelled [us toward] the highest level of allegorical interpretation. "5 Griselda and her father are like Christ in their blessed poverty (lines 204-207); Griselda meets Walter in the posture of Mary at the Annunciation, and of the Samaritan woman meet­ ing Christ (lines 287-94);6...

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