Performing the Prioress: "conscience" and responsibility in studies of Chaucer's Prioress's Tale.

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)

The Prioress's Tale poses a very confusing and uncomfortable set of problems for critics and for readers. The tale depicts Christian violence against the Jews in fictive, literary images that are tied to an actual history of oppression that is well documented and not in doubt. This history of religious violence has thus been the focus of much study of the tale, for critics have tried for years to determine the exact relationship between the tale and the history of Christian-Jewish relations that presage the Holocaust. Central to this issue is the question of agency. Someone, that is, must be to blame for the hatred depicted in the tale--Chaucer, the Prioress, the Christian culture that produced them both--diverse critics say diverse things as they attempt to determine the causes of that violence and to unravel the complex web of religious and racial ideology woven (so uncomfortably) into Chaucer's art. (1) There is no more politically charged issue in Chaucer studies.

This essay examines the critical language recent scholars use to study the tale and explores the professional and institutional implications of a politically driven medieval literary criticism. To meet the complex challenge of the Prioress's Tale, some recent scholars approach it through a type of criticism that displays a commitment to "ethics" that seems to take part in a larger critical quest for what Louise Fradenburg has called "reparation," a complicated term that implies that the critic in some way must address literature's and also criticism's ideological participation in the injustices of the past. (2) Reading and teaching the Prioress's Tale, therefore, have become not only literary exercises--comparing analogues, studying character, tracing patterns of imagery, and so forth--but also a moral exercise in how we negotiate the past, heal its wounds, and prepare our own culture's future. Recent interest in otherness, subalternaity, and minority culture help animate such an approach to the tale, for it is clear that a politically conscious criticism currently dominates our field. (3) Assessing this aspect of contemporary medievalism, David Lawton, in his introduction to New Medieval Literatures, praises a criticism that links past and present and displays an awareness of ethics:

The scholars I know who do such work and whose work I read are

united in a belief that it is ethical, and may, if we are effective in

communicating its results, be political, as a positive response to cultural

difference in a world where the fear of it licenses repression and

violence. (Lawton 261)

Lawton here argues that the end of medieval cultural studies is political in that, if it is well done, it responds to the contemporary social problems of difference and violence.

We see what Lawton means in the work of a number of scholars addressing issues of gender, race, and the medieval past. Concerning medieval and modern sexualities, for example, Karma Lochrie implies that our critical studies can reveal patterns of power and knowledge that still inform contemporary society: "the medieval closet--what it kept secret and structured its regimes of knowledge and ignorance around--has much in common with contemporary secrecies." "The uses of secrecy," thus "help us to understand our own personal and public constraints" (11), and "from the secrets and conversions of the Middle Ages, the present is challenged to address and possibly even to reframe its own understanding of its mysteries and its marvels, its power technologies and its oppressions" (4). Similarly, Kathleen Biddick hopes to "refigure politically the borders of the discipline," making it "not [one] based on expulsion and abjection and bound in rigid alterity, but one permeable to the risk of futurity" (16). She does this through a history of the politics of nineteenth-century medievalism, a politics she sees fraught with various forms of "trauma," "melancholy," and "mourning," revealed in a study of "those excluded on the exterior of medieval studies in the 19th century" (3), a history at times wrapped up in the hegemonies of colonialism and class. (4) To enable futurity, the medievalist must discern and mourn the persistent presence of the historical traumas of alienation and oppression, especially when these traumas have in some way enabled the very history of academic medievalism.

For others, ethical concerns spark not mourning but anger against those who do not see the historical dangers of critical complacency. Peter Haidu questions critics who are not sufficiently sensitive to the ideologies of violence and the "religious absolutism" behind the Chanson de Roland and who take refuge, rather, in "cultural relativism":

There is something profoundly repugnant not only about the cultural

and political ethos displayed by the text ... but also about the acceptance

of an ethos which was historically so grossly destructive. Such

an embrace by our contemporaries who are in principle capable of

conceptually distancing themselves from the position of the text they

are studying is not without serious ramifications in the twentieth-century

world.... Unfortunately, the same kind of simple "ethical"

binarism that we find in the Chanson de Roland continues to operate

in contemporary scholarship and in modern political discourse. That

dyadism was a necessary prerequisite for the programmed extermination

of the Jews in the Holocaust, and it was equally present

in the discourse that cast the Soviet Union into the role of the "evil

empire." (37)

As Monika Otter notices, Haidu "barely stops short of accusing all those who practice [historical relativism] of personal responsibility for the Holocaust" (Otter, 114). For all these critics, then, discovery of the Middle Ages has repercussions for contemporary society because an understanding of the past will allow us, as Eric Eliason and I once wrote, perhaps finally to "initiate our own critical reformations" (Calabrese and Eliason, 275). (5)

The cultural politicization of medieval studies is clear from these examples and from the status of such titles as The Other Middle Ages, The Postcolonial Middle Ages, and Sex, Dissidents, and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages. (6) That is, our collective project is not only to reveal the meaning and complex beauty of our literature but also to study the systems of power, difference, and violence that animate the world that produced and consumed texts throughout history, a world full of the neglected and the marginalized. Contemporary medieval studies, to use Michael Goodich's description of his own work, seek "to provide a voice to those persons or groups in medieval society who have often been ignored" (1). Medieval studies focus not only on the royal and empowered but also, as Lawton says, on "groups or activities not privileged by official record--the poor, the world of work, criminals" (Lawton, 248). Medievalists now draw the margins to the center, displaying that any group's power or authority--men, the orthodox, heterosexuals, a class of privileged critics, and scholars--comes at another group's expense, for power and privilege demand exclusion and silencing. The impulse to address and redress this history is strong; as John Arnold writes, "there is little more seductive in social history than the promise of access to the 'voices' of those normally absent from the historical record" (380). Medievalists now want to hear the voices of those excluded, to remember and, if needed, to mourn for them.

The overall instructional effect of critical work that studies the marginalized, demonized, and oppressed has been vast and deeply beneficial. Muslim Crusade narratives and female mystics are in the cannon; we have exposed the construction and performance of medieval gender. Chaucer studies have turned with renewed interest to the Eastern tales and to the ongoing study of women, homosexuality, and, recently, masculinity. In the new millennium "getting medieval" means engaging politically with medieval texts and culture. We now see how vast and demanding are the peoples, histories, and cultures of this imaginary space, christened "the Middle Ages" centuries after its end. In this context, then, I do not mean to turn back the clock and undo this critical, pedagogical expansion. Nor do I intend to conduct a blanket attack on the study of critical ethics in medieval or in literary studies at large. To do so would be to disregard a vast body of theory, beginning with Plato's Republic. I want, rather, to examine critical work that tends particularly to invoke a strident emotional vocabulary in the pursuit of its ethical positions and to explore the implications of both the rhetoric and the politics of this work.

For as scholars and teachers we cannot proceed uncritically in the pursuit of ethics as an attendant aspect of our studies of the medieval. The new directions in our criticism have re-defined the role of the literary critic in dangerous ways; dangerous in that if critics are to become ethicists and social theorists, then our scholarly subject will become undone, and English and other humanities departments will become subordinated, ironically, to the corporate university whose goal is to maintain the very systems of power and authority that we have sought, with our political criticism, to undermine. The issue is of such magnitude that it cannot be rehearsed fully here in one short essay nor by one lone critic. But I hope that by examining the rhetoric used to study one poem, the Prioress's Tale, we can explore issues that reflect a larger problem in Chaucer studies and in medieval literary studies in general, a problem we have to address collectively, as a community.

The problem is this: though a politicized criticism carries the weight and authority of an ethical commitment and the confidence of ethical certainty, all such criticism that foregrounds the history of violence and difference in an attempt to practice critical ethics risks reducing the text under study to a type of historical hate crime. Such literary criticism is, further, very difficult to critique because it shields itself in ethical surety, in the language of tolerance and social justice. When a critic performs ethics, who would dare oppose? Because our historical judgments about ethics tend to be more absolute and unanimous--the Holocaust was evil--a criticism that employs moral outrage as a strategy to prove its critical thesis is potentially totalizing, prejudicial, and absolute. And in questioning such criticism one risks being accused of taking an inexcusably apolitical position or, worse, of being insensitive to the history of violence and difference, as is made clear by Haidu's attack on cultural relativists who fail to confront the repugnant ideologies of Roland.

It has become a chestnut that all readings are political and that we cannot escape some sort of historical filters that will inform our literary analysis. Therefore, I do not intend to "do an apolitical reading" of the Prioress's Tale or to claim that I can or that anyone should de-historicize themselves and read out of time by focusing only on art instead of the politics of religious violence. Nor...

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