Get the PDF: revised 1 May 2007

“Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun / To telle yow al the condicioun / Of ech of hem, so as it semed me, / And whiche they weren, and of what degree.” So says Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrator in the General Prologue, and Chaucer continues to tell his readers the “condicioun” of the frame narrators by reinterpreting folk tales or prior art in ways which qualify the tellers (I 37-40). No less is true of Chaucer himself, who is qualified by the nature of his approach to the subjects of the Canterbury Tales. His era was defined by rigid normative social constructs: traditional gender and sexual identities were deeply entrenched and rarely subverted. Much is made of his manifold depictions of femininity, but I propose that despite the binding sexual identities of Chaucer’s England, his treatment of sexual alterity—specifically femininity—was remarkably progressive when taken in the proper context. Since any discussion of the Self-Other binary deals not simply with rhetorical depictions, but principally with moral or political agency, it is crucial that modern readers read past superficial description and understand both the Boethian philosophical roots that underscore Chaucer’s work and the manner in which the politics of gendered discourse inform modern readings of the work. Only then do some of the criteria for sympathetic treatment—explicitly or implicitly—reveal themselves in the text. Read more…