The “Elvyssh” Power of Constance: Christian Feminism in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Man of Law’s Tale

The ‘‘Elvyssh’’ Power of Constance: Christian Feminism in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Man of Law’s Tale Elizabeth Robertson University of Colorado Recent criticism has shown that Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are a particularly rich index of medieval culture’s interest in various forms of difference. Major recent books on Chaucer have explored the importance of class—or, to use a term more suited to the Middle Ages, social status—to an understanding of Chaucer’s work.1 Another major group of critics has investigated Chaucer’s complex engagement with issues of gender and sexuality.2 Most recently, critics have called attention to racial difference in two of his Tales—The Squire’s Tale (a romance of flying horses, magic rings, and speaking birds) for its ‘‘orientalism,’’ and The Man of Law’s Tale for its portrayal of the Islamic other as stereotypically monstrous, violent, and unnatural.3 Critics have recognized not only the importance of race, class, and gender as critical categories that map difference but also the complexity of ideas produced when these categories interact with one another.4 Current interest in 1 Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1989), and Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). 2 Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), and Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 3 The Squire’s Tale has been the subject of a number of talks on the category of ‘‘race’’ in Chaucer at the Medieval Institute Meetings of the past few years; The Man of Law’s Tale was first commented upon in terms of issues of ‘‘race’’ by Glory Dharmaraj in ‘‘Multicultural Subjectivity in Reading Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale,’ ’’ in Medieval Feminist Newsletter 16 (1993): 4–8, and more recently and comprehensively by Susan Schibanoff in ‘‘Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Antifeminism and Heresy in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,’’ Exemplaria 8.1 (1996): 59–96. 4 The call to bring together race, class, and gender was first sounded by African American feminists in such essays as Hazel Carby’s ‘‘White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,’’ which appeared first in The Empire Strikes Back: 143 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER that trinity—race, class, and gender—however, has tended to mask what this paper argues is a deeper source of radical otherness, at least to Chaucer, and perhaps more generally in the period: religion. Religion’s strangeness in Chaucer’s work emerges powerfully, I argue in this essay, in his often neglected Man of Law’s Tale. As one begins the tale, it appears to be first about Islam and then about suffering women, but closer inspection, especially of the tale’s imagery, demonstrates that Islam is not the primary other of this tale but rather a code for an equally strong challenge to convention—apostolic Christianity as it is embedded in the feminine. By interweaving and complicating the categories of race, class, and gender (as they are understood in late medieval England), Chaucer posits a religious ideal in this tale that itself occupies the position of difference: in part, by drawing on the history of the conversion of Britain as well as Christianity’s early history—apostolic Christianity as revealed in the Gospels—Chaucer presents a form of nonviolent Christianity that is less coercive, less hierarchical, and more communal than, and implicitly challenging and potentially dangerous to, the institutionalized form of Roman Christianity operating in the fourteenth-century English Church. Religion, of course, has not been neglected in Chaucer criticism. However, because exegetical criticism so dominated early Chaucer criticism , critics have found it difficult to consider Chaucer’s religion in any Race and Racism in 70s Britain (Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1982), pp. 212–35, and then again in her Cultures on Babylon: Black Britain and African America (New York: Verso, 1999), pp. 67–92. For an interesting recent collection of essays that brings psychoanalysis, race, gender, and history together, see Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, Helene Moglen, eds., Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis , Feminism (Berkeley: University...