QUEER PERFORMATIVITY AND CHAUCER'S
PARDONER
BY
Taryn Louise Norman
B.A. University of Hull, England, 2004
A THESIS
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
(in English)
The Graduate School
The University of Maine
August, 2006
Advisory Committee:
Tony Brinkley, Associate Professor of English, Advisor
Burton Hatlen, Professor
Patricia Burnes, Associate Professor
Gerard NeCastro, Associate Professor
O 2006 Taryn Louise Norman
All Rights Reserved
QUEER PERFORMATIVITY AND CHAUCER'S PARDONER
By Taryn Louise Norman
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Tony Brinkley
An Abstract of the Thesis presented
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Master of Arts
(in English)
August, 2006
This thesis intends to lay the foundation for a new theoretical way of
approaching the Pardoner from The Canterbuy Tales. I will demonstrate that,
if we move away from the traditional readings of the Pardoner and instead
move towards a Goffmanian dramaturgical analysis, we will no longer
confine the Pardoner within the stifling parameters of a unified and
consistent reading. Utilizing the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, I will
demonstrate that the Pardoner's various language games resist critical
attempts to iden*
his being, in the Heideggerian sense. Creating a unified
and consistent reading of the Pardoner has more to do with various critics'
personal intentions than letting the Pardoner speak for himself. Once the
Pardoner is allowed to revel in the multiplicity and inconsistency that a
dramaturgical analysis provides, we are able to see the Pardoner's multiple
performances. His multiple and continuously shifting performances invite a
queer reading. I will draw upon Judith Halberstam's definition of queerness,
with particular emphasis on her assertion that the label "queer"should not be
confined to homosexual experiences. "Queer"may be used to define anyone
(regardless of their sexuality) who lives in opposition to reigning normative
social paradigms.
Having established the multiplicity of the Pardoner's being and his
queer performativity, I will turn to the question of the nature of the
Pardoner's sexuality and address the popular critical question of "what is the
Pardoner's sexuality?" However, this thesis will argue that this frequent
attempt to define the Pardoner's sexuality is problematic, because many
critics impose onto him modern notions of sexuality, which are based upon
our modern two-sex gender model. During the Medieval period, gender was
still understood in terms of a one-sex model that viewed men as the "natural"
gender. Men were organized hierarchically according to how fully they
performed the "masculine"role. While male-male desire was not condoned,
such behavior was viewed as a transgression against one's masculine gender
rather than against sexuality, because the latter was not yet understood as a
distinctly separate category; therefore, I see the suggestions in the General
Prologue that the Pardoner is either a "geldyng or a mare" as a comment on his
gender performance and not on his sexuality 0.691). In defying the medieval
one-sex gender model, the Pardoner enters the space of what Halberstam
calls "queer time," and thereby he allows us to recognize some of the ways in
which gender is inherently performative.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I'd like to extend thanks to the Department of English for welcoming
me into their program and providing me with the funding to pursue a
Master's Degree. A special thanks to the faculty who were patient with me as
I adapted to a new culture and academic system. Thank you to the Graduate
School and Scott Delcourt for the summer funding to be able to complete this
thesis.
It is with great honor that I acknowledge my parents, Valerie and
Graham Norman, without whose support none of this would have been
possible. Thank you for always supporting me in my endeavors and for
encouraging me to chase my ambitions. Thanks to my own personal Jedi for
his long editorial laboring over my work. May the force be with you, always.
Thank you Mum for being a shoulder to cry on and a confidant. For your
willingness to listen to me ramble about my latest research and for your love,
thank you to all of my family.
I'd like to extend a huge thank you to Burt Hatlen for taking over the
role of thesis advisor. My thesis would not be what it is without all of the
time and energy that you have invested in whipping it into shape. I greatly
appreciate the time that you have spent on helping me to develop my writing.
To Tony, I shall always be grateful to you for the confidence you have
inspired in me and my work. You are more than a mentor, you are a friend.
Thank you to Pat Burnes not only for being on my committee when you have
so much else to do, but for getting me through teaching English 101. Thanks
to Gerard for coming all of the way from Machias to be on the committee.
Thank you to all of my office mates. A special thanks to Sara Speidel
for being there for me during my many office meltdowns and for sharing
your wisdom. Brent Griffin and Luke Hardy: thank you for all of the laughs
that brightened difficult times. To my dear American friends, Kristin
Stelmok, Katie DeGoosh and Keith Martin, thank you for always being there
for me and helping me adjust to a new country. Thank you to the Martin
family for welcoming me into their home. A "Big-up"to the UK crew; you are
all too fabulous for words. Tania Allnutt, everybody needs good neighbors.
And last, but by no means least, thank you to Eric Miller for your
continued interest in my work and your belief that I can accomplish my goals.
Thank you for making me laugh in times of stress and for bringing out the
best in me. My life is richer for having met you.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
...
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .......................................................................................iii
INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................1
1. Performance and Being......................................................................................11
......................................................11
I. The problem of the performed subject
I1. Deceit, motivation and performance ........................................................21
............................................................................31
IV. Towards a performing subject .................................................................38
I11. The Power of Language
.
2 A Queer reading of the Pardoner.....................................................................51
..........................................................................52
I1. Medieval Understandings and Expressions of Sexuality....................56
I11. Performing Gender ....................................................................................64
IV. Queer temporality ......................................................................................79
I.The Debate Over Sexuality
WORKS CITED........................................................................................................90
BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR ........................................................................98
INTRODUCTION
The nature of the perversion.. .needs to be expelled as it threatens to blur the
difirence behveen theater and world
--Eve Sedgwick 4
The pleasure of watching a good performance often depends upon our
sense that the boundary of the stage clearly differentiates between the theatre
and the "real"world. The Pardoner, from The Canterbuy Tales, is an example
of the "perversion"to this system that Eve Sedgwick refers to. His skill as a
performer problematizes the assumption that we, as subjects, are natural
constructions rather than performers. In this sense, the Pardoner represents a
threat, and, indeed, many have tried to expel him through explaining away
those factors that make him so threatening -namely, his inconsistent
character.
The attempts to locate Chaucer's Pardoner in The Canterbuy Tales are
as old as literary criticism in English. To explicate the motivations and
intentions behind the Pardoner's actions, critics have appealed to
interpretative frameworks ranging from applications of St. Augustine's
theological writings to attempts to categorize the Pardoner's sexuality. For
example, Alfred L. Kellogg views the Pardoner as an example of the "spiritual
degradation" that is, according to St. Augustine, the fate of a soul that turns
its back on the good of God in order to seek easier "satisfaction"(465). On the
other hand, Paul Beekman Taylor utilizes St. Augustine's writings,
particularly the Confessions, to read the Pardoner as an example of medieval
concerns about language. In particular Taylor focuses upon St. Augustine's
views on the inability of language to represent a person's intent, and on the
ability of an eloquent speaker to deceive his audience into accepting
falsehoods.
A more recent trend has moved away from reading the Pardoner in
terms of Augustinian theology and has instead drawn upon contemporary
gender theory. Carolyn Dinshaw, Robert Sturges and Glen Burger have
dedicated entire books to gender theory and Chaucer. In her chapter
"EunuchHermeneutics," Dinshaw examines the recurring question of
whether the Pardoner might be a eunuch. Jeffrey Rayner Meyers argues that
the Pardoner should be read not only as a eunuch, but as specifically akrnale
eunuch. Gregory Gross claims that Chaucer's use of "vicious"indicates the
Pardoner's sodomitical practices and desires (29).
Inevitably, such readings are unable to resist creating a consistent and
unified expression of the Pardoner's being, thereby reducing the threat of the
Pardoner so that he can then be controlled. In The History of Sexuality, Michel
Foucault argues that before we can suppress something we must subjugate it
at the level of language. So too, I wish to contend that critics continue to
name the Pardoner in such limiting terms with the aim of controlling him. In
doing so, it seems to me that critics dismiss those qualities of the Pardoner
that make him such an interesting figure.
George Lyman Kittredge's study of the Pardoner has provided the
framework for many critical readings of this perplexing figure. His argument
is that the Canterbury pilgrims are "dramatis personae" (Chaucer and His Poetry
155). The General Prologue is, in his opinion, the opening act which sets the
characters in motion by introducing them. Kittredge compares the humanlike quality of the pilgrims to the qualities of Hamlet, Iago or Macbeth, but
concludes that their individual speeches are "not mere monologues" but part
of a conversation because they evoke replies (155). It would seem that no
pilgrim has evoked such strong replies as the Pardoner, in part as a result of
his introduction in the General Prologue, where we receive an image of him
that is seemingly contradictory to what he claims about himself in later
passages.
Kittredge's study has been crucial to the development of the idea that
the Pardoner's portrayal must be "consistent with itself and with nature"
(Chaucer: Modem Essays in Criticism 119); otherwise, he argues, Chaucer has
"violated dramatic propriety" (117). In order to alleviate these contradictions
and reconcile the Pardoner of the General Prologue with the Pardoner of his
own prologue and tale, and to protect Chaucer from any accusations that he
"blundered"(119), Kittredge argues that if the Pardoner's self-presentation
initially appears to be inconsistent with the General Prologue's portrait, it is
because he is momentarily taken in by his own performance (123-4). That is
to say, the Pardoner is caught up in the fervor of his own sermon, as if he
were delivering it to a group of unsuspecting individuals, and he therefore
performs his act to its finale by trying to sell his relics. Kittredge claims that
his reading is the correct interpretation. Even though nearly one-hundred
years now separates us from Kittredge's essays on Chaucer, many later critics
have been unable to move beyond his notion of a consistent Pardoner,
regardless of the limitations they impose upon him.
Chapter one of this thesis will challenge this persistent attempt to see
the Pardoner's being as consistent and unitary. I instead wish to invoke the
argument of Michel de Montaigne's in his essay "Of the lnconsistancy of our
actionsN:
We are all odds and ends, and of a contexture so shapeless and
various that each part every moment plays its own game, and
there is much difference between us and ourselves as between
us and another (447).
Glen Burger has attempted to move away from the overly-determined
consistent readings of the Pardoner that I have described above by invoking
performative theory, but he also falls into the trap of attempting to name the
Pardoner's sexuality at many points in his text. Robert Sturges' discussion of
the Pardoner's blurring of gender boundaries and his multiplicity is
extremely useful and convincing (xxiii). However, it becomes increasingly
apparent, as one reads his text and peruses other critical essays on the
Pardoner, that critics are still determined to pinpoint his sexuality, despite an
increasing willingness to accept his gender deviance. Even critics who invoke
the term "queer"limit its use to homosexual experience,' and they continue to
examine him in terms of gender and sexuality as separate categories.
However, I will argue in chapter two that it is problematic to regard the
Pardoner in terms of our polarized two-sex model of gender as male/female,
masculine/ feminine.
The innovative readings of Burger and Sturges would be greatly
strengthened had they not tried to impose a two-sex gender model onto the
Pardoner, and had instead placed the Pardoner within a dramaturgical
framework. This thesis intends to compensate for those holes in recent
performative and queer readings by arguing that the Pardoner should be read
through a dramaturgical lens. Dramaturgy opens up the possibility of
reading the Pardoner as a performing subject, rather than as a performed
subject.* It also allows for a distinction to be drawn between expressions
given and expressions given 08
as defined by Erving Goffman.
As I will demonstrate later, I intend to use "queer",as suggested by JudithHalberstam, to
apply not only to homosexuals, but to anyone of any sexual orientation who lives in
opposition to normative paradigms.
I have created the terms performed and performing to distinguish between a subject that is
viewed as a possessing a unitary and consistent being. and a subject that has multiple and
Erving Goffman's 7'h.e Presentation of Se2fin Eveyday Lifi, offers a new
way to approach the Pardoner psychologically. Goffman, the father of
dramaturgy, uses the stage and its characteristics as metaphors for the
performative nature of social interaction. He argues that "when an
individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire
information about him or to bring into play information about him already
possessed in order to "define the situation" (1).Insofar as all players are
consciously aware of this "information game," this self-consciousnessleads to
a "potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and
rediscovery" (9). From the expressions that individuals give and give of(2),
spectators expect to be able to predict behavior through a "generality of
psychological traits" (1).Expressions one might give constitute what we
traditionally define as communication, such as "verbal symbols or their
substitutes," and expression given of"invo1ves a wide range of action that
others can treat as symptomatic of the actor" (2). Goffman points out that
individuals will often "intentionally convey misinformation," and this
propensity can offer a possible explanation of the Pardoner's behavior (2).
Once the Pardoner is provided with the textual space to express his
performing subjectivity, we are able to address Monica McAlpine's questions:
"What is the sexual status of the Pardoner?" (8). It is their failure to recognize
shifting beings. This terms was inspired by Bakhtin's distinction between the uttered and the
uttering subject (see page 20-21).
the performing nature of the Pardoner's subjectivity that has led many critics
to apply to the Pardoner limiting labels such as "eunuch"or "homosexual."
McAlpine argues that the term "mare"used by Chaucer to describe the
Pardoner in the General Prologue was the medieval equivalent of our modern
term "homosexual." However, she fails to consider the possible distorting
effects of imposing a modern term onto the medieval period. The ruling
Medieval social paradigm was concerned with gender rather than sexuality.
As I stated above, our modern sexual terms have a distinct history and
encode our assumption that gender is formed around expression of two polar
opposites. For those living in the medieval period, however, gender was
understood in terms of a one-sex gender model. The male was the ideal
gender, and men were organized hierarchically according to how suitably
masculine they appeared. As a result of this ranking system, there were
different degrees of masculinity which were defined according to how much
one was viewed as lacking. Those that failed to meet the ideal version of
"male"were viewed as lacking certain qualities, and therefore they were
positioned on the lower levels of the hierarchy. At the lowest point on this
hierarchy, the scale passed into the territory of the "other"-those that were so
lacking that they were not viewed as possessing any of the masculine
qualities (or alternatively we might say these individuals were viewed as
possessing "feminine"qualities). "Female"was not yet its own category of
gender and therefore it was viewed as falling within the territory of "other."
Those individuals whom modern society might label as "homosexual"were
simply viewed by Medieval society as lacking and they were exiled to the
position of "other."
I aim to demonstrate in chapter two that Chaucer's presentation of the
Pardoner's apparently perverse character challenges the medieval one-sex
model by revealing the performativity of gender. Through the seemingly
conflicting expressions given and expressions given offby the Pardoner, he
challenges the notion that there is any natural or innate gender that can be
determined based upon one's sex. It is through the Pardoner's performances,
his "fluctuat[ion]between different minds," that we are able to move towards
a queer reading of him (Montaigne 442).
In his book, Chaucer's Queer Nation, Glen Burger argues that queer
theory
has sought (1)to challenge the assumability of a biologically
"real"body and a sex/gender system based on it; [and] (2) to
explore the crucial and disruptive role that perverse pleasures
plays in the relationships between desire and power (both
dominant and marginalized) (xi).
These are the strengths that I too see in queer theory; however, Burger goes
on to argue that another aim of queer theory is to
resist a separate spheres model for gender and sexuality that
would define the relationship between feminists or gender
studies and sexuality studies as "gender does this while
sexuality does that" (xi).
It seems to me that, by this point, Burger has forgotten the differences
between contemporary and medieval understandings and definitions of
gender and sexuality. Medieval paradigms did not understand sexuality as a
distinct category, but instead placed it under the jurisdiction of gender. As
chapter two will explore in much greater detail, what we would see as a
sexual aberration was understood in the Medieval era as a gender aberration.
Crucial to medieval understandings of gender is the use of costume
and physical appearance as a way of defining an individual's position within
the masculine hierarchy. The distinction between expression given and given
offprovided by dramaturgy will help me to further clanfy the perfonnativity
of gender in the medieval period by examining the link between costume and
gender, a theme that both Burger and Sturges neglect. With the help of
Valerie Hotchkiss's book Clothes Make the Man I intend to explore the tenuous
relationship between gender and the sexed body.
Burger's book provides an extremely useful examination of the
Pardoner's refusal to assume a stable gendered identity, but his use of the
word "queer"assumes an active homosexual way of life; hence his need to
account for the Pardoner's sexuality. As I have already suggested, I intend to
utilize "queer"in a broader sense, as modeled by Judith Halberstam'sbook In
a Queer Time and Place, to compensate for critical tendencies, such as Burger's,
to h i t the Pardoner's "queerness"to an expression of sexuality.3 I also
intend to consider Halberstam's notion of queer time. She posits that "queers"
experience time differently than the way dominant, normative paradigms try
to dictate that we should experience time. In living in opposition to the
normative paradigms, "queers"very way of life represents a threat that must
be controlled (1).Again we are drawn back to the quote by Sedgwick used in
the opening of this introduction, in particular the word "threat." Let us then
begin by proceeding into chapter one, where I will lay the groundwork for a
queer reading of the Pardoner.
Halberstam sees queerness as a postmodern construction and therefore does not discuss her
theory in terms of Chaucer. However, I will argue in chapter two that there are many ways
in which Chaucer's character representations, grammatical style and plot make possible a
"queer"reading, in Halberstam's sense.
3
Chapter 1
Performance and Being
I. The problem of the performed subject
While this chapter will refer to other critical interpretations of the
Pardoner, some of which address his sexuality, my goal here is to reveal the
problems that are encountered when we try to impose a reading upon the
Pardoner that regards him as a consistent being. In order to discuss the
Pardoner's being, one must address the issue of performance, and related to
this, the question of deceit. This discussion will focus on the benefit that a
dramaturgical reading can bring to the problem of the Pardoner.
However, I wish to caution readers that a dramaturgical reading
should not be confused with the more commonly implemented dramatic
reading. Dramatic readings tend to focus on separating the performative
from the real because they assume that there is some representational being
behind the performance. Critics have tended to use such a representational
reading to arrive at a consistent view of the Pardoner and thereby to remove
the threat that he poses. Approaching the Pardoner as a one-dimensional
figure, or as an example, or as possessing a consistent and unitary being
creates the problem of a plethora of incompatible readings.
In Chaucer's Drama of Style, C. David Benson points out that "variety is
essential to literary criticism; but looking at the range of contradictory
recreations of the Pardoner, we may suspect that we are dealing more with
idiosyncratic response than with genuine literary analysis" (46). In an article
specifically on the Pardoner, Benson argues that "perhaps even more
dangerous is the often unexamined assumption that since the Pardoner is a
vivid truly flamboyant presence in The Canterbuy Tales, he can therefore be
analyzed as though he were a real person instead of a fictional, even
allegorical character" (337). Benson's concern is indeed valid, but such an
assessment is produced because dramatic readings try to determine what is
being performed. Each critic limits the Pardoner to one single, consistent
performance, and the result is, as Benson suggests, a "range of contradictory
recreation," because such interpretations do not see the Pardoner as a subject
that is capable of, and indeed prone to, fluctuation and change. Benson's
overall assessment of dramatic readings of the Pardoner is largely negative,
and he cautions against them by arguing that they
are essentially based on two related assumptions: first, that
the pilgrims, as we meet them in the General Prologue and the
narrative links,are to some extent whole and consistent
figures, perhaps even.. ."living character[sHand] second, that
the connection between teller and tale is usually close and
revealing (my emphasis 6).
In response to such reservations, I would argue the Pardoner is not meant to
be considered as a "consistent"figure, and that a "living character" precludes
such notions of consistency.
Michel de Montaigne mused on the inconsistency between human
appearance and the soul in his discussion of physiognomy. In reference to
Socrates "deformed"face, he said,
I fancy that those features and molds of face, and those
lineaments, by which men guess at our internal complexions
and our fortunes to come, is a thing that does not very
directly and simply lie under the chapter of beauty and
deformity,no more than every good odor and serenity of air
promises health, nor all fog and stink, infection in a time of
pestilence ("Physiognomy,"Oregon State University
website).
He concludes that "A person's look is but a feeble warranty" of what this
person may actually be. To assume that a person's look is indicative of his
character, that the two are consistent, results from a naive desire to have some
means readily available of determining the quality of an individual.
In his essay " O f the Inconsistancy of our actions" Montaigne argues that
"vacillation seems to me the most common and visible defect of our nature"
(440). He continues:
There is some reason for forming judgment of a man from the
most usual features of his life; but, considering the natural
instability of our customs and opinions, it has often seemed to
me that even good writers mistake when they persist in
representing us as of a changeless and unyielding nature. They
select a prevailing characteristic of a man, and adapt and
interpret all of his actions in accordance with that image, and if
they cannot sufficiently bend them, they attribute them to
dissimilation (440).
To call the Pardoner a "living character" or to describe him in terms of
distinctly human qualities, as I have done, allows for such inconsistency.
Unfortunately, dramatic readings of the Pardoner, as distinct from
dramaturgical readings, tend to reduce his character to a single dimension.
Thus Benson seems to me correct when he argues that some "dramatic
explanations of The Pardoner's Prologue turn our attention away from
Chaucer's text to the supposed psychology of the pilgrim" (49). Dramatic
readings of the Pardoner tend to be essentialist; they conflate the physical
descriptions of the Pardoner with speculations about his psychological state,
and they often do so using very little textual evidence. For example, many
critics have sought to identdy the Pardoner's sexuality based upon the
physical descriptions given in the General Prologue, concluding that he is a
eunuch. This possibility will be discussed at greater length in chapter two,
which will focus on the question of sexuality and the Pardoner, but it is worth
noting here that the descriptions in The General Prologue are from the
perspective of the narrator. He both gives his opinion of the Pardoner's
appearance and relates, using third person narration, what the Pardoner says:
With hym ther rood a gentil Pardoner.. .
Ful loude he soong "Com hider, love, to me!"...
This Pardoner hadde heer as yellow as wex,
But smothe I henge his lokkes that he hadde,
And therwith he his shuldres overspradde;
But thynne it lay, bu colpons oon and oon (669-79).
As what we learn of the Pardoner in the General Prologue is from the third-
person perspective of the narrator rather than from the Pardoner himself, it is
problematic to assume that we can respond to the Pardoner as an exposed rather than a concealed- being with an identifiable motivation and intention.
The reservations that Benson raises concerning dramatic readings
acknowledge the impossibility of our knowing the Pardoner as a definitively
performed subject. A performed subject implies a unified, coherent and fixed
being and one that has uttered; that is, his performance is completed and
confined to the past rather than ongoing. It presupposes that once the
Pardoner has uttered who he is, he can then be defined because his
performance is always the same.
In making the distinction between a performed and a performing
subject, I am making both a grammatical and an ontological distinction. In
his essay Tense in the French Verb, Emile Benveniste underscores the
significance of the grammatical distinction now at issue. He proposes that
there are two categories of tense: historical narration and discourse.
Historical narration can be described as follows:
Events that took place at a certain moment of time are presented
without any intervention of the speaker in the narration. In
order for them to be recorded as having occurred, these events
must belong to the past. No doubt it would be better to say that
they are characterized as past from the time they have been
recorded and uttered in a historical temporal expression. The
historical intention does indeed constitute one of the important
functions of language.. .because] it impresses upon.. .[language
a] specific temporality (206).
Discourse can be understood "by way of contrast" to historical narration (208):
Discourse must be understood in its widest sense: every
utterance assuming a speaker and a hearer, and in the
speaker, the intention of influencing the other in some
way.. ..It is primarily every variety of oral discourse of every
nature and every level, from trivial conversation to the most
elaborate oration. But it is also the mass of writing that
reproduces oral discourse or that borrows its manner of
expression and its purposes (208-9).
When we initially encounter the Pardoner he is discussed through the
eyes of the narrator, in the third person and the simple past tense:
With hym ther rood a gentil Pardoner,
Of Rouncivale, his freend and his compeer,
That streight was comen fro the court of Rome.
Ful loude he soong "Com hider, love, to me!" (1.669-72).
A voys he hadde as smal as hath a goot,
No berd hadde he, ne nevere sholde have;
As smothe it was as it were late shave (1.688-90).
Then we shift to the present tense when the narrator claims "I trowe he were a
geldyng or a mare" (1.691). The narrator's use of the past tense to describe the
Pardoner creates certainty in the reader's mind about his perception. The use
of the past tense has the effect of producing what seems to be a consistent and
final interpretation of the Pardoner. However, when the narrator shifts to the
present tense, we get the impression that he is no longer certain about his
perception of the Pardoner, and this has the effect of allowing the definition
of the Pardoner to fluctuate or even to open the possibility of inconsistentcy.
Chaucerian critics, in trying to provide a consistent and unitary
reading for the Pardoner, impose a specific temporality upon him; indeed,
these are both dependent upon one another. Benveniste argues that "An
event, in order to be set as such in a temporal expression, must have ceased to
be present and must no longer be capable of being stated as present" (211). In
effect, the dominant tradition in Chaucerian criticism has focused on the
historically determinant elements in Chaucer's presentation of the Pardoner,
and has ignored the ways in which he is defined by a play of discourses
surrounding him. By ignoring this play of discourses, critics tend to see him
as uttered, rather than as someone who utters. If we examine the Pardoner as
an uttered subject rather than an uttering subject, our study of him is limited
either to an ontological or to a psychological definition. An uttered subject
represents a final and unitary being. However, when we examine the
Pardoner as an uttering subject, we open up the possibility of perceiving him
both as an epistemological/ontological, and as a psychological subject. Such
a perception acknowledges the plurality and multiplicity of the Pardoner's
distinctly human qualities that are not characterized by stasis. The mistake in
attempting to analyze the Pardoner as an uttered subject might be linked to a
desire to conceive of the Pardoner (make him the uttered subject in our own
discourse), rather than perceive of him as a speaker. Thus we run up against
a limit in our own language, since the Pardoner is not the uttered subject but
the subject who utters and performs his own utterance- a performer who
creates many versions of himself but who is not adequately represented by
any of these versions, since he only shows himself.
The Pardoner is constantly speaking and is therefore an uttering
subject. The multifarious performances that the Pardoner enacts as an
uttering subject have led to a plethora of critical interpretations which seek to
iden*
the motivation behind and the intentions for the Pardoner's
performance, which results in a confusion between his unwillingness to
relinquish the floor and his resistance against becoming an object. As Mikhail
Bakhtin suggests in The Problem of Speech Genres, the "finalized wholeness of
the utterance" no longer elicits a response. According to Bakhtin's theory of
speech genres, "any utterance.. .[has] an absolute beginning and an absolute
end: its beginning is preceded by the utterances of others, and its end is
followed by the responsive utterances of others.. .[It is] delimited by the
change of speaking subjects, which ends by relinquishing the floor to the
other" (71-72). While the Pardoner, as a performing subject, does not
relinquish the floor to another for a response at the end of his prologue,
inasmuch as he is the other and creates impressions of otherness (for
example, the old Man in his tale), we nonetheless attempt to respond to him
as an uttered subject, a response that he does not allow. Literary critics who
attempt to explain the Pardoner by transforming him into the uttered subject
reduce him to what has been uttered and discuss him in terms that assume he
can be represented with certainty through historical narration. The Pardoner
has therefore been placed within parameters that control and objecw him.
11. Deceit, motivation and performance
In her book, Truth and Textuality and Chaucer's Poety, Lisa Kiser argues
that most of the Pardoner's claims are false (143). Benson also implies that the
Pardoner is a liar by pointing out that the Pardoner is a "self-admitted verbal
trickster" (45). Such claims have led to the question of whether the Pardoner
is telling the truth or attempting to deceive his audience. Is the Pardoner
simply lying or is he lying and simultaneously being honest inasmuch as he
indicates the deceptions as performative? Or perhaps he is misleading us
(and the pilgrims) into believing that he is offering this honesty when it too
may be a deception? It can be quite seductive to try to interpret the
expression given offby such a complex and extremely human character.
When examining the Pardoner, we are perplexed to determine the motivation
behind his actions, and, consequently, to ascertain whether the motivations
and intentions he professes to his audience (the pilgrims) are honest
confessions - and I use honest as opposed to truthfi_llintentionally-or just
another part of his performative deceit.
Goffman's theory that all social interaction is performative suggests
that, in a sense, we are constantly deceiving one another. For Goffman, we
are always performing when in the presence of others, whether we are
directly interacting with them or simply aware that they may be observing us.
While deceit is similar to performance, in that they both aim to give a false
impression and ensnare the observer, the former term is pejorative, especially
as we consider it to be the polar opposite of honesty. One is deceitful or
honest, truthful or a liar. If we substitute the word "performance"for "deceit,"
we lose some of the negative co~otationsthat we might automatically
bestow upon the Pardoner, as performance does not stand in opposition to
truth or honesty. While the Pardoner clearly confesses to deceiving certain
audiences in the effort to swindle money, if we extend the label "deceit"to
apply to everything that the Pardoner says and does, we end up viewing the
Pardoner as completely despicable. Assigning to the Pardoner the label
"deceit"again allows critics to formulate a consistent reading of him.
The Pardoner, by profession, is a pardoner. Pardoners were medieval
church officials with three tasks: they sold indulgences, they sold relics, and
they preached sermons (Nighan, StJohns-chsorg). A pardoner made his
living by asking an audience to believe his performance and thereby accept
the assumption that he had the authority to pardon their sins through the
selling of indulgences and relics. However, Chaucer's Pardoner defies the
rules of social interaction by telling the pilgrims that he does not expect them
to take him seriously and by questioning their assumptions of what
constitutes a pardoner: "What, trowe ye, the whiles I may preche, / And
wynne gold and silver for I teche, / That I wol lyve in poverte wilfully?"
(VI.439-41).
According to Goffman, we assume that "an individual who implicitly
or explicitly signifies that he has certain social characteristics ought in fact to
be what he claims he is" (13), and this is because "when an individual plays a
part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that
is fostered before them" (17). The Pardoner illuminates the performative
nature of interaction by defylng this convention. In confessing that he is not
really a Pardoner, he both defies and mocks this convention, which creates
uneasiness and resistance among the other pilgrims as he implies that they
may also simply be actors.
Most literary critics have assumed that their task is to distinguish the
Pardoner's performances from his real character. This has proved to be
particularly difficult to achieve and has led to the privileging of expression
given ofover expression given in order to confine the Pardoner to the realm of
a performed subject. Since the Pardoner confesses his corruption at the
beginning of his Prologue and then asks the pilgrims to buy his relics, one
might be tempted to argue that the Pardoner is "taken in by his own act," and
therefore his expression given of(his discourse) is only performance and has
no honesty behind it (Goffman 17). However, I shall explore the possibility
that the Pardoner is not at all taken in by his performance; instead, he is
always aware of his performance and conscious of the power that can be
gained by manipulating it.
Goffman's theory, can help us to understand how the Pardoner's
manipulation of generally accepted rules of social interaction creates such a
dilemma in how to respond to him, for the pilgrims and for us as readers.
Goffman argues that
Regardless of the particular objective which the individual
has in mind and of his motive for having this objective, it
will be in his interest to control the conduct of the others,
especially their responsive treatment of him. This control is
achieved largely by influencing the definition of the
situation which the others come to formulate, and he can
influence this definition by expressing himself in such a way
as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to
act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan (3-4)
Critical responses to the Pardoner aim to identdy his motive (with the
ultimate aim of identdying his being), and, in doing so, they seek to invert
this relationship of control. Rather than letting the Pardoner control them
(and I refer to both the pilgrims and the readers when I say "them"),they seek
to control the Pardoner. The pilgrims -especially the Host -seek to control
the Pardoner's behavior. When the Host asks him to tell a tale, the Pardoner
states that he must first drink and eat,
But right anon the gentils gonne to crye,
"Nay, lat hym telle us of no ribaudye!
Telle us som moral thyng that we may leere" (VI.323-5).
Based upon the expression given and given of previously by the Pardoner which have had the effect of "influencing the definition of the situation"-the
pilgrims have already formulated an impression of the Pardoner as a wanton
rascal who has been so corrupted by his greed that he carries fake relics of
Our Lady's veil (1.695). From his appearance and his singing in the General
Prologue to his interruption of The Wife of Bath's Tale, the Pardoner has been
performing. In response to his performing, and as an attempt to reject it, the
pilgrims wish to hear a tale of "moral"worth and not of "ribaudye." The
pilgrims desire the Pardoner to act as a pardoner that is not corrupt.
Interestingly, this attempt to control the Pardoner by the pilgrims
actually works "in accordance with his own plan." The pilgrims explicitly ask
the Pardoner to perform his professional services, and he later makes them
aware of this in his Prologue when he repeatedly explains: "I preche of no
thyng but for coveityse. / Therfore my theme is yet, and evere was, / 'Radix
malomrn est Cupiditas"' (VI.424-6). This revelation by the Pardoner serves as
his critique of the authority of the Church, as he is able to perform papal
authority even when he has been revealed as a fraud. The "real" authority lies
not with the Church but with a performer who can convince an audience that
he is authentic and can therefore grant them absolution from their sins. In the
Pardoner's self-confessed trickery in his prologue, I see him as mocking the
pilgrims because, despite suggestions in the General Prologue by the narrator
that the Pardoner is corrupt, the pilgrims ask him to assume the position of
Church authority by giving one of his sermons.
The desire to control can also be seen in the many critical
interpretations of the Pardoner which seek to locate his "real"intention and
motivation and thereby limit him as a performed being. Such critical
interpretations mediate the Pardoner and attempt to know him in a way that
he explicitly avoids through his continually shifting performances. The
-
expression he gives offduring the General Prologue where the narrator sees
him as either a "gelding or a mare" because of his apparently effeminate
appearance4 and goat-like voice (1.691)- directly contrasts with the more
masculine expressions given by him in his interruption of The Wife of Bath's
Tale, when he says, "Now, dame,. .."by God and by Seint John! /
... I was
aboute to wedde a wyf; allas! / What sholde I bye it on my flessh so deere?"
(111.164-7), and later in his Prologue when he professes to "have a joly wenche
in every toun" (VI.453). Even though we cannot take these expressions given
as anything more than hints of masculinity or as performance, they do
For examples see McAlpine, Meyers and Gross for descriptions of the Pardoner'seffeminate
image in the General Prologue.
problematize an unquestioning reading of the Pardoner as consistently
feminine. The Pardoner thereby evades an easy definition.
Goffman notes that while expressions given oflare not always
calculated, they can often be. Such controlled expression given offUuponthe
part of the individual reinstates the symmetry of the communication process,
and sets the stage for a kind of information game -a potentially infinite cycle
of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery" (8). Goffman
assigns great power to the individual who intentionally conveys
misinformation as "he can gain much by controlling"the impressions of
others (8). We know that the Pardoner is well aware of his own ability to
control the responses of others: "What, trowe ye, the whiles I may preche, /
And wynne gold and silver for I teche" (VI.439-40). Yet critical responses to
the Pardoner rarely credit the expressions he gives oflto his conscious
performance. Instead such responses assume that he is trying to hide his true
nature. Indeed, the Pardoner is a self-confessed verbal trickster, but to
assume that this verbal performance is used to divert attention away from the
expressions he gives oflprivileges one form of communication over another,
as we see in Lisa Kiser's argument that the Pardoner's "obvious sexual
deficiencies [conveyed by his expression given om mitigate against the
likelihood that he enjoys (or even wants to enjoy) the company of women"
(143). Ironically, critics often use the Pardoner's confession that he viciously
deceives his audiences to corroborate their own attempts to assign to him
some type of gender or sexual deviance.5
Indeed, most of the attempts to explicate the Pardoner's sexuality rely
upon the idea that the real (non-performed)Pardoner is described in the
General Prologue through the expression he gives ofi The assumption is that
he is unable to fully conceal his real self. Such readings dismiss the
expression he gives as merely a performance designed to conceal a sexuality
that might deviate from heterosexuality. When the Pardoner claims that he
has "a joly wenche in every toun," many critics view this expression given as
an unconvincing performance, and instead determine the Pardoner's
sexuality based upon the narrator's interpretation of the expression given o f
during the General Prologue.
However, one has to question such conclusions. If we are to credit the
Pardoner as an expert performer who is able to swindle many people out of
their money for fake relics, as he himself professes to do- and there is indeed
no suggestion that such an assumption is incorrect, as the narrator states that
"Of his craft, from Berwyk into Ware, / Ne was ther swich another pardoner"
(1.692-3)-why would we assume that his performative ability lies only
within his verbal communication (his expression given)? It is difficult to see
why such a capable performer would not or could not perform on both levels
of communication (expression given and expression given ofl.
5 See
Gross who argues that "vicious"refers to the Pardoner's practice of sodomy (29).
28
Kitteredge, in his attempt to produce consistency between the General
Prologue, The Pardoner's Prologue, The Pardoner's Tale and his epilogue, argues
that the Pardoner, "Forgetful of his surrounding,. ..does not stop with the
'application,' but goes on to the exhortation with which he regularly
concludes his harangues" (121). Kittredge argues that the Pardoner's
concluding remarks reveal that he is "takeni n by his own performance (17):
And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soules leche,
So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve,
For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve.
But, sires, o word forget I in my tale:
I have relikes and pardon in my male (VI.916-20).
However, as previously stated, Kittredge's interpretation devalues the
Pardoner's abilities as a performer. While the Pardoner does shift from
apparently exposing the nature of his profession to the pilgrims to asking
them to purchase his pardons, there is no evidence to support Kittredge's
reading. Kittredge mediates the Pardoner and controls him in an effort to
produce the consistency that he desires. One might quite justifiably argue
that the Pardoner is not taken in by his own performance, "since no one is in
quite as good an observational position to see through the act as the person
who puts it on" (Goffrnan 17).
If we recognize that the textual evidence does not conclusively support
a reading in which the Pardoner is taken in by his own performance, we can
begin to move towards a reading of the Pardoner as a performing subject
rather than as a performed subject. Dramatic readings have examined the
Pardoner as having only one performance, and in order to produce the
consistency they seek, they must view the Pardoner as being taken in by his
own performance. Goffman's dramaturgical reading of interaction as
performative offers an alternative to such limiting dramatic readings.
111. The Power of Language
At every moment the Pardoner is a performer. The performative
character of his action is further illuminated by the language that he uses in
his prologue and tale. The Canterbury Tales is, of course, unique in its use of
language, as it was the first example of Courtly literature written not in the
traditional literary language, French, but in vernacular English. In
abandoning French to write The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer significantly
expanded his class audience, but limited its international scope. Carolyne
Larrington of St John's College, Oxford, sees as one sign of Chaucer's skill in
the use of language his ability to make us not simply hear the tales of the
pilgrims but "find ourselves inside them"; that is to say, he leads us to actively
engage them in order to figure them out (In Our Time, BBC Radio 1).
While Chaucer may have been an innovator when it came to language,
Medieval writers often, according to Carolyn Dinshaw, manifest confusion
over the role of language; specifically, they are uncertain about the
relationship of signifier to referent and about whether these relationships are
determined by nature or convention (170). Chaucer's own citation of St
Augustine in The Prioress's Tale and The Nun's Priest's Tale demonstrates his
familiarity with the author, and Dinshaw notes that Augustine was highly
influential in the Middle Ages (VII.1631& 4431). Language, for Augustine,
was a means of remembering, but it was unable to attain truth (Stock 249). As
Dinshaw notes, words "are able to point to the truth but do not possess it.
And consequently, all kinds of slips are possible between the speaker, his
language, and his audience" (171).
Why did language and its possible defects pose such a dilemma for
Augustine, and later Medieval writers? If language is inherently unable to
communicate and convey truth, then it cannot be used to represent divinity.
"In the beginning was the word and the word was with God, and the word
was God. He was with God in the beginning" (John 1.1).Jesus is the word
and the word is also God. But if the word "is"God, then it is presumptuous
for any specific human statement to claim to describe God. If language
cannot be used to represent God, how do we gain greater knowledge of Him
and use that knowledge to reform ourselves? It is this very dilemma that the
Pardoner so astutely poses through his performances.
It does not seem to me useful to try to categorize what the Pardoner
says as truth and lies. Ludwig Wittgenstein argues that "'We do run up
against the limits of languageNand [we] "are always making the attempt to
say something that cannot be said"' (Conversations 68-9). Wittgenstein
concludes that truth is inherently unsayable through verbal communication,
and that it is therefore more viable to consider social interaction as devoid of
truth. Intead Wittgenstein sees human beings as engaged in a variety of
language games. In shifting focus from truth to the performances of language
games, Wittgenstein anticipates Goffman's theories of performativity. Both
Wittgenstein and Goffman discuss interaction in terms of "a game" with
specific rules that one can adhere to, bend, or break, depending on the
performance one desires to enact. Wittgenstein's "language games" focus
upon the various types of language structures that we have available to us
(7.59, and he argues that miscommunication can occur depending on how
different individuals create signifiers for these words (20.9e).6 Goffman's
study takes Wittgenstein's observations farther by arguing that we are all, to
some degree, conscious of the effects that these "informationgames" (to use
his own label) can have on social interaction. Goffman proposes that most of
us chose to manipulate our knowledge of these effects, and therefore our
language (or expression given)becomes part of our performance (8).
My argument here is that in the sections of Chaucer's texts that present
the Pardoner, we encounter a variety of language games (Chaucer's, the
narrator's, the Pardoner's himself) that make it impossible to define the
Pardoner: Is he a "gelding or a mare," or one who will take a wef? (166). Is he
a patristic man tormented by the pervasive sinfulness that he is able to
manipulate to his own advantage, or an opportunist7, or simply a sinner
For example, in point 20 Wittgenstein discusses the problems that can occur when
communicating across languages. If one individual (A) says "slab!",which is meant to be
understood as a command, another individual (B) whose first language is different may not
understand this to be a command and merely a statement, an observation.
7 See Richardson (89-91).
6
tormented by his own sing? Goffman and Wittgenstein offer us a way to
recognize these questions as unanswerable, so that instead of trying to find
the "real"Pardoner we must see him simply as enacting a series of sometimes
contradictory language games.
Wittgenstein, in point 23, lists some of the language games available to
us and emphasizes the "multiplicity"of these games (23.11.):
Giving orders, and obeying them Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its
measurements Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) Reporting an event Speculating about an event Forming and testing a hypothesis Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and
diagrams Making up a story; and reading it Play-acting Singing catches Guessing riddles Making a joke; telling it See Kellogg (465-481).
Solving a problem in practical arithmetic Translating from one language into another Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying (23.11.-12.).
7'he Canterbuy Tales, as a whole, is a language/information game. The
narrator explains how the Host asks the pilgrims to partake in the language
game of making up a story and telling it:
He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan
Everich a word, if it be in his charge,
AZ speke he never so rudeliche or large,
Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe
Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes newe.. ..
Ye goon to Caunterbury - God yow speede,
The blisful martir quite yow youre meede!
And we1 I woot, as ye goon by the weye,
Ye shapen yow to talen and to pleye (1.732-72).
Then the Host explains the rules of the game which he often phrases as a
command that must be obeyed:
That ech of yow, to shorte with oure weye,
In this viage shal telle tales tweye
To Caunterbury-ward I mene it so,
And homward he shal tellen othere two,. ..
Tales of best sentence and moost solaas,
Shal have a soper at oure aller cost
Heere in this place, sittynge by this post,
Whan that we come agayn fro Caunterbury.
And for to make yow the moore mury,
I wol myselven goodly with yow ryde
Right at myn owene cost, and be youre gyde (1.791-804).
The Host even dictates the punishment that will be inflicted upon any who
should disobey the rules of the game: "And who so wole my juggement
withseye / Shal paye a1 that we spenden by the weye (1.805-6).
The Pardoner is the pilgrim who is the closest to receiving this
punishment as he does not play by the rules. In Goffman's terms, the
Pardoner refuses to engage in the performance. When the Host turns to the
Pardoner to give his tale, the Pardoner challenges the Host's position as the
master of the game by refusing to submit immediately to the Host's
command:
It shal be doon," quod he, "by Seint Ronyon;
But first," quod he, "heere at this alestake,
I wol bothe drynke and eten of a cake (VI.319-322).
The Pardoner's manipulation of the language games -his implicit and explicit
bending and breaking of the rules -makes his behavior unpredictable and
inconsistent. He does not perform the one role assigned to him as defined by
the Host's rules. Throughout the rest of this thesis I will examine many other
instances of the Pardoner's refusal to submit to the rules of the game (both the
Host's and Medieval society as a whole) culminating in the confrontation
between him and the Host. This confrontation ultimately ends with the
Pardoner's submission and reintegration into "appropriate"parameters
established by the Host's and Medieval society's rules.
IV. Towards a performing subject
In moving towards the Pardoner as a performing subject, I have
attempted to demonstrate that all attempts to limit the Pardoner to one
consistent reading and reveal him as an allegorical character must fail,
because any such interpretation requires that we accept three problematic
notions: 1.that the narrator's account of the Pardoner's expression p e n off is
to be believed over the Pardoner's own expression given; 2. that he is taken in
by his own performance, and 3. that the Pardoner's performance is a direct
manifestation of his essential self, rather than a manifestation of his
performing self. However, as previously stated, the Pardoner is a performer
by profession, and he himself demonstrates the agency of language. He
consciously and explicitly purports to unveil himself, the real self that critics
search for, but his very claim to reveal the truth about himself actually serves
to further veil him. When he says, "I am this" and gestures towards himself,
he is also gesturing and saying, "I am not that.'' However, "this"and "that"
are not stable categories, and he is therefore actually producing more veils
which conceal while claiming to be unveiling himself.
For example, when the Pardoner confession that he commits "gaude"
(VI.389), he labels himself as a liar, but he then proceeds to tell a convincing
story about "coveityse,"the very vice that he claims to suffer from (VI.424).
However, the Pardoner, at the end of his sermon, offers his relics and his
"absolucioun"to the pilgrim, which thereby problematizes his previous claim
to be nothing but a liar (VI.924). The liar's paradox has the effect of
disorienting the pilgrims (and us); the Pardoner's gesture towards the
instability of his being reveals how his performances fluctuate.
While Leicester argues that the Pardoner's "explicit project" has been to
unveil himself (55), Robert Sturges disagrees, instead claiming that the veil
places the Pardoner within a hierarchy of veils that lead all the way to God
Himself. "In itself, the Pardoner's vernicle is only one link in a chain of
signifiers, but this chain is not endless: it finds its endpoint, and its
signification comes finally to rest, in the transcendental signifier, the Logos in
its full presence" (67).
I agree with Sturges that the Pardoner is indeed shrouded beneath
many veils, but I would disagree with the notion that we can unveil the
Pardoner through an exegetical reading that will uncover a primal signher;
there is no inherent truth hidden beneath these veils of the Pardoner,
awaiting the correct mediator to interpret what is concealed. Heidegger, in
his essay Aletkia, states "Self-revealingloves self-concealing" (113). The
Pardoner, when gesturing toward himself or claiming to offer a selfpresentation, simultaneously reveals and conceals (or veils) himself.
Revealing and concealing are not "two different occurrences merely jammed
together, but as one and the Same" (112-3). Being is in a constant state of play
(it is in a ludic temporalityg), because "As it reveals itself in beings, Being
withdraws" (Anaximander, 26). When the Pardoner reveals his being- such
as when he claims that he is a liar- his being presents itself as beings because
he is also simultaneously claiming that he is not something else (a liar), and
therefore being withdraws as the performance is revealed for its instability.
The Pardoner's process of revealing and concealing himself is achieved by his
performance. His performance is evidence of his self as an actor and not of
his being.
As Stanley Rosen says, for Heidegger "Being is concealed beneath
beings" (129), because Ouisa (or Being) "is unspeakable and unthinkable, at
least so far as dianoia (the discursive or calculative thinking) is concerned"
(128). The Pardoner presents many beings but the Pardoner's performances
are never representations of his existence (dasein) because Being can only
show itself- it cannot represent itself. For those who seek such a
representation and try to know being in a way it cannot be known, "being is
indistinguishable from Nothingness" (128). Nothingness is the result because,
in attempting to know being in a way that it cannot be known, we engender a
variety of interpretations to suit our various intentions. These interpretations
(or beings) are hollow -they are nothingness-since they do not represent an
individual. As Benson's reservations about the various "idiosyncratic
See discussion on Queer Time and Space in chapter 2.
response[s]" to the Pardoner suggest, an individual cannot represent all of the
multifarious beings at the same time, but they can show them through
performance (as I will demonstrate in chapter 2 with the queer reading).
Another way one might look at the problem of the Pardoner is to
reference the debate in Gender and Queer theory over whether there is an
inherent "I" (or being) behind discourse before it comes to language. Does the
"I"refers to anything prior to the act of expression, or is it only engendered
and mediated when it arrives in language? While Heidegger would posit
that there is a referent for "I"but that it cannot come to language, Judith
Butler argues that there is no referent preceding the speech act of "I." But
whether we see the "I"as unrepresentable or whether we believe there is no
referent to "I,"the perspectives of Heidegger and Butler both point us toward
the need to view the Pardoner as a performing subject.
The Pardoner's performance is convincing because of the citational
aspect of the utterances that he uses in order to j u s w his claim to authority.
Citational utterances implicitly appeal to authorities (such as the Church) and
can be seen as a language game. When using a citational utterance, an
individual implicitly asks his audience to believe his authority and accept
what he utters. If his audience accepts his authority and does not challenge it,
then the game will continue. The Pardoner explains to the pilgrims in his
prologue how he goes about setting into motion this language game. When
giving sermons, he first "shewe[s]" his papal "bulles"so that his "body to
warente, / That no man be so boold, ne preest ne clerk, / Me to destorbe of
Cristes hooly work" (VI.336-40). The authority of the Church gives the
Pardoner's performance authority and therefore provides him with protection
by seeking to ensure that his language game will not be interrupted. To
further reaffirm this authority, he speaks "a wordes fewe" in Latyn, a
language that the country folk he preaches to would not understand, but
which they would recognize as another claim to authority, and consequently
they will be stirred to "devocioun"(VI.344-6).
While the Pardoner's appearance (or expression given ofl may
potentially jeopardize his authority, his performative utterances restore his
credibility. As he is able to make a lucrative living from his profession, we
can assume that his performance is effective but that this effectiveness is also
dependent upon the apparent demand for and value invested in the
commodity he sells. The Pardoner's appearance disturbs the narrator in the
General Prologue, and it seems justifiable to assume that this reaction would
not be uncommon. Why then is the Pardoner able to maintain such an
appearance (even though his performative abilities suggest that he would be
aware of the effect of his appearance and be able to alter it), and make a
successful living?
Rosen's summation of Heidegger may help to provide the answer to
this question:
A thing or object can thus be identified only on the basis of what
counts as a satisfactory analysis. Since "satisfactory"is itself
defined on the basis of human intentions, the very notion of
definite things.. .is necessarily jeopardized (128-9).
Heidegger posits that in trying to name the being of a thing, we convert it into
many beings. A thing becomes defined in terms of what it is not. Rosen's
reading of Heidegger points out that in this process of conversion from being
to beings, we may choose to accept beings as a "satisfactory analysis" of a
thing's being. For example, if an audience member desires absolution from a
sin, he may choose to disregard the Pardoner's effeminate appearance in
favor of the Pardoner's claim that he has the authority to provide the service
of absolution. The audience member has created a "satisfactory analysis"
based upon the intention to seek absolution.
As readers, we are confronted with a variety of perspectives on the
Pardoner, and these perspectives (each implying a different interpretation
through their mediation) complicates a reading of him. Each interpretation
reveals a different intention on the part of the critic in question. To reject any
such intention as illegitimate is clearly fruitless, but we need to recognize that
the ways different intentions mediate the object under study reveals that this
object is itself inherently undecipherable. Wittgenstein's discussion of color
offers a useful account of intention in human language games:
I describe a room to someone, and then get him to paint an
impressionistic picture from this description to shew that he has
understood it. -Now he paints the chairs which I described as
green, dark red; where I said "yellow", he paints blue. -That is
the impression which he got of that room. And now I say:
"Quite right! That's what it's like" (sic. 368.115").
The speaker's initial intention was to describe an imagined scene of a room
that contained chairs that were green and others things that were yellow;
however, the artist has imposed onto the picture his own intention, making
the chairs dark red and the yellow things blue. The initial intention has been
redefined, but the imaginer of the room concedes "that's what it's like." The
picture is a "satisfactory" definition of the imaginer's intention. However,
what this example reveals is that this "satisfactory"definition is not stable;
should the picture be described again, the colors of the room might fluctuate,
but be no more unsatisfactory than the original painter's translation of the
described room. So too, the various critical interpretations of the Pardoner
(as a sodomite, a homosexual, a eunuch, morally depraved, an allegorical
figure, even a woman) may all be "satisfactory,"if we see them as
manifestations of the relationship between fwo subjectivities; the subjectivity
of the critic who develops this interpretation and the subjectivity of the
Pardoner.
A definition of being that is satisfactory and dependent upon human
intention cannot be definitive; it is prone to fluctuate depending upon the
intention imposed upon it. As the narrator says, "I trowe he were a geldyng
or a mare" (1.691). He is unsure which noun best represents the Pardoner's
being, as indicated by his use of "trowe"and the presentation of two options.
As fluctuation becomes a primary characteristic of any attempt to define the
being of a thing, Being and nothingness merge.
The Pardoner's words and acting, as described by Chaucer, are rife
with further examples of instability, especially concerning his ambiguous
gender and sexual orientation. Because many of the pilgrims seem to insert
parts of themselves into their taleslo, critics often turn to the characters within
the Pardoner's tale for clues to deciphering the Pardoner. The Old Man has
often been read as Death himself because he admits that he cannot die,
despite apparent attempts to do so. But the character of the Old Man is no
less perplexing than the Pardoner's, as highlighted by the use of parataxis.
When the three revelers from Flanders come upon the Old Man, the
"proudeste of thise riotoures three" asks,
lo For example the old wife in The Wifi of Bath's Tale could be read as a representation of the
Wife of Bath herself because of their similarities. Both women demonstrate a strong will and
skill in manipulating men, as demonstrated at the end of the tale.
"What, carl, with sory grace,
Why artow a1 forwrapped save thy face?
Why lyvestow so longe in so greet age?" (VI.716-9).
To which the Old Man
seyde thus: "For I ne kan nat fynde
A man, though that I walked into Ynde,
Neither in citee nor in no village,
That wolde chaunge his youthe for myn age; (VI.721-4).
Our first reaction to the Old Man might be curiosity and amusement sparked
by his strange response. It is not surprising that an old man could not entice
someone to exchange his youth for his age, and therefore we are left to
wonder whether the Old Man is making a joke in the attempt to evade a more
direct response to the proud rioter's rude question. However, even as we
speculate that the Old Man might be making a joke, there is a shift in tone:
And therfore mooth I han myn age stille,
As longe tyme as it is Goddes wille.
Ne Deeth, allas, ne wol nat han my lyf. (VI.725-7).
The Old Man now seems to be despairing of his inability to die. Rather than a
logical link that will clanfy the relationship between the first half of the Old
Man's response (which seems humorous) and the second half (which seems
despairing), Chaucer simply links the two parts by a semicolon. Such
paratactical relationships are frequent in this section of The Canterbury Tales,
and they demand that we work out the relationship between apparently
discordant motifs. For example, the reference to God, made by the Old Man
in lines 725-7, still indicates a man of Christian faith, but this gesture towards
God suggests a resentment that was not present in the initial greeting, "Now,
lordes, God yow see!" (VI.715).
If we consider the Old Man to be "Deeth"himself, what are we to make
of his comment that even "Deeth...wol nat han my lyf"? The Old Man may
have returned to humor to conceal a role that he performs, and he can
therefore be seen as engaging in verbal trickery similar to the Pardoner. Just
as the Pardoner's actions display the instability of the liar's paradox, the Old
Man in gesturing towards the other (Deeth) may be simultaneously gesturing
towards himself. The inconsistency and instability of the Old Man's
expression given is a performance designed to misconvey information.
The Old Man continues his performance and switches to the present
tense with his speech acts that "in saying do what they say," just as the
Pardoner in saying what he does (such as giving a sermon) actually does this
(Butler 2). He "knokke[s]"on the ground, his "moodres gate"
And seye, "Leeve mooder, leet me in!
Lo, how I vanysshe, flessh and blood and skyn!
Allas, whan shul my bones been at reste?
Mooder, with yow wolde I chaunge my cheste,
That in my chambre longe tyme hath be,
Ye, for an heyreclowt to wrappe me."
But yet to me she wol nat do that grace,
For which ful pale and welked is my face (VI.730-8).
Interestingly, the Old Man's performance has shifted again as he now moves
away from the Christian deity and invokes a pagan god, "mooder"earth. But
then the Old Man once again shifts his performance and returns to invoking a
Christian deity:
In Hooly Writ ye may yourself we1 rede,
'Agayns an oold man, hoor upon his heed,
Ye sholde arise;' wherfore I yeve yow reed,
Ne dooth unto an oold man noon harm now,
Namoore than that ye wolde men did to yow
In age, if that ye so longe abyde.
And God be with yow where ye go or ryde.
I moote go thider, as I have to gott(VI.742-9)
His apparent gesture of goodwill towards the revelers - "God be with yow"points to his performance, for he has just invoked "mooder"earth, and so we
have to question how sincere this gesture toward God is. It is not God that
will go with them but "Deeth."
When The Old Man says, "But, sires, to yow it is no curteisye/ To
speken to an old man vileynye, / But he trespasse in word, or elles in dede",
he seems to asks the revelers to judge his performance (VI.73941). He is
trespassing in both word and deed, but the revelers are too blindly intent on
their quest to kill Deeth to recognize the Old Man's performances and to
realize that he may be Deeth himself. Despite their initial revulsion and their
later questioning of the Old Man's allegiance to Deeth, the revelers, due to
their intention to kill Deeth, create a satisfactory analysis of the Old Man that
enables them to gain what they want from him: directions to where Deeth is
hiding. Tony Brinkley argues, "What is important is what is left out, an
explanation, a sense of causality, how one perspective becomes another" (36).
The Old Man is engaging in the process of unveiling and concealing
his being beneath multiple beings that I discussed at the beginning of this
section. The Old Man's various verbal gestures towards a Christian deity and
then a pagan deity disorient the reveler's and the reader's interpretations of
him. He engages in the language game of "making"and "guessing riddles"
(23.12"). The Old Man is the personification of the riddle. However, he
defies the rules of the game by refusing to allow the riddle to be solved, and
the revelers' failure to solve the riddle ultimately leads to their deaths. His
gesture towards the various deities disrupts the rules of the game as he
produces multiple beings that show his self but do not represent him. The
shifting interpretations (or beings) that can be concluded about the Old Man
are indistinguishable from nothingness.
To recognize that critics base their ideas about what constitutes a
satisfactory analysis of the Pardoner on their own intentions enables us to
understand why these critics have such a strong investment in seeing the
Pardoner (or any being) as performed, rather than performing. To view the
Pardoner as performed is to attempt to place limitations upon him by
confining him within the parameters of consistency which he explicitly
avoids. Chapter two will explore how allowing him to exist as a performing
subject offers new readings of the Pardoner's sexuality and gender. The
Pardoner evades categorization on the most fundamental level by refusing to
allow a "generality of psychological traits" to be established that will enable
others to predict his behavior (Goffrnan 1).
Chapter 2
A Queer reading of the Pardoner
One aim of this chapter is to examine the much debated question of the
Pardoner's sexuality: is he a eunuch, a homosexual, a heterosexual, or even
perhaps a woman cross-dressed or in disguise? My goal is to reveal how a
queer reading of the Pardoner becomes available if we allow him to revel in
his inconsistency and instability, to embody the ludic position that he
performs. While my use of "queer"will partially refer to a sexual orientation,
I will also give the word a broader meaning. As Judith Halberstam argues in
her book In a Queer Time and Place, while queer theory has a clear history with
and relationship to homosexual lives and cultures, homosexuality is not a
prerequisite for queer experiences (6). Therefore, at times this chapter will
specifically focus on the Pardoner's sexuality, but at other times I will
broaden the focus to build upon the ideas raised in chapter one about a
performing subject.
I. The Debate Over Sexuality
Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality sets forth the argument that
in order to exert power and control over sex one has to "subjugateit at the
level of language" (17). For Foucault, the subjection of sex and sexuality
characteristic of modernity emerged during the seventeenth century,
significantly after the composition of the text with which this thesis is
concerned - The Canterbury Tales. However, there has certainly been no
shortage of articles and books that seek to locate the sexualities of a number
of the Canterbury pilgrims, especially the Pardoner, using contemporary
notions of sexuality. The authors of Consfrucfing Medieval Sexuality argue that
there is no "medieval equivalent" to the term "sexuality,"but Bruce R. Smith,
while conceding that "sexuality,"as a term, is "time- and culture- specific,"
suggests that the later concept was a "formulation of a more general
phenomenon that European culture has known as eros" (319).
There have been many critics11 who have attempted to move beyond
the description of the Pardoner as a sodomite and have instead labeled him as
11
Two of the most cited and influential are Monica McAlpine and Steven Kruger. McAlpine
provides the framework for glossing "mare"as the medieval equivalent of homosexual.
Kruger attempts to reclaim the Pardoner as a gay ancestor.
a homosexual. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the adjective
"homosexual"was not in use until 1892, and it was not recorded as a noun
until 1912. Therefore, it may initially seem problematic for critics to discuss
the puzzle of the Pardoner in terms of modem sexualities. The labels we use
to categorize modern sexualities are deeply embedded within our
sociopolitical and historical time frame, and it would be a mistake to simply
project labels such as "homosexual"onto our predecessors.
While the polarized gender and sexual categories that we live by today
were not the model of the medieval ages, the histories of these categories
relate them to medieval paradigms. Just as we can gain greater
understanding of contemporary issues by tracing back the histories of our
modem conceptions of sexuality, we can develop our understanding of
medieval conceptions by charting their future. While the term "homosexual"
was not yet coined, the acts that we now understand to constitute
homosexual behavior were of course commonplace in the Medieval era. In
Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender and Sexuality, Anna Livia and Kira Hall
argue that the problem with Foucault's understanding of language and
sexuality rests with his claim that "it is the act of naming homosexuality as such
that brings it into beingt' (8). Indeed, the emergence of "homosexual"as a
category occurs in the context of a long history of prejudice and phobia that is
specific to our cultural and temporal milieu, although this thesis does not
intend to delve into this history. But it is important to remember that, while it
is anachronistic to impose the term "homosexual"in reference to a medieval
character, our interpretation of homosexuality is connected historically to
Medieval interpretations of the human activities we now call "homosexual."
In this sense, Foucault's argument that it is the act of naming homosexuality
that brings it into being is insufficiently genealogical.
Judith Halberstarn, in Female Masculinity, cautions critics against
merely projecting modern terms into the past but recognizes the "insights"
that can be gained from cautiously applying our modern understanding of
sexuality onto the past (53). Halberstam, to compensate for this problem,
created "perverse presentism" as a model that avoids the over-determination
of projection. Her model is twofold: firstly, she argues that we should not
simply consider those who expressed "perverse"desire (i.e. non-normative
sexual desires) as automatically homosexual or gay or lesbian; and secondly,
she argues that we should take our present and significantly more diverse
understanding of sexuality and see what can be gained by using it as a lens to
view the past. For example, Halberstam's book desires to demonstrate how
all non-normative female expressions of gender and sexuality from the past
are usually considered as "lesbian,"but that this label does not account for the
wide variety of different experiences and desires that women of the past
expressed. This being said, although the plethora of sexual and gender
categories that modern society has created provide useful ways of thinking
about past experiences, one cannot simply project the labels without
considering the implications of doing so.
While Halberstam uses perverse presentism to trace the histories of
lesbians and of female masculinities, her methodology is useful in the context
of the Pardoner. She emphasizes the development of gender and sex
categories, rather than taking modern terms and applying them to the past.
For example, our modern understanding of how homosexuality as a term and
category has developed provides us with the hindsight to realize the
limitations of simply assigning the label of "homosexual"to an individual
prior to the term's conception. However, her concept also recognizes that
such terms do not simply spring from nothing, and that we can trace the
history of such a concept by observing historical examples of behavior
defined by gender and sexuality and contrasting them with modern
examples. After all, at a fundamental level, both Medieval and modern
culture considered nonnormative desire to be deviant, and the homosexual
behavior issuing from such desire encountered no less prejudice and phobia
in the past than such desire faces today, even though the forms that such
prejudice and phobia assumed in the Middle ages are quite different from
those of our time.
11. Medieval Understandings and Expressions of Sexuality
The medieval period did not have available the neat terms and
categories that we use to define varieties of sexuality. Sexuality in the
Medieval period was particularly complicated from our point of view
because categories of gender were not viewed as polarized between male and
female. The one-sex model was the reigning paradigm in the Medieval
period. This model was constructed as a male hierarchy. Women had no
place within the system except as inferior versions of men. To be a woman
was to not have a male body; women were not a part of the hierarchy as their
un-male bodies prevented them from entering it. However, men had not
fully developed a rationale for why their bodies entitled them to a "natural"
superordinate position. Essentialized gender differences have developed
along with the modern two-sex model, but these were not yet articulated
during Chaucer's time. During the Medieval period, gender was determined
by what one covered the body with and how one styled those parts of the
body that were regularly on display. Accordingly, men were defined by the
costumes that they donned and by how they styled their hair and facial hair.
Valerie R. Hotchkiss's book title, Clothes Make the Man, articulates how
gender was determined. A system that saw clothing as determining the
gender of an individual created a perfect situation for individuals to slip
between categories. Hotchkiss explores a variety of Medieval texts that
depict women who live in disguise as men in order to attain a higher social
position. She argues, in reference to Roman de Silence, that maleness is viewed
"as a social performance, while femaleness looks much more like a sexed
body" (110). Hotchkiss argues that many Medieval writers were
problematizing these notions of the relationship between performance and
the sexed body as they depict women in men's clothing who are able to
become successful knights and enter other male professions by performing
masculinity. In turn, she argues that sexuality becomes problematized
because these women in disguise frequently fall in love with women or even
marry them, events that raise questions of same-sex desire. Conveniently,
many of these women-in-disguise are transformed into men by God and their
sexual aberrations are remedied.
Gottfried con Strai3burg1sTristan und Isold, according to James A.
Schultz, depicts only heterosexual love, but he questions how heterosexual
love was maintained when "one can scarcely tell the men's bodies from the
women's" (91). E. Jane Burns also emphasizes that in the Gvalier de la chawete
and the Prose Lancelot men and women are distinguishable in terms of their
dress. She notes the detailed descriptions of men being encased in so much
"armor that no skin shows" (118). In Refashioning Courtly Love, she notes that
"as soon as this male figure [of the knight] is 'disarmed'. ..and divested of that
key marker of masculinity, his gender comes into question'' (112).
If we turn to Chaucer's own descriptions of courtly love in The Knights
Tale, we see Arcita and Palamon at their weakest without their armor:
This fierse Arcite hath of his helm ydon,
And on a courser for to shewe his face.. .
He pighte hym on the pomel of his heed,
That in the place he lay as he were deed (1.2676-90).
Indeed, their armor appears to be crucial to their ability to fulfill the role of a
knight. Knighthood does not seem to be innate and natural to the men but
requires armor. Although the knight would appear at the top of the male
hierarchy, his position is not naturally predetermined but constructed,
depending on his ability to display those qualities which make a good
knight -chivalry, honor and bravery. In order to perform masculinity, one
needs the correct attire to do so. Arcite, when he escapes from prison, does
not play the part of the courageous and bold knight but instead sneaks back
to Athens in disguise as a poor laborer. Even when the two rival knights
encounter each other outside of prison, they postpone the fight until the next
day when both can obtain armor:
But for as muche thou art a worthy knyght,
And wilnest to darreyne hire by bataille,
Have heer my trouthe; tomorwe I wol nat faille
Withoute wityng of any oother wight
That heere I wol be founden as a knyght,
And bryngen harneys right ynough for thee;
And ches the beste, and leef the worste for me (1.1608-15).
We see here the ways in which clothing defines the social roles available even
to men of noble blood. The Knight in the General Prologue may seem to
disprove this argument, for when we meet him he is not wearing his armor;
instead "He wered a gypon" (1.75). However, he still wears the markers of
knighthood and therefore courtly m a s c ~ t yas
, his tunic is "A1bismotered
with his habergeon" (1.76).
The tenuous relationship between the sexed body and gender is not
resolved in Chaucer's era, but can be seen as a recurring theme in later
literature, including the works of Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. In The
Faerie Queene, the masculine identity that Britomart takes on when she is
disguised in armor demonstrates the continued reliance upon clothing to
define gender. The confusing gender identities of both Britomart and Viola in
Twelfth Night lead to sexual transgressions when Orsino begins to desire his
page (Viola disguised) and Malecasta pursues Britomart. These momentary
sexual transgressions are always remedied, for if they were not these authors
would be crossing into the dangerous territory of same-sex desire.
The absence of our dual, polarized model of gender made both gender
and sexuality far more complicated to determine and categorize in the
medieval period. Fundamental to establishing and perpetuating social
attitudes on gender and sexuality was the Church. For the Church, the
female was negatively marked by the trespasses of Eve, and therefore she was
subservient to the male. While heterosexuality was the primary sexual
model, the most "natural man" was the celibate (Burger 125). Mark Jordan
argues that "[tlhe place of the erotic in Christian love is no more settled for
other-sex couples than for same-sex couples" (Burger 125).12
In the medieval period, the question was beginning to arise as to
whether gender and, in turn, sexuality were natural dispositions. Glen
Burger argues that "essentialized gender difference provides the stabilizing
foundation by which medieval dominant culture regulates 'the natural"' (1289). The one-sex medieval model required that gender distinctions were
externally imposed upon the body, but these were regarded as essential and
natural differences. As Judith Butler argues in Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution, "gender is in no way a stable identity.. .It is an identity tenuously
constituted in time - an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts"
(154). Gender, by this definition, is constructed and imposed upon the body.
''
From this point on, I will refer to the term "other-sexdesire"rather than heterosexuality, to
reflect the absence of the later term in the medieval period, and to avoid any confusions that
might arise from the use of a purely modern term with its own history
Those bodies then seek to confirm their gender status through convincing
performances of these socially-defined constructs.
Sexuality was defined by the Church, and specific forms of sexual
expression were judged by whether or not they conformed to "natural"
gender distinctions. For example, an effeminate man was seen as "unnatural"
insofar as he did not enact the masculine role that he was supposed to
perform. Ruth Karras and David Boyd concur that sexual perversions were
judged based upon gender deviations. In 1395John Rykener was tried for
dressing as a woman (named Eleanor) and engaging in prostitution and
sodomy. He was judged as "a man who had forsaken his gendered identity
and had become a woman.. ..That he prostituted himself and engaged in
sodomy only confirms his gender loss and conflation" (97). Such a man is
perceived as failing to perform the "natural"masculine identity awarded to
him because of his male body. Rykener, by engaging in sex with other men,
is attempting to become a women without the divine intervention that, as
Hotchkiss notes, occurred in Roman de Silence. The sexual act itself only
references and proves his gender aberration.
Sexuality was linked to gender in terms of whether the former
complimented the latter. "Natural"masculine performance required that a
man desire only women. To desire another man was viewed as a
transgression, not because of the sexual act itself, but because a man who
desires another man is not performing the socially regulated definition of
masculinity. Such a man therefore slips down the masculine hierarchy and
becomes defined as that which is other than male: female. As the two-sex
model of gender developed later, and women became a separate and distinct
category (rather than being seen as men lacking certain male attributes),
same-sex desire began to be examined under sexuality rather than gender.
Same-sex desiring men could no longer simply be dismissed as effeminate, as
femininity became its own category with essentialized gender differences.
The Bible's descriptions of God's wrath in "Gensis 19"against Sodom
determined the medieval Catholic Church's position on sodomy. Legally,
according to Rictor Norton,
The first significant reference to civil laws against
homosexuality in England occurred in 1376, when the God
Parliament unsuccessfully petitioned King Edward 111 to banish
all "Lombard brokers" because they were usurers, and other
foreign artisans and traders, particularly "Jewsand Saracens,"
who were accused to having introduced "the too horrible vice
which is not to be named" which they thought would destroy
the realm. But it was not until 1533 that a statute was actually
enacted against homosexuals. The Act.. .adjudges buggery a
felony punishable by hanging until dead.
However, as seen with the case of JohnRykener, sodomy or same-sex desire
has less to do with the sexual act itself, than with transgression against
gender roles.
111. Performing Gender
"Itrowe he were a gelding or a mare"
This one line from the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales has
provoked an abundance of critical debate about the Pardoner's sexual status.
-
The Pardoner, in the General Prologue, is described as having
heer as yelow as wex,
But smothe it heeng as dooth a strike of flex;
By ounces henge his lokkes that he hadde
And therwith he hise shuldres overspradde;
But thynne it lay by colpons oon and oon
Also "Swiche glarynge eyen hadde he as an hare," and
A voys he hadde as smal as hath a goot,
No berd hadde he, ne nevere sholde have;
As smothe it was as it were late shave (1.676-91).
To support his thesis that the Pardoner is an example of the eunuchus ex
nativitate, Walter Clyde Curry cites a description by Antonius Polemon
Laodicensis of eunuchs as having wide, glaring eyes. And Curry concludes
that the Pardoner's appearance would have indicated to the medieval
audience that he was a "'mangiven to folly, a glutton, a libertine, and a
drunkard" (57). To support the argument that the Pardoner's voice - "voys he
hadde as smal as hath a goot" (1.689) -is a sign that he is a eunuch, Curry
cites a description of "shameless"men in the Semeta Secretorurn: "tho that haue
a voyve hei, smale and swete and pleasaunt, bene neshe and haue lytill of
manhode, and i'likened to women" (57-8). Curry asserts that it would have
been quite logical for Chaucer to have used physiognomy to indicate to his
readers the character of the Pardoner.
However, Monica McAlpine, by glossing "mare"as meaning
"homosexual,"argues that all of the Pardoner's effeminate physical qualities
can be accounted for by seeing him as a homosexual. She rejects Curry's
theory that the Pardoner is a eunuchus ex nativitate, arguing that Curry is
unable to prove his claims; however, as evidence of the Pardoner's sexuality,
McAlpine relies heavily upon the same physical characteristics of the
Pardoner that Curry cites in support of the ideas that he is a eunuch. Carolyn
Dinshaw and Gregory Gross are quick to dismiss readings spawned by
Curry's use of medieval physiognomy. Consultation of the physiognomies
reveals the research to be "faulty," as it rests on only one case study of a
eunuch.
Some medievalists see the term "eunuch"as indicating, not simply a
physical absence of testicles, but also a spiritual or character absence that can
lead to effeminate and/or homosexual behavior. Gregory Gross claims that
the description of the Pardoner as "vicious"refers to his practice of sodomy
(29). He further argues that the use of gelding and mare is a sign, not of
physical emasculation, but the "figurative sign of his membership in the
medieval poetic tradition that equated the fraudulent use of rhetoric with
sodomy, and sodomy with gender inversion" (31).
Much has been speculated about the Pardoner's relationship with the
Summoner. They are traveling companions and their voices compliment each
other (1.669-74). Melvin Storm argues that the General Prologue "hints" (318) at
a homosexual relationship between the Pardoner and the Summoner in the
use of the phrase "stif burdoun" (1.673). However, as Robert Sturges quite
rightly states, the use of this phrase "literally means that the Summoner sang
the bass line to the Pardoner's melody" (47). Monica McAlpine focuses upon
the significance of the lines which the Pardoner sings, "Com hider, love, to
me!," as evidence for her homosexual reading of the Pardoner (1.672).
McAlpine argues that the Pardoner may be viewed as
A frustrated heterosexual who associates himself with the
lecherous Summoner in order to deny his own impotence and to
acquire symbolically the Summoner's virility; or he may be seen
as a homosexual, ambivalent about disclosing his status, who
nonetheless becomes suspect through the public display of his
ambiguous friendship (13).
However, Mc'Alpinetsassessment of the relationship between the traveling
companions is based on as little textual evidence as her decision to gloss
"mare"as "homosexual." In a footnote to The Canterbuy Tales edition by
Robert A. Pratt, the editor states, "Com hider, love, to me!" was a popular love
song of the time (21). While the Summoner may be introduced in the General
Prologue "Ashoot he was and lecherous as a sparwe" (1.626), the accusation
that the relationship between the two men is "suspect"is based on what
constitutes, for McApline, a "satisfactoryanalysis" of the Pardoner: namely,
that he is homosexual.
McAlpine also chooses to ignore the Pardoner's own claims to keep a
wench in every town in his prologue, and his statement that he was about to
take a wife until he heard The W
ifeof Bath's Tale. Neither of these comments
by the Pardoner suggest that he is "frustrated." However, I do agree with
McAlpine's assessment that the Summoner is both lecherous and virile.
Although the masculinity that he performs is excessive and lacking the
dignity of the Knight's performance, it is distinctly "masculine"and provides
a good contrast to the Pardoner's defiance of "appropriate"gender
performances, Postulating a homosexual relationship between the Pardoner
and the Summoner seems to me to be a desperate attempt to find more
evidence to support an already problematic reading.
Interpretations of the Pardoner's sexuality are related to the overall
critical attempt to define him. Indeed many critics make a major investment
in one of the various sexual readings of him as providing the key to his secret.
For example, one reading takes the Pardoner's self-confessed viciousness as a
true confession and therefore concludes that his sexuality must be equally as
depraved and abhorrent (1.459). In the 2004 BBC adaptation of The Pardoner's
Tale, the Pardoner is merged him with the Old Man and one of the three
revelers from Flanders . Remaining true to the nature of Chaucer's Pardoner's
profession, Jonny Lee Miller plays a modern-day swindler and petty thief.
He is assisted in his schemes by two others, and they routinely spend the day
drinking and engaging in riotous behavior. The Pardoner is also quite
literally death, as he is a sexual predator and murderer, taking the lives of
young local women. While this adaptation liberally interprets Chaucer's text,
the pattern is clear: a vicious man must have a vicious sexuality. We see a
similar assumption in the work of critics who have argued that the Pardoner
is a eunuch or a homosexual. Often inherent in these sexual interpretations of
the Pardoner is a degree of prejudice or, as Steven Kruger argues in reference
to homosexual readings, "homophobia"(150). Such prejudiced readings seek
to establish consistency among the Pardoner's conflicting personas.
We are introduced to the inconsistency and instability of the
Pardoner's character in the General Prologue. Determining consistency is
initially problematic due to the narrator's use of "trowe"in describing the
Pardoner as either a gelding or a mare. "Trowe"indicates uncertainty, and
therefore, while the Pardoner may be either a gelding or mare, he may
actually be neither or b0th.13 The description is suggestive, indeed, but not
conclusive.
In light of the narrator's uncertainty, one might question why so many
critics begin their discussion of the Pardoner's sexuality by assuming that the
narrator's comment, "I trowe he were a gelding or a mare," is meant to be
read negatively, and implies a deviant sexuality;l4 this assumption is
especially problematic, given the Pardoner's own later statements about
engaging in sexual acts with women: specifically, his claims that he has a "joly
wenche in every toun," and that he intended to get married until he heard The
Wifi ofBathtsPrologue (VI.453).15 Furthermore, even if we accepts readings,
such as Curry's, that identdy the Pardoner as a eunuch, we must ask why, if,
13 Surges argues that
"the Pardoner's description tends to dissolve sexual difference; he
problematizes the very concept of sexual dimorphism because he makes it so difficult to
decide where one sex begins and the other leaves off' (41).
14 On the basis of the narrator's opening comments, Gregory Gross argues that the Pardoner
"vicious[ness]"indicates his sodomitical desires.
15
Conveniently, many critics such as McAlpine, ignore these comments by the Pardoner,
perhaps because they threaten their reductive readings of the Pardoner that limit him to one
sexual label.
according to the Church, the most natural expression of sexuality is celibacy,
his asexual status is viewed negatively? As he confesses that he performs the
role of the Pardoner, even though he is not actually a man of the cloth, is it
not possible that he also performs eunuchry in order to perform the role of
the Pardoner more convincingly?
However, I find all of these critic's conclusion to be lacking, as their
assumptions confuse our modern two-sex model of gender with the Medieval
one-sex model. As demonstrated in section 11, the issue is not really the
Pardoner's sexuality, but his apparent aberration from masculinity. By
medieval standards, the Pardoner, if desiring other men, would be viewed as
behaving like a woman. The derogatory label of "mare"implies a failure to
perform masculinity appropriately. It indicates to an audience that Chaucer
wishes us to understand that the Pardoner is low on the masculine hierarchy.
As with much that Chaucer depicts about the Pardoner, the
relationship between gelding and mare is not clarified for us, other than that
he could be one or the other. Hotchkiss notes the importance of language as a
veiling technique when it comes to issues of identity, particularly gender
(107). We cannot assume that the relationship between "gelding"and "mare"
is meant to be understood as one of mutually exclusive derogation. The
accusation that the Pardoner is a gelding might, as I have argued above,
indicate that he performs the Church's idealized version of male gender that
is both virginal and celibate.16
Having established the performing nature of the Pardoner in Chapter 1
and having examined how medieval notions of gender were constructed in a
way that heavily relied upon performance, I am now in a position to propose
a queer reading of the Pardoner. While many critics have formulated
readings of the Pardoner based on as little textual evidence as glossing
"gelding or mare," I have attempted to demonstrate that there is an
abundance of textual evidence which reveals the inconsistent and unstable
performative nature of the Pardoner. It is this inconsistency and instability
that will enable us to create a queer reading of him.
Glen Burger's book Chaucer's Queer Nation contains a chapter on the
Pardoner entitled, "Queer Performativity," and while this chapter attempts an
original reading of him, Burger ultimately produces a reductive reading of
the Pardoner by equating "queer"with "homosexual." His use of queer theory
provides an opening for a more in-depth queer reading of the Pardoner that I
will construct with the help of Judith Halberstam's recent framework of queer
temporality and space.
Leicester questions what he sees as a continuous assumption that the Pardoner, if he is a
eunuch, is the "embodiment"of sin (31). Again, it becomes clear that medieval
understandings of sexuality were confused because of the uncertainty surrounding the onesex gender model. The assumption of many critics that eunuchry implies sin seems
unwarranted. The Old Testament's position on the eunuch is confused- Deuteronomy 23.1,
Isaiah 56.3-5 and Matthew 19.12 all give different accounts of the status of the eunuch's
relationship with God.
'6
Halberstam explains the emergence of queer subcultures as distinctive
of postmodernism and as particularly brought on by the post-Stonewall AIDS
crisis. However, the one-sex model of the medieval era and Chaucer's
creation of an English vernacular allowed him to re-imagine the relationship
between gender and the body in a way that anticipates Halberstam's model.
In Chaucer, the conventional characters do not merely function as examples
against which the unconventional ones may be compared, but the often bland
stereotypes that Chaucer gives us -sometimes bland to the point of parody reveal a problematic gender system, which is illuminated by those characters
that more openly defy gender norms. Carolyne Larrington argues that The
Knight's Tale, The Parson's Tale and The Plowman's Tale are all exemplary tales,
while the rest are subversive through little, unexpected twists. The Wife of
Bath's Tale, along with The Pardoner's Tale, is one of the better known
Canterbury Tales for its open and scandalous presentation of femininity.17
Whether we view the Wife of Bath as a "feisty proto-feminist" or a
"misogynistnightmare," her performance is excessive, and the humor that
17 Charles A. Owen, Jr argues that these unexpected twists are possible as Chaucer entered
his own text and thereby "freed the other characters from his control; he had to respect the
mystery of their being, their capacity to surprise him with what they said and did" (179). The
characters are "fictions within a fiction that purports not to be a fiction" (179).
results from her excessive performance suggests that gender is performative
(Larrington In Our Time, BBC Radio 1).l8
Halberstam argues that what is threatening about queerness to
normative ways of life - the latter being typified by masculine and
heterosexually-orientated social paradigms -is not the way that queers have
sex, but how they live their lives in opposition to heteronormative time and
space. According to her, one does not have to be homosexual to experience
or live in queer time and space. It follows that queerness is not a threat
because of sexual acts but because it threatens normative ways of life. As I
have sought not to use "homosexual"in reference to the medieval period and
have instead spoken of same-sex desire, it also seems inappropriate to use the
term "heterosexual,"and therefore I will substitute "opposite-sex desire."
Medieval normative paradigms determined that the one of the
"appropriate"ways that people should live their life was for sex to be
sanctified by the union of marriage and to occur between members of the
opposite sex. The Pardoner is a perversion of this system. His ambiguous
gender orientation communicated by his expression given offchallenges the
notion that gender is natural, as he is so clearly performing. The Pardoner's
Many critics have analyzed the Pardoner in conjunction with the Wife of Bath. Robert
Boenig, for example, argues that the Pardoner's performance is meant to be read as a parody
of her. "Indeed, almost as central to the criticism of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale as the
Pardoner's arrogance, blind hypocrisy, and sexual irregularities is his odd relationship with
that other favorite of the explicator, the Wife of Bath. In this interpretation, the Pardoner is
someone who emphasizes seemingly hypocritical excesses in his own character and career
primarily as a means of interpreting the Wife's hypocrisy" (11).
18
performances, in which we see him move from the position of an accused
gelding or mare to desiring the opposite sex, place him within a queer
instability, As Halberstam argues, "The notion of a bodycentered identity
gives way to a model that locates sexual subjectivities within and between
embodiment, place, and practice" (5). Halberstam's perspective thus allows
us to view the Pardoner's body as ludic. A ludic body is one that is playful; it
is characterized by inconsistent and unstable performances.
The ludic body confuses critics and causes them to address the
Pardoner's sexuality as the primary focus for concern, when they should
focus upon his gender. His body plays at performing male and female,
characteristics typical of a two-sex model that the Medieval period had not
yet articulated. For example, the Pardoner's body can be seen to play
between his "feminine"(or less than masculine) expression given ofin the
General Prologue, and the hyper-masculine expression given in his assertion
that he has a wench in every town.
The Wife of Bath, the performing female in the text, also plays between
what we today see as male and female genders in her philosophy on and
accounts of marriage. She performs exaggerated versions of both feminine
and masculine qualities that make us laugh. The Wife of Bath, like the
Pardoner, depicts the power that can be gained from being aware of the
performance one plays. She has autonomy, unlike the other female pilgrims,
and details how she gains agency through her performances with her
husbands. She insists that "Man shal yelde to his wyf hir dette" (III.130), by
using "his sely instrument" (III.132), and also explains in detail how she
simultaneously reaps the benefits of sex with pleasure while simultaneously
gaining control over her husbands by performing the role of a good wife. She
informs the pilgrims how she has profited:
In wyfhood wol I use myn instrument
As freely as my Makere hath it sent.
If I be daungerous, God yeve me sorwe!
Myn housbonde shal it have bothe eve and morwe,
Whan that hym list come forth and paye his dette.
An housebonde wol I have, I wol nat letter,
Which shal be bothe my detour and my thrall,
And have his tribulation withal
Upon his flesh, while that I am his wyf.
I have the power durynge a1 my lyf
Upon his proper body, and nat he. (111.149-168).
While the Wife's aggressive sexuality means that she too violates Medieval
understandings of gender, she appears to be able to conceal her perversion
beneath her performance because she outwardly looks and appears like a
woman should. She is described as "A good Wif" who "Of Clooth-makygn
she hadde swich an haunt" (111.445-7):
Hir Coverchiefs ful fine were of ground;
I dorset swere they weyeden ten pound
That on a Sonday weren upon hir heed.
Hir hosen weren of fyn scalet reed,
Ful streite yteyd, and shoes ful moyste and newe.
Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe.
She was a worthy woman a1 hir lyve (111.453-459).
Although she uses her performative abilities to gain agency, she does so
within the confines of marriage, and therefore, although sexually desirous,
gives the appearance of femininity. However, she subverts the reigning
patriarchal paradigm only within her marriages, whereas the Pardoner's
ability for subversion is farther reaching.
While the Wife seems thoroughly feminine, the Pardoner's appearance
betrays his queerness and, as we see in the General Prologue, he is judged
accordingly. The same assumptions, which today we might describe as
homophobic, are still made in contemporary society, which has for so long
been preoccupied with "aberrations"of gender that, we assume,
automatically imply sexual aberration. Recently, the coining of the term
"metrosexual"has allowed us to consider the possibility that a man who
deviates from perceived gender norms (whether they be performed or
natural), need not necessarily deviate from "normal"forms of sexual
expression (i.e. heterosexuality). An apparently "feminine"man -defined as
such only because he does not uphold preconceived notions of masculinity can still be heterosexual. However, in the medieval period, such flexibility
was not attainable because gender and sexuality were not yet distinctly
defined and labeled as separate categories.
This line of thought brings us back to the chapter's opening discussion
of the debate over sexuality and The Canterbury Tales narrator's use of "trowe."
At the time when Chaucer was tryrng to re-imagine the relationship between
gender and body, sexuality was still considered to be a part of gender. While
male-male sexual acts were considered a sin punishable by death, these acts
were viewed as a transgression against one's gender, because sexuality was
not yet a distinct identity separate from gender. I have attempted to show
that trying to locate the Pardoner's sexuality within the parameters of modern
understandings of sexuality is problematic when we take into account that
Medieval society understood gender as a one-sex model, rather than the twosex model that our modern sexualities have developed out of. The Pardoner's
"deviance"away from social paradigms should be read as the result of his
performing subjectivity that shifts between multiple performances depending
on the situation that he is in. In the next chapter section, I will turn to Judith
Halberstam'snotion of queer temporalities in order to further exemplify the
Pardoner's shifting performances.
N. Queer temporality
Judith Halberstam's book In a Queer Time and Place argues that those
whom we consider to be queer may experience time differently from those
who live within heteronormative paradigms:
Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by
allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be
imagined according to logics that lie outside of those
paradigmatic markers of life experience -namely, birth,
marriage, reproduction, and death (2)
Again, I wish to caution us against imposing modem conceptions of life
experience onto the past, but, as already demonstrated, the Pardoner's
performative expression of gender places him within a queer paradigm that
disrupts what Halberstam sees as normative time.
One of the paradigmatic markers that Halberstam mentions is
marriage. The Pardoner interrupts the Wife of Bath to proclaim that he was
"aboute to wedde a wyf," but has now changed his mind after hearing her
tales of wifely manipulation (I11.166). Whether we believe this proclamation
by the Pardoner or see it is an attempt to conceal his (sexual) perversion, it
seems that the Pardoner has not married and does not intend to do so. Thus
he rejects this fundamental marker of a "normal"life path. So too, if we
accept the possibility that the Old Man is Deeth and that the Pardoner may
have projected himself into his tale in the form of the Old Man, then the
Pardoner is proposing a radical revision of the last example made in
Halberstam's list, death. From this perspective, The Pardoner's Tale represents
the Pardoner's attempt to impose his own meaning on the last stage of life.
Refusing to perform those paradigmatic markers of life experience, The
Pardoner gives himself the freedom to play between performances and
thereby to experience alternative temporalities.
Forgetting is crucial to queer temporality as it allows the body to shift
between performances of different modes of gender and sexuality.
"Forgetting"is another of the Pardoner's language games, allowing a strategic
method of communication that subverts and disrupts socially conceived
notions of appropriate -namely stable -representations of being. When the
Pardoner first begins confessing the method of verbal trickery that is so
lucrative for him, he tells the pilgrhns how he says to his audience, "taak of
my wordes keep" (VI.352). He emphatically asks them to commit his words
to memory so that his relics -because of his citational references to the
Church and this subsequent authority- can cure their problems, and then he
repeats his request that they "Taak kep" (VI.360). However, no sooner has the
Pardoner invoked this citational authority and asked his audience to heed his
words, but he exposes the corruption of the Church, as he says that a man
may buy relics to cure his jealousy brought on by his wife's cheating with
"prestes two or thre" (VI.371). He subverts the authority of the Church by
exposing it as corrupt, but he disclaims any such subversive intention by
conveniently forgetting what he has said previously.
The skill of the Pardoner's performances lies in his subtlety. He does
not expose or reveal his subversions explicitly, but conveys them through the
subtly shifting contradictions revealed by his unstable performances. Before
an audience has time to absorb the Pardoner's comments upon the wife
having had "prestestwo or three," he reinstates (or performs a remembering
of) the Church's authority: "They wol come up and offer a Goodes name, /
And I assoille hem by the auctoritee / Which that by bulle ygranted was to
me" (VI.386-8). As readers, we are caught up in the Pardoner's infinite cycle
of forgetting and remembering, and such a language game prevents us from
being able to create a fixed and unified understanding of him.
The Pardoner's subversion of normative temporalities is also evident in
the shifting verb tenses of his tale itself. He does not experience time, or
himself as situated within it, in a linear and progressive fashion. Leicester
cites the "Pardoner'sdifferent attitude toward temporality" as evidenced in
the opening of his tale:
In Flaundres whilom was a compaignye
Of yonge folk, that haunteden folye,
As riot, hasard, stywes, and tavernes,
Wher as with harpes, lutes, and gyternes
They daunce and pleyen at dees, bothe day and nyght,
And eten also and drynken over hir myght,
Thurgh which they doon the devel sacrifise
Withinne that develes temple in cursed wise,
By superfluytee abhomynable.
Hir othes been so grete and so dampnable
That it is grisly for to heere hem swere. (VI.463-73, Leicester's
emphasis 163-4).
The Pardoner begins his tale, in the past tense, by telling the pilgrims of a
company that was in Flanders that practiced folly. He then shifts to the
present tense when describing the activities that they engage in: "daunce,"
"pleyen," "eten,"and "drynken." The Pardoner shifts between the past and
present tense in this passage and Leicester argues that this emphasizes that
"sin occurs continually, so that in a sense it does not matter whether it is
located in the past or the present" (164).
The effect of this disruption of linear time in Trle Pardoner's Tale is further
highlighted by examining the Pardoner's profession. For example, the
Pardoner, by profession, provides relics which absolve the purchaser from
having committed a specific sin. As pointed out by Leicester, the Pardoner
presents sin as unfixed to a temporal moment. This is highly problematic for
the Catholic Church because if sin is not fixed to a specific moment in time,
but fluid, and occurring and recurring in many moments, then it is difficult to
establish the rituals of repentance and absolution which eventually provides
access to heaven in the afterlife.
Forgetting further disrupts the Church's rituals of repentance and
absolution by breaking the link between sin and identity. The disruption of a
linear progression of time that forgetting allows enables an individual to shift
with greater ease between different performances; therefore, an individual
may be absolved of a sin committed when enacting one performance, simply
by shifting to a different performance. For example, while the Pardoner may
be viewed as a sinner because he swindles people out of their money for false
relics, he may no longer be that same sinner by the end of his tale as he has
forgotten this performance and asks the pilgrims to buy his relics. The
Pardoner detemporalizes sin through the language game of forgetting.
The Pardoner refers often to the sin of "glotonye"(VI.498). He recounts
the downfall of Adam and Eve in the past tense, and then he shifts to the
present in his use of a citational reference. In the Pardoner's reference to the
Bible in lines 598, "as I read," he explicitly invokes one of his performances.
The line is performative as it explains his action of reading and it uses the
referent "I." Again the Pardoner is making his audience aware of his
authority by informing them that he has read the Bible, which gives him the
knowledge to be able to deliver his sermons. He speaks directly to the sin of
glotonye in the present tense:
0 glotonye, ful of cursednesse!
0 cause first of oure confusioun!
0 original of oure dampnacioun.. .
0 glotonye, on thee we1 oghte us pleyne!
0,wiste a man how manye maladyes
Folwen of excesse and of glotonyes
He wolde been the moore mesurable
Of his diete, sittynge at his table (VI.498-516).
His present tense utterances reveal the performative nature of what he
discusses. The Pardoner personifies "glotonye"by speaking of it as though it
were a person, and by directly speaking to it. In this sense, "glotonye"is
transformed into a referent "I" and it becomes one of the many available
performances. However, the "I"that performed one sin may fluctuate and
engender a new, but still temporary, performing "I,"and therefore, there is no
fixed "I"which a first-person utterance refers to. As a result, asking for God's
absolution and forgiveness is a hollow gesture, if we consider "I"to be a
willed performance.
"Glotonyne"in the Bible is the original sin of Eve, and in the Pardoner's
rant about gluttony he indulges himself, but he then offers a moral tale of the
results of indulgence by describing the demise of the three revelers from
Flanders. They are described as the most abominable sinners and their every
action is excessive and fuelled by the sin of "glotonyne." The revellers
Daunce and pleyen at dees, bothe day and nyght,
And eten also and drynken over hir myght,
Thurgh which they doon the devel sacrifise
Withinne that develes temple in cursed wise,
By superfluytee abhomynable.. ..
And ech of hem at otheres synne lough.
Hir othes been so grete and so dampnable
That it is grisly for to heere hem swere.
And right anon thanne comen tombesteres,
Fetys and smale, and yonge frutesteres,
Syngeres with harpes, baudes, wafereres,
Whiche been the verray develes officeres
To kyndle and blowe the fyr of lecherye,
That is annexed unto glotonye.
The hooly writ take I to my witnesse,
That luxurie is in wyn and dronkenesse (VI.467-484).
According to Brian Stock, St. Augustine believed memory was crucial to the
ability to reform oneself (207). To improve ourselves and earn our entrance
into heaven, one needs memory in order to reflect upon the sinfulness of our
ways. In order to atone for our sins, we need first to accept that a sinful act or
thought is part of our identity and remains a part of us until we ask for
forgiveness. A fundamental teaching of the Church argues that Jesus died on
the cross for our sins that we inherited from the original sinners, Adam and
Eve. Such an argument claims that, not only can sin become part of our
identity, but that we can inherit it. However, a performing or queer subject
does not have a stable identity and therefore may shed the "responsibility"of
having to repent for a sin by switching performances. The Pardoner's shifting
performances and the presentation of sin's instability (through his language
games) radically challenges such Church messages.
The Pardoner's last challenge to normative culture comes with his final
moment of forgetting when he offers his relics to the pilgrims. The
subsequent anger that his performances invokes from the Host may perhaps
be Chaucer's way of acknowledging that Medieval society was not yet ready
to accept the implications of the ludic body of the Pardoner. The Pardoner's
nonnormative expression of time represents one of the many strategies that
he utilizes to disrupt the one-sex gender model by revealing its reliance upon
performance and not nature.
The disruptive presence of the Pardoner is remedied when he is
stunned into silence at the end of his tale, because the Host responds to his
tale by refusing to engage in the Pardoner's playfulness:
"Nay, may!" quod he, "thane have I Cristes
curs!
Lat be," quod he, "it shal nat be, so theech!
Though woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech,
And swere it were a relyk of a seint,
Though it were with thyn fundament depeint!
But, by the croys which that Seint Eleyne fond,
I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond
In stide of relikes or of senturaie.
Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie;
Thy shy1be shryned in an hogges toord!" (VI.946-55).
The Host's comment upon seeing the Pardoner's "wrooth"suggest that, while
refusing to engage in the Pardoner's disruptiveness, his comments were not
delivered in anger (VI.957). The Host is now out of good humor due to the
Pardoner's apparent anger: "I wol no lenger pleye / Wight thee, ne with noon
oother angry man" (my emphasis VI.959-60).
To restore order by resuming the "pleye,"the Knight steps in and
suggests that the two "kisse"to reconcile (VI.964-7). The Knight, as the rolemodel of masculine performance, suggests that the Host and the Pardoner
engage in a traditionally Medieval gesture.19 Burger notes the differences that
a kiss on the mouth, compared to a kiss on the check, might imply. Overall,
Burger argues that the kiss is ironic, as the Host is doing exactly what he has
only moments before refused to do - "kissing an impotent and worthless
relic" (146). The kiss therefore represents a confusing moment. It may be
read as both a publicly acceptable gesture of reconciliation and as a gender
perversion; it may be a success or a failure for the Pardoner. However, as the
Pardoner is silent from that moment forward and therefore does not invoke
any more language games, I am inclined to read this scene as suggesting that
the Pardoner's attempts to disrupt the Medieval one-sex gender model has
experienced, if not total failure, then at least a temporary setback.
It is interesting that it is the Host who puts an end to the Pardoner's
playfulness, if we consider the initial description of the Host in the General
Prologue:
A semely man oure Hooste was withalle
See Burger's discussion of the significance of the kiss in the Medieval period in his section,
"Kissingthe Pardoner"(140-156). He notes that it is difficult to assess whether it would have
been viewed at this point in time as definitively a kiss of goodwill or perversion depending
upon if it occurred on the mouth or the check, as the gesture was undergoing change.
'9
For to been a marchal in an halle.
A large man he was, with eyen stepe A fairer burgeys was ther noon in Chepe Boold of his speche, and wys, and well ytaught,
And of manhod hym lakkede right naught (1.751.56).
The Host possesses bright, piercing eyes, a description that does not hint at
the apparent anger the narrator sees in the Pardoner's "glaryngeeyen" (1.684).
The Pardoner's small voice and hairless face are feminine in comparison to
the Host's masculine large frame and bold voice. Furthermore, the
description of the Host as both wise and well taught suggests that he is
honest. The narrator implies that there was no "fairer"a tradesman. In
contrast, while the Pardoner may be skillful at his profession, he is not an
honest man. The virtue of honesty is equated with masculinity. Essentially,
the Host, although not as highly ranking on the male hierarchy as the Knight,
represents everything that a man should be that the Pardoner is not. It is
unlikely that it is a coincidence that the winner of the Pardoner's language
game is the "masculine"Host. The Host, by winning the language game, puts
an end to the Pardoner's performances and therein places him back within the
parameters of normative temporalities, discourse and gender.
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BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
Taryn Norman was born on October 31~11981 in Wellingborough,
England. She studied for her GCSE and A-Level exams at Weavers Senior
School. She graduated from the University of Hull, England in 2000 with a
Bachelor's degree in American Studies. While studying for her Bachelor's
.
.-
degree, she went on exchange at the University of Maine.
After receiving her Bachelor's degree, Taryn applied to the University
of Maine English program. She is a candidate for the Master of Arts degree in
English from The University of Maine in August, 2006.