Chaucerian Ecopoetics

Deconstructing Anthropocentrism in the Canterbury Tales

Shawn Normandin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319904566
• eBook ISBN: 9783319904573
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Chaucerian Ecopoetics performs ecocritical close readings of Geoffrey Chaucer's poetry. Shawn Normandin explains how Chaucer's language demystifies the aesthetic charm of his narratives and calls into question the anthropocentrism they often depict. This text combines ecocriticism with reading techniques associated with deconstruction, to provide innovative interpretations of the General Prologue, the Knight's Tale, the Miller's Tale, the Reeve's Tale, the Franklin's Tale, the Physician's Tale, and the Monk's Tale. In stressing the importance of rhetorical nuance and literary form, Chaucerian Ecopoetics enables readers to better understand the ideological prehistory of today's environmental crisis.

© The Author(s) 2018

Shawn NormandinChaucerian EcopoeticsThe New Middle Ageshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90457-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Chaucer and Ecopoetics

Shawn Normandin¹

(1)

Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

Shawn Normandin

End Abstract

Geoffrey Chaucer did not use the words environmentalism and ecology, let alone ecopoetics. Yet he lived through the “the largest ecological and demographic event in pre-modern European history,” the so-called Black Death (Hoffmann 2014, 289).¹ The Black Death was not an isolated trauma but comprised “a series of epidemics, a pervasive and deadly reality that could strike at any moment…. Chaucer himself is likely to have witnessed four or five serious outbreaks of the disease in his adult life ” (Lewis 2003, 147–48). Though his works—like those of most fourteenth-century English poets—seldom refer to the plague, it shaped the cultural conditions under which he wrote (Wenzel 1982, 148).² Chaucer must have witnessed rising post-pandemic tensions: the plague caused the disappearance of many villages, and “as local populations fell, lords turned increasingly from the production of corn (less profitable, with fewer mouths to feed) to sheep farming (lower labor costs, therefore more profitable )” (Wallace 1997, 125, 145). Karl Steel summarizes the literary consequences of these agro-pastoral developments: “Fourteenth-century England sacrificed its lambs on the altar of the very commerce that afforded Chaucer time to write … a point that could hardly be lost on a civil servant who spent twelve years as comptroller of the wool custom and the wool subsidy” (2012, 192).

The plague is the most notorious of those “agents” that, although “poorly known, even invisible, to medieval Europeans,” nonetheless “shaped human lives, regional cultures, and historical periods ” (Hoffmann 2014, 303). The contrast between the lurid phenomenality of the disease’s symptoms and the non-phenomenal materiality of its agents emblematizes the contrast between phenomenality and materiality at work in Chaucer’s poems. As we stumble into global warming, which promises to be deadlier than the Black Death, we may find the English poet more instructive than ever. Eleanor Johnson has shown how fourteenth-century poems such as William Langland’s Piers Plowman use “recognizable, even conventional formal techniques of medieval poetics” to think ecocritically. She represents Langland as an “early” ecocritic, for whom “poetic form offers a mode of staging meditations on complex, multilayered social problems for which a fully articulated critical vocabulary in other medieval discourses does not yet exist” (2012, 473). Arguably, Chaucer also writes as a medieval ecocritic, exploiting poetry’s formal resources where modern ecocritics would use discursive prose techniques.

This should not be too surprising, since literary history has often positioned Chaucer as a nature poet—in multiple senses of the word nature. Recall the old image of Chaucer as a kind of naïve proto-Wordsworth —an image that the poet, however ironically , created for himself in the Prologues to the Legend of Good Women (Donaldson 2005, 504).³ Though Chaucer was not a tree-hugger, he posed as a daisy-chaser. This self-representation is either ridiculous or ecologically audacious. Carolynn Van Dyke notes that “French poems link the daisy with a beloved and faultless lady, and marguerite names both daisy and pearl. But Chaucer’s narrator moves directly from plant to divine ideal without the conventional human intermediary” (2005, 65). Whereas fifteenth-century poets admired Chaucer’s rhetorical sophistication (his aureate language), misunderstandings of Middle English pronunciation (hence, meter) would recast him as a poet of raw vitality. John Dryden thus conceives of Chaucer as “a rough diamond” that “must first be polished ere he shines” (2014, 78). Kellie Robertson suggests that “for Dryden and other eighteenth-century writers, Chaucer’s poetry exemplified the effortless capacity of art to imitate nature” (2012, 117).

Scholars have long taken an interest in Chaucer’s representations of nature, but, as Dan Brayton and Lynne Bruckner insist, “ecocriticism is distinct from” nature studies “in its attention to anthropocentrism , ecocentrism, living systems, environmental degradation, ecological and scientific literacy, and an investment in expunging the notion that humans exist apart from other life forms” (2011, 3; cited by J.J. Cohen 2015, 267n16). Chaucer’s texts permit themselves to be read as commentaries on anthropocentrism . Recent scholars have found Chaucer challenging human claims to superiority over nonhumans. Such scholars have alighted on Chaucer’s tales of talking birds. For Van Dyke, the “humor” of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale “depends on Chauntecleer’s denial of the gulf between animal actions and human significance.” Yet this humor is deceptive: it “seduces us into a superiority to the protagonist that duplicates his hubris” (2005, 92–93). In laughing at the rooster, we laugh at ourselves. Though the tale’s laughter depends on anthropomorphism , the naturalistic accuracy of the Nun’s Priest’s description of the rooster ultimately “undermines the very notion of anthropomorphism” (89).⁴ The Squire’s Tale, long considered one of the poet’s least distinguished works, has attracted ecocritics, who have spurred reevaluation of its importance. Susan Crane finds that interactions in the tale between a princess named Canacee and a talking female falcon develop the “counter-hegemonic” idea of “cross-species empathy” (2007, 37). According to Lesley Kordecki, “In this complex performance, we are to assume that birds have a language of their own. Paradoxically, language, the great divider of the human and nonhuman, becomes the site of their union” (2011, 93).

These exuberant calls for avian–human convergence may raise the hackles of the historicist. Lisa J. Kiser warns that “in texts from earlier periods during which nothing like a modern environmental consciousness existed, one would expect to find only in oblique forms—if at all—the concepts and distinctions that today we regard as central to environmental thought” (2001, 42). Since premodern “societies lacked cultural grounds for purposeful written descriptions of environmental issues, concepts, or conditions,” Richard C. Hoffmann recommends that students of environmental history read medieval texts “‘against the grain’ to see what the creator had simply assumed, had refused to acknowledge, or had attempted to conceal” (2014, 15). Yet there is at least one Chaucerian text that we can read with the grain: “The Former Age,” a poem as exacting as deep ecology in its awareness of human environmental depredation. Without glossing over the hardship of pre-technological life (M. Miller 2004, 146–47), the poem clearly traces “our sorwe” to the “swety bysinesse” of mining for precious metals and gems (32, 28).⁵ Going beyond vegetarianism , the poem’s sympathy extends even to the “ground,” which in the former age was not yet “wounded with the plough” (9), and to the “wawes grene and blewe” not yet carved by ships (21).⁶ The “peples in the former age” have minimal agency (2). Shorn of personal names, “they” are described as a collective (3, 5, 7)—as though they were animals (they are). “Nembrot” is the historically earliest human to achieve a personal name in the poem (58), by which time we have entered the era of

covetyse,

Doublenesse, and tresoun, and envye,

Poyson, manslawhtre, and mordre in sondry wyse. (61–63)

Karl Steel rightly situates “The Former Age” in a tradition of “late-medieval antihumanist works about people indifferent to the hierarchical distinction between humans and nonhuman animals and even between humans and the world more generally. These works not only advocate what might be recognized as ecological thinking, but also directly envision what humans would lose if they abandoned their supremacy” (2012, 185–86).⁷

Yet despite “The Former Age,” much of Chaucer’s work may turn off ecocritics. One of the achievements of ecocriticism has been to urge a reevaluation of setting—an aspect of literature that many scholars take for granted while they lavish their attention on character and plot (Buell 2005, 3–4). Chaucer’s settings are usually underwhelming. Many descriptions of lovely gardens appear in his works, but these owe more to literary convention than to horticultural experience. The idea of the Canterbury ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Chaucer and Ecopoetics
• 2. Ecophobia and the Knight’s Tale
• 3. Nocturnal Ecologies: Metaphor in the Miller’s and the Reeve’s Tale
• 4. Iterability, Anthropocentrism, and the Franklin’s Tale
• 5. The Unnatural Personifications of the Physician’s Tale
• 6. Ruminating on and in the Monk’s Tale
• Back Matter