Chaucer's Knight's Tale and the Work of Mourning

Abstract

In this essay I argue that in the Knight's Tale Chaucer presents a picture of the possibility of accomplishing what Freud has termed "the work of mourning"; to do so he sets out a fantasmatic world of virtuous pagans, because such work cannot in fact be accomplished in the Christian era of the author's time. The funeral and cremation of Arcite provide a starting point; they provide a scene for Chaucer's anthropologically distanced view of the pagan world, and establish a counter-economy to that of the rivalry and competition for a singular, indivisible good—Emily. The private war between Palamon and Arcite exemplifi es, in Bataille's terms, a restricted economy, while the funeral counters it with a general economy of loss and expenditure. But the work of mourning requires more than this. It is the process by which the energy, both social and personal, that has been invested in lost objects becomes reabsorbed by suffering mourners. Such a work of mourning is exemplifi ed in the final speech of Theseus and in the marriage of Palamon and Emily. The achievement of such a work of mourning is contrasted on the one hand with the near limitless need of the dead in the fourteenth century for perpetual grief expressed as prayers for intercession for souls in Purgatory, and on the other with the courtly understanding of a love which survives death forever. The pagan past, then, becomes a place that offers a symbolic solution to the problem of interminable mourning.