ABSTRACT
One critic whose reading is informed by Marxism is Aers, whose book Chaucer is an accessible and excellent starting point for any critical study of Chaucer. This is not to say that his conclusions must be accepted without question, rather that they must be taken account of in any conclusion one wishes to draw, and may themselves both pose questions and be open to question. Thus his appraisal of The Clerk’s Tale explores the creation of power and acquiesence in it exemplified by Walter’s despotism and Griselde’s passivity: ‘the poem is thus a powerful dramatisation of the effects of absolutism on both the ruled and the ruler’ (Aers 1986: 34). Aers links this directly with the political position in England in the late 1390s with its growing concern about despotism. For him, although Griselde’s ability to rule well offers a radical alternative to monarchical rule, Chaucer does not endorse it:
here we meet one of the horizons of Chaucer’s social imagination, for … it tends to abandon all ideas of fraternity, social justice and the social embodiment of charity, foreshadowing an ideological position that would become commonplace with the triumph of bourgois individualism in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
