The Canterbury Tales 273exhibit “mannish” treachery (2.781–782), it is more
often men who exhibit traits that are considered
feminine. The Host likens the Clerk to a newlywed
“mayde” in his riding behaviour (4.2–3), and in “The
Knight’s Tale,” Theseus’s masculinity incorporates
pity (1.954–955), a trait normally assigned by medi-
eval gender discourse to women. Assumptions of a
clear-cut gender division are challenged most force-
fully by the portrait of the Pardoner, a figure hotly
debated in gender and queer studies. The Pardoner’s
high voice (1.688) and effeminate looks (“No berde
hadde he / ne nevere sholde have” [1.689]) make
the narrator indecisive as to whether he was “a gel-
dyng or a mare” (1.691), the first of which has been
glossed as “eunuch,” the second as “effeminate male”
or “effeminate homosexual.” And it is not least the
complexity, ambiguity, and fluctuation of gender
constructs in The Canterbury Tales that make this
work so appealing to us today.
Annette Kern-Stähler
GrieF in The Canterbury Tales
In the past two decades, emotions have been
increasingly approached from a perspective that
acknowledges cultures vary about which emotions
are appropriate to particular situations and social
roles. As cultural practices, literature and art have
the potential of both disseminating dominant con-
structions of emotions and of challenging them.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales emphasizes
both the imposition of standards of decorum for the
expression of emotion and the transgression of these
limitations.
The exposition of different occasions for and
types of grief and of different ways of grieving and
mourning are explored by Chaucer in the very first
of the Canterbury Tales. “The Knight’s Tale,” in
accordance with the social standing of its narrator, is
concerned with highly ritualized court culture, but
it is in some respects also an exposition of various
types of grief which resurface in different genres and
narrative contexts in other stories in the Tales—fre-
quently from another, often contrasting, perspective.
With repeated reference to Fortune “and hire false
wheel” (1.925), grief intrudes in many ways in “The
Knight’s Tale”: the grief of the Theban widows
whose husbands have been left unburied; the empa-
thetic grief of the knightly Theseus, who then sets
out to redress the iniquitous injustice (and whose
susceptibility to grief tends to feminize him, in con-
trast to the Amazon queen he marries); the grief of
the captive; the ritualistic grief in the coded system
of courtly love, which produces symptoms of illness;
the grief of those who feel betrayed by a friend and
relative; the grief at the death of a friend; and,
finally, the grief for the hero who, contrasting the
beginning of the tale, is buried in full state and
mourned by the whole populace.
Changes of perspective occur, for instance, when,
in “The Franklin’s Tale,” Arveragus’s grief over the
unattainability of Dorigen moves her to pity him
and to accept him as her husband. Within the same
tale, this form of empathy is questioned when the
now married Dorigen once again succumbs to pity
toward another man, which makes her set him a
seemingly impossible task. But grief and despair
multiply when Aurelius succeeds against all odds,
and the ideals of courtly love are subverted when
Arveragus urges her to make good on her word,
and when Aurelius, subject to all the well-known
symptoms of suffering for his love, finally releases
Dorigen from her vow.
While Arveragus is away, Dorigen mourns his
absence as if he were dead: “she moorneth, waketh,
wayleth, fasteth, pleyneth” (5.819). She thus con-
forms to the model of wifely behavior as prescribed
in the dominant medieval discourse, which con-
sidered grief for an absent husband a wifely virtue.
Another model of wifely virtue, as the Host under-
stands it, is provided by “The Clerk’s Tale.” Dorigen’s
excessive grief may be contrasted with the suppres-
sion of grief and the patient suffering of Griselidis
in the face of the ordeals set her by her husband. He
tests her by pretending to have their children killed
and apparently getting married to another woman.
Throughout her ordeal, Griselidis acquiesces, sur-
rendering herself completely to the authority of her
husband, and does not show any outward signs of
grief. “The Clerk’s Tale” is not, however, uncritical of
these social constraints, and in the concluding envoy
it proposes a role reversal: “Be ay of chiere as light
as leef on lynde, / And lat hym care, and wepe, and
wrynge, and waille!” (4.1,211–12).