The Yeoman's Canon: On Toxic Mentors

Abstract

The Yeoman's Canon:On Toxic Mentors Micah James Goodrich Beneath the writing on the wallis the writing it was designed to obscure. The two togetherform a third kind1 When a complaint is stripped of its legal fetters it is a lamentation. In fourteenth-century Middle English the verb compleinen meant both to grieve and to make a formal accusation or appeal.2 Complaint reflects the shadows of Latin complangere (com-[with] + plangere [to strike, beat oneself, mourn]) and French complaindre (from plaindre [weep, complain]), which highlight its deep association with lamentation. Pain made manifest. For a medieval audience, the Christian Latin planctus, past participle of plangere, captures the salvific stakes of publicizing lament. Making pain manifest is contingent on pain's disclosure to another. According to the Dictionnaire du moyen français, the medieval French verb plaindre means "manifester sa peine par des pleurs, des lamentations" (to manifest your pain through tears, lamentations).3 Elaine Scarry's formulation of pain as a destroyer of language suggests that complaint is "in many ways the nonpolitical equivalent of confession."4 However, as I show in this essay, complaint—as lamentation, legal redress, or confession—is political. [End Page 297] As Wendy Scase explains, when complaint is used in literature it concerns "the responsibilities of those in power to deliver social justice" and "becomes a metaphor for social processes and relationships."5 The politicization of complaint reveals the pain of abusive power structures. As a form of social disclosure, complaint percolates when consent is blurred, invalidated, or violated between people. Sara Ahmed's recent work on complaint has suggested that when the abuse of power is challenged through complaint, communities learn about power.6 Further, when our lamentations for redress and responsibility go unnoticed (or unmet), we still learn about power: "not being accommodated can be pedagogy."7 Chaucer was interested in the messiness of complaint. This brief essay turns to Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale (CYPT) to examine how the abuse of power of a mentee (Yeoman) by a mentor (Canon) forces the victim to choose between the false protection of silence and the public disclosure of complaint. This choice is muddied in operations of consent politics because both actions place the burden of speech on the victim. I trace the Yeoman's decision to make the pain of violated consent manifest. In CYPT we see how an abusive mentor's misinterpretation of consent is based entirely on his fear that his actions will be made public. The Canon is afraid that the Yeoman's disclosure of their toxic working relationship is dangerous to his reputation and so he constructs his mentee's complaint as slander. Abusers contort consent by keeping their actions quiet: when a victim reveals abuse, the abuser claims the victim is speaking without their consent. Through this misdirection the abuser shows the design by which they held the victim's consent hostage to begin with.8 [End Page 298] The Yeoman becomes a vector of complaint as his livelihood is volleyed between two patriarchs: the Canon and the Host. Chaucer's CYPT is not the only relationship with a power problem among the pilgrims (consider the Prioress and the Second Nun, and the Prioress and the Nun's Priest, and even the Parson and the Plowman). Yet, CYPT is singular in that it depicts a work-based relationship between a mentor and his mentee. The title alone, "the prologe of the chanons yemannes tale" (Ellesmere MS, fol. 192r), suggests the possessive power between the two: the Yeoman belongs to the Canon. The Yeoman's relationship with his mentor is marked by community isolation, silencing, and lethal working conditions. When the Yeoman threatens disclosure, the Canon tries to silence him: "spek no wordes mo."9 Yet the Host encourages the Yeoman to continue his complaint, no matter what happens: "telle on, what so bityde" (CYP, 697). The Canon's eventual desertion of the pilgrimage stokes the fire that inflames the Yeoman's complaint. It is the abusive relationship between mentor and mentee that unveils the alchemical nature inherent in their work; the Yeoman's complaint makes manifest the toxicity of...