Sexual Exegetics and the Female Text

Abstract

Chapter 1 argues that paternity’s claims to authority were undermined by the inherent doubts associated with siring offspring. The inability for a man to know his children to be his own with certainty epitomized the divine limitations that had been placed upon men’s cognition. There was no perfect reciprocity between sign and meaning within a fallen world; men were forced to acquiesce to a semiotics of doubt and insufficiency. Chaucer explores these themes within the Manciple’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale. In the former he writes affirmations of paternal certainty out of his source texts, and in the latter he depicts the search of a husband for cognitive certainty, a search that condemns the man’s wife, Griselda, to torturous scrutiny. Chaucer concludes that men must simply live with their own doubt, for doubt is a reminder to man that he is human, that true authority belongs to God alone.