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  • The Clerk's Tale and the Forces of Habit
  • Michael Raby

The Clerk is untimely. He is busy contemplating sophisms when he should be gearing up to tell a merry tale. Or at least that is how Harry Bailey reads him:

"I trowe ye studie aboute som sophyme;But Salomon seith 'every thyng hath tyme.'"

(IV 5-6)1

Now is the time for "pley," not pondering (IV 10). Harry Bailey advises the Clerk to refrain from preaching and to speak plainly, reminding him that he is not sermonizing at Lent or petitioning the king. He worries that the Clerk is dragging old habits of thought and speech into the novel situation of the pilgrimage. One can take the Clerk out of Oxenford, but taking Oxenford out of the Clerk requires some disciplining.

Harry's concern about the persistence of habits is echoed in the tale itself. The Clerk weaves strands of commentary into his translation of Petrarch's story, interjections that vary between outrage, admiration, and rationalization. As A. C. Spearing puts it, the Clerk begins his tale as a literary critic, dismissing Petrarch's "prohemye" as "impertinent," but quickly becomes a moral critic (IV 43, 54).2 He does more than simply evaluate Walter and [End Page 223] Griselda's behavior; he tries to explain it as well. How does Griselda manage to endure such brutality at the hands of her husband? Why does Walter persist in testing his wife beyond measure? Like many readers and critics of the Griselda story, the Clerk tries to dispel some of the scandal embedded in his source material. Amy W. Goodwin has pointed out how both Petrarch and his source, Boccaccio, gloss the action of the Griselda narrative with "ethical frameworks" that are indebted to the literature of the remedial virtues.3 The Clerk's commentary is similarly informed by theories of "moral vertu," which, we learn in the General Prologue, infuse his speech (I 307). In particular, I will argue, the Clerk seizes upon the formative power of habit, a concept latent in Boccaccio's and Petrarch's "ethical frameworks."4 Habit plays an important role in the Griselda narrative because habit endows character with consistency and the consistency of character—both Griselda's and Walter's—is precisely what is at stake throughout the tale. By exploring how Griselda and Walter are influenced by habits, both good and bad, the Clerk illuminates, if not resolves, some of the vexing questions surrounding their behavior.

Many of the critical readings that explore the Clerk's engagement with contemporary philosophical debates focus on issues of agency and volition.5 Such a focus is encouraged in part by the way the tale amplifies the voluntaristic diction present in its sources.6 One persistent strain of interpretation reads the tale as a "voluntaristic allegory," to use Rodney Delasanta's term, in which Walter's "inscrutable will" represents the unlimited potentia absoluta of God, to which Griselda, as the stand-in for the patient human soul, must submit.7 In Linda Georgianna's reading, it is Griselda who possesses the [End Page 224] "mysteriously self-authorized" will.8 According to Georgianna, Griselda's enigmatic capability to assent to Walter's demands represents a disavowal of the prudential "avysement" that characterizes Walter and his subjects. As influential as both of these arguments have been, they overlook the ways in which each character is guided by the force of habit. Neither Walter nor Griselda acts ex nihilo; their mysterious acts of will have antecedents and conditions of possibility, which the Clerk attempts to lay bare. He pays particular attention to how their habits have been shaped by the places that they have inhabited. In pursuing the co-implication of habit and habitat, I build on the work of William F. Woods, who argues that the Canterbury Tales demonstrates "how characters arise through emplacement, how they create themselves by dwelling in place."9 Habits are formed in the intersection of the voluntary and the involuntary, and it is this region in which the Clerk's Tale takes place.

The Ambivalence of Habit

As a reader of Aristotle, the Clerk would be familiar with how important the Aristotelian concept...

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