What's Wrong with the Pardoner?: Complexion Theory, the Phlegmatic Man, and Effeminacy

Abstract

What's Wrong with the Pardoner? Complexion Theory, the Phlegmatic Man, and Effeminacy Elspeth Whitney Chaucer's Pardoner poses, above all, a puzzle. Introduced in the General Prologue as a "gentil Pardoner" and invited to tell a moral tale, he both shows and names himself to be a "ful vicious man." On the one hand, the Pardoner deliberately calls attention to the contrast between his admitted vices and his role as a preacher who can bring souls to salvation; as Alastair Minnis has recently argued, the Pardoner's "self-exhibition" of the utterly corrupt nature of his professional practice threatens to disrupt the pilgrimage's entire spiritual purpose.1 On the other hand, the Prologue's detailed but inconclusive description of the Pardoner's physical characteristics suggests some form of more hidden deviancy, one unacknowledged by the Pardoner himself and not clearly identified by his fellow pilgrims. This physical anomaly, signaled most directly by the much-discussed line "I trowe he were a geldying or a mare" (I 691)2 points the reader toward a disjunction between the Pardoner's self-proclaimed gender identity as a young man planning on marriage who wishes to "enjoy a wench in every town" and his emasculated bodily condition. The complexities of Chaucer's portrait of the Pardoner have resulted in a proliferation of diagnoses, none of which has gained universal acceptance. Since Walter Curry's introduction of the topic in 1919, when he named the Pardoner as a eunuch ex navitate, the Pardoner has been categorized as a "normal" [End Page 357] male, a congenital eunuch, a man who has been castrated, a man impotent but physically intact, a hermaphrodite, "a testicular pseudo-hermaphrodite of the feminine type," an oversexed womanizer, an alcoholic, a "drag queen," a cross-dressed woman, and, most resonantly, a homosexual.3 In response to this lack of consensus, a recent trend among critics has been to retreat from a definitive naming of the Pardoner's physical condition, emphasizing instead what Robert Sturges has called the "impossibly incoherent," fractured, and (merely) performative identity for the Pardoner, emblematic of the Pardoner's role as a reminder of the disrupting power of gender ambiguity.4 Carolyn Dinshaw, for example, in situating the Pardoner within Chaucer's patriarchal and heterosexual hermeneutics, declines to pin down the Pardoner's body, suggesting that "no one really knows what the Pardoner is," his being defined by absence and fragmentation, best described as "not a man" but also "not a woman."5 Similarly, Glenn Burger characterizes attempts to "stabilize the meaning of the Pardoner in terms of the biological 'facts' of his body" as a "red herring" and, like Sturges, rejects attempts to "fix" the Pardoner's body in favor of emphasizing the Pardoner's fundamental lack [End Page 358] of coherence.6 This line of thought threatens to erase the Pardoner's body altogether. After insightfully rehearsing the possibilities, Minnis in Fallible Authors: Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath concludes that the Pardoner's sexual proclivities, whatever they are, matter only in the most general way as reflecting an association between licentiousness and the immoral preacher.7 Thus, while critical reading of the Pardoner once perhaps reduced his deviancy to an overly determined physical condition, the pendulum has now swung toward the opposite extreme, threatening to make the particulars of the Pardoner's body irrelevant. The very multiplicity of the verdicts rendered on the Pardoner's condition suggests, however, that attempts to pin down the Pardoner's body and sexuality too neatly according to modern sex/gender categories are in some sense off the mark or, to put it differently, the apparent incoherence of the Pardoner's sexual and gendered identity can be resolved if we attend more closely to medieval rather than modern categories. Ruth Mazo Karras, for example, has suggested that "medieval people did not draw the line between gay and straight, but between reproductive and non-reproductive sex," while also asserting that the deliberate renunciation of sexuality by individuals in the Middle Ages constituted the self-conscious creation of "an identity of chastity."8 She concludes that even as aspects of modern sexuality have their roots in the Middle Ages, "the...

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.