Desire in the Canterbury Tales : Sovereignty and Mastery Between the Wife and Clerk

Abstract

From the beginning of The General Prologue, Chaucer makes it clear that desire is, everywhere in the Canterbury Tales, his most central and abiding concern. Where individual tales speak to the particular desires of their tellers, the poem’s memorable opening sentence frames the entire fiction as a function of desire in its deferred predicate: ‘‘[folk] longen.’’1 This syntactic delay also incites the audience’s desire across its first eleven lines as it explains the effects of a changing landscape and newly awakened natural world. In setting the season for an Eastertide ride to Canterbury, Chaucer situates the pilgrimage as an effect of collective human desire as he simultaneously conceals why each figure is on the pilgrimage behind a variety of implied but unstated motives.2 And desire gets things going in more ways than one. Beyond accounting for a way of understanding what lies ‘‘behind’’ each narrator’s speech, desire inhabits the very language of the tales in larger and more abstract terms. The conscious means by which speakers pursue various desires and goals within their stories is underwritten by the structure of unconscious desire assumed with language when the subject enters the com-

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