Desire in the Canterbury Tales

Abstract

Desire in the Canterbury Tales by Elizabeth Scala. The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Elizabeth Scala's most recent monograph, Desire in the Canterbury Tales, reads Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a discourse of desire. She argues that this discourse is not only rooted in the topics chosen by individual pilgrims in the frame narrative, but can also, more significantly, be found in various acts of misreading occurring in the frame narrative that produce compulsive desires and that can in turn be traced in the structure of the language and in signifying chains connecting the tales. The frame narrative, Scala argues, is where Chaucer sets up a "pretended unity" among the pilgrims, "a unity that then gets tested and discomfited" (2-4) and results in competitive fictions that are often linked to misrecognitions and misreadings of the tale tellers. Scala's work, as a whole, contributes a structural reading of the tales to ongoing debates in Chaucer studies. But her monograph also productively intervenes in current criticism by linking her structural analysis of Chaucer's language to the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan. Scala argues that the "conscious means by which speakers pursue various desires and goals" are linked to the "structure of unconscious desire assumed with language" (11). Psychoanalytic theories help her to explain "the subjects position within the complex and socially structured world of symbolization, the Symbolic order" (11). Scala's readings are therefore heavily influenced by Saussure's structural linguistics regarding the signifier in language (the '"audible image' of a sign"), which Lacanian theories separate from the mental concepts the signifier inspires. Lacans essay on the "Mirror Stage" is referenced more particularly to point to the "imaginary identifications and gestures of communication" which arise from mistaking other subjects as our "selves" (24). Her individual chapters trace these structural and psychoanalytical theories in the frame narratives and tales of Fragment I, as well as in the marriage group and the religious stories of the Canterbury Tales. Her analyses therefore also consider how desire might be linked to gender and sexuality, as well as to religion. She moreover frames her argument by considering other voices in Chaucer studies (including debates by New Critics and Historicists) and, more specifically, the questions these schools of thought leave unanswered about language, selfhood, and expressions of desires in medieval texts (15-20). Her introductory chapter, "Mobility and Contestation," describes her overarching argument for the book, and frames it by setting up her critical apparatus and her definition of Chaucer's discourse of desire. She begins her analysis of the primary source by quoting the first eighteen lines of the General Prologue and pointing to the "function of desire" in his poetry. Verbs like "longen" and "seken," framed by the "artifice" of nature ("rains, warming winds, and budding stems") and birds that mimic human lovesickness, are examples Scala draws on to explain the juxtaposition between sexualized desire and its buildup from "gentle awakening" to being "violently erotic" and "penetrative" (5-6). This analysis sets the stage for reading burgeoning desires and misrecognitions in the frame narrative and in the tales of, specifically, Fragment I. Scala's first chapter, '"We Witen Nat What Thing We Preyen Heere': Desire, Knowledge, and the Ruse of Satisfaction in the Knight's Tale," comments not only on the frustrated desires of characters in the "Knight's Tale," but also references Chaucer's act of appropriating source material and reappropriating his own previously penned "Palamon and Arcite" into the Canterbury Tales. This act of "suturing" another story into the Canterbury Tales not only "[alters] the romance he formerly wrote" but also "[crafts] a particularized response and aggressive reading of it" (84). …