Chaucerian Obscenity

ABSTRACT

What does “Chaucerian” mean today? As a noun, it refers to those who imitate, admire, or study the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. As an adjective, it can describe anything related to Chaucer’s works, or an unspecified quality that is judged to be characteristic of Chaucer’s work. This latter meaning leads to new questions, the first of which is that of precisely how one determines what is distinctive about or distinctively reminiscent of Chaucer’s writing. While answers to such questions may depend on direct familiarity with Chaucer’s works, they can also be the product of much more amorphous, nonspecific notions of what seems like Chaucer, notions that are themselves frequently received second- or third-hand from sources ranging from movies to historical fiction to comic books. Fifteenth-century readers would have associated Chaucer’s name with eloquence in English, even if they had only read his name in the works of those poets inspired by him. Modern teachers and students of Chaucer might know him best for his irony or for his portraits of pilgrims drawn from different levels of medieval society. For those familiar with Paul Bettany’s portrayal of the author in the 2001 film A Knight’s Tale, the name of Chaucer is likely to evoke memories of mischief and spectacle (not to mention unexpected moments of nudity).

This special issue focuses on one of the many qualities that have been linked to Chaucer’s name and works over the centuries: obscenity. The word is, of course, a postmedieval term, first attested in the late sixteenth century.¹ Its precise etymology is uncertain: it may derive from Latin caenum (filth, mud) or—as Robert Graves suggested in his essay on “Poetry and Obscenity”—from Latin scaenus and Greek skene (scene), an etymology that evokes the idea of the obscene as something that belongs “offstage” but which is made the center of attention.² What constitutes obscenity varies from one context to another, encompassing different forms of taboo violation even within a single historical period. As Nicola McDonald has pointed out in her work on medieval obscenity, “the obscene remains a loose and fuzzy category”; as one moves between periods and cultures,

McDonald’s reference to the sexual and scatological reflects obscenity’s most common associations in contemporary Western culture. But, as Geoffrey Hughes has observed, the meanings of obscenity and obscene have undergone considerable semantic evolution, shifting from “a basic sense of religious violation” toward an emphasis on perceived “sexual depravity or extreme vulgarity.”⁴ While the sexual and the scatological could indeed be viewed as obscene in certain medieval contexts, Nicole Nolan Sidhu has shown that “the strictly hierarchical culture of the Middle Ages also invests disobedience and resistance to the established order with a level of obscenity equal to the display of lower body functions, body parts, or sexual acts.” Indeed, “The equivalence medieval culture makes between sexual obscenity and resistance to authority is witnessed in the way that obscene comedy often depicts the two qualities together,” which may partially explain how a figure like the Wife of Bath has been lumped together with the Miller, Reeve, and Cook over the centuries.⁵ The meaning of obscenity continues to evolve in the present day, when phenomena such as gender-based violence, racial discrimination, or even excessive wealth might be labeled “obscene.”

The obscenity on which this issue focuses relates to such socially taboo subjects as sex, genitalia, bodily functions, and scatology, as well as resistance to authority—in other words, what Chaucer himself refers to as harlotrie (foul jesting, scurrility, a dirty story) in the Miller’s Prologue, when he warns his audience to turn over the leaf and choose another tale if they might be offended by tales like those of the Miller and Reeve:⁶

While the Miller’s rebellion against both social hierarchy and the Host’s authority might strike medieval audiences as socially taboo, the above passage primarily seems intended to serve as a kind of disclaimer for the three fabliaux that follow in Fragment I, which are ascribed to the “cherl[s]” who tell them rather than to the pilgrim narrator who reports them. But, by this point in history, fabliaux were not so much shocking as they were outmoded: they had originated in twelfth-century France and their popularity had peaked in the thirteenth century, though Giovanni Boccaccio experimented with the genre in his Decameron. The fact that only one fabliau in English, Dame Sirith, is known to survive from before Chaucer’s lifetime has led many to label Chaucer the creator of the fabliau in English, despite the fact that he appears to take such pains in this and other passages to dissociate himself from the kind of content characteristic of the genre.

The dual aim of the articles included in “Chaucerian Obscenity” is to look closely at the phenomenon of obscenity in Chaucer’s works and to uncover the history of how obscenity is and has been judged to be Chaucerian since his death in 1400. The above passage from the Miller’s Prologue notwithstanding, the association between obscenity and Chaucer’s name can be traced back at least as far as the early fifteenth century, when John Lydgate referred to Chaucer’s fabliaux as “ribaudye” (“bawdy speech,” “ribaldry”):⁸

Whereas Chaucer’s disclaimer focused on forestalling potential offense, Lydgate’s reference to the fabliaux of Fragment I places more emphasis on the harmless intent behind the tales: “To make laughter in the companye.”

While it is true that the bulk of Chaucer’s obscene language and content can be found in the comedy of his fabliaux, it is not always a laughing matter. The Host’s threat to cut off the Pardoner’s “coillons” and enshrine them “in an hogges toord” (VI 952–55) is, as Mark Allen has observed, an example of violent rather than comic scatology.¹⁰ On the other hand, the Host’s remark to Chaucer that his “drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord” (VII 930) may be insulting, but it serves as a comical interlude between the absurd Tale of Sir Thopas and the gravitas of Melibee. And while the rape jokes of the Reeve’s Tale may have struck some as merry in the past, present-day scholarship is inclined to see them for what they are: examples of how a man’s sexual assault of a woman can serve as a device for bonding with or attacking other men.¹¹

Whether comical or shocking, Chaucer’s obscenity has provoked mixed responses from readers over the centuries. Some fifteenth-century scribes who copied the Canterbury Tales toned down its obscenity (as in London, British Library, MS Harley 7333), while others highlighted it by adding bawdy lines to episodes such as the famous conclusion to the Merchant’s Tale.¹² These spurious lines were jettisoned from Caxton’s second edition of the Canterbury Tales (after he had included them in the first edition), but they found their way back into print editions in 1532 and remained there until Thomas Tyrwhitt’s 1775 edition of the Canterbury Tales. Even other, less famously bawdy Chaucerian works did not escape occasional bowdlerization: for example, John Rastell’s edition of the Parliament of Fowls (ca. 1525) rather primly changes “Priapus” to “Priamus.”¹³

Chaucerian obscenity has likewise met with a mixed reception in more recent centuries. While the poet’s bawdy humor has been celebrated in scholarship and in publishers’ blurbs, and even inspired a pornographic homage titled The Ribald Tales of Canterbury (1985), it has also been censored in US schools as recently as 1995, when it was removed from the syllabus of a college prep course at a high school in Illinois.¹⁴ Even beyond the borders of the anglophone world, Chaucer’s obscene language and content have stymied translators and scholars. As Mary Boyle has recently noted, in nineteenth-century Germany Chaucer’s “canonicity mattered, because it was the best defence against charges of obscenity” that might be brought against translations of his work; on the other hand, “that obscenity ran the risk of undermining his canonicity.”¹⁵ In this respect, nineteenth-century German translators of Chaucer seem to have agreed with John Dryden, who took pains to explain to readers in the Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) that when he had gone about deciding which works of Chaucer to translate, he had decided to include only those that “savour nothing of Immodesty.”¹⁶

The articles included in “Chaucerian Obscenity” consider how Chaucer’s obscenity has been received in different contexts over the centuries. Carissa M. Harris writes on obscenity, humor, and masculinity in the Manciple’s Tale, revisiting her concept of “felawe masculinity” in order to consider the dynamics of cuckoldry and intimate partner violence. Harris outlines parallels between a medieval model of masculinity and contemporary incel culture, which “frames women’s erotic choices as a tyrannical force and advocates retaliatory violence.”¹⁷ In their obscene “japing” with one another, the felawes of the Canterbury Tales become bonded through a shared fear of being screwed, literally or figuratively, by both women and other men. The intersection of gender and obscenity is also at the heart of Kristen Haas Curtis’s essay on two versions of the ballad known as The Wanton Wife of Bath, which was popular in the eighteenth century. The balladeers heighten the Wife of Bath’s perceived nature as a socially obscene figure by emphasizing her unruliness as an aging woman who refuses to be silenced. In The Wanton Wife, the Wife refuses to remain off scene, a fact that is rendered grotesque and subjected to sharp critique. Curtis’s analysis reminds us how, even now, the desire of older women is often framed as something that needs to be silenced and hidden from sight.

The next two articles examine the reception of Chaucerian obscenity during and after the eighteenth century, an era that produced extremely divergent responses to Chaucer’s sexual and scatological content. Lotte Reinbold considers how one author inflated the implied fart joke in the House of Fame in his poem Aesop in the Bear-Garden (1715), a satirical parody of Alexander Pope’s Temple of Fame (1715). While most eighteenth-century authors seemed anxious to defend Chaucer from charges of obscenity in order to reinforce his position as a father figure in English literary history, Reinbold shows that Aesop in the Bear-Garden does the opposite by introducing additional obscenity into Chaucer’s legacy and scatologically satirizing Pope’s Chaucerian poem. Alternatively, Simone Marshall’s article demonstrates how Chaucer’s obscene legacy was viewed as a complication by those who wrote about his life and work. Tracing how three authors dealt with this problem between 1700 and 1893, she argues that, in the very act of grappling with the issue of Chaucerian obscenity, they drew attention to it in ways that paradoxically reinforced its importance as a key feature of Chaucer’s writing.

The final two articles in this issue consider how postmedieval adapters and translators have addressed the question of what to do with Chaucerian obscenity: should they omit it, gloss over it, or draw attention to it? Lucy H. Fleming examines how three adapters of the Merchant’s Tale for children transformed the tale’s famous scene of adulterous sex in a pear tree for more innocent audiences, whether by exchanging the bodily pleasures of illicit sex for the pleasures of eating forbidden fruit or the thrill of a stolen kiss. Fleming demonstrates how the Merchant’s Tale both challenged and inspired those adapting it for young readers, and also how the results sought to preserve forbidden pleasures even as they “sanitized” the tale. The final contribution, authored by myself and Jonathan Fruoco, brings our collective exploration of Chaucerian obscenity to a close by considering the subject from a translator’s point of view. We focus on the word queynte, whose exact interpretation has provoked considerable debate. The moment that Nicholas grabs Alisoun by the queynte in the Miller’s Tale is among the most famously obscene episodes in all of Chaucer, yet its language is surprisingly difficult to gauge or parse with precision. As this concluding article demonstrates, the process of translation defamiliarizes this well-known scene in ways that reveal not only the skill with which an infamous couplet is composed, but also the degree to which our interpretation of it is shaped inevitably by what we bring to Chaucer’s work.

As all the contributors make clear, while responses to Chaucerian obscenity have varied widely over the past six centuries, the phenomenon itself remains an issue to be continuously contended with, a sometimes uncomfortable aspect of Chaucer’s legacy that raises questions about how, or whether, a particular editor, publisher, or reader should engage with content that would otherwise be regarded as taboo. To some extent, Chaucer himself builds such questions into his final, unfinished work when his pilgrim-avatar issues warnings about the harlotrie of tales like the Miller’s; when the Merchant apologizes to his female listeners for his blunt account of adulterous sex in a pear tree; and when the Retraction that follows the Parson’s Tale in so many early copies of the Canterbury Tales disavows those of Chaucer’s works that “sownen into synne” (X 1086). If there is one distinguishing feature of “Chaucerian” obscenity, it is surely this: the ways that it insistently demands a response from readers, whether those responses be enjoyment, condemnation, or an impulse to “Turne over the leef and chese another tale.” Taken together, the contributors to “Chaucerian Obscenity” respond to Chaucer’s prompts, apologies, and provocations in ways that shed new light on the transmission and reception of Chaucer’s most transgressive moments, and on how obscenity shapes—and is shaped by—our sense of Chaucer himself.

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