Reflecting on Chaucer Today

As I prepared this bundle, I took a trip down memory lane, flipping through the textbook I had for my undergraduate Chaucer class back in 1981.  My twenty-year-old self was not a big fan of Walter.  Or of Griselda.

“Sadist!” “Not a virtue!” “Brute!” “Sad specimen of a mother!” “Warped!” I scrawled in the margin.

I suspect that anger is what both the Clerk and Chaucer were aiming to elicit in their audiences.  But to what end?  Any ideas?

It is impossible, in just a week, to give you a decent appreciation of Chaucer’s oeuvre, which is immense, rich, and varied.  I’ve chosen to focus on the themes of marriage and gender conflict, which, though central to The Canterbury Tales, also (I think) portray Chaucer in his least appealing, most problematic, guise.  Chaucer’s engagement with gender issues is tremendously controversial, with some scholars seeing him as deeply sympathetic to women and others (myself included) perceiving a strain of misogyny running through his tales, so many of which conclude that what women really want is good sex with bad boys.  You will make up your own minds.

But there’s another side to Chaucer we haven’t sampled, and that is Chaucer the social critic, who uses the weapon of storytelling to denounce hypocrisy and deride those who prey on the poor, the vulnerable, and the faithful.

That side of Chaucer is perhaps what has inspired so many contemporary authors to adapt The Canterbury Tales to criticize hypocrisy and malfeasance in the present day and to call for compassion and social justice.  Here are a few of my favorite twenty-first-century adaptations of Chaucer, and one classic from the twentieth century:

• Telling Tales (2015), by Patience Agbabi, begins with Harry “Bells” Bailey crowing, “When my April showers me with kisses / I could make her my missus or my mistress….”  The storytellers in this delightful collection include Mrs. Alice Eli Bafa and Yejide Idowu-Clarke.  Their tales, like those of Chaucer’s pilgrims, are mostly poems.  See Agbabi’s performance of her adaptation of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue.
• Refugee Tales (2016), as told to Ali Smith, Patience Agbabi, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Inua Ellams, et al, relays the stories of contemporary refugees to Europe, “re-humanising,” to quote reviewer Shami Chakrabarti, “some of the most vulnerable and demonized people on the planet” and challenging “leaders to action.”
• Sometimes We Tell the Truth (2016), by Kim Zarins, is set on a high-school senior field trip to Washington D. C.  Mr. Bailey, the civics teacher chaperoning the trip, devises a storytelling contest to keep the kids in line.  Those kids include Alison, “Venus with a gap-toothed smile; her favorite color is red.”  The field trip is told through the eyes of Jeff, who’s coming to terms with his sexual identity.
• The Miller’s Tale: Wahala Day O! (2018), by Ufuoma Overo-Tarimo, relocates Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale to contemporary Nigeria.
• Bailey’s Cafe, by Gloria Naylor, tells the stories of those who frequent Bailey’s Cafe, a magical place that can only be found by those who need to find it, mostly African Americans who have been through Hell. Beautiful. Heartbreaking.

Though my own view of Chaucer is ambivalent, he is a wonderful poet to “think with.”  For that reason, I love to teach him, and I hope that some of you will study him further by signing up for English 4515!