The Pestilential Gaze: From Epidemiology to Erotomania in The Knight’s Tale

On his deathbed in Pars Quarta of The Knight’s Tale, Arcite bemoans the paradox that to be “with his love” for a fleeting moment is also to step into “his colde grave / Allone” for eternity (I.2778–79)—pushed there, he declares, by his “hertes lady, endere of my lyf!” (I.2776).¹ Unlike Boccaccio’s Arcita, who in the parallel scene addresses his final wishes to Teseo, Palemone, and Emilia at length, Chaucer’s Arcite speaks only to Emelye—even his reconciliation with Palamon is figured through his words to her—and his dying sentiments evoke a problematic instability in Emelye’s narrative position. Whereas his Boccaccian counterpart despairs that “dolce Emilia, cuor del corpo mio” (sweet Emilia, heart of my being) must now be “abandonata” by him, insisting that death pains him only on account of her grief (“per te sola m’è noia il mio morire” [10.104.3, 4, 7]),² Arcite comes suggestively close to equating Emelye’s hardness itself with his death blow, holding her all but responsible for his demise. Arcite regards himself as the sole victim of misfortune, Emelye as its instigator. Acknowledging the unalloyed power that she still exerts (so he believes) over his well-being, Arcite incongruously pleads “Mercy” of Emelye with his last breath (I.2808) in a significant departure from Arcita’s courteous farewell (“A Dio, Emilia!” [10.113.7]), which in the Teseida’s different post-tournament series of events is delivered to Emilia as his lawfully wedded wife. The pervasive morbidity and subtle reprimand in Arcite’s final speech to Emelye darkly fulfill the “series of hints, premonitions and prefigurations” of his doom throughout the tale,³ while leaving ambiguous the causal balance between the symmetrical laments “Allas, the deeth! Allas, myn Emelye!” (I.2773).

This essay explores the aggressively metonymic relationship hinted at here between “deeth” and Emelye—especially noteworthy given Emelye’s apparent lack of agency and her own status as a subject of others’ designs—as it emerges from Arcite’s troubled perspective as a pathological lover. Chaucer not only darkens the thematic and metaphysical hues of the Teseida,⁴ he endows the narrative with a new unity based in the pathologization of love in the realm of human action. At the same time, he consistently defines this field of action, as it relates to both love and death, in terms of vision. Indeed, Chaucer amplifies Boccaccio’s conventional account of amorous glances stolen and exchanged into a drama enacted almost exclusively on the level of visual encounter, one in which looks have the power to sever or unite, preserve or extinguish, occlude or enlighten.⁵ The power dynamics and epistemological commitments underlying acts of vision constitute one of Chaucer’s main poetic concerns in his critical adaptation of the Teseida, forcefully reflecting the broader investment in visual discipline that occupied the later Middle Ages.⁶

In light of this, my first concern is to establish the tale as a sustained drama of lookyng, mapping those moments in which the power of the gaze and bodily malady intersect. Next, I turn to Emelye as the epicenter of this drama, suggesting that Chaucer’s thinly characterized heroine becomes troublingly associated with suffering and death in response to a narrative motion initiated in the Teseida. Boccaccio establishes Emilia as a rounded character who regards herself as an agent of destruction but whose assessment is undermined by narrative fact and authorial irony. Chaucer strategically shifts these mitigating elements in a way that fulfills the heroine’s self-incriminations while removing their logical motivation; he replaces them in turn with a metaphysical vision of human imbalance that manifests itself as pathology. Emelye’s status as an Amazonian princess naturalized into structures of Athenian order further contributes to the topoi of feminine destruction and visual power with which she is differently aligned in the Italian and English texts. Far from eliding Emelye’s Amazonian heritage—as comparison with the Teseida’s fuller account of this subject may at first suggest—The Knight’s Tale displaces and...