Lorraine Kochanske Stock University of Houston

lstock@uh.edu 713-743-2958

Foiled by Fowl: The Squire’s Peregrine Falcon and the Franklin’s Dorigen

Compared with Chaucer’s other Canterbury Tales, the Squire’s Tale has attracted relatively little (and decidedly mixed) commentary–perhaps reflecting a critical repudiation of the tale’s thematic lack of cohesion, structural disorganization, and fragmentary nature. In an effort to find ulterior thematic purpose in the Squire’s narrative, I focus on a small, important, self-contained section of the tale, the “peregrine falcon” episode in Part II, immediately preceding the Franklin’s interruption of the Squire’s discourse. Significantly identified by its teller as the narrative’s “knotte,” this episode, which in which Chaucer once again engages with the medieval genre of the beast fable, presents Canacee’s interruption of a female falcon’s attempted suicide by pecking herself to death and Canacee’s encouragement of the rhetorically articulate bird to “talk out” her grief and despair by narrating her “complaint” of abandonment by her avian “gentil lovere.” Raising issues of “trouthe,” “gentillesse,” and appearance versus reality, the falcon’s brief tale-within-a-tale is a vehicle which allows Chaucer to anticipate major thematic elements of the story he has the Franklin tell, after interrupting the Squire, about the marriage of another pair of lovers, the human Dorigen and Arveragus. Significantly, many aspects of the relationship of the noble birds and the noble humans mirror each other. More important, both females, fowl and human, consider suicide as a solution to their personal predicaments.

However, Chaucer reverses the usual generic beast fable paradigm, in which Disney-esque beasts’ activities and discourse parody human behavior and speech. In the sequence of the Squire’s and Franklin’s Tales, the human situation follows and parodies that of the fowls, rather than vice-versa. Indeed, the falcon’s seemingly more genuine grief produces the bloody near-corpse that Canacee discovers, while Dorigen’s “ful sorweful cheere” prompts the three-day-long catalogue of exempla illustrating reasons why she should commit suicide, even though she makes no real attempt to take her life. Thus, the complaints of the falcon and Dorigen are mutually illuminating in important ways that provide new perspectives on both tales. When they are disengaged from their usual contexts and stripped of the usual critical assumptions about them, it is difficult to decide which is the more stylistically overwrought and bathetic; which the straight version, and which the exaggerated parody? When both heroines, imagining themselves between the proverbial emotional “rock and a hard place,” view suicide as the only “socour” by which “t’escape” the “cheyne” of Fortune, the falcon barely escapes bleeding to death before being rescued by Canacee.  It is fair to assume that, had Arveragus been detained another day or so, Dorigen would have somehow recited twenty more exempla before his convenient return prevented her from acting upon her “purposynge” to die. Parodying the Franklin’s own interrogatory concluding style, I close my proposal and eventual paper with a question: “Lordynges, this question, thanne, wol I aske now,” between Dorigen’s black rocks and the hard place of the “roche of marbul gray” wherein the falcon was fostered, “Which was the mooste hard, as thynketh yow?” Ultimately, the falcon’s frame story in the Squire’s Tale provides a fruitful context in which to evaluate the authenticity of character and action in the Franklin’s Tale. Dorigen is “foiled” (in the sense of both “contrasted with” and “confounded”) by a “fowl” in the Squire’s Tale.