Chaucer’s Feminine Subjects: Figures of Desire in the Canterbury Tales by John A. Pitcher (review)

Pitcher engages deconstructionist and psychoanalytic theories of the subject to study the presentation of female characters as subjects of desire in four tales and their prologues. Pitcher contends that Chaucer’s use of figurative language and the resulting ‘rhetorical instability’ are ‘the very matrix for his presentation of decentered subjectivity’ (p. 3). In other words, Chaucer’s construction of the self is not the liberal, humanist individual but the decentered, unstable, even contradictory subject of poststructuralism and psychoanalysis.

Chapter One, on identity and desire in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, suggests that Chaucer capitalizes on the ‘indeterminacy of reference’ (p. 36) of several multivalent signifiers (the city of Bath, the incubus and Midas) to ‘demystif[y] the self as a linguistic effect’ (p. 36). Ultimately Pitcher sees Alison’s desire not as a desire for mastery, but a desire ‘to be the other’ (p. 42), thereby explaining her submissiveness in response to Jankyn’s obedience. The chapter ends with a discussion of Jankyn as an exemplary masculine subject whose abuse of the Wife is a symptom of the ‘production of masculine identity in relation to an ideal image’ (p. 57) of a rival lover that is the preferred object of women’s and the Wife’s desire. At times thought-provoking, this chapter could benefit from more careful consideration of the following issues. Pitcher observes that ‘Chaucer has made the witness of the truth of violent antifeminism: a woman accomplished in the art of rhetoric and deception’ (p. 40), but despite his investment in Chaucer’s sexual politics, he does not discuss the important political implications of this observation. Nor does he address the fact that his theorization of masculine subjectivity—identification with an imaginary rival—encodes misogynistic violence as its inevitable by-product. Finally, despite Pitcher’s insistence that Chaucer intentionally demystifies feminine difference (pp. 44–45), in his discussion, masculine subjectivity (as exemplified by Jankyn) appears to be formed through a straightforward identification with an idealized image, whereas feminine subjectivity (exemplified by Alison) is a rhetorical construct that that does not ‘coalesce around a core of identity’ (p. 36).

This unheralded distinction between masculine and feminine subjectivity recurs in the second chapter, in which Pitcher discusses Dorigen in the Franklin’s Tale as a ‘divided subject.’ He argues that Dorigen’s rash promise to Aurelius, clearly intended as a rejection, nonetheless implies her latent, repressed desire for him. Pitcher justifies this reading via reference to Freudian psychoanalysis, namely that ‘an individual’s self-understanding is not likely to be a reliable guide to unconscious motivations’ (p. 69). The problem is that these alleged unconscious desires of Dorigen have no textual expression, so Pitcher has to co-opt evidence of the opposite to support his point. The resulting logic is circular: her identification with the ideal of a faithful wife is exactly what provides the motivation for her repression: ‘any hint of desire for Aurelius would be forced into just the realm of fantasy offered by her promise’ (p. 69). Again, Pitcher portrays feminine desire and subjectivity as contradictory and decentered, whereas masculine subjectivity appears straightforward and unified. The chapter is as much about Arveragus and Aurelius’ desire as Dorigen’s, but these male characters are not psychoanalyzed in such a way as to isolate and alienate them from their reported desires.

The third chapter is dominated by a concern to disentangle the Clerk’s intentions in telling the tale of Walter and Griselda through attention to the Clerk’s ‘rhetorical nuances’ (p. 84), and to psychoanalyze Walter’s desire to test his wife. Griselda’s desire and subjectivity take up only a little more than a third of the chapter. Pitcher finds that the Clerk’s motivation for telling the tale is to problematize unconditional submission and adherence to a vow as ‘self-destructive’ (p. 107). Walter’s...