ABSTRACT
Hansen reads the subordination of Griselda to Walter in the Clerk’s Tale as at once an instance of the ‘powerlessness of real women in history’ and, more significantly, as the undoing of male control over behaviour that takes patriarchal idealizations of ‘wommanhede’ to the limits of comprehensibility and beyond. The Clerk-narrator’s shifting loyalties to both the male and female protagonists in his Tale bespeak, Hansen argues, the uncertainties of Chaucer’s own attitudes ‘toward the problematic issues of gender and marital conflict’, and what Hansen sees as the string of jocular or unconvincing interpretations of his Tale that the Clerk appends at its conclusion only serves to trivialize and distance these issues. Beyond the Clerk’s desire to escape the contamination of a womanhood that he is forced to identify with on several levels, Hansen posits the evasiveness of Chaucer himself, wishing to step out of the problems of ‘sexual politics and gendered poetics’ into a realm of transcendent aesthetic ‘play’. Unlike the majority of critics in this volume therefore, Hansen argues for Chaucer’s identification with the patriarchal attitudes of many of his tellers, rather than for a Chaucer who stands back from and criticizes such tellers. For further discussion of Hansen’s work, see my Introduction, pp. 7–8.
