김현진, 초서의 ‘나약한 수소’: ｢기사의 이야기｣ 다시 읽기
Hyonjin Kim, Chaucer’s “Wayke Ox”: Rereading The Knight’s Tale

Abstract

The Knight’s Tale has recently degenerated into a “wayke ox” of Chaucer scholarship: critical interpretations of the tale have hit a dead end, on the one hand, because the New Critical legacy of Charles Muscatine is too potent to overcome, and, on the other, because the tale itself is too obviously masculine and too outrageously patriarchal. Major critical camps, including New Historicism and Feminism, continue to employ Muscatine’s model of “the struggle between noble designs and chaos,” or between order and disorder. While a greater number of recent critics, of which the New Historicist Lee Patterson is a prominent example, recognize the artificiality and temporality of order, most Femininist readers are baffled by the seeming absoluteness of the patriarchal order Theseus and the Knight impose. The present article suggests that what Patterson views as the self-destructive nature of order is applicable to the order of patriarchy, as well. The tale, in fact, functions nicely as a second prologue to, and also as a miniature of, the entire Canterbury Tales. The ideological bulwark of The Knight’s Tale is erected only to be toppled in the subsequent tales, whereas the twofold frame of wedding and funeral, which marks both ends of the tale, is reproduced in a much larger scale in the tale collection as a whole, where the twofold lineup of normative framing devices (The General Prologue and The Knight’s Tale at the beginning and The Parson’s Tale and Chaucer’s Retraction at the end) unsuccessfully overrule the chaotic worlds created by “a compaignye / Of sondry folk.”

Key Words
Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale, order, disorder, New Criticism, New Historicism, Feminism