Desire in the "Canterbury Tales" by Elizabeth Scala (review)

Part of what I have always loved about teaching the Canterbury Tales is the slightly shocked sense that undergraduates get, in reading the more honestly sexual bits, that they are spying on the antics of the generation of their great-great-great-grandparents. This is, of course, their misreading of the text; even at his most apparently realist, Chaucer does not necessarily depict “real,” historical people, and, often, the moments in his writings that seem at first glance to be the most about them are the ones that turn out to be more concerned with questions of power, money, and status. Then again, how is this different from the workings of desire as they are treated in literature in any century subsequent to Chaucer’s?

Elizabeth Scala’s Desire in the “Canterbury Tales” is a book that is not primarily about sexuality. As suggested by its title, Scala’s study of Chaucer is very much a book about “desire,” here understood through the lens of psychoanalysis as a state of being experienced by characters and actual people. The kind of “desire” that Scala is thinking about is often the desire for a socially recognized and recognizable self, the place where Hegelian thought and psychoanalytic theory meet. For this reason, she focuses on the rivalries among the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales’ frame. For Scala, the form of the Canterbury Tales ensures that desire will be a central thematic problem of the work. As she reminds her readers, the storytelling competition is what sets up the component narrative of the Canterbury Tales as a contest among social classes, sexes, and human types. This conceit highlights human diversity and demands that the text’s interstitial moments, when one tale ends and another begins, become spaces for working out the social tensions and encounters that the tales and their tellers set in motion.

In her substantive “Introduction,” Scala seems to relish the challenging journey that she is embarking upon, taking on the iconic eighteen-line first sentence of the Canterbury Tales for a bravura five-page rereading—a task last attempted by Carolyn Dinshaw back in 1999, to spectacular effect. While I am not entirely persuaded by Scala’s take on The General Prologue’s first lines—namely, that they invite the reader into a “scene of misreading” (9)—I am left full of admiration for the incisiveness with which she analyzes this famous passage, and for the sheer ambition of her book. With its focus on Chaucer’s framing narrative, Desire in the “Canterbury Tales” continually negotiates between those critics who treat the pilgrim narrators as psychologically real and the sources of ultimate authority over the Tales’ narratives, and those critics who treat the pilgrims as largely beside the point (I exaggerate for effect; Scala is far more careful in how she characterizes these positions). The focus on the pilgrimage frame also justifies many key choices that Scala makes in this book, most significantly the decision to deal extensively with only a few representative tales and only a few of the pilgrim tellers, rather than adopting an omnibus approach. The selectiveness of Scala’s approach is, overall, a strength of this book, although I can imagine that some will complain about the interesting tales and pilgrims who go unmentioned. In anticipation of such objections, however: the tales that Scala does discuss in depth are ones that have long been central to our understanding of Chaucer’s project.

Each of the chapters in Desire in the “Canterbury Tales” deserves its own particular attention; each is substantive and solid. Scala begins, in the first chapter, with a discussion of The Knight’s Tale, concentrating on the relationship between the desiring worlds of the doubled cousin-knights, Palamon and Arcite, and on how the text itself focuses attention on the endless circulation of the signifier rather than privileging some final, definitive access to the signified. The second chapter grapples with the Reeve as misreader, examining how...