Mobility and Identity in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Abstract

Sarah Breckenridge Wright's Mobility and Identity in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a generative, insightful study of movement and mobility in the later Middle Ages. Although focused primarily on the Canterbury Tales, this book should have significant interest for researchers of Chaucer, literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or ecocriticism and the Middle Ages.Wright's central insights arise from the observation that “Chaucer's works are surprisingly kinetic” (p. 4). At first, this may seem like an obvious statement with little surprise because, of course, Chaucer's frame collection revolves around a journey to the Shrine of St. Thomas Becket. However, as Wright searchingly interrogates, many studies focus on place, or the journey, and not on mobility or movement itself. To explore how movement evokes a potentiality for “infinitude and plurality,” Wright draws together several discourses to consider “mobility rather than place” (p. 9). First, Wright elaborates several investigations into matter and movement by medieval thinkers, most notably William of Ockham, who insists on the importance of movement for being and existence. From there, Wright puts these medieval thinkers into conversation with cultural geography and what is termed the “new mobility paradigm,” (p. 9), a strain in recent critical theory (including thinkers like Deleuze, Guattari, and de Certeau) that prioritizes the nomadic over the sedentary. Finally, in addition to medieval and modern understandings of movement, she also draws significantly on ecocritical analyses of nonhuman actants, including object-oriented ontologies, vibrant materialism, and actor-network-theory. By doing so, Wright explores how “mobility offers a powerful means by which to reimagine physical space and challenge traditional hierarchies and hegemonies” (p.18).The first chapter, “Economic Mobilities in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,” explores the tension between mobility and sedentarism, how movement upsets and reorders seemingly stable hierarchies in order to fashion something new. In prioritizing movement, Wright describes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as “a register of fourteenth-century England's itinerant identity” (p. 21). This itinerant identity accompanies the rise and further development of a mercantile economy, where stable places and structures such as the city walls around London and the city of Canterbury as the seat of the Church become more permeable and open to mobilities of all sorts, physical and ideological. In her reading of the Cook's Tale and the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, the city, London in particular, is shown to be “a fractured space defined by unstable relations and difference” (p. 30). These narratives, she argues, portray mobility as something disruptive and disorderly, hostile to various social orders. The Cook and the Canon's Yeoman each tell tales where new economic practices are made legible through an emphasis on mobility and movement and are subsequently judged and rendered threatening. However, although these London narratives posit movement as dangerous, the frame narrative, as Wright demonstrates, contains this threatening potentiality by recognizing mobility as an opportunity. Where the Cook and Canon's Yeoman illustrate the potential threat of economic mobilities in their tales, as pilgrims they harness and exploit these same forces; Roger of Ware, a notably disorderly and diseased cook, enables the entire pilgrimage through both the continuation of the tale-telling game and by cooking and preparing food, and similarly, the Canon's Yeoman “offers a redemptive take on economic mobilities, as he abandons the perpetuum mobile of the alchemy lab for the Canterbury pilgrimage” (p. 47). Separating the Canterbury pilgrimage frame from its tales, therefore, Wright distinguishes between an “errant mobility” and a “mobility that operates according to a given structure/vector” (p. 48). That is to say, mobilities without purpose are compared to mobilities as an organizing principle, a generative and productive movement that refigures identity and communal practice.This chapter closes with an evocative reading of the places mentioned in the frame narrative. Rather than focusing on a stable sense of place such as London or Canterbury itself, Wright observes how Chaucer's pilgrims draw attention instead to the locales of Sittingbourne, Rochester, and Harbledown, three towns that developed as a result of mobile bodies, because of a nascent tourist industry born out of pilgrimage economies. These sites are waystations on the road, spaces that foreground physical, economic, and spiritual mobilities. As Wright concludes, “[b]y absenting authorizing sites and telling tales in the spaces between, Chaucer does not dislocate authority altogether, but instead relocates it in mobile bodies and the economies, geographies, and discourses they generate” (p. 57, emphasis in original). This insight animates everything else that follows—authority and identity comes not from stasis or hierarchy, but rather from the movements in between, the kinetic travelings of actants (bodies, objects, ideas, texts) across multiple networks.Perhaps the most provocative and intriguing chapter in this book is chapter two, “Building Bridges to Canterbury.” Continuing work begun at the end of the preceding chapter, Wright focuses less here on the Canterbury Tales, and instead examines the environment that existed outside of the frame narrative. Much like how the towns that developed on the way to Canterbury emphasize multiple mobilities, bridges are not static locations, but are instead “better understood to be kinetic in place” (p. 70, emphasis in original). Drawing on Latour's actor-network-theory, Wright considers bridges as examples of “‘natureculture’ that commingle human/nonhuman movement and architectural stasis, and in so doing bear witness to the profound hybridity of the Middle Ages” (p. 60). Though not explicitly referenced in the Canterbury Tales, bridges here serve as a focal point that illuminates how Chaucer's text bristles with hybridity: between frame and tale, frame and outside world, and the liminal places between London and Canterbury.Wright emphasizes the fluidic rather than lithic (or sedentary) nature of bridges, often swaying as they do over water. The heart of the chapter provides microhistories of two specific bridges: Rochester and London. The town of Rochester is referenced in the frame narrative, yet Rochester Bridge, which would most likely have been traversed, remains a present absence. She explores how Rochester Bridge, as a space between, suspended in place over fluidic currents, not only enables mobilities of all sorts, but also regulates and structures—there is only one way over a bridge, as opposed to the errant possibilities of water. “Such mobilities,” she argues, “came to define England and its people, locating medieval identities (like the bridges across which they were played out) in a hybrid category that at once represented humankind's freedom to move, and the strictures placed upon that movement” (p. 74). With London Bridge, though, the connection between these kinetic spaces and the worlds of the Tales becomes even more explicit. As Wright demonstrates through the Bridgemasters’ account rolls, the London Bridge estate owned numerous shops in Cheapside (p. 75). It seems likely, then, that the Cook is telling the story of a shop that would be paying rent to this estate, just the sort of economic relationship that Chaucer surely would have been aware of given his own personal experience with the London economy. Wright delves deeply into the architectural, symbolic, and economic histories of these two bridges. In doing so, she provides a framework for other such analyses of places in fourteenth-century English literature, focusing on the kinetic hybridities and generative potential of spaces that facilitate movement.The third chapter, “Rocking the Cradle and Quiting the Knight,” returns to the first fragment. While the Cook becomes surprisingly central to the Canterbury Tales in the preceding chapters, here Wright revisits familiar terrain, notably the tensions between order and chaos, rule and disorder as they play out across the narratives told by the Knight, the Miller, and the Reeve. To recast this tension, she examines the series of quiting between these pilgrims as evocative of and constructed by a politics of mobility. The Knight's Tale proves to be dependent on a figuration of chivalry that is both ahistorical and static, “while also leaving little doubt that the Knight is a product of and wholly committed to this stasis” (p. 92). The mobile potential of Theban and Amazonian bodies are continuously contained throughout the narrative. In contrast, the Miller and the Reeve subvert and reject the regulatory impulse of the Knight, opting instead for a perspective where “movement empowers the mobile body and instability and dispersal are generative rather than destructive” (p. 106).The final chapter, “‘Translating’ Female Bodies and (En)Gendering Mobility,” brings together the several different configurations of movement and mobility throughout the book in order to recast some of the central questions of the Clerk's Tale and Griselda. Wright rereads Griselda's submission as a persistent act of yielding—that is to say, a choice “resulting in a surplus of movement” (p. 131). Attending to this surplus allows Wright to demonstrate how Griselda, as an agentive being, “denies the notion of sealed identities, and destabilizes the terms that characterize her—obedient (4.230), meek (4.538), patient (4.624)—and the frameworks that seek to contain her” (p. 132). The chapter, then, is structured by tracing Griselda's hypermobility across several different registers, including the geographic, the religious, the textual, and the ecological. In each instance, her steadfastness is read as mobility, complicating and subverting the Petrarchan desire to fix Griselda in time and space. For example, Wright describes how Chaucer untethers Griselda from universal frameworks and puts her story on the road, in flux, thereby challenging static hierarchies (p. 166). Like bridges and waterways, the road proves to be a liminal space that at once structures and makes possible multiplicity and hybridity: nomadic rather than sedentary, fluidic rather than lithic, and permeable bodies rather than static, closed systems. Through the figure of Griselda, Wright reads the multiplicities that cohere in an identity that is on the move.While Mobility and Identity in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales focuses on a handful of narratives, Wright keenly demonstrates how prioritizing mobility and movement from the vantage points of cultural geography and ecocriticism unveil how the seeming fixity of places and of bodies instead gives way to kinetic hybridities. One wonders what new insights this approach might yield for other mobile and itinerant figures, such as Dorigen, Constance, the Prioress's little clergeon, or even someone like Gawain.