Monday, May 18, 2009

Chaucer's Clerk's Tale: a Seminar Starter

“Chaucer and Everyday Death: The Clerk’s Tale, Burial, and the Subject of Poverty” by Kathy Lavezzo

Critical Summary:
Kathy Lavezzo suggests that “the notion of universal death was a late-medieval commonplace,” which found representation in such things as: “sculpture, the visual arts and literature of the Dance of Death” (295-96). Both the ClP and the ClT discuss this universal claim. According to Lavezzo, Chaucer is following Petrarch, as one of his sources for his re-telling of the Griselda story. Still, the discussion of death—as—leveler performed, according to Lavezzo, “other social functions” (296). Citing E. P. Thomson and David Wallace, Lavezzo seems to move beyond religious fear and persuasion for control to suggest that Chaucer cared for the peasant class. In fact, Chaucer privileges the notion of a universal death to suggest that it really does not exist; i.e. death, though it happens to all, cannot be appropriated to function the same way to all. To Lavezzo’s credit then, “Chaucer raises the idea of a universal death only to undermine it,” and upon a close examination of the Griselda story seeks to uncover this in her five sections below. Before we get to that, however, Lavezzo engages us with what feminist readings regard as “gender resistance” only to add to it her own branding of another “more material type of resistance” (298). She claims that “povre” Griselda registers her peasant estate via “fatal maternal losses” and as a “subject of poverty” (299) and when death re-visits her throughout the tale with the taking away of her children, it is not a leveler per se. It is her material oppression, or her lack of material possession that Lavezzo begins to claim has a visible “vantage point” (299) when focused on Griselda’s poor recollection. As Christian ideology is invoked in the ClT, Lavezzo further notes that the lack of protection afforded to Griselda’s children via burial rites (a claim that she will later make is “standard” to Christians, but unfulfilled in Church practice), reminds Griselda of her indigent peasantry; and, moreover, the treatment of the peasant in death is related with the treatment of the peasant in life. This Lavezzo offers as the “politics of burial” (299). Before launching into the “how,” Lavezzo initiates her motive to “shed new light” on the “social Chaucer” (taken, as she notes, from Paul Strohm’s Social Chaucer) by focusing on the quotidian, the everyday affairs of Griselda and possibly her example as “peasant agency” (300).

I: The Rhetoric of the Leveler
. Lavezzo opens with the disclaimer, “The rhetoric of universal death has a long history,” which extends from Horace into the Medium Aevum and the Enlightenment period. She offers that death visits everyone, especially in moments of pestilence. Moving beyond revisionist criticism, which support death’s universal claim, Lavezzo here is interested in separating ideation (perhaps, called theory) from actual, from “death as medieval reality” (301). This is her attempt to smell the fecal matter of death; to taste and touch and hold, if not grasp at it. In times of pestilence then, all are affected. Lavezzo, comparing both the dans macabre and the 1381 Rebellion, offers this. Moreover, Lavezzo suggests: “If the discourse of the leveler satirized the proud and wealthy, it also fostered complaisance among the poor” (302). In citing Villon and Myrc, she recognizes in the first, the use of the leveler as a move from the indigent self to a blessing; in the second, the leveler is used as a way to view the corpse toward a humble life, ensuring “their soul’s redemption” (302). The role of a universal death here offered two things: an attack on “the hierarchical world” as well as the “stifling of peasant discontent” (302). Lavezzo then reiterates her point that “the ideology of the great leveler” is not commensurate with the actual, the real-life death of the medieval people. She then gives example of death associated with the disadvantaged, taken from Carmichael’s work on the Black Death and the lazaretti, or plague hospitals. In short, the very plague hospitals came into existence when the need arose; the need arose because wealthy Florentines departed, leaving the urban poor; no work, no money, no food. Still, she asserts that this example contrasts death as leveler, and in fact, suggests death’s affinity for the indigent despite “universal images of death […] and modern scholarship” (303). Two final thoughts are offered by Lavezzo in this section: first, “death in the Middle Ages was not universal”; second, the “rhetoric of death—as—leveler is profoundly challenged by the social renunciations it entails” (304).

II: “Povre” Griselda. In this section, Lavezzo is convinced that Griselda’s new clothes and new location, “an emperoures halle,” (which proves to be more like an emperoures helle) might offer, on the surface, a change, but instead suggests a Griselda, who “never relinquishes her identity as a ‘povre womman’” (305). She then claims that though both Walter and Griselda exist as chasm opposites, in terms of estate class distinctions, “there has yet to appear in Chaucer studies” a comprehensive examination regarding the “figure of poverty in The Clerk’s Tale” (305). Lavezzo admits that the ClT records accurately Chaucer’s depiction of peasant and rural life. On page 306 then, she takes up the argument in some detail suggesting a “social Chaucer” who departs from his sources, only to offer: “how medieval rural life was filled with labor and devoid of proper sustenance and suitable housing” (306). By focusing on the death of children (infanticide), Lavezzo recalls such disasters as: the Hundred Years’ War, the famine of 1315-17 as well as the plague of 1349-50. She then proceeds to have a “what if moment” beginning at “But due to close quarters, an inadequate diet” (307) and so on, until the end of the paragraph. In support of her earlier claim that death was in fact no leveler (when applied to medieval real life), she attempts to make a link between dispossessed, peasant mother and Griselda’s loss of child in support of “other hardships faced”; hardships, beyond death as leveler (308). Lavezzo then moves into describing Griselda’s “complex gesture” of cross-signing at the moment her baby girl is to be taken away. She suggests that the signing is not in association with “an oppressive ideology of death” (think back to E. P. Thomson), but rather in support of “spiritual significance” (309). This significance takes, amidst many shapes, the shape of Griselda’s transcended, indigent self into what Lavezzo calls “a daughter of Christ or a type of the Virgin” (309). Taking a cue from John Boswell, Lavezzo continues her discussion of “povre” Griselda in terms of tokens as material offerings. In short, she had none to give her children, but the sign of the cross. This only reaffirmed her peasant estate even as a Marquess, and further reaffirmed “her doomed daughter’s peasant heritage” (310). This section ends with Lavezzo suggesting, “Griselda remakes the Christian economy of suffering” (311) even though she cannot save her daughter by quietly signing on her child[ren]. And, by doing so, “Griselda,” Lavezzo argues: “registers the intimate connection between the problems of impoverishment, child abandonment, and infanticide” (312).

III: Burial and Indigent Vulnerability. Lavezzo claims that Griselda is indeed anxious, regardless of her rather stoic appearance, when her children are taken away and led to death. Chaucer, in going beyond his sources, pays close attention to Griselda’s concern for their burial, a protective space away from beasts and birds (of prey). Due to such a concern, Lavezzo suggests “Griselda’s woe,” “Griselda’s anxiety” help to undermine “the idea of a leveling death” (313). In terms of the Second Coming, Lavezzo relies on Augustine, Ariès and Bynum to tease out medieval concerns “between the dead’s interment and their bodies’ resurrection” (314). Those (properly) buried were ready to meet their Maker, while the “ill-prepared,” or non-buried and openly rotting folk, were not. What is at stake then is how non-burial may “seriously jeopardize their final adoption by Christ” (315). She further comments on the disparity between Church practice and Church doctrine in terms of burial rites for Christians; where Griselda is a Christian then, burial is her rite and “supports the notion of death as a moment of social leveling,” but she cannot even guarantee this for her children much less herself (315). Lavezzo continues with the obvious disparities between the place of burial as well as the way one is to be buried. Anxieties felt by the indigent peasantry were well supported. As Lavezzo put it: “the most likely category of person to die in the Middle Ages” was “a member of the group least likely to receive a proper burial” (316). Moreover, those who could afford it, and were afforded coffins, Lavezzo insists, “the Clerk attributes the privilege of protection to the upper classes” (317). She ends this section suggesting that the “coffin” and the “cofre” extend the upper class stratification of privilege, and further seeks to widen the gap between the peasantry and the aristocracy. At one point, Lavezzo reminds us of the Clerk’s portrait and his possession of “but a litel gold in cofre” (GP 298). In support of Jill Mann, even this seems to point, or rather reflect an authenticity by Chaucer to portray the poor.

IV: Everyday Death and Guild Culture. Lavezzo opens with a reminder of the power of “chesting,” or what to her Chaucer seems to be doing for those who have “the power to ‘chest’” (321). Admittedly, she declares, “Chaucer points […] to a contradiction in a religious ideology intended to manage the peasantry” (321). The contradiction? That “imbalances” exist and off-set any creature comforts afforded by burial of the peasantry in death, or in the after-life. In short, it was a constant reminder to the un-interred, and proved problematic to what Lavezzo calls, “the loyal subject in medieval Christian society” (322). Lavezzo runs with this into the folds of a child-less Griselda, then shifts into a discourse on Guilds and their relevance to The Canterbury Tales (Tales), which stem from “an anxiety over the care of the dead” (322). Citing Chaucerians, Lindhall and Wallace, Lavezzo gives credit to the link between guilds and Chaucer; specifically, when citing Wallace on “his provisional effort to connect guild emphasis on death,” (323) the Pardoner, the Summoner and even The Friar’s Tale are used, but to Lavezzo—it is The Clerk’s Tale, which “offers us our most powerful link” between the Tales and “medieval guild culture” (323). Again, Chaucer’s “representation through Griselda” may have been the “very impetus” for the creation “of many guilds in the fourteenth century” (323). Lavezzo seeks to prove this via historical account (Richard II solicitation in 1389) and Hanawalt’s assertions on “guild functions” (323). She then goes into the care-taking duties such guilds performed: body retrieval, funeral attendance, financial assistance and so on. The point she makes here is that burial was a business and being a member of a guild could assuage medieval peasantry anxieties associated with such burial practices. Moreover, Lavezzo points out: “guild membership provided much-needed financial aid that inadvertently acknowledged social inequities”; both for the living as well as the dead (324). Again, Lavezzo seems to use this information to point out: that “death reasserted rather than leveled the material distinctions between the privileged and the disadvantaged” (325).

V: Unearthing Chaucer’s Object Lessons. Holding onto her conjectures “about the significance of a historical parallel between the guilds and the subject of burial in The Clerk’s Tale,” Lavezzo uses this section to launch into “Chaucerian sympathy” and borrows Strohm’s nomenclature of “the social Chaucer” (325). She acknowledges that in times past, there was a tradition to hold Chaucer as detached from the hardships of late medieval life. In this section, Lavezzo seeks to move beyond that thinking and bring in a Chaucer who is very much in tune, in step with such a society. Moreover, she relies on “A growing body of criticism” (325) beyond Kittredge, which challenges Chaucerian detachment; further still, it is this “important scholarship,” which “identify Chaucer’s literary work as encompassing multiple discourses, some of them liberatory” (326). In short, she is in agreement that Chaucer cares, and cares “about the commons,” but “to claim that he supports peasant agency is another” thing altogether (326). Lavezzo seeks to do this. By examining Chaucer’s use of the quotidian, the everyday aspects and associations in medieval life, peasant agency can be represented. The purpose, to provide insight or thought “about power and disenfranchisement” (327). Lavezzo claims that Chaucer, “Primarily through his depiction of material goods,…reveals his own investment in peasant agency” (327). Through “material goods,” Lavezzo claims that resistance, subtle ones are privileged. They may in fact be secret, hidden. She ends with Chaucer’s “interest in how the disadvantaged can point to contradictions within a powerful and oppressive Christian culture of death” (328) as well as how, such disenfranchised people groups are themselves members, “living and dying,” (329) as sites of quotidian contestation.

Larger Issues:
--Estate Discourse Satire (commentary on social mobility); Death and Knowledge (i.e. being in the know) as power dynamics; Christian ideology (practice v. doctrine); Social Chaucer v. Detached Chaucer (artist); Guild Formation (14th century clubs and rites of the disadvantaged); Marriage Commentary (a little uncertain about this one because neither Walter nor Griselda reflect an ideal, but seem to suggest the excess, the incorrect).

Illuminations:
Tha article provides a historical backdrop, which serve as a midrashic filler to the tale. For instance, background information on guild formation, burial practice as a business as well as a return to the Tales GP describing the Clerk’s portrait and his “cofre” (l. 298). These help to illuminate both ClP and ClT; moreover, Lavezzo’s insistence on the “social Chaucer” presents a reading of ClT which presents new light on the quotidian spaces, places of interaction—the middle of everyday representation.

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