Avian Hybridity in The Squire’s Tale: What’s Right with Anthropormphism

In recent years, anthropomorphism has received a bad press, as a simplistic or excessively sentimental genre. For purposes of animal studies, the error of anthropomorphism is the presumption inherent in attributing human attributes to animals. In so doing, we deprive animals of subjectivity and impose on them what Rosi Braidotti describes as an “asymmetrical relation to animals” which is “framed by power relations biased in favor of human access to the bodies of animal others” (526).

Animal anthropomorphism is hard to escape: just as we ascribe human form to the divinity due to our own epistemological shortcomings, so too we cannot know how animals think even when we acknowledge them as fellow sentient beings. Onno Oerlmans points out

… The problem of how we are to view animals neutrally, to see them as they are and not as they are like us, probably has no solution. We cannot, finally, distinguish those features of their being (emotions, desires, etc.) which are truly theirs from those with which we are familiar because we experience them ourselves. (68)

In contrast to Parlement of Foules and Nun’s Priest’s Tale, which deal with inter-avian exchange, The Squire’s Tale presents an exchange between woman and bird. This Tale is frankly anthropomorphic. As Lesley Kordecki comments, no one seriously believes that this is a story about birds (289). Kathryn Lynch complains that “the talking bird, which ought  to seem a strange and exotic thing, becomes comically indistinguishable from any swooning courtly maiden” (542). At first glance the Tale seems to exemplify the worst excesses of anthropomorphism (what Braidotti calls the “propping up of human self-projections” [528]), as the formel laments that she has been seduced and abandoned by a faithless tercelet.

Chaucer presents the formel and her faithless mate as hybrid figures. For example, the tercelet slides between male hawk and human maleness, as when the formel laments men’s inclination to “newfangleness” (v.610). I argue that the “work” that the formel does in her dual capacity as woman and bird is considerably more positive and more important than Lynch suggests.

In this moment of animal studies there is an emerging appreciation of the permeable bounds between species. We recognize a biological kinship, if not biological equality, between human and non-human animals.  What does Chaucer achieve by presenting the formel and the tercelet as divided creatures with avian form and human attributes?  First, the hybridity enables Chaucer to show a fundamental commonality in living creatures: if Canacee can communicate with a formel, then differences between rank, nationality, and religion must also be surmountable for those who have the will to sympathize with others.

Second, the hybrid nature of the formel provides a space for friendship to form. In medieval literature it is rare to find portrayals of female friendship (Lochrie 70), possibly because such friendship in a patriarchal society threatened insubordination or taboo relationship. The difference in species between Canacee and the formel provides a safe space: as females the two are close enough to form a bond of sympathy but different enough that their friendship cannot be a cover for a proto lesbian relationship.

Third, the relationship between Princess Canacee and the formel stands for protective and reciprocal care both between women and between species. As the older and wiser formel warns young marriageable Canacee about the danger of male treachery, the Princess provides nursing care to heal the wounds that the formel inflicted in her despair. Susan McHugh comments that “animals emerged as significant figures in English literature only in terms of metaphor,” for example, the Romantic poets’ figuration of the poet as nightingale (488). The formel who has pierced her breast until she bleeds evokes the martyred pelican. Use of the pelican metaphor recalls Jill Mann’s reading of the trials of Griselda, where suffering woman evokes suffering Christ (125). Canacee responds creatively to the formel’s physical and psychological agony, by constructing an ekphrastic hospital mewe painted with images of treacherous fowls.

The formel in The Squire’s Tale represents not a swooning courtly maiden, but a woman/bird in suicidal distress. The Princess’s compassionate response anticipates “the ethics of care” advocated by Carol Gilligan (13) and other philosophers. Anthropomorphism here represents not a subordination of the animal but an affecting cry to ease suffering across borders.

Sara Schotland sschotland@cgsh.com or schotlan@umd.edu 202-9741-550

Works Cited in Abstract

Braidotti, Rosi. “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others.” PMLA 124.2 (2009) 526:531. Print.

Gilligan, Carol.  In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1982. Print.

Kordekci, Lesley Catherine. “Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Animal Discourse, Women, and Subjectivity.” The Chaucer Review 36.3 (2002): 277-297. Print.

Lochrie, Karma. “Between Women.” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing. Eds. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace.Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003: 70-90. Print.

Lynch, Kathryn L. “East Meets West in Chaucer’s Squire’s and Franklin’s Tales.” Speculum 70.3 (July 1995): 530-51. Print.

Mann, Jill. Feminizing Chaucer. Rochester, N.Y.: D.S. Brewer, 2002. Print.

McHugh, Susan. “Literary Animal Agents.” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 487-495. Print.

Oerlemans, Onno Dag. Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: U of Toronto P, 2002. Print. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson. 3d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987.

The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson. 3d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin

Company, 1987.