Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale as Political Paradox

Chaucer's Clerks Tale as Political Paradox Michaela Paasche Grodin University ofOregon CHAUCER'S C/c,k, Tale is usually the subject of ethical, psycho­ logical, and religious exegetics. Walter's treatment of Griselda-the most interesting and problematic aspect of the poem-is debated in terms of its rightness or wrongness, its illumination of human motives, and its relation to Christian doctrine. 1 Apparent success or failure in these interpretative enterprises is customarily proportional to the critic's ability to "resolve" Walter's disturbingly severe treatment of his wife into coherence with some theoretical matrix. But such approaches mistake their own goal because they generically disregard a key element in the poem. The thrust of The Clerks Tale is not to resolve but rather to reveal a paradox, and this paradox emerges not from ethics, psychology, or religion but rather from the heart of the political theory of the Middle Ages. This is not to say that The Clerk's Tale is only about politics, that it does not concern ethics, religion, and a number of other accessible levels of discourse. I mean rather that the poem, especially when considered in the context of its fourteenth-century Italian analogue and Petrarch's "transla­ tion" of Boccaccio's Decameron 10.10, may be read as a political paradox and that it is from politics that it draws its mystery and its dynamism. The centrality of politics in The Clerk's Tale is suggested by Charles Muscatine, 1 For a recent overview ofscholarship on The Clerk's Tale, see Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Miffiin, 1987), pp. 880-81. The most comprehensive attempts to account for how the story changed as it passed from Boccaccio to Petrarchand Chaucerinclude]. BurkeSevers, TheLiteraryRelationshipsofChaucer's "C!erkes Tale" (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942); Alfred L. Kellogg, "The Evolution of the Clerk's Tale: A Study in Connotation," in Chaucer, Langland, Arthur: Essays in Middle EnglishLiterature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1972), pp. 276-329; Anne Middleton, "The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts," SAC 2 (1980):121-50; Robin Kirkpatrick, "The Griselda Story in Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer," in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 231-47; and Charlotte C. Morse, "The Exemplary Griselda," SAC 7 (1985):51-86; none of these, however, addresses the degree to which the story gains political dimension. 63 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER who, without denying the validity of the other levels, sees politics as a concern which symbolically unifies the others. Muscatine sees the interac­ tion of such political values as sovereignty, virtue, and subordination operating on the main intellectual stratum of the poem, linking religious meaning on the one hand with ethical and psychological meaning on the other: In medieval thought, the secular grades of sovereignty, paternal, political, marital, are figures for each other and copies of the divine fatherhood, lordship, spousal. One is made to feel this in the poem. The marital level is the obvious one on which the theme of sovereignty is worked out .... The theme is briefly taken up on the filial level, in Griselda's relationship to her father. But it is on the political level that much of the poem's materials operate, and beyond this on the religious level, from which the others depend.2 Muscatine goes on to elaborate political elements of Chaucer's treatment in some detail. Not just those elements he mentions but others as well deserve some introduction before we proceed. The Clerk's Tale opens with the description of established, hereditary rulership in which there is both economic and social well-being. Walter is introduced only after the por­ trayal of an ideally ordered state which stresses obedience, diligence, and reverence (lines 57ff.).3 The ordered life ofJanicula and Griselda reflects the larger order of the land in which they live (lines 197ff.). Marriage negotiations with Griselda (lines 323ff.) are cast in legal language which echoes the language and the political concepts found in the earliernegotia­ tionsbetweenWalter and his people regarding the choosing ofa wife (lines 143ff.). Once married, Griselda is briefly praised for...