Both these monologues contain so many outrageous and mutually inconsistent statements that making secure judgments about their speakers becomes extremely difficult. As a result, much ink has been spilled, through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, about their motivations and moral status, and about Chaucer’s goal(s) in creating them: Is the Wife of Bath a protofeminist or simply an anthology of misogynist and misogamous stereotypes? Does she represent Chaucer’s indirect comment on the contention of religious reformers that women should be allowed to teach and preach, and if so, on which side of the question? Is the Pardoner a eunuch, or what we would today call a homosexual? When, after having revealed the tricks and phony relics by which he takes money from congregations, he invites the pilgrims to come and pay to kiss what are presumably those same relics, is he drunk? Or just adding a final twist to his deliberately over-the-top performance as stage villain? Or is he moved by some deep impulse of self-loathing that desires the cruel rejoinder of the Host, who proposes to cut off what the Pardoner may already lack, his “coillons”?

To ask such questions seems appropriate, even inevitable. On the other hand, to seek clear-cut answers to them risks misunderstanding, and diminishing, Chaucer’s achievement. The nature of that achievement is to explore, seriously but also comically, the important role of self-construction and performance as strategies of successful participation in the competition for justification and mastery central to social existence. In creating his great prologues, Chaucer in effect anticipated the theorization of social behavior as performance in the works of sociologists such as Erving Goffman (whose books include The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life). Chaucer was, of course, familiar with the performative rituals and spectacles—tournaments, royal entries, coronations and crown wearings, state banquets, etc.—by which nobility and royalty constructed images of their power and hegemony. But the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner undertake their respective self-constructions and self-presentations from much less powerful and secure positions. As a woman, Alison of Bath played the game of life on a distinctly unleveled playing field; as for the Pardoner, both his body and his profession made him suspect: the first because of widely (but not universally) recognized medical and physiognomic theories that equated physical “deformity” with moral failings, and the second because the offer of indulgences (guarantees of the diminution or elimination of purgatorial suffering after death for sins committed during life) in return for acts of piety, including contributions to the building of bridges and the maintenance of hospitals, was widely regarded in late-medieval Europe as an ecclesiastical practice rife with corruption—nothing less than the selling of salvation.

The question then becomes, what are we to make of these self-constructions? Where and how, if at all, does virtuoso performance intersect with reality? This seems to me the other significant achievement of the prologues of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner: They put the reader (or listener, if Chaucer ever read them aloud to his contemporaries) in the same position of trying to separate fact from fiction, or of discovering the psychological truths that lie beneath the most extravagant or self-delusory masquerades, which we experience in our social or professional interactions with our friends, acquaintances, superiors, colleagues, or subordinates.

It’s important to realize that in crafting their pilgrimage personae the Wife of Bath and Pardoner make use of readily available, dominant discourses, as they (and the other pilgrims) do in their tales. For example, the later, larger portion of the Wife’s prologue utilizes two major bodies of textuality—misogynist and misogamous—by which men have justified their continuing social and political hegemony over women. Classical, clerical, and popular literary strands intermingle in these discourses, and Chaucer, by putting these stereotypes in the Wife’s mouth, has seemed to some readers to be endorsing, however playfully, their points of view. At least as likely is the view of other critics that Alison, by constructing herself as a compendium of male fears about female sexuality and aggressiveness, is enjoying the paradoxical power that such discourses unintentionally grant their victims: the power to induce shock and anger by their overt, hyperbolical embrace, in word and deed, of the supposedly debilitating stereotypes. Chaucer suggests the success of this strategy by his depiction of the responses of male pilgrims (Friar, Clerk, Merchant, Franklin, perhaps Nun’s Priest) whose tales, or comments in links between tales, reveal their need to respond to, and dispute, the Wife’s outrageous claim to have achieved complete mastery over her five husbands (albeit, in the case of the last one, not without a fight).

The Pardoner’s strategy is similar. Faced with the knowledge that his physical features—high voice, lack of facial hair, glaring eyes—suggested to adherents of physiognomic analysis an absent or deviant sexuality (as witnessed by the narrator’s assessment in “The General Prologue”: “I trowe he were a gelding or a mare”; p. 36), he plays with, and seeks to provoke, his fellow pilgrims by singing “Com hider, love, to me” with the Summoner (suggesting what me dievals would have called a sodomitic relationship), but also claiming, when he interrupts the Wife of Bath, that he was about to marry, and then declaring, as proof of his villainy, that he will “have a joly wenche in every toun” (p. 490). That both the Pardoner’s appearance and his profession suggest an immoral character is underscored when the Host (who salutes him insolently as “thou bel amy”) asks him to “tel us som mirth or japes” (an off-color story), and there is an outcry from the pilgrims of upper rank—“Nay, lat him telle us of no ribaudye!”—who obviously fear the kind of filth such a man might be capable of uttering. As part of his strategy of exacerbating (and thus in a sense controlling) such negative reactions to him, the Pardoner implies that it will be a stretch for him to think of “som honest thing” to tell, and that he will need strong drink to help him!

The “honest thing” he chooses to tell in his tale is a hair-raising story of evil’s self-destructive nature, the quasi-allegorical quest for Death by three young scoundrels who start out on their “pilgrimage” from a tavern and end up killing each other over a cache of gold to which they are directed by an old man whom they meet (and verbally abuse) along the way. It’s fairly easy to see this story as the Pardoner’s tart comment on the pilgrimage that began at the Tabard and on some of his self-righteous detractors, who have treated him as the young wastrels treat the old man who responds by sending them to their death.

But before we get to this grisly tale, which demonstrates the Pardoner’s command of the exemplary stories so important to medieval preaching (especially that of the mendicants), the Pardoner performs a different kind of honesty (or fictitious honesty): an expose of the pulpit trickery by which he defrauds gullible congregations of their hard-earned money by hawking phony relics. He does not just reveal his hypocrisy—he preaches against greed, the very sin that motivates him—he revels in it: Although a sinner, he saves others by his preaching, but that is not his intention; as long as the money rolls in, its donors can go to hell for all he cares.

In crafting the Pardoner’s prologue, Chaucer synthesizes contemporary concerns about the fraudulent selling of pardons with two other areas of discontent: the traffic in false relics and the problem of sinful priests who do not practice what they preach. The last of these three abuses contributes most to the Pardoner’s melodramatic “confession” of his misdeeds, and it’s no surprise that Chaucer lifts the Pardoner’s description of his hypocritical preaching from an established discourse on the subject that circulated in late-medieval preaching manuals and treatises, which besides offering advice on effective preaching contained warnings that such preaching required of its practitioners a virtuous life, as well as discussions about whether a priest guilty of mortal sin should be allowed in the pulpit. That the poet should have converted the manuals’ warnings and condemnations into the self-description of a Canterbury Tales character can mean one of two things: Either Chaucer raided the discourse of the hypocritical preacher in order to give, in the Pardoner, an example of clerical villainy, or the Pardoner is himself fully conversant with the preaching manuals and from them has constructed two voices: one, that of the effective preacher (as shown in his tale); the other, that of the hypocritical, evil preacher (as shown in the prologue). By showing his mastery of both discourses, the Pardoner not only manages to upset and outrage his critics on the pilgrimage; he also makes a good case for winning the supper for the best tale. After all, he boasts that “my entente is nat but for to winne” (p. 488), which could refer not only to his quest for wealth, but also to the storytelling contest, and indeed to his ongoing battle against being physically and professionally stereotyped—or to all three.

The self-constructing performances of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner may represent the pinnacle of Chaucer’s art in The Canterbury Tales, but they share with many other moments in that incomplete collection of stories told on a pilgrimage that never reaches either of its announced goals—Becket’s shrine or Harry Bailly’s dinner table—a power to delight, engage, and mystify their readers that shows no sign of lessening more than 600 years after their author’s death.

 

Robert W. Hanning is Professor of English at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1961. He holds degrees from Columbia and Oxford Universities, and has also taught at Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and New York University. Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, he has published The Vision of History in Early Britain, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, The Lais of Marie de France (co-translated with Joan Ferrante), and Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture (co-edited with David Rosand), as well as many articles on Chaucer’s poetry and other medieval and Renaissance subjects.

A Note on the Text and the Translation

The Middle English text of The Canterbury Tales used in this edition is that of W. W. Skeat (1835-1912), the great Victorian scholar of medieval English literature. Skeat’s editions of Chaucer’s complete works and of many other Old and Middle English texts, including Piers Plowman, by Chaucer’s contemporary, William Langland, established new standards of textual accuracy, thanks to the extensive study of medieval manuscripts on which they were based. A fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, Skeat was an indefatigable worker who played a major role in the Early English Text Society, the Philological Society, and the British Academy, and in the establishment of English language and literature as subjects of serious study at the university level.