ABSTRACT
As opposed to the ‘disenchantment’ that characterizes Leicester’s reading of the General Prologue (see previous piece), Sherman notes in the Knight’s narration a resolute attempt to maintain chivalric ideals of order, an order, however, that can only function by marginalizing and eliding that which is seen as ‘other’ to it, in particular women and the realm of the erotic. The Knight’s favourite rhetorical device of occupation (by which reference is made to that which the narrative is not going to discuss) acknowledges and effaces a variety of what Sherman calls ‘countercoherent narratives’ that remain to threaten the chivalric project; Theseus’s desire to purge the narrative’s ‘erotic restlessness’ in fact contests the pro-creative force out of which the entire Canterbury Tales spring, as indicated in the General Prologue’s opening lines, and though this force may be driven underground at several points in the Knight’s Tale it bursts out anew in later Tales that will challenge the Knighf’s. The Tale is, however, internally challenged at various places, though the attempt is made at silencing such challenges; one such instance (discussed in the final few pages of Sherman’s original article but omitted here because of space constraints) relates to Theseus’s slay-ing of the Minotaur and the crucial assistance offered by Ariadne, a narrative of female intervention that has to be suppressed because of the Knight’s ‘misogynistic anxiety’. For further discussion of the piece, see my Introduction, pp. 13–14.
