Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and the Question of Ethical Monstrosity

Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and the Question of Ethical Monstrosity

J Allan Mitchell. Studies in Philology. Chapel Hill: Winter 2005.Vol. 102, Iss. 1; pg. 1, 26 pgs

Abstract (Document Summary)

Mitchell contends that from the standpoint of exemplary morality, Chaucer's Clerk's Tale can easily offend ordinary prudence, where prudence is understood in the medieval sense as a matter of discovering practical precepts for action. He finds that the larger critical history of the tale is instructive in which it is an offensive monstrosity to some, an alluring and subtle fable to others, and to still others an artistic failure or deliberate caricature.

Full Text (12635 words)

Copyright University of North Carolina Press Winter 2005

FROM the standpoint of exemplary morality, Chaucer's Clerk's Tale can easily offend ordinary prudence,1 where prudence is understood in the medieval sense as a matter of discovering practical precepts for action. The tale is emphatically a problem exemplum in which the most pressing practical question-for medievals and medievalists-is what to do with Griselda's voluntary submission. What is it good to do with her example? Does Griselda epitomize wifely perfection in acting as she does, does she represent a spiritual ideal to which readers should aspire without acting as she does, or is she morally repugnant for doing what she does? At what level of generality or specificity, ultimately, are readers to take the example? The question could be put in terms of whether to take the letter or the spirit of the tale, but in any event it is difficult to tell whether Chaucer hasn't finally impeached the Clerk's morality, whatever register it occupies, making a caricature of the rhetoric of exemplarity. Perhaps the example is not to be taken at all.

Such are the sorts of questions that constellate around the tale as if subject to simultaneous attraction and repulsion. The Clerk, though, would attempt to provide a center of gravity by referring his audience to a general morality:

This storie is seyd nat for that wyves sholde

Folwen Grisilde as in humylitee,

For it were inportable, though they wolde,

But for that every wight, in his degree,

Sholde be constant in adversitee

As was Grisilde; therfore Petrark writeth

This storie, which with heigh stile he enditeth.

For sith a womman was so pacient

Unto a mortal man, wel moore us oghte

Receyven al in gree that God us sent.

(IV.H42-5l)

The Clerk speaks as if he could stabilize the narrative by transcending its worrisome literality, refocusing it by way of the spiritual exhortation that follows: "Lat us thanne Iyve in vertuous suffraunce" (IV. 1162). But does the Clerk thereby solve the moral problem by legislating a correct meaning? Doubts settle in immediately. For one thing, why should the Clerk have to correct his text or readers at this point if the tale were obviously pertinent to "every wight"? Moreover, how invested he is in the literal rather than the spiritual plane is put in question soon afterward, in the envoy, when he makes an ironic nod in the direction of the Wife of Bath and her "secte." The implications of the envoy are not so different from those that emerge every time the Clerk insists on the perfection of Griselda as a wife, a donnée he never questions. She is, we might suppose, not just any representative Christian soul after all.

Academic discussion of the moral meaning of the tale has not settled the issue either, though critics often focus skeptically on elements such as the envoy to show that the tale is monstrous rather than moral-a telling dichotomy I want to explore. The larger critical history of the tale is instructive: the tale is an offensive monstrosity to some, an alluring and subtle fable to others, and to still others an artistic failure or deliberate caricature; the Clerk's Tale remains a moral challenge. The tale poses as a problem of prudence precisely because of its multiplicity of meanings. Judith Bronfman concludes her book-length survey of its history of reception by reflecting, "What does the story mean? There is no correct answer. And in this, I think, lies its fascination."2

And yet if there is no correct answer, it should be said straightaway that this is because (as Bronfman's study demonstrates) there are several salient answers rather than one or none. The narrative is fascinating because it is polyvalent in its moral exemplarity, not pointless; because it runs a surplus of meaning rather than a deficit. Polyvalence is not the same thing as a kind of foggy indeterminacy. The tale in fact comes to us complete with alternative affective tonalities and more or less explicit valuations built in, the Clerk's running commentary on Walter's cruelty being one instance that we can sort out. Meaning is not so much irreducible or indeterminate, then, as it is polarized between deeply felt antithetical possibilities-for example, Walter exhibits God's absolute power on the one hand, yet is callous as a husband on the other; Griselda is saintly from one perspective, masochistic from another. The problem is how to choose. This is the case in part because, as Elizabeth Salter argued long ago, the audience is obliged to negotiate the threshold between the higher religious register of the narrative and its lower register of "pathetic realism,"3 the former supporting an otherworldly ethic at odds with the this-worldly ethic of the latter. "Basically," concludes Salter, "the trouble originates in an inability to decide upon and abide by one single set of moral standards for the Tale."* Over the years, critics have elaborated on the incongruity in various ways, some holding that it results in an aesthetic breakdown, others allowing that it enriches the tale.5 Bearing in mind Salter's original characterization of the problem, I want to reflect further on the process of moral deliberation by thinking through the exemplary irresolution-the "inability to decide upon and abide"-audiences can experience. Avoiding the negative assumption that the tale is a fractured or failed exemplum, I will elaborate the way in which instability can be a part of moral deliberation itself, is indeed the general condition of moral deliberation Chaucer thrusts upon his audience. In this narrative, irresolution is as much a pragmatic ethical problem as an aesthetic one; this provisional distinction should permit us to move beyond the old binaries.

PARABLE OR PARODY?

As several critics urge, the Clerk's Tale appears to better purpose when it is considered as a parable, a species of exemplum.6 It was Quintilian who in his discussion of public oratory went on to formulate a description of the rhetoric of exemplarity that turns on a distinction between paradigma and parabole. In his Institutio oratoria, he describes the two figures of speech as methods of comparison, the paradigm being identified as a rhetorical induction that presupposes relative similitude: "the adducing of some past action real or assumed which may serve to persuade the audience of the truth of the point."7 According to most rhetorical handbooks, the success of paradigms depends on their simplicity -brevity, clarity, and plausibility, as Cicero would say. The parable, by contrast, differs in that it compares things whose likeness is "far less obvious."8 An enigmatic figure, the parable is, as it were, provocative rather than directly persuasive because it challenges an audience to think through the terms of the comparison being made rather than to apply it immediately in action without reflection. It is a trope used often in the Gospels. For Jesus, a near contemporary of Quintilian, parables had what has been called a "restrictive and defensive" quality, their sense having been purposely obscured by indirection and figurative language.9 In the Gospel of Mark, following hard on the heels of the Parable of the Sower, Jesus explains that parables are given to listeners "[t]hat seeing they may see, and not perceive, and hearing they may hear: and not understand."10 Accordingly, the New Testament parables hold out the promise of revelation only for a self-selecting group of listeners, those who are, somewhat mysteriously, ready to hear." Quintilian claims that the unlearned fail to comprehend, too; like Aristotle before him, he assumes paradigms are more intelligible and are therefore better for general purpose use.

As Richard Rolle was to put it in the mid-fourteenth century, "to speke in parabils" is to employ "likyngis that all men kan noght vndirstand,"12 and on any such definition we see that the Clerk's learned tale bears important hallmarks of the parable (i.e., dissimilitude, ambiguity, and secrecy), as if it too were intended to rouse a select group of listeners to moral and theological reflection on a higher level than, say, the exempla Friar John tells in the Summoner's Tale.The Clerk's is simply less paradigmatic or pragmatic than other Canterbury Tales, and indeed than most exempla. Of course, given its situatedness in the tale-telling game of the collection, the Clerk's Tale has additional generic dimensions: we can distinguish the narrative as it exists for its fictional audience and as it exists for any actual audience. To the fictional pilgrims, it may be restrictive, opaque, and learned: parabolic. But for those who approach it as one among other Canterbury Tales, the Clerk's Tale is surely something more and less. On the one hand, it is undoubtedly more straight-forward, because the dramatic context fixes meaning according to use; the Clerk's rejoinder to the Wife of Bath, and the Host's and Merchant's responses, make the tale less enigmatic when it comes to locating ulterior motives affecting meaning. On the other hand, the tale is much more obscure, because its intentions are mediated by further layers of indirection than those intrinsic to the tale: the comic envoy and dramatic links just mentioned serve to lessen our hold on which motives are ultimately determinative of meaning. The point is simply that the parable is conditioned by the complex communicative context in which we find it.

On this score, the Clerk's Tale may feel more like parody than parable, and indeed I suggest the tale has about it the sort of rhetorical excess and incongruity characteristic of both the ridiculous and the sublime. It seems-to borrow a term found often in this context-to be an ethical monstrosity. However, this is perhaps only to confess that the Clerk's Tale is more parabolic than parables usually are, for the very reason that the outlandish responses of the envoy and tale links serve to keep Chaucer's readers alert to the risks of responding, prudently, as the tale demands. For these and other reasons that I will explore in this paper, readers are faced with an exemplary narrative of unparalleled complexity in the Clerk's Tale. Chaucer's audience is compelled to reckon with the tale as a phenomenon, the key to the moral of the story being, so I shall attempt to argue, the morality of story itself.

Thus, the Clerk's Tale can profitably be viewed as parabolic insofar as the term can withstand the shock of any additional paradoxes, including the paradox that Chaucer incorporates parody into a serious moral parable. The term still denotes an exemplary narrative that obliges its audience to think through the terms of comparison it employs. In addressing the morality of story, I am interested specifically in the way Chaucer makes the problem of ethical deliberation a cornerstone of his tale. In fact, Griselda's practical dilemma is exemplary of dilemmatic thinking generally. In what follows, I pursue the issue circuitously, as I must, asking first of all on what level of generality or specificity we can possibly take the tale of Griselda. What are some possible responses to the tale? Once the major options have been surveyed, I return to consider the stakes involved for those who accept their responsibility for the tale.

"BE CONSTANT IN ADVERSITEE"

The Clerk expressly enjoins his hearers to assent to a general morality about spiritual patience ("For sith a womman was so pacient / Unto a mortal man, wel moore us oghte / Receyven al in gree that God us sent"), on the face of it a reassuring generality drawn from-or in spite of-a complex narrative that makes a variety of applications possible. Griselda is finally made to stand, or rather stand aside, for an abstract virtue, one clearly spelled out in the end as vertuous suffraunce (IV.noa). At the beginning of the paper, I wondered if the Clerk has thereby solved the moral dilemma for us about how to take the example, but I want to suggest that in practice the explicit moral itself gives rise to the dilemmatic. It is not just because the spiritualization is not persuasive that readers find it difficult to take, though I've suggested ways in which the morality may seem problematic on close reading. My first point, which is not a skeptical one, is that even when the morality is persuasive, its generality does not entail a predictable generality on the side of reader response. Multiple possibilities are built into the kind of moralization the Clerk employs.

How to practice the moral virtue of patience remains indeterminate until, through a process of pragmatic reduction, the tale is translated into action or personal insight. How I see fit to express vertuous suffraunce in response to my adversity can only be something I discover in view of the particulars of my life experience. Reading morally, I thus supply something personal-say, the recognition of some accident or other difficulty I have in securing my general welfare-to fill in the details about what here and now constitutes, in the Clerk's words, "sharpe scourges of adversitee" (!¥.1157). Accordingly, patience cannot be the same everywhere and for everyone. This point should suffice to indicate that even with what would seem to be an inflexible moral generality, the ethical response to exemplarity can enjoy considerable latitude, understood as a result of unpredictable contact between a text and the life plans of a specific individual. In this sense, even abstractions give rise to a relativizine ethics, originating outside a text.13

However, this analysis remains preliminary to an appreciation of the exemplarity of the tale. The moral about patience is not without some prior exemplary content, though that content remains elusive; in any event, exemplary Griselda, who embodies vertuous suffraunce, is the flesh and bones of the abstraction. Of course, she is herself something of a normative abstraction. Attending to the typological and iconographie details associated with Griselda, the reader discovers secondary generalizations. Griselda's virtue is compared to that of Job (!¥.871-72; 932ff.), the Virgin Mary (!¥.294 recalls the Annunciation), and Christ (IV.88o echoes the Via Dolorosa).14 These substitute figurai abstractions should be distinguished from abstract statements, for the audience is now given examples to fill out the meaning of the virtue of patience, alongside a summary morality; these slender examples, not yet existing as anything like full exemplary narratives, serve to relativize-even as they concretize -the moral of the story from within. Now, how one takes the moral depends on a lateral reckoning of examples, plus whatever life plans are brought to bear on them. Here we take a first step toward narrative ethics in the text.

The meaning of patience is fleshed out in more obvious directions when we begin to consider the full narrative context of the Clerk's morality. Other more or less explicit moral imperatives, themselves subject to different applications, present themselves as more problematical ones than those touched on so far. Such are the possibilities most critics focus upon in their interpretations. We could call these other possibilities competing rhetorical demands because they tend to be more literal than the religious and spiritual valences of the tale touched on so far and because they may not be best described with reference to conventional morality at all, least of all by vertuous suffraunce. The most important competing demands are those issuing from feminist or antifeminist perspectives, since they tend to view the text literally, not spiritually, as the Clerk has attempted to do through typology and moralization.

"A WOMMAN WAS SO PACIENT"

From one well-established perspective, Griselda seems to have been enlisted in the service of a marriage debate, that fourteenth-century, fictional and not-so-fictional querelle des femmes with which Chaucer was often preoccupied in the Canterbury Tales. Never mind how the Clerk tries to finesse things at the end ("This storie is seyd nat for that wyves sholde / Folwen Grisilde as in humylitee, / For it were inportable, though they wolde" [IV. 1142-44]); one cannot help but notice that, from the standpoint of the patriarchy that authorizes the Clerk, the narrative is conveniently easy to mistake for a marital exemplum. The story is literally about "a womman" who "was so pacient." Moreover, we are made to observe that two of the pilgrims-who hearing hear, but do not understand? or rather, understand too well?-construe the narrative exclusively this way. The Host wishes his wife had heard "this legende" (IV.1212d), which, he admits, is "to my purpos" (IV.1212f). The Merchant likewise says, "There is a long and large difference / Bitwix Grisildis gret pacience / And of my wyf the passyng crueltee" (IV. 1223-25), inscribing a fuller response to the tale as a marital exemplum in the long discussion of marriage that prefaces the Merchant s Tale. Chaucer, by building into his collection the moral responses of others, is highlighting a potentiality readers cannot ignore when they attempt to assess the morality of the Clerk's Tale.

Several elements in the text conspire to suggest that the exemplum is offered by the Clerk as a story of a good wife in refutation of the heresies of the Wife of Bath, Griselda's antitype. To begin with, there is the ambiguity surrounding the word inportable, "intolerable," in the Clerk's morality. Does he mean to say that it would be intolerable for wives if they would so behave? And if so, is it because wives could not bear to follow Griselda as they should? Or does he mean that we would find it intolerable if wives would follow Griselda, because no one ever should? In other words, is the Clerk commenting on the capability of women to endure humiliation or the justification of submitting to the humiliation? If only the capability, as Petrarch originally indicated in the Latin (saying that Griselda is beyond imitation, vix imitabilis, rather than that imitation should never be attempted), then the Clerk would seem to betray attachments to the letter at the very moment he would appear to transcend it with a spiritual interpretation.15 He could be allowing that it is practically impossible to imitate Griselda because women nowadays are not so strong as they once were (IV.1164-69), so that a spiritual moral is the most relevant-indeed, he could allow all this without ruling out the possibility that for him Griselda still exemplifies textbook wifehood. In other words, the Clerk could hold the tale up as a model for the spiritual and the domestic realms without thinking any woman could succeed in both. Don't his rueful remarks at the end suggest as much (IV.1163-69)? On this account, if persuasive, the Clerk insinuates himself into the debate on marriage, opposing the doctrine of female mastery while proving that clerks can speak well of wives (defending himself against the Wife of Bath's allegations at III.688-91), all the while prevaricating on the real purpose of his narration. The spiritualization of the exemplum thus becomes so much chaff hiding the literal (male chauvinist) fruit. (The alternative reading of importable is, again, that Griselda's humility is not just inimitable but morally unjustifiable, on which more shortly.)

That patience and obedience are specifically feminine virtues was the application of choice for other late medieval authors, and it well describes many modern approaches to the tale. Before Chaucer got around to translating Griselda, there circulated various versions in French expressly directed at the improvement of women; Chaucer used one of these as a source. Boccaccio's original story, too, which Petrarch had translated and tried to dignify, presents the tale as a story of marriage. Treating the legend literally is consequently not anachronistic, nor is it difficult to do; what seems much more difficult to do - for many modern readers, as for Harry, the Merchant, and perhaps the Clerk himself-is to take it spiritually.16

The competing imperative to literalism asserts itself throughout, as the Clerk's own asides indicate. In one place, the question is raised as to whether men or women are capable of greater humility: comparing Griselda favorably to Job's "humblesse," the Clerk concludes that although "clerkes preise wommen but a lite, / Ther kan no man in humblesse hym acquite / As womman kan" (IV.932, 935-37). After crediting Griselda with such embodied virtue, how are we to take the belated disclaimer, "This storie is seyd nat for that wyves sholde / Folwen Grisilde as in humylitee"? Why would we interpret Griselda any other way than literally, that is, as a figure of a good woman rather than as some neuter soul? The problem comes up again with respect to Griselda's embodiment of spousal virtue in particular, never explicitly put in doubt. Midway through her ordeal, Griselda is called a perfectly attentive wife:

And, God be thanked, al fil for the beste.

She shewed wel, for no worldly unreste

A wyf, as of hirself, nothing ne sholde

Wille in effect, but as hir housbonde wolde.

(IV.718-21)

The Clerk could hardly have done more to affirm the relevance of the letter of the tale, and of Griselda's exemplary spousal qualities in particular, as against the general morality. The Clerk will emphasize over and over again that Griselda is a "flour of wyfly pacience" (IV.919) - her virtue is her wifehood-before he ever gets to the part where he says wifely patience is not really the point (or is vaguely inportable).

There are additional incitements to literalism one could explore,17 and yet tracking them all would not necessarily lead us to the conclusion that Griselda is a good example. In other words, it may be possible to establish the literal rather than the spiritual exemplarity of Griselda, but the question remains whether she sets a negative or positive example. Griselda's example may be construed diversely. For instance, Chaucer may have conceded that from the clerkly perspective Griselda "shewed wel" and yet have gone on to subvert the clerkly perspective. On the other hand, we could pursue the idea that Chaucer is critiquing medieval marriage (the very idea of wifehood Griselda represents) by pushing female submission to its logical limit. Here are the lengths to which a woman must go if she is to be a good wife, Chaucer could be saying, and here is what a man will do to a woman when she really is that good. A reductio ad absurdum, the tale might indicate that to keep faith with the institution of marriage is to sacrifice other important values, such as love and mutuality (or, more concretely, the duties of maternity which I will discuss below). Walter's exploitation of Griselda is, as the Clerk freely admits, a strong enough indictment of the status quo: "wedded men ne knowe no mesure, / Whan that they fynde a pacient creature" (IV.622-23). Who would choose to become a patient wife in such a context? Moreover, yielding up one's children to be slaughtered in order to uphold any human institution might constitute a condemnation of it. Griselda's responsibility in the matter is mitigated by the restrictions set upon her; she may feel beholden to Walter for taking her to wed despite her low birth and poverty (as he thrice reminds her at IV.466-78), and she is told the people demand the sacrifice of her (IV.481-90). She seems to have no real choice given the exigencies of the political situation-her apparent influence in the sphere of civic politics notwithstanding (e.g., IV.430-41). However, perhaps Chaucer is scrutinizing this marriage rather than marriage as such. The point is easily made with reference to Walter, who is regularly called an immoral husband: the Clerk garlands the man and his conduct with such epithets as "yvele" (IV.460), "crueel" (IV.740), and "wikke" (IV.785). Nor does the Clerk maintain the illusion that the relationship he describes is in any way ideal: "O nedelees was she tempted in assay!" (IV.621).

Griselda's own moral responsibility is put forward as a problem when she agrees to the terms of Walter's prenuptial demand, which run as follows:

"I seye this: be ye redy with good herte

To al my lust, and that I frely may,

As me best thynketh, do yow laughe or smerte,

And never ye to grucche it, nyght ne day?

And eek what I sey 'ye,' ne sey nat 'nay/

Neither by word ne frownyng contenance?

Swere this, and heere I swere oure alliance."

(IV.351-57)

In response to Walter, Griselda makes a most significant refinement on the already severe restrictions laid down in what Spearing has called a "monstrous marriage-agreement."18 She vows, "And heere I swere that nevere willyngly, / In werk ne thoght, I nyl yow disobeye" (IV.362-63), effecting a qualitative change in the nature of her servitude and of her self-governance. Going further than what is asked of her, Griselda agrees neither to disobey her husband in any external expression (with words or frowning countenance) nor any internal disposition (in thought). The prenuptial vow is extraordinarily demanding, but it is made much more so by Griselda herself; unconditional assent to her cruel husband represents the terms she largely invents for herself. Of course, in principle female submission meets the formal demands of Christian marriage, and she probably could not have hoped to bargain for better terms and conditions-but did she need to bargain for worse? As Chaucer's Parson elucidates, a wife ought to be subject to her husband first of all in her obedience (X.930), and by the same token, "Man sholde bere hym to his wyf in feith, in trouthe, and in love" (X-929).19 That Walter, in manipulating Griselda, fails to love his wife as he should is of course contemptible. But that Griselda voluntarily submits to her husband's excessive demands may not be a credit to her character either, insofar as she voluntarily and indeed eagerly submits to an extent he does not actually require.

Here we enter the most controversial and fascinating moral terrain of the tale. All critics concede that Griselda's willful submission is prima facie difficult to accept because it leads to extreme humiliation and potential infanticide.20 Moreover, by way of such indiscriminate obedience Griselda does little (and if anything "acts" too late) to correct her husband's excesses and is in fact complicit with them.21 Griselda comes up short again by the standards of medieval discussions of the virtues of patience and obedience.22 At best, she may be said to illustrate something of the form of such virtues, as though lacking the right content, for if patient obedience as such is all Griselda exemplifies, then this could be exhibited just as well by the vicious sergeant who carries out Walter's orders.23 On all these grounds, then, when Griselda chooses to keep her prenuptial promise at the expense of the lives of her children and her own well-being, she may appear hard-hearted rather than long-suffering. I already considered parenthetically the possibility that wives are not to imitate Griselda because her example is inportable, in the sense of being unethical rather than improbable-a reading supported by at least one source and analogue, probably not incidentally and now we can see why this might be so.24 Her willful surrender to Walter can seem to make her utterly irresponsible-indeed, irreligious. Derek Pearsall suggests that her "readiness to die if it is her lord's will is, in a literal sense, a blasphemy."25 It is the literal sense, indeed, that we cannot easily ignore. Griselda's obedience appears to be the polar opposite of that which Chaucer's Parson, following the moral theologians, calls "parfit": namely, "to parfourne the doctrine of God and of his sovereyns, to whiche hym oghte to be obeisaunt in alle rightwisnesse" (X.675-76).26 Far from conducting herself with all righteousness, she lapses into the specific kind of blasphemy called idolatry. The Parson notes that if a man loves his wife or child or "any worldly thyng" above God he is an "ydolastre" (X.860), words that could very well apply to Griselda when she treats her husband as though he were, as the Clerk says, her "verray worldly suffisance" (IV.759). In addition, the evident worldliness of Griselda's attachments recalls the Parson's teaching in another place: "What seye we eek of wommen that mordren hir children for drede of worldly shame? Certes, an horrible homicide" (X.578). Could Chaucer be counting on his audience to recognize as much? At the end, when the Clerk declares "Grisilde is deed" and he hopes no husband will test his wife "in trust to fynde / Grisildis, for in certein he shal faille" (IV.1177, 1181-82), the joke may actually be that women are better than that nowadays, because prudent wives would not consent to idolatry or homicide!

To invoke terms that are now familiar from a series of modern discussions, Griselda may seem too much the monster and not enough the critic when she assents to Walter,27 and this brings us rather dramatically face to face with the problem that arises in attempting a moral application. Again, how is one to take Griselda? The dilemma is whether to take Griselda at all as an example of character or conduct.

EXEMPLUM TERRIBLE

So far I have pursued the letter and spirit of the tale, in each case showing that various levels of generality and specificity allow for different moral readings. According to the best accounts, the audience can find itself torn between incongruous valuations (as medieval versions of the story attest), each of which has a certain salience in different interpretive contexts, at least one of which leads readers to sense that the tale could be monstrous. The analysis could be extended. I have surveyed some obvious options, without fully imagining those possibilities being put in practice, but all I need to establish here is that the radical interpretability of the tale constitutes its parabolic dimension. Granted, a certain latitude of interpretation is intrinsic to practical reason of the sort exemplarity by its very nature allows; prudence requires freedom. But in the Clerk's Tale, where there is reason to doubt whether it is a moral tale after all, the profound degree of latitude calls into question the morality of the story itself. The tale is therefore what I should call a parable of exemplarity.

It is with ah eye on the so-called monstrosity of the tale that I want to pursue the idea of exemplarity and moral application one step further, beyond the usual dichotomies and their irresolution. It could be useful here to bear in mind the etymological association between our English word monster and the Latin noun monstrum, "omen, portent, marvel," akin to the verb monstrare, "to show."28 If it is monstrous-deformed, hybrid, abnormal-what does Chaucer's problem exemplum reveal? The revelation of "swich mervaille" (IV.1186) that is the Clerk's Tale, I think, has to do with the ordinary paradox of ethical responsibility: the instant of decision which, in the punctual moment of reading for the moral, excludes several alternatives by selecting one. As a parable of exemplarity, the tale draws its audience toward a pointed recognition of what is at stake every time moral application is sought. Nevertheless, so far the tendency has been to see the tale as monstrous or moral. The more persuasive readings, in my view, will be ones that perceive something recursive and paradoxical in Chaucer's recourse to the monstrous as moral. Can it not be said that it is something like the monstrosity of morality that the tale exposes? Such a reading does not resolve the tale in the standard either/or way; rather, it serves to adumbrate the dilemma more clearly. By returning to what Salter calls the "inability to decide upon and abide by one single set of moral standards for the Tale," and by appreciating just how the tale generates so much anxiety about moral deliberation, the moral of the story conceived as a story of morality starts to reveal itself.

One way to speak about the effect of the Clerk's Tale is to say it forms a dynamic force field that resists all static positions-including ironical or skeptical ones. It is the perpetual energy of the force field (rather than the quandary of whether any "correct answer" exists, to recall Bronfman) that is truly instructive, even morally instructive, for even when a decision appears so elusive-as so many readers attest-magnetism remains. The tale attracts as much as it repulses. The energy of Chaucer's parable of exemplarity resides precisely in the way it summons the audience to judgment in order to account for the undecidable (which is not to say indeterminate) tale of Griselda. The distinction is vital. Derrida, who contrary to popular opinion is no advocate of indeterminacy, defines undecidability as "a determinate oscillation between possibilities (for example, of meaning, but also of acts). These possibilities are themselves highly determined in strictly defined situations (for example, discursive-syntactical or rhetorical-but also political, ethical, etc.). They are pragmatically determined."29 Oscillation between determinate possibilities might characterize any attentive reader's reaction to Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, in which competing lines of force, as if emanating simultaneously from both positive and negative polar charges, mark out while failing to fix the moral. These contrary forces ensure that audiences almost inevitably come to feel something closer to responsibility for, rather than indifference to, the example.

Thus, as I suggested at the outset, Chaucer's tale remains so elusive to readers because it requires that we adjudicate among alternative determinate meanings, rather than because there are no candidate meanings. That the tale demands a response is clear enough from the way it so startles modern readers with its monstrous incongruity - the way, consequently, it scarcely permits complacency. If it also hardly permits us to interpret the tale, to reduce it to some obvious generalization ("This tale is about such and such"), the Clerk's Tale does not at the same time preclude an ethical response; rather, it prompts one.30 Hence, undecidability is a call to responsibility rather than a cause for apathy or indifference, insofar as any ambiguity that audiences experience can be an inducement, instead of an obstacle, to ethical deliberation.31 Ambiguity is in any case necessary for genuine decision, in which case the Clerk's Tale is not unusual for being so extraordinary. As Derrida notes, decision "can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate causes. There can be no moral or political responsibility without this trial and this passage by way of the undecidable."32 The trial by way of the undecidable therefore constitutes the very possibility of responsibility, one of the very conditions of ethics, an incalculable condition all live with and every exemplary case presumes.33 The Clerk's Tale, on all accounts, simply makes the incalculability of prudential decision-making hard to miss.

There may be something unsatisfactory and possibly tragic about any decision we finally settle upon because of its inherent reductiveness, and this too is part of the story of morality Chaucer's tale wants to tell. One may find an ethical use for the text, but only at the expense of others; thus, the call to responsibility entails sacrifice. Griselda herself seems to be responding to the most rigorous of biblical injunctions to sacrifice - though without an obvious guarantee of divine sanction, making her case so eminently undecidable-embodied in the Crucifixion. In particular, she behaves as though she were responding to Jesus' call for the suspension and indeed denial of family allegiance: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."34 That famous desideratum is a moral monstrosity with all the force of biblical authority behind it, and it speaks to the heart of the problem of prudence and exemplarity.

We can bring out the significance of the point by invoking the by now routine comparison of the Clerk's Tale to the trial of Abraham (Genesis 22), another difficult tale of unconditional assent and sacrifice. Derrida calls the story of Abraham and Isaac "monstrous yet banal": "monstrous" because of the logic of sacrifice educed to represent ethical responsibility, "banal" because of the ordinariness of the sacrifice.35 It is the same scandalous interface that has interested readers of the Clerk's Tale, in which (as in Genesis 22) a criminal or pathological act ostensibly exemplifies a spiritual obligation.36 How can it be said to exemplify something of the everyday?

If Abraham's dilemma is exemplary, it is so because his decision to sacrifice his son exhibits what Derrida calls an "aporia of responsibility," which consists, first, in the solitude and singularity of his decision, the way it cannot be accounted for by a cause other than his own free will, and, second, in the requisite sacrifice, the way it remains unaccountable in the economy of exchange. Abraham, Derrida reasons, "assumes the responsibility that consists in always being alone, entrenched in one's own singularity at the moment of decision."37 God's "secrecy" about his intention to release Abraham of his obligation ensures the father's "absolute solitude"38 in a poignant way, for it requires him to make a decision without the benefit of considerations of outcome or calculable effects; he has to conduct himself without reckoning, knowing, or expectation. Accordingly, Abraham's responsibility is itself characterized by secrecy because for the rest of us there is no accounting for the instant of his decision in rational or prudential terms. The same double condition of solitude and secrecy is always our own: it constitutes the "paradoxical condition of every decision" because every responsible decision "cannot be deduced from a form of knowledge, of which it would simply be the effect, conclusion, or explication."39 The aporetic quality of responsibility, then, is that it is always unaccountable at the moment one is called to account. No cause could suffice to explain one's choices if they are freely made. Responsibility is in this way gratuitous, even imprudent, because it circumvents the law of exchange: causality, calculability, reciprocity. The only law it knows is sacrifice, a "law of exception." Abraham indeed must sacrifice the general economy of exchange and all it implies to meet the singular demands of the Other with a genuine offering. The biblical story is an extreme case, to be sure, illustrating in a particularly vertiginous manner all that is involved in responsibility: that in giving ourselves to an other we sacrifice others. But Abraham's tragic duty to give up a son whom he loves dearly in order to obey the Other he also loves -thus clearly surrendering that which it is not easy to give up-is finally representative of the ordinary dilemma of the ethical intention. It is a common enough "gift of death."

Something of the same dilemma is movingly expressed in those pathetic moments when Griselda hands her children over to the scary sergeant of Saluces in an effort to obey her husband whom she loves at the same time as she surrenders her beloved children. Yet Griselda's is per haps the more profound and extraordinary example for several reasons. First, her dilemma is literally more mundane than that of Abraham, who has the advantage of a theophany to orient himself ethically, making his choice less uncertain and more bearable because it is God who demands the sacrifice. Griselda has only her vow to obey another human being. Moreover, Griselda follows through on her vow. Slavoj Zizek observes that "if Abraham were a modern hero, no angel would appear at the last moment; he would actually have slaughtered his son."40 On this view, isn't Griselda the more austerely "modern hero" for having (for all she knows) undertaken Walter's commands to sacrifice her children? Like Abraham's, hers is an ordeal of temporary obedience, but more pertinent after all perhaps is the unique comparison (not in Petrarch) the Clerk makes to Job, who actually lost everything. Even this comparison underestimates Griselda, who can actually be said to exhibit the proverbial "patience of Job" that Job lacks. Chaucer has in effect trumped both biblical examples with an account of far more radical and exemplary responsibility-what Zizek calls a response to the "fragile absolute." The Clerk thinks a woman can model the ethical response better than men:

Ther kan no man in humblesse hym acquite

As womman kan, ne kan been half so trewe

As wommeri been ....

(IV.936-38)

Zizek concurs that the most profound exemplary acts represent a properly feminine "ethical monstrosity"41-witness Medea, Sophie's Choice, and Beloved -for the truly "modern" (yet now medieval) ethical act is figured best in a woman's exemplary cutting of ties that run to the heart of her identity: that is, maternity.

Returning to the story vis-à-vis Derrida's original analysis, we can see that it is precisely by sacrificing a vital element of her feminine identity that Griselda figures a radical rejection of calculating means and ends according to the law of exchange. Hers is the ordinary condition of moral responsibility men and women experience in a complex moral universe. As Chaucer makes clear, Griselda is fully aware of what she gives up, passively. We are not invited to think that her submission is just part of the nature of things; nor can we settle complacently for an ideological analysis that deprives Griselda of freedom of choice. We are instead directed to the disposition and decisiveness of her free responsibility as a moral agent. Her decision is profoundly her own, something the text insists upon by having Griselda intensify her submission to Walter when she freely vows never to disobey him in "werk ne thoght." If her decision is thereby not coerced, neither is it apparently caused by pathology. Not even Walter doubts that "parfitly hir children loved she" (IV.690), though the question crosses his mind, indicating that like us even he finds her behavior perverse. Potentially perverse it will remain until we find an explicable cause (patriarchal ideology? sickness? selfinterest? domestic abuse?). But none satisfy. Does she hate her children? No. Is she acting out of mere obligation to Walter? No, because she loves him too. Does she suffer from false consciousness? Her dilemma, which is whether to keep her promise and transgress the maternal bond, or to attempt to rescue her children and transgress her prenuptial promise, pushes hard against our capacity to account for her conscious response even as it figures utmost responsibility.

Her decision, to sacrifice one for the other, may thus be the more exemplary because of its "monstrosity" in the sense Derrida and Zizek give the term, for the bare fact of her dilemma and the enigmatic freedom she exhibits in dealing with it may be enough to model something of the ethical intention. Hers is the problem par excellence of how to respond responsibly, and what her response goes to show is that ethics invariably involves secrecy and sacrifice-a gift of death. As Griselda says to her firstborn upon handing her over to the sergeant, "For this nyght shaltow dyen for my sake" (IV.560), acknowledging the gift that makes her responsibility possible.42

Hers is not a decision all readers can tolerate nowadays (but we observed that Walter too doubts her maternal love, while the Clerk calls her actions inportable, in which case suspicion is built right into the tale). We might rather prefer to call Griselda mad or shallow or selfish ("dyen for my sake"!). If she is responsible, then isn't she so to a fault? The extravagance of her decision is made all the more problematic in light of her previously equitable administration of the commons: "whan that the cas required it, / The commune profit koude she redresse" (IV.430-31). She had given "juggementz of so greet equitee" (IV.439) at that time, exhibiting an even hand in public affairs. What happened to make her behave so irrationally and for the sake of such apparently "singular profit"? By later freely transgressing prudential calculation with a final and inscrutable (imprudent) decision,43 Griselda responds to the singular demands of Walter with a conviction we can hardly muster. Nevertheless, Griselda's unconditional obedience figures something of the secrecy and tragedy of all dilemmas, even those we face in trying to account for her actions, in which the ethics of reading morally does not resolve itself without remainder.44

This returns us to the recursive level of the text where conviction is required, even for the scholarly expositor aspiring to a detached historical view of the matter. Any audience's dilemma remains how to take responsibility for the tale, realizing full well what the cost might be (e.g., our conviction that Griselda is really immoral? our commitment to the narrative complexity of the tale? our sense that Griselda has been hard done by?) in responding responsibly. In addition, whatever decision we make, we may find ourselves trying to account for an application in the public sphere where no explanation is totally persuasive, no decision sufficiently justified, no response good enough. And yet, unable to give adequate reasons for our choices, we may still have an ethical response to give. It is just that our choice will amount to a selection from among a range of alternatives, so that responsibility will have about it an air of irresponsibility. In this way, Griselda is the monster that haunts our reception of the moral tale-a "mervaille" for which we as students and teachers of Chaucer can hardly begin to account at the same moment that it holds us accountable to respond.45

Chaucer's moral tale is more demanding than most because of its insistence on the question of its own exemplarity, the way it makes a parable (rather than a parody) of itself. A perverse exemplum terrible,46 the Clerk's Tale invites us to think hard about moral thinking. A failure to come to grips with a unifying moral principle governing the tale is finally no objection to it, though it does make reading for the moral difficult. We may fail to find an application for Griselda, but in the case of the Clerk's Tale our repeated attempts, observed patiently, may constitute a properly ethical application after all. I for one am continually fascinated not just by a lack of answers, nor even by the fact that the tale finally seems unanswerable, but by the way this parable demands attention anyway, perhaps even our vertuous suffraunce. If this is not an agreeable conclusion, it may be because "Pacience is a point, pa3 hit displese ofte."47 The Clerk, reaching the end of his narrative, seems to have grown altogether impatient with the story when, turning to "noble wyves, ful of heigh prudence" (IV. 1183), he remarks how improvident Griselda's example is. The Clerk thus seems to have abandoned the parable in favor of a simplistic and reactionary reading. What happened to vertuous suffraunce! His turn away from "earnestful matere" (IV.1175) can of course seem to undercut the morality of the story, in which case any attempted spiritualization comes off as so much clerkly camouflage, proving it is true that clerks never speak well of wives. And yetas a final paradox-it is no argument against the morality if it tends to "displese" or exasperate its audience, because displeasure and difficulty constitutes a reason for patience.48

University of Bristol

[Footnote]

1 Cf. IV.1183 of the Clerk's Tale. Citations are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) and hereafter appear in the text.

2 Bronfman, Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale": The Griselda Story Received, Rewritten, Illustrated, Garland Studies in Medieval Literature (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 128.

3 Salter, Chaucer: The Knight's Tale and the Clerk's Tale (London: Edward Arnold, 1962), 50.

4 Ibid., 61.

5 Those besides Salter who take the first view include Robert M. Jordan, who argues that the tale is "broken backed" (Chaucer and the Shape of Creation: The Aesthetic Possibilities of Inorganic Structure [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967], 198); R. P. Miller ("Allegory in the Canterbury Tales," in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland [New York: Oxford University Press, 1979]); Alfred David (The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer's Poetry [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976], 159-69); and Hi Kyung Moon ("Chaucer's Clerk's Tale: A Disrupted Exemplum," English Language and Literature 40 !1994]: 643-55). F°r tne opposite view, see Dolores W. Frese, who thinks the "bifurcated" quality of the tale is constructive ("The Clerk's Tale: The Monsters and the Critics Reconsidered," Chaucer Review 8 [1973]: 133-46); Denise N. Baker, who claims the duality is a deliberate "trap" ("Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and the Monstrous Critics," Medium Aevum 60 [1991]: 241-56); and, most recently, Linda Georgianna, who argues that the reader is provoked to "wonder" at a disjunction between letter and spirit ("The Clerk's Tale and the Grammar of Assent," Speculum 70 [1995]: 793-821). Surveys of the criticism can be found in Bronfman's Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale" and in Charlotte C. Morse's "Critical Approaches to the Clerk's Tale," in Chaucer's Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 71-83.

6 See Salter, Chaucer, 38; A. C. Spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry, 2d ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), 101-3; and Baker, "Chaucer's Clerk's Tale," 64.

7 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, vols. 1-4, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 5.11.5-8.

8 Ibid., 5.11.22.

9 The phrase "restrictive and defensive" is Jean Starobinski's, as cited in Susan Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 33-34. For a fuller discussion, see John Drury's article on the Gospel of Luke in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 427-39, and the entry on "Parable" in A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition, ed. David L. Jeffrey (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eardmans, 1992).

10 Mark 4.12 (Douay Version of the Neiu Testament [Dublin: Sealy, Bryers and Walker, 1944]). In this phrase, he is citing Isaiah, in which a prophecy is spoken concerning the divinely imposed ignorance of the cities before an impending catastrophe (Isaias 6.9-10). Jesus' hidden meaning in the gospels is frequently as dire and apocalyptic. Thus, Matthew adds that Jesus uses parables "[t]hat it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying: I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden from the foundation of the world" (Matthew 13.35). Jesus will reveal what was once concealed, making the meaning of the past accessible to the present, so parables are not utterly secretive. However, even in the more optimistic Matthean context, the sentiment is qualified by the Parable of the Sower (a paradigmatic parable about the efficiency of parables). seeds falling on good ground are like parables yielding understanding in the regenerate heart; those falling on stony ground lie moribund. The audience for whom enlightenment comes is always a select one; parables are not reassuringly egalitarian: "For he that hath, to him shall be given, and he shall abound: but he that hath not, from him shall be taken away that also which he hath" (Matthew 13.12).

11 However, this is perhaps not always the case. On at least one occasion, Jesus dogs and provokes his opponents-stony ground though they be-by means of parabolic indirection: having heard the Parable of the Vineyard, the chief priests, scribes, and elders "knew that he spoke this parable to them" and schemed to arrest him (Mark 12.12). Of course, they do not really understand the parable because they fail to take the spiritual point. see Frank Kermode on how parables polarize the knowing and the unknowing ("Why Are Narratives Obscure?" in Genesis of secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979]).

12 The Psalter. Or Psalms of David and Certain Canticles with a Translation and Exposition by Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. H. R. Bramley (Oxford, 1884), 48.4.

13 I do not mean that the Clerk's morality is in a modern sense relativistic or even free of absolute authority. On the contrary, since the virtue in question will have to attach itself to the details of contingent circumstance, such relativity as there is enables greater specification, and with specification comes a greater sense of responsibility for the circumstances that are one's own. The moral will become an absolute imperative for people when it seems to apply to them. Thomas Nagel's point that generalities do not contain their application is relevant: "Reasons may be universal. . . without forming a universal System that always provides a method for arriving at determinate conclusions about what one should do" (The View From Nowhere [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], 152).

14 For more on the iconographical elements forming a consistent religious focus in the narrative, see Frese, "Clerk's Tale." Interestingly, the religious imagery is not all on the side of Griselda. Walter exhibits something of God's character according to the theology of both bridal mysticism and nominalism. Frese notes, "the Clerk draws here on the solidly traditional view of Christ as a perverse, wife-testing husband" (137) as exemplified in a well-known section of the Ancrene Wisse. Salter remarked on the parallel years before in Chaucer, 38-39. For the nominalist background, see Robert Stepsis, "Potentia Absoluta and the Clerk's Tale," Chaucer Review 10 (1975): 129-46. God as persecutor, or flagellum divinum, providing "the Christian with the opportunity to exhibit his patience," may also be relevant here; for background, see Ralph Hanna III, "Some Commonplaces of Late Medieval Patience Discussions: An Introduction," in The Triumph of Patience: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Gerald J. Schiffhorst (Orlando: University Presses of Florida, 1978), 65-87.

15 While Chaucer's rendering of vix imitabilis as inportable may distance Petrarch's misogynist implications, the translation does not disqualify them. Chaucer's English does not fix the meaning either way, since that which is unendurable is ambiguous. see Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, Vol. 1, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 101-67, for transcriptions and facing-page translations of Chaucer's sources, Petrarch's Latin and the French Livre Griseldis.

16 Bronfman's first chapter of Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale," "The Story Before Chaucer," is a complete account of all extant late medieval versions of the Griselda legend. As she notes, the prose tale, Le Livre Griseldis, a French translation of Petrarch that Chaucer consulted, leaves out the spiritual moralization and appends a "preface which declares that the story is an example for all women, especially married ones [a l'exemplaire des femmes mariees et toutes autres]." Moreover, the prologue to a late fourteenth-century French play dramatizing the legend of Griselda calls the story "a mirror for wives [le miroir des dames mariees]" (17). Baker, in "Chaucer's Clerk's Tale," 61-64, reviews the literalism of modern critics such as Bernard Huppé and Michael Cherniss, against whom she sets what she takes to be the Clerk's unproblematic spiritualization. Feminist readings tend to literalism, just as Harry Bailey's and the Merchant's antifeminist responses do.

17 Also encouraging us to take the tale as a marital exemplum are the emotions we are likely to attach to Griselda's specific actions or situation. The Clerk is susceptible to these as well. As many have observed since Severs's The Literary Relationships of Chaucer's "Clerkes Tale" ([New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942], 247), Chaucer heightened the pathos of the tale in translation by augmenting its realism; with greater pathos may come a fixation on the letter that would distract us from its spirit (though I grant that it could just as plausibly heighten our sense of spiritual import, as others have urged). Argues Salter, "the more vividly [Griselda] emerges as a sentient being, the less will be her power to move and instruct as a pure religious symbol" (Chaucer, 50). In addition, there is the issue of the Clerk's own engagement with the specific difficulties of his story. Baker observes that the Clerk's "explicit criticism of Walter forces the audience to regard the Marquis's behaviour literally and to evaluate it both psychologically and morally" ("Chaucer's Clerk's Tale" 63). Encouraged as we are, so Salter concludes, "to believe in his heartlessness rather than in his inscrutability," we may have trouble crediting Walter's purely symbolic or functional significance (Chaucer, 59). In this view, the narrator's preoccupation with particulars forces the audience to turn its attention to social and psychological matters, and to their affective dimensions, which may not be strictly relevant to the morality of the story.

18 Spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry, 93.

19 In a still familiar medieval version of the marriage ceremony, a woman would have vowed to "obey" her husband, "forsaking all others on account of him," while a man would promise, among other things, to "guard" her; see "Sarum Missal," in R. P. Miller, Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 375. Griselda seems willing to take the "forsaking" clause extremely seriously, but she is actually keeping an extraordinary prenuptial pledge (what Petrarch calls a mimculo, no less).

20 On the condemnation of infanticide in the later Middle Ages, and, perhaps not incidentally, the evident increase in ties of affection to children, see David Herlihy, "Medieval Children," in Essays on Medieval Civilization: The Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, ed. B. K. Lackner and R. K. Philips (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 109-41.

21 Griselda does not heed the advice of penitential manuals and sermons that urged pious wives to use persuasion (as does, for example, the prudent wife of Melibee) and even deception to influence their husbands for good, though she does apply herself to reforming Walter for his next wife (see IV. 1037-43). For the history of such advice to women, see Sharon Farmer, "Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives," Speculum 61 (1986): 517-43. Farmer cites Thomas of Chobham, who, like other proponents of wifely persuasion, taught his congregants that "the sin of a man is often imputed to his wife if, through her negligence, he is not corrected" (21).

22 See Hanna, "Some Commonplaces," 70, on the received theological wisdom that the virtue of patience is never an unqualified good: "[Augustine] sees clearly that triumphant endurance of pain is a great virtue but that some triumphs are not worth suffering for. The later medieval citation-version of Augustine puts the matter most succinctly: 'Non facit martyrem poena, sed causa' ('Not suffering, but a good cause, makes a martyr'). Augustine produces the usual theological standard for measuring the value of a cause, the eighth Beatitude: 'Beati qui persecutionem patiuntur propter justitiam, quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum' ('Blessed are they who suffer persecution for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven').... [S]uffering for a cause which is not God's is viewed throughout the Middle Ages as less than meritorious, as indeed sinful." On obedience, see Denise Baker's "Chaucer's Clerk's Tale," 66, and also her "Chaucer and Moral Philosophy: The Virtuous Women of the Canterbury Tales," Medium Aevum 60 (1991): 24156. Taking up the question as to whether one is bound to obey a superior in all things, Aquinas argued sed contra as follows in his Summa theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, Dominican Editors, vols. 1-60 (New York: Blackfriars, 1964), 2.104.5: "It is written (Acts 5:29): 'We ought to obey God rather than men.' Now sometimes the things commanded by a superior are against God. Therefore superiors are not to be obeyed in all things." This unexceptionable piece of doctrine covers all sorts of hierarchical relationships, and by its lights apparently we are bound to find (excluding an allegorical reading of Walter as God) against Griselda.

23 James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2. 2350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 320.

24 A variant in one reliable late fourteenth-century manuscript containing Le Livre Griseldis, the main French source and analogue of Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, indicates that Griselda's example is hardly worthy, estimable, rather than hard to imitate, ensuivable-, on the distinction, see Amy W. Goodwin, "The Griselda Story in France," in Sources and Analogues, Vol. 1, ed. Correale and Hamel, 138.1 am developing an interpretation that shows how Chaucer puts the alternative senses in play with his equivocal inportable.

25 Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), 271.

26 Cf. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2.104.5.1 invoke such heavy-duty theological authorities not to foreclose interpretation, but rather to multiply its bases.

27 Modern reaction to "monstrous Griselda" can be dated to Thomas Lounsbury's Studies in Chaucer: His Life and Writings, vol. 3 (New York, 1892), 340-41, where she is called "weak-spirited, and even despicable" because she "does not even exhibit the degree of sensibility which exists in the females of brute creation." George L. Kittredge evidently entertained similar misgivings, but he concluded that such negative reactions are beside the point when it comes to the moral discourse of the former age, when there was an acceptance of "stories that exemplify a single human quality" and "show to what lengths this quality may conceivably go" ("Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage," Modern Philology 9 [1912]: 307). But even an early source study yielded negative judgments: in Literary Relationships of Chaucer's "Clerkes Tale," Severs encouraged the notion that Chaucer had intensified the tale's irrationality, a change which Nevill Coghill would characterize by saying it had become "monstrous" (The Poet Chaucer, ad ed. [London: Oxford University Press, 1967], 140). James Sledd's "The Clerk's Tale: The Monsters and the Critics" (Modern Philology 51 [1953]: 73-82) acknowledged prior critics' doubts but argued that if there is a problem with the morality of the tale it is ours, not Chaucer's. According to Sledd's circular logic, "the judgement that [Griselda] is good is an essential preliminary" (79). In "Clerk's Tale," Frese attempted to refocus the controversy by insisting that the tale (not Griselda) is deliberately grotesque-she speaks of the Clerk's "two-headed creation" (138) because of the way it sets up a "rhythmic tension" (135) between the "intellectual-religious and the emotional-human" (140). Baker alludes to the terms of past discussions in "Chaucer's Clerk's Tale," arguing, like Kittredge and Sledd before her, that the real monsters are the critics who fall into the "trap" of reading literally: "In the Clerk's Tale Chaucer subtly warns us about the importance of careful reading and the dangers of confusing the letter and the spirit" (67). Griselda's monstrosity is still worth talking about because it remains one of the best characterizations of the problem of reading for the moral that we have. However ambivalent or protective past critics have been, we should take away from the debate something of what it is like to experience the narrative, even if that initial experience (rather than the assumption that Griselda is good) is preliminary to a deeper understanding.

28 David Williams, in Deformed Discourse: The Function ofthe Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), argues that monstrosity in medieval art and literature "points to utterances that lie beyond logic" (10). I do not claim quite the same mystical or metaphysical effects for Chaucer's literary marvel that is the Clerk's Tale, since I am interested in practical reasoning, but even from an ethical vantage, as I will explain further, the exemplary narrative achieves a certain sublimity.

29 Jacques Derrida, "Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion," in Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 148 (italics in the original). The interest in possible pragmatic meanings or acts rather than indeterminacy accords with Derrida's interest in "relations of force, in differences of force, in everything that allows, precisely, determinations in given situations to be stabilized through a decision of writing (in the broad sense I give to this word, which also includes political action and experience in general)" (ibid.).

30 It prompts an ethical response because this reaction is in the reader, not the text. For instance, in the limit case of the Clerk's Tale, where moral meaning is so elusive, articulating the elusiveness may be enough to have finally discovered its morality. My reading of the Clerk's Tale is a development of this basic line of reasoning. It is an ethical or practical sort of reasoning because ethics is concerned with what stories do and not just what they mean. Even if the Clerk's Tale is ambiguous as to "meaning," that ambiguity is not itself experienced as ambiguous-is not, so to speak, ambiguous as to "doing." A text may lack structure or sense without failing to structure the experience of a reader.

31 That we find a decision difficult does not preclude the experience of feeling as though a decision were required. Two critics who have emphasized the tale's moral claims are Charlotte Morse and Linda Georgianna. Morse, observing that we are used to sympathizing with literary characters rather than imitating them, thinks moderns hardly have the faith anymore to take the tale as it is intended to be taken; nonetheless, she stresses that the Clerk's Tale belongs to a class of medieval "literary texts that mean to effect a moral or spiritual change in us" ("The Exemplary Griselda," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 7 [1985]: 54). Georgianna similarly argues that Chaucer wants us to assent to Griselda's example rather than to avyse it in some detached, academic manner. As a result, we are "forced to confront the radical demands of faith, and our need, as fallen people, to rationalize them" ("Clerk's Tale," 818). Both critics thus insist on self-improvement as the only adequate response to the tale. I enlarge the field of possibilities by insisting that self-consciousness about the risks of responding constitutes another response.

32 Derrida, "Afterword," 116.

33 Compare Ludwig Wittgenstein on how in practice when one reads one must at every stage decide how to "go on." Rending is a matter of learning to apply rules "in the particular case without guidance" (Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3d ed. [Toronto: Prentice Hall, 1958], 75, 100). See also Timothy C. Potts, Conscience in Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), for relevant remarks about rule-following in the moral sphere: "a rule can never dictate its own application. However detailed it maybe, a decision is always required as to whether it applies to a given situation" (18)

34 Luke 14.26; cf. Corinthians 7.29-31.

35 Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 75. As Derrida explains, "The story is no doubt monstrous, outrageous, barely conceivable: a father is ready to put to death his beloved son, his irreplaceable loved one, and that because the Other, the great Other asks him or orders him without giving the slightest explanation. . . . But isn't this the most common thing? what the most cursory examination of the concept of responsibility cannot fail to affirm?" (67-68; cf. 85).

36 "Like Griselda," A. C. Spearing argues, "Abraham is commanded to give up his child to death, in order to show his total commitment to an absolute system of values; and like her, having displayed his willingness to commit an act which by normal human standards is cruel and unnatural, he is eventually released from the test." Spearing describes such stories under the rubric of promise-and-release, a popular type that dramatizes divided allegiances or a clash of values: "Medieval writers and their audiences were very fond of stories in which an unbreakable promise imposes on the person who has made it conduct that may seem irrational or even monstrous" (Criticism and Medieval Poetry, 2d ed. [London: Edward Arnold, 1972], 98-99). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Franklin's Tale are other examples, but the tale of Griselda remains especially "monstrous" according to Spearing (the term is invoked on pages 93, 97, 98, and 101). In A Reading of Sir Gawain (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), J. A. Burrow lists Abraham and Isaac and the Clerk's Tale among what he calls "test-stories," which stage a contest between opposing virtues (160). Richard F. Green's recent A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) gives further examples of the oath-testing story, of which the "archetypal example" is "the story of Abraham and Isaac" (332). Lounsbury seems to have been the first to remark the comparison between Abraham and Griselda (Studies in Chaucer, 342). Apropos of the comparison, Thomas J. Farrell observes that "[aluthors in the Middle Ages seem to have recognized the (at least) potential monstrosity in the sacrifice Abraham is willing to make, as their delight in accentuating the pitiful plight of the boy by careful extrapolation of his character in the mystery cycles attests." Farrell claims that "Griselda demonstrates virtue in a monstrous situation, but her virtue is not for Chaucer monstrous"-as if monstrosity could not also be virtuous ("The Chronotopes of Monology in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale," in Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, ed. Thomas J. Farrell [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995], 153).

37 Derrida, Gift of Death, 60.

38 Ibid., 57.

39 Ibid., 77.

40 Zizek, The Fragile Absolute-or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), 150. On the other hand, Emmanuel Lévinas thinks the angel's appearance is of most consequence to the ethics of the story: "Abraham's attentiveness to the voice that led him back to the ethical order, in forbidding him to perform a human sacrifice, is the highest point in the drama. That he obeyed the first voice is astonishing: that he had sufficient distance with respect to that obedience to hear the second voice-that is essential" (Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996] 77}

41 Zizek, Fragile Absolute, 153.

42 The "ethical monstrosity" does not quite fit the Kierkegaardian "suspension of the ethical," because the suspension of the law of exchange grounding ethics is the foundation rather than the breach of the ethical. Again, the paradox of Abraham and Griselda is that to be morally responsible to one another is to be irresponsible to other others. The gift, representing the rupture in the economy of exchange in much recent theory, here stands for the paradox at the center of responsibility: that is, in responding to an other, I fail to respond equally to others. Derrida calls this the law of exception. In Chaucer's text, on the level of phraseology alone, there is evidence of a certain exceptionalism. The phrase "save one thing" and similar expressions of reservation recur throughout the text (see IV-55,76, no, 507, 569, 680, 768,1036, and 1163, and see the oaths at lines 169 and 351), as if to draw attention to the question of value: what is and is not worth sacrificing? It is perhaps a latent recognition of manifest content.

43 As Georgianna argues, "The only motive Griselda ever offers for her assent is love, which is less an explanation than a synonym for her assent. . . . No practical purpose, strategy, or possible reward impinges on Griselda's assent, which is in every sense free" (Clerk's Tale, 805). For Georgianna, Griselda's love is something holy or numinous; in my analysis, it is earthly and pragmatic but no less mysterious for that reason. For a very different reading of Griselda's unintelligibility, see Elaine Tuttle Hansen's Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), where it is construed as a calculated challenge: "Griselda has threatened to escape Walter's tyranny by willfully refusing to resist it, and it is possible to argue that he keeps testing her because given his view of selfhood and power, her behavior can only seem unmotivated, implausible, irritating, and even inhuman" (194). My argument is closer to Georgianna's in supposing that Griselda's "inhuman" act adumbrates something about the cruel nature of moral responsibility, particularly the nature of its gratuity (rather than any sort of proto-feminist aggression).

44 The radical break between common and singular profit in the Clerk's Tale points to Chaucer's strategy to represent what is most irrecuperable about responsibility: its irresponsibility. Lévinas, too, describes ethics as an anarchic response to a singular other that sacrifices others, but his conception-one which informs Derrida and Zizek-also recognizes the "corrective" imperative of justice arising out of consideration for the third party: "all the others than the other obsess me, and already this obsession cries out for justice, demands measure and knowing, is consciousness" (Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981], 158). The inevitable injury done to others in the name of one other is not lost on Lévinas, and a similar sense of inevitable injustice is there in the ethical pathos of the Clerk's Tale. The Clerk's Tale, though, does not seem to take us beyond the scandalous negative description of the necessary moment of imprudence prior to prudence; for the reaffirmation of prudence, one must look ahead to the Tale of Melibee, which I discuss in a forthcoming book. Suffice it to say that Chaucer brings us to the edge, the threshold of prudence before justice and the conscience emerges, in Lévinas's terms, as "the limit of responsibility and the birth of the question: What do I have to do with justice?" (Otherwise Than Being, 157).

45 The absurdity of her decision may (also) represent something more spiritual than I have so far allowed, requiring recognition of Griselda's extravagant transgression of morality, but sublimated to a higher register, much in the way readers are incited to a higher-level awareness through the forced comparison of spiritual welfare in heaven to the arbitrary dispensation of an earthly lord in the difficult Parable of the Vineyard (see my discussion of the parable in "The Middle English Pearl: Figuring the Unfigurable," Chaucer Review 35 [2000]: 86-111). On a theological reading, the less justification there is for Griselda's passion from the ordinary terrestrial perspective, the more awe-inspiring is her example from the celestial perspective. Suffering for God will never be unjustified, so when we think of Griselda in those terms her apparent irresponsibility may not be strictly applicable, except insofar as it is necessary to fire our imagination or move emotion. For superb religious interpretations in this vein, which depend on the shocking nature of the tale, see both Georgianna's "Clerk's Tale" and Ian Robinson's Chaucer and the English Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 164-65.

46I borrow the awkward polyglot term, first used by G. R. Owst, from Joan Young Gregg's Devils, Women, and Jews: Reflections on the Other in Medieval Sermon Stories (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), where it is used to describe tales of horror and intimidation.

47 Patience, in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Berkeley: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 185, 1. i. My allusion is occasioned by Burrow's claim in Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature and its Background, 1000-1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) that Patience "does not. . . bring with it any of the doubts and ironies which disturb the simple functioning of the exemplary mode in the Clerk's Tale." Patience allegedly gives no grounds for subversion: "if we fail to see this, it can only be from a profound failure of interest in general moral concepts. We do not want to learn about patience" (116; emphasis mine). Wittgenstein could have been describing the same phenomenon when he observed, "What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect" (Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 17). Similar claims have been made about the Clerk's Tale, in fact. Charlotte Morse argues that ironizers and allegorizers alike diminish the tale because they will not accept it: "Thus displacing the tale from itself and from themselves, readers make it safe, acceptable, and comfortable" ("Exemplary Griselda," 52). It is an important point about the place of the will in reading. However, while Morse excludes ironizers and allegorizers tout court, I have aimed to include their insights by suggesting the way mutually exclusive meanings work against one another and demand judgment even when judgment remains so impossible.

48 I thank Melissa Furrow, Russell Peck, John Baxter, and Ad Putter for their critical interventions at various stages in the development of my argument. Research for the article was undertaken with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Trust.