Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition

T H E N E W M I DDL E AG E S BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.

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CONSTRUCTING CHAUCER AUTHOR AND AUTOFICTION IN THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Geoffrey W. Gust

CONSTRUCTING CHAUCER

Copyright © Geoffrey W. Gust, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN : 978–1–4039–7643–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gust, Geoffrey W. Constructing Chaucer : author and autofiction in the critical tradition / Geoffrey W. Gust. p. cm.—(The new Middle Ages) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–1–4039–7643–7 (alk. paper) 1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Technique. 3. Persona (Literature) 4. Authors and readers. 5. First person narrative. I. Title. PR1924.G87 2009 821⬘.1—dc22

2008047342

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To “my girls,” Kym and Kylee

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 1 Persona and Personalities: Medieval Lineage, Modern Legacy 1.1 Unveiling the Mask: Historical Definitions of the Persona 1.2 Premodern Persona-Theory: A Brief History 1.3 “Self ”-Projections: Modern Persona-Theory, Chaucer the Pilgrim, and Chaucer the Man 1.4 Autofiction, Neo Persona-Theory, and Chaucerian Interpretation 2 Getting a Life: Biographical Constructions of Chaucer the Man 2.1 Early Praise for the “Fadir” of English Poetry and the Creation of the Chaucer “Legends” 2.2 The Early Modern Justification of Chaucer 2.3 Eighteenth-Century Changes and “Legendary” Continuations 2.4 Romanticizing Chaucer the Man 2.5 Fact or Fiction? Chaucer’s “Lives” from Nicolas to the Present 3

Chaucer Speaks: Memoirs of the Man? 3.1 The Man and His Familiars: Chaucer Talks to Friends 3.2 The Man and His Monarchs: Chaucer Talks to Kings 3.3 The Man and His Maker: Chaucer Talks to God

4

Lives of Their Own: The Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and Critical (Dis)Approval 4.1 Lives of Their Own: Scholarly Ethics and the Wife of Bath and Pardoner 4.2 The Wife’s “Wommanhede”: Alisoun, (Anti)Feminism, and Scholarly Acceptance 4.3 The Pardoner’s “Privetees”: Physiognomy, Perversion, and Scholarly Retreat

xiii 1 4 9 28 36 51 54 58 63 68 72 87 90 102 112 121 124 129 142

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Claiming the “Popet”: Ethics, Evasion, and the Pilgrim’s Progress 5.1 The Divided Self: Poetic Play and Authorial Advice 5.2 The Divided Self in the Ghetto: Chaucer the Pilgrim’s Ambiguous Sexuality and How It Matters

159 163 177

Notes

199

Works Cited

257

Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

n essence, this project began on January 3, 2000—the day I moved to England to begin my Ph.D. at the University of York. Much has happened since that day, both personally and professionally. The roots of Constructing Chaucer are found in my doctoral dissertation, but the material has since gone through countless reconsiderations, rewritings, and revisions. It is now a far different piece of scholarship, and the number of people who have helped me along in this process are too numerous to thank here. Therefore, I have chosen to single out just a handful of individuals below, without whose help the book may never have come to fruition. On a personal note, to my friends and family, I can’t thank you enough for your humor, your curiosity, and your support. Professionally, I am indebted the librarians at the University of York Library, Leeds University Library, the Bodleian, the British Library, and Hayden Library for their assistance with rare books in particular. I received invaluable feedback from audience members at several conferences over several years, and I appreciate having the opportunity to present various forms of this research. Indelible marks were left on my life and my work during my time at both York and Arizona State University (where I was an M.A. student and, later, an Instructor), and to those who gave me assistance, encouragement, teaching opportunities, or simply collegial good will, I am much obliged. I also must acknowledge the aid given to me by the anonymous reader of this book, whose detailed report left me with significant amounts of work to do before the text could be called “complete,” but it was clearly time well spent since the monograph benefitted greatly from his/her thoughtful critique. Specific thanks must be given to Robert E. Bjork, my M.A. supervisor at ASU who has now been a consistent source of support for over a decade. Also from ASU, Neal Lester and Greg Glau advised me in key professional areas, and Dhira Mahoney and Robert Sturges kindly provided much insightful feedback on my manuscript. At York, I especially owe my gratitude to Nicola McDonald, who helped to guide me through

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my doctoral work and oversaw my viva. Derek Brewer, too, deserves recognition for serving as the magisterial external examiner of my dissertation. Sadly, Prof. Brewer passed away just months before this book was to be published—may he rest in peace. Most significant of all has been the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis, my doctoral supervisor. Alastair is my greatest inf luence as a theorist, and my most steadfast supporter as a young scholar; in simple terms, without his help this book would never have seen the light of day. Finally, I would like to thank the editors at Palgrave Macmillan for their hard work and assistance, and particularly Bonnie Wheeler, a wonderful steward of the “New Middle Ages Series” who has never wavered in her enthusiastic support for this project. To one and all, I borrow from Shakespeare’s Sebastian in saying “I can no other answer make but thanks, / And thanks” (Twelfth Night 3.3.14–15).

CHAPTER 1 PERSONA AND PERSONALITIES: MEDIEVAL LINEAGE, MODERN LEGACY

I kan right now no thrifty tale seyn That Chaucer, thogh he kan but lewedly On metres and on rymyng craftily Hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan Of olde tyme, as knoweth any man. —Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, II.46–501 Disblameth me if any word be lame, For as myn auctour seyde, so sey I. —Troilus and Criseyde, II.17–18 I wot myself best how y stonde. —The House of Fame, 1878

I

n Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry, it often appears that the author is present in some way, shape, or form. But this seeming presence is a kind of narrative mirage, inconsistent and unreliable. The three well-known disclaimers selected to introduce this chapter are indicative of the shifting, elusive authorial technique manipulated by poet throughout his oeuvre. Chaucer frequently cultivates the illusion of authorial presence, sometimes to establish his own authority—“I wot myself best how y stonde”— and sometimes to defer to the authority of other authors and texts, as in the example cited earlier from Troilus and Criseyde. In other instances, he creates a different kind of illusion by downplaying his presence, to the extent that the Man of Law may enthusiastically speak of Chaucer the poet’s “rymyng.”

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With the insertion of numerous variations on these epigraphs, Chaucer repeatedly pulls the proverbial rug out from beneath the feet of readers who have begun to feel confident that they have a firm grasp on the author or his text. This deliberate and playful evasiveness is part of the poet’s allure for many readers and is a prominent reason why critical consensus is so difficult to reach on key aspects of the Chaucer corpus. By initiating many complicated narrative moments of this sort, Chaucer himself seems to be at once present and distant in the verse. In such moments, he appears at one instant to be extremely authoritative, selfassured, and even confrontational, while immediately thereafter he may be construed as submissive and subordinate to his characters and literary predecessors; he seems both confident in his abilities as an auctor, and resigned to the inf luence other authorities and narrative constructs have over him. Explaining these paradoxical narrative poses has proven particularly difficult for scholars over the years, and for good reason. They are carefully crafted illusions. The interpretive challenges that result from Chaucer’s ambiguous narrative role and presence (or absence) probably will never be resolved. But one thing seems clear: however his illusory narrators are read, they are vital. It is apparent that the crux for virtually any understanding of Chaucer’s poetry is to be located in his self-conscious use and manipulation of diverse narrative personae. As the following pages will show, it is likely that Chaucer was well aware of interpretive issues surrounding the employment of personae, which were widely utilized and theorized throughout the Middle Ages. In the twenty-first century, however, there is considerable misunderstanding regarding the usage and ramifications of personae, and the concept itself has largely fallen out of critical fashion. This introductory chapter seeks to facilitate the theoretical recuperation of the narrative persona for the study of Chaucer, and beyond, by offering a comprehensive historical account of the persona-concept. It will discuss the construct’s etymology, theorization, and perhaps more importantly, offer a fresh theoretical concept that provides new insights into the persona by emphasizing the historical distance between author and narrator, “truth” and fiction. The notion in question is “autofiction,” which designates a “story of the self ” that is creative, unreliable, and essentially unreal. Autofiction is a theoretical response to the many readers of Chaucer who are inclined to believe in a certain kind of “truth,” a predilection that—at least to an extent—Chaucer’s characters are “real” in that they authentically depict the poet’s world or somehow reveal facets of his mind or convictions. It is a reply to critics who, to borrow from Stephanie Trigg, yearn for “an elusive, virtually forbidden moment of authorial

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presence” and seek to affiliate with Chaucer by hearing his own voice speak through the utterances of his narrators.2 Constructing Chaucer arose from a need to address the ramifications of such belief for the continued study of the so-called “Father of English poetry.” As Trigg recognizes, Chaucer’s poetic presence is only a textual vestige, if an inviting one; “he” and his many narrative brothers and sisters are merely fragmentary “selves” that speak in the moment and on the page, but are neither “real” nor present beings. They are, in brief, personae. Trigg does very little with the persona-concept in her masterful study of Chaucerian reception titled Congenial Souls. I, however, would like to make the autofictional persona the centerpiece of my own critique of the poet’s scholarly legacy. Hence, section 1.4 below outlines the concept of autofiction and explains its relationship to, and implications for, the narrative persona; the concept will then be applied to various Chaucerian critical legacies in the book’s remaining chapters. But first the complex persona itself must be introduced. For roughly a quarter century, persona-based criticism has widely been regarded as out-of-date and has even been condemned outright in some quarters. This mainly is due to a backlash against New Criticism, and follows in the wake of Post-Structuralist theories that were rife in the late twentieth century—particularly Roland Barthes’s idea of the “death of the author.” In spite of such notions, the fact is that the primary poetic mode of the Middle Ages was first-person narrative voiced through the persona, and with this in mind I contend that the widespread disuse or disapproval of the persona-construct by contemporary medievalists is quite illogical. To be sure, the concept of personae never really disappeared from literary discourse, and there is some recent evidence of the persona coming back into prominent critical use. Yet it is apparent that when the term is used, it is often based on the problematic assumption that the meaning of this complex critical concept is clear or widely agreed upon notion. There appears to be a fundamental lack of understanding of the persona-concept, especially regarding its historical significance and interpretive ramifications. As George Wright has observed, “our criticism needs, more than anything else, a sense of the due importance of historical ideas to the mask”—critics must understand the persona’s “mask” in terms of its intellectual systems and traditions, in order to best understand what it veils, or reveals. 3 It is hoped that the following pages will help to “unmask” persona-theory and fill a significant gap in scholarship by tracing the persona’s meaning and development, and exploring its ramifications through the concept of autofiction. The etymological evolution of the persona will be considered first, beginning with evidence from ancient Greece.

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1.1 Unveiling the Mask: Historical Definitions of the Persona The term persona has a lengthy history that dates back to the classical period, making it one of the most long-standing literary tools for writers and readers alike. In the most extensive modern critical examination of the construct—The Literary Persona by Robert Elliott—the term is described as having one of the most complex etymological histories known to philologists, full of contradiction, controversy, and enigma. Elliott also asserts that “the most striking characteristic of the term is its polysemous nature, the contradictory range of its reference,” which may well explain much of the controversy that continues to surround the notion even today.4 Contemporary philologists generally believe that the term persona derives from the Etruscan character Phersu, a masked gladiator/executioner whose deeds are depicted on the Tomb of Augurs in Tarquinia. In Etruscan usage phersu came to denote a mask, and as Elliott notes, the likely derivation from the gladiator of the same name emphasizes the visual or physical aspects of masking, which contrast the strictly acoustic properties of the logically affiliated Latin verb personare, or “to sound through.”5 Whatever its precise derivation, it is evident that in early Latin usage the term persona originally referred to a device of transformation and concealment on the theatrical stage.6 In Greek and Roman theater, donning a mask probably was sacred or mystic in its origins and allowed a masked actor to identify with and represent mysterious and all-powerful gods. The persona would gradually take on additional connotations and usages, and especially became known as a secular device used by actors playing deliberately conceived roles. From this expanded application the mask became available for a variety of social purposes, to the extent that the classicist W. Beare suggests that “everywhere the Romans turned, they found established the tradition of masked performances.” 7 This is likely an overstatement, but it is evident that, as the usage of masks/ masking grew and increasingly varied, the Latin meaning of the term concurrently multiplied.8 Bearing witness to these changes during the classical period, the Oxford Latin Dictionary (OLD) offers the following definitions of persona: “a mask, esp. as worn by actors; a character in a play, dramatic role; a character in a speech, dialogue, or other literary work; an assumed character, pretense.” Connotations indicating an individual’s actual person also are presented, such as “the part played by a person in life (without idea of deception), a role; personal qualities or characteristics; the actual being of someone, individual, personality, one’s person; (speaking or acting) in one’s own

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person or name, on one’s own behalf.” The OLD also provides these related meanings for personatus: “wearing a mask, masked; a play performed by masked actors (for persona fabula); masking one’s true nature; or masked by an outward expression.”9 On the surface these definitions are fairly straightforward, with the primary, literal meaning being that of “a mask,” and the term being employed to connote roles played either on or off the stage. In its emphasis on the “dramatic” undercurrent of masking, the OLD provides important evidence for the idea of a split character or personality, or what I call the “divided self ”—a notion that emerges more fully in the Middle Ages, and plays a key role in later sections of this study. It is the challenging concept of the “divided self ” that has particularly created much confusion with literary critics. When personae are cited in a literary context, scholars primarily imply two main types, which I term “dramatic personae” and “I-personae.” The phrase “dramatic personae” echoes the Latin dramatis personae, and it is thus a general expression used to designate literary characters that are not meant to somehow represent the author and have, so to speak, their own distinct personalities. By their nature, all personae have a dramatic function, but the function of “I-personae” is very specific: I-personae are stand-ins for the writer that typically guide the narrative and may appear to embody the author him/herself. As a textual self-representation or bifurcated extension of the writer, it is this latter type of persona that functions as the “divided self ”—although it is essential to note that both types of personae are related and both types are, in fact, crucially separate from the author. When faced with personae marked by a kind of self-division—such as “Chaucer the Pilgrim” in the Canterbury Tales10 —it is difficult, or impossible, to determine what is “real” and what is not, to identify where one self begins and another ends. The “divided” I-narrator is indeed doubly challenging, for here a persona ostensibly portrays a particular individual in a fictional text that already, by definition, straddles the line between truth and fiction, so that this line becomes even more blurry and confusing. But this complexity becomes more manageable for the reader when it is realized that, as classical usage makes clear, any literary character who wears a mask is “assumed,” a mere “pretense” that does not depict the “true nature” of a given being, or a given author. This realization is critical because it demonstrates that in the classical age—when I-personae were relatively rare—masking was not perceived as being somehow real or even meant realistically. Rather, the persona represented a convenient literary trope, a “false face” (literally speaking) that would allow for the human discussion of certain cultural and religious topics, but nonetheless was viewed as inherently fictional and unreal.

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Like the OLD, medieval Latin dictionaries illustrate the ambiguity inherent in the very notion of the persona, which can represent a particular individual, mask him/her, or somehow double that person through the adoption of a fabricated “self.” J. F. Niermeyer, for instance, references one’s personal “identity” and acting “in person” (for personaliter), while also presenting the bifurcated possibilities of an individual’s “representative, proxy.”11 Albert Blaise, in turn, registers the possibility of a second self with the (French) definitions “caractére” and “représentation dramatique,” and notes the potentially deceptive nature of the persona with “en apparence.”12 What is particularly striking about the evidence found in these dictionaries is the fact that medieval Latin usage apparently does not specifically implicate authors and their speakers within the ambivalence of the terminology. Instead, the constituent dramatic notions seem to ref lect the voices/masks of the stage, but do not directly reference the speakers/writers lying behind them. This, it seems, is an all-important connection that was to develop over time, as theories of authorship and narrative became more explicitly concerned with narrative positioning and intentionality, and the difficult distinctions between fiction and reality. The view that eventually emerged was the idea that the various personae on stage and elsewhere in literature spoke not just in their own imaginary voices, but might voice the words of the author, who could potentially be present as his or her own narrative alter ego (an I-persona) or in the guise of another, wholly separate character (a dramatic persona). As the next section of this chapter shows, medieval scholars were aware of key issues surrounding literary personae and frequently sought to reconcile the author, his or her characters, and the accountability of both for their articulated ideas. But this does not seem to have been a prominent concern of the Greek and Roman grammarians and rhetoricians. Following on from the Latin understanding of the persona, its signification within the English vernacular utilized by Chaucer must be considered. Etymologists believe that the word “person” likely stems from the Latin persona, and thus it follows that the Middle English Dictionary (MED) lists “on his behalf ” as one notable connotation of the general term persoun(e), where the dramatic, or in fact divided nature of literary usage is apparent; conversely, the phrase “in person” is offered, which signifies the idea of the persona as an actual, present being.13 This common phrase is an obvious variant on the Latin in propria persona, a phrase which Chaucer himself uses twice in the Middle English vernacular of The Tale of Melibee.14 Chaucer’s use of this phrase by no means proves his awareness of persona-theory and its attendant controversies, but it might be noted that medieval exegetes and literary scholars often sought to determine when certain content was being voiced directly by an

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author “in his own person.” Hence, the fact that this phrase is uttered in a tale told by Chaucer’s divided narrative “self ” draws attention to issues of intentionality that are central to my analysis. The MED highlights these issues by defining personal(e) as “pertaining to the person as an individual; performed by the individual himself,” or “indicating actual physical embodiment, literal as opposed to figurative.” In contrast, the MED makes it clear that any presumed connections that might be drawn between author and character inevitably must remain tentative, because “persoun(e)” may allude to an individual’s complex “manifestation,” “representative” or a dramatic “role” or “character.” Collectively, the MED’s evidence points to a body of meaning that is relevant to both the literary uses of the term persona and the nontechnical usage of everyday speech, when the actions of “real” individuals are being described. But even in colloquial Middle English usage, the persona-concept seems to indicate the likelihood that any projected person/personality may not, in fact, be one’s “true” self. In effect, the MED reveals that masking (though not so termed), adopting poses and “roles,” is part and parcel of any self-presentation. And it is intriguing to note that, as seen with Latin dictionary definitions, so too with the MED: there is no distinct etymolgocial evidence for the use of the term persona in medieval England as signifying a direct connection to authorship. Yet as the next section shows, there is ample documentation that the complicated relationship between author and persona was not only recognized, used, and manipulated but also debated with a high degree of sophistication by medieval scholars across Western Europe. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) provides yet more helpful information about the English usage of the term persona by illustrating more recent connotations. The OED’s definitions generally echo those seen above, with the literary persona specifically designated (under the headword personæ) as “a character deliberately assumed by an author in his writing.”15 This definition most closely describes the primary use of the term in modern literary theory and illustrates the fact that the terms “character” and “persona” have historically been used interchangeably by many critics. That said, it may be argued that this definition does not adequately ref lect just how complex the persona is, since various possibilities for narrative “reality” or self-division may be identified as central to the persona-concept. As the notion has evolved, a literary persona may be a mere fictional character whose speech and designs are dictated by the story at hand. A persona also may serve as a complex speaking voice or representation that is not necessarily directly that of the author, but which sometimes speaks for him since he (or she) is the creator of the text.

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The most remarkable feature of the OED’s etymological discussion, however, is the idea that, at least according to the dictionary’s editors, “the sense mask has not come down into English.”16 It appears that in place of the classical notion of “masking” and its attendant theatricality, the term persona and its corollaries in English came to more overtly indicate a stable, trustworthy human identity or “personage”: “the actual self or being of a man or woman; presence or action ‘in person’ ” (definitions offered for person). If the OED is correct, then this may help to explain much of the critical estimation of Chaucer’s poetry, specifically the long-standing, widespread belief that the speaker of the poems is Geoffrey Chaucer himself. But even if there did develop a generally understood (direct) relationship between individual and persona, speaker and personage, there also remained in English usage a lexical undercurrent that rendered these connections as unstable, untrustworthy, or indeed unreal. Because even if the term “mask” did not follow from the Latin persona into the English “person,” there is no doubt that a sense of masking remained, as the OED itself suggests by offering such connotations as “to accept the face of ” and “a character sustained or assumed in a drama or the like, or in actual life; part played; guise, semblance; one of the characters in a play or story; personal agent or actor.” If the definitive dictionary in the English-speaking world offers definitions of the persona that are deficient, then it is hardly surprising that confusion abounds in literary scholarship that applies or is based on the construct. Though it is difficult to summarize such a complex notion, it may be said that all of the diverse usages cited above apparently have their fundamental basis in the idea of a real person, either being present or, alternatively, represented. This projected personality, if you will, may take a wide range of forms, but all have general connections to the classical idea of “masking,” with the mask functioning to identify, veil, alter, or divide the person who speaks and/or is spoken through. Whatever the level of affiliation implied by the mask, it is easy to see why the personaconstruct, and thus persona-theory, is indispensable for reading an author such as Chaucer, who writes in the first person but strikes a number of different narrative poses and speaks through a variety of characters. When treating such challenging first-person narrators readers are faced with a kind of duality of authorship that results, at best, in implied positions for author, narrator, and literary character, and makes it impossible to identify with any assurance the relationships between these entities. Due to the construct’s ambiguity, an unproblematic, autobiographical correlation between “Chaucer the Man”17 and Chaucer the Pilgrim—or his other characters and personae—is not plausible. The etymological evidence just outlined shows that, even if scholars were able to remove

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one mask, this might not preclude another veil beneath, or in fact the adoption of another “face” altogether. And as I will emphasize further through the notion of autofiction, none of these poses struck by an individual are necessarily accurate, “real,” or truthful, which underscores the importance of reconsidering many critical assertions that have been made over the years that assume an unequivocal relationship between Chaucer and his narrators. 1.2

Premodern Persona-Theory: A Brief History

In his study of the personae of T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Ezra Pound, Wright observes that “although modern criticism may seem to have penetrated into some of the psychology of poem-making and poem-reading, we still tend, along with critics of other ages, to expend our industry rather on the mask than on how the mask reveals what it does reveal.”18 As Wright suggests, critics have long overlooked the subtleties of personae; they have failed to take into full account the persona’s diverse connotations and historical legacy. The goal of section 1.2 is to address the latter of these shortcomings. A useful starting point for a better understanding of the persona and its theorization is to note that in its various stages of growth the literary persona both ref lected and was the outcome of concomitant beliefs about language, theory, and philosophy.19 As Burt Kimmelman explains, the persona “came into being in response to philosophies of its time,” and it was theorized by a variety of philosophers, theologians, and literary auctores.20 Given the practice of masking in Greek and Roman theater, it is fitting that several thinkers of the classical period take an interest in the literary persona. On the most basic level, a series of grammarians and rhetoricians debated the precise dramatic origins of the personaconstruct. Diomedes and Cicero, for instance, posited that the actor Roscius Gallus, known for his squinting, may have been the first to use the mask extensively on stage. Diomedes states that “the distinguished actor who introduced the mask (on stage) was Roscius Gallus, because he squinted and his eyes were not seemly enough (for acting) unless he acted through a mask (in personis).” Cicero, in turn, adds that the new tradition of dramatic masking was not always well-received by the audience, as “the elder generation did not praise even so great an actor as Roscius when he played (on stage) in a mask (personatum).”21 Donatus, on the other hand, speculates that the dramatic persona may have been introduced at the funeral of Aemilius Paulus, where Terence’s Adelphi was first performed and the two main actors “were wearing masks (personati), along with their company.”22

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Despite evident interest in the construct, the term persona is not always so explicit in classical discussions of narrative perspective. Nonetheless, its function is identifiable in a number of important philosophical works, as figures such as Aristotle, Plato, Horace, and the aforementioned Cicero variously addressed the speakers and voices of literature. It appears that classical philosophers typically assumed no necessary or definitive connection between even the most intense personal poems and the lives or personalities of their authors.23 As Elliott has shown, “in ancient literatures it is the personality expressed in the poem, not the personality of the historical poet, that signifies.”24 This is a crucial point, because it demonstrates that the writer(s) and dramatic performer(s) of Greek and Roman theater generally were considered to be distinct figures, so that the persona was not perceived as being some kind of “real” authorial self-projection but rather functioned as an imaginary construct that told the diverse stories of gods and the world. This mindset may even have inspired one playwright to call a play Personati, which would suggest that the creative, imaginary employment of the mask was a live issue to at least some classical dramatists, if not their audience. According to Festus, “a certain play written by Naevius was called Personati,” and the grammarian goes on to note that the Attelani, who apparently performed this play, worked together on stage to create their credible personae.25 Additional evidence illustrates that the persona was not—or allegedly should not be—directly related to the author, but served as a type of dramatic impersonation of important cultural figures and their traditions, which would be reenacted by the performer(s). Hence, the famous playwright Terence passionately defended his dramatic method, and his own authorial beliefs, by emphasizing the imaginary roles played by the actors in The Eunuch.26 In view of such commentary, the common point of departure in the classical response to dramatic literary speaking is a distinction between performer and poet, with the persona of the writer offering a performative reenactment of mythical (or worldly) characters and events, the word for such literary impersonation being mimesis.27 As it generally is used and understood today, mimesis is a term that designates the imitation of earthly, human reality rather than the simulation of mythical or superhuman concepts, which were central to much classical drama. Thus, in modern theory there is a tendency not only to emphasize the notion of “imitation” when speaking of mimesis—which is the primary meaning of the Greek term—but to signify the imitative actuality of the work on a human level, the way in which the characters can be seen as representing (or imitating) the realities of mankind.28 As this concept of imitation developed, it widely inf luenced persona-theory—since personae act as the vehicles for dramatic mimesis—and has directly led

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to many of the controversies surrounding the use of the I-persona. For, if it is presumed that the persona is used to imitate reality, then questions may be raised concerning the author’s personal intention in representing significant facets of his/her culture, questions that are only intensified if the presented reality is socially divisive or controversial. If so, then it is only natural that additional questions about his/her supposed morality would arise. Due to such questions, authorial intention would become a central concern of some of the most inf luential thinkers of the classical and medieval periods. For example, in his Rhetoric Aristotle established narrative intent as a basis of criticism—commenting on the “quality of purpose” that determines the “quality of character depicted”— while Horace asserted the pervasive dictum that poets aim either to profit or delight, to benefit or entertain (aut prodesse volunt aut delectare, ars poetica 333), a distinction that would prove absolutely vital as a basis for categorizing different kinds of poets.29 Concerns with authorial intent naturally grew as greater numbers of poets manipulated their speakers in a variety of ways. Ovid, for example, thoroughly “explored the immanence of self and the plurality of voice” in his works, and this would play a key role in his extensive inf luence, especially during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. 30 But it is arguably in the proliferation of satirical poetry that the most explicit and widespread evidence is found for the manipulation of personae by classical writers. Simply stated, it is apparent that “the creation of the persona is an integral part of the literary endeavors of Roman satiric poets.”31 Among the satirical writers, Juvenal’s biting satire may have had the most profound inf luence on personae and their reception. Time and again, Juvenal chastised Rome’s deviants and railed against the ills of his society, which was so filled with problems that one of his many personae declared that “it is difficult not to write satire.” Claiming that “indignation leads to the making of poetry,” Juvenal freely adopted whatever rhetorical mask he found suitable and used his speakers to censure any area of human behavior that he deemed fit.32 By consciously exploring varieties of authorial masking, satirical authors ranging from Lucilius to Horace produced direct attacks on society behind a veil of fictionality that could help to protect them from negative reactions others might have to their harsh cultural criticisms. Disapproval and censure certainly could be directed toward the satirist, but the use of personae could presumably help them evade controversy through the def lection of blame, which might be placed on a separate speaker, an imaginary narrative situation apart from the author him/ herself. The possibility for authorial protection that the persona conveniently provided—and satirical authors happily manipulated—would

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play a significant role in many subsequent arguments regarding the construct throughout medieval Europe. Thus, having firmly established the persona’s theoretical foundations in classical Greece and Rome, attention will now be shifted to the persona-theory of the early Middle Ages, when narrative positioning increasingly was discussed by scholars and the persona-concept itself became a much more prominent feature of literary discourse. The classification of poetry in terms of personae can be traced back to the fourth-century commentary on Virgil’s Bucolics by Servius. In this commentary, Servius writes about the speaker(s) in Virgil’s work and makes a crucial distinction that would be applied by scholars to both secular and sacred writings. Specifically, Servius delineates the three styles of writing (or characteres scripturae) that can be found in the work of any one author.33 Describing the different narrative poses that an author might assume, Servius explains that the style of a work can be called “exegematic” when the author speaks in his own person, “dramatic” when he speaks in the persons of others, and “mixed” when both styles are used. Servius’s text provides a distinct point of departure for the theoretical discussion of the persona during the period, as his tripartite classification system would become prevalent in much medieval literary criticism. Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636) and “the venerable” Bede (ca. 672– 735) both drew on Servius’s theory of the characteres scripturae. Much like Servius, Isidore explains in the Etymologiae that in Virgil’s Georgics it is the poet who speaks, while in his dramatic tragedies and comedies it is the characters who speak. Furthermore, Isidore asserts that, in the Aeneid, Virgil speaks at times in his own person and sometimes through his characters (personae), this representing a mixture of the narrative and dramatic modes.34 In De arte metrica, Bede similarly describes the different styles of writing consciously used by poets, and states that “in the dramatic or active type the characters (personae) are presented without any intervention by the poet, as is the case with tragedies and fables.”35 Bede classifies the Song of Songs as having been written in a dramatic style in which the characters speak rather than (or apart from) the poet, because when the Old Testament author of this work does speak, it is in his own voice rather than through any personae (in quo poeta ipse loquitur sine ullius interpositione personae); on the other hand, in the “mixed” style found in poetic literature such as Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, sometimes the poet himself speaks and sometimes personae are introduced as speakers (in quo poete ipse loquitur et personae loquentes introducuntur).36 These comments exemplify early outlines of different types of personae and suggest different levels of authorial involvement and responsibility—and intimate the key problems of intentionality that the shifty persona-construct would

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create, since it is difficult (if not impossible) to determine the exact relationship between author and persona. Like Bede before him, the theologian William of St. Thierry (ca. 1085–1148) was particularly interested in the multiple speakers of the Song of Songs. William thus applies secular literary theory to the stylistic analysis of this sacred text, employing the characteres scripturae in order to show that the work is written in dramatic form and theatrical style, as if it were to be recited by various personae (tanquam per personas et actus recitandum). William proceeds to describe the four main personae of the Song and notes that “scarcely any other voice is heard, or utterance introduced, in this entire song but that of the central Bride and Bridegroom.”37 William’s qualifier “scarcely” (vix) is interesting, because it may do more than just recognize the existence of several speaking voices in the Song (recitandis personae diversae); arguably, the term may also indicate an awareness of the shifting multiplicity of voices, the subtle and sometimes inexplicit transitions in narrative perspective that may occasionally include the authorial speaking voice. Even if this is not William’s implication, he may be said to register more explicitly than Isidore and Bede the difficulty of accurately locating any given voice or moral intention as a result of carefully constructed textual multispeaking. 38 Though certain voices may dominate a given text while others are “scarce,” William’s observations underline the freedoms that use of personae could afford authors. This narrative freedom is evident in certain biblical texts such as the Song of Songs, but it would become prominent—and frequently problematic—in the speaking voices of secular literature. According to Gerald Bond, “arguably the most significant formal achievement” of the inf luential French literary culture during William’s era (roughly the late eleventh to early twelfth centuries) was the development of “a more complex attitude” toward personae.39 This claim is disputable, but it is nonetheless instructive to note that in the later Middle Ages, “the art of fictional self-inclusion was practiced by poets ever more widely and with ever greater acumen and imagination.”40 As Bond has shown, an excellent example of such creative self-inscription may be found in the epistolary writings of Baudri of Bourgueil (f l. 1078– 1107), who employs a type of “polyphonic composition” that allows him to escape blame for the content of his verse, which (among other topics) includes the lyrical portrayal of the “rapturous effects” of a boy’s body.41 Recognizing the sensitive nature of such content, Baudri uses his speaker(s) to assert that “I do not speak the truth but make it all up” (non uera loquor magis omnia fingo), contends that “nothing more than the material seed is mine” (nec plus inde michi nisi semen materiei), and, paradoxically, asks his reader to “please let the verbal meaning be mine, but

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the material intention be its own, not mine” (sodes mea sit sententia uerbi, / Et sua, non mea sit intentio materiei).42 This last comment is key, as Baudri creates a kind of rhetorical shield for himself by carefully utilizing the relative literary freedom that personae afforded. Authorial evasions of this sort are not uncommon during the period in question, and often would be controversial because writers and/or their supporters could thereby justify practically anything they might write.43 As Baudri’s self-conscious narrative commentary demonstrates, his was an age of gradual change in technique, with “autocitation” becoming more prominent, and in turn, authors experimenting with ever more complicated narrative “selves.”44 Largely through the efforts of Chrétien de Troyes and his fellow French “romanciers,” romance would become the major poetic genre in European aristocratic circles. Kimmelman identifies a modern sort of historical consciousness in medieval romance, which is highly debatable; however, it is apparent that these writers subtly experiment with their chivalric narratives and display an increasingly explicit type of self-ref lexivity, and therefore it may be argued that the romances of the period play a central role in an important stage of poetic transformation marked by a cognizant and complex manipulation of personae.45 Coinciding with these developments, the twelfth century would see much scholarly discussion of the use and ramifications of selfconscious narrative speech. The commentaries of this age are remarkable for their frequent recognition of the fictionality of literary characters and the (conventional) distance from the author of these characters. Literary decorum was also a regular topic of discussion, as many commentators concern themselves with the intentions of the literary texts discussed, and hence the aims and decency of a given writer. Although issues of intentionality are nothing new in medieval discussions of personae, interest in narrative intentions would grow in the later Middle Ages as authorial ethics become even more important in the eyes of scholars.46 Peter Abelard is one major twelfth-century exegete who references the author’s role(s) in order to explain the morals underlying several works. Abelard’s discourse on biblical literature neatly illustrates that views of biblical writing often would parallel, in language and theory, the interpretation of secular literature, since the methods being developed by exegetes to elucidate sacred texts “became, with slight modifications, those employed for secular texts,” as Brian Stock has noted. Medieval philosophers, theologians, and literary commentators alike drew on a “common fund of knowledge” and endeavored to understand what a writer said, how he/she spoke in the text, and why.47 One reason for these parallel interests is that medieval authors frequently sought to reconcile the apparently incompatible authorities of their texts by asserting

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the distinction between reportatio and assertio. By announcing (typically through personae) that they merely were reporting the opinions of their sources or telling stories they had heard, writers were able to distance themselves from precise judgments or controversial material, whether in a poem, a historical work, or a religious treatise. For Abelard, the distinction between reportatio and assertio is crucial, so he offers several warnings in Sic et non that an author’s citations of other men’s books (and their views) should not be attributed to the author himself (or his intent).48 Abelard observes, for instance, that St. Jerome “said that he often dictated indifferently his own views or those of other men, so that he might leave it to the reader’s discretion as to whether they should be approved or rejected”; in addition, the theologian notes that poets and philosophers “make many statements in which they are similarly quoting another man’s opinion as if they were based on solid truth, yet is clear that they are completely at odds with the truth.”49 What is interesting here is that Abelard seems to believe that the distinctions between reportatio and assertio are clear, so that the intent, the moral “truth” is likewise evident. However, the ambiguous nature of the persona-construct makes this a very difficult argument to sustain, and subsequent pages will show that this is especially true in the context of secular narrative poetry. Abelard’s contemporary “Bernard Silvester” also was much concerned with authorial intention, and states that “some poets write with a useful purpose in view,” others write “to give pleasure,” while others still write “to a useful end and to give pleasure.”50 “Silvester” details the common, complex system of interpretation that most often was applied in accounts of allegorical works, where the reader sought the philosophical truth beneath a poetic text by deciphering what the author’s intention was, and how and why he wrote. He explains how, much like a mask, the integument (integumentum) veils the intention of the author (unde agat) since “the integument is a kind of teaching which wraps up the true meaning inside a fictitious narrative ( fabulosa narratio), and so it is also called ‘a veil’ (involucrum).”51 The language used here is compelling. Though few, if any, scholars made a direct connection between the idea of the persona and this allegorical “integument” and “veil,” the vocabulary does precisely echo prominent lexical connotations of the persona during the age. Indeed, critical discussions often were elicited by various kinds of “veiling,” as scholars sought to reveal the (allegorical) covering of literary works and focused upon the ramifications of narrative “masking” for the meaning that lay beneath.52 In his reading of Virgil’s Aeneid, “Silvester” perceives the author’s “mode and reason for writing” (modus agenda et cur agat) as being clear-cut and identifiable—despite the narrative “integument” that masks the poet’s intentions—and asserts that his aim was to

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“recount the experiences of Aeneas and the sufferings of other Trojans” and to convey “the knowledge of how to act properly.”53 In making this claim, “Silvester” confidently utilizes Horace’s dictum (noted earlier) that the purpose of poetry is to give “profit” or “delight.” There are, however, a number of provocative narratives that the exegete might have difficulty reconciling because they do not fit neatly within Horace’s oft-cited paradigm.54 Take, for example, a pair of poems composed by a near-contemporary of Abelard that focus on the controversial topic of male homosexuality. The first of these “amatory and queering lyrics” has been ascribed to Marbod of Rennes (ca. 1035–1123), while the second, anonymous work—found in a late twelfth-century German manuscript—may also have been written by Marbod, although this has not been proven decisively.55 Whether these poems give “profit” or “delight” is in the eye of the beholder, but for my purposes it is especially notable that to present such morally forbidden fruit as male homosexual love, each poem overtly manipulates the narrative persona. In fact, the titles given to both works specifically highlight the use of the personaconstruct, which likely was the primary way in which the author(s) sought to def lect the blame for the poems’ suggestive content: the verse ascribed to Marbod is titled “Satyra in amatorem puelli sub assumpta persona,” and the second poem similarly is called “Disuasio intempestivi amoris sub assumpta parabola.”56 In these poems, the deliberate distancing of author and narrator is emphasized through various descriptors of the speaker (such as “observer” or spectator) and his role (mihi ludo), as well as in phrasing that makes the self-division of the narrator clear, such as the comment that “I am divided in myself: part of me laughs at the other part” (in me divisus de me mihi concito risus).57 In the latter text, the speaker agonizes over his role and laments that his self-division does not actually allow him to escape his desires, which he indicates by commenting that “it would not be good, even if I desired it, to become again what I was” (nec bene, si cupiam, quod eram, tunc denuo fiam), and doubting his very role as a lover itself by asking “surely I won’t always want to betray myself to this old trap and step again into the snare once I have escaped?”58 The controversial nature of the verses is made explicit by Marbod when he, or rather his speaker, ends the first poem by beseeching his adored young man that “these words of my request, most beloved, are sent to you alone; do not show them to many others.”59 These words need not be taken at face value, yet their urgency illustrates that, although the persona could serve as a protective shield for taboo verse of this sort, the assumption of an evasive narrative pose did not preclude the dangerous possibility that a speaker’s illicit purposes would be linked directly to the writer himself. The very possibility of such connections

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explains why writers of the period frequently feel the need to defend their subject-matter—because, as the current examples clearly show, even if Marbod is trying to playfully “delight” his reader, does assume the voice of another and does not share the speaker’s desires, his own values must be justified and preserved since he has deliberately assumed his role and therefore the moral content and purpose of that role. The challenging narrative “selves” manipulated by Marbod and his contemporaries helped to keep the persona-construct at the scholarly forefront during the thirteenth century. As scholasticism’s reach expanded, growing numbers of theologians elaborately sought to defend the reputations and authority of divinely inspired authors in the face of certain unacceptable or dubious statements found in their writings. Hence, Saint Bonaventure (ca. 1221–1274) explains in his commentary on Ecclesiastes that sometimes its supposed author Solomon speaks in his own person and sometimes in the persons of others. When he speaks in the person of the foolish and vain man, he does not approve of this man’s foolishness but despises it; however, when he speaks as a wise man, his words, to be taken directly as his own, are to be seen as conducive to good behavior. According to Bonaventure, Solomon’s own views are made clear by the sententia expressed in the epilogue to the work, where the auctor provides his reader with a sense of how to judge the manner in which doctrine is being communicated throughout the text.60 Despite Bonaventure’s certainty it may be argued that this example—and many others like it—reveals that the distinctions between a writer and his/her narrators are never clear-cut or indisputable when the persona-construct is at issue. That said, when considering the hermeneutic strategies of St. Bonaventure it is perhaps even more important to note that, in his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the theologian precisely outlined the “modes of making a book” (modus faciendi librum), or the various roles a writer could fulfill.61 Of these four roles, only the auctor could claim a strong sense of literary autonomy; the other three roles were scribe, compiler, and commentator, which were marked by different levels of passivity and simultaneously endowed with varying degrees of agency.62 In narrative poetry, the generally subordinate nature of the writer’s prescribed roles commonly led to the use (or even appropriation) of material from other sources, which was then frequently presented as personal experience.63 The presentation of personal(ized) experience is vital here, since the individuality of the author and his/ her role becomes increasingly prevalent in the later Middle Ages, while the tendency to defer to past literature continues but appears to be less dominant. Rather than merely being reliant upon earlier auctores, writers in this period could be compared with these wise authors in a number of

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different ways.64 Recognizing this gradual authorial individuation helps to support the conclusion that there was a “subtle shift in mentality” around the thirteenth century, with more and more authors claiming positions of authority based on their own “sagacity” and experience65 — and it characteristically was through a creative use of the persona that these writers were able to more firmly assert their own authority. In hand with these changes, it is evident that growing numbers of late medieval writers “summoned literature to ref lect upon the self,” and utilized various masks to examine the functions of narrative and to address directly the frailties of mankind.66 It is not surprising that, in a textual culture in which writers more explicitly asserted their own authority, a central theme of the day became authority itself. Closely associated with this motif was a thematic concern with the words and deeds of the author, as narrative speaker. By “words and deeds,” I mean the question of whether an author’s deeds actually follow his/her words, and vice versa—an idea centered on moral honesty and textual “reality” that closely corresponds with the distinctions made between reportatio and assertio. The theme of words and deeds would figure prominently in the growing controversy over authorial intention and the role of the persona in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as the problem arises of whether a text and/or narrative “I” really means what is said, and whether an author’s words necessarily followed his/her ostensible deeds or views. During this period, it was widely believed that a textual “I” need not correspond to a unitary person or “reality.”67 Thus, the ambiguous persona-construct allowed authors to establish, so to speak, a narrative defense for critiquing their cultural surrounds as they saw fit; and it permitted literary writers to deal more freely and authoritatively with sexual, social, and political issues that previously would have been unacceptable under the prevailing literary theory. Such breach of tradition naturally incited controversy and, in fact, greatly worried some of the period’s scriptural exegetes, who were much concerned with authorial decorum and preserving the reputations (and hence authority) of inspired auctores whose characters voiced unacceptable content.68 Consequently, like the many contemporary authors who were becoming increasingly self-conscious while actively manipulating positions of authority, a number of late medieval theologians and scholars also took a greater interest in questions of authority, which they addressed by making use of hermeneutical principles that were apparently based on, and helped to develop, persona-theory in all its facets. This system of hermeneutics is well-documented and is especially prevalent in the many interpretive works concerned with Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae. Commentaries on the Consolatio illustrate how

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late medieval scholars built upon the theories of interpretation outlined above in order to analyze and describe various types of literary responsibility, and to place the responsibility for the diverse statements made in a given work where it allegedly belonged, whether to a specific character or the author speaking in propria persona.69 For instance, William of Aragon (f l. late thirteenth century) asserts that the author Boethius molds two personae (duplex persona confingitur): the learned and the learner, or the sufferer and the physician. It is through this divided man (homo in duo dividitur) that Boethius imparts his wisdom, seeking to cure his pain by finding philosophy and, as a result of this search, ultimately being rewarded with consolation.70 The term confingitur is particularly significant here, because it shows that William perceives Boethius’s fabrication of himself by assuming the mask(s) of another. The Latin confingitur signifies a feigned construction, a creative molding of a person with a sense of invention, fabrication, or indeed deception.71 Accordingly, William seems aware that the “divided” narrative “I” is not a realistic or reliable self-representation but a fictional speaker used for fictional purposes. Though William’s reading highlights Boethius’s authorial role and assumes a fundamental relationship between the writer and his two speakers, it views the characters as characters and thus demonstrates that medieval theorists unquestionably recognized the fictional aspects of narrative poetry. And the fact that William, among others, does not wholly fall prey to the “intentional fallacy”—the perception of a literary work as the direct expression of an author and his/ her ideals—attests to the sophistication of the period’s persona-theory, as scholars from the later Middle Ages evince a nuanced understanding of the interpretive ramifications personae might have for different authors and varied texts.72 It is striking that one of the writers who was especially interested in Boethius’s Consolatio was none other than Jean de Meun (ca. 1240– 1305), who profoundly inf luenced Chaucer and whose continuation of Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose would be hotly disputed in terms of authorship, morality, and the intentionality of his personae. In Jean’s apologia to the Rose, he employs evasive narrative tactics of the sort frequently made by many late medieval writers in defense of their works, asserting (through the I-persona) that he is merely repeating the words and ideas of previous auctores (i.e., reportatio) rather than affiliating himself with these ideas (i.e., assertio). In Jean’s words, “I merely repeat, except for making a few additions on my own account which costs you little. Poets do this among themselves, each one dealing with the subject that he wants to work on, for, as the text tells us, the intention is solely to edify and to please.” 73

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The high level of Jean’s narrative awareness is also apparent in the preface to his French translation of Boethius’s Consolatio, where he incorporates part of William of Aragon’s prologue and therefore similarly comments on the Boethian speaker who is “divided into two” (devisé en deuz), into the tormented man and the divinely elevated presence of Philosophy.74 Jean notes that Boethius (deliberately) establishes himself in the role (partie) of the troubled man while placing Philosophy in the role of man spiritually elevated.75 Jean’s notion of an author deliberately playing a role, or dividing himself, exemplifies the fact that within many exegetical writings and literary commentaries alike, the “distancingeffect” of the persona is recognized. This is crucial to the understanding of the persona’s theorization, because it further illustrates that discerning medieval readers perceived that personae were characteristically creative and imaginary rather credibly autobiographical—a key tenet for my own conception of autofiction. Although Boethius’s personae elicited much scholarly discussion, other noted medieval authors’ purposeful manipulation of “second selves” incited more heated debate and even outright controversy. Among these writers, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265–1321) stands out as a would-be auctor whose usage of the I-persona led scholars to dispute the meaning and methodology of the Commedia in light of “his” authorial presence in the poem. In Guido da Pisa’s (f l. 1327) commentary on the Commedia, the several “causes” of Dante’s text are considered, including the formal cause (causa formalis) and activating cause (causa agens), as well as the form of the treatise and its treatment ( forma tractatus and forma tractandi).76 Guido draws attention to the fictional nature of Dante’s masterpiece in his account of its styles and modes, saying that “the form or mode of treatment is poetic, fictional, descriptive, digressive, and transumptive”; in addition, he observes that “the Holy Spirit Himself, speaking through Dante’s mouth [i.e., his pilgrim-persona], has openly condemned the crimes of prelates and kings and princes of this world.” 77 This is a telling statement when it is recalled that the very term persona may derive—at least in part—from personare, or “to sound through.” Guido concludes that Dante’s characters (personae) are not present in reality, but represent imaginary examples of many things: “we must not believe that they are there in reality, but rather see them as being so many examples. For, when Dante treats of some vice, in order that we may better understand it he introduces a character who was full of that vice as an example.” 78 This is a fascinating comment, in view of the fact that the majority of the characters to which Guido alludes were based on reallife figures from Italian society whose earthly crimes Dante has chosen to condemn by placing them in his imaginary Inferno. Yet Guido clearly

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recognizes that these characters were not necessarily “real” or meant to be accurate descriptions, but played a crucial role in the poet’s fictional agenda. The aforementioned Jean de Meun was another vernacular writer whose use of personae elicited significant scholarly response, such as the account by Evrart de Conty (f l. late fourteenth century), who advanced a precise theory of poetic fiction by examining narrative method and technique. Commenting on the Eschez amoreux, which he compares at points to its primary inspiration, the Roman de la Rose, Evrart emphasizes the anonymous author’s intent and the work’s utilitas (moral utility) by observing that “the principal intention of the author (l’entente principal de l’acteur) in question and the end of his book, is to lead to virtue and good works and to f lee from all evil and all foolish idleness.” 79 Anxious to emphasize this utilitas, Evrart carefully distances the poem’s author from the personae he deploys in the text by explaining how the poet feigns his presence and participation in the story. Evrart contends that many of the things said in the narrative are not to be taken according to the literal meaning of the words (a la lectre), but instead should be seen as feigned ( faintes) in a reasonable manner and may, therefore, contain some hidden truth.80 As a result, he argues that the poet feigns and introduces several characters (personnes), each of whom speaks in his turn as is appropriate to his nature—in the manner of feigning used in the Rose—since it is possible that a writer can sometimes feign and speak figuratively in a way that may prove beneficial.81 Thus, Evrart makes a clear distinction between what the self-aware author makes up or feigns and what he really believes, or what actually lies behind the most obvious meaning of his statements. This commentary offers considerable insight into how an understanding of the first-person narrator might operate, and how moral (and other) interpretations often hinged upon conceptions of the I-persona.82 It especially highlights the lengths that may be taken by scholars to justify an author’s writing and/or values. Even today this remains true, and some Chaucerians—much like Evrart—take great care in using the persona as a means to demonstrate and defend their poet’s moral integrity. The disputants in what is known today as the querelle de la Rose also were interested in the narrative speaking of the Roman, concerning themselves with questions of whether, given the employment of fictional personae, Jean de Meun should be held accountable for certain controversial words spoken by the characters in his continuation of the poem. The querelle occurred during the years 1401–1403 and pitted the social dignitaries Pierre and Gontier Col and Jean de Montreuil against Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson, the chancellor of the University of Paris. Jean de Montreuil and the brothers Col strongly defended Jean de

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Meun and his characters, and cited the persona and its distancing-effect in his defense. In stark contrast, Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson rejected the would-be protection of the persona and held the poet personally responsible for alleged obscenities articulated by his narrators and for these speakers’ unacceptable views on love, marriage, nature, and other subjects.83 Hence, principles of persona-theory lie at the very heart of the dispute itself: both the supporters’ attempts to authorize certain comments in the text and the attackers’ efforts to refute this perspective are centered on shared ideas regarding narrative personae. The surviving documents of the heated querelle de la Rose offer perhaps the finest, and unquestionably the most extensive evidence for the various late medieval views regarding narrative voicing.84 Having occurred just years after Chaucer’s death, the querelle provides an illuminating depiction of the major issues Chaucer and his contemporaries worked with and around by utilizing personae in their verse. Therefore, this dialectic represents a vital, representative microcosm of the ideological wrangling by medieval authors and scholars alike over narrative positioning and authorial intent, authorship and authority, fiction and reality. On one side of the querelle debates are those disputants who, for the sake of their argument, disregard the “dramatic” nature of the Roman de la Rose and choose to make no distinction between the author and his characters. Instead, the two famous figures in question hold Jean directly responsible for everything that his characters say, as well as what he says in propria persona—he cannot hide behind his personae.85 Christine de Pizan condemns the poet for his lecherous talk and exclaims that “he speaks too dishonorably in some parts of the Roman de la Rose, even when he speaks through the character (personnage) he calls Reason, who names the secret members plainly by name.”86 For Christine, this is indicative of the moral corruption of Jean since, although one might expect such talk from a wanton old woman, a good character like Dame Reason would not (or should not) talk in so dirty a fashion. Christine also blames Jean for the Roman de la Rose’s supposed lack of utilitas by commenting that “many people attempt to excuse him by saying that it is the Jealous Man who speaks and that in truth Meun does no more than God himself did when He spoke through the mouth of Jeremiah! But whatever lying additions he may have made, he certainly could not have rendered worse or abased the condition of women more!”87 Christine herself was a poet who carefully used personae and whose narrative approach is notable for its “conscious and sustained interweaving of historical fact and poetic fiction.”88 Thus, there is little doubt that she recognized the creative capabilities of personae and was aware that many writers were quite calculated in their deployment. As a result it

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would seem that, while her reading is credible, Christine’s decision to condemn Jean is an ideological choice colored by her views on gender, a negative reaction to the poet largely because she disapproves of his portrayal of women. Indeed, it is interesting to find that Christine’s chastisement of Jean turns on her assertion of a typical pose rendered by poets who manipulated their personae: specifically, Christine claims that she knows “the truth” in part through her own experience, so that the harsh portrayal of women is proven false. In Christine’s words, “it is precisely because I am a woman that I can speak better in this than one who has not had the experience, since he speaks only by conjecture.” She later adds that “nothing gives one so much authority as one’s own experience” (vraiement je ne pouroie d’aucune chose respondre si proprement come de mon propre fait). Hence, in this case I can speak the truth from certain knowledge.”89 In discounting the validity of Jean’s personae to speak for women, we find a reader who clearly interprets the persona for her own agenda, perhaps to the extent that Christine chooses to wholly ignore the imaginative, fictional nature of a construct that she herself manipulates in her own creative writing. Like Christine, Jean Gerson also criticizes Jean de Meun’s continuation, especially in terms of its presumed lack of utilitas. Gerson condemns Jean by saying that “in his own person (en sa propre persone) and by his own examples, he counsels men to try out all kinds of women indiscriminately,” and adds that “in his own person (en sa persone), he uses holy and sacred words to name the dishonorable parts of the body and impure and shameful sins.”90 In response to such blatant narrative indiscretions, Gerson is careful to assert that “nor can you [i.e., Jean] be excused in your method of speaking through characters ( ja n’en yés a excusser sur la maniere de ton parler par personnaiges)” since “everything seems to be said in his own person (tout semble estre dit en sa persone); everything seems as true as the Gospel, particularly to those foolish and vicious lovers to whom he speaks.”91 In light of such statements, it is evident that for Christine and Gerson, the poet is (always) directly responsible for what his characters say—even in a fictional text the author cannot hide behind his personae because immoral speech is immoral speech, no matter who is talking. The defenders of the poet, on the other hand, worked under the opposite assumption and distanced the writer from his text, asserting that Jean and his characters were distinct entities to the extent that the author should not be held personally accountable for the words and ideas of his speakers. Jean’s sympathizers thus “excuse” the poet throughout the querelle in a fashion very similar to that described, or rather condemned, by Gerson. This is apparent in the response of Pierre Col, who answers vehemently that “the work itself is my shield” since “Master Jean de

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Meun in his book introduced characters (personnaiges), and made each character (personnaige) speak according to his nature, that is, the Jealous Man as a jealous man, the Old Woman as an old woman, and similarly with the others.”92 Jean de Montreuil, in turn, accuses his opponents of not understanding Jean’s narrative technique, asserting that “these detractors [i.e., Christine and Gerson], clearly, have no understanding of the variety of his characters (que de personatuum varietate non discernunt), and do not perceive by what emotions and passions they are driven, nor to what end or purpose they were made to speak.”93 Such statements reveal that Jean’s supporters staunchly defended him by upholding the fictional nature of the text, arguing that, since the Roman de la Rose is a fully “dramatic” work, the controversial statements found in the poem do not ref lect the views of the writer himself. Instead, the disagreeable content merely represents the expressions of personae of limited standing, or altogether reprehensible character; these are characters whose immorality and questionable pronouncements are to be located in the context of the story, ascribed to the requirements of the tale rather than the writer and his actual beliefs.94 The intensity with which the querelle disputants attacked each others’ views throughout this dialectic suggests that ethical issues surrounding narrative voicing were of real interest to a number of people.95 Such interest is supported by the fact that during this polemic, Jean Gerson addressed the subject in several of his public sermons, which has been said to indicate a “widespread interest in the debate.”96 This may be overstating the case, but when the querelle controversy as a whole is considered, it appears that this series of arguments demonstrates, at the very least, that by this era, a common, highly sophisticated body of ideas had been formed, disseminated, and accepted through the commentary tradition, resulting in the moral significance of poetry being increasingly contested in terms of the narrative positioning of the author and the voices of his characters. For the study of Chaucerian reception, it is also important to emphasize that the querelle illustrates how a common body of ideas were manipulated in various ways, in this case to serve two totally opposed and irreconcilable theoretical viewpoints. This running argument exhibits how critics not only concerned themselves with the sort of narrative evasiveness displayed by Jean de Meun, but also how this authorial elusiveness actually could be used to their argumentative advantage.97 In other words, the querelle reveals how critics of the age—or any age, for that matter—could lend themselves a measure of authority by appropriating the narrative persona so that the meaning of a text fits within their own ideological ideals. With the querelle de la Rose as a kind of terminus ad quem, I have now demonstrated the continuity and centrality in the Middle Ages of

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literary analysis conducted in terms of narrative poses and authorial selfconstructions. It goes without saying that the list of medieval authors who used and experimented with personae is a substantial one that includes the aforementioned Boethius, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, Jean de Meun, and other prominent authors from the continent such as Juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Giovanni Boccaccio; in England, the foremost examples are Chaucer and his contemporaries John Gower and William Langland. It is beyond the scope of this study to examine the diverse I-speakers utilized by these authors, but this list attests to the fact that the persona was at the very center of most medieval vernacular poetry. In view of the scholarly discourse outlined above, the medieval use of the narrative persona may be summarized by stating that the construct permitted poets to work with and manipulate the characteres scripturae, serving as a shifty device that allowed them to elusively mask/mark their own positions and avoid making explicit ideological commitments or judgments. In a politically tumultuous age, the persona-construct provided protection for authors who wished to address controversial issues of the day, and sought to draw the reader into challenging processes of cultural negotiation and discovery.98 Having established these key points, I will now move on to consider brief ly the theoretical discussion of personae in subsequent eras, when the prevailing views of the persona would be transformed. This is necessary because the scholarly discourse on persona-theory during these periods is insubstantial; and to completely apprehend my theory of autofiction, the changes in the persona’s theorization after the Middle Ages must be understood, since many (post)modern theorists—myself included—have been compelled to respond to these new critical perspectives. It was also during these periods that Chaucer’s critical legacy extensively changed and grew, with the poet’s “I” read in an ever-widening variety of ways. The remaining chapters of this study examine these diverse interpretations of Chaucer’s personae, and thus to lay the groundwork for those discussions it is imperative that the picture of persona-theory and its historical development is completed. Taking the Renaissance into consideration, Shakespeare’s sonnets alone are proof that fresh verse forms and narrative techniques provided “readily available paradigms for the development of authorial personae,” and it is clear that the sonnet was a genre “in which autobiographical and authorial selves could appear as safely figurative and rhetorical.” 99 There is no doubt that personae continued to be used and manipulated often during the Renaissance, but it does appear that the persona-construct was not as widely theorized in comparison to the extensive scholarly discussions of the Middle Ages. Despite this relative disengagement, certain

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Chaucer commentators from the period distinctly employ persona-theory to explicate the Middle English. Thomas Speght, for example, addresses Chaucer’s I-persona in his important comments on Sir Thopas from 1598. Speght argues that the tale was “purposely uttered by Chaucer, in a differing rime and stile from the other tales, as though he himselfe were not the authour, but only the reporter of the rest.”100 It is generally true that, as Alice Miskimin has observed, in Elizabethan criticism the actual man is usually taken to be the “Chaucer” in the poems, while the Canterbury pilgrimage is concurrently accepted as being based on fact.101 Speght’s comment, however, provides tangible evidence that there were some Renaissance scholars who recognized the fictional signification of Chaucer’s personae, or at least acknowledged that the persona-construct rendered the type of “autobiographical” readings described by Miskimin as theoretically problematic. A similar recognition is discernible in John Hoskins’s Directions for Speech and Style (ca. 1599), in which the noted scholar seems to warn his readers to be wary of the voices and masks used by Philip Sidney in the New Arcadia, particularly the fallen and implied characters through which the writer manipulates “ironia” (“which expresseth a thing by contrary”).102 Hoskins pays special attention to “ironious” “personages” that are said to represent “counterfeits of amplification” and uses the Arcadia as an example of a “figured story” which shows that it is most convenient sometimes for the bringing in of life and lustre to represent some unexpected strains beside the tenor of your tale, and act, as it were, your meaning; which is done either by feigning the presence or the discourse of some such persons as either are not at all or, if there be, yet speak not but by imagination.103

These are deeply meaningful words, since Hoskins’s pronouncement precisely echoes the observations of several medieval theorists who understood that while they may seem realistic, personae are nonetheless “feigned” figures carefully crafted by the author. In contrast to Hoskins’s acknowledgment of a distinction between author and narrator, the majority of Renaissance critics promoted a more explicit relationship between the writer and his/her I-speaker.104 In fact, in the Neoclassical and Romantic periods, scholars also tend to disregard the distinction between author/narrator, as the lyric persona becomes more and more directly identified with the writer. This is a crucial point for the remainder of my study, because it appears that by the early nineteenth century the typical persona has become distinctly personalized, as Wright has observed; although there were exceptions, such

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as the dramatic monologues of Browning or Tennyson, the characteristic I-speaker came to represent a particular individual, the actual poet who writes the verse.105 This development may have been aided by the growth of the novel as an art form, and with it the continued extension of narrative subject matter into private life and actual, personal experience. Regardless of the impetus, it is apparent that following the Renaissance readers evince a growing interest in the real persons and personalities of poets, while authorial sincerity is widely endorsed as a standard to which literary writers are expected to conform. This trend would culminate in the emotional verse and “sublime” criticism of the Romantic Age, when it appears that poets such as Wordsworth and Keats increasingly looked inward and used poetry to explore their own beings, while critics, in turn, came to more closely identify the speakers of poems with their actual authors, rather than perceiving these voices as separate and fictional.106 Despite these gradually constituted changes, nineteenth-century authors do manipulate diverse voices, and as a result it has been observed that “the Victorians, particularly within the first decades of their era, were at something of a loss to define and defend the role of the poet, his poetry and indeed, his persona.”107 This theoretical confusion is identifiable in Chaucer scholarship and may help to explain why several Victorian critics show particular concern with what Matthew Arnold described as the “bewildering” “multitude of voices” that continued to be found in all kinds of literary texts.108 Not all scholars were so confused, however, and later chapters will demonstrate that some “Men of Letters” sharply countered the literal readings of their contemporaries by astutely emphasizing the imaginary, creative employment of literary personae. Nonetheless, the sources I have examined indicate that the persona-construct was not a prominent component of the Victorian period’s critical discourse because it was most common to directly connect author and speaker. It is not until the mid-twentieth century that a widespread critical dialectic on the persona of the sort found in the Middle Ages is seen again. Although the narrative construct itself persisted and, indeed, flourished, it would only reemerge as a prominent critical tool through Modernist literature and criticism. As the historical outline provided in this section has sought to show, by coming to terms with the assumptions and usage of premodern persona-theory critics may better understand the works of past writers such as Chaucer who consciously reacted to the theories of their time in manipulating their personae. In addition, the theories of our own age and their place within the trajectory of history may be better understood. And thus to completely lay the foundations for the theory of autofiction, I must now focus upon the twentieth century, when new theoretical

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tenets were offered in response to the many complex voices being brought to the literary page, none more challenging than Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce’s alter ego who explains in a fascinating bit of metafiction that “the personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a f luid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak . . . The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”109 1.3

“Self”-Projections: Modern Persona-Theory, Chaucer the Pilgrim, and Chaucer the Man

When Pound used Personae as a title for volumes of his poetry and discussed the adoption of masks as a vital poetic technique, he helped return the concept to its old connotations—especially of “masking”—and refreshed its theoretical importance, so that the narrative construct again was widely recognized by the mid-twentieth century as one with much critical utility.110 Instead of emphasizing the literal, autobiographical possibilities of the narrative “I” like many literati from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pound, Yeats, and Eliot placed the notion of the fictional persona at the very center of the Modernist movement. Although the term itself was not always explicitly used by these writers, they took great care to emphasize that the “I” of the poem is always a dramatic “I.”111 Hence, in “The Three Voices of Poetry,” Eliot describes the third of these voices in the following manner: “the third is the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse; when he is saying, not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character.”112 Adopting this sort of dramatic conception, these three poets (and many of their Modernist fellows) used the persona to describe and experiment with the role a poet assumes when he/she pretends to have another speak in verse, and articulates his/her ideas through the feigned narrative mask.113 In light of the pervasive theoretical inf luence of Modernist thought, a parallel development can be traced in Chaucer Studies that also bolstered the idea of the persona and helped it to fully reemerge in the English literary tradition as a notion of particular critical importance.114 The criticism of G. L. Kittredge would appear to have been informed by Modernist ideals, and can be identified as one of the prime movers in what might be called the “persona movement” in Chaucer Studies. Though he did not extensively make use of the term persona, it is clear that Kittredge had an acute awareness of the narrative function of Chaucer’s speakers long

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before persona-theory was, once again, widely popular with critics. It is worth remembering that it was Kittredge who initiated the idea of the “dramatic principle,” so that many of his comments emphasize the dramatic aspects of the poetry in describing what he calls, appropriately enough, Chaucer’s “dramatis personae.”115 Kittredge specifically alludes to the narrative mask, and presumes that Chaucer himself was cognizant of poetic masks and their usage, as he indicates on the final page of Chaucer and His Poetry by saying, “nobody but Geoffrey Chaucer divined the tragic face behind the Satyr’s mask.”116 In Kittredge’s conception of Chaucer’s “Human Comedy,” the plan for the Canterbury Tales is that the stories grow out of the character or situation, while the digressive comments scattered throughout the text are made by the storyteller(s) and not the author.117 Regarding the Merchant, for example, Kittredge concludes that “Chaucer is not speaking, and there is no violation of dramatic propriety on his part. It is not Chaucer who is telling the story. It is the Merchant.”118 Kittredge contends that almost all references to Chaucer (as speaker) are ironic and, in turn, views his narrative method as being marked by a type of authorial detachment, both of which are indicators that the verse is not directly spoken in his own voice or person—as a reader of the Book of the Duchess sees, the narrator is a “purely imaginary figure,” as much a part of the dream vision’s fiction as the Pardoner or Host is part of the Tales’ fiction.119 Despite this perceived authorial detachment, Kittredge believes that in the House of Fame the dreamer is not a fictitious character but is “certainly the poet himself.”120 Kittredge similarly argues that, because the Canterbury Tales is a dramatic work, Chaucer makes himself one of the pilgrims (“this, beyond question, is the real Chaucer”) in order that we may accept the illusion that they are as real as he.121 The fundamental inconsistency seen in Kittredge’s comments is highly significant, because it underscores much subsequent critical controversy over the poet’s narrators. Regardless of Kittredge’s obvious awareness of narrative masking, it is E. T. Donaldson who generally is seen as the key figure in reintroducing persona-theory within Chaucer Studies. There is no doubt that Donaldson’s criticism played a key role in reinvigorating the discussion of Chaucer’s speakers by utilizing persona-theory to address the complexities of the author’s pose(s). However, as Donaldson himself knew well, his own scholarship was entering a debate that had been raging for centuries on the topic of first-person narration, and owed a debt not only to Modernist thinkers and Kittredge (whom he cites), but also to fellow New Critics and scholars from other literary fields who helped give “academic respectability” to the use of the term persona in critical discourse.122 Within this milieu, Donaldson’s famous essay “Chaucer the

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Pilgrim” had a profound impact on the study of Chaucer’s personae and remains inf luential to this day. Published in 1954, “Chaucer the Pilgrim” did much to establish the very name that is now customarily used to describe the narrator of the Canterbury Tales. More importantly, the essay categorically reestablished the persona-construct as an essential tool for Chaucer scholarship. In Donaldson’s conception of the persona, there are three altogether separate, yet closely related entities: “Chaucer the pilgrim” (the narrative speaker), Chaucer the man (civil servant and man of record), and Chaucer the poet. As he puts it, Chaucer the pilgrim “is in every physical respect [the same as] Chaucer the man” but with some distortion so as to be laughable—“this Chaucer [i.e., the Man] was telling them of another who, lacking some of his chief qualities, nevertheless possessed many of his characteristics, though in a different state of balance.”123 Donaldson goes on to assert that “the third entity, Chaucer the poet, operates in a realm which is above and subsumes those in which Chaucer the man and Chaucer the pilgrim have their being.”124 It is evident in these assertions that the presumed distinctions between these three “Chaucers” are difficult to glean. And this is just one of several problems that may be identified within “Chaucer the Pilgrim.” Donaldson operates on the assumption that the meaning of the persona-concept is clear and widely agreed upon. This is hardly the case, as section 1.1 has shown, yet he offers no basic definition of the term in his essay. This is problematic because those who have followed Donaldson’s lead have often misapplied or fundamentally misunderstood the personaconcept, which is already ambivalent and confusing by its very nature. A similar issue is that Donaldson is one of several critics who have failed to locate Chaucer’s persona historically, within the discourses of medieval persona-theory. Though Donaldson is not alone in creating a kind of historical discontinuity in the study of the persona, the lack of specificity contained in his quintessential scholarly essay has perhaps made this historical gap larger, which, at the very least, underscores the need for a more nuanced, accurate historicization of Chaucer’s personae.125 In section 1.2, it has repeatedly been shown that authorial intentions are typically at issue when scholars address the narrative persona. And despite his advancement of personae, it is interesting to note that Donaldson ultimately seems to favor a view in which Chaucer himself stands directly behind the mask. In other words, Donaldson appears to fall into what his friend William Wimsatt condemned as the “intentional fallacy.” To be fair, Donaldson does not wholly read the Chaucerian “I” autobiographically, but he does seem to be inclined toward such a possibility. Hence, Donaldson notes that “Chaucer obviously exploits his

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physical personality” and submerged “his own personality into the personality of a fictional substitute, who speaks for or instead of the poet and who resembles the poet in many ways and even bears his name.”126 Donaldson even goes so far as to suggest that “the pilgrim Chaucer and the poet occupied the same body and could at any time become the same person,” so that “the several Chaucers must have inhabited one body, and in that sense the fictional first person is no fiction at all.”127 If the “intentional fallacy” is evident in what is likely the most inf luential application of persona-theory in the history of Chaucer Studies, then it should come as no surprise that many other readers, before and after the publication of “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” have supported a similar viewpoint. In fact, it may be argued that the intentional fallacy, or what Elliot labels the “doctrine of sincerity,” is the single greatest critical problem that has arisen from Chaucer’s ambiguous personae.128 With issues of sincerity/intent in the theoretical foreground, critical accounts of Chaucer naturally project three primary ways of reading the persona: they contend that the poet and narrator are altogether divided, wholly separate entities so that Chaucer’s speaker is afforded no “realistic” significance whatsoever; a middle ground is alleged wherein the speaker(s) ref lects partly on Chaucer the Man but also functions partly as fiction; or, it is argued that the narrator represents the poet himself (and his beliefs). My research indicates that the last of these interpretive positions is the most commonly seen in Chaucer’s six hundred year reception history, yet it is also the most problematic because the fictional undercurrent of the persona-construct complicates or altogether undermines this “autobiographical” perspective. Nearly fifty years ago, George Kane shrewdly cautioned against such literal readings in his book The Autobiographical Fallacy in Chaucer and Langland Studies.129 But even today, in spite of such warnings, the “autobiographical fallacy” endures and has profound implications for the reception of Chaucer, and this is why the concept of autofiction is, I believe, so crucially important. Donald Howard was one of the earliest scholars to build upon Donaldson’s account of the persona-construct, and his pivotal essay on “Chaucer the Man” epitomizes the belief that the persona somehow speaks for the poet. In Howard’s eyes, the narrator points us toward the author; he leads us there because he is the author.130 Howard admits that the poet does “mask his personality” through his ironic role playing, but contends that Chaucer presents something of himself in everything he writes—he may choose to do so by fragmenting himself behind various masks, but he does not, and cannot, make himself disappear.131 To reconcile Chaucer’s narrative complexity, Howard fosters the notion of the implied author, asserting that because we so often doubt the narrator’s

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view we are required to intuit the writer’s own; thus, Chaucer makes the reader play his role.132 As an implied author, Chaucer’s presence is not explicit but dynamic—it exists through an implied relationship between himself and his audience, so that the Chaucer we know (through our own response to his works) “is no less the real Chaucer.”133 In recent years, the autobiographical inclination exemplified by Howard’s essay has been tempered significantly; for in the wake of “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” it is now more common to find discussion of Chaucer’s narrative detachment, rather than the kind of attachment adhered to by Howard. A belief in narrative detachment is variously manifest, but perhaps is most famously—and controversially—found in Chaucer’s supposedly ironic textual positioning and play. Donaldson’s scholarship is again crucial here, because his advocacy of the poet’s “ironic” pose fostered the possibility of a carefully detached author/speaker, which greatly opened up the interpretive potential of the text.134 In Chaucer’s Poetry, Donaldson describes the author as assuming an “ironic role” in the guise of Chaucer the Pilgrim, and states that “the way of indirection is generally the way of irony, and allows for a pervasive suggestiveness to which the reader is then free to assign any number of meanings.”135 Some scholars, however, strongly disagree with such contentions and make the counterargument that the premise of narrative irony allows, or encourages, a critic to say that virtually anything found in the text is “ironic,” and therefore the words on the page might come to mean anything a reader wants them to mean.136 Another important, controversial issue that has resulted from perceived narrative detachment is that some Chaucerians have used this sundering as a way to absolve the poet of responsibility for certain distasteful content; meanwhile, others have taken the opposite view and held the author culpable for questionable material in a manner reminiscent of the disputants of the querelle de la Rose. The ideologies that underline each of these perspectives will be examined at length in later chapters. A more immediate issue is that several critics have applied narrative detachment in such a way that the very function and usefulness of persona-theory is questioned. Take the criticism of C. David Benson, for example, which asserts that “Chaucer does not present himself in the Canterbury Tales as a fully developed and definable persona but as a teller of tales” who indicates how all of the pilgrims should be read—not as characters in a drama but as (individual) artists, figures that do not adhere to the dramatic principle.137 For Benson, the General Prologue shows how the poet uses his “f lexible but disembodied” voice to produce a series of narrative perspectives too diverse to ever coalesce into a single, definite personality. Therefore, Chaucer the Pilgrim is best understood as a “shadowy

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figure” who disappears after the General Prologue, only to reappear in the Thopas-Melibee link in confirmation of his elusiveness.138 As Benson puts it, bluntly, “I suggest that we dismiss the futile pursuit of Chaucer the pilgrim, who never becomes a real personality.”139 Few critics “dismiss” the poetic I-speaker as boldly as Benson, but his words highlight what is perhaps the most important, and in my view unfortunate, aspect of applied narrative detachment in recent years. Specifically, it is not the author’s persona that has been widely discussed of late, but instead a series of voices or tones that depend on the narrative context.140 This stance is evident in many scholarly accounts, including Barbara Nolan’s well-known essay on the General Prologue which argues that the I-speaker represents “a series of impersonations” that do not fully reveal the poet’s presence. In this view, Chaucer is “a quick-change artist, a shape shifter, a prestidigitator, a player with voices.”141 Hence, Nolan locates three distinct authorial voices in the General Prologue: Chaucer the Pilgrim, Harry Bailly, and the anonymous voice that declaims the spring opening and is said to represent a clerkly guise, the learned poet of the schools.142 David Lawton’s study Chaucer’s Narrators is the most significant recent account that upholds narrative detachment in the manner just described, as the book openly attempts to accelerate the critical movement away from persona to tone.143 Lawton takes a distinctively Bakhtinian approach to Chaucer’s verse, highlighting its oral nature and emphasizing different voices and tones. His primary argument is that Chaucer’s voice is reduced to parity with other voices in his poetry—ultimately, the audience is not left with a speaker, but a tone. As Lawton explains, “this tone is not single or unitary. It is a complex and multiple play of voices.”144 Lawton asserts that a voice of narration is not a narratorial persona, but the “index and prime mover” of a literary performance.145 Therefore, he argues that it is better to reserve the term persona for cases or texts in which there is a clearly identified ostensible narrator, since the Chaucerian persona is not a constant point of reference but occurs where it is seen to occur.146 Despite this view, Lawton does cite the persona-construct throughout his study (describing “open” and “closed” personae), but simply does not favor the term itself, as is seen in his discussion of Troilus and Criseyde’s complex narrator: It is unclear to what extent one may justifiably talk of a narratorial persona at all: unexpectedly, Chaucer retains a closed figure of some complexity, and makes it seem open, virtually transparent. It becomes the voice of performance, stressing both the fact and the fictional nature of the poem. It is not the author’s voice, but it is very near to being a neutral voice. It is

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the voice of an apocryphal author commenting on his own composition, almost the voice of the poem speaking from the time and continuum of its own performance.147

Here is the very notion—apocryphal voices—that Lawton prefers over the persona-construct, because he feels that “the multiple meanings of the modern adjective cover the permutations of narratorial voice, persona and literary strategy with which I deal,” as “narrators are always concealments, bookish secrets: apocrypha.”148 Upholding the notion of apocryphal voices, Lawton contends that “a babel of apocryphal voices is enacted, stylistically and rhetorically” by Chaucer, as readers are faced with a kind of performative multivoicing, a variety of voices and tones rather than a fully rounded narrator.149 Considering the entirety of Chaucer’s corpus, it is true that he uses a number of narrative voices and that his I-narrator, his divided self, is not wholly consistent across works ranging from the dream visions to the Tales. But even if these diverse voices are somehow “apocryphal” in their function, Chaucer invariably would have seen his speakers as personae, in view of the theories of his age. Contrary to these medieval theories, Lawton’s de-emphasis of the persona-construct is symptomatic of a widespread tendency in contemporary criticism that follows in the wake of Structuralist, Post-Structuralist, and Narratological theories. In large part due to these paradigms, there has been a turn in the theoretical hermeneutic that has led scholars to discuss a variety of narrative concepts instead of the persona. In particular, a proliferation of recent theoretical approaches have concentrated their attention on voices, tones, subjects/ subjectivities, the “text of Chaucer,” implied authors, polyphonic narratives, dialogism and heteroglossia, internal focalization and homodiegetic speakers, and so on.150 The critical agenda represented by this list would seem to be a widely accepted view that the persona has “had its day,” so to speak, that day being generally seen as the age of New Criticism, which lasted until roughly the 1970s. The belief in the sujet (or subject) is emblematic of this agenda and is perhaps its most prevalent embodiment, since several Chaucerians of late have concentrated on narrative subjects rather than personae, most notably H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. and Lee Patterson. In Leicester’s The Disenchanted Self, it is argued that the Canterbury Tales represent “a set of texts that are about the subjectivity of their speakers in the technical sense and that Chaucer’s subject is the subject, not, or only incidentally, the self.”151 Patterson, in turn, claims in Chaucer and the Subject of History that the poet’s writing explores “the dialectic between an inward sense of self hood—subjectivity—and the claims of the historical world.”152

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As Alastair Minnis has observed, the basic idea in such approaches is that the subject is an ideological product that is divided against itself, rather than something unified, self-determining, autonomous, and originary.153 According to Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, the subject (whether textual or otherwise) is, therefore, “constructed in language and discourse; and rather than being fixed and unified, the subject is split, unstable or fragmented.”154 Given such perceptions, modern criticism characteristically regards literary subjects/subjectivities as cultural “sites” rather than centers or real presences, to borrow Minnis’s phrasing.155 Or, in Jonathan Culler’s words, the (decentered) subject is “not the source or centre to which one refers to explain events. It is something formed by those forces.”156 Through such conceptualizations, contemporary scholars are able to detach a piece of writing from a living being, thus avoiding the intentional fallacy while allowing for interpretive struggle and negotiation. The problem, however, is that the focus on subjects often falls into its own trap, “more or less abolishing human subjects altogether,” as Terry Eagleton has noted.157 Whether scholars focus on subjects, voices, tones, or any other related notion, it may be said that these approaches often disregard the importance and vitality of the actual person who wrote the texts being analyzed. And, as Eagleton’s general view recognizes, critics cannot altogether ignore or “abolish” the poet Chaucer, although they are unable to definitively garner his thoughts. Thus, it is essential that Chaucerian scholarship pays due attention to many author-functions and/or cultural subject-positions—including the medieval author himself. This is not to say that the problematic notion of the “doctrine of sincerity” should be upheld; quite the contrary, as there is little doubt that the intentional fallacy is, indeed, theoretically fallacious. I contend that the personaconstruct deserves recognition as a more useful critical tool than subjects, voices, tones, or any other aligned contemporary practices because it allows readers to consider both the author—the originator of a text who must retain some measure of authority—and a variety of potential subjectivities that surround a given work as it enters into social transaction. And given its fictional resonance, the persona-construct encourages critics not to fall prey to the intentional fallacy. Moreover, the persona represents a historically viable critical concept that, in fact, explicitly serves many of the very functions implicated by modern ideas of the subject, voice, and so on. Hence, although the persona-construct is no longer prevalent in twenty-first century critical discourse, its ghost still hovers in/around a variety of notions that would seem to support its continued significance. Recognizing this endurance and utility, a strong case can be made in support of a historically based, neo persona-theory for use in

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literary studies today and in the future. I would now like to make such a case, by presenting the concept of autofiction in order to demonstrate what a refreshed persona-theory might look like and do for the study of Chaucer and his critical reception. 1.4 Autofiction, Neo Persona-Theory, and Chaucerian Interpretation As Elliott has observed, the issues surrounding the persona are deep and fundamental. At stake are questions about the nature of the self, about sincerity and its values, and about the truth-claims of literature.158 Faced with such issues, literary scholars have frequently contested the persona— yet the construct has stood the test of time. For those who would question this enduring legacy, consider the words of Langston Hughes as he coped with the pressure of potentially being labeled a communist during the infamous McCarthy hearings of the 1950s. Under great scrutiny about his views, Hughes explained his personal “feeling about creative writing” by stating that he did not necessarily believe in the allegedly communist perspective of the poem “Scottsboro Limited” “because I was writing in characters” and thus the ideas were appropriate to the narrative situation and speaker alone.159 Or more recently, take Salman Rushdie’s post-fatwa retractions, where he felt compelled to mitigate certain content found in The Satanic Verses by publicly announcing his Islamic faith and declaring “that I do not agree with any statement in my novel . . . uttered by any of the characters who insult the prophet Mohammed or cast aspersions upon Islam or upon the authenticity of the Holy Quran.”160 Both Hughes and Rushdie recognize the importance of various personae to an author, whether for purposes of self-defense or literary creativity. And their words make it clear that the persona-construct has not, in fact, “had its day.” In Chaucer Studies, there seems to be a prevailing view that Lawton’s account of Chaucer’s Narrators is perhaps the “last word” on the poet’s personae. But this could not be further from the truth. Chaucer’s Narrators is in many respects a commendable book, and Lawton does make an interesting case by subverting the persona-concept through the assertion of “the end of a critical tradition” (i.e., dramatic readings of Chaucer’s verse) because he feels that “not every narrator is a persona, and not every persona really amounts to more than a narratorial voice,” while “the narratorial persona supplies not a fully rounded character but a variety of responses and tones.”161 However, the fact that Lawton himself uses the term persona throughout the book signals the concept’s continuing importance. In essence, what Lawton and other critics are doing by using

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more recent terminology is presenting “old wine in new bottles,” given that, in Lawton’s own words, Chaucerian verse highlights the “duality of the narratorial persona, and this duality, in the style and tradition of the Roman de la Rose, is the sine qua non of the generous and unpredictable tonal range.”162 This comment neatly demonstrates that the persona, by definition, overlaps with and functions in a manner similar to “apocryphal” voices or tones—Lawton’s preferred terms—and also resonates with critical applications of dialogism, subjectivity, homodiegetic narration, performativity, and so on. Take, for example, Mikhail Bakhtin’s assertion of “polyphonic” narratives, wherein one finds “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices” that give the impression that “one is dealing not with a single author-artist who wrote novels and stories, but with a number of philosophical statements by several author-thinkers.”163 Bakhtin applies his “polyphonic” paradigm to the novels of Dostoevsky, which are “dialogic through and through” as “the genuine life of the personality is made available only through a dialogic penetration of that personality, during which it freely and reciprocally reveals itself.”164 Does this conceptualization not parallel the persona-construct, with its classical roots tied into dramatic characters, multiple (false) faces, and in fact dialogue? Like Bakhtin, Gérard Genette is critically acclaimed for his narrative theories, which include a belief in narrative “distance” and “focalization,” and resistance to the use of “inadequate” locutions for narrative perspective (i.e., first or third person) because the writer’s choice “is not between two grammatical forms, but between two narrative postures”: “heterodiegetic” texts are told by a narrator beyond the story, and “homodiegetic” works are offered by a speaker who is a participant in the story.165 In either case, Genette sees “distance” and “perspective” as “the two chief modalities of that regulation of narrative information that is mood.”166 Here again, it is difficult not to hear a distinct echo of persona-theory in these contentions, and this echo is undeniable in the following words on Stendhal’s complex narratives, which Genette describes as “highly variable” works told by a narrative “I” who “is rarely identical with the person” of the author: “the paradox of [narrative] egotism is more or less this: to speak of oneself, in the most discreet and unrestrained way, may be the best way of concealing oneself. Egotism is, in every sense of the term, a parade.”167 In a similar vein, several other recent examples could be cited, all pointing toward the same conclusion: whether an egotistic “parade,” a dramatic “charade,” or a literary “masquerade,” the persona is a key player. Whether the text was written in 1400 or 2008, the persona- construct

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is critical. And whether scholars choose to reference voices, tones, subjects, dialogism, or homodiegesis, the persona essentially serves the very same functions but merely assumes the “mask” of variant terminology. Although these recent concepts have been very useful in advancing the theoretical agenda, one might wonder why critics do not simply use the term with the most historical tradition and consistency: the narrative persona. This would allow for a more accurate comparison of different eras, different authors, and different ideas about narratives, and would not necessitate the elimination of other, related concepts; rather, these notions merely would be located within the long-standing scholarly hermeneutic of persona-theory. A recuperation of the personaconstruct would, in fact, not only span several theoretical paradigms but also encourage critics to pay close attention to history itself, because to retheorize the persona, its meaning and history must be understood, as well as its interpretive applications, analogues, and ramifications. To revitalize persona-theory, a historical focus is needed, which brings into play a broad historical palette to help illustrate that persona-theory is still fresh, compelling, and indeed vital today despite the fact that, in this case, “what is new is old.” An important aspect of persona-theory’s historical legacy is that—as Judith Butler’s theories of performativity have made eminently clear—we all adopt various “masks” and play any number of different roles in our daily lives, whether we are aware of them or not.168 Like the typical narrative “I,” our own “selves” constantly shift and change: as Wright puts it, “everyone assumes certain roles, which alter slightly as he moves from one situation to another. Our audience largely determines the face we shall put on.”169 In support of this view, contemporary sociological accounts describe how every individual enacts a multiplicity of roles in his/her capacities as a parent, friend, lover, employee, and so on—with the ritual requirements of each role being determined by society.170 Seen within this cultural context, it is apparent that the literary persona is a pivotal narrative creation that mimics/mocks our own multifaceted lives. The persona registers the inherent diversity, plurality, or instability of mankind, all of which may partially explain why the construct often proves difficult for critics to grasp. Today, we live in a world that “especially prizes individuality,” an individuality that narrative personae may uncomfortably undermine and question as a stable human ideal.171 Moreover, it is evident that humans habitually, if not instinctually, search for the “real” figure that hides behind the mask.172 Yet the fact is that this identity is evasive even when considering our own selves, as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others helped to establish for modern psychology.

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Narratologist James Battersby explains this elusive self hood by saying that like many sentient creatures, we have conscious selves, selves we are conscious with, and like a rather select few of those creatures, we have selves we seem to be able to be conscious of (we know what it’s like to be selfconscious), and, finally, like no other (or almost no other) creatures, we have the ability to be conscious of our consciousness of being conscious. What we don’t seem to be able to do is to ferret out the one and only self that is endowed with such powers and hold it up to the light and see it for what it really and truly is or is like.173

As human beings making our own history, we constantly grow, mature, and change—we are “both Diachronic and Episodic, evanescent and enduring, both other and the same, protean and persistent.”174 Consequently, when an individual speaks as an “I” that “self ” is different than any past “I” that is talked about; in Battersby’s words, the “I is and is only a now experience.”175 Battersby demonstrates that we can never fully know our own “selves,” but can merely portray them as we see best through a kind of self-interpretation that inevitably differs from the perspectives of others, and is in the moment, of the moment, and ideologically appropriate for the moment. If our own “selves” are inherently elusive, then the authorial “self ” is doubly so when enacted on the page as a narrative I-persona. The I-persona represents a detached literary “self ” that blurs the lines between fiction and “reality” and makes it impossible to pinpoint the “truth” of the text, the author, and his/her narrative stand in. These challenges also adhere with dramatic personae, which are not surrogates for the author yet may likewise seem “real” or purport to tell “the truth”— but that “reality” is feigned and unreliable, at best. Hence, like the history of mankind, the history of persona-theory is a complicated story, full of drama, masking, and individual theatrics. Both histories are marked by conf lict, ambivalence, discomfort, and outright confusion. These are among the traits that come together to make us uniquely human, and when seen in our literature, these characteristics lead to many questions and few answers. Yet the questions that humanlike personae elicit certainly are worth asking. By definition, any literary work is voiced by speakers with some sort of oblique relationship to the author him/herself. Whether written in the first, second, or third person, the material on the page is the direct result of the writer who has produced the text; whether presented in the form of hagiography, drama, or verse, the work is somehow connected

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to the author. This historical connection may very well be the major reason for the constant critical controversy surrounding the persona, but it is important to note that there is a “creative instinct which allows all intelligent artists and writers to distance themselves from their work,” as Leo Carruthers has observed.176 The persona, in fact, signifies this very distance by distinctly marking off poet and character, creative writing and historical fact; it is a sign of fiction, of storytelling, of narrative play. What is interesting here is that, following the rise of the novel and its techniques, countless critics have recognized the instinctual creative “distance” described by Carruthers and thus chosen not to read a given fictional I-narrative as authentic or autobiographical. But in Chaucer Studies, the opposite commonly has been true. And this disparity would seem to highlight a critical gap in logic, as more “ancient” literary narratives customarily are connected in various ways to their authors, while the same kind of direct relationship is not as frequently projected for other, more recent works (novels in particular). Whatever the date, it is fundamental to the creative writing process that “in all poems it is a persona, not a poet, who speaks the actual words.”177 And as I have demonstrated, the persona is not only historically consistent as a literary device but also theoretically f lexible as a critical device. The construct offers a logical counter to the so-called “death of the author,” serves subjectivity in its functioning, and forwards a variety of ideas that tie into theories of narratology and other relevant paradigms.178 The persona is not, therefore, merely useful as “a salutary contribution to what should be a central topic of Chaucer criticism: tone,” as Lawton has argued.179 Rather, the persona is and should be seen as a “central topic” of literary history, broadly conceived, and is crucial to Chaucer’s works. Recognizing and utilizing persona-theory allows both the author and the reader to retain their own (relative) authority; persona-theory permits readers to mediate between biographical criticism and the “death of the author”—while carefully avoiding the intentional fallacy; and it helps critics to reconcile the different voices, tones, characters, and content that must be addressed in any given textual reading. This chapter has done much to articulate and defend such notions, and in turn has sought to redress the recent critical backlash against the persona fostered by Lawton and others. But my work is not yet complete. For there is still more to be said about (neo) persona-theory and its implications to ensure that the advice of Evelyn Vitz is followed, and critics of medieval literature “keep revising [their] theories and paradigms to fit the data (the works, the culture) and not, as is so common, the other way around.”180 To conclude my reexamination of the persona, I must elaborate further on the notion of autofiction, a theoretical concept that helps to provide a

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more complete understanding of the persona’s narrative signification and interpretive ramifications. Autofiction is a response to several narrative paradigms, including its original usage by Serge Doubrovsky. His conception, however, had little or no impact on medieval studies, and my own usage of the term is meant to convey a more complete separation of author and artifice.181 More overtly relevant to my project is Lawrence de Looze’s notion of medieval “pseudo-autobiography.” In de Looze’s model, pseudoautobiographical texts are works that manipulate first-person narrative and insist on the identity between author and narrator, “while disjunction also obtains.” The hallmarks of pseudo-autobiography are that “one’s belief in the truth of signs seems to be affirmed and denied” as the author “plays with questions of truth, authority, and the relation between life in a book and life outside a book.”182 Though it is apparent that some critics hold fast to a sort of “mimetic ideology”—believing that all texts present certain worldly realities—the interpretive challenge of pseudo-autobiography lies in the fact that in such texts words may not follow deeds, even when they claim to.183 De Looze’s notion of pseudo-autobiography has much to recommend it, but I believe that an even better theoretical concept is autofiction, because it does not imply some sort of partial fictionality (or semi-fiction) and does not seem to suggest the same autobiographical register. Instead, autofiction explicitly denotes a “story of the self” and highlights the fact that first-person narration is necessarily contrived and categorically fictional; it is not a realistic self-presentation. As I use the term, Autofiction emphasizes that any literary self-presentation is a creative construction, a narrative doubling in which the fictional surrogate need not look, think, or feel like the author him/herself. The same may even be true of autobiography “proper” since “the I who speaks, speaks of himself as another. The me to whom the I refers is someone else: a past self, someone who no longer exists.”184 Some critics might dispute such a notion in reference to autobiographical writing, but it is difficult to contest the view that in fictional writing the gulf between the authorial self and his/her narrative “selves” is even larger. As Henrik Nielsen explains, in first-person narratives there “need not be an existential indexical continuity” between the I-speaker and the authorial voice; and there is little doubt that “ ‘the real world’ outside the text and ‘the real world’ as it is created in the text are by necessity not the same.”185 Accordingly, the concept of autofiction signifies that critics cannot hope to somehow recover “the facts” about an author’s life by reading his/her literary works, because what is found in such works is explicitly a fiction of the self, as the term implies. It is undeniable that the I-persona often gives the impression that social reality or experience makes itself felt in a text, and we need look no further than the Canterbury Tales for such enticing literary material. However, the presence of personae also means that this impression may be, and likely is, simultaneously “co-opted” by the author for his/her own

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narrative purposes.186 Seen within the aegis of autofiction, the I-persona is best perceived as a consciously applied literary device that should remind the interpreter that the fiction is fiction, urging him/her to “activate the critical intelligence, while deactivating the affectations.”187 Rather than functioning as autobiography or offering the direct views of the author, the I-persona serves as both a fictional device and a fictional warning, pointing out to the reader that there may be no “truth” in the “true” tales told by a given writer, and perhaps even questioning the possibility of authoritative “truth” itself. This may be taking the point too far, and none of the observations above are intended to suggest that authors do not present some part of themselves in their work. Inevitably, they do, but critics should be wary of overstating the supposed autobiograph-ality of a given I-narrative. An effective way to address this issue is to apply Michael Zink’s notion of the “mark of autobiography,” which recognizes that certain medieval authors may well have offered some accurate details and autobiographical f lourishes in their works.188 Yet readers do not learn much about the typical first-person speakers who leave their autobiographical “mark,” and the world they depict is far more imaginary than it is in any way “real.” Contemporary Chaucerians, in fact, generally recognize that the poet’s corpus does not provide a “real” account of Chaucer’s life, but they frequently betray this belief by perceiving the I-narrator as being somehow a version of the actual author.189 On the contrary, the evidence that has come down from the Middle Ages, including that offered in section 1.2 above, seems to indicate that most medieval readers were wellaware that a narrative I-persona had a literary and not autobiographical function. When scholars addressed such works as Dante’s Commedia, Boccaccio’s Decameron, or Chaucer’s Tales, the prevailing attitude apparently was to recognize that poetic narrators were, indeed, imaginary creations offered within an imaginary world. It even seems likely that an audience hearing an oral performance of first-person verse knew that the recital did not provide an “actual” representation of the author and his world, but a mere playful persona loosely related to the poet and his surrounds. Though they obviously did not use the term, the late medieval literary audience evidently perceived the contingencies of autofiction, and generally realized that, at most, a narrative “I” offered a mere “mark of autobiography.” Interestingly enough, the case for medieval autofiction is perhaps no better made than by looking at the historical realities of autobiography. As Elizabeth Heale has observed, the very notion of autobiography did not enter the English lexicon until the nineteenth century, during “the heyday of that search for a unique individuality.”190 The derivation of the

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term is Greek, and its antecedents date back to the classical age when various authors wrote personal orations and apologias. In the Middle Ages there was a series of confessions of the sort famously offered by Saint Augustine, but, in general, there does not appear to have been much interest in the autobiographical form. As Zink explains, even when he put himself at the center of his work, a medieval author was rarely writing autobiography in the modern sense, that is, not only a systematic account of his own life but an account conducted from his own life’s perspective, in which the world appeared through the dual gaze that he brought to bear on himself during his existence and on this gaze itself at the moment of writing. Autobiography as a specular account was little used in the Middle Ages.191

Although “autobiography” was not commonly featured in medieval writing, autofiction represents a type of creative first-person writing that was prominent in the Middle Ages. To underline the questionable nature of the very notion of medieval “autobiography,” one need look no further than The Book of Margery Kempe, which is arguably the most famous “autobiography” written in medieval England. But Margery was apparently illiterate, and she dictated her story to two different scribes who mediated and embellished the content. Hence, there is a significant element of fiction to Margery’s Book, and as a result, the “truth” of this extraordinary text must be questioned and the work itself may be labeled as offering a distinctive variety of autofiction. Characterized as such, Margery’s story demonstrates that “the fictional exhibition of the self . . . [is] based on an attention to the subject quite different than what is presumed by autobiography, the subject’s search for its own elucidation by going back over its past.”192 Margery’s example provides further evidence that the autofictional “I” should not be confused with the authorial or autobiographical “I,” and this is especially true of medieval narratives because autobiography itself was rarely found in the age. Filtered through the hands of two scribes, Margery’s I-narrator clearly illustrates the (auto) fictional nature of any given literary speaker, which dictates that he/ she “has to some extent escaped out of the poet’s life into an independent existence, so that the act of creation is also an act of separation,” as Richard Ellmann has noted.193 This holds true whether one is speaking of a twenty-first century novelist or a medieval mystic, and therefore “the first point almost anyone in the field of narrative will agree on nowadays with regard to narrators is that they should not be confused with authors.”194 In theory, this contention would seem difficult to argue against in the modern critical

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hermeneutic. But in practice, it is still broadly true that regardless of the context or the theoretical tools being used, some Chaucerians see in the narrator a kind of direct relationship with Chaucer the Man himself.195 Thus, one of the main intentions of Constructing Chaucer is to address the fact that Chaucer’s readers have consistently favored questionable autobiographical perspectives, and in so doing have frequently overlooked the narrative implications of personae, or the realities of what I call autofiction. Whatever the extent of a given critic’s autobiographical inclination, there is a long-standing view that “in all stories the characters are at one level splits of the total mind of the author” so that the persona “has, so to speak, a foot in both the subjective and objective world. He [or she] both is and is not the poet.”196 However, even if there is some kind of autobiographical mark in/on the text, this belief is problematic because, in simple terms, the persona is not the poet. Given all the evidence above regarding autofiction, the common (autobiographical) connection between Chaucer and character, poet and persona is highly dubious, and is rendered even more so when it is recalled that Chaucer’s poetic surrogate is not consistent across the works. Even in the Canterbury Tales, where we find “Chaucer the Pilgrim”—the narrative “I” who has most often been read as the poet’s autobiographical alter ego—the speaker is elusive and unstable, dramatically shifting and changing in the course of the fictional pilgrimage. At one moment he represents a dimwitted “elf,” at another a magisterial auctor; his presence is at once immediate and powerful, and shortly thereafter he may seemingly disappear or be subjugated by another voice. In other poems, such as The House of Fame or The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer’s I-speaker does not change as profoundly as “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” yet in either of these examples the audience learns very little about a given narrator, let alone the author who has inscribed him. Overall, the corpus contains many different narrative “Chaucers,” who are neither consistent nor especially revelatory. Hence, readers hardly are offered a precisely centered autobiographical self, whether considered collectively or within a single text. And in any of the examples just cited, it is difficult to definitively link the narrator with the “realities” of Chaucer the Man. More to the point, it is futile to make such connections, because a given Chaucerian “self ” is a mere fiction of the self. It is not Chaucer the Man who speaks, but various autofictional “Chaucers” who provide nothing more than a “mark of autobiography,” and may well give the reader even less. As an autofictional construct, the persona perpetuates the distance between art and reality, because no matter how close the relationship

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between author/text, this gap remains.197 In Ellmann’s terms, the presence of the narrative persona “distorts, heightens, simplifies, and transmutes.”198 As this phrasing implies, the persona creates complex challenges for the reader, but these challenges can be overcome through a careful, historically informed application of persona-theory, and specifically the theory of autofiction. For this neo persona-theory recognizes that the author is not “dead,” but counters the intentional fallacy by viewing his/her text as a literary fragment, in the most literal sense a figment of his/her imagination that speaks through multiple voices. The critic who applies this particular theory is prompted to recognize that the I-narrator does not provide autobiography or some kind of accurate social history, but is an artistic construct that renders the writer’s own beliefs, feelings, and obsessions forever unrecoverable. As a result, the scholar is encouraged to examine the I-speaker in terms of its literary function, its fictionality, while objecting provisionally to any perceived “realistic” statements made by any characters. In spite of critical fashion, it is somewhat surprising that very few contemporary critics have supported the premises and utility of personatheory just described. Cheryl Walker is one scholar who notably upholds the promise of the persona, and has proposed an elaborate system of “persona criticism” that aims to reconceive the author-function by recognizing that the narrative mask may be related simultaneously to the biographical author and to other cultural voices. This strategy, Walker explains, is an appealing one for those who are committed to talking about the author and do not want to fall into the trap of limiting the text, but instead hope to suggest avenues of potentiality.199 Walker, like many scholars before and since, might be read as being somewhat inclined toward the intentional fallacy, and her intricate application of “persona criticism” undeniably falls short from a historical perspective, failing to adequately address the meaning and usage of the persona from premodern to postmodern times. Nonetheless, as a vocal adherent of persona-theory swimming in a sea of critical dissenters, Walker deserves recognition for providing important ideas and a compelling theoretical approach. Primary among its merits is that Walker’s “persona criticism” views the narrative “I” as a creative application that has a literary, and not necessarily a literal (autobiographical) function. Walker also suggests a viable way to address the many problems that are inherent in the persona-construct, by examining the historical and theoretical context of a given narrative “I,” exploring the functions of the speaker in light of the time-period in question. As Walker’s chosen (Foucaultian) terminology indicates, when faced with a narrative persona scholars are best served by considering literary and cultural author-functions that might help to open up the text’s

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interpretive possibilities, and I would argue that critics must place these functions within their historical context. The current study, it is hoped, illustrates this approach and its utility by employing a historically based theoretical paradigm through which the transient space represented by the poet can be analyzed, alongside that of his characters and readers. By applying the type of persona-theory advocated on these pages, critics are able to consider authorial effect and the literary functions of various speakers, while usefully directing attention toward different levels of perception—historical, literal, figurative, and so on. This seems an especially worthwhile approach for Chaucerians, since the poet himself apparently manipulated the distance between author and persona(e) at different places, and for different effects. Therefore, by considering the Chaucerian mask in this way, examining its historicity and autofictional functions rather than simply attempting to identify the human figure behind the veil, the persona-construct is used to broaden the critical horizons and perpetuate numerous textual possibilities, with the author serving as merely a prominent—if theoretically distant—figure within a complex matrix of interpretive potentiality.200 The interpretive potential of the persona is crucial to my conceptualization, because the construct not only is central to medieval literary writing, but also functions as a facilitator of multiple meanings and is thus at the core of a great many scholarly discussions. As Lawton has observed, the vast critical process surrounding the Chaucerian persona—from the poet’s use of the construct to readers’ various responses to it—shows how and what scholars think of reading as an ideological relationship between text and context, writer and reader, literature and society, and ultimately brings to the fore the question of authority in literary and interpretive practice.201 Or put another way, critical perceptions of the construct are a result of, and have profound implications for, the history of Chaucerian reception. And persona-theory provides a f lexible tool that serves as a kind of “theoretical interface between narrative structures and strategies on the one hand and interpretive approaches on the other,” and allows scholars to mediate historically “between textual features and contextual and pragmatic aspects, as well as political, philosophical, anthropological, psychological concerns.”202 My theoretical model of the autofictional persona permits the critical reader to examine a given work within its textually inscribed limits, while likewise considering the “multiple perspectives, different critical metalanguages and didactic methods” that have been applied to the same text.203 By using the persona to read, and read historically, its usage can therefore be traced and its many interpretations compared, and in the process, scholars may “speak” with multiple voices from divergent eras.

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With this wonderful potentiality, however, comes a major challenge of both the persona and persona-theory: as Carruthers explains, the identification of multiple author-functions may result in “a sort of critical schizophrenia.”204 But this “schizophrenia” need not be a hindrance, because multiple meanings are arguably ideal, and perhaps even inevitable given the nature of Chaucerian verse. By presenting “himself ” in his texts—or a mere vestige thereof—Chaucer both resists and contradicts ideas regarding the Man in his poems, as well as ideas about the Man drawn by scholars from his poems. “Truth” in any case seems a notion that is not only unlikely, but in the end impossible because Chaucer appears to undermine any such contingency with the elusive persona, which creates such a degree of ambiguity that no single reading can unquestionably describe what the poet “really” intended. In fact, Chaucer’s manipulation of the persona seems to encourage such a wide range of interpretations and possibilities that it not only renders the search for a sort of Chaucerian “truth” to be an altogether impossible task, but perhaps also reveals this very possibility itself as being a critical pose that is fraught with deep ideological implications. If this view is correct, then it would seem that ideological consideration, mediation, and contingency are encouraged through the text, so that an important function of the autofictional persona is to serve as a constant reminder to writer and reader alike of the impossibility of ever knowing the “truth.” Chaucer’s narratives simply do not lend themselves to definitive answers, but this is precisely what many critics have sought to find. Time and again, scholars have made assertions of positivistic “truth” and understanding regarding Chaucer’s oeuvre, an absolutely vital point for the study of Chaucerian reception. And it is for this reason that I see queer theory as a promising corollary to my own vision of persona-theory, because queer theorists stress the inherent unpredictability of literary writing and have done much in recent years to question purported “truths” regarding sexuality, literature, and society. By focusing on autofiction and a wide variety of author-functions, the remainder of Constructing Chaucer will similarly critique a number of “truths” surrounding Chaucer the Man, Chaucer the Pilgrim, and other prominent narrators. By promoting a “queer” view of these personae, I am not primarily interested in raising questions of homo- and heterosexuality—although these ideas will come into play in the final two chapters of the book. Instead, the idea of “queering” persona-theory is intended to signify that “finding the queer is more than pointing to a homosexual character or act; it is a practice of reading that looks to the past and to the future as it negotiates what it means to read and live in the present.”205 Moreover, a “queer” use of persona-theory emphasizes that “literature

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and its techniques of reading explicitly resist the project of conceptual categorization and classification through the complex rhetorical displacements of subjectivity and the impossibility of closing off—delineating the boundaries of—the field of signification.”206 Actively pursuing a “queer” notion of the autofictional persona is my way of disrupting the interpretive status quo and seeking “more f luid, dynamic subject positions” for Chaucer’s speakers in particular, and narrative personae more broadly, in order to “open up new possibilities in the present moment and provide a different lens on that present’s dynamic relationship with the past.”207 In these words are found the deliberate purpose of my “queer” reading throughout this study, as I will strive repeatedly to unsettle, question, reenvision, and “open up” traditional views of the persona-construct. In light of the construct’s inherent ambiguity, it is possible to say that the autofictional persona itself has a “queer” function—a “productive indeterminacy” that willfully perverts a straightforward reading.208 Queer theory questions authoritative knowledge on several levels, and in effect the persona does the same by being elusive, divisive, and often discomfiting. An important result of the “queerness” inherent in the persona-concept, however, is that this ambivalence ultimately may encourage critics to assert their own ideological mastery upon/around a text. For, it may be said that the interpretive openness that adheres to the persona-construct often leads to scholars “blatantly re-working the authoritative text so that it is forced to yield, against the grain, explicitly oppositional kinds of understanding.”209 Such forceful assertions of interpretive autonomy can be suspect at times because the interpretive potential of these characters does have historical limits. Even if the personae in question are open to numerous “queer” possibilities, critics may occasionally jeopardize the integrity of the text by somehow disregarding the historical parameters of the writer’s words and/or attaching modern sensibilities to the medieval characters. These are the very types of issues that shall be addressed throughout this monograph. Recognizing these issues, subsequent chapters will apply the neo persona-theory outlined above in order to analyze how the Chaucerian persona has been read, shaped, and manipulated by critics over time. As these chapters will show, the interpretation of the poet’s autofictional “I” has resulted in an ever-increasing and seemingly infinite variety of “Chaucers” that variously ref lect the ideological sympathies of each individual critic and his/her school or methodology. Thus, in the annals of Chaucer scholarship, editorial, ironic, sociological, pious, pacifist, humorous, and gender-oriented “Chaucers” are found. Many other “Chaucers” also are identifiable, and it is clear that the wide assortment of interpretations that have been issued are largely a result of the shifting

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narrative pose seen throughout the Chaucerian corpus, the ambiguous persona that is employed in a variety of literary and social contexts. By considering Chaucer through the “queer” lens of persona-theory, the author is seen as a poetic agent and mediator, who thrived by both producing and responding to the diverse implications of his material, whether social or textual, satirical or sexual.210 And the “mask” of the autofictional persona reveals that the poet deliberately addressed many cultural contingencies and consciously created interpretive challenges by manipulating his speakers. The likelihood of this cognizant manipulation is made explicit when Chaucer’s I-persona famously interjects during the course of the Canterbury Tales by saying, “oure Hooste japen tho bigan, / And thanne at erst he looked upon me / And seyde thus: ‘What man artow?’ ”211 At this moment, Chaucer the Man, Chaucer the Pilgrim, and the other pilgrim storytellers are ideologically intertwined in a direct expression of the difficulties of interpretation and the equivocations of “truth” and fiction, writer and narrator, author and reader, authority and subjectivity. Critical tradition continues these intersections by acting much like Harry Bailly does in the Tales, with scholars interacting with tale and teller and serving as “juge and reportour,” appropriating the persona-construct to draw a variety of conclusions based upon their own beliefs and biases.212 The remaining chapters of this study focus more directly on the “juggement” of critics throughout the history of Chaucerian reception. By concentrating upon the controversial presence of Chaucer the Pilgrim, or whatever name the I-narrator is given, I have been able to illuminate particular subjects embraced as vital to the understanding of Chaucer the Man, and to highlight poems with reception-histories that illustrate important scholarly trends and constructions. These chosen texts represent instances where Chaucer seems in the eyes of critics to be, on one hand, a central player in his social and poetical environs, balanced against those where he has been said to project himself out of existence through his creation of vivid characters. Further complicating these contrasting perspectives are texts where the persona-construct is overt and the tensions of fiction/reality explicit, works where the difficulties of establishing authorial presence/absence are pointedly, and problematically, textualized due to the narrative ambiguity represented by the figure of Chaucer the Pilgrim or his equivalent. Chapter 2 will set the stage for these discussions by examining biographies and biographical accounts of Chaucer. Given that biographical scholarship was, for centuries, the most common critical approach to the poet, this second chapter provides an account of the ideological legacy of Chaucer in biographical writing, and shows (inter alia) that critics often read the I-persona both autobiographically and favorably, using the verse

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as “evidence” for the construction of the venerable author’s supposed life. This focus on the persona’s legacy in biographical writing helps to account for the various “Chaucers” that have concurrently emerged in nonbiographical criticism. Chapter 3 is the first of three chapters that builds upon this biographical discussion by examining the critical reception of particular works that best reveal the complicated nature of Chaucer’s autofictional personae. Here, I consider texts wherein the author “himself ” addresses actual contemporaries or utilizes first-person narration to confront the “real world” in which he lived. In these historically suggestive poems—including minor works addressed to Bukton, Scogan, and others, as well as Chaucer’s “Retraction”—Chaucer the Man often has been seen as presiding distinctly within or closely behind the text, with his own voice and ideals resonating through the verse. From this seeming “autobiographical” proximity, critics have constructed many different, approbative pictures of the poet: he is presented as a faultfinder of kings, a death-bed penitent, a Lollard sympathizer, a criminal debtor, a scorned lover, and nearly everything socially imaginable in between.213 Diametrically opposed to these more “historical” texts are poems in which the strong characters are conceded a greater authority and take on a rich “life” of their own apart from the poet. Chapter 4 analyzes the best examples of such vibrant characters—the Wife of Bath and Pardoner—and addresses the ways in which, within the critical tradition, the author frequently has escaped blame for any potentially distasteful or scandalous sentiments conveyed by the two dramatic personae, especially evident in various manifestations of what I call the “moral flinch” in Chaucer criticism. Finally, chapter 5 critiques the Thopas-Melibee link of the Canterbury Tales, where the author’s use of the persona-construct is rendered most problematic due to the ambiguous narrative inscription of his “elvyssh” alter ego, Chaucer the Pilgrim. In considering this conspicuously effeminate storyteller, I suggest the possibility of a provocative “queer” reading and urge critics to more actively respond to “Chaucer’s Challenge”—the poet’s call for recognition of the interpretive ramifications of the persona, including those that might seem undesirable or even shocking. Concluding the study by looking at the reception of the poet’s challenging narrative surrogate may help to heighten the perception of the tenuous connections between “reality” and fiction that appear in various guises/forms in the other poems, and ultimately aims to help critics better grasp how the persona-construct functions to question notions of ideology, authority, and “truth” itself, be it for a fourteenthcentury poet or a twenty-first-century scholar.

CHAPTER 2 GETTING A LIFE: BIOGRAPHICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF CHAUCER THE MAN

It is well known that a great work of art, or, as we say, the writer (meaning his works), shows different faces to different ages. —Derek Brewer1 Nothing is more natural than the wish to give genius a human face. —F. R. H. Du Boulay2

I

t has been thirty years since Roland Barthes announced the supposed “death of the author,” but even today there is evident resistance to the author’s hypothetical critical murder. One need only look in book reviews, newspaper articles, or in many scholarly studies to get a sure sense that the idea of the author remains very much alive and well in the twenty-first century. The reason for the concept’s endurance may be nothing more than the seemingly obvious fact that, as the novelist Malcolm Bradbury puts it, “in the common-sense world . . . writers have common-sense existences.”3 Although the call for the author’s demise has promoted much helpful discussion, it is apparent that the pronouncement was premature. The author lives, and thus literary biography, the focus of this chapter, remains a valid, useful tool for scholars.4 As Bradbury and many others have noted, the vital relationship between fiction and life, author and reader, simply cannot be disregarded. Even Stanley Fish, the famous proponent of Reader-Response theory, has recognized that meaning is a function of what a particular speaker in a specific set of circumstances intended to say, so that there is no such thing as a meaning that is drawn apart from the contextual circumstances of its production.5 Fish asserts that it is impossible to read without having received the text as the expression of an “intentional being” with a

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particular history—even if the author is dissolved into a series of functions, then he/she is still present, only relocated or displaced.6 As Fish explains, it does not matter whether the originating agent is a discrete human consciousness or an abstract notion such as the Victorian “spirit of the age,” because to read a text as a product of any type of “transcendental anonymities” is to endow that anonymity with intentionality and a biography, or with a sense of authorship.7 In short, even when a reader cannot know the author’s personal history, even when he/she merely exists as a sort of veiled, abstract ideal, he/she continues to be authoritative. However, it is wise to take a cautious course and resist endowing the writer with too much authority, which was an important lesson Barthes taught by theoretically “killing” the author. On one hand, it should indeed be acknowledged that the very existence of the work itself announces that it is the creation of a specific author, who has initiated a textual “system of controls” (to use Wayne Booth’s phrase) that effect the involvement of the reader.8 On the other hand, in Barthesian terms, it is clear that the work of a past writer is variously limited and transformed by the range of modern human interests. Hence, while the author’s voice itself remains ever-powerful, the ideas that are vocalized in/through the text can and will be negotiated and appropriated by subsequent readers. And whether or not Barthes was correct in claiming that the text’s meaning lies “not in its origin but its destination,” he was prudent in suggesting that scholars should not focus too much attention on the author of a literary work.9 The observations of Fish and Barthes bring to light the central focus of this chapter: the connection between the author and literary biography, as filtered through the narrative persona. Due in part to the attack on the author begun by Barthes, the utility of literary biography has been severely questioned in recent years and there is now an “intense suspicion” of the form in the Humanities.10 Yet despite this suspicion, scholars cannot avoid the relationship between the author as life-giver, and the text as life-given.11 Therefore, like the author, his/her biography lives and deserves recognition as a potent force in contemporary critical thought. Rather than discrediting biography, literary critics would be best served by accepting it as a unique genre with its own rules and assumptions that might help bring forth new readings and ways of reading. Chapter 2 attempts to follow such a path by carefully considering Chaucerian biographies, with the goal of critiquing traditional, “autobiographical” presentations of the poet’s narrative I-speaker. Donald Howard, who has written a major biography of Chaucer, has shown that “a biography is more than a life” because by definition, “a life moves, shapeless, from day to day,” and as it is experienced, textualized, and interpreted it becomes different things to different people, in different situations and different ages.

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Howard explains that biographers must interpret the material they find, bringing to it a favorable or unfavorable bias that necessarily colors the presentation of the life.12 This is critical for the discussion of Chaucerian biography because laudatory accounts of the poet are unquestionably the norm, and make it clear that “we get back the answers only to the questions we ask of a life—the picture lives only within the frame we have invented for it.”13 As John Worthen contends, it is also notable that the documentary “facts” of a given biography may be nothing more than certain materials manipulated to fit into an apparently and ideally “seamless web of cause and effect, of inevitable and seamless progression.”14 This is a particularly appropriate metaphor for biographers writing on individuals from the Middle Ages, who must create such “webs” from scanty and oft-confusing resources. Given the inherently fragmentary nature of medieval documentation, biographers considering figures such as Chaucer also have a tendency to treat and present information as important simply because it survives, rather than thoroughly questioning it and demanding to know what answers it really provides.15 These are just some of the issues that are central to biographical writing, and key to the historical discussion of Chaucer the Man provided in this chapter. In addition, there are certain problematic tendencies in life-writing that pertain specifically to eminent “Men of Letters.” One significant trend that frequently is found in biographies of writers, and well-represented below, is the desire to enact a sort of literary “monumentalization” through life-writing, a “canonization” of the life and works of a revered author.16 In essence, this “monumentalization” results in a sort of quasi-hagiography, whereby biographers tell the story of a figure admired and even loved—attempting to create a commendatory portrait and seeking “their own features in a kindred face.”17 Another impulse often at issue in biographies of literary authors is the degree to which their works can be used as sites for biographical evidence. This is crucially important for my analysis, and while it should be admitted that a literary work can potentially tell a great deal about an author, there is reason to be extremely wary of any “facts” drawn from texts that are creative and fictional. The variety of authorial poses enabled by the persona-construct is pivotal here, since there are occasions when the elusive I-persona may appear to speak for the author; but as an autofictional construct, a given persona may be intended solely for local purposes, may be shaped by the requirements of the story, or may function deliberately to create the writer’s “own myth.”18 In any case, the persona is not the poet, and autofiction is not autobiography. Yet in practice, the autobiographical connections cited above are veritable “truths” that many Chaucerian biographers have worked to establish.

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With the above issues serving as the theoretical backdrop for my discussion, there are several reasons why it is sensible to begin my analysis of Chaucerian reception with a chapter on biographical writing. One of the more important reasons is the fact that for hundreds of years lifewriting was the primary, if not sole representative of literary “criticism.” It was not until the eighteenth century that a “modern” type of Chaucer scholarship became prominent. Before that age, biographies were the very embodiment of interpretive criticism, and thus “lives” of Chaucer were crucial for establishing the early understanding of the poet and his works. They formed the foundations for other, nonbiographical readings, and their consideration helps to illustrate major premodern interpretive trends and to place historically the various “Chaucers” that emerged over time. Another important aspect of Chaucerian biographies is that that these works offer intriguing examples of the aforementioned tendency to read the persona literally, and therefore highlight important ramifications that neglecting the autofictional nature of the verse might have for the author’s legacy. In particular, some of the very best evidence is found for the many ways in which Chaucer has been shaped to fit the beliefs of his readership: explicit evidence is seen for the politicized idealization of the author, who consistently emerges as the lofty “Father of English poetry” rather than, say, a civil servant of perhaps dubious societal import during his age.19 Overall, “lives” of Chaucer reveal key aspects of the ideological coloring of the poet, as his biographers “overlook things that are there and put in things that are not there. [They] underread and overread” Chaucer’s personae.20 To paraphrase the epigraphs offered at the start of this chapter, these biographies essentially create different versions of the medieval author, different faces for different ages. For my designs, what is most significant about these different faces is that they commonly are based on fallacious views of supposed poetic autobiography. In addition, these constructed “Chaucers” are a symbolic product of scholars who seemingly wish to give the genius of Chaucer an appropriately praiseworthy human face. To begin my necessarily selective critique of these laudatory constructions, the age of Chaucer’s immediate successors must be considered, because in this era the poet was destined for greatness. As Nevill Coghill distinctively proclaimed, “when our language was in solution but at a temperature to crystallize, Fortune chose [Chaucer] as its nucleus.”21 2.1 Early Praise for the “Fadir” of English Poetry and the Creation of the Chaucer “Legends” No single author has been commented on in English as regularly and extensively as the “Fadir” of English poetry.22 To quote Derek Brewer,

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“the literary observations and discussions threaded together by their reference to Chaucer constitute a unique index to the course of English criticism and literary theory.”23 A major reason the poet has been widely considered since his death in 1400 is that “Chaucer—unlike most writers, I fear—led an interesting life,” and therefore “would be a good subject for a biography had he never written a line of poetry.”24 Though it was evidently his verse and not his life that eventually garnered high praise, the plain fact is that Chaucer was a legend almost from the moment of his last breath, and since that time “successive generations have refashioned that legend in their own terms.”25 The first formal biography of Chaucer did not appear until the midsixteenth century, but the vast tradition of Chaucerian reception commenced even before his death, seen in the work of Eustache Deschamps, Thomas Usk, and John Gower.26 And shortly after his passing, a chorus of reverential praise for Chaucer’s greatness, genius, and poetic inf luence would grow prominent through the efforts of such notables as Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, and William Dunbar. Chaucer’s earliest readers offer him “worshyp & reuerence bothe” and laud him as the initiator of the English literary tradition—even going so far as to praise him for the very invention of English as a poetic language.27 Although this chorus of praise did not serve a strictly biographical function, the assorted comments of Chaucer’s fifteenth-century admirers did lay the groundwork for future biographies. In fact, a fairly consistent figure of “Maister Chaucer” emerged in the period, a general representation that assumed the shape and dignity of the collective eulogies about him, merged into one cumulative, socially and politically central ideal: the noble patriarch and first maker of English.28 This era, in turn, also is important as the period in which Chaucer’s “writings, his name, and his example came to be pressed into the service of a variety of social practices,” as Seth Lerer has shown.29 This emergent pattern of scholarly appropriation is central to Constructing Chaucer, as it becomes a constant issue throughout the history of Chaucerian reception. In looking specifically at Chaucerian biography, it is readily seen that many, or indeed most, biographers continue the trend of Chaucer’s fifteenth-century followers by upholding the cultural centrality of the poet and projecting his life in accordance with their own high expectations. As Paul Strohm has shown, it is a significant historical paradox that the very texts that promise access to the lives of certain distinguished individuals actually screen them from view. In effect, these texts come to supplant the life by installing themselves in its place.30 Nothing could be more true of Chaucerian life-writing, and this is especially so of the early biographies and their desire to appropriate the laureate figure of

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“Father Chaucer” for political and cultural means. In response to such ideologically charged biographical manipulation, Jacques Le Goff asserts that “there is no clear dividing line between reality and the ideal.”31 This certainly is the case with the first “life” of Chaucer, written in Latin by John Leland ca. 1540. Leland’s biography appeared in his Comentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis, and catalogues certain noble traits that would become the foundation for Chaucer’s presumed life for at least the next two hundred years. Leland’s laudatory text has an obvious political undercurrent, since his catalogue of great Englishmen was commissioned by Henry VIII, who ordered a search throughout the land for records of past British glory— wherein a noble Chaucer would be a desirable and key construction.32 This royal commission demonstrates the king’s zeal to create a distinctly English cultural identity (with himself as its esteemed majesty), so that Chaucer becomes a primary focus for what has been called the “writing of England.”33 Consequently, and perhaps even more fervently than in the previous era, Chaucer is consistently portrayed in the Tudor age as the first bard of the realm, the first great English poet for Englishmen, an author of nationalistic and religious import whose verse is central to the land’s intellectual heritage.34 Leland’s rhetoric is full of such reverent and patriotic overtones, which are immediately evident when he asserts the grandeur and extent of Chaucer’s learning in a passage that would often be cited in the years that followed: Leland states that the author left the University of Oxford “an acute logician, a delightful orator, an elegant poet, a profound philosopher, and an able mathematician,” as well as having become a “devout theologian.”35 Leland’s politicized veneration is even more obvious in his proclamation that sometimes Chaucer strove with all his power to instruct the reader, and . . . took pains as sedulously to give him pleasure. Nor did he cease from his labors until he had carried our language to that height of purity, of eloquence, of conciseness and beauty, that it can justly be reckoned among the thoroughly polished languages of the world.36

Through such exaltations, Leland creates an ideal portrait whereby the author becomes “Father” Geoffrey Chaucer, poetic hero of Albion and well-spring of English cultural authority. These ideals would endure for centuries, both within and beyond biographical writing. For the analysis of Chaucer’s personae and their critical legacy, there is another, extremely important aspect of Leland’s reverent life-writing. Leland’s biography initiated “the legends” of Chaucer, which play an

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essential role in my critique below; these “legends” have been usefully defined by Eleanor Hammond as a series of false assertions about the author’s life, which underlined his presumably remarkable existence and would be built upon by succeeding generations of biographers. 37 For years, the following “legends” asserted by Leland would reappear frequently in Chaucerian life-writing: that the poet was born of a noble family; that he studied at Oxford, where he was taught by John Some and a Carmelite Friar named Nicholas; that he admired and imitated Gower as a master; that he had a sister who married William Pole, Duke of Suffolk; that he had a house at Woodstock, adjoining the king’s palace; that he lived in France in the last years of Richard II’s reign; and that he was personally known to and highly esteemed by Henry IV and Henry V.38 In her early twentieth-century critique of these “legends,” Hammond argued that the approach taken by Leland and his followers continued even into the modern era, since she still perceived a tendency “to repeat statements without examination, to welcome an attractive but ill-founded suggestion, and to accept poetic commonplace as autobiography.”39 Today, this statement no longer seems wholly accurate, but it is an apt description of Chaucerian biography until at least the nineteenth century, since Leland’s “legendary” perspectives would be incorporated by John Bale and John Pits, the next major Chaucerian biographers, and also would be found in a number of subsequent “lives.”40 There are several reasons that “the legends” of Chaucerian biography are dubious, not the least of which is the fact that the primary texts used to create the fallacious “legendary” ideas were not actually Chaucer’s to begin with. Usk’s Testament of Love was commonly ascribed to Chaucer in Leland’s age, and it was largely upon this apocryphal text that the biographer based his “legends.” This attribution brings us to what is, for my purposes, the more significant problem with Leland’s work. In creating his “legendary” account, Leland set the questionable precedent whereby details of Chaucer’s life would be extracted directly from his verse, with the persona read as an actual, literal representation of the author.41 This autobiographical approach would persist for centuries, to the extent that it became a veritable “fact” of scholarship. Biographer after biographer followed Leland’s lead by adhering to the belief that Chaucer himself is the narrator of the poems and is telling readers the truth about his existence. Given the autofictional nature of the persona outlined in chapter 1, and recalling the fact that many scholars from the Middle Ages forward recognized the construct’s fictionality, it is remarkable that this autobiographical perspective f lourished so long. But f lourish it did, and this was due in no small measure to Leland’s “legends.” Hence, Leland’s inf luential biography offers distinct evidence not only for autobiographical

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interpretations, but literal readings with a purpose: the agenda in question being to celebrate the purported “Father of English poetry.” Having illustrated the roots of this tendency, the other early “lives” of Chaucer need not be considered here because they follow the same “legendary” path as Leland and thus have little of substance to say about Chaucer’s persona. When it is remembered that biographical writing was the primary type of Chaucer scholarship until, perhaps, the Romantic Age, the fact that the I-narrator was assumed to depict the actual author represents a formidable tradition, one that would be difficult to overcome. And Leland’s instrumental account should make it clear that the tradition of autobiographical interpretation would have major consequences for the “Chaucer” that emerged in scholarly writing—an idealized “legend” who was “held to be the English Homer” because he “lifted our language with so much splendor and ornament, that no one has a place before us.”42 This was not Chaucer the Man but a version of the poet whose “life” was constructed on the basis of fictional texts, and apocryphal works at that. As a result, this early “Chaucer” was not only historically inaccurate but also theoretically unsound. 2.2 The Early Modern Justification of Chaucer If recent New Historicist criticism is followed, a pivotal inclination of the Renaissance is well-summarized by the concept of “self-fashioning.” “Self-fashioning” is a process of constructing one’s identity that has been hailed by some scholars as the very birth of the individual, which went hand in hand with the lofty Humanist perspectives through which art and the greater world were perceived.43 In light of this so-called “selffashioning,” it has been argued that critics, as individuals, consciously sought to separate their own positions from earlier theoretical viewpoints, to “fashion” their own singular critical “selves.”44 This yearning to establish a scholarly authority and superiority apart from their predecessors is well-illustrated in Chaucer criticism and helps to explain the fact that Renaissance scholars incrementally devalued the poet’s language—the chorus of praise grows fainter as Chaucer’s verse is seen to be more and more “remote and rebarbative.”45 A memorable example of this outlook is found in Philip Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie, where he famously wonders about his medieval forefather, “truly I know not, whether to meruaile more, either that he in that mistie time, could see so clearely, or that wee in this cleare age, walke so stumblingly after him.”46 Henceforth, I will refer to such commentary as the justification of Chaucer and his language, which represents a significant critical shift—or, in fact, a cautious intellectual distancing—that

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became prevalent in the Early Modern period. The justification in question serves as a type of apologia for the perceived f laws in Chaucer’s work, with the poet still valued and revered as the “Father of English poetry.” However, the continuing veneration for Chaucer commonly is offered in conjunction with lamentation for the supposed obscure and/or barbarous aspects of his writing—particularly his language—due to the unfortunate circumstance of his having been born in an age of poetry that had become outmoded. Chaucer’s literary greatness therefore required justification, an approach that grew during the Renaissance and was especially prominent in seventeenth-century biographies. The primary biography of Chaucer in the Renaissance was composed by Thomas Speght for his Workes of our Antient and lerned English Poet, Geoffrey Chaucer (1598). The significance of this edition cannot be overstated, because Speght’s Workes would prove to be the definitive text of Chaucer until well into the eighteenth century, used by such notables as Milton and Dryden.47 Indeed, Speght’s edition marks a watershed in Chaucerian reception, as does his biography—the first written in English, and the most extensive and careful to date. As Tim Machan has noted, Speght’s edition articulates a momentous, “distinctly Renaissance” outlook on Chaucer and his works, which valorizes the poet and his importance for English literary and cultural history.48 This is evident in Speght’s biography, which justified Chaucer’s verse and was highly inf luential in promoting “legendary” notions with particular consequences for the perception of the author’s persona(e). Speght undertook a diligent search of the public records to create his edition, and his “lives” (he slightly revised the biography for his 1602 edition) offer some fresh documents that contribute to a better understanding of Chaucer the Man. Speght was assisted in his research by John Stow, and together they unearthed Chaucer’s recorded titles (i.e., “armiger,” etc.), grant of land, controllership, employment abroad, and pensions received.49 But despite this research, Speght nonetheless falls into the common trap of basing his work on his predecessors’, even directly quoting them, so that he perpetuates many of the same “legends” as well as adding a few of his own, such as the suggestion that the poet actually met Petrarch in Italy.50 The most enduring addition Speght makes to Chaucer’s supposed life, however, is his assertion that the poet “was in some trouble in the daies of King Richard the second,” f led in exile to Holland, Zealand, and France (“where he wrote most of his bookes”), and eventually returned only to be imprisoned.51 This story was based on Usk’s Testament of Love, and Speght’s account takes the autobiographical slant of Leland even further. Speght’s troubling presentation of this material may be summarized as follows: Chaucer, as a Lollard sympathizer and

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supporter of his (alleged) patron John of Gaunt, got caught up in a series of political intrigues surrounding the mayoralty of London. Fearing for his life, he escaped to the Continent where he supported friends who f led for similar reasons. These same friends soon betrayed him, and he found himself alone and without money. Dejected, he decided to return to England and face his fate, and upon reentry he was immediately imprisoned. Eventually, the poet reluctantly decided to give in to the authorities and offer information against his friends, in return for his release. It is crucial to recall here that Speght apparently was aware of the fictional undercurrent of personae, as chapter 1 illustrated.52 Despite this recognition, Speght’s biography represents the first instance where many (or most) of the biographical “facts” that are presented are, rather, details drawn from the poetry. This is highly important, because it shows how deeply ingrained was the autobiographical inclination of Chaucer’s early readers. In Speght, we have a generally astute scholar who sought to improve the documentary foundations for Chaucerian biography, and who recognized the persona-construct. Yet as the “legendary” story above shows, Speght went even further than Leland and others in emphasizing the autobiographical “truth” of the verse, to an extent that could even mar the poet’s reputation. Counterintuitively, Speght’s “life” would come to represent the next major step in the progression of “the legends,” with the persona read autobiographically and in this case, in such a way that justification would be necessary not only for the poet’s barbaric language, but also for the supposed trouble he found himself in during his life. By extending and more firmly establishing the fallacious material drawn from the Testament of Love, Speght’s depiction perpetuated some of the most prominent and damaging untruths ever found in Chaucerian life-writing. In fact, Speght’s portrayal altered the view of Chaucer so drastically that biographers in subsequent years often felt the need to rationalize the author’s suffering, typically by associating him with the problems of his so-called “friend” and patron John of Gaunt and carefully explaining away the poet’s alleged treachery against his other friends. Speght himself took care to ensure that the “famous and learned poet” would retain his rightful legacy as one who “liued in honour many yeares both at home and abroad.”53 Speght’s work has been noted for its “pan-English,” nationalistic slant, which falls in line with the agenda of “monumentalization” described earlier, so that the biography seeks to promote a “preeminent, mythic status” for the poet.54 Speght’s “pan-nationalism” allows him to overlook any potential f laws that might be seen in the author’s purported life-history by accentuating the positive, so to speak. This is no better seen than in his explanation that all of England is “much beholden” to

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Chaucer because he “had alwaies an earnest desire to enrich & beautifie our English tongue, which in those daies was very rude and barren,” and his performance of this task was not at all “inferior” to that of other revered authors, including Dante, Petrarch, or Alan of Lille.55 Though Speght perceives the language of medieval England as being “rude and barren,” he takes care to emphasize Chaucer’s cultural significance and, by extension, to justify the poet’s honorable standing. This idea is clear in Speght’s preliminary address, where he questions how anyone could doubt the author’s merit, saying that “oure” Chaucer “in most vnlearned times and greatest ignorance, being much esteemed, cannot in these our daies, wherein Learning and riper iudgement so much f lourisheth, but be had in great reuerence, vnlesse it bee of such as for want of wit and learning, were neuer yet able to iudge what wit or Learning meaneth.”56 Through such comments, Speght is able to gloss over the possibility that Chaucer was some kind of political turncoat in favor of praise for his literary achievement. The project of ideological justification is bolstered in Speght’s edition by the inclusion of a letter written in 1597 by Francis Beaumont, who explicitly sets out to “defend” Chaucer against those who feel that his words “are growne too hard and vnpleasant.” Beaumont declares that there are “no sufficient causes” to withhold the poet’s rightful “desert of glorie” because languages inherently change, and his words were “pure” for “his owne daies” so that he should remain esteemed and be given “that honour that he most worthily deserueth.” Interestingly, Beaumont’s letter demonstrates how the persona-concept might directly come into play in the poet’s justification, as the epistle also rationalizes Chaucer’s presentation of such disreputable figures as the Miller and the Cook. Beaumont does not use the term persona itself, but it is clear that he has the construct in mind in his assertion that it was part of the author’s plan to depict his fellows accurately in the Tales, so that his presentation of their speeches was “in excuse of himselfe” as he maintained his own decorum and merely portrayed “the disposition of these meaner sort of men [by] declaring in their prologues and tales, that their chiefe delight was in vndecent speeches of their owne.”57 For both Beaumont and Speght, Chaucer’s cultural renown is easily justifiable, even if an apologia is necessary for certain aspects of his works, narrative approach, and life. Moving forward into the seventeenth century, one enters an era in which several more “lives” present Chaucer’s I-persona autobiographically, and similarly serve to justify his cultural value. The heated religious climate of the age would bring rise to the major change in the period’s biographies: the common creation of a Protestantized, didactic poet-preacher, a fresh construction that likewise was pervasive, in

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various forms, for centuries.58 For my aims, the persistent, literal reading of the I-narrator is most notable here, as scholars continue to disregard the autofictional persona while ensuring the poet’s justification and cultural import. Due to spatial constraints, a few brief references from the Latin biography of Henry Wharton must suffice to illustrate the primary tendencies of seventeenth-century Chaucerian life-writing. Wharton’s biography was written in 1687, and it justifies the poet’s status by assuring readers that Chaucer is a “worthy author” who is so extraordinary that “it is certain that we will not be able to find in Latin antiquity a poet of more merit.”59 Wharton adds that Chaucer was “truly an English poet to princes and his fatherland,” who endured the “somewhat rough language” and rendered it “melodious with elegance and pleasantness. For he should be excused as being the first in all our language who lifted it from darkness and enriched it with a great voice, made it milder and more ornamented than when he found it.”60 Wharton’s Chaucer, however, is not only the great forefather of English poetry, but of the Reformation itself—a man who recognized the virtues of Wyclif ’s doctrine and was “in Theological things exceedingly well-versed.”61 Wharton explains that the poet often bitterly criticized the most grave superstitions of the Roman Church and its frequent errors; he mourned its corrupt ecclesiastical teaching with its most inept lies; he castigated the luxuriousness and sloth of the clerics; however, he inveighs everywhere with the most forceful hatred against the Order of Friars, whose hypocrisy, ambition, and other vile vices he forcefully attacks several times throughout his whole work, but nowhere without having some reason for doing so.62

Wharton offers a variant form of justification, as he presents a man of religious distinction who has rightly criticized the church and deserves praise for doing so. This is a representative, Protestant “Chaucer”—one who is not documented in the historical records. Therefore, this pious figure apparently was created by reading certain personae (in the Tales in particular) through an ideologically-colored lens. Wharton’s biography is very short, but to draw the conclusions above it is evident that he would need to go beyond the surviving documents and Chaucer’s poetic alter ego, an I-narrator (or series of I-speakers) who has very little to say about religion throughout the corpus. Hence, though he does not mention the persona by name, Wharton tacitly brings other (dramatic) personae into play, using them to determine the “truth” about the poet’s life, to perceive the “real” thoughts that were in his mind on the subject of religion. As chapters 4 and 5 in particular will demonstrate, this selective

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type of autobiographical reading features prominently in nonbiographical Chaucer scholarship, although the nature of autofiction makes it difficult to sustain—or indeed justify—such readings. With Wharton, my brief consideration of the early years of Chaucerian life-writing has reached its conclusion. This pre-“Enlightenment” era is most significant biographically as the age that initiated, extended, and relied heavily upon the Chaucer “legends,” and created an idealized myth of the venerable auctor who, supposedly, began the English literary tradition and established many of the very traditions of the language itself.63 This conventional view of “Father Chaucer” continued for centuries, and the autobiographical “legends” also would endure. But these “legends” would be altered somewhat during the eighteenth century, a change that was initiated by John Dryden, one of Chaucer’s greatest admirers. 2.3

Eighteenth-Century Changes and “Legendary” Continuations

Dryden’s literary criticism carried much weight with his contemporaries. The Shakespeare scholar Ashley Thorndike has commented that during the Neoclassical period, “the criticism of Dryden led in the discussion of Shakespeare’s merits and defects and toward a full recognition of his dramatic and poetic greatness.”64 A similar assertion could be made with reference to Chaucer, and the point cannot be overemphasized: Dryden’s criticism profoundly inf luenced Chaucer scholarship throughout the eighteenth century, and his life-writing marked a significant period of change.65 This is why section 2.3 begins with Dryden, whose last major work—published shortly before his death in 1700—would be a catalyst for change, a starting point for much Chaucer commentary to come. Dryden’s major discussion of Chaucer’s life and works is located in the “Preface” to the Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), which includes modernized versions of several Chaucer poems.66 Arguably, the “Preface” represents the first critically self-conscious, theoretically cautious account of Chaucer and his verse. In Trigg’s view, it provides the first extended discussion of Chaucer that does not introduce a collection or edition of the poet’s works, “so it offers a new kind of space in which to write about Chaucer, as well as an inf luential, individualized refiguration of the voice of critical judgment.”67 Though some might debate the theoretical impact of Dryden’s “Preface,” it certainly merits recognition as a landmark critical text for those of us in Chaucer Studies, if not literary studies in general.68 Dryden’s admiration for Chaucer is obvious, as he holds his predecessor “in the same Degree of Veneration as the Grecians held Homer, or

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the Romans Virgil,” so that “I seriously protest, that no Man ever had, or can have, a greater veneration for Chaucer than my self.”69 The “Preface” also demonstrates the deep-rooted, nationalistic sentiment underlying Dryden’s work (here and elsewhere), and he thus creates a patriotic “Chaucer” that would resound in subsequent years.70 Dryden compares Chaucer’s work with classical literature—keeping in mind that the Fables also contained translations of Ovid and Homer—and aims not only to perpetuate Chaucer’s memory but also to assert English literature’s rightful place alongside the classics. He states that “with Ovid ended the Golden Age of the Roman Tongue: From Chaucer the Purity of the English Tongue began. The Manners of the Poets were not unlike: Both of them were well-bred, well-natur’d, amorous, and Libertine, at least in their Writings, it may be, also in their Lives.” 71 The nationalism evident in such words would become increasingly common through the Victorian age, and Dryden’s account also seems to ref lect the growing belief in the power of great literature to teach “proper” living.72 But there is far more to Dryden’s “Preface” than mere patriotism or “polite learning.” As a poet-critic Dryden cultivated a sophisticated intellectual program that largely arose from his concern with and reaction to classical literature and theory, and his thoughts frequently were occupied with the practical problems of writing, including questions of artistic methods and aims, narrative style, and function.73 The result was a critic who, for his era, was unusually aware of the individual, creative aspects of literary artifacts.74 Dryden believed that the distinctive character of poetry arose from and ref lected the character of its creator, a view that fits well with Neoclassical ideas of mimesis. In the “Preface” Dryden promotes critical appreciation of what may be termed Chaucer’s mimetic genius, seemingly anticipating the now-common notion of the poet’s realistic depiction of fourteenth-century England.75 For example, Dryden notes that “Chaucer follow’d Nature every where, but was never so bold to go beyond her,” and states that “he has taken into the Compass of his Canterbury Tales the various Manners and Humours (as we now call them) of the whole English Nation, in his Age. Not a single Character has escap’d him.” 76 The “realistic” poet constructed by Dryden would become pervasive in several eighteenth-century biographies that followed, and he also foreshadows things to come by making direct reference to the “novelistic” traits of the Tales and offering a sort of early conception of the “dramatic principle.” This is crucial because it illustrates that, although he tends toward a “realistic” reading of Chaucer’s verse, Dryden does not cultivate an autobiographical meaning for the poetry. Instead, he strictly maintains the imitative nature of poetry inherent in the notion of mimesis and emphasizes the dramatic, if not autofictional aspects of the verse. Hence,

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Dryden comments on the distinct “marks” the poet gives to each character, and suggests that the Matter and Manner of their Tales, and of their Telling, are so suited to their different Educations, Humours, and Callings, that each of them would be improper in any other Mouth . . . Their Discourses are such as belong to their Age, their Calling, and their Breeding; such as are becoming of them, and of them only.77

Through such carefully chosen words, Dryden recognizes that the verse may well imitate reality, but is not reality—he stresses the dramatic capacities of literature and promotes an awareness that the fiction remains fictional, while the characters serve as mere characters (or personae).78 Dryden knew classical forms very well, and was a noted satirist in his own right who utilized various personae to critique his society. Thus, it stands to reason that, although he does not specifically make use of the term, he did indeed recognize that personae were central to Chaucer’s works and that the medieval poet made conscious use of them. When it is recalled that personae were vital to classical satire, it may be significant that Dryden carefully distinguishes the “character” of the “Good Parson” from other “guilty” clergymen who “deserved the poet’s lash,” declaring that “a satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.” And when it is remembered that the terms “character” and “persona” have often been used interchangeably by scholars, it seems noteworthy that Dryden states that in his own translation of the Parson “I have followed Chaucer in his character of a holy man” and adds that some of his “persons”—or personae—are virtuous, while others are vicious; and “all his Pilgrims are severally distinguishe’d from each other; and not only in their inclinations, but in their very Phisiognomies and Persons.” 79 None of these “persons,” however, appear to equate directly to the poet himself in Dryden’s eyes. Through its subtle wording and critical nuance, Dryden’s approach to Chaucer’s life and works encourages an important shift of emphasis from strictly author-centered analysis to more text-based considerations. That is to say, Dryden’s “Preface” promotes a crucial change that would serve to temper the autobiographical trend seen thus far, by perceptively approaching the poetry as poetry and therefore encouraging a reading that does not rely so strictly on a literal view of the persona and does not presume that the verse somehow provides evidence for the author’s actual existence. As Trigg puts it, Dryden is “the first to take Chaucer’s authorship absolutely for granted as the starting point, not for biography or historical recovery per se, but for comparative, evaluative criticism.”80

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However, it was not until the nineteenth century that scholars substantially built upon Dryden’s fresh and sophisticated approach, and consequently “legendary” portrayals would persist. Although it took time for other biographers to pick up on the interpretive subtleties of the “Preface,” Dryden’s text should be recognized as having laid the foundations for biographical analysis that at least offers the possibility—through an awareness of the persona or its (autofictional) literary functions—that the verse is not autobiographical, but complexly fictional. Having examined Dryden’s important views, I may now proceed to outline brief ly some of the other biographical trends that were prevalent in the eighteenth century. In sum, the justification of Chaucer continued to proliferate, with various biographers addressing and excusing the poet’s perceived linguistic barbarity; and critics also continued to enlist Chaucer into Protestant service by presenting him as a sort of pre-Reformation poet-preacher. It is not necessary to consider further examples of these tendencies here, for they offer little that is new in terms of the biographical manipulation of the persona. But in order to more fully illustrate the historical trajectory of the persona in Chaucerian life-writing, another key trend deserves mention that I have not yet discussed. Specifically, the most frequent guise for the poet in the Neoclassical period may be identified as the construction of Chaucer the gentleman, with the author presented as an example of a cultivated man of leisure who teaches about important ideals such as taste and piety.81 This socially courteous construction, with its obvious designs on fostering virtue and the idea of poetry by and for gentlemen, would also be asserted by Victorian critics with similar sensibilities. Prominently supportive of such a poet-gentleman is John Dart’s Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, prefixed to the 1721 edition of John Urry, which was extremely popular in its time but has since been ridiculed by several textual scholars.82 Dart’s biography was the most elaborate to date and would prove to be the most significant Chaucerian life-writing of the eighteenth century. This is not only due to the popularity of Urry’s edition, but also because Dart’s text, unlike Dryden’s, was intended exclusively for biographical purposes, and thus its more extensive historical commentary would be relied upon by writers throughout the era. Kevin Pask has observed that Dart endowed Chaucer with his own character, recuperating medieval religious authority to “allow the author to become a cultivated gentleman living as a country squire.”83 Dart’s construction of a properly pious man of taste and leisure is vividly seen when he describes Chaucer by saying that “in one word, he was a great Scholar, a pleasant Wit, a candid Critick, a sociable Companion, a stedfast Friend, a grave Philosopher, a temperate OEconomist and a pious Christian.”84 Like any proper gentleman, Chaucer’s “Reading was deep, and extensive,

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his Judgment sound,” and he was a man whose temper was “a mixture of the gay, the modest, and the grave.” Fittingly, “of Friendships he selected the best, being familiar with, and received by all the Men of Learning at that time.”85 Dart is also careful to assure his reader that Chaucer wisely turned his attention to the Heavens, asserting that “towards the latter part of his Life, the gay Gentleman gave way to the grave Philosopher and pious Divine.”86 Here again, we have a “life” that is based on a selective reading of purported “autobiographical” verse, and is impossible to substantiate from the surviving documentary records. Nonetheless, Dart portrays himself as a perceptive, cautious biographer, openly criticizing the earlier work of Leland, Bale, Speght, and Pits, and outlining his own project as aiming to correct past mistakes through “the recovery of some parts of his History.”87 Though Dart did make use of a greater number of government records, he ultimately was unable to meet his own challenge since his biography typically offers restatements of the prior “legends” and actually further ingrains this material. Like previous “lives,” Dart’s account was profoundly inf luenced by the Testament of Love, but he also builds upon the spurious Court of Love; hence, Dart’s biography offers a much more full and detailed account of these fallacious “legends,” which more firmly establishes the poet’s alleged political troubles. In particular, Dart solidifies and elaborates Chaucer’s supposed complicity in John of Northampton’s political plot, the poet’s forced exile into Hainault, France, and Zealand, and his harsh imprisonment in the Tower of London where he would be forced to forsake his friends in return for his freedom.88 Dart ends his story by explaining how “Chaucer” had to disclose information against his former friends in order to earn his release, which “brought upon him the ill will of most people, who (as he says) called him false, lyer, base, ingratefull, &c. But the King regarding him as a person beloved by his Grandfather, and a faithful servant to himself, pardoned him.” Ignoring the fact that this story was based on erroneously attributed texts, Dart’s depiction plainly illustrates the biographical inconsistencies that might result from the fallible assumption that the I-narrator of the verse represents the author himself. For it is difficult to balance this “Chaucer”—a political pawn of sorts who appears to be a pathetic, unfortunate figure—with the noble gentleman depicted elsewhere in Dart’s biography. Dart himself failed to ref lect on this paradox, and “legendary” stories would remain central to the poet’s “life” throughout the eighteenth century—regardless of the ways in which these misrepresentations might serve to undermine “Father Chaucer” or create illogical biographical discrepancies. The enduring legacy of the “legends” is perhaps no better seen

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than in the brief biographical commentary offered by Thomas Tyrwhitt in his important edition of Chaucer, published in 1775.89 Tyrwhitt was a cautious scholar who was wary of life-writing because of its potential to depict incorrectly the medieval author, which he hoped to avoid at all costs. Consequently, Tyrwhitt condemns the lack of scholarly care taken by previous Chaucerian biographers, especially Leland, whom he reproves for the “inconsistencies” of his account and the untrustworthiness of his documentation.90 Ever mindful of his craft, Tyrwhitt makes note of various documentary patents and annuities granted to Chaucer and offers a sound discussion of the potential such records hold for outlining the author’s life, ultimately concluding his account by saying “these, I think, are the principal facts in Chaucer’s life, which are attested by authentic evidences.”91 Despite such circumspection, it is illuminating that Tyrwhitt still falls into some of the old biographical traps, especially by using certain verses as evidence of autobiographical “fact.” This is particularly troublesome when Tyrwhitt agrees with earlier accounts centered on spurious texts like the Testament of Love and argues that a “more attentive examination of his works might furnish a few more” autobiographical “facts” about Chaucer.92 In time, “the legends” of Chaucerian biography would wane. But Tyrwhitt’s call for more use of autobiographical readings demonstrates that even if the “legendary” stories eventually would come under attack, the assumption that Chaucer himself appears in the verse would continue to be widely accepted. Indeed, this dubious assumption based (whether consciously or not) on a literal reading of the persona-construct, might be labeled as the primary biographical trend in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.93 Hence, in spite of the earnest efforts of careful critics such as Dryden and Tyrwhitt, “the legends” continued to play a prominent role through the Romantic age, although the “legendary” stories themselves had gradually changed in form and detail over the years. 2.4

Romanticizing Chaucer the Man

It is well-known that during the Romantic period, a new appreciation for medieval literature developed. Antiquarian critics of the age, who fostered a substantial growth in historical scholarship, asserted that the medieval period was vital as the origin of the cultural ideals and social institutions through which “civilized” men lived, so that poets from the Middle Ages served as exemplars of taste, learning, and civilization.94 From a theoretical standpoint, the Romantic era is known for its assertion of emotionalism, and thus its cultivation of an idealized (or sublime)

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literature of feelings and personal self-expression.95 This was especially true with regards to poetry, as verse was increasingly seen as a kind of textual portal into the mind and inner life of a given author.96 To an even greater degree than their forebears, Romantic critics read literary narratives as the direct expression of an individual, as a sort of emotional, psychological case-study in words. This would consistently be evident in Chaucerian life-writing during the age. In 1803, the “monumentalization” of Chaucer reached its apex in William Godwin’s Life of Geoffrey Chaucer. I have introduced the concept of “monumentalization” at the start of this chapter, and the notion is no better illustrated than in Godwin’s laudatory, two-volume behemoth that spans well more than 1000 pages.97 For if ever there was a biographical “monument” created to venerate the paternity of an author, surely this is it, and Godwin openly articulates his reverent intentions by stating that “the first and direct object of this work, is to erect a monument to his name.” Godwin reveres his subject so much, and hopes to bolster the poet’s position so much, that he unabashedly announces (in a sentiment seen throughout the biography) that “no one man in the history of human intellect ever did more, than was effected by the single mind of Chaucer.”98 Overzealous though Godwin may appear to modern eyes, his Life was by far the most inf luential biography of the poet written in the age, and thus played a central role in the articulation of a distinctly Romantic “Chaucer,” shaped to fit the intellectual patterns of the age. For the reception theorist, Godwin’s spirited biography is an enticing document, full of colorful rhetorical f lourishes and vague, unfounded suppositions. Godwin not only includes much historical information wholly irrelevant to the poet’s life but is not averse to creative conjecture or outright manipulation. He frequently reconfigures the documentary material he has compiled and creates conjectural theories so that the records used are made to fit with his own biases and preconceived “facts.” 99 As a result, it is apparent that this “life” often records more fiction than fact—for Godwin, perhaps more than any other biographer, Chaucer the Man is whatever he wished the poet to be. Much of Godwin’s work is predicated upon the old “legends,” and he offers numerous speculations on the presumed thought and motivation of the poet based on the disputable evidence of the first-person narrator. What emerges is an evocative “Chaucer” with distinctly Romantic ideals, as the text is rife with comments that portray the author as an exemplary gentleman with a “frank and easy temper” and “lively, spirited and cheerful views of nature” whose works “act upon all our sympathies in turn, relieve us with pleasantry, melt us with sorrow, and work up our

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souls into tumults of resentment or exultation.”100 In all likelihood, few Chaucerians would quibble with Godwin’s declaration that there is no production of man that displays more various and vigorous talent than the Canterbury Tales. Splendour of narrative, richness of fancy, pathetic simplicity of incident and feeling, a powerful style in delineating character and manners, and an animated vein of comic humour, each takes its turn in this wonderful performance.101

However, what is debatable is Godwin’s underlying critical method. To create his favorable impressions of the poet, Godwin not only uses the old “legendary” biographical canon (i.e., The Court of Love and Usk’s Testament of Love) but also insists that “it is impossible however to entertain a rational doubt” about the authenticity of these works. Moreover, he openly states that Chaucer’s literary works are “the best materials for arranging his life.”102 There is no need to extensively range about this material here, because the obvious outcome is that the author depicted in Godwin’s biography is not only historically inaccurate, but also theoretically questionable according to the tenets of autofiction. Despite its shortcomings, Godwin’s Life deserves some measure of praise, since there are moments when he proves himself to be a more astute reader than some of his predecessors. Given his strict adherence to “legendary” stories and assumptions, Godwin naturally holds fast to the notion that Chaucer himself appears in the verse. However, it is important to note that the narrative persona has a resonance in the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer that, with the exception of Dryden’s “Preface,” we have not heretofore encountered. Though Godwin does not go so far as to categorically assert a notion of the divided self for the first-person narrator, there are certain instances in which he clearly implies the persona- construct and seems to register the inherent fictionality of the verse. Unlike Dryden, Godwin is not consistent in his views on Chaucer’s narrative approach, since he favors an autobiographical technique and perceives the poet himself as the dreamer of the Book of the Duchess; meanwhile, the narrator of the House of Fame is said to display “certain features of his own character,” as is true of other speakers (particularly those in the Tales).103 The qualification in this phrase is key, because Godwin suggests that the narrator both is and is not the poet; although Godwin generally is inclined to view the I-speaker as a literal representation of the writer, he acknowledges that this figure likewise serves the functions of an imaginary creation. In another notable moment, Godwin addresses the “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton” by saying that “it would be unjust however, from his playfully expressing an aversion to marriage in the character of a satirist, to

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infer that he had not lived in perfect harmony and happiness with the mother of his children.”104 Godwin unmistakably alludes to the “character” of the fictional persona in order to safely distance Chaucer from potentially damaging content in “Bukton,” a defensive view of this particular speaker that will be discussed more fully in chapter 3. The best example of Godwin’s tacit recognition of the I-persona is his remark that “when literature began to grow more common, one of the first effects was to detach in a great measure the character of the poet from that of the reciter of the verse.”105 Here, it seems, is the divided self, or at least a parallel concept that is exceptional within Chaucer’s scholarly reception during the period. And in this recognition, we are inching nearer to the suppression of the fallacious “legendary” tendency to read the verse autobiographically. The other prominent Romantic biography of Chaucer was written by Leonhard Schmitz, an important “life” that creates an even more explicitly “sublime” portrait and also seems to ref lect upon the personaconstruct in isolated moments. Schmitz’s biography appeared in 1841, in The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized. This volume marks a high point in the movement of modernizing Chaucer’s verse, and it is particularly noteworthy due to the prestige of its contributors, including its editor Richard Hengist Horne, as well as William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Leigh Hunt, and Robert Bell. Schmitz’s contribution to the volume is the last major biography that is centered squarely upon the spurious “legends,” and it is interesting that this account is perhaps even more definitive in its use of this material than some previous “lives.”106 For example, Schmitz comments that “one passage in [Chaucer’s] own works renders it incontrovertible that he was born in London,” and adds assuredly that “the first account we have of him is, that, at the age of eighteen, he was entered a student of the university of Cambridge. This information we derive from a passage in the ‘Court of Love.’ ”107 After relaying the “legendary” story of Chaucer’s exile and imprisonment, Schmitz contends that “all we know of it is derived from Chaucer himself, who in his ‘Testament of Love,’ excuses his conduct, and states that it brought upon him the charge of falsehood, and oppressed him with severe obloquy and censure.”108 Schmitz continually refers to the narrator of Chaucer’s poems as the author himself, who purportedly is ref lecting on his own experiences. However, Schmitz was a classicist by training, and his awareness of the satirical usages of narrative may help to explain why his life-writing echoes Godwin’s in its implicit articulation of the I-narrator’s fictional undertones. This is best seen in Schmitz’s discussion of the poet’s presumed self-description in the Thopas-Melibee link, where the author “hints

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that he was rather corpulent,” as well as giving the “impression of great delicacy.”109 Schmitz also seems to recognize the persona-construct (or its functions) when faced with the possibility of the poet taking a strong stand against the Church, and distances the writer from his characters by saying “his poems, indeed, abound in censure inf licted upon the licentious and worldly habits of the clergy, but no proof can be adduced of his having advocated the cause of any particular party, or of his having identified himself with any.”110 This phrasing recalls earlier debates over reportatio and assertio, which chapter 1 has established as central concepts in the medieval period’s persona-theory. I would argue that phrases of this type reveal that many Neoclassical and Romantic biographers were aware that a given narrative “I” was only reliable up to a point. Although it generally was presumed that the poet himself was present in his verse, select biographers distinctly perceived a sort of unnamed Chaucerian persona, tacitly recognizing the fictional functions of the narrative I-speaker. A fully embodied perception of the persona has not yet been encountered, but in the life-writing of Godwin and Schmitz important signs of progress are found, with subtle movement being made away from the f lawed autobiographical assumptions of the “legends” and toward a more historically accurate biographical technique. As Hammond has observed, “the work of killing the legend[s]” has been “difficult.”111 This is undeniably so, and it cannot be overemphasized how profoundly the “legendary” methods outlined above alter the view of Chaucer, since all the biographies encountered thus far depict a figure entirely different than would characteristically be described today. Schmitz’s account makes it clear that “legendary” views continued to be widespread as late as the mid-nineteenth century, and it may be argued that new manifestations of the “legends” have arisen since that time. However, the primary “legends” of Chaucerian biography did indeed come to an end during the Victorian period. So the question is what, exactly, did it take to deaden the major “legendary” assertions of yesteryear? The answer is not difficult to find: an all-important shift in Chaucerian life-writing was initiated by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas, whose biography has rightly been credited with advancing the critical separation of “Chaucer,” the poetic figure of “legend,” and Chaucer the Man, the civil servant who lived and breathed on English soil during the fourteenth century. 2.5 Fact or Fiction? Chaucer’s “Lives” from Nicolas to the Present Nicolas wrote his Memoir of Chaucer for the 1845 Aldine edition of the poet’s works.112 The Memoir stands as a major landmark in the history of

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Chaucerian reception and has been called “the first life of Chaucer drawn up on sound methods.”113 As Hammond explains, Nicolas took great care to ensure that his study was “entirely free from the extravagances of Godwin” and others, and cautiously utilized the documentary records to show that the supposed story of Chaucer’s life culled from the Testament of Love should not be regarded as true or autobiographical.114 Nicolas opens his account by explaining that although great trouble was taken to illustrate the life of CHAUCER by his former biographers, the yield of research was but imperfectly gleaned. Many material facts in his history have been very recently brought to light, and are now, for the very first time, published; but it is not from these discoveries only that this account of the Poet will derive its claim to attention. An erroneous construction has been given to much of what was before known of him; and absurd inferences have, in some cases, been drawn from supposed allusions to himself in his writings. A Life of the Poet, founded on documentary evidence instead of imagination, was much wanted; and this, it is hoped, the present Memoir will supply.115

In order to rebut the critically ingrained, “legendary” stories—and in the process alter the scholarly perception of Chaucer’s I-narrator—it was necessary for Nicolas to challenge directly the views of earlier biographers. Regarding Godwin’s Life, for instance, Nicolas comments that those who are satisfied with probabilities founded upon fanciful allusions to Chaucer himself or his contemporaries, in the Poet’s writings, or who are pleased with ingenious speculations as to time when, and the feelings under which his pieces were written, and what he may have said, or heard, or thought on different occasions, will have their taste amply gratified by a perusal of the most elaborate Life of Chaucer that has yet appeared, which work will also shew them upon what slight and unstable foundations theories may be built.116

This statement illustrates Nicolas’s desire to speak from a position of greater critical care, which is manifest in a thoughtful reliance on valid historical documentation; as he puts it, “in this Memoir, such facts only have been stated as are established by evidence.”117 This is a notable departure from the typical (auto)biographical approach, and in hand with this refreshing focus on the records the Memoir powerfully emphasizes the fictional rather than “actual” connotations of the I-narrator. Nicolas goes further than Dryden and others in his commentary on Chaucer’s narrative approach, and specifically addresses the I-speaker by arguing that “little reliance can be placed upon any of his remarks” for

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use as biographical facts. In addition, Nicolas apparently recognizes the persona and its functions in stating that readers may only hope to see f lashes of Chaucer in his writing, but nothing more—“glimpses which he himself affords of his taste, habits, and feelings.”118 Some might argue that these “glimpses” represent nothing other than Nicolas contradicting himself by reading the verse autobiographically. But for Nicolas, such “glimpses” merely offer f leeting impressions of the poet’s personality and cryptic images of his mind, which are not biographically reliable; in fact, Nicolas claims that it is “dangerous” to put much stock in any such poetic passages. Nicolas therefore distances the author from the verse, even going so far as to connote the very idea of the divided self, in this case a fabricated narrative surrogate who may appear to represent the writer in some verses but who shifts, changes, and is not a literal I-representative. In Nicolas’s words, “it is in his own character only, that Chaucer appears in the Pilgrimage, in the General Prologue, the Rime of Sir Thopas, and in the prose tale of Melibeus; and each of the other personages is individually described, and has a distinct existence.”119 Again, some might view this quotation as making an autobiographical claim on Chaucer’s writing, alleging that we have (in this case) an image of Chaucer himself as the speaker of the Canterbury Tales. I would disagree. As chapter 1 has indicated, the terms “character” and “persona” often are used synonymously in literary criticism. For Nicolas, the “character” of the I-narrator is a persona; it is a fictional character with a “distinct existence” that is appropriate for the narrative situation. It is not Chaucer the Man himself. This is made clear when Nicolas pronounces that “the creator of an imaginary hero can never be safely identified with his creation.”120 To further the point, it might be noted that Nicolas’s biography not only references the narrative “personages” of the Tales, but also contains several instances of the phrase in propria persona. By using the term itself, Nicolas becomes the first scholar to bring the persona explicitly into play in Chaucerian biography, another sign of his extraordinary consciousness of the minutiae of first-person narrative. Given the body of evidence presented above, Nicolas’s biography should be seen as making the vital move in Chaucerian life-writing toward a more clearly recognizable and fully embodied persona-construct. This was a change centuries in the making, and it was Nicolas who finally proved himself bold enough to definitively detach the poet from the verse and thus assert a more historically valid perspective on Chaucer based on the extant records rather than dubious literary texts and ambiguous fictional narrators. Nicolas did a great service by discounting the autobiographical “legends,” effectively minimizing the scope of the author’s life and closing down unsound avenues of thought that previously were seen

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as having great biographical potential. His biography helped to clarify the logical parameters of Chaucerian life-writing by calling into question faulty records and the pronouncements of erroneously attributed works and, in effect, disputing long-standing notions of biographical “truth.” By narrowing the documentary scope of Chaucer’s “life,” exposing historical gaps in the evidence, and persuasively demonstrating that scholars should draw their conclusions solely based on the scanty documentary records, the end result of Nicolas’s critique is that it may even have fostered a greater potentiality for the poet’s life. Thus, I would call Nicolas’s life-writing usefully “queer” in its function. Like the persona-construct itself, Nicolas’s biography perverts the stable traditions of the “legends” and undercuts unequivocal, positivistic readings of complex texts and records. It supports a “productive indeterminacy” that is a key characteristic of both the persona and persona-theory.121 If this “productive indeterminacy” is somehow queer, as I have argued in chapter 1, then the remainder of this section might be used to examine the effects that the newly rediscovered persona and its queer possibilities would have on Chaucerian biographies in the wake of Nicholas’s powerful account. As a practical extension of Hammond’s notion of the Chaucer “legends,” she offers the concept of the biographical “Appeal to Fact,” which is intended to define the second broad period in Chaucerian life-writing. In Hammond’s paradigm, the period of “fact” is initiated by Nicolas’s work and extends forward, “to the Life-Records gathered by the Chaucer Society, and subsequently”; it represents the “soberer” investigations of Nicolas and those that followed, which were “greatly augmented” by the discovery in the late nineteenth century of a number of official records that helped to form “the authentic foundation for a biography of the poet.”122 It should be acknowledged here that early Chaucerian biographers were sincere in their endeavors and simply saw the “facts” differently; that said, Nicolas’s “appeal” generally has been heeded by subsequent biographers, so that a more historically-sound view of the poet would emerge. But old habits die hard, and the “Appeal to Fact” would face a particularly formidable foe in the deeply ingrained tendency of reading Chaucer’s verse autobiographically, as if it offers reliable, “realistic” glances at the author. Nicolas’s scholarship is indicative of the fact that Victorian antiquarians fostered a growing interest in literary history, tended toward a more cautious historical method, and often worked to uphold patriotic poetic genius.123 Still treasured as the “Father of English poetry,” Chaucer remained a prominent figure throughout the period, frequently praised as an author who offered a realistic representation of fourteenthcentury life, who used his verse to present readers with an accurate record

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of societal truth as he saw it.124 Victorian critics also typically viewed Chaucer as an important representative of a bourgeois or middle class, emphasizing the poet’s “Englishness,” rational mind, even temperament, and genial personality.125 Due to a prevailing belief in the power of literature to serve as force for improving morality and promoting nationalism, Chaucer was perceived as a national poet par excellence “whose body and poetical productions become a kind of origin for an emerging secular statehood”—in practice, his life and works would come to serve as a “how to” guide to being properly English.126 The first noted Victorian biographer of Chaucer post-Nicolas was Henry Morley, whose life-writing accords with these tendencies. In his English Writers series of texts, Morley produced various biographical accounts of Chaucer over the years, and this work is compelling because the revisions that were made present evidence for the gradual critical acceptance of Nicolas’s modus operandi. Simply put, Morley eventually made an “Appeal to Fact” in his life-writing, as the “legends” are progressively diminished in each new account while the fresh records located and published by the Chaucer Society (founded in 1868) are incorporated to a greater extent over time.127 In his 1866 biography, the cautious approach ultimately taken by Morley is not evident since he, for example, states (á la Nicolas) that it is not known for certain where Chaucer was born, but then proceeds to advance (á la Godwin) a birthplace of London as culled from the spurious Testament of Love.128 At this early date, it is clear that Morley has not taken Nicolas’s critical advice to heart, and instead clings to a traditional belief in certain “legendary” perspectives. In the 1867 revision that immediately followed, Morley similarly indicates that the Testament can and should (still) be read autobiographically, even going so far as to conclude that the “legendary” story of the poet’s exile and imprisonment should be believed, but simply cannot be ascribed to the old dates due to the records unearthed by Nicolas.129 When we get to Morley’s 1890 revision, however, we see a biographer who has had to retrace his steps, reassess the evidence, and for all intents and purposes, create an entirely new “life” for the poet. This eventual change may be explained by the fact that, while Nicolas discounted autobiographical renderings and cast serious suspicion on the Testament of Love, he did not directly question its authorship or work to prove that the text was not Chaucer’s; that proof would eventually be provided by the German philologist Wilhelm Hertzberg in 1866.130 In his final Chaucerian life-writing, Morley evidently has been inf luenced by this later textual scholarship and thus has cause at this point to recognize, begrudgingly, that the Testament of Love “used to be ascribed to Chaucer, but is not by him.”131 Comments of this kind

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demonstrate Morley’s more careful reliance on the documentary records in his final account, so that his 1890 biography contains no mention whatsoever of any “legendary” imprisonment or exile.132 What Morley offers, then, in toto is evidence of critical resistance against abandoning the old “legends,” and as a result a “Chaucer” who undergoes a major biographical metamorphosis: at first, the (spurious) I-speaker is seen as an explicit, “realistic” self-representation, but later, the “life” is based more squarely on the actual historical documents while the fictional narrator is generally perceived as separate from the poet’s own “self.” Unlike Morley, William Minto was a biographer who apparently did take Nicolas’s lessons quickly to heart, and therefore Minto’s cautious, records-based “life” of Chaucer (published in 1874) may be said to represent the first substantial sketch that both “Appeals to Fact”—or, rather, accepts the newfound “facts”—and articulates an outright disbelief that the first-person narrator is “autobiographical” or “realistic.”133 Perhaps in reaction to the type of critical resistance represented by Morley, Minto made certain that his biographical method was in accordance with Nicolas’s new approach, and drew attention to the scholarly recovery of the documentary details of Chaucer’s life, a process that had recently quickened through the archival research of W. D. Selby, F. J. Furnivall, and other noted members of the Chaucer Society. Minto holds that the official records alone accurately render the poet’s existence, and recognizes the I-persona and/or its functions in cautioning readers that “we must be careful about filling in details of his inner history from supposed autobiographical references in his poems,” especially since “biographers too often take the poet literally” and ignore Chaucer’s use of conventional narrative tropes and ironic humor.134 In accordance with this view, Minto is the rare Victorian critic who believes that the self-description of the narrator in the Thopas-Melibee link is not a trustworthy account of Chaucer’s actual appearance.135 By distancing the author from his poetic creations through such contentions, Minto constructs a wholly different “Chaucer” than that described by his biographical predecessors, and the all-important theoretical turn away from the “legendary” texts and techniques has been realized at last. From this point forward, each Chaucerian biographer must consciously decide whether to rely more exclusively on the documentary records to depict Chaucer or continue to experiment with conjectural, “autobiographical” possibilities that are opened up by the poetry’s first-person narrator(s). With this difficult decision in mind, we might pause to consider the “life” of Chaucer written by Adolphus William Ward for the inf luential “English Men of Letters” series of publications. Ward’s biography undertakes a patriotic celebration of the poet’s “Englishness,” as is seen

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distinctly when he states that Chaucer “is English in his freedom and frankness of spirit; in his manliness of mind; in his preference for the good in things as they are to the good in things as they might be; in his loyalty, his piety, his truthfulness.”136 For my aims, however, Ward’s biography does not stand out due to its persistent nationalism, but because it may be identified as the earliest noteworthy exemplar of a “modern” life of the poet. Admittedly, this notion is slightly problematic so some elaboration is necessary. Like Minto, Ward has heeded the “Appeal to Fact” and generally banished the “legends” to oblivion; the main difference in Ward’s “modern” biography is that there is no longer any need for lengthy methodological discussions like that provided by Nicolas or Minto, because the validity of the documentary basis for the poet’s life finally has been accepted. Therefore, from Ward forward, what is found in Chaucerian life-writing is the widespread “Appeal to Fact,” with the author’s life colored on occasion by a slight deviation from the Life-Records, or more often a selective, literal reading of the persona. These are important moments where biographers have subtly appropriated the narrative speaker through some critical turn-of-phrase, and in so doing project ideals that may considerably alter the emergent picture of the poet. It is largely through such manipulation that Chaucer has been depicted in subsequent modern (or postmodern) biographies as a poet who is noted for his pacifism, lauded for his God-fearing piety, and so on. Ward himself acknowledges the sort of break in Chaucerian lifewriting just described, commenting that biographies of the medieval author are no longer merely a “mixture of unsifted facts, and of more or less hazardous conjectures” but instead are based upon the surviving documentary evidence, so that “we have at least become aware of the foundations on which alone a trustworthy account” of the poet’s life can be built.137 Later, Ward states that “in truth it is but a sorry makeshift of literary biographers to seek to divide a man who is an author into two separate beings, in order to avoid the conversely fallacious procedure of accounting for everything which an author has written by something which the man has done or been inclined to do.”138 Here, Ward recognizes the divided self, but is struggling with the inclination to read the narrative “I” in a factual rather than fictional manner. For Ward, biographies should be firmly based on the documentary evidence, yet the “autobiographical” possibilities of the verse ultimately prove too enticing at times, as he contradicts himself at points by enlisting the persona to promote the poet’s historical value as a writer who “realistically” depicts late medieval English life. In fact, Ward feels it necessary to address those biographers who have the audacity to disagree with his belief in Chaucer the Man’s bona fide narrative presence in key moments, explaining confidently

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that “it is thus, with a few modest but manifestly truthful touches, that Chaucer, after the manner of certain great painters, introduces his own figure into a quiet corner of his crowded canvas.”139 In the end, Ward’s account may not be wholly “trustworthy” because he periodically favors autobiographical readings that help support the author’s position at the British cultural pantheon, but are not substantiated by the archival records. This ideological coloring is evident in several places in Ward’s “life” and is perhaps no better seen than when he cites the Book of the Duchess as evidence for a “more or less intimate” relationship between Chaucer and John of Gaunt.140 This purported affinity between the poet and the inf luential Duke of Lancaster is commonly upheld by Chaucerian biographers. However, there is little actual historical evidence to support this supposed friendship, so we have here in Ward’s account (and others like it) a typical move that serves to foster the author’s cultural authority by associating him with powerful “friends.” In such instances, the persona-construct is read in a way suitable to the biographer’s ends—in this case, implicitly affording the writer a more prominent place in society than, in actuality, he may ever have attained. Hence, Ward seems to read the narrative “I” literally at points where an autobiographical view might conveniently bolster the poet’s stature, while there is ample distancing and reliance on the Life-Records at other moments. This inconsistent clashing of perspectives is characteristic of “modern” biographies, in which the persona generally is ignored or viewed as an unreliable fictional construct except on those occasions when it might be read in such a way that the venerable position of “Father Chaucer” is somehow promoted or his supposed outlook is upheld. Suffice it to say that there are a great many examples of the type of subtle ideological appropriation just described in “lives” of Chaucer since the late nineteenth century. Spatial constraints necessitate that I may only brief ly consider these recent manipulations, having established the “Appeal to Fact” and the tendency in subsequent biographies of generally denying the autobiographical possibilities of the I-narrator, unless a literal reading is more appropriate in an isolated moment, in support of a particular argument. In response to this blurring of the lines between fiction/ fact, several critics have rightly urged their fellows to be cautious with their biographical writing lest they fall into the trap of depicting Chaucer largely as they idealize him as opposed to the life that is revealed through a careful “Appeal to Fact.” Among the most vocal of these critics, past or present, were Thomas Lounsbury and Walter W. Skeat, both of whom were wary of straying too far from the documentary records and were progressive in their scrupulous scholarly approaches to Chaucer’s life and works. Lounsbury’s critical acumen is especially evident in his Studies in

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Chaucer (1892), the first volume of which specifically deals with the problems of Chaucerian life-writing—including an incisive chapter (titled “The Chaucer Legend”) that examines the types of fallacies outlined above.141 The American scholar Lounsbury firmly resisted the critical imperatives of British Victorianism and worked against the grain of much accepted interpretive practice through the employment of a rigorous historical method that was unique for its time.142 Lounsbury frankly acknowledges the intrinsic biases of the biographical craft, commenting that “the life of Chaucer is a field that blossoms luxuriantly with conjectures, and it is asking a great deal of him who enters it to abstain from plucking occasionally one of its f lowers.”143 However, Lounsbury attempts to avoid this problem by relying on the documentary evidence and, in turn, refraining from “introducing any guesses that have been or can be framed to fill in the gaps that exist in the information we possess.”144 This statement illustrates Lounsbury’s refreshing alertness to the inherent challenges of meaning/interpretation, as he is wary of the scholar who disregards the uncertainties of the “existing state of our knowledge, [and] presumes to give a decisive answer” when such answers are untenable due to the ambiguities of the poet’s life and works. The important result of such caution is Lounsbury’s view that the role of the critic should be to weigh “probabilities where certainties can never be assured.”145 Lounsbury favors this conservative approach because he believes that other biographers have too carelessly drawn autobiographical ideas from Chaucer’s verse, confidently seeing things that were never really there since “sentences, under torture, like witnesses upon the rack, can be made to confess almost anything that their persecutors desire to have admitted.”146 Lounsbury bluntly asserts that some scholarly contentions “are of the kind sure to be found in the statements of men who never succeed in gaining a full mastery of the difference that exists between the discovery of facts and their invention.”147 In the context of both reception studies and persona-theory this is a key statement, for Lounsbury thinks it ludicrous to believe that Chaucer intended his narrator to be taken literally, as a realistic mirror of his own person. Lounsbury may not speak of autofiction, per se, but he was acutely aware that the narrative “I” represents an “untrustworthy” fictional presence; even if we could presume that the author spoke in his own voice, his “true” thoughts and the “reality” of his situation would remain unclear because “the mind of the poet which makes him so sensitive to the objects that surround him . . . likewise makes him usually a worthless witness in his own case.”148 Lounsbury’s perceptive outlook on the imaginary nature of Chaucer’s I-speaker is wonderfully summarized by his terse statement that “as well might one hope to squeeze rain from a Saharic sand-cloud,

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as out of materials so empty and juiceless as these to gather the details for the narrative of a life.”149 Through such pronouncements, Lounsbury definitively separates the author from his work/narrator and promotes the view that everything that may be true of the poet must be culled from his life records alone, which the Chaucer Society began to publish extensively in 1875. Although the documentary records may have their own ideological undercurrents and may not be wholly accurate or reliable in their own right, they surely are preferable for biographical purposes to fallible readings of Chaucer’s personae. This notion would be supported by Skeat in the biography published in his distinguished Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, which is the remarkable nineteenth-century edition of the corpus that made the greatest use of the scholarly tools afforded by the Chaucer Society. Skeat admits that writing a biography of Chaucer is a difficult task because the records “tell us very little about the man himself,” but nevertheless favors these archives and emphasizes that the personal allusions in the poems are “a very sandy foundation on which to build up a serious autobiographical structure.”150 For those who would draw conclusions about Chaucer from his works, Skeat clearly recognizes the persona-construct in urging hesitance because, even if his works appear to “exhibit his thoughts and character . . . we must not always accept all his expressions as if they were all his own. We have to deal with a writer in whom the dramatic faculty was highly developed.”151 Perhaps even more telling is that Skeat goes on to explain that the uncertainty which adheres to personae (even when not so named) demands that the “truth” that is offered as biographical fact is nothing more than the biased vision of the scholar him/herself. As Skeat puts it, “when a poet complains of hopeless love, or expresses his despair, or tells us (on the other hand) that he has no idea as to what love means, we are surely free to believe, in each case, just as little or as much as we please,” but in any such instance, these inferences “may easily be wrong” due to the ambiguous I-persona.152 With these words, Skeat makes it clear that it is not necessarily Chaucer the Man who is revealed through accounts of his life, but rather the scholars themselves and their own personal viewpoints. As Louis Althusser has shown, ideologies can be extremely powerful, and it seems that despite the warnings of Lounsbury, Skeat, and others, a number of critics have found it difficult to resist the allure of projecting their own beliefs by citing purported Chaucerian “autobiography.”153 Consequently, in the many biographies of Chaucer that have been written since the nineteenth century, the result has been many different “Chaucers” painted with the ideological colors of a given critic, and at times marked by the f lawed “legendary” inclination to read

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the verse literally. These ideologies may or may not be conscious, but they are unquestionably impactful. J. M. Manly stands out as the biographer who has taken the “realistic” possibilities of Chaucer’s verse to their limits, and his conjectural method is characteristic of much twentieth-century life-writing. Manly is forthright about his technique, describing Some New Light on Chaucer as neither a formal critical treatise for experts nor a book of fact but “merely a collection of suggestions of a more or less speculative character” that represent the culmination of his view that “we shall never succeed in the interpretation of the past without the use of the constructive imagination.”154 Manly’s candor here is laudable and his point well-taken, but there is no doubt that the type of overtly “imaginative” construction he endorses frees him to manipulate the poet’s life as he sees fit. Manly uses his “imaginative” technique primarily to support two currents of biographical thinking about the poet. The most important and inf luential of these is the depiction of a consciously realistic author whose works show medieval life as it “really” was.155 Manly takes this viewpoint to its extreme, being particularly interested in proving the “truth” of the Canterbury Tales by identifying the actual, living people Chaucer supposedly based the pilgrims on. Manly argues that “some at least of the pilgrims were real persons, and persons with whom Chaucer can be shown to have had definite personal contacts.”156 He proceeds to offer some of these “definite” identifications, by locating such figures as the “real” Southwark innkeeper Harry Bailly, the “tricky Reeve of Baldeswell,” and so forth.157 These identifications disregard the fictional functions of the characters in question and help Manly to show that Chaucer is a “realistic” poet who portrays his culture “with all the solidity and colors of reality, [since] the men and women of his world are as vivid and familiar as those whom we see daily with our own eyes.”158 The “new light” Manly shone on Chaucer has proven quite inf luential, but his de-emphasis of the literary traditions surrounding narrative personae gives the verse and its speakers a “truth to life” that the author may never have intended within the fictional framework of the Tales. To be sure, there is much critical merit in seeking new meaning and attempting to open up the poet’s oeuvre to new possibilities. As I utilize the term in this study, such willfully provocative broadening of the interpretive horizons is usefully “queer”—and the ambivalent persona itself functions to forward a great many engaging “queer” possibilities. However, biographical analysis is not literary interpretation, and as real as they may seem the Canterbury Tales are poetic texts and not historical records. Hence, there is a danger in Manly’s “imaginative” reconstructions insofar as they may

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well take us further from the historical truth, which is presumably what biographical scholarship seeks to find. Although most recent biographers have taken care to utilize the documentary remnants of the poet’s life, the line between scholarly lifewriting and imaginative criticism has been crossed on several occasions. John Gardner’s biography is an especially intriguing case in point, as it represents a fusion of his scholarly and creative interests, resulting in a lively, self-consciously fictionalized sketch of The Life and Times of Chaucer. Gardner fully acknowledges his fictional inclination, declaring that he tried to be “judicious and relatively objective” as he “gathered the available scholarly materials in a heap, to make a stab at sorting them and finding out how much it is possible to say, or rather make up, about the character of Chaucer.” But because the historical records are so fragmentary, Gardner alleges that “we have no choice but to make up Chaucer’s life as if his story were a novel, by the play of fancy on the lost world’s dust and scrapings.”159 Gardner uses this approach to good effect and succeeds in “[making] the story interesting,” but at what cost?160 Outright fiction in biographical writing creates a “life” that is largely a construct of the imagination, so that the result may not be perceived as biographical scholarship at all, but historical fiction, or a popularizing novel of sorts. With these issues in the foreground, it is an interesting exercise to consider how Gardner utilizes the persona-construct in his fictionalized account. Gardner’s text follows in the wake of the midcentury reemergence of persona theory in Chaucer Studies, and his use of and reference to the I-persona is perhaps even more extensive than in any other recent Chaucerian life-writing. Discussing one of Chaucer’s “complaints,” for example, Gardner claims that “the poem’s speaker is some fictional persona or caricature of the actual poet,” which is significant because “as a rule . . . Chaucer’s ingenious [narrative] tricks contribute to meaning.”161 Brief comments of this sort are quite suggestive given that the biographer’s substantially fictionalized “Chaucer” is a figure predicated largely upon the poet’s “ingenious tricks” of narrative: the medieval author’s manipulation of his I-narrator(s) not only appears to contribute to meaning, but also encourages, or at least permits Gardner’s biographical freedom. Thus, Gardner’s book illustrates just how crucial the persona might be for those who favor a speculative approach to the author’s biography. In Gardner’s case, he variously underlines the “reality” of the speaker or emphasizes the narrator’s fictional aspects, depending on which seems more suitable for his storytelling purposes in a given moment. It is this ease of biographical appropriation that is most troubling to the reception theorist, because manipulations of the kind seen throughout Gardner’s text afford a biographer even more license to shape the “Chaucer”

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whose story is told. This is no better seen than in the vivid conclusion to Gardner’s “life,” which stems from an emphatically autobiographical reading of the Retraction as the author’s own pious, final words. In Gardner’s evocative conception, when [Chaucer] finished he handed the quill to Lewis. He could see the boy’s features clearly now, could see everything clearly, his “whole soul in his eyes”—another line out of some old poem, he thought sadly, and then, ironically, more sadly yet, “Farewel my bok and devocioun!” Then in panic he realized, but only for an instant, that he was dead, falling violently toward Christ.162

Gardner’s colorful Life and Times makes it crystal clear that, as Donald Howard noted in his own Chaucer biography, some element of fiction is almost inevitable because “we do not find anything without knowing first what we are looking for.”163 The point, then, is not to condemn Gardner but to consider the implications of his approach. From a critical perspective, it might simply be said that substantially based biographical possibilities are welcome, but theoretically unfounded suppositions are not. This chapter has shown that, historically, many (or most) of the baseless presumptions that have been made regarding Chaucer’s life are forged through unsound usage of the persona that downplays its autofictional resonance in favor of purported autobiographical indicators. In fairness, Gardner’s fictional creation helps us to see that the narrative persona actually invites biographers to apply their “constructive imagination” because Chaucer uses the I-persona to speak to readers across the gulf that divides medieval from modern, beckons us into his inner world, makes us want to think his thoughts and feel his feelings even as he masks these behind multiple ironies and leaves us guessing at them. This quality, which at once invites and eludes, is so much an aspect of his style that no literary biography focused on his works can escape an effort to see into his mind.164

Such is the temptation of the persona for the Chaucerian biographer. In response, where do critics draw the line between what is excessive biographical manipulation and what is not? Is there in fact such a line, or should there be? What is fact and what is fiction, and when should fictional texts be brought into the discussion of historical facts? The answers to these important questions are difficult if not impossible to determine, but the questions themselves deserve close attention. As time progresses, these questions will continue to arise, particularly in response

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to biographies such as Gardner’s, or Terry Jones’s more recent collaboration that speculates about Who Murdered Chaucer?165 One way of addressing these questions is by admitting their very intractability, frankly recognizing the contingencies of medieval information and its modern deployments and recuperations. Derek Pearsall’s Chaucer biography exemplifies this very approach, offering, as the title suggests, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography. Pearsall is careful not to make sweeping conjectures, present unsupported speculations, or draw absolute conclusions, and thus his “life” counters hundreds of years of autobiographical interpretations, “legendary” ideals, and outright appropriation by merely telling the reader what the poet may have been like. Faced with the allure of the persona, Pearsall candidly comments that the poet “did not make the biographer’s task any easier” since “he seems to have anticipated modern verdicts on the ‘death of the author’ by prudently absenting himself, leaving only his creations to deputize for him.” Pearsall is mindful that the I-persona has been appropriated by many biographers and therefore consciously seeks to avoid such manipulation, saying that “the emphasis on Chaucer’s presence within his poems has often been no more than a convenient fiction for those who wished to attribute their own interpretive activity to his supposed intentions.”166 By merely presenting the possibilities for Chaucer’s life, Pearsall encourages readers to consider the information for themselves and draw their own conclusions, rather than presenting the sort of ideological certainties frequently encountered earlier. Inevitably, there are moments where Pearsall does draw conclusions or indicate an authoritative viewpoint, but these moments are few and far between, and in such moments we usually are told that things are “likely” or “possible,” rather than “certain.” This is sensible, because the only thing one can be “certain” of with regards to Chaucer’s life is uncertainty itself. Pearsall also is wise to steer clear of the persona in his biography, because he realizes that while “the relationship between ‘life’ and ‘works’ may take many forms” and may cultivate our interests, the poet ultimately tells us “little about himself ” and his writings do not evince his actual existence. Hence, “it might be better to have no biography at all” than to create a fallacious “semi-fictional biography” based on “elusive,” unreliable references from Chaucer’s poetry.167 Pearsall naturally recognizes that there is value in Chaucerian biography, but merely yearns for a measured, theoretically sound account. Pearsall himself has provided such an account, and it is important to note that his conservative approach is not ultimately limiting, although it may appear to confine the possibilities for the poet’s life by sticking to the archives and generally being skeptical of the biographical utility of the verse. Instead of restricting Chaucer’s life, however, what Pearsall offers

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are possibilities themselves, powerfully indecisive biographical renderings based on the best available resources. In this uncertainty is potential itself, f luid meaning which invites a reader to draw his/her own conclusions and thus opens up the author’s life to numerous possibilities while, in turn, expanding the possible horizons of the poetic corpus.168 This would seem to be the theoretical ideal, and Pearsall’s biography epitomizes a widely accepted contemporary viewpoint that criticism— biographical and otherwise—is best utilized to ask questions and facilitate potential meanings rather than close down the interpretive contingencies.169 And by preferring possibility to positivity, Pearsall’s method significantly parallels the persona itself in its function as a “queer” construct that questions scholarly “norms” and creates compelling, productive inconclusiveness. To be sure, Pearsall’s Life of Geoffrey Chaucer is neither deliberately “queer” nor purposefully ref lective of the tenets of queer theory. Nevertheless, it is exceptional in its consistent advancement of such thoughtful open-endedness, its questioning of tradition, and especially its perceptive skepticism of personae for biographical purposes. Whether it is called “queer” or simply historically and theoretically astute, the utility of Pearsall’s approach seems unimpeachable. Admittedly one still does not, and cannot really “know” him, but in the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer readers are presented with historically viable, theoretically valid possibilities that illuminate who the author/civil servant might have been. In truth, this is all we can hope to discover for such a sparsely documented figure six centuries after his death. As this chapter has shown, in Chaucerian biography manipulations of the persona profoundly inf luence the portrayal of the poet—especially in ways that underline his laureate status. When Chaucer’s “life” is written, it is obvious that the author has been, can be, and will be constructed for various ideological purposes, and these ideals often are advanced through a questionably literal view of the narrative “I.” Of course, the shadowy figure of Chaucer does not just emerge in biographical descriptions. Constructions of the author and his life also have been a staple of interpretive scholarship since the earliest stages of Chaucer criticism, particularly based on favorable, autobiographical representations of the I-persona. The following chapters will analyze significant examples of this kindred critical appropriation of the persona, in the hopes of increasing scholarly awareness of just how much our own beliefs and preconceptions inf luence our comprehension of Chaucer, his narrators, and his narratives.

CHAPTER 3 CHAUCER SPEAKS: MEMOIRS OF THE MAN?

The voice, which is to say the question of the voice (who is speaking? is there a voice?) is not the form of, but the provocation to ethical decision. —Steven Connor1 To assess the character of criticism requires one to study the ethical attitudes behind critical claims as well as the attitudes engendered either consciously or unconsciously by particular theoretical stances. —Tobin Siebers2

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ince the classical period, poetry and morality have been intricately linked. As Horace noted, poets seek either to delight or profit, to entertain or benefit.3 Arguably, the moral dimension that has been a defining feature of literary writing since the Greeks is especially prominent in the Middle English corpus. The late Middle Ages was a time of profound political change, scholastic growth, and theological questioning, which led exegetes and poets alike to examine the ethics of the period. Chaucer was no exception. Although his verse is more varied in its content and approach than that of most late medieval poets, there is no doubt that moral concerns are at the very center of Chaucer’s major works. This is obvious, for example, throughout the Canterbury Tales, where the author “himself ” tells us that he will offer stories “of best sentence and moost solaas,” as well as tales of “moralitee and hoolynesse.”4 In a similar vein the minor works, which are the focus of this chapter, characteristically were written with an eye toward moral issues. Hence, in the texts under consideration below, the I-narrator not only laments “that al is lost for lak of stedfastnesse” but in Chaucer’s Retraction even goes so far as to revoke his “translacions and enditynges of worldly vanities” and seek remembrance for works of “moralitee, and devocioun” alone.5

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Citations of this sort prove that morality is all-important, and even unavoidable, for interpretations of Chaucer’s oeuvre. Without question, twenty-first century scholars are far less likely than, say, their Victorian or “Exegetical” predecessors to render explicit moral judgments on literary works or to read those texts primarily as repositories of moral insight. But as the distinguished scholar of ethics Tobin Siebers has emphasized, it remains true today that “the character of criticism emerges in its critical choices, and the nature of that critical choice reveals that literary criticism is inextricably linked to ethics.”6 More directly, Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods note that the critical practices of de Man, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida et al., have been enlisted over the last few decades in projects that are overwhelmingly motivated by ethical concerns—above all, in attempts to expose and to rectify the oppression or marginalization, through culture, of individuals and groups on the basis of race, class, sex and/or gender, or sexuality.7

This contention certainly holds true in the realm of Chaucer Studies, where the reading practices of critics typically involve applying their own “ethical codes” to the medieval corpus (to borrow from Wayne Booth).8 In the reception of the minor works, the “ethical codes” of critics are widely apparent. Chapter 2 has shown that idealization permeates Chaucerian life-writing, with biographers going to great lengths to portray the author favorably, working to establish and “monumentalize” the supposed “Father of English poetry.” Chapter 3 demonstrates that the same impulse is found in non-biographical scholarship on the minor works, where a moral propensity is often explicit since critics take great care to present the poet as an honorable and pious figure, in the face of material that includes problematic or even objectionable contents. Time and again a kind of moral value has been assigned to the minor works and the author who wrote them, for in the eyes of most readers Chaucer’s (presumably) virtuous, magisterial outlook is revealed in his epistles, and especially in the Retraction. Therefore, I contend that the reception of the minor works is inextricably bound up with issues of literary morality, as the desire to create an ideal, moral image of Chaucer is consistently identifiable. It is this inclination that will be critiqued on the following pages, because it is clear that the moral beliefs of scholars have skewed their depictions—or, rather, judgments—of Chaucer’s short works and their narrative personae. A pivotal issue for my discussion is the assumption that, in the words of Alfred David, the minor works “give us a more intimate glimpse of Chaucer’s mind than we receive in more formal and elaborate works.”9

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The short poems do have an extraordinary historical valence since the author addresses actual contemporaries and arguably offers a more direct political and social engagement than is typically found in the longer works. It is thus no surprise that the scholarly legacies of these minor works are marked by various historicizing approaches, with critics appealing to the author by connecting Chaucer, his life, and his supposed ideals directly to the texts in question. In other words, further evidence is at hand for the autobiographical impulse examined in chapter 2. In the context of the minor works, the problem with this autobiographical tendency is that these texts are neither documentary records nor historical discourse, but pieces of literature offered in the voice(s) of the autofictional I-persona. Consequently, Chaucer the Man may well be wholly detached from the text(s), his beliefs entirely different from those articulated by the firstperson speaker(s). The autobiographical reception of the minor works is therefore doubly revealing because it shows not only how the persona implicates, or is implicated by Chaucer criticism, but also demonstrates the degree to which the author is morally shaped by critics. To critique the appeal to the author described above, this chapter considers three primary categories of narrative speaking found in key shorter works. The first two categories, and the following sections, highlight David’s statement that “identifying the people to whom the short poems are addressed and the occasions behind them has been the object of much patient research.”10 Accordingly, I will examine Chaucer talking to friends and Chaucer talking to kings. To consider these two types of Chaucerian “talk,” the scholarly legacies of the following poems will be analyzed: “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton,” “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan,” “Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn,” “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” and “The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse.” Finally, the focus will be shifted toward the heavens in order to analyze an altogether different kind of “talk”: Chaucer talking to God. For this category of speaking I shall consider “Chaucer’s Retraction,” a short prose text with an alluringly tangible narrator that brings to a head many of the issues found in the reception of the lyrics, as controversy arises concerning the author, his intentions, and his religiosity. As Jay Ruud has asserted, Chaucer’s minor works provide a key to understanding the whole corpus because the poet’s mode of presentation and manipulation of narrative style in the shorter works adds much to our comprehension of the Chaucerian persona and the structure of the longer works.11 This crucial point highlights the importance of the minor works to my project, and articulates one of the main reasons I am brief ly considering selected short works before moving on to “major” texts in the remainder of the monograph. To borrow from this chapter’s

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opening epigraphs, the persona is the “provocation to ethical decision” for the minor works, and by examining its reception the moral attitudes “engendered either consciously or unconsciously” by scholars are clearly seen. The complex “voice” (or voices) of the short works consistently is downplayed in critical accounts, and hence this elision helps us to see the extent to which numerous scholars have chosen to ignore the fictionality of Chaucer’s personae. For it is apparent that the autofictional nature of the narrative “I” problematizes many accounts where the presumed ideals of the poet are upheld and a notably moral Chaucer is constructed. Nevertheless, time after time, critics of the short works project an auctor who offers authoritative truth and serves as a guide to virtuous actions. The persistent creation of this high-minded father-figure illustrates that, as Booth explains, “the virtues of narratives relate to the virtues of selves and societies, [and] the ethos of any story affects or is affected by the ethos—the collection of virtues—of any given reader.”12 3.1 The Man and His Familiars: Chaucer Talks to Friends In an early printed edition of the “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton,” the poem is introduced with the following headlink: “Here foloweth the counceyll of Chaucer touchyng Maryag &c. Which was sente te [sic] Bucketon &c.”13 The topic of marriage (and marriage counsel) has remained central to the poem’s reception ever since this rubric was written more than five hundred years ago. Closely aligned with this is the topic of friendship, which has likewise been highly important to scholars over the years. This holds true not only for “Bukton” but also the “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan,” while there are different questions of friendship surrounding the third poem to be considered in this section, “Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn.” A general assumption of intimacy between author and addressee has distinctly shaped the interpretation of these poems, and is part and parcel of the pervasive impulse toward literal readings and “autobiographical” possibilities. In the reception of these particular minor works, this predilection is perhaps best seen in the widespread tendency toward individualizing each poem’s content. For centuries, critics have sought to determine the kind of relationship that existed between Chaucer and his three fellows, and in light of these relationships, to draw firm conclusions about the “counceyll” being offered to each individual “friend.” To analyze this brand of historical individualization it is useful to first consider “Bukton” and “Scogan” collectively, because they are kindred works with parallel content that were written to identifiable members of the royal court. Whereas projected notions of friendship for

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“Scogan” typically tie into the general, universal motif of love, readings of “Bukton” primarily are centered upon the more specific theme of marriage. In particular, critics have sought to explain—or explain away—“Bukton’s” commentary on matrimony, which is easily read as being quite wary of “the sorwe and wo that is in mariage” (6), although the narrator does advise that “bet ys to wedde than brenne in worse wise” (18). One of the earliest accounts of “Bukton” was published by William Godwin, who defends both the poem and its writer by asserting that “it would be unjust however, from his playfully expressing an aversion to marriage in the character of a satirist, to infer that he had not lived in perfect harmony and happiness with the mother of his children.”14 I have previously cited this allusion to the functions of the persona-construct in chapter 2, which allows Godwin to justify the poem’s disparagement of marriage and ensure that the author’s own wedded state is not seen as somehow impure. By rationalizing the verse as satiric discourse, Godwin detaches Chaucer from the text’s controversial views, absolving him of any ill-feelings toward the holy rite of marriage, or indeed his wife. And the Romantic scholar Godwin is not alone in citing literary conventions to account for potentially unbecoming material found in both “Bukton” and “Scogan.” According to V. J. Scattergood, “Bukton” is a playful letter of advice that makes use of conventional wisdom (i.e., proverbs), and “it is not difficult to appreciate the main direction of Chaucer’s advice to Bukton”: the poet is interested in the difficulty of truth, of being “al trewe.” By asserting a kind of playful use of convention, Scattergood presents the poet’s own position on marriage as an ambiguous one, and perhaps deliberately so; like Godwin before him Scattergood implicitly reconciles the poem and excuses the poet, in this case by citing the conventional, comic nature of his advice that leads him to present marriage as the lesser of two evils.15 Both Godwin and, to a lesser degree, Scattergood place “Bukton” in the category of antimatrimonial satire, a genre common in the Middle Ages that has predictable, characteristically misogynistic content—and if this content is expected in such a work, it can safely be assumed as being distinct from the author and his own views. This has been the attitude of several readers, whose citations of conventions serve to disassociate the poet from potentially indecorous perspectives regarding those who “falle of weddynge in the trappe” (24). An interesting feature of such readings is that the satiric persona— itself a highly conventional narrative construct—rarely comes into play. Instead, the common view seems to be that the speaker of the poem is Chaucer, but he is merely speaking of/through conventional ideals. However, is it not possible, or even likely that Chaucer is manipulating his

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I-speaker here to playfully address the subject of marriage? Of course it is, and especially since this appears to be a satirical poem and not a straightforward friendly letter. Then why does the persona not play a key role in the poem’s reception? I believe the answer lies in the autobiographical inclination of critics, who characteristically yearn to hear Chaucer’s voice when another narrative “I” could be speaking. In the case of “Bukton,” this bent is signaled by the age-old, traditional title of the poem—we are not just reading an envoy to one Bukton but the “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton.” For those who accept that “Bukton” is conventional in nature yet hear the author’s voice rather than a persona, a typical move is to draw attention to Chaucer’s audience of courtiers to justify the contents of the poem. In this view, the poet is subtly divorced from the cynical sentiments of the text even if he “himself ” is the purported narrator. Kittredge, for instance, states that the poem “is no more significant of Chaucer’s views or experiences than a comic valentine,” given that “it seems to have been not uncommon to send a jocose message, in dispraise of wedlock, to a friend who had either just married or was on the point of taking such a step,” so that the text may well have been read at a farewell stag dinner amidst the “inextinguishable laughter of the blessed bachelors.”16 Pearsall concurs, and taking into account the historical relations between Chaucer and Bukton, states that the poem’s general, bitter tone indicates that it is “not too genial” but “would have given pleasure in an all-male company.”17 Some might consider “Bukton”—and the responses of male critics such as Kittredge and Pearsall—as evidence of the “obligatory heterosexuality” that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sees as central to male- dominated kinship systems, where there is a direct relationship between “male homosocial desire” and the various structures used to maintain and transmit patriarchal power.18 In fact, this perspective is surprisingly rare, and although few would deny that there is some degree of misogyny implied in “Bukton,” Chaucerians of all theoretical colors have ultimately freed the poet of responsibility for this material. Whether this is a conscious move is debatable, but it is clear that the conventions of antimatrimonial satire are convenient for this very purpose. Hence, by placing the poem within the context of Bukton and other male courtiers at the time, the text is presented as being for this historical audience and thus its questionable virtues not truly believed by the author himself. On the whole, interpretations of “Bukton” that cite literary conventions and/or antimatrimonial satire do sensibly engage the contents of the verse, especially by cautiously distancing the poet from the poem. But where these readings arguably falter is in failing to take the next step and

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more fully detaching the author from his creation by directly recognizing and utilizing the persona. As any reader of classical satire or Shakespeare’s sonnets knows well, there is no reason to assume that “personal” poems are emotionally accurate or straightforward in terms of their content, speaker, or addressee. The same is true of “Bukton,” where it may be that the alleged historical connection with the real-life courtier Bukton has proven too enticing for critics, not unlike the so-called “Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets.” An interesting method for reconciling these issues might be to attempt a reading centered on the following question: What if we did not have the traditional title here, and line one simply read “my maister” rather than “my maister Bukton”? If Chaucer’s “maister” remained anonymous, then perhaps critics might be inclined to offer more fully autofictional accounts. This would raise some intriguing questions, because a reader is thus faced with, at most, a “mark of autobiography” that is elusive throughout the poem. In the envoy, it may be argued that the text does seem more intimate than the preceding material, but even here the familiarity and personal sentiments are impossible to pinpoint with any accuracy. Collectively, the poem does present a kind of shared humor and appears to offer friendly advice, but the final implication remains unclear—maybe the narrator is disparaging of marriage, maybe not. But by distancing the poet through the persona, critics might be more comfortable exploring the likelihood that this poem is critical of the holy institution of marriage, and that the satire is potentially biting and acerbic. Even if it is not scathing in its critique, the presence of a persona underlines that this poem deals with universal sentiments and regards that could be sent from virtually any articulate medieval man to any kindred spirit, any literate male courtier to another. What an autofictional reading ultimately teaches is that the poem is an ambiguous work that need not—or should not—be taken at face value. Despite this marked ambiguity, critics of “Bukton” frequently individualize the poem and make the case for a personal text that addresses sensitive, private concerns. Here again, it is evident that even if the content itself is somehow questionable, most scholars take care to project an admirable epistolary writer noted for “always following artistic and moral truth.”19 This is identifiable in the reception of both “Bukton” and “Scogan,” with Chaucer customarily seen as a kindhearted companion who yearns to honestly dispense whatever advice is necessary in order to help his comrades in times of need. David’s reading of “Bukton” illustrates this tendency well. No matter which Bukton was the real-life recipient of the text, David contends that what is important is that he belonged to the same class as Chaucer, so the poem provides readers with

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“a rare insight into Chaucer’s relationship with members of his circle, men with whom he has outwardly much in common and who . . . also shared something of Chaucer’s outlook, his learning, his humor, and perhaps the complexity of his vision.” David argues that it would be “a serious distortion” of the poem to assert that Chaucer intended the verses to dissuade Bukton from marrying, because “what shines through the satire is his sincere wish for his friend’s happiness.”20 The poem may be satirical, but it is well-intended and sincere in its good-natured personal sentiments. Jane Chance goes even further, seeing “Bukton” as a wholly sincere account of marriage, as an epistle that highlights the virtues of love, matrimony, and even Christian piety. Chance argues that the text intimates the need for caution in heeding any condemnation of marriage—“in short, the poem actually means the opposite of what it seems to say: marriage is not folly but wisdom.”21 The logic here highlights the lengths that may occasionally be taken to ensure the poet’s moral standing. For Chance, the poem is not humorous but pious, as its words on marriage actually serve to direct the reader toward the ultimate friend, the goal of the sincere penitent: God the Father and his teaching. When sincerely pious men like Bukton or Chaucer understand and obey the Word of God, they realize the necessity of both literal and figurative marriage, living the spiritual life by binding themselves to their wives as Christ bound himself to the Church so that “paradoxically, true freedom derives only from bondage and obedience to the New Law of Christ predicated on love, both of neighbor and of self, for the sake of God.”22 The moralization on display here—a kind of interpretive cloistering of “Father Chaucer”—is encountered frequently in criticism of the shorter works, including the next focus of my attention, the “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan.” G. L. Kittredge once described “Scogan” as Chaucer’s only piece of “real autobiography.”23 Recalling that Kittredge was a scholar who clearly recognized the fictionality of the persona-construct, this is an intriguing comment. It seems probable that Kittredge favored a literal reading of this particular I-narrator because it helped him to foster an advantageous view of Chaucer-as-friend, with the amiable author giving sage advice to his compeer. Others have been far more overt in projecting such a view, and Chance’s account is again illustrative of the degree to which certain critics have gone to moralize Chaucer’s epistolary verse. Chance maintains that, while the surface level of “Scogan” concerns a topical situation involving a problem of courtly love, “its underlying level . . . concerns secular and religious means of circumventing the power of mutability and spiritual death.” She believes that Chaucer uses the text to show that both men, having avoided love, must realize that the stream of divine grace cannot bring forth proper fruit if they do not obey the law

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of God by following a higher form of love, the love of self and neighbor for God.24 Ruud would agree, and cites the Ciceronian material of the poem as evidence that it advises Scogan to obey Nature’s law and place his love where it best belongs. It is acceptable to love one whom nature would see as a fit object of love, but it is more important to direct one’s love toward the most fruitful end, the love of God.25 By reading the poem with such a moral view, these critics are able to gloss over the possibility—prompted by the famous lines in the envoy that beseech Scogan to “thenke on Tullius kyndenesse; / Mynne thy frend, there it may fructyfye!” (47–48)—that Chaucer is using the text to plead with Scogan for monetary assistance. Although few accounts of “Scogan” have upheld such an outwardly pious image of the author, several critics have, like Ruud, applied literary conventions to warrant the entreaty found in the poem’s envoy. For example, Scattergood finds the satirical male posturing of “Bukton” to have been replaced in “Scogan” with an ennobled notion of love as a kind of mirror in which a sensitive man may see himself. Scattergood acknowledges that Chaucer may have been in financial straits and possibly wrote the epistle to ask his well-connected friend to remember him in such a way as to benefit him materially; however, the Ciceronian content of the poem ultimately points to a suggestion that Scogan not separate himself from love and instead continue their (loving) friendship.26 Scattergood deems the metaphors associated with love to be offered from an ironic narrative perspective, with Chaucer stating that financially speaking Michaelmas is a particularly sensitive time for people like Scogan and himself due to rents and so forth having to be paid, and it is therefore not a time to be altering relationships or provoking the displeasure of those on whom one depends.27 Here is an illustrative example of the individualization of the minor works, as “Scogan” is placed in a precise personal context. Scattergood recognizes that a persona may be present in the poem, yet he seems to downplay its significance; he shrewdly discusses the classical undercurrent of the verse, but the persona (a classical construct) is functionally marginalized in favor of the poet’s own voice. Like Scattergood, David may be seen as citing conventions as part of a program of individualizing “Scogan.” David describes the poem as a sort of balade de bon conseyl that gives a young friend some humorous advice, which turns upon the similarities between Scogan and Chaucer. 28 David interprets the piece as a playful epistle that is neither begging Scogan for money nor asking him to put in a good word for Chaucer, but rather urges Scogan to remember the example of his old friend, and contrast their present fortunes in love as a remedy against future pride and recklessness since all the works of man and nature fade away, literature included.29

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This is a persuasive reading, but it is questionable whether the personal, private intentions of a conventional poem like “Scogan” are so neatly recoverable. By definition, conventions are public in that many people recognize and utilize them. And it is important to note that there have been a handful of critics who view both “Scogan” and “Bukton” as verse epistles that are not merely private but address “potentially disparate, and hence more public groups of readers alongside the coterie audience they ostensibly target.”30 In a literary culture in which poetry apparently was distributed in manuscript among courtiers, it is certainly possible that Chaucer assumed both texts would have some degree of public circulation and thus wrote with a wider audience in mind.31 This might well explain certain conventional features of each poem, but few critics have supported this reasonable position. Instead, private concerns rule the day. When literary conventions are cited, their public resonance commonly is tempered in favor of interpretive individualization, as scholars advance a private meaning for conventional material of a kind that may have been known and used far and wide. Though the conventional content of “Scogan” does seem to have a universal quality, there is a level of intimacy to the poem that cannot be overlooked. Thus, in seeking a more theoretically nuanced reading the notion that there is a familiar regard in the poem cannot be discounted, highlighted by the seven separate references to Scogan in the text. Considering these repeated references, a case could be made that “Scogan” is a more thoroughly intimate, personal poem than “Bukton.” However, the Ciceronian content and classical allusions may serve to undercut such a view, and what is more important for my purposes is the notion of intimacy itself. This is a belief that sidesteps the conventional nature of the I-speaker, a narrator who addresses classical figures and ageold ideals. This narrator is nothing other than a persona who may seem to speak for the poet himself but who may just as likely be speaking in a detached public voice for a broad courtly audience. I believe that many readers of this poem have been coaxed by the references to Scogan—not to mention the established title itself (“Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan”)—into autobiographical perspectives and precise, pointed advice. But the allusions to Scogan need not be read “straight,” and if the poem is understood as spoken by a persona and not the poet himself the conventional features may take on a different register and new interpretive possibilities may appear. “Scogan” offers conventional sentiments throughout: amorous desires, wariness for undercutting the laws of love, dread for one’s erroneous ways, and apprehension for old age and the passing of time. Collectively, these traditional motifs produce a kind of distancing-effect, or at least a sense that whoever the speaker

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is his feelings are in many ways universal. Seen within the text’s traditional schemes, the references to Scogan do appear pointed and perhaps even biting at times: “this is for thyn offence; / Thow causest this diluge of pestilence” (13–14). Here again, it may be that more fully utilizing persona-theory would help critics to temper their instinctual desire to establish (or uphold) “Father Chaucer” in the poem. As with “Bukton,” applying the persona to “Scogan” might encourage renewed discussion of the harsh criticism that is perhaps leveled at the recipient. On the other hand, the persona might underscore the fact that these references need not signify any particular “offence” but fit the general tenor of the text’s conventional discourse. When the autofictional persona is emphasized, the advice to Scogan becomes more obviously vague and noncommital. It may be eminently clear that the speaker suggests that one should never “Love dyffye” (49), but beyond that the suggestions are consistently equivocal; in particular it is not evident what the reader might do other than generally abide by the rules of love. And even when the implications are seemingly identifiable at points, they could be applied to virtually any “frend” and not just an individual named Scogan. The reception of “Scogan” not only tends to downplay such impersonal interpretive possibilities, but also is marked by the kind of pervasive seriousness, or indeed moralization seen in Chance’s reading cited earlier. Few go so far as Chance, but a number of critics overlook the poem’s humorous undercurrent, ranging from lighthearted comments on aging (“While I was yong, I put hre forth in prees; / But al shal passe that men prose or ryme; / Take every man hys turn, as for his tyme” [40–42]) to possible sexual innuendo (“Lest for thy gilt the wreche of Love procede / On all hem that ben hoot and rounde of shap, . . . Than shal we for oure labour have no mede” [30–33]). The presence of the persona does not necessarily alter these humorous f lourishes, but their general oversight has functioned within the individualizing tendency of the poem’s criticism. Rather than perceiving the persona, scholars prefer to see the poet. And in this case, critics have favored a broadly serious view when the humorous possibilities of the text—highlighted by the playful persona— might actually help to minimize any likelihood that Chaucer found himself in financial distress and was begging a “frend” for money. Hence, even if this poem was written in a strictly private context, as an epistle between two friends, the reception of “Scogan” is notable for its subtle historical evasiveness, with cited conventions helping to rationalize the poem’s petition and to foster a magisterial view of the author. Whether or not Chaucer truly was in need of money, he was, it would seem, never lacking in sage advice for his friends. If this is so, then what happens in scholarship on a text where the author is not addressing a close

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friend, but apparently is chastising an employee? Does the poet emerge as a similarly wise and caring advisor? The answer is yes, as the criticism on “Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn” makes clear. As is true of “Bukton” and “Scogan,” scholars typically view “Adam Scriveyn” as a private poem with personal concerns. But this is a very different work that conveys a wholly different type of friendship—if the term “friend” is even appropriate to describe Adam the scrivener. In this seven line poem a tangible sense of social hierarchy adheres, with the narrator addressing an inferior intimate rather than a man of similar class and employ. Nonetheless, the patterns of thought found in “Adam Scriveyn’s” reception are akin to those seen above, with critics again displaying an interest in historicizing the poem and individualizing its advice. The poem’s opening phrase and rhetoric makes it clear that it is addressed to a scribe with the name of Adam. This was a very common name in medieval England, and it is possible that the verse addresses scribes in general, given that there were doubtless many authors who were unhappy about having to “correcte” their works because of scribal “negligence” (lines 6–7). Yet the name Adam itself, like Bukton and Scogan, has proven very enticing to critics. This is particularly evident in the series of scholarly accounts from the early twentieth century that sought high and low to identify the Adam to whom the advice is offered; the answer remains inconclusive, although Adam Pinckhurst recently has been established as the most likely figure.32 In the identification of Adam Pinckhurst as Chaucer’s alleged scribe, we have a distinct historical narrowing of the poem and its interpretive parameters that may be seen as unnecessarily restrictive and limiting. Hence, I would like to (re)expand the text’s parameters, and persona-theory is the perfect tool to do just that. If it is assumed that this is an autofictional narrator speaking and not Chaucer himself—as the traditional, critically accepted title suggests—then the relationship between the speaker and Adam becomes far less precise and intimate. Rather than a brief condemnation of Adam Pinckhurst, the text emerges in a more general light—these “wordes” could be spoken by virtually any medieval writer to any scribe. A useful model for reading the poem is Carolyn Dinshaw’s well-known account in Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. Like most critics Dinshaw does, in fact, seem inclined to hear Chaucer’s own voice in/through the poem; but rather than focusing primarily on the historical relationship between author and scribe Dinshaw views the text more broadly, perceiving it as speaking to the “social enterprise” of literary writing. Dinshaw notes the conventionality of the verse—“it sounds like a classical epigraph”—and observes that the text may well articulate a real exasperation with the scribal reproduction of Chaucer’s works.33 However, rather than falling

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into the customary trap of precisely individualizing the poem, Dinshaw takes a cue from its explosive final word to consider possible implications the verse may have for the human body, gender, and even “rape” itself. Some might question Dinshaw’s gendered association of the scribe Adam with the biblical figure of Eve or feel uneasy with her argument that the poem may serve to feminize the writer or suggest his own literary “rape.” But surely there is merit in the idea that “Adam Scriveyn” may provide trenchant commentary on masculine acts and associations, as well as the “division, difference, fragmentation, and dispersal that characterize the condition of historical language.”34 Such commentary need not fit neatly with a particular historical relationship or even the specifics of manuscript production. Instead, Dinshaw’s reading urges scholars to look beyond the obvious surface matter of the text and seek fresh, challenging interpretive angles. In this way, the noted queer theorist demonstrates that there may be hidden, “queer” possibilities in “Adam Scriveyn” that remain unexplored, and this is still true nearly twenty years after Dinshaw published her account of the poem. The persona invites a similar view. “Queer” and ambivalent in its function, the unstable, autofictional persona signifies that the poem might be read as far more than a mere direct admonition, or even a conventional complaint with universal sentiments. In effect, the persona helps to temper the individualizing spirit surrounding “Adam Scriveyn,” and encourages readers to look beyond Chaucer the Man and his immediate situation and to consider suggestive “queer” connotations that may lie beyond the familiar circumstances of textual production. “Adam Scriveyn” is, in fact, the Chaucer text with a scholarly legacy that is most explicitly tied into specific textual issues. Motivated by the appeal to the author, the primary enterprise of scholarship has been to illuminate the advice—or anger—the poet directs at Adam the clerk, who is perceived as an identifiable, real-life figure who has worked on Chaucer’s personal manuscripts. Numerous examples of this specific brand of individualization could be cited, but a few must suffice. The most common approach is to legitimize the poem’s harsh words by depicting a careful writer understandably concerned with his text. For example, in the late nineteenth century Henry Morley observed that “some lines to Adam, his scrivener, express Chaucer’s care in correcting, rubbing, and scraping the bad copies of his works,” while Thomas Lounsbury stated that “this poetical address to the scrivener is evidence of an unmistakable character as to the anxiety that must have always burdened the mind of the author during the existence of the age of manuscript.”35 Recently, Britt Mize has similarly noted Chaucer’s “real anxiety about textual mutability” and legitimate concerns about transmission and the orthographic choices of

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his scribe, which could profoundly affect the poetics and language of his writing.36 These assertions, and many others like them based on a literal reading of the I-persona, justify the poet’s discernible anger by making the case that, as W. P. Ker suggests, Chaucer’s “appeal to the conscience of Adam, the ready writer, is the cry of an injured man who had suffered much and long without protest.”37 A common extension of these ideas is to reconcile the poet’s irritation by depicting Adam’s failings as broadly representative of medieval scribes’ typical shortcomings. This move would seem to temper the author’s resentment by directing it not exclusively at a lone figure but at a widespread problem. Scattergood’s reading is exemplary here, as he feels that the poet likely did have a specific copyist in mind when he wrote the text, yet “Chaucer’s stance in this poem—a slightly exaggerated irritation, a comically inappropriate ill-will toward the copyist—is common in other complaints,” since there is evidence from classical times onward of copyists being the subject of “outraged diatribes.”38 Here, convention is brought to the table in tacit defense of the author, which permits Scattergood to support the notion that, as in other conventional examples, “Adam Scriveyn” is a manifestation of the medieval writer’s seriousness about his art, which is to be respected in exact detail.39 Thus, Chaucer is not portrayed as an excessively angry and bitter old dotard, but instead emerges as a conscientious writer who is concerned with his art and whose magisterial words reasonably address a universal problem. Their autobiographical slant aside, any and all of these accounts are warranted. But in many ways, scholarship on “Adam Scriveyn” characteristically offers variations on the same theme. Although these readings should not be discounted since textual production is at the center of the poem, perhaps the time has come to see what else might be found if we “rubbe and scrape” (line 6) at the linguistic surface of this text. Realistically, there may be logical limits to the interpretation of this short poem. But by recognizing the persona, with its ambivalence and “queer” resonance, fresh connotations might be discovered in the proverbial cracks of “Adam Scriveyn’s” seven lines. For the purpose of opening up the poem’s prospective meaning, there is great promise in certain moral renderings that drive home the point that the primary current of criticism on “Adam Scriveyn” is to variously place the verse within “a field of associations that draw their force from their moral and philosophical gravity,” as Mize as observed.40 The very concept of gravity is a useful one here, because in scholarship on the poem Chaucer’s words are not only perceived as principled and grave, but the Man himself typically is constructed as a dignified auctor who has serious concerns about the world around him. The grave nature

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of “Adam Scriveyn’s” critical legacy finds its most explicit embodiment in the depiction of a Christian author whose poetics are designed for moral purposes, and whose art ultimately is meant to transcend art. Given its obvious biblical connotations, the very name Adam has helped to foster the devout strain of moralization for this brief poem. Here, interest in the historical personage to whom the poem is addressed is, as it were, translated into a search for Adam the First Man, and Chaucer’s relationship to that individual and his maker. In readings of this kind an appeal to the author remains, but in addition there is an appeal toward God on High that comes to eclipse the focus on textuality and earthly interests. The account of R. E. Kaske is among the most persuasive of this type. It argues that Chaucer is depicting sinful, earthly Adam the clerk writing about the sin of the first Adam.41 For Kaske, the poet is capitalizing on the “happy correspondence” between the name of his scribe and that of clericus Adam, and beseeching his copyist not to disfigure his handiwork the way his namesake disfigured the work of God.42 Chance’s moralization is even more overt, with the poem read as a very brief account of Original Sin and Redemption as witnessed through the relationship of the author and his word, and the scribe who copies his word.43 Like the original Adam, Chance contends, the copyist suffers from a darkened understanding, a sinful nature that leads to mistakes in copying, and the poet advises that only when he follows the word of his auctor—God or Christ, Chaucer if read literally—will his skill improve and will he attain redemption.44 Characteristically, these moral renderings are based on an autobiographical view of the text that the persona inherently problematizes. But the accounts themselves are intriguing, and offer some new interpretive directions for the poem. What might happen, then, if critics were to more fully use the autofictional persona to subdue the appeal to the author? The answer is that the poem might be opened up to further scrutiny regarding masculine interactions and anxieties, social hierarchy, textual authority, artistic piety, and so on. Whether moral or not, such fresh perspectives are welcome—and needed—and underscore that the persona is not only a theoretically sound concept but also an invaluable facilitator of interpretive possibility. Having analyzed Chaucer’s advisory discourse with friends, it is now time to move on and consider a second type of Chaucerian “talk”: the poet speaking to his superiors. Faced with a far different historical audience, what type of moral Chaucer is projected by critics? There is no simple answer to this question, although it is clear that the poet continues to take on a virtuous visage in scholarship on “Lak of Stedfastnesse” and “The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse.” However, in the legacies of

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these poems the author becomes more of a “political animal,” whose writing is morally bound up in the cultural politics of his day.45 3.2

The Man and His Monarchs: Chaucer Talks to Kings

In his analysis of Chaucer’s Jobs, David Carlson depicts the poet as an “official of the repressive apparatus of state” whose fame as an author was due in no small measure to the supposed fact that “he was servile, doing useful work serving dominant interests.” Carlson argues that as both a domestic servant and writer Chaucer was an ideological police officer of sorts who enforced the established order and actively fostered “a kind of myth-making, serving and protecting hegemony by representing as natural and inevitable . . . states of affairs that were not.”46 Carlson’s reading begs the question of just how servile Chaucer really was, which is of central concern with regards to the two short complaints ostensibly written to kings Richard II and Henry IV. To explain Chaucer’s relationships with his monarchs and rationalize how and why the poet could have presumed to address such powerful rulers, scholars have adopted many different positions. Whatever the favored perspective, the presence or (supposed) lack of the I-persona is vital in determining the level of intimacy present in these texts, and ultimately in defining the writer’s alleged political beliefs. It should come as no surprise that a historicizing tendency of the kind seen in section 3.1 would be found in the reception of Chaucer’s famous complaints, with numerous scholars drawing from the verse a direct, private relationship between the poet and his sovereigns. However, such projections are surprisingly inconsistent for the two works in question. Criticism of “Lak of Stedfastnesse” is, in fact, marked by a general downplaying of the poem’s potential as private discourse, while the opposite holds true for “The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse.” A handful of readers have drawn from “Lak” a personal relationship between the poet and his majesty, with the writer being seen as “firmly committed to Richard’s court” and “accepted there as one of Richard’s own,” so that the poem speaks to a “devoted though sometimes critical friendship” that developed between the two men.47 But such perspectives are rare in “Lak’s” reception, while readings of this type are common concerning “The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse.” In short, criticism of “Lak of Stedfastnesse” is characterized by several varieties of interpretive de-individualization, with scholars perceiving a socially centered authorial voice in lieu of a historically specific notion of the poetic “I.” As a result, the likelihood of direct, personal admonition is minimized in favor of more universal sentiments and literary purposes

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that might be expected in the work of a medieval court poet. In other words, a public voice is heard rather than a private one. This is a fascinating tendency, because the creation of a social, public narrative “self ” is essentially nothing other than the assertion of a particular kind of persona. However, the construct itself rarely is mentioned in criticism of “Lak,” which is a clear indicator of the widespread disregard for the persona (and persona-theory) outlined in chapter 1. Of additional interest here is that the assertion of the persona—even if not so named—significantly undercuts the possibility that “Lak” was written explicitly for Richard and may underscore a scholarly inclination to believe that Chaucer was on more intimate terms with Henry than his controversial predecessor. If, indeed, “Lak” represents a public-oriented document, then what does that mean for Chaucer and his supposed convictions? Paul Strohm has provided an answer to this question that exemplifies the scholarly tendency toward deindividualizing “Lak.” Rather than portraying Chaucer as a personal princely advisor, Strohm emphasizes his status as a court poet writing with broad public interests in mind.48 Strohm does claim that the poem inhabits a specific historical place in the continuing discussion between Richard and the Appellants regarding public order, new forms of retention, and the social responsibility of nobles and the king, so that the author might be seen as performing a general act of appropriation on Richard’s behalf.49 Despite its severe and hortative tone, the poem actually f latters and supports the position of the king by consistently aligning itself with Richard’s own program of self-presentation, through an emphasis on public order and the role of the sovereign as mediator; however, Chaucer does not address the king directly but assembles a body of powerfully suggestive statements about important social topics such as the honorable rule of law, and opposes these ideals with notions of greed and collusion.50 At a glance, Strohm’s account may seem to individualize the poem, but when his terms of analysis are closely examined—the concern with public order, social responsibility, honorable rule, and so on—it becomes evident that a deindividualizing strategy is at work. Strohm does not project private interests or a personal relationship but instead shifts the focus toward societal issues that would resonate with any reader familiar with courtly culture during the age. The poet does not appear as an outright “king’s man” but as a writer who addresses problems that are important for the entirety of mankind—he does not admonish Richard personally but offers shrewd advice that any good ruler, or indeed any good man, should heed. This is a thoughtful reading of “Lak’s” general, conventional advice. I am left wondering, however, what might result if Strohm went one step further in deindividualizing the poem,

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by utilizing the persona to more fully temper the text’s connection with both Chaucer and Richard. Obviously Chaucer did write the poem, but a more complete narrative disconnect might advance other new lines of thought. Much is at stake in such a move, however, because to downplay the author here may be to somehow downplay his magisterial wisdom or its cultural impact. And indeed, time and again the verse is made to tie in with the author’s sage perspectives on the world-at-large. In scholarship on “Lak,” a tempting variety of projected sagacity is the prototypical view that Chaucer’s commentary is not intended to inf lame the local political scene. Rather, the poem is said to display how Chaucer’s responses to political changes were repeatedly pragmatic and measured, since he was “not a man fanatically to espouse one party or another” in either his life or writing.51 However, England was filled with such greed and immorality that he felt obliged to protest and lament the many problems around him 52; in Brewer’s words, Chaucer had become so sickened by his society that “Lak” may even voice a measured acceptance of vice and puts on display “a kind of cheerful, certainly worldly, pessimism” that the poet had come to adopt.53 These readings represent a political decision of sorts that ensures that Chaucer is not seen as supporting any political thought that might be unfavorable to him. In making this assertion, I must take care to emphasize that this predilection likely is not conscious or overtly intended. But in the scholarly deindividualization of “Lak,” Chaucer frequently is portrayed as a “political animal” whose words highlight public issues and whose views are ethically sound and politically acceptable. One way to establish this position is to underline identifiable conventions and conventional thinking found in “Lak.” Characterized as a type of “abuses of the age” poem, the text’s conventional material allows and maybe even encourages critics to see the poet as a cautious, socially oriented writer whose implied narrative distance both detaches him from the controversial king and helps to foster the wisdom of his societal dealings. When seen from a traditional, conventional perspective, the work’s broad cultural commentary emerges as generically typical and politically subtle, and naturally leads to the assumption that we have in “Lak” a prudent poet who talks about the world surrounding his king rather than an author speaking directly to his king. Unconsciously, perhaps, critics are thus inclined to depict Chaucer as a tactful advisor based on the conventional material at hand, reading the narrative “I” in such a way that the writer is seen in a morally and politically favorable light. The speaker may be a kind of public persona, but nevertheless the conventional voice is shown to speak highly of “Maister Chaucer.”

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A fine example of convention being used to explain “Lak” is J. E. Cross’s essay that compares Chaucer’s poem with the Old Swedish Trohetsvisan (Song of Fidelity). Cross illuminates the characteristic discourse and political commentary found within these works (as well as others of a similar nature), which indicates the unlikelihood that Chaucer’s text makes a direct admonition to Richard since, among other reasons, a royal recipient would have been more specifically distinguished in the verse.54 In addition, Cross contends that the term “Prince” is a frequent conventional usage for addressing a patron, rather than ruler, and thus there is no conclusive evidence for the identity of the recipient, who may not even have been of royal blood.55 This is a convincing reading, and by connecting “Lak” with the traditional “Song of Fidelity,” Cross clearly shows how Chaucer’s poem generically addresses the “evils of the times” and takes into account such widespread societal ills as injustice, lies, and greed. By situating the conventional material historically, it is seen in a helpful new light, yet Cross’s discussion also demonstrates further that even when the poem is read as a broad, generic piece, critics tend to align the work’s conventional views with the actual virtues of the author.56 It may not equate to the “legendary” autobiographical depictions of “Father Chaucer” outlined in chapter 2, but it is evident that the appeal to the author has a strong pull in criticism of the short poems. This is even true in response to “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” in spite of the general critical deindividualization of the poem. Though Chaucer may have been doing nothing more with the work than offering a traditional account of his age through a conventional I-narrator, several critics have used the material in a precise fashion to construct a sage and moral author who addresses the rights and responsibilities of kingship or who believes in a mercantile nation led by a powerful and just monarch.57 The list of possible political meanings goes on, and here again it must be said that these perspectives are viable, worthwhile additions to the short catalog of scholarship on “Lak”; but here again, the autofictional resonance of the speaker often is ignored in favor of narrow perceptions of Chaucer’s own voice and the author’s own moral views. Ruud is one of the few critics who has largely kept the author out of his reading, and sees the speaker as an Everyman-figure who describes how harmony, stability, and the orderly adherence of natural law no longer exists due to widespread social dissension.58 Given the conventional nature of “Lak’s” lament for a lost Golden Age, a view of the persona as a traditional Everyman is sound. But what else might be found by pursuing this line of thought further? To date, there have been only a small number of scholarly works published on the poem. By using the persona to deepen the critical deindividualization of “Lak,” I believe that much more might

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be added to the critical canon on the piece. For starters, given the equivocal, playful nature of the persona, scholars might question whether it is necessary to read this text as a straightforward “abuses of the age” poem that offers characteristic advice. Chaucer’s verse is rarely clear-cut, and the ambivalent persona could serve as a sign that there are levels of irony or outright mockery that have yet to be considered. A greater emphasis on the “queer,” autofictional persona would help Chaucerians to read against the grain and unearth such new possibilities. If, for example, “Lak” represents a public work that does not truly offer a personal “Lenvoy to Richard,” then other worthwhile discoveries are possible regarding the poem’s view of the “fals and deceivable” (line 3) goings-on in late medieval Britain. In particular, there appears to be unrealized interpretive promise in the poem’s nationalistic sentiments and ideas of community, both of which were arguably evolving during Chaucer’s lifetime. Hence, the I-narrator’s thematic references to “estat” and “regioun,” “obligacioun,” social “dissensioun,” and wronging one’s neighbor all might raise fascinating questions about both the national rule of law and the contentious feudal system. In addition, critics would do well to explore further the fact that the poem—a piece of literary fiction that itself need not be taken at face value—is deeply interested in words and deeds, truths and falsehoods, concepts that are highlighted by the very presence of the persona, that resonate in other Chaucerian works, and are central motifs in vernacular literatures throughout Western Europe.59 In readings of “Lak” Chaucer, as public poet, is consistently depicted as wise, and his use of conventions as shrewd. Turning now to criticism of “The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse,” it is evident that when the author is read as a private advisor of princes, he is regarded as equally astute. Instead of the interpretive deindividualization encountered with “Lak,” criticism of “Purse” has largely undertaken a project of re-individualization, with this late Chaucerian text seen as an intimate, private correspondence between the author and Henry. There are several reasons for the widespread acceptance of this perspective, which assumes a literal version of the I-persona. One logical explanation is that critics have reacted instinctively to the contents of a begging poem, which by definition fosters a personal appeal. A successful begging poem must create an impression of intimacy, and “Purse” does this well. However, it is also true that “Purse,” like “Lak,” has a number of generic features that do not necessarily imply a personal relationship—yet it is “Purse” that typically is viewed as a private missive. Biographical considerations also may help to explain the divergent reception of these two works. The Chaucer Life-Records document the fact that the poet was affiliated with the courts of both Richard II and

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Henry IV. Chaucer began his career as a page and servant in Edward III’s court, and continued on in several capacities under Richard. Although it is possible that the poet was personally known to Richard, there is no surviving evidence to support this position and Pearsall’s well-respected biography sees an intimate association as being “extremely unlikely.”60 In contrast, Chaucer’s connection with the House of Lancaster is arguably more explicit, and biographers often have presumed a close relationship between the author and John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Chaucer’s purported wife Philippa served the Duchess Constance, Katherine Swynford apparently was Philippa’s sister, and the poet offered unforgettable emotional consolation for the death of Blanche in The Book of the Duchess. This is some of the primary evidence cited by scholars in support of supposed relationships Chaucer had with both John of Gaunt and his son Henry, and it is widely assumed that the bonds of affinity between these men began at a relatively early stage in the writer’s life. In fact, it is a distinct possibility that Chaucer had, at best, a limited, formal relationship with John of Gaunt. Furthermore, his relationship with Henry might have been marked by courtly ties and nothing more, so that a close friendship between the two would have been “extremely unlikely” (to reuse Pearsall’s phrase). Nevertheless, there seems to be a will to believe that Chaucer was more intimate and friendly with Henry than Richard. In addition to the generic and biographical explanations already offered, there may be another significant reason interpretive individualization commonly pertains to “Purse” and not “Lak.” Arguably, Henry may have been a more tolerable, more popular, and more effective ruler than Richard—and scholars have followed suit by aligning the poet with the preferable prince who established a dynasty. Richard’s reign was famously tumultuous, noted for popular unrest (i.e., the Peasant’s Revolt) and—especially toward the end of his regency—ample disagreement with the king’s extravagances, advisors, and rule in general (i.e., the Merciless Parliament).61 Henry’s reign was not without its own controversies, but in comparison, he eventually may have earned greater popularity with the commons and more extensive parliamentary support, and despite his usurpation of the crown his rule was arguably not marred by the same degree of political discord. Characterizing Henry’s reign, A. J. Pollard states that he was a king “genuinely concerned to work with and through the co-operation of his subjects” and was “never a would-be tyrant” which holds the “key to the durability of his regime.”62 If so, then perhaps the reception of “Purse” highlights a veiled desire to hitch the poet’s fortunes to the brightest star, so to speak, which would prove helpful in establishing an ethically prudent, politically astute, and historically important author.

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This is a highly speculative argument, and while history has favored Henry over Richard, there is no specific evidence that critics have indeed (re)individualized this poem as a result of an overt preference for Henry. In exploring this conjectural theory, I have deliberately worked on the historical and interpretive margins to make two important points. The first is that after centuries of scholarly discourse on Chaucer and his works, certain avenues of historical thought may now be worn thin. The time is right for new critical directions and fresh historical paths, and a heightened use of the ambivalent, “queer” persona might do much to destabilize the interpretive status quo. The purposefully divergent reading just offered thus represents the type of unconventional criticism that will help to facilitate future discussion by encouraging untried and unfamiliar interpretive possibilities. The second point here is to emphasize that, as Althusser has shown, ideologies are not only powerful but, perhaps more importantly, frequently unrecognized. Even if a scholarly predilection toward Henry is not in evidence, the very possibility underscores the power of ideology for the Chaucerian. Naturally, scholars who deeply respect Chaucer and love his writing are likely to manifest that admiration somehow in their criticism. It is usually not conscious or deliberate, but in the case of the minor works it is evident that critics do provide different forms of moral support for the poet. The ideologies underlying such scholarship merit further discussion, and a defining feature of my own ideology as a Chaucer critic is to work to unveil and resist the predilections of criticism. Whatever the actual ideologies underlying the (re)individualization of “Purse,” critics of this poem face a difficult challenge, for how does a reader reconcile an image of Chaucer-as-royal-advisor with certain documentary evidence that the writer was in dubious financial standing during the last years of his life? This question lends itself to interpretive historicization, which has left an indelible mark on the poem’s reception. It was not until the Victorian era that scholars began to take the writer’s fiscal (ir)responsibility seriously, with antiquarians viewing the contents of the poem through the lens of exchequer records that, according to Nicolas, “so strongly support the opinion that Chaucer was in distressed circumstances as to leave little doubt of the fact,” while the verse displays an individual who talked about poverty in terms of “such force and truth as would naturally proceed from one by whom its ills had been experienced.”63 James Lorimer, in turn, reads “Purse” as “proof ” of Chaucer’s poverty, but slightly tempers the author’s dire straits by describing the work as a “sportive production, written for the purpose of bringing his claims for an increase to his pensions in a light and graceful manner before the young king,” a petition that apparently

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proved successful since “probably the very day that he received the verses in question, he [i.e., Henry] doubled the poet’s pension.”64 Lorimer’s argument seems to stretch the bounds of logic and overstate the implications of the surviving exchequer records, all in an apparent effort to explain away the poem’s petition and closely align Chaucer with Henry. This tack is no better seen than in Marchette Chute’s mid-twentieth century account, which claims that “Chaucer had always been on excellent terms with Henry of Derby,” and thus the poem was not written to beg for money but rather proves their intimate relationship inasmuch as they could share a joke together.65 More recently, several critics have carefully examined the extant historical records and considered their implications for both the poem itself and Chaucer’s supposed financial status. The research of Sumner Ferris and Andrew J. Finnel is of particular importance here, with the former suggesting that although “Purse” is courtly, jocular, and probably comically exaggerated, it is still essentially a sincere begging letter.66 Ferris emphasizes that Chaucer’s annuity was not initially renewed when Henry took the throne, which points to the conclusion that the poet felt it would not be paid without further urging; hence, Chaucer appealed directly to the king, partly to amuse him and partly to gain his sympathy.67 Following up on this account, Finnel argues that the documentary evidence shows that Chaucer was hard-pressed in the winter of 1399 and found it difficult to attain his annuity when Henry assumed the throne, so the author likely took residence in Westminster Abbey because protection against creditors was the sanctuary right of Abbey residents.68 During this tenure, Chaucer wrote the poem to ask the king for the support necessary to settle his debts.69 It is interesting that both Ferris and Finnel ultimately blame the court’s pecuniary system—and not Chaucer himself—for his financial distress ca. 1399–1400. They also imply that the poet was securely positioned to address the king, whether friends or not, and used the poem to do just that. This assumption, autobiographical in nature, is common; but despite its prevalence, the autofictional I-persona renders this view suspect. In many ways, “Purse” offers a conventional complaint, and it is a long-standing poetic tradition to “write” to a king or queen in order to seek their support and/or patronage. Such poems might speak generally of a common authorial malaise (i.e., poverty), and in a manuscript culture these texts may never have been seen by the powerful individual whose financial “purse” was seemingly being sought. In fact, the persona underscores the possibility that the speaker’s alleged poverty is a mere conventional trope, and that this is not a personal poem. Moreover, the inherent distancing-effect of the

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persona illustrates that the text need not even be intended for the king, as is widely accepted. For scholars who hear the poet’s voice, these possibilities are essentially moot. Hence, many respondents to the poem have blatantly posited a close relationship between Chaucer and the English monarch, including the diligent literary historian Skeat, who was usually very cautious in his ruminations. Skeat believed that the change in regime brought the poet’s financial woes to an end, as Henry was quick to answer Chaucer’s “Complaint”: “it must have given him real satisfaction to be able to assist the old poet, with whom he must have been on familiar terms.” 70 E. P. Kuhl takes this view one step further, citing both the “open criticism” of Richard in “Lak” and “Purse’s” supposed defense of Henry and England as evidence that the latter poem shows us a writer acting as “the new King’s propagandist.” 71 According to Kuhl, Henry rewarded Chaucer for his efforts by swiftly awarding his grants and, following his death, giving him an appropriate burial in Westminster Abbey, this being “the least the new king could give to a relative who had aided him.” 72 There is no concrete historical evidence that the king himself had anything to do with Chaucer being granted his past-due annuity or being interred at Westminster Abbey. Yet Kuhl’s account is important because it is one of the few to look (albeit brief ly) beyond the entreaty and its historical backdrop to consider the politics of “Purse,” which might serve both to defend Henry and also to comment on England under his rule. Admittedly, there is very little, if any, overt political content in the text, which has led most scholars to concentrate on what the verse was for, rather than what it says. Thus, the general consensus seems to be a view of “Purse” as a lighthearted demonstration of the poet’s desire to trade his literary labors for money owed to him.73 However, perhaps more exploration is warranted regarding what the poem says, or might say. Certainly the poet and sovereign could have had a kindred sense of humor, as R. T. Lenaghan has argued, and the text might very well be based on shared knowledge and attitudes.74 But maybe the time has come to look beyond the supposed familiarity between Henry and Chaucer, especially since this intimacy is historically questionable and the poem’s narrator may very well represent the kind of generic public voice posited by critics for “Lak.” If the poem is read with more theoretical nuance by recognizing the I-persona, a useful starting point is found in the realization that “Purse’s” conventional refrain—“Beth hevy ageyn, or elles moote I dye”—articulates a universal sentiment for those struggling financially and need not be uttered in a specific context for a specific recipient. Robert Sturges offers a wonderful model for exploring what the “Purse” might reveal if a reader works beyond the typical individualization of the poem.

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Sturges analyzes the poetic details that might be said to articulate the gendered relations between a poet and a patron. Like Dinshaw’s account of “Adam Scriveyn,” Sturges provides a model “queer” reading that suggests new ways scholars might push the boundaries of the text. Sturges highlights a provocative erotic register that may be identified in “Purse,” to the extent that the verse is shown to hint at homosexual desire and even sodomy. Sturges emphasizes that he does not see these possibilities as being Chaucer’s actual intention, but his idea that the poem “unconsciously works against its own heterosexual presumptions” is an instructive one. As Sturges states, “the discourse of gender—and perhaps poetic discourse itself—is so slippery and ambiguous that it seems inevitably to deconstruct itself, to allow prohibited meanings to manifest themselves in the very language that attempts to silence them.” 75 Sturges superbly expands the interpretive potentiality of “Purse,” and I would agree that there are questions of gender and eroticism here that deserve fuller critical attention. For instance, if this poem was written to Henry, then how does one explain the narrator’s entreaty to the “Quene of comfort” and assertion that “ye be my lady dere” (lines 2 and 13)? If a conventional persona speaks these words, then these references might be easier to reconcile. If the speaker is Chaucer, as scholarly tradition generally assumes, then these feminine descriptors might be deemed inappropriate in a poem supposedly written to the king. There are several other important questions left unanswered by critics. If, indeed, Chaucer was intimate with Henry, then any supposed joking aside, where is the overt f lattery one might expect toward the new king? Where is the criticism of his f lawed predecessor? Why is there not a more extensive justification of his regime?76 These ideas are, at most, only f leetingly found in the poem, and the questions just posed would seem to be significant. Some would say that the answers to such questions are found in “Purse’s” status as a begging poem, but the omissions are provocative because they might very well undermine a belief in Chaucer’s “friendship” with Henry. The scholarly silence about these omissions is likewise suggestive, for it may lend support to my speculations concerning the impulse to link Chaucer with the ruler perceived by many as more effective, more deserving of admiration, and thus more worthy of the moral poet’s amicitia. Whether or not this argument holds, I hope to have shown on these pages that there is unrealized interpretive promise in the poem. As Sturges’s “queer” account proves, the content of “Purse” is notably “slippery and ambiguous”; and I contend that a more fully realized application of the “slippery and ambiguous” persona would aid critics in discovering a number of “prohibited meanings” or ways the text “unconsciously works against” its own presumptions.

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As this section has illustrated, whether speaking to his friends, his monarch, or a broad, public audience, critics have consistently constructed Chaucer as a magisterial auctor whose moral discretion shines through his words and whose sagacity has earned him the right to speak his mind. In fact, as the following section will show, Chaucer’s supposed prudence runs so deep that few critics have hesitated to declare the Retraction a final, ethical pronouncement by a sincere and pious man. For if the wise poet used his verse to talk subtly to kings, then why wouldn’t he judiciously talk to God in his masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales? 3.3 The Man and His Maker: Chaucer Talks to God In the mid-fifteenth century, Thomas Gascoigne famously described a scene in which a remorseful Geoffrey Chaucer, lying on his deathbed, lamented not only his sins but also his sinful writings. According to this account, before his death, Chaucer often shouted, “Woe is me! Woe is me! Because now I will not be able to revoke or destroy the wicked things that I have written about the most disgraceful and wicked love of men for women, which will now be continually passed down from man to man, whether or not I wish it.” And thus lamenting, he died.77

Gascoigne’s anecdote may be the single most blatant incarnation of the widespread desire to create, or ensure, an ideal, moral vision of Chaucer. With this vivid image of repentance, the Oxford chancellor wrote a script of sorts for the poet’s life based on the problematic text known as “Chaucer’s Retraction.” This account would prove highly inf luential for many biographers, who generally believed in the story’s veracity and followed Gascoigne’s lead by writing various scripts for Chaucer’s final days, based on the Retraction.78 A similar inclination is found in nonbiographical scholarship. For the study of Chaucerian reception, critical response to the Retraction is all-important because, as David Marshall has observed, it “provides a window through which we view the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s entire canon, and our own self-fictionalizations of their author.” 79 This last phrase is particularly illuminating in its recognition that the text has important ramifications for how readers perceive Chaucer’s other I-narrators, and especially if it is seen as a record of the poet’s repentant last words. The authorial plea to a higher power presumes a speaker generally unlike any other in the corpus, and thus the question of whether or not authorial distancing is involved in the Retraction is

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crucial. Faced with a challenging, exceptionally devout narrative “I,” consideration of the presence or absence of the persona-construct in this pious entreaty is unavoidable, indeed mandatory. Scholars have therefore sought to ascertain the sincerity or conventionality of the views expressed by the speaker, and examined the reasons for the Retraction’s placement at the (supposed) end of the Canterbury Tales. The result is that many of the issues and problems discussed above come to a head here, with the ideologies of critics writ large on the text’s reception. Every reader of the Retraction must reconcile the work with his/her personal image of Chaucer the Man, answering the question of why the author would write such a piece—or if he actually wrote these penitent words at all. Although the presentation of the “final” passage in such editions as the Riverside Chaucer may seem authoritative and unimpeachable to the casual observer, there is much unreliability beneath the surface that has led to great debate about the textual status of the Retraction. Questions about how, and whether, the prose is connected to the Canterbury Tales as a whole or just to The Parson’s Tale underscore deeper concerns with the repentant narrative voice, and thus, in the words of Joseph Dane, the Retraction’s final place in the canon “has little to do with its existence in manuscripts” but “has to do with ideology.” 80 A number of premodern textual critics actually argued that the Retraction was not written by Chaucer. This would seem to be a variant strain of scholarly deindividualization, a defensive gesture intended to separate the author from content that, in this case, was deemed inauthentic or “unlike” something Chaucer characteristically would write. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in particular, multiple scholars refused to accept the work at all—often attributing it to the intrusion of a hypothetical monk—or they accepted it as genuine, but deplored it and attributed its sentiments to old age or disease.81 For instance, Thomas Hearne argued in 1709 that the Retraction was written by monks, because “not only the Regular, but Secular, Clergy were exasperated against Chaucer, for the Freedom he had taken to expose their Lewdness and Debauchery.”82 John Hippisley agreed that “some pious catholic or schoolman” had “interpolated” the text, and proclaimed that there was “no ground” for believing the “highly improbable” circumstance that Chaucer revoked his former opinions and works at the end of his life.83 The Victorian antiquarian Ward was similarly skeptical, doubting the authenticity of the prose simply because it did not fit with his notion of Chaucer’s corpus, and therefore “it would be unbearable to have to accept [it] as genuine.”84 Subsequent textual critics have taken a more measured approach, generally accepting the Retraction’s authorship while seeking to reconcile its

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place in the canon.85 J. M. Manly, for example, concluded in 1928 that the “sermon” (i.e., The Parson’s Tale) and Retraction were authentic, but not intended for the Canterbury Tales; rather, they “may have been found in Chaucer’s chest after his death, and, on the inadequate ground that they were in prose, have been falsely supposed to have been intended for use as the Parson’s Tale.”86 James Work agreed with Manly, adding that the “casual mention” of the Canterbury Tales in the Retraction demonstrates that they were “not uppermost in Chaucer’s mind” when he wrote the text and, in fact, it was not written to be attached to the Tales. Instead, Work argues that the use of the term “tretise” indicates that Chaucer refers to the Parson’s “sermon” in the Retraction and not the Canterbury Tales as a whole, so the Parson’s Tale together with the Retraction must have been composed as a single, independent work.87 This view remains inf luential today, and establishes a “Chaucer” who was writing with a far different intent and frame-of-mind than if he were engaged in composing a conclusion for the Tales, or perhaps his entire oeuvre. Charles Owen, Jr. is prominent among the contemporary textual scholars who have been inf luenced by this stance, which he makes clear by rejecting the Parson’s Tale and Retraction as Chaucer’s actual ending for his “unfinished masterpiece.”88 Owen contends that by looking carefully at the manuscript evidence for the Canterbury Tales, we find two projected endings and evidence for the different final plans Chaucer worked with at different times. The manuscripts also show that Chaucer intended the Parson’s Tale as an independent work, with the Retraction serving as a fitting conclusion to that treatise in particular.89 Owen makes a convincing case, but it has been met with strong resistance. Larry Benson, for one, takes the opposite view, arguing that the manuscripts testify that the text belongs where it stands at the end of the Canterbury Tales, so that, unfinished as the Tales obviously were, the Retraction gives us Chaucer’s own word that he has finished with his work.90 This position is widely accepted today, yet the issue is by no means cut and dried. A lingering problem is the break that marks the “end” of the Parson’s Tale (at line 1080) and the “start” of the Retraction, traditionally separated in editions with the rubric “Heere taketh the makere of this book his leve.” It is largely on this partition that critics have based their assumption that Chaucer himself takes over from the voice of the Parson and offers some final words on the Tales and his entire literary output. As Míc˙eál Vaughan has emphasized, this division is a scribal construct that was progressively codified over time, while “the text of the Retraction seems quite comfortably continuous with the Parson’s Tale.” 91 Whether or not there is an intended textual break, it is suggestive that many scholars unf linchingly support the notion that there is an explicit

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point at which the author ultimately “taketh his leve.” In Vaughan’s eyes, it is illogical that critics openly accept that other Chaucerian works are incomplete or unfinished while they argue the opposite for the Parson’s Tale/Retraction, which indicates that “they do not wish his final masterpiece to be unclouded, even if it is demonstrably incomplete.”92 Vaughan seems to be onto something here, since a view of the Retraction as a “final” authorial pronouncement offers a convenient bookend to the poet’s life and works, helping to foster a morally inclined father-figure who, in his last breaths, wisely turns his eyes to the heavens and bows before his God. This perspective has long been sustained in interpretive criticism. Putting aside the textual issues surrounding the Retraction, scholars who have sought to decipher the meaning of these “final” words have responded by asserting different kinds of conversations, different types of talk with God. A common tack is to use identifiable conventional features in the text to explain Chaucer’s supposed thinking. Once again, this brand of criticism represents an individualized application of widely used literary conventions, with most scholars perceiving the I-speaker as Chaucer the Man himself and no mere persona. J. S. P. Tatlock’s important article published in the early twentieth century did much to foster this tradition. Tatlock compared the Retraction to other authorial “retracciouns” that offer parallels to Chaucer’s listing of works and his expression of dis/satisfaction with them.93 This comparison demonstrates that the kindred works of St. Augustine and others represent a wellknown literary tradition that, Tatlock suggests, makes Chaucer’s act of writing his own Retraction more intelligible.94 In response to Tatlock’s inf luential essay, Olive Sayce compared the Retraction with other medieval rhetorical conclusions, and showed that Chaucer’s passage is structurally in keeping with the general pattern of certain medieval prologues and epilogues, especially in the well-attested topos of regret for worldly works.95 However, she argues that thematically it ref lects a tension between traditional ecclesiastical teaching and the growing autonomy of secular literature, so that the poet seems to be viewing this problem with ironic and humorous detachment rather than a conventionally pious attitude, as frequently has been claimed.96 Sayce’s atypical view suggests a measure of authorial detachment and lighthearted fictionality, and plays down the depth of the poet’s regret. Few of her colleagues agree with this perspective, favoring instead a more properly “pious” use of conventions. Gale Schricker is one such scholar, who considers the Retraction in light of Chaucer’s other poetic endings, especially the conventions found in the dream visions and Troilus and Criseyde. Schricker argues

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that the Retraction ties up the concerns of Chaucer’s previous endings and finalizes his views as a poet, adding that it is especially appropriate as the closing words of Chaucer in this role, for a poet is a man well-accustomed to the concept of life as a kind of fiction.97 Rather than destroying his work, the text demonstrates and verifies the significance of fictions in a factual world, as premonitions of the final perceptual experience of salvation.98 This last turn is telling, because it illustrates the lengths that some critics may go to rationalize the conventions found in the Retraction, taking care to portray it as a “final,” pious literary declaration by Chaucer the Man. Any reading of the Retraction is bound to be questionable in some way, but it seems that Sayce’s line of thought deserves further consideration. I believe that Sayce’s essay offers one of the most perceptive interpretations of the Retraction to date. Rather than taking for granted that the text represents the poet’s God-fearing “final words,” Sayce questions this likelihood by noting that there is a potentially humorous undercurrent to the prose. And although she does not overtly bring the persona into play, Sayce does recognize that a level of authorial detachment may be evident. In essence, what Sayce does well—and others fail to acknowledge adequately—is that the Retraction could very well be playful and ambiguous rather than pious and straightforward. As a writer, Chaucer was nothing if not playful: he played with societal mores, with different styles and genres, and with readers’ expectations. He also played with narrative perspective, and when he did use conventional forms and ideas, he frequently did so playfully. All of these types of Chaucerian play might be identified in the Retraction. I have already commented on the rubric found at the start of the Retraction. The traditional rubric that concludes the text is also significant: “Heere is ended the book of the tales of Caunterbury, compiled by Geoffrey Chaucer, of whos soule Jhesu Crist have mercy. Amen.” This scribal rubric obviously was written about Chaucer and not by Chaucer. Like the rubric discussed above, it fosters the ideal that the Retraction draws the Tales to a close, and apparently represents the devout final words of the author. What I find most interesting about this rubric is the description of the poet as a compiler. As noted in chapter 1, being a compiler was one of the three primary roles a writer who was not a recognized auctor could play in the Middle Ages. Hence, the term “compiler” could arguably serve to devalue somewhat Chaucer and/or his achievement. But what is more important here is that if the poet is seen as a compiler, then there is absolutely no reason to assume that the Retraction speaks the words of the author himself. They might very well be the continued, “compiled” words of the Parson.

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More broadly, the rubric provides a signal that the speaker is a persona and not necessarily the poet. If critics would ref lect further on this apparent narrative persona, then the long-standing trend toward dubious autobiographical perspectives would be helpfully counterbalanced by more nuanced readings of narrative autofiction. Among other things, employing the persona would underline the fact that retractions are very conventional and widespread in the medieval period, and therefore perhaps the piety that is expressed is highly traditional in this instance. Although critics should not presume that Chaucer was not penitent and devout, they also should not assume that this prose articulates his impassioned “last words.” And even if it is accepted that Chaucer’s Christianity was sincere, that does not mean that the Retraction should be taken at face value. It is quite possible that the extreme level of piety and remorse has a tongue-in-cheek quality, or that there is a subtle criticism at work regarding blind faith. It is also possible that there is cynicism, amusement, or outright joking at hand when the speaker denounces his “translacions and enditynges of Worldly vanities” and purported books “that sownen into synne” (lines 1086 and 1088). As Sayce suggested, perhaps what we have here is an important instance of Chaucerian play. This potential playfulness merits more attention than it has received to date, and a more fully realized autofictional persona could (and should) invite future discussion of this narrative play. It is interesting to note that there is not only a lengthy tradition of writing this sort of literary apology, but it is also a time-honored convention of scholarship to perceive a given retraction as moral and personal rather than literary or aesthetic, with the textual contents frequently tied into a presumed religious conversion undertaken in old age.99 This tradition is no better seen than in response to Chaucer’s Retraction where, in contrast to the type of playful reading I have offered, numerous critics have, like Schricker, cited conventions in support of a devout Chaucerian “I.” Another useful example of this inclination is William Madden’s reading of the text in terms of conventional medieval views on “seemliness.” By looking at this subject historically, Madden shows that in Chaucer’s age what was considered “seemly” was inevitably dictated by the religion of the day, so the Retraction represents the tension the poet faced between the demands of art and the demands of prudence. In the end, Madden concludes, Chaucer gave precedence to spiritual considerations, and came to see certain creations as likely to do more harm than their entertainment value could alleviate.100 Gregory Roper has taken a similar approach, but considers the prose through the lens of penance and medieval penitential manuals. In accordance with these conventions, Chaucer—who “understood the rhetoric, theology, and psychology”

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of penance—ultimately decided to consider his verse, and himself, in a new light. Therefore, Roper insists that Chaucer applies his penitential knowledge in the Retraction and “drops the game of language, the play of rhetoric . . . to come to the shrine beyond human words and the shrine of the Word.”101 Other critics have gone even further in attempting to locate precisely the work’s piety and to historicize the author’s “final,” personal beliefs. James Gordon’s account exemplifies this strategy in its argument that Chaucer probably had doubts regarding the propriety of his writings due to criticisms of the kind offered by John Gower, who supposedly advised his fellow poet in the Confessio Amantis to reconcile himself to advancing age and write his “testament of love.” Gordon contends that as a direct result of such advice, Chaucer was encouraged to undertake a total reappraisal of his writing, which led him to renounce all his worldly achievements in the end.102 As Gordon’s reading shows, accurately historicizing the Retraction is a difficult task, and this may be why many readers have simply projected identifiable moral beliefs and pronouncements when addressing the Retraction, not wholly disregarding history but in furtherance of a view of Chaucer as a sincere penitent. Most critics today do recognize the unlikelihood of the kind of death-bed repentance described by Gascoigne and implied by Gordon; and contemporary scholars do generally register the fact that a persona (or multiple personae) has been speaking in the final fragment of the Tales. Yet when the Parson’s Tale “ends” and the Retraction “begins,” critics typically hear the voice of the Chaucer the Man taking over and presenting his penitent change of heart. Even scholars who pursue more overtly theoretical literary criticism have frequently projected the author’s supposed piety in their accounts. For example, in light of her interest in the role of the audience in interpretation, Judith Ferster argues that the subject of the Retraction is Chaucer’s relation to his wider, nonfictional audience, as he tries to affect our actions by creating an idealized image for us.103 Since the process of interpretation is perpetual, Ferster holds, the end of the Tales (in the Retraction) is only arbitrary—the pilgrims have not completed their game or journey, and interpretation can never be finished but only stopped; hence, Chaucer ultimately submits himself and his poem to God’s judgment, the only truly authoritative interpretation.104 Ferster’s reading, along with the textual and conventional accounts considered above, points to one important conclusion: regardless of a given critic’s interpretive interest or theoretical colors, it is here, in scholarship on the Retraction, that the moral dimension of Chaucer Studies is most evident. Given the devout nature of medieval “retracciouns,” it is natural that moral issues would

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be central to the text’s interpretation, that “ethical deliberation” would be encouraged by the prose.105 However, that fact alone does not fully account for the extent of moralization undertaken by Chaucerians in addressing the poet’s famous “last” words. There is no need to belabor the point, since it has, I hope, become clear that scholars pervasively assume that Chaucer, as the purported speaker of the Retraction, is sincere in his beliefs, is seriously renouncing his earthly transgressions, and is faithfully turning his eyes toward his heavenly maker. This is as true today as it was in the nineteenth century, when the lofty ideals of Victorians led to many vivid pronouncements of the following sort: one anonymous critic stated that a change of heart came over Chaucer at the end of his days, which “must come to all such . . . the cold wind of doubt in art—doubt whether art is religion after all— sweeps like breath, across that wondrous soul” and leads him to write the Retraction in sincere penitence.106 Though not as colorful in her rhetoric, today’s kindred perspective is perhaps best summed up in the words of Helen Cooper, who states that it is not illogical that there should be only one voice left at the end of the Tales, the nonfictional voice of the author himself that rejects the Parson as a fiction along with the rest—it is only when readers reach the Retraction that “the voice becomes unmistakably Chaucer’s own.”107 Cooper concludes that, while the Retraction may not actually have been the last thing Chaucer wrote, it demonstrates that “for all the different readings of the world embodied in the various tales and all his other works, he never lost sight of the Boethian belief that God’s vision was single.”108 Cooper’s comment is an appropriate way to end this chapter, because whatever Chaucer’s view of God, there is, in fact, a “single vision” that has been considered at length on these pages. That vision is a moral perspective, and resounding evidence has been presented that past and present critics alike tend to read the minor works with an eye toward morality and high-minded ideals, a tendency that is most explicit in the apparent wish to find authorial sincerity in the Retraction. In spite of this inclination, critics would do well to remember that “narrative for Chaucer is never just exemplification of moral principle; it is also a public performance for others, and so an exploration of the possibilities of ‘telling one’s tale,’ ” as Tony Davenport has observed.109 As I have argued in this chapter, one crucial “possibility” that has been consistently undervalued in reception of the short works is the likelihood that in these texts it is a playful persona, and not Geoffrey Chaucer himself, who speaks. This “possibility” deserves more support and exploration, and might inspire much future research. At least that is my wish. Having examined minor works where the narrator is customarily—and problematically—seen as

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being none other than Chaucer himself, the next chapter will consider longer works where morality shows itself in different guises. These are texts of a far different nature told by two vibrant dramatic personae that are not typically seen as speaking the words of the poet himself. This discussion will help to provide a more accurate and thorough portrayal of the varied scholarly construction of “Chaucer,” and further demonstrates how the interpretation of the narrative “I” profoundly shapes the supposed views of the living author. Let us, then, continue to travel through the history of Chaucerian reception by examining the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, whose provocative “lives” were inscribed by “a poet who insisted on mirroring the duplicity of human nature and existence in this world in the double levels of his art.”110

CHAPTER 4 LIVES OF THEIR OWN: THE WIFE OF BATH, THE PARDONER, AND CRITICAL (DIS)APPROVAL

Sexuality is an unstable construct in our societies, and hence produces endless textual work. Such an awkward issue has continually to be revisited, disavowed, rediscovered, reaffirmed. Closure, by definition, is always potentially unsatisfactory; even conservative texts are often to be found pushing representation to a breaking point where contradiction cannot plausibly be contained. In the face of such a performance, some audience members will retreat into conformity, while others will entertain more radical possibilities. These texts were, and are, sites of struggle; and their varying re-presentations are that struggle. —Alan Sinfield1

I

n her influential examination of the Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has illuminated the ways in which individuals are assignable to—or constrained by—a “binarized identity” of homo/heterosexuality that is “full of implications, however confusing, for even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence.”2 She contends that since its establishment in the late nineteenth century, this “reductive binary” has caused a “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” that profoundly affects self-identity in our modern culture.3 Sedgwick feels that the widespread belief in a diametrical conception of sexuality is misguided and has resulted in a disregard for historically significant and “unexpectedly plural, varied, and contradictory” possibilities for sexuality and gender.4 In recent years many gender theorists have joined Sedgwick in critiquing the function of such inhibiting thinking in notable cultural realms such as art, history, and literature. Yet as Karma Lochrie has shown, “reductive” binary thinking continues to taint

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contemporary scholarship, where accepted sexual and gender norms remain “potent” forces that commonly relegate variant sexualities and gender configurations to the “excluded penumbra of heteronormativity.”5 This exclusion is evident in Chaucer Studies, and the current chapter seeks to encourage further thought regarding the “normality” of key “definitional binarisms” found in criticism of the Wife of Bath and Pardoner. As Helen Cooper has noted, “rival views of Chaucer” and his verse date back to the fifteenth century, when the poet was first portrayed as either a man of strict Catholic orthodoxy or as a kind of antiecclesiastical protoProtestant.6 Cooper depicts Chaucer as a “master of duplicity” whose works represent a world of doubles and doubling, and when seen in this light it is unsurprising that the verse often has been read in antithetical terms, defined according to countless binaries including courtly/bourgeois, English/ French, male/female, past/present, orality/textuality, tradition/innovation, and earnest/game.7 Multiplicity and doubling also characterize Chaucer “himself” since he has created an elaborate series of bifurcated “selves,” personae that narrate his works and invite questions about such opposing forces as author/narrator and fiction/reality. Given his deliberate play with various types of duplicity, it is only natural that binary categories frequently serve as convenient tools for understanding Chaucer’s intricate verse. However, as Sedgwick might argue, meaning is multifarious, and the either/or qualities inherent in binary codes of interpretation too often serve as constraints to more complex constellations of thought. By limiting historical potentiality via narrow “definitional binarisms,” some scholars overlook critical subtleties of medieval literary culture, and this disregard is especially evident in studies relating to the topics of sex, gender, and sexuality. Like Sedgwick, Judith Butler has been instrumental in showing that many individuals fail to recognize “the complexity of what is at stake in any effort to take account of the conditions under which sex and sexuality are assumed.” To redress this oversight, Butler has outlined the “performative dimension” of gender construction, arguing that gender “cannot be understood outside a process of iterability” and is marked by an ever-changing performativity that represents “a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo.”8 In this penultimate chapter and the conclusion that follows, I am particularly interested in exploring what Butler describes as “the normative force of performativity—its power to establish what qualifies as ‘being.’ ” I will focus on the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and Chaucer the Pilgrim, three all-important personae whose gendered bodies have been precisely constructed by scholars and effectively demonstrate Butler’s notion that such gendering “only” endures within “the productive constraints of certain highly gendered regulatory schemas.”9

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Here, I will address the provocatively gendered bodies of the Wife of Bath and Pardoner to show how constructions of gender work “not only through reiteration, but through exclusion as well. And in the case of bodies, those exclusions haunt signification as its abject borders or as that which is strictly foreclosed.”10 In the first three chapters of this monograph, I have established that persona-theory and queer-theory overlap in significant ways, and exemplified the notion that the persona is productively “queer” in its indeterminacy and capacity as an agent that invites interpretive questions and critical resistance. As it is used by today’s theorists, the term “queer” registers a “desire for a more mobile, less stable” set of gender identifications, more f lexible subject positions, and more “dynamic” scholarly interpretations.11 Thus, a markedly “queer” version of persona-theory is the perfect tool for critiquing scholarly accounts where gender has been narrowly “reaffirmed” or “disavowed,” and illuminating instances where it is evident that some Chaucerians will quietly “retreat into conformity, while others will entertain more radical possibilities” (to borrow from Sinfield above). By focusing on the “queer” narrative persona, previous chapters have not only offered new insights into the ideological habits of Chaucer’s readers but also explored new ways of reading certain core texts and speakers. The current chapter has been written to further experiment with this idea, testing the limits of critical reception by deliberately reading the Wife of Bath and Pardoner through their interpretive legacies. I particularly aim to illustrate what can actually be learned about the two pilgrims from their scholarly legacies, to show how the study of their reception might help guide the interpretation and understanding of their characters. The Wife of Bath and Pardoner are central to my project not only because they have rich and fascinating critical legacies, but also because they are two of the most arresting personae in English literature. And in fact, these characters represent a fundamentally different (though equally important) type of persona than those examined in the preceding chapters. Given my interest in autofiction and the critical construction of Chaucer the Man, the majority of this book focuses on various I-personae, first-person narrative stand-ins for the author. This chapter is the exception, as it concentrates exclusively on what I have termed (in chapter 1) dramatic personae, figures that are not meant to represent the poet’s alter ego but rather are distinctive speakers appropriate to the story at hand. All personae are, by definition, theatrical performers of a kind, but whereas the I-persona stages the author’s narrative self-representative the dramatic persona enacts a far different and altogether distinct being, whether male or female, young or old. It might seem that these dramatic

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personae are inherently more distant from the author and his ideals than the I-persona, having been written for a specific fictional scenario and narrative purpose. But any persona is autofictional and detached from the writer, so the study of the heavily debated dramatic personae known as the Wife and Pardoner raises additional, important questions about the reception of Chaucer’s narrative speakers as a whole. Simply put, my account of Chaucerian narrators and their reception would not be complete without an in-depth consideration of major dramatic personae. The reception of the Wife and Pardoner highlights “the role played by desires, residues, and repetitions in the historical construction of sexuality.”12 And scholarship on these two challenging dramatic personae also speaks to the ambiguity of both characters, whose gendered meanings may not be as clear cut as many critics have assumed, for both pilgrims would seem to problematize convenient binary thinking regarding their sexuality and gender roles. Indeed, when seen through the lens of their scholarly reception, both the Wife of Bath and Pardoner might be said to embody Butler’s notion of “multiple identification,” with their bodies representing sites where meaning is merely a “temporary resolution of desire,” where the “ambivalent prohibition and production of desire occurs” and sex and gender are multiple, negotiable, and f luctuating.13 As suggestive bodies of this type, these two ambivalent dramatic personae demonstrate that “the relations of the known and unknown . . . have the potential for being peculiarly revealing,” because ignorance—or that which is ignored—“is as potent and as multiple a thing” as knowledge.14 By addressing both the known and the unknown, it is hoped that the following pages will shed new light on long-disputed problems of gender in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale.15 4.1 Lives of Their Own: Scholarly Ethics and the Wife of Bath and Pardoner For many years, it has been standard practice for readers to view the Wife of Bath and Pardoner as “realistic,” lifelike characters. This perspective is neatly summed up by James Rhodes, who states that “the Pardoner [is] one of Chaucer’s more realistic creations and, with the possible exception of the Wife of Bath, he comes to life as few other pilgrims do.”16 A more impassioned example of this typical outlook was offered a century earlier, when Adolphus William Ward made several comments about the supposed “reality” of Chaucer’s verse, observing that “in his poetry there is life” since the author conjured up “the very personality of his characters” that “are not mere phantasms of the brain, or even mere actual possibilities, but real human beings.”17 Addressing the Pardoner in particular,

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Ward remarked that “this worthy, who lays bare his own motives with unparalleled cynical brutality, is manifestly drawn from life.”18 Ward’s comments are especially interesting because they were offered in the context of literary biography, and illustrate that—if only f leetingly— the “life” of the Pardoner is at times treated in a way similar to that of the f lesh-and-blood author. In the history of Chaucer criticism, no one has more adamantly asserted the “reality” of the Canterbury pilgrims than J. M. Manly. In his inf luential 1926 discussion of the so-called “real models” for the Canterbury travelers, Manly argued that the Pardoner portrayed an individual who “could not fail” to have been recognized by Chaucer’s immediate courtly audience; similarly, the critic unearthed “facts” that were claimed to indicate the Wife of Bath’s actual existence and the poet’s personal knowledge of her.19 Manly’s conclusions are highly disputable, yet it is apparent that scholars engaged in widely divergent projects agree with the basic premises of his reading and project Dame Alice and the Pardoner as the finest examples of Chaucerian characters who stand on their own as “real” and/ or authoritative individuals. As a result, the reception of these crucial storytellers tends toward a unique type of historicization, whereby critics seem to have given biography to a fiction. In essence, the Pardoner and Wife frequently are granted “lives” of their own apart from the author, a significant critical tendency that lies at the heart of my analysis. As fictional characters afforded “lives” of their own, the reception of these two pilgrims provides valuable evidence for the assertion, or manipulation, of the persona-construct. In the case of these dramatic personae, we have a notably different interpretive tack than has been outlined in the previous chapters, where much evidence has been provided for the autobiographical reading of the Chaucerian “I.” Chapters 2 and 3 have made it clear that, time and again, Chaucer’s readers have resisted key implications of the autofictional persona by consistently favoring autobiographical perspectives. The customary view of the Wife and Pardoner is fundamentally different, and in fact, more theoretically appropriate in view of the tenets of autofiction, because here the distancing-effect of the persona is evident. However, the “life”-affirming readings of scholars are nonetheless problematic because they imply that a fictional character is not, in effect, fictional. Thus, another significant (and theoretically questionable) manner of reading the Chaucerian persona is on display, in which the presumed narrative “life” is transferred to the individual character in lieu of asserting the poet’s own supposed existence and ideals. Looked at logically, bestowing Alisoun and the Pardoner with their own “lives” does not fit with the theoretical contingencies of autofiction, because any persona is expressly fictional and not perceptibly “real.”

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Many medieval readers recognized this fact, but in practice, many subsequent readers have failed to do the same. To be fair, it must be admitted that “most readers instinctively understand literary characters as if they were real people,” as John Ganim has observed.20 Moreover, most scholars—Manly included—do not wholly ignore the fictional substance of the Wife and Pardoner. What is most common, in fact, is criticism that favors a partial separation between author and character, wherein the two storytellers are read as life-like and their revelations viewed as if they were their own. 21 This perspective would seem to be the legacy of the “dramatic” conception of Chaucer and his verse, which has been prevalent since at least the mid-nineteenth century and does not altogether disregard the underlying authority of the poet. Rather, the common thread in critical accounts of this sort is a concentration upon each narrator’s individual “self,” which is viewed as somehow dramatically distinct from the poet’s own being. The theoretical sophistication of “dramatic” readings varies greatly, but this approach deserves credit for generally recognizing the functions of the persona in the machinations of Chaucer’s verse. Nevertheless, the problems outlined above typically hold, because even if the persona-construct is recognized, whether tacitly or overtly, “dramatically” oriented critics of the Wife and Pardoner still tend to grant provisional “lives” to these characters. Though he does not directly address the projection of these characters’ own “lives,” per se, C. David Benson is one critic who has strongly denounced the time-honored scholarly focus on the Canterbury Tales’ narrators by stating that the continued “temptation to read the tales through their tellers” is “like the return of the repressed or of the undead in a horror movie.”22 Despite my own reservations, I do not wholly agree with Benson’s sarcastic condemnation because the tendency to afford Chaucer’s vibrant (yet fictional) characters their own “lives” is highly important and has fascinating ramifications for the legacies of Alisoun and the Pardoner. Before I move on to more fully consider these challenging narrative “lives,” there is another significant aspect of criticism that merits attention here. As indicated in chapter 1—and perhaps illustrated by Benson’s own scholarship—a truism of autofiction is that the reader is a powerful player in a given textual transaction, because he/she helps to make the ultimate determination of the identity (or identification) of the narrator. Accordingly, response to the two extraordinarily animated storytellers in question illustrates the ways in which lifelike dramatic personae often facilitate a wide range of critical opinion. Or, put more bluntly, it is apparent that asserting the “lives” of these vivid fictional creations allows scholars to presume a more potent interpretive authority, because locating the author in the textual distance permits

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readers to (more) freely appropriate the Wife and Pardoner for a wide variety of contemporary ideologies. In making this observation, I do not wish to suggest that I am condemning my fellow Chaucerians or their craft as it pertains to these dynamic narrative “selves.” The fact is that ideologies are inescapable: we are all products of our time and place, individuals shaped by our surrounds, experiences, and history. And in light of the poet’s complex narrative approach, it is quite reasonable that scholars would afford a measure of textual agency to these lively characters. What is problematic, however, are those occasions where a tacit critical move away from the author toward the cultural “life” of his characters bolsters politically charged claims with questionable textual relevance. Moments of this sort will play a central role in the following analysis, because it is evident that by exposing the supposed views of these characters, critics often reveal—or assert—their own true colors; whether deliberate or not, the personal interests of these scholars are (silently) brought to bear upon the “lives” of the Pardoner, Wife of Bath, and by extension, the author who has engendered the pilgrims’ very beings. Having established this point, a useful way to complete the background for my analysis of Chaucerians’ “life-”affirming inclinations is to consider brief ly the scholarship of Carolyn Dinshaw. As is the rule in the strain of criticism under investigation, Dinshaw views the performances of the Wife and Pardoner as personal projections through which their innermost thoughts may be gleaned. She also typically sees the characters as kindred spirits who are afforded virtually unparalleled narrative authority and who demonstrate their unique vitality in the Canterbury Tales by seizing the opportunity to address and disrupt the beliefs of their fellow travelers. Of course, the fact that the two pilgrims actually interact with (or confront) one another as autonomous beings within their narrative play only reinforces this frequently perceived connection.23 On the subject of Dame Alice’s exposé, Dinshaw holds that the Wife addresses the agendas behind the clerical (or male) regulation of gender behavior, her performance being a “veritable analysis” of the constitution of the female heterosexual subject in late fourteenth-century English culture.24 In response to the Pardoner’s poetic “life,” Dinshaw proposes that the character is best seen as an embodiment of “eunuch hermeneutics”: his performance urges his audience to think in terms outside of the established social/sexual categories, as he deepens the Wife of Bath’s critique of patriarchal discourse and shows the inadequacy of the restrictive (binary) categories by which such discourse proceeds.25 Taken together, Dinshaw sees the fictions of Alisoun and the Pardoner as “valuable queer histories” that can be appropriated and struggled with in order to fashion

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queer existences today, so that when the Pardoner interrupts the Wife’s speech, we are led to consider how such a personage confounds the fundamental categories of nature and sexuality.26 In light of my interest in “definitional binarisms,” Dinshaw’s performative interpretations might be considered doubly paradigmatic: not only does she bring these two controversial characters to “life,” but she also perceives them through the looking-glass of medieval social conventions and particularly focuses on the potent cultural binaries of masculine/feminine, and hetero/homosexual. By extension, Dinshaw’s criticism illustrates that the “lives” of both narrators characteristically are drawn with an eye toward morality and important moral issues, as their values are said to be revealed through their storytelling and interactions with their fellow pilgrims. This point is key to my analysis, because it further highlights the moral dimension of Chaucer criticism established in chapters 2 and 3. There, it was shown that scholars commonly read the poet’s own life and values through his works, a tendency that is best seen in the reception of the minor works. When it comes to the Wife and the Pardoner, a different type of moralization is found since the principles in question may not be traced back to the author but rather are imposed on his lifelike narrators. As Dinshaw’s comments demonstrate, even the most theoretically sophisticated critics fall prey to this inclination, making it clear that the legacies of these two characters are inextricably bound up with issues of literary morality. The moral-centeredness of scholarship on the Wife and Pardoner is only natural, since the characters “themselves” are undeniably interested in important cultural mores. To wit, the Pardoner responds to his fellows’ request for “som moral thing” by providing a thoughtful exemplum on earthly cupidity: “For though myself be a ful vicious man, / A moral tale yet I yow telle kan.”27 Meanwhile, the Wife of Bath offers her “owene juggement” on the patriarchal world around her, openly admitting her personal indiscretions and responding to “hem that wolde lyve parfitly” by saying, simply, “that am nat I.” 28 Given such comments, the analysis provided below is by no means intended to discredit the propensity toward moral issues found in accounts of the Wife and Pardoner. Instead, the study of these characters’ “lives” will attempt to uncover significant, underlying biases that are brought to the table in addressing both speakers, thus helping to fill out the picture of Chaucer’s personae and their critical legacy. Of particular importance here is the way in which response to these two dramatic personae reveals the tendency of contemporary thinkers to “think about otherness from the point of view of the other. What might be called the

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thought of the other has effectively displaced traditional paradigms and fertilized whole fields of inquiry, especially those in which questions of identity are at stake.” 29 Whether the “ethical programs” of readers are focused on the ideological “Other” or other moral subjects, recent scholarship on Alisoun and the Pardoner provides excellent case studies for the impulse of critics to variously moralize the Chaucer corpus. 30 To borrow from Annette Baier, the constructed “lives” of these dramatic personae demonstrate that “ethics is a polyphonic art form, in which the echoes of the old voices contribute to the quality of the sound of all the new voices.”31 Indeed, there is tangible evidence of prior values clashing with more recent ideals in criticism of the Wife and Pardoner, who are model characters that test “the forms, both ethical and political, of social life. This cognitive, moral process . . . gives fiction its literary shape, its ethical habituation, and its political force.”32 If this is so, then what are readers to make of the fact that Chaucer has, arguably, put his most sapient pieces of moral illustration into the mouths of his most corrupt speakers?33 This is a very difficult question to answer, and questions of this sort have resulted in diverse strategies of occlusion, erasure, marginalization, transference, or displacement within the reception of these complicated pilgrims. Therefore, the extent of separation that is projected within scholarly readings will play an especially important role in the remainder of this chapter, as the scope, and nature, of the separation between author and narrator will help to reveal just how deeply rooted are the moral concerns of Chaucerians when it comes to these characters. In particular, I will show how morality, sexuality, and the persona-construct are often complexly intertwined, and will apply the patterns of criticism to make a case for a deliberately fragmented view of the gender conventions underlying both narrative “lives.” If, indeed, an effective case can be made that both personae are marked in such a way that they similarly complicate gender roles, then another important question to ponder below is this: why has the “good wif . . . of biside Bathe” long been roundly favored by critics while, paradoxically, the “gentil Pardoner of Rouncivale” has (until very recently) been condemned?34 4.2 The Wife’s “Wommanhede”: Alisoun, (Anti)Feminism, and Scholarly Acceptance In The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, Alisoun famously begins her oratory by announcing that “experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me / To speke of wo that is in mariage.”35 Later

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in her narrative, Dame Alice questions the patriarchal dominance of literary discourse by asking, Who peyntede the leon, tel me who? By God, if wommen hadde writen stories, As clerkes han withinne hire oratories, Than wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse Than al the mark of Adam may redresse.36

By these two well-known exclamations, readers are led to consider key questions of textuality, authority, and gender, which have proven to be particularly fruitful topics for the understanding of the Wife of Bath’s performance. In response to Alisoun’s concerns with “who painted the lion?” scholars have written numerous “lives” that account for the character’s relationships with men, women, and the society in which they lived. As Priscilla Martin has observed, there are all sorts of ways in which one can look at her. She is a spokesperson for various kinds of marginal energy which were insisting in the late 14th century on being heard. She is female, English-speaking, probably illiterate, bourgeois, a business woman, a member of the laity. From these positions she questions the authority of the clergy, the Latin theological tradition, the courtly ideal, the aristocratic genre of romance, the male establishment.37

Martin’s statement attests to the fact that whether critics consider the Wife in terms of marriage, textuality, religion, or medieval business practices, their interpretations almost always return in some way to gender interests. The unabashed contents of the Wife’s discourse naturally foster such engagement, and since the rise of feminism many critics have championed “her” importance as a strong medieval woman. But this was not always the case. In 1700, the highly respected poet/critic John Dryden proclaimed the Wife of Bath as being “too licentious” for proper discussion.38 Although this remark may seem overly puritanical to modern tastes, Dryden was hardly alone in articulating such a pejorative view. In fact, early readers generally portrayed Alisoun as a wanton and stereotypically shrewish wife, which fits succinctly with her satirical textual origins and may help to explain Dryden’s hesitance concerning her character.39 As Cooper has noted, the Wife’s spreading fame during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (and beyond) was as a shrew or example of “promiscuous womanhood,” so that “every mention of her brings with it an implied frisson

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for the male of the species.”40 Many examples of this viewpoint could be provided, none better than the various musings of the Restoration scholar Richard Brathwait in “A Commentary Upon Chaucer’s Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale” (1665).41 Brathwait comments on the Wife’s shrewishness throughout this text, saying such things as “She will confirm her Attention with fresh remembrances of Correction: Whoever wears the Doublet, she means to wear the Breech,” and stating that Dame Alice “constantly holds to her old Tenet: She was not made for a maid. What she hath received, must be as freely used.”42 As history ran its course, the widespread view of Alisoun as a stereotypically shrewish wife eventually waned. Though pejorative comments continue to be found over the years in some—notably male—quarters, the Wife of Bath gradually was seen with increasing respect.43 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the “good wif ” customarily was read as an ironic and comical female figure who did not deserve the scorn of her early readers. To illustrate this generally more forgiving perspective, take the subtle remarks of William Hazlitt, the renowned Victorian critic who argued that her Prologue is “unequalled as a comic story,” and believed that the Wife of Bath should be esteemed for her warm, goodnatured femininity.44 Such observations may not seem particularly exceptional to readers today, but they wrought tangible changes by drawing on notions of Chaucerian humor to promote a more acceptable view of the character. Consequently, by the late nineteenth century, comments of the following sort became the norm, rather than a quiet exception: Matthew Browne argued that the Wife of Bath represents a “most distinguished mouthpiece” for “a vein of deliberate irony addressed to the notion of ecclesiastically excising certain of the facts of life,” while Henry Morley went so far as to claim that Alisoun illustrates “the beauty and honour of true womanhood.”45 Statements of this kind, based largely upon the character’s satirical origins, are crucial because they allowed her to be seen in a more socially acceptable and even authoritative light. It is through such comments that the Wife of Bath increasingly was perceived as having a kind of independent existence, or indeed a valuable “life” of her own. Due to length considerations, the previous paragraphs have only brief ly traversed the first several hundred years of Dame Alice’s reception, when some of the harshest criticisms ever leveled at the Wife’s character are found. The drastic change in perspective just outlined is significant because the relatively early emergence of a conception of the Wife as a generally good-natured and likable woman runs counter to the longstanding strain of moral apprehension—or outright condemnation—that remains evident to this day within criticism of the Pardoner. Rather than

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distaste for the Wife’s illicit conduct, there seems to be (with a few exceptions) a historically consistent scholarly acceptance of Alisoun and her behavior. This tolerance of the Wife of Bath is in stark contrast to the reception of the Pardoner, who often is denounced as an ethically devoid “scoundrel” and afforded little, if any, respect.46 Why is this so? Why is Dame Alice typically placed in a positive light—whether deserved or not—and read as a sprightly mouthpiece for medieval feminism, while the Pardoner is famously seen as the “one lost soul among the Canterbury Pilgrims”?47 The reasons for this discrepancy are difficult to determine, but under close scrutiny this conspicuous scholarly paradox may reveal powerful ideological agendas. A simple explanation for the customary approval of the Wife of Bath is found in her satirical or comedic nature. As a rule, well-wrought humor tends to draw an audience in, and readers are often favorably inclined toward those individuals who elicit their laughter. It seems logical that this common predisposition would help to explain the scholarly tolerance of the Wife. Many readers would agree that Alisoun’s discourse is funny, and thus it may be simply that “she” has an extremely likable personality despite “her” moral indiscretions. In Cooper’s words, the Wife may well be “every antifeminist’s nightmare come true. Chaucer’s triumph is to make her irresistibly attractive.”48 This is a valid point, but the reasons for the characteristic approval of the Wife of Bath must run deeper. A far more provocative reason, I would argue, is that the illicit sexual behavior of the Wife described in her Prologue is of a kind that many have accepted as a common, if unfortunate, aspect of humanity. Alisoun’s objectionable marital dealings and candid sexual promiscuity are improprieties that are by no means socially sanctioned, but at the very least have long been out in the open. In contrast, critics of the Pardoner are faced with a historically shunned behavior in the character’s alleged homosexuality, with its attendant sexual conduct that many over the years would prefer to keep a (closeted) secret. The Pardoner’s discomfiting behavior will be taken up more fully in section 4.3. For now, I would like to explore the third primary reason that the Wife of Bath has been championed by scholars, especially of late. A careful look at the recent history of English literary criticism is quite revealing when it comes to the altered scholarly perception of the Wife. Particularly illuminating is the fact that the character’s status has closely mirrored the development of the women’s movement and the relatively recent concept of gender equality. It is evident that, since the latter half of the nineteenth century, the rise of feminism has played a major role in Dame Alice’s improved critical fortunes. More to the point, the women’s movement has fostered the scholarly approval of the Wife of Bath’s

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“life” and has cultivated the widespread praise of the character that now predominates; thus, the legacy of gender theory is vital for understanding Alisoun’s perceived status as an unusually progressive medieval woman. Feminism has had a profound effect on Chaucer Studies, and it goes without saying that much has been gained from criticism that sees the Wife of Bath as an all-important model for the exploration of the “ethical and social consequences of women’s exclusion from the world of literature in particular and the world of men in general.”49 However, some key issues do arise when gender theory is applied to Dame Alice, and these issues merit critique. An especially significant consideration is the interpretive effect of feminist ideology, since a politicized emphasis on female power and independence that is part and parcel of a feminist agenda is common in scholarship on the Wife. Seen in the wake of the women’s movement, it is clear that Alisoun’s performance routinely is viewed—or appropriated—as a revelation of her “feminist” perspectives, with her words being intended to expose “phallocentric” discursive inclinations and to legitimize the female desire for cultural “maistrye.”50 Given the contents of her Prologue, it is only natural that many scholars have seen the Wife of Bath as a powerful female character who is able (or at least trying) to free herself from the chains of masculine dominance. But a close look at the criticism that supports this view reveals that few critics follow the lead of Dinshaw in recognizing and commenting on their own subjectivity and its interpretive impact, while questions of anachronism may be asked about certain readings that arguably project present gender or sexual norms.51 These tendencies have serious ramifications for the supposed meaning of the Wife, and are also evident in scholarship on the Pardoner’s “life.” In both cases, the issue at hand is the usage of contemporary values to judge each persona, while certain historical contingences and subtle aspects of the Middle English verse are overlooked, or even manipulated. Reception studies have recently begun to address such issues, but key questions remain when it comes to the legacy of the Wife of Bath—questions that a fresh “queer” view might help to open up and reconcile. Accounts of the Wife of Bath often feature a precise type of politically charged historicization whereby the authority of the male author is variously def lected or even denounced in favor of certain “feminist” ideals. These predilections have not been sufficiently critiqued by today’s Chaucerians and underline the persona-construct’s centrality in the character’s reception. For the all-important question arises here of where to place the onus of blame or responsibility for the Wife’s views—on the author, the narrator, or conversely, on their culture. Variants of this question have been encountered previously, especially in chapter 1 where

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it was shown that many thinkers over the years concerned themselves with the issue of responsibility when faced with complex literary personae. During the Middle Ages, heated debates arose over this very subject, as the example of the querelle de la Rose makes clear. Recalling the querelle is instructive, because there are striking similarities between the disputants’ opposing viewpoints regarding the writing of Jean de Meun and the primary arguments found in the reception of Chaucer’s Wife. In the case of Alisoun, the two sides of the polarized debate generally look something like this: some critics defend the poet and his female mouthpiece for touching on sensitive or objectionable ideals, while others— often by rejecting the protection of the persona—condemn the author for unacceptable views on gender. Criticism of the Wife of Bath does not always fall neatly into these two divergent categories, but they are prominent and if nothing else, the comparison with the querelle speaks to the fact that more than six hundred years after the famous controversy arose over the Roman de la Rose, scholars continue to grapple with the same issues concerning the persona-construct. In addition it is evident that, like Christine de Pizan, some Chaucerians appropriate the narrative speaker for their own agendas and predispositions, while the persona, gender issues, and intellectual discord frequently go hand in hand. Bearing the querelle in mind, determining the presumed locus of responsibility will be central to my analysis in the next several pages because this focus helps to reveal where scholars are morally evasive in their readings of the persona, or inclined toward a particular interpretive ethos. To assess the Wife’s legacy since the Victorian age, it is only logical to begin by examining criticism that supports Alisoun’s ascendant status as a strong medieval woman. For many, if not most, postmodern gender theorists, the Wife of Bath is not a helpless woman trapped within patriarchal society; instead, she is seen as an economically sound, selfmade businesswoman who uses her God-given gifts to carve out her own niche within the world of men, a view that is characteristically established by relating the character to others of her cultural and professional kind (such as bourgeois widows, pilgrims, and weavers). In the words of H. Marshall Leicester, the Wife of Bath is able to “woman-handle” authority (and the male authorities), altering it in a way that affords her some degree of power while making “the feminist message more pointed and polemical.”52 Leicester’s notion of “woman-handling” provides a useful descriptor for the manner in which certain feminist critics have treated the Wife, by working within and applying a political agenda that “handles” men and bolsters the place of women, both medieval and modern. This project virtually requires that Dame Alice be embraced as a self-reliant female

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ancestor who gives hope to others who yearn to liberate themselves from misogynistic discourse and masculine control. Obviously, the history of patriarchal politics represents a deplorable legacy of negativity and oppression, and feminists are only right to resist such tyranny by using the tools of scholarship to uncover and undermine the injustices against women perpetuated by men. But it bears mentioning that—however justified— the resentment of patriarchal structures is sometimes morally thrust on the poet and his works. This is significant, because the indignation in question frequently is veiled or simply goes unacknowledged, although it seems unlikely that the gender theorists in question are unaware of the bias behind their position(s). The transparency Ethan Knapp sees as a characterizing feature of feminist criticism on Chaucer is at times difficult to identify in scholarship on the Wife, where the agendas of critics are not always out in the open, and thus it is not wholly accurate to say that “feminism’s opposition to the currents of misogyny in the canon has led inevitably to an emphasis on making explicit the standpoint of the engaged critic.”53 There has been a recent turn toward greater scholarly transparency, but many critics today (feminist or otherwise) remain resistant to more fully acknowledging and embracing their intellectual desires in the manner suggested several years ago in an important article by Nicholas Watson. For Watson, historical research is an emotional and somehow even tactile endeavor, and he therefore urges medievalists to both recognize and address their inescapable “desire for the past.”54 Few have done so adequately, and in the case of feminist scholars, whether or not their ideologies are openly expressed there is little doubt that the emotional, politically charged nature of critical response has profoundly shaped the emergent view of Chaucer and impacted his (supposed) presentation of gender in the Wife’s narrative and elsewhere.55 Clearly, these are issues that deserve further discussion, and I have only been able to explore them in a limited fashion in this chapter. Importantly, those critics who see Alisoun as a character who seeks to assert an authoritative cultural position for women rarely include the poet Chaucer in any such empowering program. At a glance, this may not seem all that surprising, since the author invariably worked within patriarchal literary paradigms, we are dealing here with a detached dramatic persona, and it may be argued that other female characters are not allowed the same agency as the Wife of Bath. Nevertheless, Chaucer did bring the character to life, and if the Wife does somehow epitomize quasi-feminist views then surely the male poet deserves some credit for inscribing such perspectives. Yet, conspicuously, such credit is not consistently given in recent critical accounts. A case could be made that this oversight is simply

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the result of an aggressive feminist program that purposefully aims to subvert masculine power, counteract female oppression, and deny patriarchal historical conventions. But this view is not entirely satisfactory, because while this more confrontational type of feminist writing is found in some accounts of the Wife, it is not the interpretive rule. Another way of looking at this issue is to observe that we have here a significant and atypical manner of reading the persona in which the author is not credited with the character’s potentially “feminist” ideals. Instead, Dame Alice is treated as if she deserves to be held personally responsible for her forward-thinking regarding gender roles, a tacit assumption that fits succinctly with the tendency to afford the Wife her own “life.” Previous chapters have shown that critics characteristically read Chaucer’s personae both autobiographically and in terms that convey the poet in a morally favorable light. Hence, it is striking when Chaucer’s voice is not heard and he himself is not defended in some way. In the case of Alisoun, the extraordinary disparagement of the author that occasionally is found speaks to the strength of feminist ideology, and usefully highlights the powerful distancing-effect of the autofictional persona (even if only indirectly recognized). It is fascinating that one of the few scholars to recognize Chaucer’s potential role as a kind of feminist-sympathizer is E. T. Donaldson. Donaldson was by no means a “feminist” critic but his perspective is illustrative all the same. Donaldson was, of course, acutely aware of the persona-construct, but was prone to uphold a kind of literal connection between Chaucer and his personae.56 It follows that he depicts a female-friendly poet by connecting the author to his creation, the “gloriously immoral” Wife of Bath whose questioning of antifeminist doctrine should (Donaldson thinks) be taken seriously.57 According to Donaldson, Chaucer “conceived of the Wife as the antifeminist conception of woman come alive,” so that even “if the Wife of Bath is a satirical figure, the satire is directed less against women than against the antifeminists for the gross monstrosity they had substituted for the Eve that a benevolent God had created.”58 A number of critics would strongly disagree. Among those who believe that both Chaucer and his female storyteller adhere to the antifeminist beliefs of the age, Elaine Tuttle Hansen stands out. In one of her early accounts of Dame Alice’s “life,” Hansen emphasizes that the Wife of Bath is a male construct, so she is “not the full and remarkable presence we have normally invested her with, but a dramatic and important instance of woman’s silence and suppression in history and in language.”59 In this essay, Hansen also contends that Alisoun both consciously and unconsciously endorses the antifeminist stereotypes she cites, so that the

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end of her performance (i.e., her Tale) “reveals that the Wife herself, at some level, has little confidence in the female’s powers of speech.”60 Here, Hansen takes an interesting theoretical step back, choosing to direct the antifeminist blame at the ironic narrator rather than the author himself, a move that registers the detached nature of the persona and resonates with the critic’s earlier account of the Legend of Good Women in which she likewise places the onus of responsibility on the fictional speaker.61 In her subsequent accounts of the Wife of Bath, however, Hansen makes no such move. Instead, she invalidates this position by placing the blame squarely upon the shoulders of Chaucer-as-author. Given this explicit change of position, Hansen’s work provides a compelling example of the political undercurrent that frequently guides the depiction of the Wife of Bath in the present (post)feminist climate. In fact, Hansen’s considerable ideological turn may be seen as a microcosm of a similar transition within Chaucer Studies during the late twentieth century, when a shift toward a more politically charged écriture feminine is found.62 In Hansen’s later accounts of Dame Alice, this more ideologically forceful approach is evident as the critic presents a more openly condemnatory view of the poet, who is located within a deplorable program of antifeminism. In this view, the distancing-effect of the persona is disregarded, but rather than bolstering “Father Chaucer” (in the manner seen in chapters 2 and 3) the presumed connection between author and artifice serves to indict him. Hansen claims that Chaucer’s verse demonstrates that a “naive faith” in language does not serve women well because it is an instrument for reproducing the (antifeminist) conventions that constrain and deny both the experiences and representations of women. Consequently, the Wife of Bath represents a “feminine monstrosity” who marks the limits of literary representation as a product of the masculine imagination, so that she is an “embarrassment” to Chaucer’s good name and the humanist claim that the canonical male author speaks for all of humanity.63 The harsh views found in Hansen’s scholarship on the Wife may be said to represent the extreme feminist condemnation of the poet. Others whose criticism fits within the feminist paradigm seem reluctant to take this line of thinking so far when addressing the act of “medieval ventriloquism” undertaken in bringing Alisoun to “life.”64 Instead, it is more common for gender theorists to allow Chaucer to share the responsibility for any perceived antifeminism with his culture, with the discourses he was inevitably required to work with and within when composing his poetry. Interestingly enough, even the deliberately provocative queer theorist Dinshaw takes this type of more cautious, reconciliatory approach to the Wife of Bath; rather than wholly blaming the author for any supposed antifeminist tendencies underlying the character, Dinshaw

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favorably revaluates him by commenting that through his female speaker, Chaucer imagines the possibility of a masculine reading that acknowledges feminine desire in good faith and is not antifeminist.65 As Jill Mann puts, or rather morally justifies the matter, just because Chaucer uses antifeminist satire in portraying the Wife does not mean that he endorses it.66 For critics who subscribe to this perspective, there is an apparent unease with a conception of “Master Chaucer” as a kind of stereotypical, misogynistic male. This discomfort is highly significant, because even the most steadfast feminists (Hansen excepted) tend to take a reconciliatory tone toward the poet. The critical rule, in fact, appears to be that even if Chaucer’s verse is not read as empathizing with the plight of women, most critics seemingly would prefer to condemn the world in which he lived for any perceived misogyny rather than the poet himself. The inclinations just described are typically implicit and likely not part of a willful program of interpretive manipulation, but nonetheless the elisions in question are integral to the scholarly construction of Chaucer-as-poet. In an attempt to characterize reconciliatory accounts of this sort, Alastair Minnis has outlined the notion of “structural anti-feminism” that has been utilized by numerous Chaucerians in order to explain the supposedly negative views of women found in Alisoun’s performance. As its name implies, “structural anti-feminism” defines a scenario wherein the ideas in question are dictated and required by the structures of society, so that “it would be improper to condemn a writer for structural anti-feminism (phobic anti-feminism being, of course, a different matter)” since “he was following traditions, participating in discourses of sexual difference which were to outlive him long into the future.”67 This common, “structural” impulse is no better seen than in the concise view of Helen Phillips that the language in the Wife’s portrait may not indicate that Chaucer himself was “ribaldly antifeminist,” but that “his culture gave him no other language for envisaging a financially independent woman.”68 Given the pervasiveness of antifeminism in Chaucer’s era, the measured perspectives found in “structural” critical accounts are well-grounded. Yet it is apparent that, for some, this type of approach represents a convenient way to explain away the possibility that Chaucer was an antifeminist author whose poetry is often highly conventional in its depictions of the sexes. By shifting the focus—or the blame—from the author to society, it is understood that the narrator need not be connected directly to the poet. Regardless, the persona is rarely mentioned in such discussions, even though its very presence—and ambivalence—helps to facilitate “structural” readings and allows for a smooth shifting of interpretive blame. These “structural” renderings of the Wife, therefore, provide

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further evidence for the widespread scholarly disregard of the personaconstruct. In addition, the strain of veiled scholarly desire illuminated in previous chapters is identifiable—the virtual requirement to portray Chaucer as an admirable, progressive writer whose characters depict a world of change, growth, and hope. Hand in hand with this predisposition in criticism of the Wife, it seems, is another important predilection: whether Alisoun is understood through thought patterns that are somehow feminist, antifeminist, or otherwise, most critics are not only inclined to absolve the poet of any moral blame but also tend to exonerate his “gat-toothed,” libidinous character. Even the most infamous proponent of interpretive exegesis, D. W. Robertson, Jr., does not altogether condemn Dame Alice’s illicit behavior. True, Robertson certainly does not approve of the Wife’s “rampant ‘femininity’ or carnality” and is saddened by the fact that “she has little regard for the sacramental aspect of marriage. The ‘spirit’ of the institution escapes her completely.”69 But what is most intriguing is that this critic—widely known for his “preachy” scholarship—ultimately would provide a kind of historical justification for her behavior. In one of his later publications, Robertson notes the Wife’s land holdings, financial status, and legal backdrop, which suggests that the character was read in Chaucer’s time as a rural clothier, and perhaps a bondwoman, possibilities that offer “a reasonable explanation for her obvious and even ostentatious wealth.” 70 More importantly, Robertson contends that “Chaucer’s picture of Alisoun’s wealth, wandering, and intense interest in f leshly satisfaction is a caricature” designed to offer “a satire on the acquisitiveness of some of his contemporaries, the disruption of traditional hierarchies,” and a “concomitant decline in mores,” which are all attributable to the rise of the cloth industry.71 By returning to the concept of comedy/satire as an explanation for Alisoun’s “shrewish” behavior, Robertson’s words bring full-circle my discussion of the character’s primary scholarly legacies. But there is still one more essential lesson to be learned from the reception of this commanding female persona. The lack of consensus regarding the Wife of Bath’s gendered meaning(s) urges the critical reader to be sensitive to—and is the direct result of—the ambiguity of Chaucer’s foremost female creation. As the character’s reception history demonstrates, significant questions arise regarding the locus of responsibility for the controversial content, and especially concerning the issue of gender roles and their representation. Of particular importance is the question of whether the text is feminist or antifeminist. The answer is not clear, and this seems to be part of the author’s purposeful plan. Moreover, this ambivalence may in part be ascribed to her very nature as a storyteller. The Wife of

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Bath is not alive, she is not “real,” and she is by no means straightforward. She is, simply, a carefully constructed dramatic persona. I firmly believe that Chaucer was aware of the day’s persona-theory and deliberately experimented with his personae. And it is apparent that Alisoun was intended to play a key role in these experiments. It is, perhaps, inevitable that criticism of the Wife would prove to be contradictory and divergent over time. It is the nature of literary scholarship to question and debate. And, crucially, it is the nature of the “queer” persona to be unsettling and elusive. So, too, is the Wife of Bath, and I would argue that the variegated scholarly accounts of Alisoun’s “life” are the unavoidable result of her inherent ambivalence. The Wife seems to be a purposefully suggestive and equivocal female character. Rather than being decidedly antifeminist or unquestionably feminist, criticism on the Wife makes it clear that she does not fall neatly into either category. A strong case can, indeed, be made that the Wife of Bath is not the straightforward gender construct that many readers have assumed, but represents a consciously challenging creation—and the ambiguous persona is the vehicle for that challenge. This argument is strengthened by the fact that Chaucer appears to have been keenly aware of gender issues and their narrative representation, as section 4.3 will outline more fully. And Chaucer’s very design, it seems, was to use Dame Alice to transmit equivocal gender markers that would require readers to pause and think about important issues relating to gender roles and patriarchal structures. If so, then the Wife is powerfully “queer.” As Beverly Kennedy puts it, the Wife of Bath presents a “poetic of ambiguity” that serves the “profoundly moral intention” of inviting consideration about the complexities of gender in the Middle Ages.72 For most, the Wife of Bath presents readers with an either/or choice: either Alisoun is an early quasi-feminist, or she underscores the power of antifeminism in the medieval period. But like Kennedy, a handful of critics have usefully emphasized the fact that the character need not be seen in such neat, black-and-white terms. Anne Laskaya sums up the Wife’s ambivalence well, stating that in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, tale, voice, and body, boundaries become amorphous. Here, individual speech and cultural discourse, word and experience, self and others blur together . . . Here is Chaucer’s greatest challenge to the culture’s discourse surrounding femininity. Unlike his male pilgrim narrators, Chaucer embraces and enjoys the multiplicities of character, whether male or female. What attracts him to Dame Alysoun is the complexity of the human, not the simplicity of artificial social or cultural definitions.73

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S. H. Rigby is another notable scholar who has encouraged readers of the Wife to “reject both sides of the polarized debate” regarding the character’s (anti)feminism and sought a more nuanced view by recognizing her marked ambivalence.74 As Rigby acknowledges, it is a fact of literary scholarship that critics look for definitive answers, even if none are likely to be found. In the reception of the Wife of Bath, it is evident that many scholars have chosen to read as definitive a series of textual signifiers that are by no means clear-cut; despite years of scholarship to the contrary, it remains uncertain whether Alisoun represents a kind of antifeminist pawn, a quasi-feminist, neither, or both. Thus, I contend that a reasonable way to view the character is to see her as being carefully constructed to invite this very question, since she offers a range of (anti)feminist arguments and debates both sides of this issue in her Prologue. In making this case, I am not merely aiming to support scholars such as Rigby, but also to suggest that a logical next step in criticism of the Wife is to use the persona to deepen and more fully explore the character’s apparent ambiguity, her essential “queerness.” This is a female pilgrim that is extremely difficult to classify, categorize, or even summarize, so rich and complex is her “life.” Therefore, it is by no means an interpretive oversimplification to read the Wife of Bath as a deliberately ambivalent character that speaks to many different gender conventions and possibilities. And a more fully realized persona-construct holds great promise for further opening up Alisoun’s uncertain femininity and the ramifications of her deliberate indeterminacy. By returning the “queer” persona to its rightful place at the center of critical discourse regarding Dame Alice, scholars will be better positioned to investigate further what this combative female figure might have to say about medieval gender boundaries, gender norms, and gender discord. As a famous and deeply complex persona, the elusive Wife of Bath has great potential for questioning marginalized gender activities and ideals and “queering” accepted cultural practices and biases. This potential has yet to be fully realized by critics, who might use the persona of the Wife to ask new questions and further blur the lines of gender meaning for the Middle Ages. In bringing my discussion of Dame Alice to a close, there is an important final point to be made on the subject of critical oversights. Not only have most scholars failed to see the Wife of Bath as a usefully “equivocal, non-committal, and playful” character, but Rigby also convincingly argues that many readers today ignore the significant “gap which exists between her behavior and that prescribed for the estate of women by medieval moralists.” 75 Rigby contrasts Alisoun’s “self ”-presentation to the standards on display in the works of Christine de Pizan, and concludes that the Wife would have been viewed as morally deficient not only in

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the eyes of male authorities, but also is “profoundly problematic when judged against the ethical standards of the most forthright and systematic feminist thinker of the day (i.e. Christine).”76 As Rigby notes, there are several “parallels between the behavior of the Wife within marriage and that condemned by Christine.” 77 This is yet another subject worthy of further scholarly consideration, and it is particularly intriguing when it is recalled that, despite her undeniable improprieties, the historical tendency of scholars is to accept the Wife of Bath. If Kennedy is correct, such toleration may date back to the fifteenth century, when scribal alterations and marginal notations found in certain manuscripts suggest that “lay readers were able to see the Wife as a conventionally pious woman who chose to maintain her chastity by remarrying rather than attempting the higher degree of chastity exemplified by widowhood.” 78 Whether this is so, it is certain that a wide variety of critics, from schools as diverse as Exegetics and queer theory, have celebrated Alisoun’s “life,” in spite of the moral “gap” described by Rigby. Having addressed some of the major ideologies and oversights that characterize the Wife of Bath’s scholarly reception, it is now time to focus exclusively on the Pardoner, a false preacher whose legacy runs counter to that of Dame Alice since “his” moral indiscretions are rarely (if ever) overlooked and are often condemned by critics. Whatever a reader is to make of this unique, discomfiting character, there is little doubt that the Pardoner is an especially challenging pilgrim who elicits thought about sexuality and culture, greed and God, by leading his audience “into political deliberation about the ideals and institutional arrangements of society.” 79 4.3

The Pardoner’s “Privetees”: Physiognomy, Perversion, and Scholarly Retreat

Throughout the history of Chaucerian reception, many readers have openly despised the Pardoner for being a “Devil of the first magnitude.” This was the harsh descriptor used by no less a figure than William Blake, who also castigated the character as “the Age’s Knave, who always commands and domineers over the high and low vulgar. This man is sent in every age for a rod and scourge, and for a blight, for a trial of men, to divide the classes of men.”80 Blake’s contemporaries typically displayed a similar abhorrence for the Pardoner and his manipulative, self- serving preaching, describing him as a “huckster of holy ‘trumpery’ ” who offers “bargains of his soul-saving pedlary” and tells “sermons of vulgar cajollery.”81 Charles Dickens referred to the character as “a humbug, living on the credulity of the people,” and most early readers would seem to agree with such a negative assessment.82

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Though the overt distaste on display in these comments gradually would diminish, similar concerns have been voiced by more recent critics, who have thoroughly examined the character’s historical “life” in terms of greed, medieval theology, the abuse of relics and preaching, and so on. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine accounts of this sort at length, but suffice it to say that such criticism provides ample evidence for the aforementioned tendency to afford the (autofictional) Pardoner his own historically based “life.” This specific type of scholarly (mis)reading is significant, because in the case of the Pardoner, it conveniently shields the poet from undesirable associations with arguably his most depraved creation, a startling dramatic persona unlike any other in the Canterbury Tales. When critics construct the Pardoner’s “life” by historically rooting “his” existence in medieval culture, this allows the author and his values to be displaced, reduced, or somehow ignored. Thus, the Pardoner’s moral deficiencies emerge as character-f laws that have little or nothing to do with Chaucer and his own beliefs. If Chaucer the Man is brought into the interpretive picture, then he is often morally safeguarded in a different way. Scholars who focus on the Pardoner’s historical situation commonly portray “his” religious misdeeds as accurately ref lecting the improprieties of actual medieval pardoners; as a result, the character’s sinful conduct frequently has been perceived as a poignant example created in order to condemn manipulative preachers of his kind.83 In the context of medieval estates satire, few would question such a conclusion. But it is interesting to note that this perspective may belie a distinct unease with the possibility that a presumably good man such as Chaucer would choose to write the “life” of an utterly immoral figure. A particularly suggestive example of this apprehension is found in the criticism of G. L. Kittredge. Kittredge famously referred to the Pardoner as “the one lost soul among the Canterbury Pilgrims,” the “most abandoned” character of the Tales who exposes the “horrid hypocrisy of his professional life.”84 However, unlike numerous early readers, Kittredge is neither absolute nor unwavering in his rebuke of the Pardoner. Rather, when the remainder of Kittredge’s well-known critical sketch is taken into consideration, an important instance of what I call the “moral f linch” is seen. This concept signifies the fact that many recent critics not only exculpate the poet when addressing the Pardoner, but—despite their propensity for distaste toward the character—there also is an identifiable reluctance to condemn the Pardoner outright. The moral f linch therefore represents a crucial interpretive aversion, a typically abrupt or disjunctive ethical back-tracking when scholars are faced with (arguably) the most disturbing and problematic Chaucerian storyteller. Though many readers remain uneasy with the corrupt character, the moral f linch provides

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a sense of hope—hope for the Pardoner’s redemption, or at least tacit desire that “Father Chaucer” would provide some measure of hope for a lost fellow. In its latent optimism, criticism marked by a moral f linch may be guilty of a kind of age-old humanistic sentimentality. In any case, scholarship that features a moral f linch is, essentially, doubly hesitant: it not only vacillates in the face of the sinful Pardoner, but in so doing, takes care to avoid implying any harsh moral judgment on the revered author who gave the character “life.” This cautious scholarly “f linching” represents a compelling strain of ideological manipulation, for it is an act and action that makes it clear that most readers do somehow abhor the immoral Pardoner—yet of late, few have chosen to condemn him unequivocally. Hence, the moral inclination traced thus far in my monograph takes perhaps its most dynamic form here, as the moral f linch rationalizes the authorship of the reprehensible Pardoner and signals a thinly veiled desire to ensure that Chaucer retains his favorable magisterial status.85 Manifestations of the moral f linch may take slightly varied forms, but they are united in their effect. In Kittredge’s case, the moral f linch takes the shape of a belief in the possibility of the Pardoner’s redemption, for there appears (he argues) to be a moment in which the character displays “a very paroxysm of agonized sincerity.”86 Thus, Kittredge abruptly draws back from wholly damning a character he earlier described as a “lost soul,” by offering the hopeful possibility that the Pardoner’s “cynicism suddenly abandons him, and—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye—he becomes a changed man, reverting to the days before he lost his soul.”87 Though a sense of unease remains with regards to the corruption of the Pardoner (“an assassin of souls”), Kittredge changes tack by assuming a redemptive tone and implicitly supporting the notion that the (supposedly) benevolent, sagacious author simply could not create something totally evil or irredeemable.88 Therefore, the Pardoner ultimately escapes Kittredge’s judgment. Some critics, however, have not hesitated to judge. For most of the Pardoner’s reception history, those who have scorned the character have been especially troubled by his impious actions and seeming lack of regard for certain core Christian beliefs. This disapproval is neatly summed up in the words of Kemp Malone, who bluntly condemns the “most contemptible” Pardoner as a “scoundrel” who is representative of the “wicked, vicious clerics [who] make money hand over fist, by fraud, deceit, and trickery of the basest and most despicable kind.”89 Few would deny that the Pardoner is, at best, a morally dubious character, given his deception, greed, and blasphemy. But it is interesting that other, less obvious reasons may explain the disparagement of the character in some

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quarters. Returning attention brief ly to the nineteenth century, when the condemnation of the Pardoner was rife, the severe judgment rendered by C. D. Deshler is particularly illuminating. Deshler’s distaste is obvious in his declaration that the Pardoner represents one of “the most disgusting characters in Chaucer’s picture of his times.”90 What is striking here is that Deshler’s dislike, it seems, was largely a result of the character’s “lecherous disposition and effeminate appearance,” which was unacceptable to Victorian sensibilities.91 According to Vern Bullough, “males who demonstrated any feminine qualities could only be looked down upon” during the Middle Ages.92 Sedgwick has drawn a similar conclusion about Deshler’s own era, when a “gaping and unbridgeable homophobic rift” became a permanent feature of the sexual “geography.”93 Even if Deshler’s viewpoint is not truly “homophobic,” it illustrates that for some readers—past and present—the unease they have with the Pardoner may be ascribed to the faux preacher’s feminine appearance and undisclosed sexuality. In fact, the character’s greed and religious immorality are no longer of greatest interest to many critics, but increasingly the determination of his sexual “secret” has been central to the scholarly hermeneutic concerning the Pardoner. Although most critics are inclined to accept or even delight in the rampant (hetero)sexuality of the Wife of Bath, there has been some resistance to making a similar concession for the Pardoner and his alleged (homo) sexual behaviors. The case could be made that Chaucer himself was more sympathetic to the Wife of Bath, but there may be more deeply divisive sentiments at work in the scholarly disapproval of the Pardoner. As recent queer theory has shown, compelling explanations for the disparity in question may be uncovered by highlighting the generalizations, apprehensions, or outright phobias regarding homosexuality that are, or have been, present in Chaucer Studies. I would now like to focus attention on what such theories have to say about the Pardoner’s supposed “secret,” in order to reassess the character’s unusual gender markers. The roots of today’s dominant critical focus on the Pardoner’s “secret” may be traced to the highly inf luential scholarship of Walter Clyde Curry. Curry’s well-researched physiognomical study of the Canterbury pilgrims includes the contention that the Pardoner’s high voice and glaring eyes were associated with his “shameless impudence, gluttony, and licentiousness.” 94 More explosive is Chaucer’s infamous reference to the character in the General Prologue as “a geldyng or a mare,” which is said to reveal “the secret of the Pardoner; he is most unfortunate in his birth. He carries upon his body and has stamped upon his mind and character the marks of what is known to mediaeval physiognomists as a eunuchus ex nativitate,” who frequently are marred by “all kinds of depravity.”95

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Curry concludes that, since the Pardoner is “physically unfortunate” and thus “provided by nature with a warped mind and soul, he is compelled to follow the urge of his unholy impulses into debauchery, vice, and crime.”96 By claiming that the Pardoner had a secret, and offering a suggestive interpretation of what it was, Curry provoked a series of critical accounts of the character’s nature that have sought to solve the mystery that supposedly lies at the center of his identity. As John Halverson has noted, ever since Curry’s study (published in 1926), the Pardoner’s biological condition—or sexual predisposition—has been fundamental to virtually every attempt to understand the character’s complicated personality.97 The original line of criticism regarding the Pardoner’s sexual nature closely followed Curry’s physiognomical precedent. Hence, a series of accounts were written on the “physically handicapped” pilgrim’s hypothetical status as a scriptural eunuch or hermaphrodite.98 In recent years, other possible explanations for the Pardoner’s secret have been abundant: among other things, the character has been portrayed as a spiritually impotent simoniac and as “a negative prototype of the effeminate male in Western literature” who may be suffering from Klinefelter’s syndrome.99 However the Pardoner’s physical traits are interpreted, it is clear that ever since Curry’s account the pilgrim’s secret has become the key to unlocking his being—the secret of the character’s self. For many queer theorists, the Pardoner’s secret is his closeted homosexuality. The “queering” of the Pardoner was initiated by Monica McAlpine a quarter century ago, and it has been the most pervasive critical trend surrounding the character since that time. When applied to Chaucer’s verse, queer theory often features a tacit critical move away from the author toward his character or (sexual) culture, and thus the Pardoner’s visage, storytelling, and interactions with his fellow pilgrims have been said to ref lect his moral views and presumed (homo)sexual inclinations, as well as the gender values of late medieval society. Accordingly, in her indispensable analysis of “The Pardoner’s Homosexuality and How It Matters,” McAlpine cleverly proposed that the character emerges as a conglomeration of three sexual phenomena that frequently were confused with homosexuality in the Middle Ages: effeminacy, hermaphroditacy, and eunuchry. For McAlpine, it is “impossible to exclude the suggestion of homosexuality” in the Pardoner’s portrait because it is the only concept that can account for all of the sexual phenomena found in his description.100 More important for my purposes is the fact that McAlpine’s article ambitiously moves beyond critique of medieval perceptions of homosexuality to address the inner torment of an outcast despised by society and misunderstood by his church.101 Hence, a “queer”

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version of the moral f linch is found, as McAlpine proclaims the Pardoner to be a complex man who shows “signs of spiritual life” and who genuinely wants forgiveness and an “affirmation that he is in some sense holy”; Chaucer may be attempting to “challenge the sexual phobias” of his readers with the marginalized character and encourage them to consider how to give a balanced judgment of such a figure—in the context of cupidity or through a conception of Christian love.102 This last interpretive turn is critical, because this variant of the moral f linch underscores a desire to redeem the Pardoner despite his misdeeds (or misunderstood sexuality) by offering a sense of hope that he be treated fairly and received “as a pilgrim in the fellowship of other pilgrims.”103 McAlpine’s hopeful view represents a distinct, early version of a now familiar perspective whereby there is an attempt to identify (at least partially) with the Pardoner as