Desire in the Canterbury Tales: Sovereignty and Mastery Between the Wife and Clerk

From the beginning of The General Prologue, Chaucer makes it clear that desire is, everywhere in the Canterbury Tales, his most central and abiding concern. Where individual tales speak to the particular desires of their tellers, the poem’s memorable opening sentence frames the entire fiction as a function of desire in its deferred predicate: “[folk] longen.”¹ This syntactic delay also incites the audience’s desire across its first eleven lines as it explains the effects of a changing landscape and newly awakened natural world. In setting the season for an Eastertide ride to Canterbury, Chaucer situates the pilgrimage as an effect of collective human desire as he simultaneously conceals why each figure is on the pilgrimage behind a variety of implied but unstated motives.² And desire gets things going in more ways than one. Beyond accounting for a way of understanding what lies “behind” each narrator’s speech, desire inhabits the very language of the tales in larger and more abstract terms. The conscious means by which speakers pursue various desires and goals within their stories is underwritten by the structure of unconscious desire assumed with language when the subject enters the complex and socially structured world of symbolization. Most fully elaborated as the emergence of the subject in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, desire accounts for what fundamentally eludes and constitutes the subject as such. The subject comes into being as a separate entity by losing the (imagined) unity with the original object of desire, the body of the mother. This loss, for what one never actually possessed, forever haunts the subject and stalks its fantasies of satisfaction.

Marked by an irrecuperable loss, the subject desires infinite substitutions for this originary object.³ It is as axiomatic for Plato as for Lacan that desire is lack, for, as Socrates asks Aristomachus in the Symposium, how can one desire that which one possesses?⁴ Language inserts the subject into the world of symbolization by speaking desire, an acknowledgment and recognition of lack in terms that mystify what is lacking—the subject’s relation to the Real (the realm of what lies beyond signification).⁵ Through displacement and metonymy, the path desire traces is by its nature indirect, as it substitutes linguistic signifiers for the “thing” that has been lost. As Judith Butler explains, “In this way the aims of desire are not transparently represented in the objects . . . it seeks; indeed, its aims are cloaked or displaced in such a way that what one desires is radically other. . . . The subject may well be the last to know, if he or she ever does, what it is that he or she desires.”⁶ While explaining the advent of desire in the subject through the substitutive logic of language, this Lacanian model posits a fundamental disconnection between language (even the explicit articulation of wanting) and the objects and others that supposedly lie “beyond” it. While one’s desire is spoken in language, desire names a relation to lack (rather than a particular object). In Lacan’s by-now-familiar formula,” “Desire is the desire of the Other,” which means both that the subject wishes to be the object of another’s desire and wishes to be recognized by another.⁷ Thus, beyond its complex articulation of the way desire grounds the subject itself, Lacan’s formulations also insist upon the social nature of desire, its origin in our real and imagined relation to others.

Two pilgrims overtly engaged in a debate over the correct (feminine) form of desire are Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Clerk. The Wife makes feminine desire her explicit subject by subjecting a recreant knight to the task of finding “what thyng it is that wommen moost desire” (III.1007). The Clerk more cannily deflects the Wife’s question in his exemplification of patient Griselda, the wife who can subordinate herself completely to the desire of another. These ideal images in the Wife’s and Clerk’s Tales, the magical old woman and the humble, desire-less wife, figure ideal self-images projected by...