Orientalism and the Critical History of the Squire's Tale

The history of the Squire's Tale's reception has been surveyed twice—by David Lawton in Chaucer's Narrators (1985), and by Donald Baker in his 1990 Variorum edition. ¹ Although both Lawton and Baker touch on what Kathryn Lynch calls the tale's “aura of exotic alterity,” neither addresses directly the connections between its critical fortunes and its oriental subject matter. ² In what follows, I examine some representative responses to the poem from the late eighteenth century to the 1970s, and suggest that Orientalist discourse—the ways of imagining and describing the East that have been given their most influential formulation in Edward Said's Orientalism (1978)—has left its mark on the study of virtually all aspects of the tale. ³ I conclude by looking briefly at several commentaries written since the appearance of Said's book. In contrast to the earlier body of criticism, in which Orientalist assumptions remain largely unexamined, these more recent assessments of the Squire's Tale engage directly with the issues raised by Said's work and the extensive literature that has grown up around it, arguing, among other things, that Chaucer's poem reflects, and reflects upon, attitudes toward the East that Said restricts to the post-Enlightenment period. Indeed, the most recent work on the Squire's Tale takes this trend a step further, by complicating and interrogating Said's own assumptions.