Chaucer and Religion
An article by Brother Anthony of Taize (Sogang University, Seoul)
first published in a miscellany offered to Professor Lee Gun-sop of Ewha
University, Seoul.
There have been and continue to be many ways of approaching Chaucer.
There is, for example, a great difference between the studies written about
him by academic specialists, and the kind of approach needed when we have
to teach Chaucer in the classroom. Professional Chaucer studies tend to
follow contemporary fashions, the most influential of which have recently
include discussions of narratorial ironic strategies, the exercise of power
in society, and conflicts connected with gender or sexual identity. Religion
as such is not usually mentioned, except in terms of corruption and oppresssion,
although the presence of Boethian sub-texts in Chaucer gives rise to some
quite metaphysical debates on freedom and necessity.
This paper arises out of the question, 'Who reads the Parson's Tale?'
More important than the question of what we read is the question of how
we read it. What readings do people today make of the Canterbury Tales?
What do we look for in reading Chaucer's work? Or any work, come
to that? For the last 100 years or more, the General Prologue has
often been isolated, hailed as a great masterpiece, on account of the lively
'portraits' of characters that seemed not so far removed from those of
Dickens. Still today, it is usually given pride of place in a Chaucer course,
the portraits often being viewed as examples of 'estates satire' and therefore
'socially relevant.' The fabliau-style Tales were condemned as immoral
in past times, and remained unread, while few or none today can even begin
to understand Milton's enthusiasm for the fragmentary Squire's Tale. Pilgrim
Chaucer's invitation to 'Turne over the leef and chese another tale' before
he begins the Miller's Tale is today frequently applied to the didactic
and religious tales. In all these ways, the Canterbury Tales is treated
as a collection of stories that can be taken and read or taught in isolation
without damage to their literary identity.
This paper sets out to examine ways in which the religious dimension
is integral to the understanding of the Canterbury Tales and the
key to a unifying approach to all the parts of it. This matter has been
the subject of a fine book in recent years: Roger Ellis, Patterns of
Religious Narrative in the Canterbury Tales (Croom Helm, 1986). Another
aspect of Chaucer's religious world is discussed in A.J. Minnis, Chaucer
and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge, 1982). These will serve as the starting-points
for our study, by which it may be possible to show that a reading from
a religious standpoint provides a deeper and more coherent understanding
of Chaucer's great work, fragmentary and incomplete as it is. (Readers
will please provide their own mental italics for Canterbury Tales and the
names of the various tales, if they feel a lack of them in what follows.)
Recently, some of us who teach Chaucer have been involved in a discussion,
on the Chaucer email list, on the way we view and present the Canterbury
Tales in our classes; crucial to this debate has been the importance we
want to give in teaching Chaucer to a number of often neglected Tales that
include Chaucer's own Tale, Melibee, and, above all, the final Parson's
Tale and Chaucer's Retraction that concludes it. We might recall that Chaucer
was published and read in the Reformation Era as a pre-Reformation prophet,
thanks perhaps above all to the Ploughman's Tale that he did not write.
First, what do we mean by 'Religion' in Chaucer? That there are religious
aspects to Chaucer's fictional world must be clear to any reader. They
are not all Christian; Troilus and Criseyde, the Knight's Tale and
a number of other tales are set in a pre- christian cosmos, with the old
pagan gods of Greece and Rome playing an actively destructive role.
To concentrate on the Canterbury Tales, it is obvious that the journey
to Canterbury has a religious dimension at its starting-point, as a
pilgrimage of people who are at least nominally Christian towards the
tomb of a martyred Archbishop situated inside a church building, where
they will perform religious rituals. The way in which this destination
remains hidden, virtually unmentioned in the Prologue or the links, suggests
a deliberate strategy of concealment on Chaucer's part.
Seven of the pilgrims chosen for lengthy detailed description in the General
Prologue are potentially or actually connected with the Church:
the Prioress, Monk, Friar, Clerk, Parson, Summoner, Pardoner, as compared
with the 14 descriptions of secular figures: the Knight, Squire, Yeoman,
Merchant, Man of Law, Franklin, Cook, Shipman, Doctor of Physic, Wife of
Bath, Ploughman, Miller, Manciple, Reeve.
With the notable exceptions of the Clerk and the Parson, all the Church-people
have lives that seem to be more or less far removed from what might be
expected in people of their calling; the Clerk is intensely serious at
his studies, the Parson is said to be living in true Gospel style. The
Prioress has pet dogs she feeds too well, cries over dead mice, and wipes
her mouth before she drinks her wine, which may or may not be very serious
faults; the Monk has horses for hunting, which must cost a lot to keep,
and seems not to pray very often. Others, though, have lives marked by
greed, gluttony, and sexual lechery, the Summoner and Pardoner seeming
particularly far from the Christian ideals.
Similarly with the lay figures; some, like the Knight and the Squire, the
Yeoman, the Man of Law, or the Cook, are not shown as having any particular
vices, but only the Ploughman, the Parson's brother, is presented as living
a particularly Christian life. Among the others, we find various activities
that are not normally considered good, whether the Doctor's love of gold,
or the thefts committed by dishonest people such as the Reeve, the Miller,
or the Shipman, who also seems to be something of a murderous pirate.
Recent studies have referred to 'Estates Satire' and 'Anti- fraternal Satire'
as backgrounds to the descriptions in the General Prologue but most readers
are struck by the absence of satiric voice or irony on the part of the
Narrator. The Narrator of the Canterbury Tales frame (the Pilgrimage setting)
is usually termed 'the Pilgrim Chaucer' because it seems clear that he
represents a distinct persona from the Chaucer whom we would term the 'author'
of the Tales. The setting up of this dichotomy allows critics to detect
a silently satiric grin on the author's face as he writes a text marked
by frequent application of the word 'worthy' to people who are quite clearly
unworthy of such admiration! There is little use in modern criticism of
the word 'sin'.
This Pilgrim Chaucer describes the people with whom he went to Canterbury
with remarkable detachment, agreeing uncritically with the Monk's opinions,
using the words 'good' and even 'perfect' about a wide variety of lives:
the Shipman is a 'good felawe,' the Doctor a 'verray, parfit praktisour,'
the 'good Wif' of Bath is a 'worthy womman.' There is no such word used
for the Reeve, but the Summoner is 'a gentil harlot and a kynde, a bettre
felawe shoulde men nought fynde.' It is surely safer to say that this way
of writing is the very opposite of that normally termed 'satire' and that
the exercise of all moral or spiritual judgement is left entirely to the
reader, with no knowing winks from the narrator.
All these people are embarking on a pilgrimage, but it is left to the reader
to recall that human life itself is traditionally thought of as a pilgrimage;
this may lead to the idea that in Christian thought, the goal of the human
pilgrimage is God's judgement, and that for the people of Chaucer's time,
at least, this opened on the double possibility of Heaven and Hell, bliss
and damnation. The pilgrims ought to be faced with the question, 'Where
are we going? To Heaven or Hell?' A pilgrimage potentially offers a time
of reflection, repentance, and conversion, whereby those going to Hell
can change their direction and make a new beginning.
When we teach Chaucer, how much time do we give to the last part of
the General Prologue? The introduction of the Host and his subversive
idea of how they should spend their time on the journey is as important
as the portraits. The reader may or may not note the words the Host uses
to qualify the pilgrims' activities: 'pleye,' 'disport,' 'confort,' 'be
myrie.' After all, Pilgrim Chaucer has already told us that 'of manhood
hym lakkede right naughte.' Sin may be 'only human' but manhood is what
God took to himself in Christ's Incarnation. It is the Host, this jovial
Inn-keeper, who proposes the tale-telling competition and demands the right
to be their judge, in the decision as to who 'bereth hym best of
alle.' This is more usually considered to be God's role, but the Host explains
that he only means who tells 'Tales of best sentence and moost solaas.'
The central activity of the Canterbury Tales, then, is tale-telling.
People are telling people things; in the fiction we read, the various pilgrims
are telling things to their fellow-pilgrims. Most of the 'things' told
here are tales, literary fictions of various kinds. When we are told something
by another person, we cannot avoid the question of truth: what I
am being told may or may not be true. In the Chaucerian universe, the guarantee
of truth is the level of authority that can be attributed to the
origin of the thing told.
The ultimate standard of truth is the Bible; when Chaucer translates
words from the Bible he is especially careful to translate accurately.
In the Church there are Doctors, St Augustine being the most famous, who
are cited as 'auctors' in all kinds of debates. University
education was centered on disputations designed to teach minds to use authorities
in order to distinguish truth. The habit, though, was not limited to students,
and we find the Wife of Bath as well as Chauntecleer and Pertelote busily
invoking authorities to support their opinions. Now, the truth is ultimately
God, so that it is necessary to know God correctly in order to be able
to recognize the truth, any kind of truth, and the true meaning of events.
No ordinary person, then, has authority of themselves. Experience
is not a basis for authority, since we are obliged to refer to the auctors
in order rightly to evaluate our experiences. The activity of the person
who instructs another by telling stories, then, is usually not 'authorship'
but translation. The teller tries to influence the audience by restating,
in ways that seem adapted, truths that have been sanctioned by recognized
authorities in the past. The translating activity transposes old truths
into new forms, not necessarily into a different foreign language.
To judge is to evaluate in terms of true meaning; lives are judged by God,
tales are judged by their hearers, or in the case of our Pilgrims by a
dictatorial Host who declares that his decision is final. He thus asserts
that he is fully equipped to recognize 'sentence' as well as 'solaas.'
It should come as no surprise to find that the Canterbury Tales is deeply
concerned with 'reader-response criticism' but perhaps it is not so obvious
today that such activities are deeply religious in nature!
Yet it is really quite simple. From the very beginning, the frame-situation
of the Canterbury Tales obliges us to be conscious of our reading activity.
Will we agree as to which Tale ought to win? Will we understand why, in
the end, no tale wins? We are also obliged to keep reminding ourselves
of the listening pilgrims, and the all-powerful Host, as we read each tale.
What are we looking for? Sentence? or Solaas? Truth, or entertainment?
Can the two aspects be reconciled, as Horace insists they should? Is fun
a sinful activity? Where does the highest good lie?
It is very 'natural,' we will say, to laugh when old John the Carpenter
cuts the rope and hurtles down to break his arm. 'Marvelous story,' we
say. There are other such laughs, and the Host has a term for them, 'japes.'
He enjoys them. We enjoy them. We rarely find a book devoted to a theory
of laughter. Yet it only takes a little thought to see that we probably
do not laugh in real life at people getting hurt and badly burned, marriage
vows being broken, friendship being abused, to think only of the Miller's
Tale. What is our laughter expressing, and what moral stance does it support?
Is everything ok if we only can laugh?
There are quite a number of Tales, and the General Prologue itself is perhaps
one of them, that are purely secular pictures of the 'way of the world.'
The cunning, thieves and liars, seem to win out over their unsuspecting,
or stupid victims, they even boast of it, and there is no certain justice.
The only seeming morality of several tales is 'an eye for an eye,' with
revenge being considered the obvious human response to harms received.
What hope is there of justice for the poor, what meaning in undeserved
suffering?
A problem arises because we all know that the Canterbury Tales is an 'unfinished
work' and many critics seem to feel that this prevents any valid overall
view. Yet our life, too, is unfinished work. The Tales has come down to
us in various manuscript forms, it is clear that it was still in a fragmentary
state at Chaucer's death. Yet this does not prevent us from seeing certain
important shapes in the arrangement of tales within and across the fragments.
We all agree, I suppose, that the Canterbury Tales begins with the
General Prologue and ends with the Parson's Tale and Chaucer's Retraction.
Yet from the point of view of the Host, that cannot be right, because for
him the real 'end' of the pilgrimage was to be arrival back in London and
his judgement of the Tales, followed by a party! Canterbury and the religious
activities there would only mark a half-way stage, an unfortunate interruption,
as it were, and nothing more. I wonder how many of us explain to our students
that the Tales 'would' have had that shape if Chaucer had only lived long
enough? I hope we can agree that it is not true? The Canterbury Tales would
only have that shape if the controlling genius of the work had been the
Southwark inn-keeper, and not Geoffrey Chaucer. What is the true goal and
prize in the pilgrimage of man's life, after all? Food, fun, and the options
of a bully? Or conversion, penance, and eternal bliss? It will all depend
on your point of view, I suppose, and that is why the Tales is such a remarkable
work. It keeps confronting its readers with the question of their own life's
priorities.
Harry Bailey may try to hijack the pilgrimage as it sets out from Southwark,
he is still only one character, involved in a process into the truth of
which he has a very limited insight. Like so very many people in the Tales,
he does not see the way things are going, and has only very poor control
over events. The actual end of the text, as opposed to that imagined by
the Host, is a strong affirmation of the victory of grace over sin; unfortunately
for most of us, it is also a radical denial of the ultimate value of literary
fiction!
That leads to another fundamental point about the Tales. A number of the
Tales stand in isolation, without a clear introductory linkage to the pilgrimage
frame, and sometimes without a very clearly identified teller (the Man
of Law's Tale about Custance, the Squire's Tale about Cambyuskan, the Merchant's
Tale about old Januarius, the Franklin's Tale about Arveragus and Dorigene,
and perhaps the Nun's Tale about St Cecilia).
Because of this fragmentation, it has become very easy for us to
'de-frame' the tales we are reading and attribute them all as they
stand to the authorial Chaucer. The fundamental reason for this may be
because of our 'romantic' notions of the poet/author's relationship with
his work. The result of this process, though, is incoherence, the demolition
of the Canterbury Tales as such. Ironically, the work is literally torn
to pieces, because it is accused of being fragmentary. All life is fragmentary,
as all knowledge is: 'We know in part' (I Corinthians 13). The Tales could
never have been other than fragmentary.
We have difficulty sympathizing with the savage Knight in the General Prologue?
Then we take his Tale away from him, and read it as Chaucer's adaptation
of Boccaccio, obviously written years before the idea of writing the Tales
ever dawned. By doing so, though, we loose all ability to reflect on why
the Knight's Tale stands at the beginning of the Tales, directly
after the General Prologue in all major manuscripts, and on the possible
thematic links between it and other tales. In this first Tale, Love
is an utterly destructive passion that turns sworn brothers into mortal
enemies, and reduces high princes to the level of wild animals. We are
shown the gods of this pagan world, where Christ has not yet been born,
and see that they are indifferent to human pain or powerless to relieve
it. Human beings become the objects of arbitrary measures designed to keep
a semblance of harmony, and the only certain thing in life is death.
The religious question is clearly posed, then, from the very outset: Why
do bad things happen to people? Must there be pain? The Miller comes barging
in, upsetting all the Host's plans, and tells his tale, that follows the
Knight's Tale in every manuscript, no doubt as Chaucer wished. It is not
enough to say, as Pilgrim Chaucer does, that he's a lout and tells a lout's
tale, in contrast to the aristocrat's refined art. There is much more to
be said about the way the two tales complement one another; sexual ambitions
operate destructively in high and low alike, jealousy and revenge drive
men to extremes of violence; the injustice of the trick the gods play on
Arcite is paralleled by the trick Nicholas plays on John in the tub.
Only in the Miller's Tale we are in a christian setting; at the
heart of the story is the evocation of Noah's Ark, which the New Testament
says is an image of Baptism, salvation from sin and death. The picture
of old John sound asleep in his Ark of salvation, exhausted after his efforts
to save them all from drowning, while Nicholas 'swives' his willing wife,
is as surreal as anything in Bosch; again, the question comes, 'And is
there care in heaven?' But also a murmur, 'They know not what they do.'
Or do they?
At various points in the Canterbury Tales we come across people trying
to help people become aware of what they are doing, so that they stop doing
it and change to lives of salvation. Success or failure may be a form of
judgement on the hearers, or it may depend on the unity between the words
and life of the speaker. Major examples of this come in the tale of Custance,
who converts hosts of people in the pagan world in which she is kept alive
and intact by special grace, as in Noah's Ark, despite all the plots of
the wicked.
In contrast, Cecilia in the Second Nun's Tale achieves the highest
success, eternal sainthood in heaven, by not surviving the attacks of the
pagans, her holiness is assured by her martyrdom, and she is shown teaching
her fellow-christians even with her head almost completely cut off. The
life and the message here are one, in a story where the literary technique
is significantly weak. The text of the Tale is a very conservative translation
of a story from the Golden Legend.
Now, if we talk about Chaucer taking this old translation from a drawer
and stuffing it into the Tales, to fill up a gap, we are not even beginning
to read it as an integral part of the whole work. If we complain that we
know nothing about the second Nun, so that we cannot feel the tale's potential
irony, we are barking up the 'charming Dickensian characters' tree. This
tale demonstrates a key notion: the only way a text can tell the truth
is by shunning the self-conscious search for aesthetic effects, humbly
reproducing as closely as possible the original Auctor, because the aim
of telling is to bring hearers to salvation. As Ellis (100) reminds us,
the second Nun's Tale has many links with the Man of Law's Tale, and the
Man of Law in his Prologue offers the supreme irony of a detailed criticism
of the work of a contemporary poet named Geoffrey Chaucer! The fundamental
discussion about literature contained in the Canterbury Tales is not about
how to make a 'good story' but whether anyone can tell a tale that
makes people good. The answer seems to be that it is almost impossible,
unless you are a martyr whose head has been partly cut off!
In very many of the Tales, the 'sentence,' the message, is far from clear,
and often the finer the literariness, the more confused the application.
A prime example of this is the Clerk's Tale of Griselde, which he
got from Petrarch; her sufferings are put in relationship with those of
Job, but it is far from clear that Walter can convincingly be read as God,
unless God is the Knight's Tale's Saturn. What really confuses the matter,
though, is the way in which the Clerk tries at the end to explain the message;
the story, he says, shows that we should be constant in adversity.
But then he looks around at his audience, and suddenly Griselde becomes
the antifeminists' model wife, so hard to find nowadays, thanks, perhaps,
to the Wife of Bath. So most tellers' attempts to adapt to and please their
audience lead to a failure to express the truth potentially contained in
their tales, since the truth is more or less unpalatable either to them
or to their listeners. Some tellers even seem unaware that there might
be a truth to be conveyed, especially those responsible for the fabliaux.
In any search for a religious reading of the Tales, there are certain vital
moments where everything seems to come together. One of these is certainly
the Pardoner's Tale, and within it, the exemplum of the 3 riotours.
Here they are, hard at work drinking in a tavern at some very early hour
of the morning, being served by a taverner and a boy who might rather be
asleep, when they learn of the sudden death of an old companion.
Now, the encounter with unexpected death normally provokes introspection,
memento mori, examination of conscience, and the processes portrayed
in Everyman. These three, though, have a quite different response.
First, they are too drunk or too foolish to be able to distinguish fiction
(personification) from reality, and take quite literally the taverner's
Tale that Death has his home in a nearby village where the plague has killed
everyone. They therefore imitate Palamon and Arcite, swearing oaths of
eternal brotherhood, and resolve to 'sleen this false traytor deeth' (697).
They set out on their quest, their pilgrimage. Certainly they do
not realize the enormity of their undertaking; the Prioress has the message
on a brooch, 'Amor vincit omnia,' but how much Amor have
they got? and she might have told these fellows that only Christ can conquer
death: 'Death is swallowed up in victory' (I Corinthians 15) is the central
Christian Gospel. The riotours put themselves in Christ's place, set out
to repeat his work, yet by their oaths 'Cristes blessed body they torrente'
(707).
Then comes their much-commented encounter with the poor old man.
He greets them with humble religious courtesy, 'lordes, god yow se' (713),
and in return the 'proudest' of the three insults him for being so old;
the Wife of Bath's Tale's young man comes to mind. The old man tells of
his own patient eagerness for a death that will not come, then instructs
them on the proper way to talk to their elders, quoting the Bible as authority.
They cannot find any sense in his words, learn nothing, and fail to notice
that he ends by blessing them. They simply ask where they can find death
and he points to a nearby crooked way leading to an oak-tree in a grove.
Of course, they find a pile a gold there.
Obviously, this whole scene is full of religious elements: to get to the
place, they have to turn aside from the right way; in the Old Testament
the oak tree and the grove are ambiguous places, sometimes holy like the
oak of Mamre where Abraham was buried, and sometimes consecrated to false,
pagan gods. In directing them there, the old man is recalling two phrases:
the first is 'The love of money is the root of all evils' (this is the
message that the Pardoner claims to be preaching, although he also exemplifies
love of money himself), and the second is 'The wages of sin is death.'
Both are biblical.
The old man's last words to the three are: 'God save yow, that boghte agayne
mankynde, And yow amende' (764-5). Here we find mention of the humanity
that everyone agrees is so vividly portrayed in Chaucer's work, its need
for redemption (being bought back from slavery/captivity) by God, who offers
his salvation to those who turn to him and sincerely try to change their
lives to conform to his will (amende) while looking to God for healing
(amende). The old man stands there, perfectly appalled and utterly helpless,
as the three merry youths go to their self-inflicted dooms. All he can
do is pray for them, but it will not do much good for them in this world,
at least.
If we consider the whole Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, we find a deeply
complex religious fiction. In his Prologue, the Pardoner describes
his techniques when addressing a simple rural audience; the implications
are part of a larger pattern in the Tales: he and the pilgrims consider
themselves to be of quite a high social class, so that he can show his
cunning tricks and laugh at the simple poor, his victims. The little word
'Lordings' that various speakers use, and the way some Tales contain advice
addressed to those in positions of power, suggest a subtle and foolish
snobbery or social pride that the Prioress embodies in her 'courtly' table
manners.
The Pardoner's words are in a very real sense all true, he is a masterly
'translator' of the Church's teaching about sin; but they embody what he
is, and therefore they are self-defeating because he embodies in them his
own condemnation. Critics struggle to understand what he thinks he is doing
at the end of the Tale, when he suddenly launches into a 'sales pitch'
addressed to the pilgrims; it does not help to use psychological realism
here, though.
In the Pardoner's terms, this moment is 'the moment of truth' because
he may be lucky and find his rhetorical skills have worked, some of the
pilgrims may have felt a religious anxiety that he can exploit. But alas,
he is only one money-maker among many, and most of his hearers have their
own 'tricks of the trade,' they are 'on to him' from the start as 'one
of themselves' and the Host more than any. The result is a row. The Tale
therefore ends with the highly symbolic reconciling kiss between Pardoner
and Host; they are brothers, one of a kind, and nobody has been challenged
by the message that 'Radix malorum est cupiditas' (I Timothy 6:10).
The Pardoner's Tale begins with a lengthy attempt to put various sins
into some kind of order or hierarchy of gravity; this passage reminds us
that human choices and actions derive from one another, that one thing
leads to another. It is characteristic of the Pardoner's restricted spiritual
understanding that he never really deals with 'amendment of life' but only
with escaping the consequences of sin by purchasing his pardons.
The question of the reasons for sin and the applications of grace is fundamental
in the Canterbury Tales. Why else did Chaucer set out to write it? All
the tales pursue the fault-lines of human life, the thin line between nature
and grace, life and death, Heaven and Hell. All the words of the Tales,
taken together, represent a sketch of Divine Comedy that is in some ways
more authentic than Dante's because closer to life, and because left fragmentary.
Only God can see, and be, the completed pattern. What we see and say is
a matter of glimpses, often wrong, or partly wrong; what we express, especially
in literary fictions, will often fail to communicate the truth, because
we easily allow ourselves to be corrupted, giving people what they want
(solaas) and not what they need (sentence), because that
is how we treat ourselves.
It can only be noted that the Pardoner needs the Wife of Bath (again,
ironically, because of all the male pilgrims, he is least able to partner
her!). His analysis of sin involves money, greed, anger, murder, conspicuous
consumption, selfishness, but not sex. The Wife of Bath completes his picture
without fundamentally changing it, since she too suggests that her need
of sexual pleasure is only secondary to her need of financial security.
Her young husbands only came when she had killed three rich old ones and
inherited their wealth. That she may be as murderous in her way as the
Pardoner's three young men is often generously overlooked, yet those journeys
she is reported to have made to Jerusalem, Rome, and the rest (GP 465)
were surely religious penances, not pious tourism! The multiple ironies
implicit in her use of authorities to illustrate a thesis also parallel
the Pardoner's.
Certainly sex and money between them dominate a lot of the lives
represented in the Tales, whether among the pilgrims or in the tales. Chaucer,
no doubt, more or less realized that he was better equipped to represent
fallen nature than effective grace. That would help explain why critics
use the word 'idealized' to qualify Parson and Ploughman portraits. Still,
he certainly knew a thing or two about the possible alternatives to the
primrose path.
There is another key moment for a religious reading of the Canterbury Tales.
Students may not notice it, but professors often fail to explain the first
26 lines of the Nun's Priest's Tale, beyond using such terms as
'irrelevant digression' or 'a misleading start.' The portrait of the
poor widow is, indeed, completely irrelevant to the plot of the beast
fable (with multiple digressions) that follows. If we fail to remember
that the Canterbury Tales is not an anthology of short stories, that is
perhaps all we can say, maybe not realizing that by such words we are criticizing
Chaucer's competence as a writer. There is a reason for everything that
is in the work, as well as for a lot of what is not there. There are more
ways than one of being coherent.
The widow's life is described in very great detail. Her cottage is 'narwe,'
it stands beside a grove in a dale (grove have been discussed above, this
world is known as a 'vale of tears'). Her life is 'ful symple' because
her income is 'litel' and she has no husband to get money from (the Tales
are full of mercenary marriages). Indeed, her revenue is of a very special
kind: 'swich as god hir sente' and she is very careful how she uses it.
Here is someone entirely dependant on divine providence for her survival,
like Custance in her years at sea, or like the Old Testament prophets,
and she too is not disappointed. She is not alone, she shares what little
she has with her daughters, like the Widow of Zarephath (I Kings 17) or
the Widow of II Kings 4.
She is not a purely idealized symbol, though, and her food does not come
by direct delivery from Heaven; she has cows and a sheep like anyone else.
The narrator may be suggesting 'indirect reported speech' in the line 'Ful
sooty was hir bour and eek her halle' because the implied amusement at
the idea of seeing her one room (without a chimney for the smoke from the
fire) where she sleeps and eats, as a noble house's private bedroom and
dining hall is most properly hers: she regrets nothing.
Her food is correspondingly plain and meagre ('sklendre') and the narrative
spends several lines on stating what it does not contain: all the delicacies
that the good eaters of the General Prologue enjoy! As a result she never
suffers from 'repleccioun' and indeed enjoys excellent health, again expressed
by the diseases of over-indulgence (gout and apoplexy) that she does not
suffer from.
The secret of her good health? 'Atempree diete... And exercise and hertes
suffisaunce' but it should not be thought that she goes jogging; hard work
every day in her garden and dairy is her secret. She is a truly happy woman,
for heart's contentment is true happiness and it only comes when all passions
are stilled. Very unlike the Wife of Bath, who wants satisfaction, not
contentment, and will not remain a widow one second longer than she has
to.
If the Pardoner's riotours are destroyed in part by their drinking, she
is safe because 'No wyn ne drank she.' The food she eats is milk, bread,
bacon and sometimes an egg, again seen as a royal banquet in amused tones:
'Her bord was served moost with whit and blak' in a kind of riddle following
on from the 'white and red' of the wine she feels no need of. That is all
we ever learn of the 'sely widwe' except that she and her daughters lead
the chase after the fox near the end, to no effect. She is so humble that
we know the name of her sheep and of her dogs, but not hers. Yet she is
so happy we might call her blessed among women.
The events, and the words spoken, in her chicken-yard occur in a universe
quite foreign to her, a universe of philosophical debate, of disputations
with no clear-cut conclusion, the ambiguous use of authorities and exempla,
and the mistranslation of Latin tags. The Nun's Priest's Tale is swamped
in words, but its narrator is at a loss to explain what they all mean,
offers more than one final moral, and ends by inviting the audience to
try to decide which is chaff and which is fruit, in another biblical allusion
to a judgement of a non-literary kind.
The Tale as such is a religious tale because its ultimate question is about
providence, though it cannot answer it. If the events of the future
can be known, whose responsibility is it to prevent suffering? These questions
fascinated Chaucer, they were at the heart of his interest in astronomy
and Boethius, they underlie Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight's
Tale, and all Chaucer's language of Necessity, Fortune, Chance, and Destiny.
The widow, though, has her justification elsewhere. Her life is a direct
illustration of the very last words of the last Tale. The Parson ends
his Tale by evoking the 'fruit of penaunce,' the 'endless blisse of hevene':
'this blisful regne may men purchase by poverte espiritueel and the glorie
by lowenesse, the plentee of joye by hunger and thurst, and the reste by
travaille, and the lyf by mortificacion of synne.' We know nothing of the
widow's life, her sins are as secret as her name. All we know is that she
has come to heart's contentment, she is not far from the Kingdom
of Heaven.
As we have said, the Host's pilgrimage of sin hopes to end in
supper, but thanks to the words of the Parson, his plan is thwarted.
The Parson's Tale is preceded by a Prologue in which the Host shows the
low level of his expectations; he wants one last fable. The Parson's reply
is typical of a Northerner: 'Thow getest fable noon ytoold for me.'
Basing himself on the Bible, the Parson rejects not only fables, but every
kind of fiction, since it is always an abandoning of truth (soothfastness).
He also renounces the use of verse. All that remains is 'Moralitee and
vertuous matere' told in prose, and humbly subject to the correction of
those who may know better.
The Parson's options are radical, in a later age they would be termed 'Puritan,'
and the result is a 'Tale' that goes far beyond the Pilgrim Chaucer's 'Melibee'
in its rejection of all fiction, and narrative, and of confusing debate.
The Parson's Tale is uncompromising doctrine, utterly concentrated
on provoking a change in the hearers lives; it is not open to any of the
temptations of more entertaining kinds of story. Above all, it is one with
its teller's own humanity, so that we cannot pinpoint the slightest moment
of irony.
When we teach, if we are pointing our students in the direction of the
text and not just telling them what they must find in it if they want to
get an A grade, we shall not be faithful to soothfastness if we
fail to point our students towards the Parson's Tale, followed by Chaucer's
properly ambiguous Retraction. Too much scepticism may induce us
to reject the Parson as a kill-joy and the Retraction as a joke. Both work
and writer deserve more respect and a deeper attention. For those who have
no religious dimension in their own lives, it may not seem obvious, but
Chaucer's work is not only entertaining, it is also thoughtful, it is philosophical,
but more than that, it represents a deeply religious discourse on human
existence.