The Pardoner and the Prioress

Bracketing the Shipman's Tale (wherein the questions of sex and money dealt with more disturbingly or didactically in the surrounding tales receive a more lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek treatment), I want to see what happens when we align the Pardoner's and the Prioress's tales. These two make for an odd couple indeed, with agendas, mentalities and narrative styles in more or less direct conflict. The Prioress straightforwardly and sentimentally advances ideas and themes that the Pardoner thoroughly and systematically unsettles: the stability and effectivity of language, seen in the ability of the little clergeon's song to name and evoke the Virgin whom he praises; the possibility of a miraculous triumph over death, denied to the Pardoner's deluded rioters but achieved by the Prioress's little hero; and the validity of relics, affirmed at the end of the Prioress's tale when the "litel body sweete" (682) is apparently enshrined as such. Also, there seems to be an unusually pronounced gender differential between the two. Despite (or because of?) his ostensible emasculation, the Pardoner seems to possess a thoroughly and exclusively masculine imagination. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think his is the only tale we've seen so far without a single identifiable female character. This makes the contrast with the Prioress's Tale all the more dramatic; not only does a woman narrate this tale, she does so in the name of and with constant reference to another woman, the Virgin Mary.

This point highlights the larger point of contrast and connection that I want to discuss. The Virgin is the ultimate embodiment of (pure and non-sexual) fertility: "the roote / Of bountee," as the Prioress calls her (465-466). Unfolding thus under the sign of the "mooder Mayde, . . . mayde Mooder" (467), the Prioress's Tale dwells recurrently on related themes and ideas of inspiration, growth, and rejuvenation: the Prioress's opening appeal for divine guidance in her "song" (487), the schoolhouse setting and emphasis on education, the centrality of the figure of the innocent child (Lee Edelman and reproductive futurism, anyone?), the movement from death into life, and above all the miraculous song seeded into the dying body of the boy by the "greyn" (662) planted on his tongue by "Cristes mooder" (656). In its emphasis on the miracle and mystery of fertility, of the ability of seeds to animate life and words in apparently dead matter, the Prioress's Tale thus connects right back to those famous opening lines of the General Prologue.

Seed, however, is, if we take seriously the Host's threat to his testicles or Chaucer's earlier implication that said testicles were absent to begin with, exactly what the Pardoner lacks. The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale emphasize sterility, not fertility; the "venym" of the Pardoner's words (421) and the "poysoun" featured in his tale (867) instead of divine inspiration, miraculous "greyn," or shoures soote. If the Virgin Mother praised by the Prioress is the root of spiritual bounty, the material bounty unearthed in the Pardoner's Tale yields only death, and the only root the Pardoner describes is the radix malorum, cupiditas. The Pardoner's repetitive fixation on that theme - "My theme is alwey oon, and evere was" (333); "Therefore my theme is yet, and evere was" (425) - itself demonstrates his sterility and lack of spiritual/linguistic seed. 

And yet it can just as easily be said of the little clergeon that his theme is always one, and ever was. Alma redemptoris comes to be every bit as repetitive and monotonous as was Radix malorum est cupiditas, and if the little clergeon supposedly recites his formula with all the authenticity and guilelessness that the Pardoner so conspicuously lacks, he also does so "by rote" (545), without comprehending what his words mean. The ability of this rote formula still to convey meaning and achieve its effect thus echoes the ability of the Pardoner's empty words to inspire belief and contrition in others. And if we note that, we must also note that, among these two speakers, it is the sole prerogative of the supposedly sterile Pardoner to bring about repentance and change. The Prioress describes a remarkably flat and static world: the Jews (and Satan) are evil and irredeemable, while the Christians are pure and sinless. The "grete mercy" of God that the Prioress ends by invoking (689) actually has no place in her story; it is not permitted to the demonic Jews and not needed by the innocent clergeon or his pure and blameless coreligionists. The Prioress refuses to recognize or acknowledge the broader possibilities of the fertility, potentiality, and openness to change that she invokes. Repentance, conversion, and the movement from sin to grace apparently have no reality or at least no necessity for her - as they do, in a perverse but compelling way, to her otherwise sterile and seedless counterpart.