Seductive violence and three Chaucerian women

College Literature, Spring 2001 by O'Brien, Timothy D

The conversation between the wife and Daun John begins with the wife vowing by the following oath that she will maintain confidentiality: "I swere/Though men me wolde al into pieces tere,/Ne shal I nevere, for to goon to helle,/Biwreye a word of thing that ye me telle" (VII.135-37).Along with her earlier claim that she is about ready to "make an ende" of herself (VII.122), this oath is fairly traditional and, by itself, hardly gender specific. Pandarus, for instance, uses a similar oath when he tries to get Troilus to entrust him as his go-between: "To pieces do me drawe and sithen honge" (1.832). However, the wife specifically describes men tearing her to pieces; and she tells the monk that concerning her mistreatment in marriage she could tell him "a legend of [her] lyf (VII.145).8 When she justifies her desire for the new piece of clothing she intends to buy with the hundred franks, the merchant's wife continues to use imagery that evokes the violence of the saints' lives. She tells the monk:

But by that ilke Lord that for us bledde,

For his honour, myself for to arraye,

A Sonday next I moste nedes paye

An hundred frankes, or ehis I am torn .... (VII.178-81)

This evocation is complex and ironic. As Gail Gibson (1977, 104-12) and to a lesser extent John Hermann (1985, 328) have explained, medieval discussions of clothing and women inevitably lead to the distinction between literal clothing-visiblia-and metaphorical clothing-humilitas. Typically in the saints' lives the female saint rejects promises by the lustful, heathen male and/or his representatives that he will provide her with the finest clothing and other adornments. She replies that her spouse, Christ, has already clothed her, or will soon clothe her, in the most beautiful of spiritual array. She does not need the goods of this world.Thus a typical feature of the saint's torture is that she be stripped, the physical marks of her torture replacing her clothing. Those marks highlight the breaking of borders, the emergence of the inside through the surface, the holy. And this event is remarkable because, as Karma Lochrie has pointed out, the religious life for women "consists primarily in adopting boundaries and maintaining an unbroken body" (1991, 24). The wounds become a kind of array the blood depicted as a beautiful, decorative covering, as in one of the 13t century French versions of the St Agnes legend, Gesta Sanctae Agnes, in which the unclothed saint is described as being stabbed in the breast with a sword and "covered with her own beautiful blood" (Gazelles, 1991, 98). In taking this kind of imagery to its logical, metaphorical conclusion, Cyprian, in fact, argues that the only proper adornments (array) for the martyr honoring Christ are wounds and blood (Block 1991, 106).Thus the wife's words identify her as a parody of the female saints: she wants to array herself in visiblia rather than the spiritual and sacrificial clothing of the saint. Despite the parody, however, the evocations of violence remain strong: violence, often with sexual overtones, is the primary means by which the female virgin saint can achieve imitatio Christi. She weathers sexual advances, and thus remains pure while suffering. The merchant's wife says she wants to array herself in "honour" of"that ilke Lord that for us bledde" (VII.178-79). However hypocritical, her words invite her audience-the monk particularly-to see her in terms of the female saints' attempts to honor Christ through violent victimization.