Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and the Question of Ethical Monstrosity

From the standpoint of exemplary morality, Chaucer's Clerk's Tale can easily offend ordinary prudence,¹ where prudence is understood in the medieval sense as a matter of discovering practical precepts for action. The tale is emphatically a problem exemplum in which the most pressing practical question—for medievals and medievalists—is what to do with Griselda's voluntary submission. What is it good to do with her example? Does Griselda epitomize wifely perfection in acting as she does, does she represent a spiritual ideal to which readers should aspire without acting as she does, or is she morally repugnant for doing what she does? At what level of generality or specificity, ultimately, are readers to take the example? The question could be put in terms of whether to take the letter or the spirit of the tale, but in any event it is difficult to tell whether Chaucer hasn't finally impeached the Clerk's morality, whatever register it occupies, making a caricature of the rhetoric of exemplarity. Perhaps the example is not to be taken at all.

Such are the sorts of questions that constellate around the tale as if subject to simultaneous attraction and repulsion. The Clerk, though, would attempt to provide a center of gravity by referring his audience to a general morality:

This storie is seyd nat for that wyves sholdeFolwen Grisilde as in humylitee,For it were inportable, though they wolde,But for that every wight, in his degree,Sholde be constant in adversiteeAs was Grisilde; therfore Petrark writethThis storie, which with heigh stile he enditeth.

For sith a womman was so pacientUnto a mortal man, wel moore us oghteReceyven al in gree that God us sent.

(IV.1142-51)

The Clerk speaks as if he could stabilize the narrative by transcending its worrisome literality, refocusing it by way of the spiritual exhortation that follows: "Lat us thanne lyve in vertuous suffraunce" (IV.1162). But does the Clerk thereby solve the moral problem by legislating a correct meaning? Doubts settle in immediately. For one thing, why should the Clerk have to correct his text or readers at this point if the tale were obviously pertinent to "every wight"? Moreover, how invested he is in the literal rather than the spiritual plane is put in question soon afterward, in the envoy, when he makes an ironic nod in the direction of the Wife of Bath and her "secte." The implications of the envoy are not so different from those that emerge every time the Clerk insists on the perfection of Griselda as a wife, a donnée he never questions. She is, we might suppose, not just any representative Christian soul after all.

Academic discussion of the moral meaning of the tale has not settled the issue either, though critics often focus skeptically on elements such as the envoy to show that the tale is monstrous rather than moral—a telling dichotomy I want to explore. The larger critical history of the tale is instructive: the tale is an offensive monstrosity to some, an alluring and subtle fable to others, and to still others an artistic failure or deliberate caricature; the Clerk's Tale remains a moral challenge. The tale poses as a problem of prudence precisely because of its multiplicity of meanings. Judith Bronfman concludes her book-length survey of its history of reception by reflecting, "What does the story mean? There is no correct answer. And in this, I think, lies its fascination."²

And yet if there is no correct answer, it should be said straightaway that this is because (as Bronfman's study demonstrates) there are several salient answers rather than one or none. The narrative is fascinating because it is polyvalent in its moral exemplarity, not pointless; because it runs a surplus of meaning rather than a deficit. Polyvalence is not the same thing as a kind of foggy indeterminacy. The tale in fact comes to us complete with alternative affective tonalities and more or less explicit valuations built in, the Clerk's running...