The Color Purple and the Patient Griselda

Abstract

Chaucer's Clerk's Tale is a retelling of a popular medieval tale. story of patient Griselda, whose husband Walter tests her by his pretense of killing her children, casting her away, and calling her back only to prepare the house for his new wife, circulated in Italian, Latin, French, and English versions in the Middle Ages, giving even its tellers pause as they confronted the story's treachery and brutality. Boccaccio's Dioneo warns his listeners that this story will have non cosa magnifica ma una matta bestialita (nothing magnificent, but rather a foolish brutality) (Boccaccio 539); Petrarch is careful to disclaim any intention of induc[ing] the women of our time to imitate the patience of this wife (Petrarch 138); Chaucer's Clerk interrupts his tale several times to criticize Walter's excesses: O nedelees was she tempted in assay! / But wedded men ne knowe no mesure / Whan that they fynde a pacient creature (Robinson 621-23).1 Our evidence of the medieval (male) audience's reaction to the story also indicates fairly widespread repugnance: at least one reader was too disbelieving to be impressed, one was disgusted, and the third was overwhelmed by emotion, presumably a sign of reluctant appreciation (Carruthers 221-22). As Carruthers remarks, The tale seems always to have left some of its readers in a state of puzzlement and with a feeling of distaste (222). Nevertheless, Griselda's story remained popular in the Middle Ages, perhaps horrifying generations of female listeners with its suggestion of a constant, implicit threat of a woman's dispossession from her own home by her own husband (Ellis, Treachery). And if medieval audiences were nonplussed by this tale, modern ones-as any teacher of Chaucer can attest-are often appalled. Yet the Clerk's Tale, as I hope to show, has a modern analogue in the recent novel Color Purple, a book which also has elicited simultaneous reactions of revulsion and popularity. range of response within these two sets of audience, medieval and modern, are themselves analogous to the different perspectives of Chaucer and of Alice Walker. Gender differences, as much as historical separation, dictate the idiosyncrasies and emphases of these two writers. Nonetheless, the continuities that have survived bear witness to the story's intrinsic fascination.