Apostrophe, Prayer, and the Structure of Satire in The Man of Law’s Tale

Apostrophe, Prayer, and the Structure of Satire in The Man ofLaw's Tale Ann W Astell Purdue University TEMAN OF LAw's TNE h.s figmcd prnmincntly in the ongoing debate about the teller-tale relationship in The Canterbury Tates. 1 Is The Man ofLaw's Tate primarily a satire exposing the hypocrisy of its pilgrim narrator?2 Or is it a pious legend about its saintly heroine, more properly called "The Tale of Custance"? The historical division of critics into two camps suggests that auditors are hearing two different voices in the tale, the narratorial "I" isolated as direct discourse and the oppositional "I" of Custance herself as a speaking subject. 1 Pointing to the tenuous relationship between the Head/ink, the "poverty prologue," and the pious legend in rhyme-royal stanzas, Bernard F. Huppe and others have insisted that "the Tale must speak for itself without regard to its particular dramatic setting or its narrator." See Huppe, A Reading ofthe Canterbury Tales (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1964), p. 96. See also John Tatlock, "The Man of Law's Tale," in The Development and Chronology a/Chaucer's Works (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1963), pp. 172-88. Arguing on different grounds, David Lawton, in Chaucer's Narrators (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), has insisted that "lines using a narratorial 'I' in the body of any of the tales cannot be used to demonstrate a point about the ostensible teller" (p. 104). Observing that narrator's voice in all of Chaucer's "high-style" stories (including The Man ofLaw's Tale) is virtually the same (pp. 76-105),Lawton restricts the applicability of speech-act theory to the prologues of tales, excluding the tales themselves (cf. p. 4). C. David Benson makes an argument similar to Lawton's in "Their Telling Difference: Chaucer the Pilgrim and His Two Contrasting Tales," ChauR 18 (1983): 61-76. H. MarshallLeicester,Jr., in "The Art oflmpersonation: A General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales," PMLA 95 (1980): 213-24, was among the first to discredit the dramatic model by shifting emphasis away from the voices of pilgrims ro the voicing of the tales themselves. 2 For excellent treatments of the appropriateness of the tale's assignment to the Man of Law as a satiric object, see Warren Ginsberg, The Cast of Character: The Representation of Personality in Ancient and Medieval Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), pp. 144-51; Roger Ellis, Patterns a/Religious Narrative in the Canterbury Tales (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1986), pp. 119-68; Alfred David, "The Man ofLaw versus Chaucer: A Case in Poetics," PMLA 82 (1967): 217-25; Chauncey Wood, "Chaucer's Man of Law as Interpreter," Traditio 23 (1967): 149-90. 81 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Chaucer's additions to his source, Nicholas Trevet's Anglo-Norman Chronique, chiefly consist of (1) apostrophe, exclamatio, and rhetorical questions interjected by thenarrator, and (2) prayers uttered by Custance.3 I argue that Chaucer's additions effectively convert a saint's legend into a satire through the systematic opposition of two rhetorical figures-apos­ trophe (assigned to the narrator) and prayer (assigned to Custance)-that punctuate the unfolding plot line and provide a divergent commentary on the events being related.4 Not only does Chaucer oppose the viewpoints of the tale's heroine and her pilgrim narrator in a conflictus of providential and fatalistic orderings ofexperience, but he assigns to each a characteristic figura that has its proper sign value, its power to define not only the individualpersonae as such, but also the differences between them. Cus­ tance's prayers do more than characterize her as a saint. As direct discourse they give Custance a voice and personal genre, allowing her to speak for herselfand thusprovidea counterinterpretation ofeventsotherwiserelated to the audience only by the shortsighted narrator. The tale itself is episodic, its story line punctuated by five sea voyages, its chronology spanning all of Custance's adult life, the setting for its action changing from Rome to Syria to England and back again. The natural division of the tale into discrete episodes lends itself to narrative intrusion and provides ample opportunity for the teller...