윤민우, 그리젤다의 몸과 노동: 초서의 ｢학자의 이야기｣
Minwoo Yoon, Griselda’s Body and Labor in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale

Abstract   


Griselda is “translated” in three ways in the Clerk’s Tale. Chaucer translates the versions by Boccaccio and Petrarch into a tale capable of inviting various interpretations. Griselda is translated (transferred) from her father’s house to Walter’s court and then back to her father’s place and then again to the palace. And she is translated into different persons, depending on different clothes she is supposed to wear in different places. In all the three cases, Griselda is subject to the males who weave her identity. Then, in antithesis to her changing clothes, what is constant is her naked body. Her body (in a sense, her “sad chiere”) nullifies all the variants of clothes and places that circumscribe it. Her naked body is the Real, resisting the symbolization of male glossing. 

Further, regardless of the clothes, places, and texts that environ Griselda, what also stands constant is her labor. She diligently works either in her father’s house or Walter’s palace. She performs domestic, wifely, and public works for production and reproduction. This inalienable entity of her unwavering labor makes her the master of her selfhood. Whereas Walter the marquis fails to achieve self-recognition, Griselda is not estranged from a firm sense of existence in the course of improving her own ordering and shaping skill, over time, during her contact with human beings, nature and material objects. This Hegelian dialectic of the master-slave nexus accounts for Walter’s insatiable desire for testing her wife in order to get the badly needed interaction of the conscious with the Other. Thus, feeble and momentary as it may be, there happens the translation of power from Walter to Griselda toward the end of the tale.

Key Words: translation, glossing, clothes, body, labor, master and slave