“Burn all he has, but keep his books”: Gloria Naylor and the Proper Objects of Feminist Chaucer Studies

Abstract

Abstract Through a reading of Gloria Naylor's 1992 novel Bailey's Cafe, this article asks whether feminist scholarship can engage Chaucer without reproducing the misogynist and white supremacist values that shape the canon and his central place in it. By evoking and undercutting references to the Canterbury Tales in Bailey's Cafe, Naylor's literary allusion both illuminates how a desire for Chaucer shapes interpretation and reframes Chaucer's text in terms of its relation to Naylor's novel and African-American literary traditions. Following the intersectional feminist methodology proposed in Bailey's Cafe, this article centers Naylor's medievalism in feminist medieval studies of the early 1990s and reads the Franklin's Tale for its allusions to Bailey's Cafe. Ultimately, it concludes that proper objects for new feminist approaches to Chaucer include the sources suppressed in the Canterbury Tales and the legacies of black feminist thought elided in our own critical genealogies.