Aers, David. Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination. London: Routledge.

(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)

Chapter 6 Chaucer: Love, Sex and Marriage (143-173)

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In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer's fascination with the interactions between individual being, predominant social practices and received ideas focussed on those living within the institution of marriage. Here I think we will respond to the poetry more fully if we recall some basic points about marriage in Chaucer's period. Marriage was primarily a transaction organized by males to serve economic and political ends, with the woman treated as a useful, child-bearing appendage to the land or goods being exchanged. As Eileen Power wrote, "'Let me not to the marriage of true fief admit impediments" may be said to have been the dominating motive of the lord with son or daughter or ward to marry. Weddings were often arranged and sometimes solemnized when children were in their cradles. . . . Grown women could also be summarily married off.' Once married, the woman lost any economic rights and possessions she had before marriage, and while there may perhaps be some signs that peasant women could

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On top of the theological failure Noonan describes, we should also remember the very positive contribution orthodox Christian ideas made to the traditional downgrading and oppression of women celebrated by the Knight of the Tower or the Goodman of Paris. The Wife of Bath has an excellent knowledge of the antifeminist tradition sponsored by the medieval church. St Thomas Aquinas was quite orthodox in following St Augustine's assertion that the only point God could have had in making woman was as a procreating instrument, 'since man can be more effectively helped by another man in other works':

So spoke 'auctoritee'. With statements like this, backed up as objective doctrine by the church, went a web of traditional and vulgar forms of male double-think and double standards, from which we are still far from free.6 The orthodox teaching on the sacrament of Christian marriage thus contributed to the disastrous separation of love from sex and marriage, the downgrading of women who did not choose the path of virginity, and the unreflexive male prejudices pervading the culture.

Before moving on to Chaucer's work we should acknowledge the existence of important counter-tendencies to the dominant ideologies and practices we have sketched. 7 Probably the most relevant of these were being developed in courtly literature of the high and later Middle Ages. Scholars such as J. Frappier and M. Lazar have shown how the oppositions between fin' amors and marriage in earlier troubadour poetry were gradually superseded in courtly literature of northern France in the later twelfth century, a process involving transformation of both fin' amors and images of marriage. The history is a complicated one, still being written, but it seems clear enough that Chretien de Troyes was the outstanding artist in this development. The incorporation of passionate, noncoercive mutual and sexually vital love into marriage was a vision which obviously contradicted the power relations of the period and

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the dominant attitudes to marriage and women propagated by laymen and ecclesiastics alike. What Chretien did was to give form and voice to new aspirations very much in conflict with established realities. 8 In doing this he (with those who followed him) was putting art to one of the great roles it has continually played, giving expression to wishes, experiences and beliefs which go against the predominant values and sentiments of the established culture, creating visions of alternative forms of life and relationship. Such art may even lead people to see themselves, their relationships and their culture in new ways.

survival is to make spaces in the culture for her own energies to find expression. She seems to rebel against conventional controls anc.t the attitudes we have outlined, for which she has been severely chastized by sermonizing and would-be 'historical' critics.' 9 Yet while Chaucer presents her rebellion as real, he simultaneously discloses the complexities involved in opposing dominant social and ideological forms. He dramatizes the affirmation of the established culture in her negation of it, creating an aesthetic representation of the way subordinate groups or individuals may so internalize the assumptions and practices of their oppressors that not only their daily strategies of survival but their very acts of rebellion may perpetuate the outlook against which they rebel. Their penetration of dominant ideology and practice is distorted and displaced into a significant conformity with the established values which they are opposing. In grasping and embodying this dialectical process Chaucer was meditating on his own patriarchal culture, its values, its organization of love, sexuality and marriage.

Before the publication of Alfred David's fine study of Chaucer, The Strumpet Muse, one would have had to argue this case about her rebellion and conformity at some length, but his chapter on the Wife makes this unnecessary. He shows how the Wife's attitudes to marriage 'are the sound economic ones of her time', and that having penetrated the connection between male domination and economic power she sets about gaining control of property in approved male fashion. She states that in her culture 'al is for to selle' (l. 418) and so, in Alfred David's words 'regards "love" like any other commodity to be bought and sold in the world's market place'.

..husband, although neither she nor the reader can avoid suspecting that his motives include the mercenary ones around which medieval marriage was constructed. 13

Furthermore, the male reacts to the Wife's love and generosity as a conventional domineering husband, the sort admired by the Knight of the Tower (ll. 632-85). He tries to enforce his rejection

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Bath's Prologue so he did in the Merchant's Tale, creating an imaginative vision which disclosed the structures and human consequences of the medieval institution of marriage and the ideologies which legitimated it, religious and profane.

The 'worthy knight' around whom the tale evolves is an elderly Christian gentleman whom we join as he is deciding to get married. 17 At once Chaucer evokes the economic nexus which both moulded medieval marriage and was supported by it. The old man 'lyved in greet prosperitee' and determined to use his 'tresor' to get a young and fair wife 'on' whom he might enjoyably beget an heir, ensuring his property stayed in his own family (ll. 1245-73, 1437-40). When Januarie proceeds to purchase himself a wife we images the medieval marriage market in action, displaying how old men like the Goodman of Paris could acquire brides. If readers take Januarie's conduct here as a perverse aberration from a decent norm they not only manifest unnecessary ignorance about Chaucer's society but misread the tale in a way which will consistently overlook the powerful critical dimensions of the poet's imagination engaging with his own world. Even Justinus, who has received a good press from scholars, actually shares many commonplace assumptions with the old knight. The counsel he offers is obsessed with material possession and his whole approach to marriage is centred on his acceptance that it is another business transaction. He perceives individuals in terms of land, cattle and goods, viewing personal commitment purely as a transference of property rights (ll. 1523-9). He wants a wife to be a good and safe investment for the man, telling Januarie to set up an inquiry into her wealth, attitude to property and temper. He has nothing to say about love, mutual responsibility or the self-sacrifice St Paul recommended to husbands (ll. 1530-3). The 'Justice' Justinus counsels is no more than the pragmatic wisdom of the market-place allied to warnings about Januarie's sexual decline which seem to echo his own experience (ll. 1555-65).

Chaucer then represents the processes through which the knight decided who to bid for on the marriage market, a process of 'Heigh fantasye and curious bisynesse':

Many fair shap and many a fair visage

Ther passeth thurgh his herte nyght by nyght,

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As whoso tooke a mirour, polis shed bryght,

And sette it in a commune market-place,

Thanne sholde he se ful many a figure pace

By his mirour. . . .

(Merchant, 11. 1580-5)

This reveals the individual's most intimate fantasies and his very forms of perception being shaped by his milieu and the practices and outlook it encourages. The economic sphere and the sexual are brought together in the passage as we see how the market and the attitudes it sponsors can be totally internalized. Women are reduced to desirable commodities which the male can purchase

we should not miss its more than idiosyncratic nature in Chaucer's culture, as the Wife of Bath's text also reminds us.

Once he has decided on the woman he wants the old knight uses well qualified friends who understand the workings of the marriage market:

They wroghten so, by sly and wys tretee,

That she, this mayden, which that Mayus highte,

As hastily as evere that she myghte,

Shal wedded be unto this Januarie.

I trowe it were to longe yow to tarie,

If I yow tolde of every scrit and bond

By which that she was feffed in his lond. (Merchant, ll. 1692-8)

This is explicitly presented as a socially accepted and perfectly normal procedure. The males organize a market transaction in which woman is a commodity and marriage the particular institution which will secure the transaction, stabilize the inheritance of property and, hopefully in the purchaser's eyes, allow the useful enjoyment of his new possession. Even the grammar of the passage mimes the woman's helpless passivity in the face of these customary negotiations - she 'shal wedded be', in the passive tense indeed. Still too many scholars vent moral indignation which only attacks individuals while remaining silent about the powerful social forces which constrained and partially limited the choices, relationships and perception of people in that culture. For instance,

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one scholar recently accused May of 'a willing prostitution'. Few statements about the text could be less justified, as I have noted, but it illustrates a common unwillingness to acknowledge that most (probably all) marriages in the middle and upper social groups were transactions in which human beings, their labour-power and their sexual-power were sold. In such a situation it would make more sense to call medieval parents, guardians and those holding rights over wards coercive but respectable pimps than to call May, and the women she represents 'willing' prostitutes. 18

As if to ensure we do not miss the normality and culturally sanctioned nature of Januarie' s conduct Chaucer moves us straight from the market to the church, from the social realities of marriage

of which is marriage:

But finally ycomen is the day

That to the chirche bothe be they went

For to receyve the hooly sacrement.

Forth comth the preest, with stole aboute his nekke,

And bad hire be lyk Sarra and Rebekke

In wysdom and in trouthe of mariage;

And seyde his orisons, as is usage,

And croucheth hem, and bad God sholde hem blesse,

And made al siker ynogh with hoolynesse.

(Merchant, ll. 1700-8)

This transition is most significant for it embodies the absorption of the church in the economic fabric and prevailing social practices of the world, even w here these were in plain conflict with elements of its public doctrine. My impression is that the major implications of Chaucer's decision to emphasize the church giving its unqualified blessing to this marriage, 'as is usage', have been missed. The poet examines the church's use of its spiritual and material influence over individual Christians. In his text the church is clearly decisive in turning the exploitationary and loveless purchase of a young person into a more than respectable union, a sacramental one. Chaucer completes this picture by telling us that when the appalled bride is brought to bed 'as stille as stoon' (again stressing the situation is imposed on her), it is the priest who blesses theJbed in which this marital union, this sacramental mystery of Christ, and his church, is to be consummated (ll. 1818-19). In the context, the assertion that the priest 'made al siker ynogh with hoolynesse' (ll. 1708) works in two directions. As most commentators state, it ironically exposes Januarie's delusions, his misunderstanding of the Christian dogma that enjoyment of marital sex is sinful, either venial or mortal, thus connecting it with his bizarre claim that a man cannot hurt himself with his own knife (an image discussed towards the end of chapter 4). But the second direction is at least as important, and it works against the priest and the church he represents. Piers Plowman and the Pardoner's Prologue showed sacraments becoming part of a chronically simoniac set of practices in which they were exchanged for money or land, their effects purchased in a market exchange. In this situation people could very

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siker ynogh with hoolynesse', thus having some of their most' vicious propensities legitimated and encouraged by the church. We note the priest offers no challenge to Januarie whatsoever, and makes no effort to ascertain whether May, 'as stille as stoon', genuinely had the inward consent theoretically necessary for a valid sacramental marriage. In this silence Chaucer mirrors the prevailing relationships between leading secular groups and the orthodox church, as well as the latter's inability to transform practices and attitudes in which it was fully immersed. 19 Thinking about the church's role here, we may also see how it recalls what Noonan and Kelly described as its 'failure to incorporate love into the purpose of marital intercourse', the absence of 'mutual love between the spouses' in theologians' and canonists' lists of the chief ends of marital union. 20 The fragmentation of love, marriage and sexuality in dominant and traditional ideology had its counterpart in the relationships experienced by individuals, as Chaucer's poetry continues to reveal.

For Januarie, the wife he has acquired only exists to serve his ego, a totally obedient servant, housekeeper and nurse with the added ability to provide sexual gratification and heirs. His outlook is an ordinary male one, but Chaucer now looks closely at some of the forms of relationship which emerge from it and the institution of marriage, using his art to make us engage with the human consequences of the established realities. Januarie approaches sexual intercourse as a vehicle in which the male ego can confirm its own power in a self-gratifying consumption of the 'yong flessh', 'the tendre veel' recently acquired. Like the orthodox Parson,

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Januarie perceives male sexuality as a 'knyf', an area of being quite separate from love and affection. 21 The poetry which makes lanuarie physically present is justly famous and has often been discussed (11.1821-50). Kisses, which should be expressions of love and friendship become acts of male violence over the subordinate female and we are made to envisage the specific effects of his 'thikke brustles . . . Lyke to the skyn of houndfyssh, sharp as brere' on her 'tendre face'. By choosing the verb 'rubbeth' to depict lanuarie's kissings Chaucer suggests a deliberate intention to hurt May with this painful sandpapering, an impression which links his action. both to his feelings at the feast, when 'he gan hire to manace' (1. 1752), and to the ensuing intercourse which he sees in an offence (11. 1828-30, 1840). The last thing that lanuarie considers, any more than the Knight of the Tower, is the woman's separate existence as a human being with her own wishes and thoughts. Such was the sacramental union imposed on May, a woman deprived of any possibilities of self-determination before marriage in a culture where there were few forces to encourage male self-criticism and affectionate awareness of the woman's feelings. Chaucer's art was actually one of the forces that did so, and he draws attention to this aspect in passing:

But God woot what that May thoughte in hir herte,

Whan she hym saugh up sittynge in his sherte,

In his nyght-cappe, and with his nekke lene;

She preyseth nat his pleyyng worth a bene. (Merchant, 11.1851-4)

As readers have often observed, the horror of the performance to which May is subjected is conveyed through the poet's particularization of the knight's physical age as he croaks out his aubade, the slack skin shaking about his lean neck. But as important is the utterly complacent and unselfconscious attitude of the old knight, a complacency that is dependent on the support received from the major cultural institutions which licensed and blessed this union. Chaucer (for it is he, not the egotistic, self-deceiving and thoroughly foolish merchant 'narrator' (11. 1213-39», breaks off the description of the male to remind his readers of the feminine consciousness so habitually excluded from attention in the dominant traditions controlled, as the Wife of Bath objected, by men. What the woman 'thoughte in hir herte' was hardly a habitual male concern. 2 2 Having made this consideration prominent, he acknowledges the inevitable limitations of the comic modes in which he was working - 'God woot' what May thought, and the reader has been invited to empathize, but Chaucer himself passes on. He is not writing in a form which allows the detailed psychological exploration we followed in Troilus and Criseyde, and his interest in May is, of course, quite unlike his interest in Criseyde. Nevertheless, he leaves readers with no cause to make easy moralistic judgments about May which abstract her from the system which directly engenders the situation she must suffer. 23

When May seeks to alleviate her unhappy existence it is in an alternative relationship which will not overtly challenge the accepted power relations between husband and wife. The affair between her and Damyan can only be reasonably discussed when it is taken where Chaucer placed it, within the context of the marriage and the treatment May has received. The relationship is a product of the legitimate marriage. We may laugh at May's 'pitee' for the randy squire (11. 1986-2000), but we read poorly if we stop at mockery and moralism. For however perverted by the culture in which she has been sold to Januarie, her aspirations include an aspect whose significance should not be ignored. It. is made clear that she aspires to a relationship with a man of her own choice, one which transcends the economic and religious nexus in which she has been sold and violated:

whom that this thyng displese, I rekke noght,

for heere I hym assure

To love hym best of any creature,

Though he namoore hadde than his sherte.

(Merchant, 11. 1983-5)

Of course, Chaucer shows us that May's partial resistance to her culture's values is deeply compromised by the situation in which she has learnt to exist. So her version of 'love', while it transcends the market, not surprisingly lacks any very articulate demand for close mutual affection and commitment. As for Damyan's

while in Christian marriage the carnal union was his own enclosed garden. 24

said to involve a mysterious sacrament representing the union of Christ and his church (Eph. 5:23). The Old Testament text was thus potentially one which might possibly be used to bring together a language of carnal love and the religious dimensions attributed to Christian marital union, potentially able to overcome what Noonan documented so clearly as 'the failure to incorporate love into the purposes of marital intercourse'. In doing so it could possibly meet aspirations, evident in the later medieval world, to unite a love which involves the complete, incarnate human being with the institution of marriage. 26

But these aspirations, still utopian in Chaucer's society, are disastrously negated by being used in the contexts of the Christian marriage around which the present tale develops. Here we should again be careful not to let our disgust at the old knight blind us to the representative aspects of what has happened. It is the current institution of marriage, blessed by the church, which has turned the woman from a 'lady free' into an object for egotistic male use, excluded the expression of love and mutual happiness from sexual union, downgraded sexual intercourse from being an act of love to something obscene and dirty, something only tolerable as a

'Rys up, my wyf, my love, my lady free!

The turtles voys is herd, my dowve sweete;

The wynter is goon with alle his reynes weete.

Com forth now, with thyn eyen columbyn!

How fairer been thy brestes than is wyn!

The gardyn is enclosed al aboute;

Com forth, my white spouse! out of doute

Thou hast me wounded in myn herte, O wyf!

No spot of thee ne knew I al my lyf.

Com forth, and lat us taken oure disport;

I chees thee for my wyf and my confort.

Swiche olde lewed wordes used he.

(Merchant, 11. 2138-49)

The contemptuous dismissal of Januarie's poem to 'my love, my lady free' as 'olde lewed wordes' is fully justified, for the same words in different contexts can take on very different meanings. Here the words of the Canticle do become 'lewed', as their appropriation by Januarie for his own marriage enacts a destruc

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them highly problematic topics in a thoroughly critical and creative  utopian perspective and the present was thus central to the poem's meaning. It is in this'process that we should see the teller of the tale.

He does not express Chaucer's 'final' views nor is he merely exposed by Parson-Chaucer to a damning orthodox and satiric homily. 29 The Franklin both gives voice at various points to important hopes the poet shares, and yet also serves as another means for the poet to examine significant problems in their present articulation.

The poem opens with a courtship which displays some striking features. There is absolutely no mention of land and money transactions so basic to medieval marriage, and although the woman has kindred who are socially much superior to the man, a fact which exerts some psychological pressure on him, she herself is apparently not subjected to normal controls imposed by male guardians concerned with land, money and family alliances. 30 Nor is there any sign that the knight has a thought for such normal concerns (ll. 729-42). In elaborating an image of a freely-chosen marriage between people rather than between fiefs, or between purchaser and commodity, the poet has bracketed the socioeconomic nexus whose crucial effect on marriage he had examined. He also bracketed the institutionalized Christianity of his culture, the most authoritative sanctification of traditional male egotism in the domination of women, a most influential ideological force in downgrading sexuality and in resisting any incorporation of mutual...

In the Franklin's Tale Chaucer continued these explorations and now concentrated on the utopian perspective so essential to his own art. There has been much lively commentary on the tale, but most of it may be placed into two basic groups. One, stimulated by G. L. Kittredge's influential article on 'Chaucer's discussion of marriage' sees the Franklin joining mutual love and marriage in an unorthodox view which Chaucer unequivocally approved: 'the marriage of Arveragus and Dorigen was a brilliant success. Thus the whole [marriage] debate has been brought to a satisfactory conclusion.' The second, represented by D. W. Robertson, sees the poem as an elegant but conventional homiletic text defending the traditional 'hierarchy of marriage' (the one illustrated by the Knight of the Tower and the Goodman of Paris), satirizing the wish 'to maintain the delights of the God of Love in marriage' , satirizing Arveragus, Dorigen, Aurelius, the magician and the Franklin who admires all these foolish and sinful characters. 28 The reading of the poem I wish to propose draws on both these conflicting schools.

I think Chaucer puts forward certain of his own aspirations for a marital institution in which the couple engage in non-coercive personal relations founded in a mutual love incorporating sexuality. In his historical context this comprises a utopian

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freendes everych oother moot obeye. . . .

Thus hath she take hir servant and hir lord,

Servant in love, and lord in mariage.

Thanne was he bothe in lordshipe and servage.

Servage? nay, but in lordshipe above,

Sith he hath bothe his lady and his love;

His lady, certes, and his wyf also,

The which that lawe of love acordeth to. (Franklin, ll. 762, 792-8)

love and its sexual expression into the prime purposes of marriage. 31 Bracketing specifically economic, patriarchal and Christian determinations over the institution of marriage made it possible to elaborate aspirations to mutual, non-coercive and loving relations while focussing on the difficulties concerning power, mutuality and an appropriate language of love which could persist even if the most obvious adversaries of the utopian imagination had been removed.

The husband expresses the aspiration to supersede the coercive and domineering norms sanctioned by the religious and profane circumstances Chaucer had already presented. He voluntarily renounces the traditional powers of coercion and bullying,

Bath's Prologue, when the Wife reported how she took 'al the bridel in myn hond', inverting traditional roles of husband and wife and keeping the structure of domination the traditional image mirrors so well.

Dorigen has the chance of a marriage in which both members regard each other as full human beings, yet she accepts it in an image which declares the thorough internalization of traditional marital outlooks and ideology. Her reply shows how females' selfimages, their perception of their own identity, are profoundly

Ye shul youre trouthe holden, by my fay!

For God so wi sly have mercy upon me,

I hadde wellevere ystiked for to be

For verray love which that I to yow have,

But if ye sholde youre trouthe kepe and save.

Trouthe is the hyeste thyng that man may kepe

But with that word he brast anon to wepe,

And seyde, 'I yow forbede, up peyne of deeth,

generous attempt to create a higher form of marital union has collapsed under pressures from without which revealed how the individuals concerned had internalized traditional assumptions more deeply than they, or the Franklin, had acknowledged. 'Furthermore, the collapse is not' just a decisive negation of the utopian aspirations. In fact, it comprises a subtle affirmation of them, for it is in the light of utopian perspectives evoked by

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That never, whil thee lastesth lyf ne breeth,

To no wight telle thou of this aventure,

As I may best, I wol my wo endure

Ne make no contenance of hevynesse,

That folk of yow may demen harm or gesse. (Franklin, 11. 1474-86)

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either male is offered by the Franklin, emphasizing his distortions of the poetry to fit the comforting ending he wishes to impose. He concludes with a question which fits the imposed ending but remains a bizarre and superficial evasion of the poem's preoccupation and significance: 'Which was the mooste fre, as thynketh yow?' (1. 1622). After the behaviour of Arveragus in the crisis, the paralysed dependence of Dorigen, the dramatization of problems intrinsic to utopian thought (itself an integral element in Chaucer's critical imagination), including the exhibition of difficulties in finding an appropriate language, the Franklin's final question is a misleading and comic trivialization which abandons the poem. It is this cosy and evasive imposition which justifies the...

Yet handing the poem's conclusion to the Franklin was more than a clever way for the poet to avoid tragedy while keeping his own thumb out of the balance and his aesthetic conscience clear. It is an integral part of the poem's movement sketched at the opening of my own analysis. Chaucer has used this pilgrim, with his blend of insight, enthusiasm, confusion and superficiality, to suggest the temptation of the utopian imagination to substitute what Alfred David calls 'wish fulfilment' for the creative encounter of utopia and established reality. His own profoundly reflexive art thus characteristically builds into its organization a perspective from which certain of its own basic tendencies can be viewed with a critical detachment which does not entail their rejection. We come to see that the narrator's error is not his enthusiasm for the utopian perspective on marriage, nor his generous faith that people may experience conversions which break the bonds of selfhood, allowing them to perceive and appreciate other people in their own being. Rather his mistake is in his refusal to concentrate on the power of dominant tradition and attitudes to resist and pervert utopian alternatives, his refusal to accept the poem's disclosure of this power and its human consequences. In away, the failure involves a lack of faith; faith pays scrupulous attention to the present, the weight of the past on the minds of the living who wish to change it, and yet can construct a vision on glimpses and presemblances of a more fulfilling human future which is perceived as latent but emerging as possibility. The utopian perspective and the role of fantasy and dream is an essential component of much great art for it allows the writer to posit and explore alternative values to those prescribed in the dominant codes. It allows him to generate images for aspirations he knows are part of his world, but as yet lack material realization or ideological elaboration. The poet can free these aspirations, repressed in conventional and orthodox discourse, to challenge the established realities, to question and criticize dominant values and prevalent relationships. It is this interaction between the present and utopian' perspective that the poem embodies and if, as Donald Howard claims, the Franklin's Tale 'is not the final word on marriage', 40 this is ultimately because the form of poetry Chaucer created here is dialectical and ... responding to a historical movement in which more and more ...until it ceased to be a 'utopian' project.

I shall complete this chapter with some comments on the Clerk's Tale. A great many scholars read it as a poem in which Chaucer teaches what they assume to be unquestioned medieval doctrine about the individual's duty to absolute and unquestioning obedience to superiors, whatever they command or do; they seem to view the poet as an authoritarian writer propagating the absolutism allegedly conventional in his day, another Knight of the Tower. 41 On both scores I believe such scholars are mistaken, and there has certainly been dissent from their approach. The line of dissent I wish to single out as most in accord with my own understanding of the Clerk's Tale is lucidly expressed by Donald Reiman. He focusses on the way Chaucer's text carefully brings out Walter's 'recalcitrant self-will' and its 'unambiguous censure' of his decision to afflict Griselda. In the light of this he argues that Griselda's patience becomes 'as much a source of evil as was Walter's arbitrary wilfulness', for her decision to be 'an accomplice to the murder of her own children without so much as a frown of protest' shows a disastrous failure to distinguish between her husband, explicitly presented as a selfishly cruel, mortal man, and God, the sovereign to whom both she and Walter owe allegiance and whom they both ignore. 42

The Clerk's Tale, as Reiman's study suggests, exhibits the kind of critical thought and reflexivity about authority which I have traced in this and the preceding two chapters. It involves an exploration of irresponsible absolutism which brings together psychological and political dimensions. In the domestic sphere marriage is founded on a determination to ensure...

...ther he claimed about the loss of liberty in marriage (l. 14) should be able to continue a life in which 'on his lust ...al his thoght' (l. 80). With this end, he tells the young ... 'be ye redy with good herte/To al my lust' (see ll. 35 assumes the woman only has identity as an instrument) an assumption he shares with men like the Knight of ...

...and Chaucer's own Januarie. Chaucer reminds us of representative nature by stating that although his tyranny mfe is evil there are undoubtedly men who will admire it (ll. 622-3) - such men, it should be clear by now, are far...

...feel guilty enough to make some attempt at checking reillous desir, but fails and renounces any effort at all

To emphasize this the poet adds an image to his sources...

...to people who become fixated on one course of it as they were bounden to a stake' (ll. 701-7).

The all-powerful husband and ruler whose free will is unchecked is thus pas a powerless prisoner. Chaucer presents him as an

authoritarian personality who fulfils his egotistic lust for dominion under the tyranny of his own sick will. Interestingly this combination was analysed by St Augustine himself with considerable acumen. With the reflexivity so abundant in the Confessions, he writes of himself: 'From a perverted act of will, desire had grown, and when desire is given satisfaction, habit is formed; and when habit passe; unresisted, a compulsive urge sets in: by these knit links I was held.

One of the most prevalent and vicious imprisonments the will suffered, in his opinion, was the 'lust of rule' , in which the ruler was 'ruled by the love of ruling', a lust which 'lays waste men's hearts with the most ruthless dominion'.46 These are appropriate psychological and moral

The way Chaucer illustrates the mentality which absolute rule thrives on and produces can be exemplified by his treatment of the sergeant. The poet stresses that this man's unquestioned obedience, his 'feithful' service to his ruler makes him peculiarly prone to do evil 'thynges bade'. Chaucer changes and considerably expands his sources to bring this out in his description of the obnoxious nature of the loyal and obedient man, and he has the sergeant himself remind Griselda that women moote nede until hire [lordes] lust obeye' (ll. 519-32). 47 The poet's critique of 'swich folk' as the sergeant implies a far more individualistic ethical outlook than any attributed to him by scholars who try to assimilate his art to some untroubled medieval totalitarianism in which hierarchy, authority and social obligation were fixed, unproblematic and never subject for critical reflection. The individual, we are shown, needs to assess the moral and religious ... of the superior's commands for himself rather than just obeying because the command comes from someone of higher position in the social and political hierarchy. The consequences of this view are subversive of any hierarchy where social place and inherited allegiance, rather than articulate moral reasons and the assent of independent individual conscience, are the justification and explanation of authority and obedience. 48

The political dimensions of the Clerk's Tale are lost on those who assume late medieval political thought provided a carte blanche for absolutism and therefore assume that Chaucer's text must simply fit this universal situation in his day. Such assumptions are mistaken and recent work on fourteenth-century political

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theory, and practice, makes this very plain. 4 9 For an intellectual writing in the reign of Richard II the distinction between legitimate rule and arbitrary absolutism was very much a live issue, of especial interest to a poet who attended as a member of parliament when the magnates threatened to depose the King, and who later accepted Henry IV, a magnate who overthrew a ruler judged to be tyrannous and wilful. 50

And in this connection it is worth recalling that in his own work, as Margaret Schlauch documented many years ago, Chaucer constantly depicted tyranny as arbitrary acts of will. She also noted that accusations of arbitrary will were a major theme in the 1399 Articles of Deposition, while the new king, whom Chaucer…pledged himself to pursue the 'commune profyt' and to preserve the laws above his self-will. In this, significantly enough, he was promising to rule as Griselda did in Walter's absence, not like Walter. 51

I believe that major historical studies of recent years have reconstructed the political and intellectual contexts in which we can situate Chaucer's own critical examination of Walter's arbitrary will and absolutism, for they document the emergence of fully articulate theories of limited monarchy in the later Middle Ages in which the ruler was viewed as the servant of a community where individuals rather than corporate wholes were to be the prime beneficiaries of government. They trace the desacralization of secular power together with the supersession of the hierocratic thesis of sovereignty in which all secular authority, law and government derived its legitimation from God through the ruler rather than through the community. 5 2 Here it may not be far-fetched to wonder whether the long-lived metaphor in which the marriage of man and woman is used to examine political questions concerning sovereignty and responsibility could have been an element in Chaucer's treatment of the ruler and his wife in the Clerk's Tale. It is particularly interesting that according to M. Wilks's investigations this metaphor had acquired an anti-absolutist meaning by Chaucer's day in which the ruler's authority ceases at the point it becomes harmful to the community of individuals symbolized by his wife. 5 3 And certainly the traffic between the two areas of discourse being metaphorically related was two-way, so that domestic relations could be seen in terms of political ones. In this perspective a husband's tyranny would be judged in very different terms than those of the Knight of the Tower. It is in these ways that the metaphor may have contributed to the resonance of Chaucer's treatment of Walter and Griselda. It may have been a minor, but significant element in the poem's fusion of the domestic, psychological and political spheres I have outlined, pointing towards the intellectual and political contexts which would have encouraged Chaucer's own critical imagination in its magnificent explorations of love, sex and marriage.