The Canterbury Tales Revisited –
21st Century Interpretations
The Canterbury Tales Revisited –
21st Century Interpretations
Edited by
Kathleen A. Bishop
with a Foreword by David Matthews
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
The Canterbury Tales Revisited – 21st Century Interpretations,
Edited by Kathleen A. Bishop with a Forward by David Matthews
This book first published 2008 by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2008 by Kathleen A. Bishop with a Forward by David Matthews and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-84718-613-0, ISBN (13): 9781847186133
In memory of Gertrude and Joseph Bishop
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Forward ....................................................................................................... x
The Spirit of Chaucer
David Matthews
Preface ....................................................................................................... xv
I.
Being Intolerant: Rape is Not Seduction (in “The Reeve’s Tale”
or Anywhere Else)....................................................................................... 1
Heidi Breuer
Queer Punishments: Tragic and Comic Sodomy in the Death of Edward II
and in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale .................................................................. 16
Kathleen A. Bishop
The Churlish Nature of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale: How Language Can
Define Genre ............................................................................................. 27
Erica L. Zilleruelo
Peynted by the Lion: The Wife of Bath As Feminist Pedagogue .............. 44
Al Walzem
The Crossing of the Wife of Bath
Jennifer L. Martin...................................................................................... 60
An Exploration of the Public and Private in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale ... 75
Elaine Brown
II.
The Pardoner, The Prioress, Sir Thopas, and the Monk: Semitic
Discourse and the Jew(s) ........................................................................... 88
Miriamne Ara Krummel
viii
Table of Contents
Eglentyne’s Mary/Widow: Reconsidering the Anti-Semitism
of the Prioress’s Tale .............................................................................. 110
Winter S. Elliott
“Glydeth My Song”: Penetration and Possession in Chaucer’s
Prioress’s Tale......................................................................................... 127
Bronwen Welch
No man ne truste upon hire favour longe: Fortune and the Monk’s
Other Women .......................................................................................... 151
Leona Fisher
‘To Grisilde again wol I me dresse’: Readdressing the Clerk’s Tale ...... 166
William Rossiter
Chaucer’s Knight as Revisionist Historian: Anachronism
in the Knight’s Tale ................................................................................. 194
Art Zilleruelo
“Love should end with hope”: Courting and Competition
in The Knight’s Tale ................................................................................ 209
Jim Casey
III.
Dialogue, Dialogics and Love: Problems of Chaucer’s Poetics
in the Melibee .......................................................................................... 228
Alice Spencer
Companies, Mysteries, and Foreign Exchange: Chaucer’s Currency
for the Modern Reader............................................................................. 256
Nancy M. Reale
Spaces of Authority: Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales .... 281
Charity Jensen
Chaucerian Counterpoise in the Canterbury Tales: Implications
of Newfangleness and Suffisaunce for the 21st Century Reader.............. 300
Sonya Veck
The Canterbury Tales Revisited
ix
Noise, Terminus and Circuitus: Performing Voices in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales ..................................................................................... 314
Kevin Teo Kia-Choong
Contributors............................................................................................. 334
FOREWORD
THE SPIRIT OF CHAUCER
DAVID MATTHEWS
For a very long time—as anyone working in Chaucer studies knows—a
great deal of responsibility was heaped on Chaucer's shoulders. It was
Chaucer who single-handedly renovated the previously barbarous English
language. It was Chaucer who brought English poetry—the real, iambic,
decasyllabic thing—into being. And it was Chaucer who, in doing those
things, put poetry where it ought to be: at the very centre of power, the
royal court, where it could be given proper patronage and, in its turn, help
shape the emergent English nation from that central position. Quite a
career, in short.
All of these ideas were first put forth in the fifteenth century—a period
when to be a poet at all in England was to be a poet after Chaucer. They
resulted from a kind of revisiting of the poet which amounted almost to a
refusal to believe he had actually gone.1 In the sixteenth century, editors
and commentators on Chaucer accepted most of what had been said in the
previous century and added a new facet to the poet, his protoProtestantism, necessary to ease him past the upheavals of the 1530s and
Henry VIII's Reformation. And these ideas about Chaucer were, in turn,
inherited and then amplified by the scholarship of the eighteenth century,
handed on to the nineteenth, survived the substantial revisions to Chaucer's
biography which took place in that century, were then chipped away at by
the twentieth, before, all in a rush, they were completely exploded as
myths in the past quarter century of scholarship.
Chaucer did not renovate the English language—no single person
could have done (for a powerful corrective we thank, among others,
Christopher Cannon).2 He was not, primarily, a poet to the greatest and
most powerful.3 We have long since worked out that his anticlericalism,
far from indicating a man straining to escape from the shackles of the
Church of Rome, has nothing particularly startling about it. So far, we
have left to him iambic pentameter—though with severe qualifications
The Canterbury Tales Revisited
xi
about whether, because of that, Chaucer should be awarded paternal
custody of English Poetry.
The powerful mythologising of Chaucer over the centuries ensured that
Chaucer's popular reputation stood out above all other medieval English
figures. He was for a long time, and perhaps remains, the one instantly
recognisable late medieval English literary 'brand', much as Shakespeare is
for a later period. It might be expected that with the toppling of the myths,
Chaucer would have tumbled with them. And there is an extent to which
the pre-eminence of Chaucer within late medieval studies as a whole has
been challenged over the past two decades. Middle English studies is
currently being transformed, and this is happening in ways that explicitly
decentre Chaucer.
It was inevitable that, sooner or later, scholars would begin to reevaluate Chaucer's immediate English successors, Hoccleve and Lydgate,
rather than unconsciously accepting the judgement of centuries upon them.
The last few years have witnessed a transformation in studies of fifteenthcentury verse. Technology, too, has changed the ways in which we can
think about the field of Middle English more broadly. Perhaps one of the
greatest benefits of the internet to Middle English studies has been the
release, through TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle
Ages), of a greatly expanded range of Middle English texts, which has
opened up new possibilities for teaching and research in late medieval
studies. Technology does not tell the whole story, however; the TEAMS
publication programme would not work if there were not scholars willing
to do the editing of what were hitherto seen as minor texts. Editors have in
fact flocked to the task: what we are seeing in TEAMS could be regarded
as the delayed realisation of a dream first held by Frederick Furnivall
when he founded the Early English Text Society—the placing of reliable
editions of texts within the reach of anyone prepared to pay a guinea a year
to a subscription society (for a guinea, in the twenty-first century, read:
access to a basic computer and an internet connection).
Furnivall's child, the EETS, of course continues and is responsible for
fine editions. The activities of TEAMS show no sign of slackening. The
critical activity accompanying the production of texts is also impressive.
In many ways, the prospects for the broader field of Middle English
studies have never looked better.
At the same time, there is more than a hint of uncertainty in Chaucer
studies. Scholars in mid-career or earlier have been accustomed for some
time now to regularly being handed new sets of lenses for viewing
Chaucer. If the study of medieval English literature generally was slow to
react to poststructuralism, and Chaucer studies had particular problems in
xii
Foreword
advancing beyond the agonistic struggle between exegetics and New
Criticism, the revolution was swift when it came. Two slim books, the
Marxist re-readings by David Aers and Stephen Knight in the mid-1980s,
administered short but very sharp shocks to the field.4 Within a few years,
Chaucer had been placed on the psychoanalytic couch, historicised,
gendered, queered. The notional mid-career Chaucerian is likely to have
on her shelves copies of the serious, must-read, 'big books' that seemed to
be regular occurrences: before David Wallace's Chaucerian Polity:
Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), there was Lee Patterson's
Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1991), and before that, Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), a slender work but—no
mistake about it—a 'big book' nevertheless.5 By the end of the twentieth
century, Chaucer studies seemed marked by its plurality. After all, once
we could ask, with Paul Strohm, 'What Can We Know About Chaucer
That He Didn't Know About Himself?' (and answer, Quite a lot), the old
exegetics-New Criticism binary seemed very far distant.6
Nevertheless it is much less clear, today, what is new in Chaucer
studies (and even less clear what will be new, next week or next year).7 Is
it inevitable that when work in Middle English other than Chaucer is
revitalised, Chaucer studies must suffer? I have argued elsewhere that the
study of Chaucer and the study of other Middle English texts have
historically been quite separate.8 Chaucer, the quintessential Middle
English author, was for several centuries not regarded as a Middle English
author at all; indeed, what marked him out was precisely his not being
Middle English.9 Even those Victorian scholars most responsible for
putting Chaucer back into Middle English—such men as Frederick
Furnivall and W.W. Skeat—acknowledged his separateness and special
status when they followed the founding of the Early English Text Society
with a Chaucer Society four years later. There is then perhaps some
inevitability in the current flourishing of wider Middle English studies at a
time when Chaucer studies might be faltering: a return of the repressed on
the part of Middle English or, to cast it in postcolonialist terms, a case of
the margins writing back.
It is precisely in this respect that the idea of revisiting the Canterbury
Tales is timely. Like many Middle English scholars, I have found the
possibilities of an expanded Middle English exciting and provocative. But
although I have had misgivings at times about the place given to Chaucer
in Middle English—like a giant sun, he has exercised a massive
gravitational pull, threatening to suck lesser satellites into oblivion—it has
The Canterbury Tales Revisited
xiii
always been obvious that Chaucer is our not-very-secret weapon in Middle
English. Broadening the canon of available Middle English and bringing
the kind of critical-theoretical sophistication previously devoted to
Chaucer to, say, the saint's life or the vernacular chronicle (to name two
'growth areas' of recent times) are vital for the continuance of medieval
literary study. But while such moves can be seen as a reaction to the
dominance of Chaucer, there is no reason for them to presuppose the
diminution of Chaucer studies. I am arguing, in short, that the most useful
thing that can happen in Middle English studies is the completion of a
project dating back to the 1860s and Victorian scholarship, in which
Chaucer becomes another Middle English author—albeit a supremely
gifted one.
In this context, the revisiting of the Canterbury Tales that takes place
in this book is welcome. Revisiting can mean the melancholy work of
going back, in order to pretend that someone or something has not gone:
this was the fifteenth-century model of reading Chaucer. This kind of
revisiting dwindles, eventually, until that which was revisited becomes
itself a revenant, which was what was happening with Chaucer by the end
of the fifteenth century and for some time after: Spenser and Dryden,
famously, stated their spiritual affinity with a now ghostly Chaucer. But
we revisit places and people not always simply because we wish to be
reassured that they are still there. We might want to check details; we
might expect, even before we get there, that we have misremembered and
indeed might be motivated by wanting to look again at what we thought
we knew. That happens in Revisiting Chaucer when Jennifer Martin and
Al Walzem go back to the Wife of Bath; Kathy Bishop and Erica
Zilleruelo revisit the Miller's Tale, and Winter Elliott and Miriamne Ara
Krummel the Prioress's Tale. Think you remember everything about
Chaucer's sources in Petrarch and Boccaccio for the Clerk's Tale? William
Rossiter's penetrating look at both will persuade you otherwise.
Revisiting, then, can take place in a strong sense, unburdened by
melancholy, determined to re-examine and re-read. In such new
encounters, we realise that it is possible not simply to remember afresh,
but to come away with something new.
Notes
1
James Simpson contrasts two models of thinking about Chaucer in the early
period, those of 'remembered presence' and 'philological absence'. See 'Chaucer's
Presence and Absence, 1400-1550', in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed.
xiv
Foreword
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 251–69. I am thinking also here of work by Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His
Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993) and Thomas A. Prendergast, Chaucer's Dead Body: From
Corpse to Corpus (New York and London: Routledge, 2003).
2
The Making of Chaucer's English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998).
3
On this see in particular Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1989), ch. 3.
4
David Aers, Chaucer (London: Harvester, 1986); Stephen Knight, Geoffrey
Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
5
I do not mean to suggest any kind of official lineage here, still less to exclude by
what I have not mentioned. The 1990s was an exceptional decade of Chaucer
study; the titles mentioned are among a large group which I find myself going back
to again and again.
6
Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 165. On exegesis and New Criticism, see
the now classic summary by Lee Patterson in his Negotiating the Past: The
Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1987), ch. 1.
7
It is perhaps indicative of critical uncertainty that one of the most talked-about
things in recent Chaucer studies has been not about criticism but empirical data
and Chaucerian biography: Linne Mooney's identification of Adam Pinkhurst as
Chaucer's scribe. See her 'Chaucer's Scribe', Speculum 81 (2006): 97–138.
8
See my The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999), ch. 7.
9
See also Tim William Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts
(Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1994), esp. pp. 88–92.
PREFACE
This volume grew out of a session of the 2006 International Medieval
Congress at the University of Leeds, in which I participated, along with
Heidi Breuer and Leona Fisher who have also contributed articles to this
volume. Cambridge Scholars Publishing contacted our chair David
Matthews about possibly submitting a proposal based on the session, The
Canterbury Tales Revisited. I embraced the invitation, also inviting
participants in a session I was chairing to submit chapters as well; thus
Alice Spencer and Charity Jensen joined us in our venture. In general, the
cross section of scholars gathered together in this book is both exceptional
and truly international, representing the United States and Canada as well
as Asia, the UK and the continent.
I would like to thank Amanda Millar and the staff of Cambridge
Scholars Publishing for contacting us in the first place and for all the
generous support they have provided to us in the process of producing this
volume.
I owe a very special debt of gratitude to the eminent scholar David
Matthews for all his help and guidance on this project and for taking time
out of his very, very busy schedule to contribute the eloquent opening
piece for this book. It has enhanced the The Canterbury Tales Revisited
immeasurably.
Thanks to my friend and angel Pat Wright for generously sharing with
me her little house with a very big garden in Wiltshire every summer
where this book was largely completed. And thanks to Jeff Katz for so
kindly and diligently working out a schedule every year to accommodate
my summers in the UK. I must also express my endless respect and
gratitude to Karen Mruk who has been such a very big supporter over the
years. Thanks additionally to my loving family, Gail Asher and John and
Cheryl Wagenhoffer, as well as my recently departed, and much missed
cousin Michael Asher.
Lastly, I want to express my indebtedness to my friend and mentor
Professor Robert Raymo, who taught me what it means to be a scholar. He
remains an enduring source of inspiration to me, and anything of value I
have ever done as a teacher and scholar of the Middle Ages is no doubt
due to the influence of his generosity of spirit and profound erudition.
xvi
Preface
This book is dedicated to the memory of my dear parents, whom I lost
within nine months of each other in 2005.
Kathleen A. Bishop
New York University
BEING INTOLERANT: RAPE IS NOT SEDUCTION
(IN “THE REEVE’S TALE” OR ANYWHERE ELSE)
HEIDI BREUER
When I was in graduate school, I took Chaucer courses, as did practically
every medievalist. Let me describe for you a conversation I had with one
Chaucer professor—I’ll call him Dr. Dinosaur.
I met with Dr. Dinosaur in his office to discuss an upcoming
assignment, in which we were tasked with demonstrating our skill in
close-reading by analyzing one of the Canterbury Tales in the first
Fragment without drawing on criticism or secondary research. I knew
immediately what I wanted to write about—I had a Big Idea. I don’t
really remember what my Big Idea was, but it doesn’t matter, as our
conversation hit an immediate and fatal snag the second I tried to tell Dr.
Dinosaur what inspired it.
“As I was reading ‘The Reeve’s Tale,’” I said, “I was struck by the
way in which the rape scene functions as revenge on the miller rather than.
. . .”
Dr. Dinosaur interrupted, “What rape scene?”
I hadn’t anticipated this. “Um. . .the rape scene. The one where
Aleyne sneaks into Malyne’s bed and rapes her. And then John. . . .”
“That’s not a rape,” he said. That shut me up. I was dumbfounded. It
was clearly a rape. This woman, asleep in her bed, wakes up to a man
climbing on top of her, uninvited, and forcing himself inside her. Sounds
like rape to me. I gathered myself together.
“What do you mean, it’s not a rape?” I asked, trying to be polite, as
this was the first conversation we had attempted outside of the classroom.
“He sneaks into her bed and rapes her.”
Dr. Dinosaur smiled, a look of smug satisfaction—he had me now!—
“But it says in the text, ‘shortly . . .they were aton’; by the time it was
over, you see, they were agreed, and she enjoyed it.” He stared at me, his
smile widening in glee, his gaze unrelenting. “It was a seduction.”
By now I could feel the blood in my cheeks; my hands went cold, and I
remember blinking back the surprising anger welling suddenly up inside
2
Being Intolerant: Rape is Not Seduction (in “The Reeve’s Tale”
or Anywhere Else)
me, the feeling of rage I felt smoldering within my belly. Why was I so
angry? I was shocked at myself—I don’t get emotional in academic
situations. Thankfully, I’ve never been the victim of a rape, so I didn’t
expect the emotion I felt radiating out of my skin as he continued to grin,
giggling at the enormous fun of the rape victim enjoying the rape. I
snorted, blurting, “That’s classic male rape fantasy—the victim liked it.”
Oops. I can’t remember whether or not I added, “That’s ridiculous.” I
suspect I did.
Dr. Dinosaur’s grin faded.
“I’m uncomfortable with feminist
criticism.”
What? I didn’t think that what I was doing was reading as a feminist
(though it was). I thought I was just reacting to something obvious—
something that clearly happened. We hadn’t even gotten to my Big Idea
yet—this was just plot. What happened next, I don’t know exactly; all I
remember is that, as of that moment, I was done talking to him. We
continued to speak for a few minutes, I think, but it just wasn’t the same.
It never was again—that conversation effectively ended my ability to have
meaningful interactions with that professor—after that, whenever we
spoke I felt guarded, defensive, and nervous. I wrote the paper, which was
terrible, in large part because I spent the entire paper trying to prove that it
was a rape—a point that was almost incidental to my other claims, and
certainly not the heart of my Big Idea. It doesn’t matter whether his
comments on my argument were generally useful and fair (which they
were)—I couldn’t read them, because whenever I did, his grin appeared,
Cheshire-like, floating in my mind—she liked it, she liked it.
This experience is what motivated this essay—it was the catalyst for
my investigation here. When I decided to revisit this work in preparation
for this essay, my intention was to perfect my old argument that the sexual
encounter between Aleyne and Malyne was, in fact, a rape. I began
collecting books and articles on rape law, hoping to find legal precedent
for Chaucer’s language in “The Reeve’s Tale.” I also gathered work on
representations of rape in medieval literature, spreading my net wide, as I
prepared to make an airtight case—to argue so convincingly that no one
could respond with a grinning accusation.
I had my work cut out for me. I couldn’t find anyone who agreed with
my interpretation of the notorious “Reeve’s Tale” bedroom scene. Finally,
I found Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose’s book, Representing
Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (2001). Rose writes,
“Chaucer displays a disturbing propensity to inscribe rape in his
narratives, yet often directs the readers away from reading rape to reading
not-rape” (22). I felt vindicated. Here was someone who not only agreed
Heidi Breuer
3
that the sex in that scene was rape, but who argued that the text tries to
force us to see that rape as not-rape, as seduction. And I realized that
though I could (and would) still track down the legal support for my
argument, I had another, more important text to analyze. I had to theorize
what happened to me during that conversation with Dr. Dinosaur—what
made me so angry at my male professor that any possibility of a positive
professional relationship was foreclosed forever.
Ultimately, there are two things I must explore if I want to understand
what happened in the office that day. The first is the connection between
the rapes of “The Reeve’s Tale” and medieval legal discourse about rape.
Chaucer’s language in the two rape scenes of “The Reeve’s Tale” invokes
the complex matrix of ideas which comprised late medieval discourse
about the crime. This invocation leaves little doubt about the sexual
violence of these scenes, linking the acts in the story to a legal tradition
spanning the medieval and modern periods.
The second topic I must address is what happens after the rapes, both
within Chaucer’s narrative and outside, in the responses of the critics and
of professors like Dr. Dinosaur. The attitudes of the Reeve, Chaucer, the
majority of Chaucerian scholars, and my professor towards those scenes of
rape are remarkably similar—they erase it, turn it into a seduction. My
study not only explores what’s at stake in representing rape in literary
texts, but also interrogates how and why patriarchal insistence on erasing
rape in literary texts negatively affects the way in which scenes of sexual
violence in literature are understood by female readers. What are the
implications of a disciplinary tolerance for categorical denial of
interpretations that recognize sexual violence in literary texts? In short,
my investigation is an interrogation of the sexual politics of interpretation.
My experience will serve as the case study through which I can theorize
this problem.
First, let’s examine the legal context for the crime of rape in 13th- and
th
14 -century England.1 We’ll begin with a definition. Much work has
been done to define and describe 14th-century notions of rape, frequently
in service of clearing Chaucer’s reputation from the stain inscribed by the
documents releasing him from the rape of Cecily Champain.2 As
Chaucerians inevitably know, raptus/rapere had a broader set of meanings
in medieval law than the modern word rape possesses: raptus could mean
forced sex (without the consent of the victim), it could mean kidnapping
and forced sex, it could mean kidnapping and forced marriage (and thus
forced sex), or it could mean kidnapping alone. This last definition is a
happy discovery for those looking to keep Chaucer free of the charge of
sexual violence, but it seems to me that folks are missing the point. What
4
Being Intolerant: Rape is Not Seduction (in “The Reeve’s Tale”
or Anywhere Else)
this particular range of meanings suggests is profound: the act of taking a
woman away from the men who protect her chastity is tantamount to
ending that chastity—in medieval law, abduction and rape are so closely
connected as to be considered the same thing. Christopher Cannon (2001)
addresses the conflation of rape and abduction in medieval law: “the
[corpus of medieval law] is not incomplete evidence for judging between
two different crimes (“rape” and “abduction”), but complete evidence of
the medieval law’s commitment to joining those crimes so thoroughly that
modern rubrics will never distinguish them” (82). The ambiguity of
medieval law so energetically documented by Chaucer scholars is not
simply an anachronistic reading back, but proof that conflation of rape
with abduction was a legal foundation stone in medieval England. The
equation of abduction and rape is possible primarily in a society where
women circulate via sex, and there is ample evidence that medieval
England was just such a society.
Claude Levi-Strauss famously argued that social kinship organization
in many societies is determined by the exchange of women between men.3
The exchange of women “has in itself a social value. It provides the
means of binding men together” because it allows men to organize their
social relations, offering rules about which women are available or not
available to them sexually (1969, 480). In this schema, the desire of the
woman exchanged is irrelevant (though sometimes the men exchanging
her might have a superfluous interest in her wishes). Though Levi-Strauss
doesn’t offer a critique of the situation he describes, Gayle Rubin (1997)
analyzes Levi-Strauss’s observations through a feminist lens. Rubin
argues that the formulations of writers like Levi-Strauss, Sigmund Freud,
and Friedrich Engels, though not conceived in this way by the writers
themselves, are useful as foundations for the development of a theory
about women’s oppression. While men are also exchanged (by other men)
as “slaves, hustlers, athletic stars, serfs, or as some other catastrophic
social status,” they are not exchanged as men, whereas “women are
transacted as slaves, serfs, and prostitutes, but also simply as women”
(Rubin 1997, 38). In other words, while men are exchanged in connection
with some additional category (slave, serf, wage-laborer), women are
exchanged in the category “woman,” which underlies any additional
category they may occupy (aristocrat, slave, wage-laborer). Women are
the ones exchanged specifically as a sexual commodity—as wives,
mothers, prostitutes, sexual objects. The problem with rape in this system
is not that it removes women’s right to consent to sex, but that it
circumvents their exchange between men. Losing possession of a woman
without permission (say, in abduction) is equivalent to losing the ability to
Heidi Breuer
5
regulate her sexual activity—thus, an abducted woman is a raped woman.
Late medieval law overtly recognizes the patriarchal right of men to
exchange women between them. Cannon (2000) has demonstrated that
medieval law functioned to make a woman’s consent in both rape and
abduction essentially irrelevant, though it was the factor that courts
addressed when they chose to prosecute rapists. What counted was the
father’s or husband’s consent—the man governing the sexual behavior of
the woman. The 1285 Statue of Westminster provided the option for a
rape survivor’s father or husband to bring suit against the rapist, who had
devalued his sexual property. Rape was a crime that violated “the King’s
peace”—in other words, it interfered with the social mechanism for
exchanging women and regulating their sexual behavior.
Whether courts were concerned about the violation of women or the
protection of male property (which is ultimately impossible to determine
definitively), medieval law did recognize rape, as we know it today, as a
bona fide crime. The treatises of Ranulf Glanvill and Henry de Bracton,
both highly influential for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, agree
that rape means forced sex. John Marshall Carter (1985) translates
Glanvill’s definition as follows: “In the crime of rape a woman charges a
man with violating her by force in the peace of the king” (35, italics mine).
Rape was a felony, and what distinguished rape from sex was that a rapist
completed the sex act “by force.” Simply put, force negates female
consent. The position of medieval law on a woman’s consent to sex
contained two major stumbling blocks: 1) a loophole allowing rapists to
marry their victims and thus absolve themselves of the crime, and 2) an
option for the rape victim to consent to the rape after the fact.4 The first
issue—the loophole—may very well have been developed to protect
couples who participated in clandestine marriage—also known as
“marriage of consent”—against the wishes of their families, as is
frequently argued. In such a case, an unhappy parent would accuse the
daughter’s lover of rape, and the two would marry to avoid unfair
persecution. Though this scenario represents one option, there is another,
more sinister application—for every happy couple who avoids
persecution, there may be a rape victim forced to marry her assailant and
endure a lifetime of rape. The second issue—also introduced by the
Statute of Westminster in 1285—is likewise fraught: though consent “after
the fact” may also be seen as a way to provide women more agency in
controlling their own sexual relations (as in cases where a woman’s father
brings suit against her husband without her permission), it also increases
the chances for intimidation of rape victims, forcing them to suffer a
second victimization. Both of these options, institutionalized for the
6
Being Intolerant: Rape is Not Seduction (in “The Reeve’s Tale”
or Anywhere Else)
ostensible purpose of allowing female consent, could equally function to
erode a woman’s ability to refuse consent at all. Because these laws
existed, it was not enough to refuse coitus once; she must continue to
assert that she did not agree in order to prevent the (illegal) rape from
transforming into just sex. The rapist, supported by the legal system,
could say, “After it happened, you realized you enjoyed it, didn’t you?” I
remember the grinning refrain: “she liked it.”
Consent should be an uncomplicated issue—a woman should decide
whether or not she engages in any kind of sexual encounter, in any
circumstance, with any partner. The reality is that consent is hugely
complicated—it’s complicated today, and it was complicated in medieval
England. What makes it so fraught, in part, is the fact that a woman’s
declaration of lack of consent is routinely challenged. To obtain legal
recourse against a rapist, a woman must prove she did not consent. The
fact that this feat is hampered to greater or lesser degrees depending on the
radically varying circumstances of specific historical and legal moments
does not change the underlying truth—a woman must prove she did not
consent. That has not changed. The ways in which a woman might obtain
proof of her unwillingness to be raped, however, were more limited in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries than they are today.
The best way to garner incontrovertible evidence of rape was to raise
the hue and cry during the sexual violence or as soon after as possible, so
that enough witnesses could document the physical signs of sexual assault
(such as blood, ripped clothing, or bruising).5 If the rape left no obvious
physical signs of violence, which may have happened more often than not,
the victim was particularly hard-pressed to prove her case. Bracton
describes the expectations of authorities as follows: “[The victim] must go
at once and while the deed is newly done, with the hue and cry, to the
neighboring townships and there show the injury done to her to men of
good repute, the blood and her clothing stained with blood, and her torn
garments” (qtd. in Carter 1985, 94). In other words, after the woman had
already suffered sexual violence, her humiliation and victimization would
be exacerbated, as she was forced (again) to expose her body against her
will. Legal procedure mandated that the rape victim openly display herself
as a victim in order to be considered one. This process was particularly
insidious—not only must the flesh of the female body first bear the
violence of unchecked male desire, but the visible signs of that aggression
must then function to satisfy another kind of male desire, the demand of
the patriarchal legal system. To prove that her body was violated, she
must allow more men to violate it. In fact, it wasn’t enough that “men of
good repute” have access to her most private, damaged body parts;
Heidi Breuer
7
Bracton adds, “in the same way she ought to go to the reeve of the
hundred, the king’s sergeant, the coroners, and the king’s sheriff” (qtd. in
Carter 1985, 94). The demand for public revelation of rape through outcry
and display was so insistent that failure to conform virtually ensured that
the rape would go unprosecuted and the rapist unpunished. A case from
Berkshire provides an example: “Margery daughter of Emma de la Hulle”
testified that “Nicholas son of Geoffrey of Whatcomb. . . came to her
between Bagnor and Boxford in . . . Kingestrete near Bagnor Wood on the
vigil (21 July 1244) of St. Mary Magdalen at the hour of vespers in the
28th year (of the reign of King Henry III) and raped her virginity against
the king’s peace” (Carter 1985, 23). Though her testimony is specific and
detailed, Nicholas is able to refute her by saying that “when he allegedly
did this deed she did not raise the hue and cry” nor “come to the next
county (court)” to display the signs of her victimization. Margery, in fact,
was charged with false accusation and taken into custody, so Nicholas’s
defense was apparently very successful. In this example, the rape was
erased—it was turned into just sex, not forced sex at all, despite what
Margery thought. Even worse, Margery’s attempt to obtain justice turned
her into a criminal.
Three key concepts emerge from this consideration of medieval legal
discourse surrounding rape: 1) rape—intercourse without consent—was
illegal, 2) a woman being raped was expected to demonstrate her lack of
consent by crying out and calling attention to the rape as it was happening
or immediately after, and 3) rape was considered to be such a violent
crime that it left physical signs on the victim, which could be observed by
outside witnesses after the fact. These three aspects of legal discourse
inform the representation of rape in the “The Reeve’s Tale.”6
In “The Reeve’s Prologue,” Chaucer the pilgrim tells us that “The
Miller’s Tale” has incited “ire” in the “herte” of Osewold the Reeve, and
the Reeve himself claims he will “quite” “The Miller’s Tale” (1989, 8,
10). In other words, Chaucer makes a point of telling us that the tale is
framed as a story of revenge on the Miller for his tale about the cuckolding
of an old carpenter. Indeed, the first three hundred lines of “The Reeve’s
Tale” deal with the initial exchange of tricks between Symond the miller
and the clerks, Aleyne and John. The clerks are the last to have been
bested as the tale moves into the house and the bedroom, and the tale’s
trick-swapping plot implies that it is the clerks’ turn for revenge. This
context of revenge is especially important in light of two factors: 1) the
social exchange of women constructs rape as a crime not against women,
but against the men who control women’s sexual behavior, and 2) as
documented by Barbara Hanawalt (1979), rape was very likely used in the
8
Being Intolerant: Rape is Not Seduction (in “The Reeve’s Tale”
or Anywhere Else)
fourteenth century specifically as a form of revenge or protest against
wealthy men in the community (109). Rape as revenge against men
neglects (and thus erases) the fact that the crime involves traumatizing
women. The dual contexts of the Reeve’s and the clerks’ revenge on the
Miller permeate “The Reeve’s Tale” and provide the foundation for the
dual rapes of Malyne and her mother.
The first rape proceeds as follows: Aleyne announces his intention to
obtain “esement,” or restitution, for the crimes against him, reminding
John immediately before he acts that his plan is to take revenge on the
Miller by having sex with his daughter. Then he sneaks over to the bed
where Malyne lies asleep. The following passage describes the events of
the rape:
And up he [Aleyne] rist, and by the wenche he crepte.
This wenche lay upright, and faste slepte
Til he so ny was, er she mighte espye,
That it had been to late for to crye,
And shortly for to seyn, they were aton;
Now pley, Aleyne! for I wol speke of John. (1989, 344-9)
Let’s look at the facts. Malyne is “faste” asleep, laying on her back,
completely unaware that Aleyne has “crepte” next to her bed. By the time
he reaches her bed, it is “to late for to crye.” Chaucer’s use of the word
“crye” here invokes the legal discourse I’ve been discussing—he specifies
that by the time Malyne realizes what’s going on, it is too late for her to
utilize the appropriate legal action (the hue and cry). Adding insult to
injury, Chaucer claims that as soon as the rapist reached his victim, the
two were “aton.” The phrase “aton” is the ancestor to our modern phrase
“at one,” described by the Middle English Dictionary as meaning “to be of
one mind” or “to be reconciled” and the Oxford English Dictionary as “a
state of harmony or unity of feeling.” Here, Chaucer has presented a
paradox—if Malyne is sleeping until Aleyne is on top of her, it’s virtually
impossible for the two to be “aton.” In fact, this sounds a lot like the
grinning rapist’s refrain, “She liked it!” If Malyne is not conscious when
the intercourse begins, and realizes what’s going on too late to raise the
hue and cry during the act, then how could she have given consent, how
could she have agreed? Consent is not possible in this situation.
Chaucer’s construction of this scene forecloses any possibility except rape,
despite his claim that Malyne was in harmony with Aleyne; he not only
offers a scene of sex without consent, a scene of rape, but also takes care
to inform us why the hue and cry was not raised.
The rape of Malyne’s mother is even more graphic:
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9
[She] lyth ful stille, and wolde han caught a sleep.
Withinne a whyl this John the clerk up leep,
And on this gode wyf he leyth on sore.
So mery a fit ne hadde she nat ful yore;
He priketh harde and depe as he were mad. (1989, 378-82)
Parts of this scene are similar—the victim is drifting off, lying “full stille”
and almost catching “a sleep.” The rapist leaps on his semi-conscious
victim, not stopping to obtain her consent. Whereas Chaucer’s language
in Malyne’s rape invokes the legal mandate for the hue and cry, his
language here draws on the other litigatable sign of rape, the physical
marks of violence. After John leaps onto the poor woman, he “leyth on
sore,” or lies on her with intense physical pressure, pinning her down and
“pricking” her so violently that he seemed insane. Surely this exaggerated
and violent forced sex would leave exactly the kind of physical signs
expected by medieval courts in rape cases. Chaucer pairs lack of consent
with concubitus violentus here, again describing the situation in language
that evokes the legal discourse of rape circulating in medieval England.
When considered in light of the legal definition of and proof for rape in
this period, these two scenes seem fairly evident—Chaucer utilizes a
discourse that marks these sexual moments as rapes. That medieval rape
discourse finds its way into Chaucer’s representation of rape is not in itself
surprising. What is surprising is the response of his characters and of
modern critics to these scenes. If the two rape scenes are marked so
specifically, as I have argued, why is it that Dr. Dinosaur found it so easy
to erase the sexual violence and to read this as a seduction? There are two
ways of dealing with this question, and they are closely connected.
The first involves the way in which both the other characters and the
narrator react to the scenes. Having clearly established the sexual
violence, Chaucer then treats the rape as a game, telling Aleyne to
continuing “play[ing]” with Malyne and joking that the violence of
Malyne’s mother’s rape was a “mery . . . fit.” Rose (2001) explains, “We
are invited by the poetic narrator, as in “The Reeve’s Tale,” to see sexual
violence towards women as ‘pley’. . . . Sexual assault glimmers ominously
just behind the rape-as-pley reading that the narrator’s text provides” (22,
24). As if laughing at the rape as a game isn’t bad enough, Chaucer takes
the joke a step further, making Malyne fall for her rapist; she calls him
“lemman” and weeps when he leaves (1989, 391, 398-9). Chaucer
presents a rape and then immediately erases it, offering no censure and
even hinting at consent after the fact, using an unfortunate legal loophole
to turn the rape into a seduction. Chaucer’s narrative reinforces and
perpetuates the medieval version of what modern feminists call “rape
10
Being Intolerant: Rape is Not Seduction (in “The Reeve’s Tale”
or Anywhere Else)
culture.” Emilie Buchwald, Pamela R. Fletcher, and Martha Roth (1993)
explain rape culture as “a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual
aggression and supports violence against women. . . . In a rape culture
women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from
sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones
physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm” (ii).
Chaucer’s “Reeve’s Tale” certainly “condones” the “physical and
emotional terrorism” against Malyne and her mother, arguing that women
like to be raped, that rape is really just seduction. “The Reeve’s Tale”
goes on to suggest rape/seduction is simply a male form of revenge against
other men, reducing women’s suffering to a mere side-effect of men’s
relationships to one another. Erasure of rape, denial that rape can even
exist, is central to rape culture, central to teaching women that we have no
choice about sex. Whether Chaucer was aware of his participation in this
system is irrelevant; the insidious ubiquity of rape culture doesn’t require
conscious awareness to work. Literary reinforcement of rape culture has
explicit consequences for real women. When literary texts mark the
erasure of rape as acceptable, it teaches readers that we can erase rape in
real situations as well. Chaucer’s Reeve is the forefather of all those who
call rape seduction.
Dr. Dinosaur, then, is following the lead of the Reeve in choosing to
see the rapes of “The Reeve’s Tale” as seductions. What is far more
troubling than Chaucer’s erasure of sexual violence, the second issue of
interpretation, is that decades of scholars, legions of dinosaurs, join the
Reeve in calling rape “not-rape,” join him in saying, “she liked it!.” This
is way bigger than Chaucer. While researching for this paper, I
encountered case after case of (mostly) male authors grinning at me, as in
the following examples: A. C. and J. E. Spearing call Malyne’s experience
“a moving romantic occasion” in a 1979 book (19); Larry Benson tells us
in an article published in 1987 that “The miller’s main concern is not the
seduction but the low social rank of the seducer” (852, italics mine); in
that same year, Derek Brewer claims that “the seduction of the daughter is
paralleled by the cunning ingenuity of the seduction of her mother” (74);
in 1990, Priscilla Martin suggests that Malyne receives “tenderness” and
“pleasure” from Aleyne’s sex act (77). The list goes on. Each of these
scholars join the voice of Dr. Dinosaur, erasing rape, calling it seduction,
ignoring the textual cues that mark the sex with violence and lack of
consent. Interpretations of sexual violence as normal perpetuate rape
culture, a culture that links us inextricably to the culture of Chaucer, that
binds us with the idea that rape is normal, that rape is one of the ways in
which women can and should be treated, and that rape is something
Heidi Breuer
11
women are expected to enjoy. And when male professors shut down the
possibility for female students to interpret a rape as a rape, what they are
doing is foreclosing female subjectivity, replacing it with the demand that
we side with the rapist against the victim. Rose (2001) describes the
process as follows: “Taught to read literature by men, as men, . . . women
readers of literature have had to submerge their own reaction to rape in a
work of literature to the traditional ‘male’ reading of rape”(25). Dr.
Dinosaur’s response to my interpretation was an attempt to force me into
his (male) reading of rape, and the conversations about rape in his
classroom always became conversations about seduction. But rape is not
seduction, in “The Reeve’s Tale” or anywhere else.
Literary interpretations, such as the ones favored by Chaucer scholars,
are only one facet of rape culture, which permeates all aspects of society.
Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (1991) explain, “literary and artistic
representations not only depict (or fail to depict) instances of rape after or
as if they have occurred; they also contribute to the social positioning of
women and men and shape the cognitive systems that make rape
thinkable” (3). In other words, the discourse created by representation
circulates within and informs the discourse of reality. It is difficult to
argue otherwise in a post-Derridean, post-Lacanian, post-Foucauldian
world. Erasing rape in literary narratives contributes to its erasure in real
situations. My experience is just one example of the complex, reciprocal
relationship between representation and reality. Though moments such as
the one I experienced are certainly not good, a worse result of rape culture
can be seen in the tolerance for real rape perpetuated by the far-toofrequent failure to prosecute and punish rapists. According to Rob Hall
(1996), though fifteen to twenty-five percent of U.S. women are rape
survivors, rape cases are more frequently considered “unfounded” than
any other crime—rape is “unfounded” eight percent of the time, whereas
the “unfounded” rate for all other felonies is only two percent (16). What
this suggests is that because the crime rarely has witnesses beyond the
rapist and victim and often lacks physical evidence (such as bruises, ripped
clothing, etc.), when women claim to have been raped, the
overwhelmingly male court system simply does not believe them. The
women must have liked it. The statistics corroborate this story: in 1992,
the Federal Bureau of Justice reported that for every 200 reports of rape at
the state level, there were 106 arrests, 82 prosecutions, 51 convictions, and
43 incarcerations (Hall 1996, 39). That’s a punishment rate of only
21.5%. Catherine Mackinnon (1997) addresses the disparity between
reports of rape and their successful prosecution: “The problem is that the
injury of rape lies in the meaning of the act to its victim, but the standard
12
Being Intolerant: Rape is Not Seduction (in “The Reeve’s Tale”
or Anywhere Else)
for its criminality lies in the meaning of the act to the assailant” (50).
Rape culture allows men to believe they have not raped even when their
victims tell them they have.
In medieval England, shortly before Chaucer wrote his “rape is
seduction” tale, successful prosecution of rape was (surprisingly) not much
more infrequent than it is today, but punishment most commonly consisted
of a monetary fine. In only 21% of cases was the rapist found guilty, and
in only 17% of cases was the rapist punished at all, though rarely with
imprisonment or the physical means utilized in most other crimes (Carter
1985, 97-98). These statistics are not as far removed from recent ones as
we might expect or hope for. Where medieval rape prosecution does
differ strikingly from modern ones is as follows: as late as 1321, about
49% of rape victims who reported the crime were themselves arrested for
false accusations (usually on a legal technicality). Reporting rape was a
dangerous activity in medieval England. In light of the embarrassing and
all-too-public procedure for prosecuting rape in medieval England and the
well-known fact that in the contemporary U.S., up to one-half of all rapes
are never even reported (let alone prosecuted), it is easy to imagine that a
majority of rapes went unreported in England at this time. Certainly the
fact that both legal and literary representations of rape downplayed its
significance encouraged men and women to view rape as insignificant.
The consequences of accepting sexual violence against women are dire,
indeed, and while the legal system has made it at least somewhat more
reasonable for victims to take action against rapists, the interpretation of
Dr. Dinosaur and the many readers of “The Reeve’s Tale” who agree with
him demonstrate that the important work of feminists is far from over.
The sinister collaboration between legal and literary discourses
manifests itself in their shared response to accusations of rape—claims of
both real and literary rape meet with the same grinning assertion that rape
victims enjoy being raped. My experience with my male professor is
evidence that rape culture is alive and well today in the U.S.,
institutionalized through the practice of literary scholars reading rape as
seduction, and deployed by a male professor against a female student to
suppress the interpretation of sexual violence as sexual violence. To
combat rape culture, one thing we can—and should—do is be firm in our
insistence that sexual violence be acknowledged. As Rose (2001) puts it,
we must “call [rape] by its name” (52). It wasn’t until I read that sentence
that I fully comprehended the implications of that brief, but momentous,
conversation with Dr. Dinosaur: we could not work together because he
could not allow me to call rape by its name.
Heidi Breuer
13
Robertson and Rose (2001) are right: we must reveal the sexual
violence being erased by critics and texts. But we can’t stop there; we
need to take the next step. We need to deal with the dinosaurs. We need
to foster an intellectual extinction—we need to expose the ways in which
academia participates in the culture of rape. Not only must we refuse to be
silent about the implicit sanction of rape in scholarship, but we must
encourage all professors to analyze the real effects of our actions on the
students whose interpretations we have the ability to deny. We must
recognize the devastating consequences of stripping away students’ right
to interpret and critique texts that not only display women’s bodies as sites
for male sexual violence, but also demand that we see that sexual violence
as a game, or worse, as completely insignificant for any discussion of
Chaucer’s work, as simply not there. Personal responsibility drives
change; when we feel personally responsible for something, we are more
likely to take action. It is far easier to let something go, to condone it
through inaction, when we feel no personal connection to the people
involved or to the processes which subject them to objectification and
violation. In order for me (and others like me) to operate within the
academic institutional system, I have to believe that the dinosaurs of
academe do not consciously wish to harm women; rather, they do not
understand the way in which they are personally responsible for
contributing to a culture that promotes violence against women, expects
women to enjoy that violence, and silences women who refuse to meet that
demand. Perhaps by letting these otherwise well-meaning folks know that
their actions have immediate and long-lasting consequences, by telling
them they may not silence us, we can intervene in the cycle. We must
offer a new discourse; we must speak. Do you hear me, Dr. Dinosaur?
I’m speaking.
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