Chaucer and the Subject of History (Lee Patterson)

Patterson’s Chaucerian critical history in Negotiating the Past was vitally concerned with preserving the individuality and agency of the subject; the book seems to be an enlargement on that theme, specially applied to Chaucer. A single quotation will suffice to encapsulate Patterson’s “big picture”:

When we try to define [Chaucer’s] social identity, to specify the community within which he can be securely located and from which he derived his sense of social self-definition, we find that every assertion requires a qualification. He is the son of a rich merchant, but one educated in noble households; a king’s squire, but one who fulfilled the duties of a clerical administrator; a modest servant of the Crown, but one who numbered among his friends some of the king’s closest associates. To specify his social identity with precision and confidence seems impossible. For what the evidence reveals is a Chaucer on the boundary between distinctive social formations. Not bourgeois, not noble, not clerical, he nonetheless participates in all three of the communities. Surely this sense of marginality, of participating in various groupings but being fully absorbed by none, is related to the sense of subjectivity, the sense of selfhood that stands apart from all community, that we recognize throughout his writing and especially in the Canterbury Tales. (39).

Though arguably hyperbolic in its details, Patterson’s portrait of Chaucer is a vivid depiction of a man whose marginality serves (in essence) as a place to stand and apply a world-moving lever. (Of course, Strohm would disagree strongly with this position -- the Antisocial Chaucer? -- and probably did.) He then presents his readings of several of Chaucer’s works built on this conceptual frame: that absorption in and alienation from social identity are the critical factors in the generation of subjectivity, both in the case of those who’ve accepted their social role (the Knight) and those who have not (the Wife of Bath). For my purposes, I shall treat of the Knight only.

Patterson describes the Knight as “a man whose social ideology precludes self-consciousness” (40). He also lived in a time when his own role was destabilizing: “There is considerable evidence to suggest that in the late fourteenth century chivalric identity was beginning to be seen as inadequate even to the governing class” (178). Knights became less essential to warfare, and so needed to justify their existence, with the result that chivalry became its own end. Thus the Knight’s tale focuses not on a military campaign but on a quarrel between knights: a matter of honor. Yet, as Patterson illustrates through the historic legal battle between Scropes and Grosvenor, the honor that drives Palamon and Arcite to destruction is the same honor that Theseus (and the Knight) uphold as the heart of chivalry. The failure of Palamon, Arcite, and Theseus to “self-consciously” examine their social ideology destroyed them, a problem the Knight fails to register, lacking self-consciousness himself. (Aers’s reflexivity?)