Chaucer's portraits do not illustrate a moral or philosophical thesis
On first reading them, Chaucer's
character sketches in the General Prologue certainly seem to serve as moral
judgments on the portrayed individual. However, are these to be seen as functional
as typifications of the entire social class that they represent or as portraits
of contemporary individuals? I would argue that allegorist and literalist
readings of the General Prologue are not mutually exclusive: that characters
can exist for the reader on both levels. Insofar as they serve to illustrate an
overall thesis, however, it seems sensible to concentrate of the characters as
exemplars of their type and class.
Brewster states that "The
only class system known to mediaeval theory" has "the familiar
Three-fold division... into Knights, Clergy, and Ploughmen... Knights defend
society, and maintain law and order; clergy defend men's souls and feed their
minds; ploughmen provide food to maintain men's bodies." Although Chaucer
chooses not to order his character's appearance in the General Prologue according
to the class to which they belong, presumably because doing so would result in
less opportunity for comparison, he appears to be sympathetic to such
divisions.
The Knight, who we are first introduced
to, obviously falls into the first category. Although Terry Jones sees him as
something of a bloodthirsty mercenary, I feel he is projecting his own
presentist negative attitude towards warfare onto a character Chaucer himself
seems to be very sympathetic to. Indeed the Knight embraces and stands for
values which Chaucer seems to wholeheartedly support: "trouthe and honour,
freedom and curteusie." The rest of his household, his son the squire and
the yeoman, seem to be morally worthy by association. His son, for all his
youthful faults, is imbued with the same 'curteusie', and it seems so
inevitable to me that he is going to mature into the Knight, that I see him as
an image of the Knight as he was, before being ennobled by age and experience.
As a fellow upholder of the law, the Sergeant of the Lawe can also be placed in
this class, and he too is presented in largely sympathetic terms.
Chaucer's treatment of the
ecclesiastical class is far less homogenous, ranging from his irony-free
beautification of the Parson to the little satirised Prioress and Monk, to the
pilloried figure of the Friar. In fact, some view Chaucer's unfinished
Canterbury Tales as the smoking gun, which reveals that the Church has him
murdered for publishing such negative views of the clergy. However, his
treatment of the clergy is not in any real sense radical or subversive; it
merely reflects charges commonly levelled at the orders at the time. The
Prioress is the first member of the clergy to appear and through her association
with the Benedictine order, we are invited to examine the behaviour of these
characters in light of their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Routine
breaking of these supposedly sacred vows, along with the selling of indulgences
and other such abuses are what eventually led to the Reformation.
The relative dearth of characters
who can be considered ploughmen, figures who are directly concerned with the
production of food, reflects the breakdown in feudal society and, more
specifically, the breakdown in food supply due to the deaths of massive numbers
of labourers at the hands of the Black Death. Although many contemporary
figures attacked farm labourers of the day for demanding extortionate wages
because of these conditions, Chaucer holds up his Ploughman as the epitome of
simple, Christian living, "lyvynge in pees and parfit charitee".
The Cook, with his very direct
relationship to food production, is also characterised as an amenable fellow,
but without the saintly virtues of the Ploughman However, the Peasant's Revolt
of 1381 seems to have soured Chaucer's congeniality to the rural poor. This is
evident in Chaucer's animalisation of the strong and brawny Miller. He compares
his beard o the bristles of a sow.
The fact that Miller
routinely breaks down doors with his head marks him out as a threshold-crosser,
who does not respect the natural civic order. Chaucer time and time again
employs physiognomy, the pop psychology of his day, in order to highlight the
bestial and depraved side of his character. Similarly in the Pardoner physical
and spiritual deformity go hand in hand.
The characters that do not fit into this social framework are generally satirised as being overly concerned with
the pursuit of profit or pleasure, the Merchant and Franklin being chief in
each of these respective categories. The disinterested, asexual, and devoutly
religious Clerk seems to be the moral example they should be following. In the
five guildsmen, Chaucer mildly mocks middle-class self-importance, but neither
holds them up as moral beacons nor attacks them as degenerates.
As far there is a
philosophical thesis in The General Prologue, it centres on two qualities:
Caritas: charity and compassion, and cupidity: greed and the inordinate desire
for wealth. Chaucer seems to accept that cupidity is a necessary evil insofar
as it leads to a functional and productive society. For example, the Merchant's
cupidity is respected as it is honest and makes him a 'better' merchant.
On the other hand, the Reeve's
dishonest pilfering of his master's estate is seen as bestial, sub-human. His
animal nature is reinforced by his association with his master's livestock:
"His lordes sheep, his neet, his dayerye | His swyn, his hors, his stoor,
and his pultrye." Little more than an animal, his fate is evinced by his
constant position at the rear of the company of pilgrims: the furthest from
salvation. This seems to recognise that there will be recompense paid in the
afterlife for holding cupiditas as one's central tenet, and, conversely, reward
for Caritas.
It is important to note that
Chaucer's characters are neither stereotypes nor, as DW Robertson puts it
"elaborate iconographic figures designed to show the manifold implications
of an attitude". They are not one-sided unequivocal creations and my own
interpretation of what Chaucer saw as their moral virtues and vices is far from
unequivocal. The General Prologue, and of course, The Canterbury Tales itself,
is a rich and complex text, often ambivalent and ironic. Although we are
dealing with archetypal figures, we are dealing with them outside the moral
boundaries and strictures of everyday life; pilgrims in the amoral zone of 'pleye'
and 'game'.
In Malcolm Andrew's words,
"The poet creates a fiction with decontextualises his pilgrims: the
commentators employ a method which recontextualises them." In conclusion,
Chaucer does not present us with a moral or philosophical thesis in these
portraits. Nor does he provide an antithetical reaction against the hierarchal
imposed moral and philosophical theses of church and feudal state. Instead,
through his ambiguity and he offers us the opportunity to define and redefine
the moral meaning of these brilliantly drawn portraits.
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