Medieval Autographies: The "I" of the Text

Chapter 3: Chaucerian Prologues and The Wife of Bath

65 C h a p t e r 3 C H A U C E R I A N P R O L O G U E S A N D T H E W I F E O F B AT H if, after examining two fourteenth-century dits, the anonymous Dit des monstiers and Machaut’s Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse, we now turn back to Chaucer’s prologues, we shall find that many of them, whether in whole or in part, are surprisingly similar in nature. the material of some of the prologues, for example, resembles the Dit des monstiers in consisting of a catalogue or compilation framed in a first-person discourse. an obvious instance is a section of the passage introducing The Man of Law’s Tale that catalogues the ovidian stories that Chaucer has told. it begins with The Book of the Duchess— in youthe he made of Ceys and alcione, and sitthen hath he spoken of everichone thise noble wyves and thise loveris eke. (ii 57–59) —— [in his youth he wrote about Ceyx and alcyone, and since then he has told about every one of these noble wives and these lovers too.] —and is followed by brief mentions of the stories he has not told, “unkynde [unnatural] abhomynacions” (ii 88), touching on incest. (these, as it happened, John gower had told in his Confessio 66 M e d i e v a l a u t o g r a p h i e s Amantis—a sly joke that comes from Chaucer, not from the Man of law.) this parallels the way that the Dit des monstiers mentions the buildings that do not count as churches along with those that do. But isn’t something similar true of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales—a descriptive catalogue of “Wel nyne and twenty” (i 24) pilgrims, which is framed in a first-person account of how an unnamed “i” met them, and is set in an experiential framework associated with a specific time and place? that “i” is not a character as the various third persons described in the General Prologue are.and the “i” is not the origin but the product of a “one man show,” incorporating in the mode of experientiality much material that could not have been part of the experience of an actual observer at that time and place (just as is true of the description of the young lord in Machaut’s Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse). i am thinking of all the insights into the pilgrims’ daily lives, their thoughts, and even their secrets (such as the reeve’s way of keeping on good terms with his lord even while making a profit from him), as opposed to the visible and audible details of what they wore and what they said. nor can the “i” of the General Prologue be thought of as its “speaker.” the prologue begins with a formal and ostentatiously textual springtime exordium, an opening sentence so complex that the main verb does not appear until the twelfth line; after that it often imitates speech, but it does so by conspicuously textual means. it includes, for example, instances of what ann Banfield calls “unspeakable sentences,”1 statements in forms characteristic only of writing. one example is a brief passage in the middle of the portrait of the Friar. his leniency in imposing penance is being explained: For unto a povre ordre for to yive is signe that a man is wel yshryve; For if he yaf, he dorste make avaunt, he wiste that a man was repentaunt. (i 225–28) —— Chaucerian prologues and the Wife of Bath 67 [For to give to a poor religious order is a sign that someone has made a good confession; for, he dared boast, if someone gave, he knew that he was repentant.] Most readers, i think, understand these lines as reflecting the Friar’s own self-satisfied views and probably as echoing his very words. the first of the two couplets, with its main verb in the generalizing present indicative, could well be read as reproducing those views in the form of direct speech; in modern punctuation those two lines could well be put in quotation marks. the second couplet, though, expresses the Friar’s views less directly, through “verbs of inner action”2 in the third person and the past tense—“he...