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Although Chaucer has sometimes been called a sexist author, one of the dead white males whose vision of the world is patriarchal and demeaning to women, such an accusation is far from being valid. In The Knights Tale, for instance, what we are presented with is, in fact, a subversion of other sexist literature. Rather than simply delivering a conventional romance in this work, what Chaucer does is have his Knight tell a tale in which typical male figures from such works are made to look ridiculous. His Arcite and Palamon are revealed as fools, while the object of their affection, Emelye, is shown to be much wiser. We can, therefore, look at this work as a pro-feminist statement made well before its time. The male lovers in the Knights story make a number of conventional remarks about their female love interest, Emelye.
In typical fashion, she is likened to a heavenly creature: And as an angel hevenyshhly she song (197). The west nat yet now Whether she be a woman or goddess! (298 - 300) Rather than a mere human with human interests and desires the female is made to be unearthly. This may sound like wholly complimentary, but what it does is place an unreasonable amount of expectations on her to act and to be heavenly so that the men may continue to support their fantasy. Furthermore, this fantasizing has its dark side, like any fantasy.
While the woman is made to be a goddess, the un reachability of the woman is made into a negative thing: a prison that is tormenting the men. As Arcite remarks to Palamon of his predicament: The is the victorie of this aventure. Ful blissfully in prison mailto dure. In prison? Certes, nay, but in parades!
Wel hath Fortune y-turned thee the dys, That hast the sight of hire, and I th absence (377 - 382). Palamon responds with his own prison metaphors: Yow lovers, axe I now this question, / Who hath the worse, Arcite or Palamon? / That oon may seen his lady day by day, / But in prison moot he dell alway (489 - 492). What has happened here, therefore, is that the woman has come to be thought of as the cause of the mens pain, which shifts blame onto her. If the men feel terrible for being prisoners, it is Emelye who is made responsible. This way of thinking can easily turn into misogyny the hatred of women for being other than men would like them to be. The story the Knight tells continues to follow conventional lines in the sense that Emelye is completely left out of the decision-making process when it comes to the men who want to possess her.
Where is Emelye's opinion, we might ask, when the men are deciding to kill one another? Shouldnt she have some element of choice in the matter, so that if indeed she does feel partial towards one or the other of the men, she can decide herself which it is to be? Why must her interests be sacrificed to the barbarities of a deadly battle between half-insane men which has nothing to do with love? Of course, these are not questions that conventional romances raise. Chaucer has Palamon state the typical point of view of the male lover when he has Palamon state of his and his rivals desire for Emelye: I am thy mortal foo, and it am I That loveth so home Emelye the bright That I wol dye present in hir site.
Wherefore I axe death and my jewish, But slee my female in the same wise, For both have we deserved to be say. (879 - 883) This conventional way of thinking makes no room for the womans input, and in fact sees her as irrelevant to the outcome of any romantic clash. What is extraordinary about The Knights Tale, though, is that it sees the problems with the conventional romantic formula as outlined above. Chaucer seems to know how silly it is that two men are fighting over a woman without letting her have any say in the matter, and he makes this explicit in the speech of Theseus. As this royal figure remarks of the struggles of Arcite and Palamon: But this is yet the beste game of alle, That she for whom they have this jolted Kan hem therefore as muche thank as me. She woot na moore of al this home fare, By God, than woot a cok kow of an hare (948 - 952). Chaucer is aware of the absurdity of patriarchal convention, and exposes this absurdity through this speech.
Another instance of his undermining process occurs in the following speech by Emelye herself, who asks finally to be spared from the complexities of romantic life: Chaste goddess, wel weston that I Desire to been a made al my life, Ne never wol I be no love ne was. I am, the west, yet of thy compagnie, A made, and love hunting and venery, And for to walken in the women wilde, And not to been a was and be with childe. Not wol I knowe compagnie of man (1446 - 1453). Emelye stresses her maidenhood like any good conventional romantic heroine, but here she desires to be a maiden not for reasons of purity before marriage, but because she is fed up with men. She, like Chaucer himself, sees through the conventions men have established, critiquing them harshly. What Chaucer achieves in The Knights Tale, therefore, is a feminist vision of love relations hidden beneath an apparently conventional (and patriarchal) story.
This fact has been apprehended by a number of critics, if only dimly. As Terry Jones has remarked, For the Knight, Love is just another battle. His Tale is an essentially loveless love story Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in his account of the relationship between the two protagonists, Palamon and Arcite (Jones 149). What the relationship demonstrates, in fact, is the absurdity of romantic love, at least as it has existed in conventional literature, as well as the essential and paradoxical neglect of the woman herself upon which conventional romances are based.
Works Cited and Consulted Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Interpretations: The Knights Tale. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Chaucer, Geoffrey.
The Canterbury Tales. New York: Prentice Hall, 1947. Jones, Terry. Chaucer's Knight.
London: Methuen, 1980.
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