ABSTRACT
The Knight s missing wife or lover, the Squire’s mother, the erasure of Alison’s children-these ‘gaps’ are necessitated by Chaucer’s generic interests, but also are deliberate inclusions to expose the artifice of the frame tale. We as readers react positively to the General Prologue because it is so ‘real’. The figures ‘come to life’. Yet, in terms of the historical reality of pilgrimage, The Canterbury Tales reflect the artifice of estates satire with the various classes and stations of late fourteenth-century England. Babies, children, married women with children, like the missing spouse/ lover of the Knight, are obliterated since Chaucer is not trying to depict a historically accurate painting of pilgrimage, but a literary exercise in genre which he tests and explodes. The family unit of at least two generations does not seem to concern Chaucer. The dynamics of married people fascinate him in part because of the rich literary material he can draw on: parodies, satires, and idealized portraits. The domination of one gender over another-Walter over Griselda, Virginius over Virginia, Alison over most of her husbands, cuckolded husbands defeated by crafty wivesthat interests Chaucer. But the familial dynamics of more than one bond or tie horizontally or vertically is not of prime concern for him. Only (quasi-) hagiographical works, especially the Clerk’s Tale, allow the exploration of such feelings and dynamics. And the General Prologue is anything but hagiographical, save in its descriptions of the Parson and the Plowman. Satire suggests that pilgrimage functioned as a means or venue to escape family and familial responsibilities, whereas in reality-from letters and hospital provisions, for example-pilgrimage crystallized familial duties, loves, and obligations. One path of further research would be into the family in Chaucer. He displaces the familial element of pilgrimage from the frametale to the tales themselves. We could try to reread tales in terms of family. The Knight’s Tale with its Amazon sisters, Ypolita and Emelye, could be viewed as a sisterly text. Such a reading might expose as yet unknown dynamics in the Chaucerian canon. We could also read the Reeve’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale looking at the brother-and-sister dynamics and what they signify. And the Tale of Melibee might be regularly assigned to students.
