The reading of the Canterbury Tales could inspire the investigation of Chaucer’s not-so-hidden agenda of writing about the ideal man of the middle Ages, which, could apply very realistically to the modern person. Thus, we would like to attempt here how Chaucer might have suavely insinuated what that ideal might be, through the criticism of various characters of the Tales as to their being qualified to this exemplum. The Prologue’s parade of physiognomic descriptions would be analyzed as to provide the clues to Chaucer’s idea of the good man, along with their depictions in the Tales and the stories that they recount.
Reading the works of Chaucer, the Canterbury Tales in particular, could not point out to any easily discernible paragon of manhood, to that person who could balance duties to society, family, and to the marriage, or romantic partner. On the contrary, he had paraded characters, going on a pilgrimage, with the aim to pray and gain atonement for sins that, one way or another, have glaring deficiencies or omissions to the integrity of their own manhood, vis-á-vis the ideal male character. These personality flaws were also cross-referenced by the characters that their tales also described, seen in how, the reeve and the miller attacked each other’s professions, as well as the summoner and the friar going head to head. At most, we could only cite one or two characters, who might, approximate the ideal, but in reality, only show a fraction of the aspect of a real person or ideal man.
It had been stated in a review, that “Chaucer provides readers with perspectives on the misguided-ness of characters who attribute events to a single cause (Robertson, 2009).
In fact, Chaucer’s depiction of the ideal manhood could be, ironically, in its utter invisibility from the tales. It’s a quality which is as ephemeral as his appearance as one of the Pilgrims. It could be that this ideal is in constant struggle between personal desires and societal expectations, duties, and pressures, and is the abstraction between fictional description and actual personality qualities. This is the sharper lens through which the qualification of the ideal manhood is to be critiqued from the story. However, due to this type of criticism for that ideal would have to be determined through the observation of its abstraction from various characters, most of which were subject to their own follies and were better remembered for their imperfections, hence, the ideal could only be defined through its absence from the qualities and behaviors of the characters, or the absence of such a personality from the stories. The emphasis of absence as part of a definition of a symbol or quality makes Derrida’s Deconstruction an optimum critical tool here.
Deconstruction is hereby defined as a school of philosophy that originated in France in the late 1960s, has had an enormous impact on Anglo-American criticism. Largely the creation of its chief proponent Jacques Derrida, deconstruction upends the Western metaphysical tradition. It represents a complex response to a variety of theoretical and philosophical movements of the 20th century, most notably Husserlian phenomenology, Saussurean and French structuralism, and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
We could elaborate on this thesis further by turning our attention to the obvious candidates for this elusive manhood or absence of this type of ideal: the Knight, the Parson, the Clerk, the Franklin, and other sundry characters in the Tales.
The Knight epitomizes the noble warrior who fought for the expansion of sovereignty and religious zeal. But he had to kill, hack, and dismember his way to glory. Knights’ Orders back then might have admonished that, “shame on him who thinks ill of this”, i.e., knightly chivalry and quests. Indeed, we have to concede that conquests, battles, wars, and the atrocities and lost lives that came with them have been already part of history and these have might have been necessary in the evolution of the modern human society, looking at it from a macrosocioeconomic perspective. However, the rationalization and glorification of war and conquest, especially if promoted nowadays, does not take away or render invisible the loss of lives, destruction of families, rape of the womenfolk, nor the maiming of limbs and murder. It might be no coincidence that the Knight’s physiognomic description of which, “He wore a fustian tunic stained and dark with smudges,” could be the signification of the horrors of war, of his violent past.
Some scholars seemed to concur with this analysis in stating, “the study of Chaucer in recent years has been impeded by the degradation of the Knight and other knights like him: Arveragus of the Franklin’s Tale and Gawain…the one, so we are to believe, indifference to the well being of his wife, and the other abusive of womanhood, and the two of them alike preoccupied with personal reputation rather than the exercise of virtue” (Morgan, 2009). Furthermore, he added, “It is sometimes difficult for a modern reader to sympathize with the moral idealism of the portrait of the knight…but because of a hatred of war…of religious wars in particular…such hostility to the very notion of a crusade is not a modern phenomenon. Gower’s Confessor is aware of both of the sinfulness of killing heathens and the inefficacy of the attempt to spread Christianity by the Sword (Confessio Amantis, III. 2490-2546) (Ibid.). Hence, the implied heroism of the knight is the present quality that we could immediately see and comprehend, however, the negative, and absent, invisible, and unmentioned aspects of this profession could not be divorced from this character, nor could we deny that this absence from the characterization could also affect his eligibility as a possessor of the ideal manhood.
Moreover, this analysis of manhood being gender-specific, would not be authentic without its correlation with the consequences of a man’s ties with his partner, the woman. Most religious men in the Pilgrimage and in the tales would have been ideal, spiritual men, had they sincerely followed their vows of chastity and not hypocritically lain with wenches and other men’s wives while they penalized and preached against fornication.
With the exemption of the Parson, their dealings with women had actually been more of sexual gratification only, rather than doing it with their legal wives. Their taking, and caring for a wife were precluded by their vow of celibacy. Hence, tales are truly fabliaux in their narration of the cuckoldry of the monk in the Shipman’s Tale, as well as with the Bible Clerks pleasuring themselves with the Miller’s Wife and Daughter in the Reeve’s Tale. Objectification and opportunism at the expense of women is hardly a trait of an ideal man for a woman, much less, for the members of the clergy.
Exposing one’s woman to treacherous and lecherous attentions of other men by going on far away quests had been fodder for infidelity stories no matter how much duty and glory beckoned by conquest. King Alla would have spared Constance all the suffering had he just relegated his political expansionism and military hegemony to his lieutenants and young, unmarried knights. Arveragus became redoubtable as a caring and protective husband for first, having sought glory overseas, exposing Dorigen to Aurelius, and more shockingly, consenting to his wife being sexually obtained by another man, just to adhere to his wife’s whimsical oath. Aurelius may have renounced his right to violate Dorigen’s chastity but this does not remove his earlier guilt of desiring another man’s lawful wife, in one of the glorified instances of Amour Courtois. Although they would appear that they were just fulfilling their duties to the state, it nonetheless diminished their fulfillment of the ideal for their women at that moment, and the consequences of that moment then becomes the factor that would undermine their relationship unless remedied by both.
The Knight’s seeming obliviousness to the mentioning of a wife, and yet, having a passionate, almost, flamboyant squire, creates a motherless, woman-less world of martial, philandering patriarchy.
Virginius had decapitated Virginia on moral and honor code bases, but, as their names suggest, he had decapitated his very self long before Virginia was seen as an object by Claudius, for a sheer lack of talent for strategy and plotting and planning, for someone who was supposed to be knight and the head of an estate. It makes one think that he had left the intellectual aspect of feudal management to his underlings, while he clung to the easy excuse of honor for getting the easy way out of a complex situation. It could also be that his knighthood had suffered a serious decline and deterioration in self-image, for, how else could other men not have taken him as a threat and a force to reckon with and have dared plot treachery on his daughter? It was even more disconcerting that the townspeople threw their support around a father who murdered his own daughter whose only fault was being beautiful, when other resolutions were supposed to be available. The mob should have expelled from their town these plutocrats whose principles were bordering on insanity, like that the husband of Griselda or Constance’s Emperor Father, marrying her off to a totally foreign husband in a distant land for religio-political intentions. However, in imperfect characters and fictional circumstances, one would be hard-pressed to find the ideal, except again, as a thought provocation of what should have been, what traits could have averted such folly.
My concept of an ideal man would be a person who is brave, self-sacrificing, witty, intelligent, and understanding, and strives to achieve and maximizes his talent. He should be a good husband, and makes sure that by the time he settles down, he would protect, take care, and love the woman of his life, not leave her side for too long. He should be considerate to his woman, never to abuse his physical strength, and remains faithful to her whom he had chosen as his ideal woman, in the first place. He must adhere also to the highest moral code, and should think of his wife and family first, society second, unless his woman forfeits his trust and confidence, by commission, or, omission.
I’m assuming that Chaucer, in thinking of the ideal manhood, would not be so different from my formulation, setting aside cultural constraints and societal pressures, all things being equal. This ideal manhood in particular, and ideal personhood, in general, is the highest morality that Chaucer might have been hazarding to imbue in his Canterbury Tales, hence, he was trying to cover as many marital, societal, moral and psychological situations and dilemmas as possible with the compiling and retelling of diverse tales into one volume, and intriguingly, never utilizing shining paragons in the tales although he did have an exemplary person in the Parson, and the erudition of Theseus in the Knight’s Tale, who had pretty much everything in his power.
It is complex to pin down which character possesses the Chaucerian Ideal when he utilized these misguided characters most of the time. It has been propounded in a review of Holly Crocker’s Book, Chaucer’s Vision of Manhood, that “Chaucer offers men and women access to a ‘vision of manhed’, one that fragments a traditional gender binary by blurring its division between agency and passivity (Review, 2012). The operant word here, for the literal textual denotational ideal is “vision”, whose meaning is taken as something akin to the visions of angels or the Virgin Mary than that of ordinary optical capacity. so we must ask whether an ideal man is an active agent of events, or a passive worker of routine.
In fact, those that have entertainingly shown much agency in the Tales were Allison in the Miller’s Tale, the Wife of Bath, May of the Merchant’s Tale, and Constance of the Man of Law’s Tale, to fruitful, if not, bawdy effects.
Chaucer had hinted at the fate of those that had been too ambitious with one’s actualization of agency. The Monk’s Tale had provided the roll call of those who have obtained and held power and had fallen by their hubris, as they had reveled in their capacity as agents of events: kings, princes, warriors, and angels.
That’s why when I mentioned “settling down” as one of the things an ideal man would do later in life, and to try to achieve a balance between further achievement and focusing on one’s woman and family. Obsessing only on higher accomplishments and dreams makes one lose sight of one’s loved ones, and of, oneself. This obsession for an ego motivated perfection makes its agent the ideal person for that perfection, but ends up sacrificing one’s being an ideal man. The Merchant in the Shipman’s Tale would have made the grade, but, his excessive focus on his trade somehow affected his ability to please his wife’s wishes, who in turn, resorted to having liaisons with the Monk, the Prologue’s so-called ‘manly man’, under the Merchant’s very roof, and under his very nose. However, the ending of that tale is open to a probable reform in the thinking of the Merchant, once his worries were settled as far as his business is concerned. Chaucer granted him a virtual victory in that he still kept his wife as his partner in the end.
Returning to our earlier proposal that men are measured by the yardstick of the way they treat their women, the Merchant comes out as the champion of this type of ideal manhood for not punishing and forgiving his wife for her “excesses”, even though there might have been an iota of suspicion on the two paramours, whom the Merchant was aware of transacting and negotiating the money borrowed from him, behind his back. January in the Merchant’s Tale also forgave May even though he had caught her and her lover en flagrante above his very nose, and even swallowing up his very jealous nature. It might only be a striking coincidence that both forgiving and lenient men were retold in the Merchant’s Tale, and by the Shipman in his depiction of the Merchant character in his tale.
It’s like saying almost that Chaucer has a greater vote of confidence in terms of feminist ideal manhood, among the members of the tradesmen’s guilds than among those of the nobility, warrior class, and the clergy. He himself came from a family associated with the wine trade.
One could note how Chaucer described the trade and craftsmen that traveled with the rest of the pilgrims: the Haberdasher, Dyer, Carpenter, Weaver, and Carpetmaker. He narrated how they were dressed in “all livery of one impressive guild fraternity/They were so trim and fresh their gear would pass for new/Their knives were not tricked out with brass/But wrought with the purest silver” (The Prologue).
Chaucer’s knowledge of physiognomy apparently was put to greatest, profoundest, and most witty effect in the challenge to be the ideal man in his Canterbury Tales, with the description of his brethren, the Guild Men, which is, he might have been saying after all, the Few Good Men. It seemed that, putting the characters under the knife of physiognomy, he had pointed out who was a cut above the rest. It was asserted that, “Many of the details of the portraits in the general Prologue reflect the influence of physiognomic works…bodily conditions directly influenced behavior and propensity to sin, complexion determined susceptibility to particular sins: sanguine to lechery, choleric to wrath, melancholy to envy, and the phlegmatic to gluttony and sloth…provided a materialistic explanation to human behavior, including sin” (Elspeth, 2011).
It is obvious in the Prologue that most of the misguided characters, and the tale-tellers of the tales, all wore gold, and greediness for gold (golden florins), was the cause of death of the body, morality, and human sympathy in the Pardoner’s Tale, whereas, the Guild Men wore “the purest silver”, which, in folklore, was the metal that was believed to ward off evil spirits and werewolves.
Thus, seeking first the Kingdom of God through the maximized exercise of trade with, God-given talents, would be the right path to attain the ideal manhood. The tradesmen were mentioned, and conspicuously, had not told any tales, probably because they were focused more on worrying about their wives and children back home, their trades, and the actual spiritual objective of their pilgrimage, rather than become overly involved with a game played by a bunch of hypocrites and high-browed, aristocrats. Ironically, it was with these very wealthy storytellers that Chaucer wove the tapestry of his greatest achievement: the non-moralistic pedagogy of ideal personhood, and the realization of the ideal woman-man relationship as filtered from a half-dozen more misogynistic characters and scenes.
Thus, Chaucer executes the uncanny role as a pragmatic counselor and creative humanist that the clergy of his tales could not with integrity do. Through his adept knowledge of physiognomy, revising the tales of Boccaccio, Dante, and the other Classicals, and then making his thought more accessible to a greater number of Englishmen by becoming “the crucial figure in developing the legitimacy of the vernacular, middle English, at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were French and Latin (Wikipedia, 2012).
Reaching and living the Ideal, whether it is ideal manhood or ideal womanhood, is a work in progress, just as the constant study of Chaucer is a work in progress. His Canterbury Tales were not finished, just as our duty to accomplish and maintain, that “invisible” ideal manhood, and personality, is never finished.
Now, in theory, it might not have been Chaucer’s expressed intention to write stories that would be the guide for readers on how to conduct themselves behaviorally, however, it could not be avoided, especially for a keen observer, that certain deductions could be realized from those scenes and circumstances constructed by the author that have their origins from real situations, or that their structural behavioral causes and effects could also be duplicated in real situations. Hence, vicarious learning could be gleaned from the Tales, as well as the characters would also serve as the template and the “other”, a fictional mirror, to which a reader could view oneself, to contrast and compare oneself, and probably, depending on that one’s desire to better oneself, form a self-criticism based on the concepts fortuitously or evidently presented by the Tales.
The morality that could be formed through reader perception and/or through the presentation of the cause-effect, action-reaction, and behavioral characteristics and behavioral consequences need not be attuned to the mainstream morality or the dominant culture that the reader is enveloped with. The morality of right or wrong could be an altogether subjective exercise based on objective texts. Readers could form their own opinions and behave accordingly, subtly, without overtly going against the status quo. Chaucer himself, for giving voice to feminist characters, or moving his readers to the plight of those women suffering under the tyranny of chauvinists like Griselda or Virginia against Appius and Claudius, had creatively and subtly spoken against the patriarchal milieu of his times. For a good lover of his own object of Courtly Love, the fear of his Ideal Woman being harmed by misogynistic persons got incited by repeated appalling difficult circumstances 13th century women were put into by the culture and thinking of the times.
It might be probable that his authorship of the Legend of Good Women, written around 1394 (eChaucer, 2007), was not necessarily to downgrade the moralmerit of the didactic aspect of the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, but rather, to further bolster the feminist, humanist messages of the tales. On the contrary, both serve in the reader education in the same manner. Even within the Canterbury Tales themselves, the juxtaposition of oppressed women with women who got away with their wiles and wit might for some see women in a bad light, but its further discursive effect would be to show women in a quasi-position of power and on a further equal footing in Medieval gender politics, showing women as agents of their own favorable consequences along with passive men tolerant and oblivious to overly violent reactions to such women initiative while focusing more on their crafts and on the domicile, or the bedroom, as in the case of the Merchant in the Shipman’s Tale.
Such prioritization of the brighter and victim-victorious image of women in an oppressive, Middle Age patriarchal thinking milieu could only be possible with the invisible existence of the fictional ideal manhood, which came from a motley of male prerogatives of non-reaction and passivity shown by January, the Merchant, the Miller in the Reeve’s Tale, Man of Law’s Tale perennially loving King Alla, Theseus, Arveragus, among others, and whose common behavioral denominator is the “live and let live” attitude, slowness to punish and quickness to accord mercy. No sole character among them possessed both agency and passivity, action and toleration, meekness and aggressiveness, mercifulness and fierceness, fighting and building. A fictional character, as part of a moral didactic nature of a text, must exist in a moral space wherein the final behavioral action would determine the fate of another character, or spell the ending of a story. Hence, January had been oppressive with his jealousy in the beginning, but was won over with May’s persuasiveness at the end. Theseus had not fought with Palamon and Arcite, but rather, gave commands and passively let the story end by itself. Troilus was betrayed by Criseyde, but had sought to kill her lover Diomedes rather than be seen to let Criseyde taste his vengeance with his own hands. A character could not be both good and evil within a single literary moral moment of crucial action, at least, in that would determine how a character would appear in the conclusion despite his actions could have double consequences. Hence, the crucial moment of a character behavior could not be both active and passive at the same moment, and this limitation allows the women to subvert the hierarchic structure and seize the moment of being proactive and of fulfilling agency at the moment of masculine passivity.
Presupposing Chaucer was intentional in his creation of a passive-tolerant manhood and an agency-minded womanhood, which only adds to his profundity and greatness as an author, he had to word his morality in such a way that his literary pedagogy would be taken passively by the reader. To directly teach people morality would certainly face misunderstanding and rejection more than a distilled morality comprehended and realized by the reader voluntarily from an artistic work. It helps the reader to recall the virtues, values, and situations more from an entertaining literature rather than getting it from a somber, pedantic book of morality which is full of doctrines, but lack the circumstantial signs that a reader could recognize once a similar situation alights in their experience, and that is fully described and narrated in a literary work. Indirect means of conveying morals and messages are more potent than directly instructing them what to do. Their own interpretations and reforming these story morals, especially in conceptualizing their own ideal manhood or personhood, would be more easily absorbed and practiced when restructured according to their own subjectivity and personal situations.
The qualities of the ideal man, the situations where the ideal manhood could be found, and where it will not be found, would be pieced together by the discerning reader or even suddenly occur to a person who would be unconsciously applying the same concepts that could be emulated in the works.
We become encouraged in looking for further realizations and analyzing deeper Chaucer’s writing as it is asserted in one of the online journals, “Mary Flowers Braswell observes that “Chaucer not only invites but actually insists that his audience becomes pleaders, that they both articulate and argue a response to the facts he has presented” (Lee, 2010).
This thesis would like to provide just the alternative perception and another critical method in extracting valuable insights from the Canterbury Tales that modern readers could appreciate and enrich their own view of Chaucer and his writing. This endeavor is summarized in the following points.
Chaucer was trying to locate various ideals, or that his Tales could direct one to those moral insights, through the narration of character and subplot follies and identifiable and recognizable circumstances the reader could recall and most likely, develop on the avoidance those follies and improvement of personal traits to attain a personal ideal. He did not try to enumerate them directly, but subtly weaved opposites to that ideal that the readers could interpret and extract from his Tales.
One of the ideals he might have trying to lift to the surface of his plots would be the ideal manhood that his characters mostly lack except for particular moments of realizations wherein they tend to reduce the conflicts and consequences of their follies and fated experiences. To say that Chaucer intended for the ideal to be abstracted from most of the Tales is the theory of this paper, and the exercise of attempting to view the Tales as a whole and a pattern for instruction and moral guidance by inferring the ideals absent from all too human and frail characters could be, for the Canterbury Tales, a worthwhile critical and reading exercise.
Chaucer’s greatest achievement is that his Tales give access to modern readers the thinking of his times but at the same time making classical the medieval aspiration for spiritual and worldly perfection amid the tension between religious, social, and personal demands and circumstances. It may sound contradictory that he was teaching morality, especially in painting the absent ideal manhood or its deficiency from his male characters, while depicting the immorality of his characters, is not farfetched when it is almost instinctive for a reader to compare fictional situations to real life ones, all things being equal, and the reader becomes forced to arrive at a judgment of what could be best between those two oppositions. The dialectic between fictional folly and potential personal situations could produce the ideal that a reader is seeking and could adhere to so as to avoid folly and failure, and then to enrich one’s achievements and personal experience.
REFERENCES
Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex and Agency in the Canterbury Tales, and Chaucer’s Agents: Cause and Representation in Chaucerian Narrative (Review). Robertson, Elizabeth, University of Colorado. Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Volume 108, Number 1. January 2009. pp. 123-128. Project Muse Retrieved 3/21/2012.
What’s Wrong with the Pardoner? Complexion Theory, The Phlegmatic Man, and Effeminacy. Elspeth, Whitney. The Chaucer Review Volume 45, Number 4, 2011. Project Muse Retrieved 3/21/2012.
The Worthiness of Chaucer’s Worthy Knight. Morgan, Gerald. The Chaucer Review Volume 44, Number 2, 2009. Project Muse Retrieved 3/21/2012.
Apollo’s Chariot and the Christian Subtext of the Franklin’s Tale. Lee, B.S. University of Cape Town. The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, Volume 36, Number 1, 2010. Project Muse Retrieved 3/21/2012.
Life of Chaucer. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Chaucer. Retrieved 3/19/2012.
Review of Chaucer’s Vision of Manhood by Holly Crocker. us.macmillan/Chaucersvisionsofmanhood/HollyCrocker. Retrieved 3/19/2012.
eChaucer. Chaucer Chronology. University of Maine. http://www.umm.maine.edu/faculty/necastro/chaucer/chronology/. copyright 2007. Retrieved 3/24/2012.
Canterbury Tales. Coghill, Neville. Penguin Classic Edition. Penguin UK: 2003.
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Rome is Calling Me
The tiger was planted among the grass of tawny black, white, and yellow and brown/// with flecks of gold when hit by a sincere afternoon sun***
the old occident crashed on my thoughts///youtube be charged with first degree discourse*** indicted but never convicted acquitted by frowning and solo laughter before face lighting flatscreens///
I am admiring those sexy ironclad, rectangle shielded Romans clashing against///barbarians who never knew what hit them///)))
They fought for a dream, for an ideal, spreading the beauty round///the way ))) they ogle at each other when there was no woman around***how their swords fell and rose those wounds never truly healed for the huns or the buns, woe to the conquered)))
For their love of beauty, ))_))_)) hemmed in by human sacrifi+cesspool and fools///we enjoy their legacy///though some warriors have grown too head bloated to condemn publicly that which is done with consent and in private)))saving private Ryan never was this polemical+++
I know you will only understand literally “Rome is calling me” in these modern times, to uphold civilization and my mental sword, no matter how flaccid and unemployed the other dagger is…/// but this is free writing in a free world brought about by the blood and iron of a legion of red capes and capers, whose woe to the conquered reverberated for good and gored for all times///+++
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