Desire in the Canterbury tales

Abstract

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