The Envoy of the Clerk's Tale: A Farewell to Arms

I can't get over that envoy to the Clerk's Tale, which vaulted an already sophisticated and fascinating story into some transcendent level of narrative art. The tale of Griselda is a masterpiece: gripping in its own right and replete with the rich political significance and allegorical symbolism that we discussed on Monday (and that themselves, in their Boccaccian and Petrarchan manifestations, point in different directions, both of which Chaucer nonetheless manages to render simultaneously plausible in his telling). To conclude such an absorbing, shocking, infuriating story with such a boisterous and satiric coda, one that almost seems to undermine everything that precedes it, is a stroke of genius - and like all real strokes of genius, it more or less defies interpretation.

The opening lines of the envoy would be astonishing enough by themselves: "Griselde is deed and eek hire pacience, / And bothe atones buryed in Ytaille" (1177-1178). In the way in which it unceremoniously shoves our sentimental, sympathetic heroine under the ground, this beginning is almost ruthless. Beyond its brusque disposal of the story's protagonist, the envoy also disposes of the exemplary/allegorical significance and didactic force that the Clerk, following Petrarch, has only recently broached. Granted, the Clerk specifically disclaims only a reading of his tale that would make it a model for matrimonial behavior, but the envoy is so insistently playful, with its show-off rhyme scheme and increasingly comic or extravagant images, that not just this specific didactic meaning but all exemplary or allegorical readings (the very idea of exemplum?) come to seem ridiculous. "[L]at us stynte of ernestful matere," indeed (1175).

Which is not to say that the envoy doesn't make a serious point, just that this point isn't something simplistic and edifying (on the order of "wives should endure their husbands' authority as patiently as Griselda, or even "all human beings should endure the inscrutable acts of God as patiently as Griselda"). The envoy begins with a relatively straightforward warning against confusing life and literature, or directly translating literature to life (an important warning for some on the pilgrimage: witness the Reeve). It warns also, and at the same time, against the unbridled exercise of masculine authority in marriage, another relatively straightforward and unambiguous injunction. But from here, as the same rhymes repeat again and again, giving the little poem an increasingly comic and artificial air, things get steadily less serious. The legitimate admonition to married men (and political leaders?) to not act like Walter becomes a call for women to rhetorically defend themselves against misogynist "auctoritee," to talk back and wield "governaille" (1190), and finally to wage metaphorical warfare against their husbands and reduce them to misery. Round about the entry of the cow Chichevache (1188), this has all become visibly tongue-in-cheek, and by the time we get to the overblown depiction of marriage as a Hundred Years' War battle, with wives piercing husbands with "[t]he arwes of thy crabbed eloquence" like longbowmen mowing down knights at Crecy or Poitiers (1203), its burlesque qualities are patent. 

That the Clerk doesn't seriously make a case for women running marriages and hectoring the life out of their husbands is not a surprise. But I don't think the comic absurdity of these stanzas has the effect of putting women back in their place, either. These absurd images of warfare between wives and husbands instead point to the absurdity of seeing matrimony as warfare - maybe even the absurdity of strife between two people who should, in the eyes of God and men, be one flesh (something that various speakers in the Merchant's Tale will reiterate). As Jason points out in his recent post, Chaucer has gradually been developing a picture of the reciprocity necessary to marriage. In The Wife of Bath's and Clerk's tales, both parties must negotiate their positions, modify their behavior, or at least prove their worthiness. The best marriages (the Wife of Bath's with Jankyn after its crisis, for example) are founded on some sense of cooperation and equality. Through and beneath its satirical scenes of matrimonial warfare and male misery, I think the Clerk's envoy makes a similar point. Differences in power, age, temperament, or other factors that might lead to such opposition and conflict have no place in marriage and must be reciprocally worked out should they arise. 

And by making this point by wildly exaggerating it, the Clerk also follows the model of the Wife of Bath, who, as I see it, cloaked a similar plea - for reciprocity, parity, and harmony in marriage - in a similarly boisterous, comic, deliberately overstated manner (at times, anyway). So in claiming that he speaks "for the Wyves love of Bathe" (1170) when he satirizes her demand for female governance in marriage (a demand that I don't think was entirely serious even in her articulation of it), the Clerk speaks the plain truth. I think he does in fact honor Alison of Bath by making a similar point in a similar style.