The Canterbury Tales: Week 6

"Women, Do Not Suffer Any Man to Do You Offense" -- Geoffrey Chaucer

[Illustration from Mary Eliza Haweis' Chaucer for Children (1882); public domain]

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil¹

On the surface, The Clerk’s Tale is disturbing, vexing, and cruel. (And maybe it is these things beneath the surface, too!)

But there is an awful lot going on this tale and having re-read it for the first time in a long time to write this post, I have to say that I’m really rather taken with it! There were aspects of it I hadn’t remembered, and those are some of the things that stuck out most to me. I will get to those in a bit. First, some background.

The story of “The Patient Griselda” is, as the Clerk mentions in his prologue to the tale, based on one found in Petrarch (1304-74), the Italian Renaissance poet famous for the sonnet form that now bears his name. Petrarch, in turn, based his version of the story on one found in the Decameron by Boccaccio (1313-75). The figure of Griselda likely existed in folklore before even these, and retellings of her story have continued all the way to the present day. Variations on the patient Griselda are seen in other tales, too, like Cinderella (who, like Griselda, is put through a kind of “test,” although not one nearly so trying!) and George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (adapted into the film My Fair Lady), in which a wealthy man transforms an impoverished woman (another plot element shared with Cinderella). Griselda’s existence as a mythical figure helps us, I think, to better approach the tale less as a realistic story and more as, well, myth. More on that below.

By the way, is it wrong that I love the fact that the illustration above comes from a children’s edition of Chaucer? I think it’s hilarious. Reminds me of this meme someone sent me the other day:

[Dwight Schrute would be proud]

We must also address the relationship between The Clerk’s Tale and the rest of The Canterbury Tales. One point I don’t think I brought up before is that part of the unfinished nature of the work is the lack of any final, definitive order of the tales we do have. The work exists in ten fragments and can be found in different order in various modern editions. The biggest clues to the order can be found in the interactions between pilgrims in the tales, but even those are largely incomplete. So if you are reading a version with the tales in a different order than another edition, don’t be surprised.

At any rate, it is clear that The Wife of Bath’s Tale and The Clerk’s Tale are in conversation with one another, just as their two tellers display their own rivalry. The “bad guy” in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, Jankyn, is also an Oxford clerk, and the Wife insults all such clerks for their lack of skill in the art of love (lines 707-10). The Clerk’s Tale takes on The Wife of Bath’s Tale directly by portraying a woman who does the opposite (to say the least!) of taking sovereignty over her husband.

Yet, to develop a little further my observation above, I think there is more going on in The Clerk’s Tale than merely a jab at uppity women. In fact, consistent, I think, with their respective characters, the Wife of Bath tells a story that has very personal stakes for her. The Clerk, on the other hand, tells a story that seems for him to be “merely academic,” even as it offers a counterpoint to the Wife’s tale.

Having previously read The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, we hopefully pick up more easily in The Clerk’s Tale the recurring themes of sovereignty (obviously), nobility (and what it truly consists of), virtue (especially in this story, the virtue of patience) and the relationship of all of these (or lack thereof) to social class.

But before digging more deeply into the content of the tale, let me point out an essential quality of its form. The Clerk’s Tale is written in a style of poetry called rime royale (or rhyme royal, in Modern English). Rime royale consists of 7-line stanzas with a rhyme scheme of ababbcc. Chaucer is believed to have introduced rime royale into English, using it in several of his works. Shakespeare used it in The Rape of Lucrece. The form of rime royale is especially suited to longer narrative poems: the longer and uneven number of lines in a stanza tend to draw the story out and the reader in, and the variation of the previous rhyme scheme at the end of the stanza prevents the sound from becoming too predictable and sing-songy. All of these qualities make rime royale particularly suited to serious, grave stories—like The Clerk’s Tale.

This is indeed a grave story. But it’s a roller coaster of a story, too. Our hearts and hopes soar when Walter picks out a daughter of the poorest of the poor (lines 204-05) for his wife, against all expectations, even telling his people beforehand that they are to respect and revere the woman he chooses all her life (lines 162-68). (He seems so genuine!) Then our hearts and hopes are dashed by Walter’s wanton and repeated cruelty in his unwarranted and inhumane “tests” of Griselda’s patience and faithfulness. He even, like a true narcissistic abuser, explains his actions based on lies he makes up about what “the people” are saying—a classic example of blame-shifting. (The scheme about the fake papal bull is just a brilliant bit by Chaucer though). Walter’s cruelty is so depraved, that the “happy ending” of the tale doesn’t seem happy at all.

But what if we read the story more, as I suggested above, as myth than as a “real” story? If Griselda is a longstanding figure in folklore who symbolizes virtuous patience (and she is) then what does patience look like in this story?

Perhaps we can answer this question better if we think of Walter less a tyrannical human ruler and more like the tyrant of fate—or merely life with all its vicissitudes—which throws things at us without rhyme or reason, leaving us to determine only how we will bear the suffering that inevitably comes our way. Will we bear that suffering well or ill?²

Griselda bears it well, of course. But I think the true test of her character comes when Walter brings her before the woman he says will be his new wife (but is really the daughter that has been stolen away all these years). In this moment, Griselda speaks truth to power in beseeching Walter not to treat this woman as cruelly as he has treated her. Griselda bore her own suffering—but she would do all within her power to prevent another from enduring the same.

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t see that coming. If Griselda had been merely the “doormat” of a wife the story set her up to appear to be at first, she would not have exhibited this strength of character.  Moreover, the Clerk himself, in narrating the story, points us to Job (lines 932-38), suggesting that the tale is less about “the battle of the sexes” (which is at the center of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale), and more about something more human, something that transcends class and gender divides.

Griselda is a type of Job.

And Job is a type of all our undeserved, inexplicable, and unnecessary human suffering.

When we were introduced to the Clerk in the General Prologue, we learned that he is a good scholar, one who prefers books to food, and gladly learns and gladly teaches.

True to character, in telling this grave tale, he offers his own philosophical commentary on it. At the end of the tale, the Clerk says that the moral of the story is not that all wives should follow Griselda’s example, for such would be unbearable. Rather, the Clerk says, everyone (not just wives or women), in whatever station of life or degree, should be as constant in adversity as Griselda was. The example of a woman patient before a mortal man, the Clerk says, is an admonition to us all to receive in humility what God brings us because his governance is only for our good. Let us then live in virtuous patience (lines 1142-62).

But lest we doubt the Clerk’s gloss on his tale, Chaucer himself enters the room in the form of the lenvoy (or postscript).

Chaucer declares quite clearly that prudent wives ought not to let humility nail their tongues nor to give cause to some clerk to write such a story of us as that of Griselda (lines 1183-87). He says in lines 1195-97 (my translation):

                             You, strong women, stand at defense,

                             Since you are as strong as is a great camel;

                             Do not suffer any man to do you offense.³

Amen and amen.

*****

Next readings in this series:

·        The Pardoner’s Prologue

·        The Pardoner’s Tale

I may add one or two more from The Canterbury Tales before we move on to Shakespeare. Stay tuned (and let me know yay or nay!)

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1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. By Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.

2. It’s helpful to remember that the word “patient” comes from a root word that means “suffering.” A patient is literally one who is suffering. I devote an entire chapter to the virtue of patience (which is the habit of bearing suffering well) in my book, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books. There I examine patience as exemplified by the character of Ann Elliot in Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

3. It might be helpful to note that the women in Chaucer’s life—including his wife, his mother, and many of the women he would have encountered in business and market—were independent and well-connected. (Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life [Oxford University Press, 2019], 212-13.) Chaucer was no oppressor of women as far as the (considerable) record shows. Relatedly, Chaucer was for a time accused of being embroiled in court in an accusation of rape because of a court document discovered in the nineteenth century. This document troubled scholars for over a century, but in 2022, a new document was discovered which (long story short) indicates that the accusation of rape was based on a misinterpretation of a legal term. See more here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/books/geoffrey-chaucer-rape-charge.html#:~:text=A%20court%20document%20discovered%20in,translated%20as%20rape%20or%20abduction. This confusion over the legal language reminds me of the humiliation of author Naomi Wolf a few years ago when she tried to claim that the long-accepted history of executions for sodomy in Victorian England was wrong based on her “discovery” in court documents—which turned out to be her misunderstanding of a legal term. Whew. Words (and their definitions) matter!