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Criseyde’s Prudence
- Studies in the Age of Chaucer
- The New Chaucer Society
- Volume 25, 2003
- pp. 199-224
- 10.1353/sac.2003.0024
- Article
- Additional Information
Criseyde’s Prudence Monica E. McAlpine University of Massachusett Boston Concluding his discussion of the accomplishments of Prudence in Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee, and citing those of other women counselors in the Canterbury Tales, David Wallace remarks: ‘‘The price of such success for women is that their complex and dangerous work of household rhetoric, vital to the health of the body politic, will not be acknowledged as political work; assumed to occur in private, it can expect no public acknowledgment.’’ Similarly, speaking about actual prudent women like Joan of Kent, Carolyn Collette has proposed that such women may remain largely invisible either because they do not ‘‘perform deeds that translate into records we are used to looking for,’’ or because ‘‘we have not looked closely enough into the available records, have not yet asked the right questions.’’ Wallace attempts to rescue one fictional female figure from this kind of neglect by arguing that the Wife of Bath performs valuable political work by means similar to Prudence ’s, although critical presuppositions have blocked from view this dimension of the Wife’s character. I shall argue that Criseyde is one of Chaucer’s neglected prudent women, one who enacts a highly significant and especially complex anticipation of the ‘‘wifely eloquence’’ Wallace identifies as ‘‘the most distinctive feature of Chaucerian polity’’ in the Canterbury Tales.1 Initially, it seemed to me that of the two—the Wife and Criseyde— the case for Criseyde’s prudence would be the easier to make, but further 1 David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 246, 225, and 82, respectively ; Carolyn P. Collette, ‘‘Joan of Kent and Noble Women’s Roles in Chaucer’s World,’’ ChauR 33 (1999): 358. In Chaucer in Context: Society, allegory and gender (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 151–63, S. H. Rigby argues that ‘‘woman as help-meet,’’ as ‘‘respected inferior,’’ was the dominant image of woman in Chaucer’s era, not those more extreme images that placed her in the pit or on the pedestal. 199 ................. 10286$ $CH6 11-01-10 13:53:49 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER reflection on Criseyde’s critical history has fully persuaded me of the difficulty of my undertaking. Since prudence was understood, in the medieval period, to be a moral as well as an intellectual virtue, readers who see Criseyde as the embodiment of carnality, as well as all those for whom her ultimate infidelity to Troilus must be the defining fact of her career, are unlikely to be willing to associate her with the chief of the cardinal virtues. A special difficulty, however, arises from the association of prudence with considered action. As Aquinas insists, ‘‘the value of prudence consists not in merely thinking about a matter, but also in applying itself to do something.’’2 In arguing for the prudence of the Wife of Bath, Wallace has at least the advantage that the Wife has long and often enthusiastically been associated with agency. Criseyde, on the other hand, is ever more insistently, and usually pejoratively, identified with passivity. ‘‘Drift,’’ the tendency to be guided by circumstances and by others’ choices, was very early attributed to Criseyde by R. K. Root; it was elevated by Charles Muscatine into the instability and ambiguity that characterizes the entire sublunar world, of which Criseyde became virtually a symbol. More recently, Gretchen Mieszkowski has seen Criseyde as the medieval equivalent of Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘‘Other’’ objectified by men, an ‘‘extreme instance of the passive woman.’’ Derek Pearsall’s more subtle reading of Criseyde as an individual consciousness attributes to Criseyde only the will to appear—even to herself—to have no choices, as she protects her self-image from the consequences of decisions she seems not to make. Emphasizing the external constraints Pearsall downplays, Carolyn Dinshaw’s powerful reading of Criseyde as a woman traded between men grants Criseyde insight into her situation but no effective way to influence it. Earlier, David Aers’s groundbreaking portrayal of the poem’s patriarchal society denied Criseyde even this, seeing her as a woman whose choices were dictated by internalized male values. Thus...