For much of the last century, there existed a consensus among Chaucerian scholars that since Chaucer rarely mentioned current events in his poetry, he was apolitical. Except for some discussion in the Knight’s Tale and the Tale of Melibee, it was generally held that Chaucer refrained from substantial analysis of political issues and refused to take sides in the political factionalism of his time, maintaining ties to both parties in the power struggle that engaged the ruling class of the late fourteenth-century England. However, about 30 years ago, a group of scholars began to change our understanding of how Chaucer positioned himself politically. Paul Strohm persuasively argues that Chaucer was not the neutral player he was assumed to be but rather was a member of King Richard II’s affinity.1 Unlike some of the more prominent and careless members of that group, Chaucer modulated his relation to the king, especially during the crisis years of 1386 to 1388 when he took himself out of harm’s way from London to Kent. Strohm concludes that not only did Chaucer have a profound understanding of the politics of the day, but also he was acutely aware of how to survive them.
About this time, the general agreement about Chaucer’s diffidence toward political matters also began to change, a shift that coincided with the growing influence of modern theory on a number of scholars who utilize it to analyze and interpret his work. As Lee Patterson states, the ruling consensus of opposing New Critical and exegetical historicisms began to give way to the new theoretical dispensations such as Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, New Historicism, and deconstruction.2 Construing the New Criticism as a historicism is almost a misnomer because the principle underwriting their brand of historicism was the transhistorical subject. Opposed to this old-fashioned humanism was the anti-humanism of the exegetical school which, according to Patterson, was a kind of latter-day logical positivism, a reworking of the nineteenth-century historical practice.3 The exegetical scholars insisted that each historical period or epoch reconstructed the subject; that is, there is no transhistorical subject as the New Critical humanists maintained. The critics working with recent theory have a more nuanced view of the subject; they situate their scholarship and criticism of Chaucer’s work more firmly in the cultural and historical context of the fourteenth-century England.
Still, as Louise O. Fradenburg points out, in a trenchant article written at the end of the 80s, the antagonism at this time toward the new “theory” was still quite strong.4 Referencing Paul Olsen as an example, she argues that the resistance toward theory was part and parcel of an opposition to changing the traditional image of Chaucer as a poet identified with powerful elites and the rulers he served to a view that regarded him as a more politically engaged writer. She also connects this antagonism to theory with a reluctance to modify the relation of absolute “alterity” between the Middle Ages and Modernity in historical thinking, an alterity she says that facilitates the bracketing off of the Middle Ages from Modernity. Finally, she also associates this set of resistances with the anti-Semitism of the Prioress’s Tale, which she regards as a test case that deconstructs the hidden agenda of the more traditional critics.5
Before I discuss how the issue of anti-Semitism operates as an exception in the Prioress’s Tale, which is, in some ways, analogous to the political exception in the Man of Law’s Tale, I want to give a brief synopsis of several scholar/critics whose work can serve as an example of the reception of modern theory in this transition period of the late 80s through mid-90s.6 Even though they oscillate on the matter of the political in Chaucer, they provide a context and point of departure for my political reading of the Man of Law’s Tale. As we shall see, they construe their analysis, for the most part, in terms of the social. Although the political and the social are imbricated with each other, it is important to distinguish them. The political is a distinct entity not adequately explained as an instrument of social or class power. In the configuration of power, the institutional and symbolic forms of sovereign and governance are essential and relatively autonomous from the social domain. With this distinction in mind, I turn to a discussion of these scholars.
Strohm, who, as I mentioned earlier, argues that Chaucer was politically savvy, develops a reading model based on what he characterizes as the structure of late medieval social relations. The most persistent and dominant model was that of hierarchically arranged social estates which were divinely sanctioned. Strohm asserts that Chaucer complicates this vertical model by combining it with a horizontally arrayed set of social relations, which were communal and secular and, he says, encouraged by the freewheeling social circumstances within Chaucer’s political affinity.7 This horizontal modeling was sensitive to the rapidly changing set of relations in the fourteenth century that witnessed an ongoing transformation usually described as the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Strohm, however, is very cautious in his appraisal of Chaucer’s making specific political references in his work. Instead, he suggests that Chaucer displaces the political and social import of his poetry to the aesthetic domain, arguing that Chaucer develops “a mixed commonwealth of style” (144–45), thereby accommodating the political impulses associated with class conflict within “the environment of lessened risk provided by a literary work” (167). Although he focuses his interpretations on the stylistic features, Strohm is loath to let go of the political dimension of Chaucer’s work, alluding to Althusserian, “absent causes” behind Chaucer’s aesthetic choices. He states that they are absent in ways that frustrate our attempts at recovery because “Chaucer’s usual tendency is deliberately to efface any demonstrable connections between contemporary politics and the meaning of his text” (164). Even though he asserts that Chaucer excludes political references from the Canterbury Tales, Strohm resists calling the work unhistorical, arguing that while history is “suppressed at the level of allusion, it is reintroduced at the level of form” (166). And he insists that it is necessary “to recognize the social conditioning of certain categories of aesthetic choice” (163). However, while Strohm makes a strong case for connecting Chaucer’s stylistic differentiation with the social heterogeneity and conflict of the late fourteenth-century England, he frustrates our attempts to understand more clearly the political import of Chaucer’s work. He evades the political by emphasizing the social.
Carolyn Dinshaw also approaches her reading of Chaucer’s work through the screen of the social. Drawing on the theories of Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, she focuses on what Chaucer’s works reveal about the way women were positioned in medieval patriarchal society. She contends that throughout the Chaucerian corpus literary activity is always gendered activity and “literary representation is understood in terms of the body…as it is assigned gender value in the transactions that constitute social structure.”8 Dinshaw’s critique has a double focus: first, she objects to what she takes to be the denigrating way women have been represented in the patriarchal literary and textual tradition and second, she protests what she labels as the misogynist tradition of textual reading. She asserts that the traditional allegorical reading construes the text as the feminine body which is passive, which is then unveiled by a masculine reader. She contends that “Chaucer’s works point to a critique of patriarchal conceptions of language and literary activity” (16) and cites the Wife of Bath as an exception to this paradigm because she speaks and “makes her autonomous desire the very motive and theme of her performance” (114). Taking aim at both the traditional way literary works were construed and the ongoing patriarchal attitudes that inform reading them, Dinshaw brings to bear a feminist critique of the theories she uses to read Chaucer, while showing the central importance of gender for reading Chaucer’s tales.
As such, her readings concentrate on how power is exercised as social power. An example of this can be seen in her analysis of the Man of Law’s Tale. Although she mentions that for the Man of Law tale-telling can be metaphorically equated with paternity, kingship, and commerce, she places her reading of the tale securely in the domain of the social: “Tales are firmly established in the Man of Law’s Introduction and Prologue as part of patriarchal social organization” (93). Dinshaw, too, evades the political. Her readings may suggest the political implications, but they are more immediately focused on how patriarchal power is exercised as social power and not, specifically, political power, let alone sovereign power. Yet, sovereign is not simply patriarchal authority. Needless to say, in the Man of Law’s Tale, those exercising political power are, for the most part, sovereigns.
Lee Patterson initially seems to make a more calculated attempt to examine the political dimension in Chaucer’s work. But he theorizes the political as class politics and argues that Chaucer deflects the argument opened up by the Miller’s Tale, which Patterson regards as an act of political resistance directed against seigneurial exploitation,9 into the more sedate exposition initiated by the Wife of Bath. Class politics is set aside for the exposition of the poetics of the subject. The Wife of Bath’s discourse is “a theatrical self-display that at once assumes and legitimizes the priority of a socially undetermined subjectivity” (40). Patterson regards the Canterbury Tales as a dialectical oscillation between the subject and history. He argues that by choosing to elaborate the vicissitudes of the subject, Chaucer opts for the politics of individualism, a more congenial message than the class antagonisms that the Miller’s Tale touched upon and that the Reeve’s Tale quickly refused. The shift is completed with the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale which see “the instauration of the subject at the center of the Canterbury Tales” (40). Patterson attributes this move to “Chaucer placing his poetry in the service of the dominant merchant patriciate from which he himself originally derived” (278). He construes Chaucer as a politically conservative writer, whose outlook is determined by his bourgeois background. And by characterizing him this way, Patterson, too, displaces the political into the social.
Nevertheless, what his analysis reveals for us is the tension or oscillation in Chaucer’s poetry between a transcendent subject and a subject that is grounde...