Father Chaucer: Generating Authority in "The Canterbury Tales by Samantha Katz Seal (review)

In terms of both poetic authority and bodily generation, Samantha Katz Seal notes, Chaucer was fortunate, surviving the plague to sire at least two sons and serving later poets as the idealized progenitor of their literary tradition. Seal takes aim at any optimistic view of either paternal or poetic authority, however, arguing that in the Canterbury Tales Chaucer challenges masculine claims to certainty and continuity in either realm. His competing desire for and critique of authority, she argues, derive from an awareness of human fallenness: God is the only true origin, and human reproduction "results in loss, and in degradation" (5). Women serve as the force of chaos that prevents any perfect lineal transfer, whether in their roles as personified destroyers of reputation and status (Fame, Fortune) or as inadequate channels for, if not outright enemies to, paternal bequests of virtue, likeness, or wealth to male inheritors.

If this sounds like a somewhat gloomy lens through which to read the Tales, Seal assures us that despite Chaucer's clear-eyed sense of the inevitable losses and imperfections of generation, he nevertheless understands it as an essential human activity. Memory and authority may be fragile and limited, but they are not therefore to be abandoned entirely, and the pilgrims, the frame, and the tales themselves show us Chaucer's sense of the appeal and the uncertainty of both paternity and poetry.

Arguing, somewhat surprisingly, that The House of Fame's mysterious "man of greet auctoritee" redeems the poem's account of the randomness and brevity of fame by reminding Chaucer "of the authority incumbent within masculinity itself: the weight of patrilineality, the stability of kinship, the unending reproduction of blood" (17), Seal depicts the Canterbury Tales, by contrast, as the creation of a Chaucer who has lost his belief in masculine reproduction in the course of Richard II's difficult reign, and no longer trusts his own ability to, in effect, outrun history. She considers political, economic, and legal aspects of paternity and inheritance that contributed to this mistrust. Most centrally and consistently, however, she presents the Tales as shaped by a scientific model of sexual reproduction that casts women as passive or, worse, deforming vessels of male seed.

In each of three sections, focusing respectively on certainty, creation, and likeness, Seal devotes two chapters to the connections between paternity's intellectual and reproductive forms. Thus, the desire for certainty about one's wife and offspring is both the hallmark and the downfall of masculine authority; men must learn to accept their own and their wives' human limitations, taking these on faith. The de-divinized Phebus of The Manciple's Tale negotiates conflicting claims about his wife's fidelity, while the erasure of the son of Apollo who appears in Chaucer's sources does away with a figure of unquestioned paternity. In The Clerk's Tale, Walter, similarly assured of his children's paternity, becomes an exemplar of a more generalized drive for knowledge that, as readers of the tale know well, is consistently critiqued. Despite Griselda's indubitable fidelity, Seal argues, her womb is nevertheless a locus of "sorrow and disappointment" for Walter and his people when she initially bears a daughter (46). Reading the daughter as a kind of "deception" requires some resistance to the text's own proclamation of gladness at Griselda's fertility, but sets the stage for Seal's intriguing solution to the question of how Walter is finally resigned to his own limitations: he comes to see that he would know his new "spouse" no better than his original one.

If even so idealized a wife as Griselda can ultimately offer only disappointment and deception, it is not surprising that the Wife of Bath appears as a figure of destruction in her Prologue: "annihilation is ever her only goal" (59) as she seeks to display the futility of belief in "an earth held stable through the steady patterns...