Sara Gutmann
Abstract for In Hir Corages: Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (proposed edited collection)
Chaucer’s Chicks: Ascetic Feminism in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Parliament of Fowls
In her guest column, “Why Animals Now?” for the March 2009 issue of PMLA, Marianne Dekoven comments on the relevance of critical animal studies in the theoretical turn to the posthuman. She specifically aligns animal voices with other nonhuman voices historically suppressed in literature, most potently of women: “Women and animals go together. The mode of animality that interests me is also premised on the current posthuman conjuncture, moving beyond human-only and only-human paradigms” (366-7). I propose an alternative question that reorients the postmodern, posthumanist gaze to the pre-modern, pre-Cartesian world that considered animals within a discursive framework of species that included humans and nonhumans in a continuum of being and becoming. Thus, I ask, “why animals then?” The focus of my answer proposes a rethinking of Chaucer’s animal imagery, specifically birds, which returns the analytical emphasis to the bird as bird, and not merely a symbolic stand-in for the female human. To do so, I track the gendering of birds and sport in the hunting and hawking manuals of the late medieval period, in, for example, The Art of Venery by Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor from 1215-1250, the Livre de Chasse by Gaston Fébus (1387), and The Boke of Saint Albans purportedly written by Dame Juliana Berners (1486), alongside Chaucer’s “chicks” in The Knight’s Tale, The Squire’s Tale, and The Parliament of Fowls. Considering these three poetic encounters between the bird and woman (granted Emelye does not have a bird in the tale, despite Boccaccio’s description in the Teseida) reveals a medieval world obsessed with class and gender markers in its venereal pursuits but challenged by the practicalities of hawking that prioritizes the female species in terms of its prowess. Despite the valuation of the female bird, the manuals reiterate the misogynistic rhetoric of the marriage debate and the role of women in medieval society. Conversely, Chaucer manipulates the gendering of the hawk in his literary interpretation of the problem of the “woman,” seeing in the bird an opportunity to negate the masculine power of chivalric discourse through a symbol often appropriated by it. What emerges is an Ovidian metamorphosis of the female, from Emelye to Canacee and the peregrine to the formel eagle, that negotiates alternative spaces and lives free from the bo(u)nds of sex through an ascetic deferral of courtly love that ties the woman, like the jesses on the feet of the falcon, to her handler. Chaucer broaches this ascesis in The Knight’s Tale through Emelye’s request to traverse the forests wild as Diana’s handmaiden. Despite realizing the limitations of the forest/garden dichotomy, Chaucer leaves the promise of an alternative world on the margins of the Knight’s vision and ultimately reinforces the heterosexual demands of courtly romance so that Emelye ends betrothed to both knights. In The Squire’s Tale, Canacee and the falcon demonstrate the meeting of species spun through the rhetoric of courtly love as well as hawking thereby exposing the interrelationship of bird and woman in their restrictive roles. Then, in The Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer departs from the limitations of the economy of deferral by locating a space at the center of the garden for feminine agency. Ending the poem with ambiguity leaves the garden gate open, so that the female can fly free of the bounds of Nature’s court. Rather than continuing the vision of the damsel locked in the garden, exemplified by Emelye, the eagle presents an option for women to participate in the jouissance of the hunt not as the object of the courtly love discourse but as an agent functioning within it.