Ethics, Antisemitism and The Prioress’s Tale: A Reparative Approach

Abstract

ABSTRACTResponding to debates about “the way we read now,” I propose a reparative reading of Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale: a text that, as an antisemitic child-murder narrative from the Middle Ages, offers special interpretive and ethical problems. I seek to demonstrate the usefulness of psychoanalytic concepts as uniquely capable of effecting progress in the face of aporia. My reading reveals the tale to be “about” its own ethical failure: a failure that coincides with its attempt to dispense with the figure of “the Jew,” here formulated in relation to the necessity of submitting to moral Law. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Klein and Freud, on Kantian ethics, and on Fackenheim’s understanding of tikkun, my reading focuses on the tale’s prologue and conclusion, as well as the link between the child’s miraculous singing and the grain that is placed in his mouth by the Virgin Mary. I also discuss the tale’s major intertexts: Psalm 8, the “Alma redemptoris mater,” and to a lesser extent the opening of Dante’s Paradiso 33.