Hysteria, Perversion, and Paranoia in "The Canterbury Tales"

"Wild" Analysis and the Symptomatic Storyteller

Becky Renee McLaughlin

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501514067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea medieval

Beginning with the spectacle of hysteria, moving through the perversions of fetishism, masochism, and sadism, and ending with paranoia and psychosis, this book explores the ways that conflicts with the Oedipal law erupt on the body and in language in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for Chaucer's tales are rife with issues of mastery and control that emerge as conflicts not only between authority and experience but also between power and knowledge, word and flesh, rule books and reason, man and woman, same and other – conflicts that erupt in a macabre sprawl of broken bones, dismembered bodies, cut throats, and decapitations. Like the macabre sprawl of conflict in the Canterbury Tales, this book brings together a number of conflicting modes of thinking and writing through the surprising and perhaps disconcerting use of "shadow" chapters that speak to or against the four "central" chapters, creating both dialogue and interruption.

Chapter 1 The Prick of the Prioress, or Hysteria and Its Humors

I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you […] I mutilate you.

—Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis

We often speak of love as a mysterious phenomenon, saying things such as “I don’t know why I love him. There’s just something special about him.” That “something special,” which we cannot quite locate or determine, is what Jacques Lacan refers to as objet a, the thing that is in the beloved more than the beloved, the thing that escapes signification, a kernel of the real. Generally, we are not willing to let the matter rest with what seem to be romantic vagaries, and so we begin a retroactive search for the cause of our love. We say, perhaps with a certain amount of unconscious desperation, “I love him because his body is like a thick knot, because his shoulders are dense, as smooth as baby’s skin, because his hair erupts into curls on a particularly humid day, because his eyes are as cold and clear as an ice-blue glacier,” and so forth and so on. We can make list after list of reasons, list after list of the beloved’s adorable characteristics, but love and/or the identity of the beloved cannot be totally positivized. There is no way to sum it up, to say it all, and if there were, the field of desire would be evacuated. And yet we continually search for the one signifier that would explain this mysterious phenomenon. What this search amounts to, however, is mutilation. As Slavoj Žižek argues, “Word is murder of a thing not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence—by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present—but above all in the sense of its radical dissection.”¹ In seeking to account for love, then, what one does is to “quarter” the beloved, hack it up into its component parts, reduce its organic whole to a list of fetishized pieces. Love is, one might say, fetishization par excellence. Paradoxically, it is this failed search for the final signifier or the impossibility of representing the subject that actually founds or constitutes the subject’s identity. It is around the missing part (objet a), which representation fails to inscribe, that the subject constructs its fantasies and/or its self-image, not, as Joan Copjec points out, “in imitation of any ideal vision but in response to the very impossibility of ever making visible this missing part.”²

The Prioress, then, is situated at the center of a series of mutilations or “murders,” including her own, for what is her portrait but a list of fetishized pieces? If because of its ambiguity, Chaucer’s portrait of the Prioress is a failed attempt to represent the “beloved” Prioress, it is also what brings her to life. The garment of the text gapes, and it is in this gap where two edges fail to meet that we see the Prioress emerge, for looking at the Prioress is like looking at something through a kaleidoscope: with one small adjustment of the lens, the picture shatters into something entirely different. What one will find in the following chapter is a series of lens adjustments, one picture of the Prioress shattering into the next.

Dora and the Prioress

In “The Disposition of the Voice,” Régis Durand argues that the voices that return to us from the past are “like a powerful current,” for “they leave marks. They burn.”³ Like the voices that return to us from childhood, voices that have left their mark, the Prioress’s voice returns to us from the fourteenth century. Hers is a voice that is cut off from us through the passage of time—of centuries—but it is a voice that we return to again and again. It is a voice that never gives us the satisfaction of mastery. It, too, is a voice that leaves its mark. That burns us. For she has become the Lady and we, her courtly lovers. She is the inaccessible object around which our desire circulates. And if she is our Lady, our “Domna,” then we “domnoyer,” we “caress” her, we “play around” her. Just as readings of the petite hysteric Dora, another voice from the past, continue to proliferate like an analysis interminable, so, too, do readings of the Prioress. For what creates mystery also creates desire, the wish to see and understand something that remains hidden from view.

In a discussion of courtly love, Lacan articulates surprise that it emerged “at a time when the historical circumstances are such that nothing seems to point to what might be called the advancement of women or indeed their emancipation.”⁴ He then uses as an example of these historical circumstances events surrounding the Countess of Comminges, daughter of William of Montpellier, events that took place during the full flowering of courtly love. Peter of Aragon, who was king of Aragon, wished to extend his power north of the Pyrenees, and because the Countess of Comminges was heir to the county of Montpellier, Peter of Aragon wanted her. The obstacle, however, was that she was married to someone else and was apparently not the type to participate in sordid extramarital intrigue. Political machinations and pressure from Peter of Aragon forced her to leave her husband, and although she was returned to him through papal intervention, she was again corralled by Peter of Aragon upon her father’s death. Worn down by these machinations, the Countess’s husband repudiated her, and she became the wife and property of Peter of Aragon, who mistreated her so flagrantly that she fled to Rome and lived out the rest of her life under the protection of the Pope.

What makes this story odd is its temporal juxtaposition to the flowering of the courtly love tradition, the most important convention of which is the Lady’s inaccessibility, for as this story illustrates, women are hardly inaccessible, used as they are as political pawns or objects of economic exchange. Even within The Canterbury Tales itself, we have story after story showing the plight of women and the paucity of options for dealing with it. If we think of what the Prioress has been listening to before it is her turn to speak, perhaps her tale’s aggressivity will not seem quite so startling, her rage at the plight of women manifesting itself in virulent anti-Semitism and displaced violence against the little clergeon and the Jewish community.⁵ The Knight, for instance, speaks of conquering the Amazons and bringing two of them home as prisoners of war. Theseus marries the older of these two Amazons, and he turns the younger one over to whichever knight, Palamon or Arcite, defeats the other in hand-to-hand combat. In both cases, Ypolita and Emelye have little or no say in their destiny. This tale is presented under the guise of courtly romance, but it hardly hides the fact that while Palamon and Arcite have some hope of escaping from their prison, women do not. Far raunchier and more troubling than the Knight’s Tale is the Reeve’s Tale, in which women are used as pawns in an ugly game of revenge involving rape, the nocturnal “swyvings” seen by the two clerks as a mere joke upon Sympkyn the miller. Not surprisingly, the degenerate Cook responds with great glee to the Reeve’s tale, telling an abbreviated tale that features a woman who is forced to earn her living through prostitution. And the Wife of Bath’s prologue explains in great detail the machinations a woman must go through to have her own desires met and the price she pays on and with her body. These, however, are the mildest of the stories involving the subjection of women, the Man of Law, the Clerk, and the Physician offering more cruelly sadistic ones. Even the tale told by the Shipman, which comes just before the Prioress’s, hints at the sinister underbelly of domesticity, for the rich merchant’s wife is forced to apply to Monk John for money, saying, “[…] if that I hadde a space, / As I have noon, and namely in this place, / Thanne wolde I telle a legende of my lyf, / What I have suffred sith I was a wyf / With myn housbonde […]” (VII, 143 – 47). Once Monk John and she have sworn not to tell anyone of their conversation, the wife continues, saying,

Myn housbonde is to me the worste man

That evere was sith that the world bigan.

But sith I am a wyf, it sit nat me

To tellen no wight of oure privetee,

Neither abedde ne in noon oother place;

God sh...