Guide to Week 5:

        Moral tales are specifically referred to with approval by Chaucer-the-Pilgrim in the "Miller's Prologue" (I. 3181).  They resemble the sermon's "exemplum" or teaching example in that they are intended to yield an unambiguous rule or rules for behavior from any competent interpretation.  Modern critics, however, tend to distrust this limitation of interpretation as an ideological surrender to the authority of Christian dogma and bourgeois or noble social norms.  The disruptive powers of "carnivalesque" or Deconstructive interpretations often are invoked by critics following Bakhtin and Derrida.  This poses an interesting challenge.  Is that approach "ahistorical" and illegal because it violates what may have been the author's intention, or does appeal to "author's intention" commit what New Critics called the "Intentional Fallacy"?  Before you accept without debate any critical article which urges such a disruptive or subversive interpretation of the "Man of Law's Prologue and Tale," the "Pardoner's Tale," or the "Physician's Tale," take seriously the possibility that the modern critic might be importing ahistorical values into the interpretation which would have been as alien to the medieval situation of its origins as nuclear power or "human rights."

        Once we have exercised due caution about casually disruptive or subversive readings of moral tales which are not supported by evidence of disruptive or subversive evidence in the narrative, we can start asking those same questions ourselves.  Does the teller truly control the moral significance of his/her tale, or does it escape that control and perhaps suggest significances which criticize the moral lesson its teller most obviously hopes to communicate?  Be especially careful to compare concluding or internal narrators' judgments about the moral significance of episodes or characters.  Test them carefully to see whether the moral fits the tale.  Comparison of the teller with her/his General Prologue description often can give us clues about what Chaucer was attempting to do with such a creature when it begins to narrate its own tales, though not all tales fit their tellers so precisely as those of the KT-MT-RT-CFrag sequence.

        When you turn from your work by Chaucer to the works of Gower and the anonymous author of "Nouvelle LXXXII," test the other authors' style against Chaucer's by comparing their handling of the narrator's point of view, characterization, descriptions of actions and settings, and other standard aspects of narration.  As in the cases of the Harley 2253 fabliaux vs. Chaucher's Miller's, Reeve's and Shipman's tales, we also can consider the presence or absence of a frame narrative and the degree of characterization given the narrator, him- or herself.  Could any of these tales have been narrated by a woman, or is their point of view peculiarly male for some reason.  Let your feminist criticism guide you in the usual tests: identifying exploitation of women by a patriarchal value system; identifying the text's "representative women" or detecting the absence of women's ideological presence; reading the margins and questioning the center of the narrative's value system; interrogating the narrative's version of "normal" or "natural" roles, behaviors, and rules.  Deconstruction, New Historicism and Cultural Criticism also can offer some help put the text's value systems "into play" again.

        In the cases of Chaucer and Gower, where you have two poets working in Middle English, try comparing their poetic technique.  How cleverly do they handle rhymes?  Dull narrative poets tend to produce many rhyming couplets which rhyme on exactly or nearly the same word, whereas more talented narrative poets use pointed rhyming combinations to add compressed meaning to the sentences from which the poem is made.  (For more on this, see W. K. Wimsatt's "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason" in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, KY: U Kentucky P, 1954) 152-66: 808.1 W757.)