The Canterbury Romances: Chaucer’s Tales of Trouthe
The Clerk’s Tale
Most discussions of trouthe in Chaucer start with The Franklin’s Tale, because it is built around the question of how trouthe is to be met. But I am inclined to start in another place, with that most extreme of romances (so extreme that many refuse to regard it as a romance26), The Clerk’s Tale.
We may summarize The Clerk’s Tale as follows: Walter the marquis is urged by his followers to take a wife. He agrees, but insists on choosing her himself, in his own time, rather than submit to an arranged marriage to some noble lady. In due time, he locates Griselda, the poor daughter of a peasant. He keeps her existence a secret until the very day he has set for his wedding, when he raises her up and — after extracting a promise of obedience — marries her. They have a daughter and a son.
But he is resolved to test her. First he takes away her daughter, implying that the child will be killed. Then he takes away her son, again claiming the boy will die. Then he degrades her. Then he declares (using forged letters from the Pope as his excuse) that he will take another wife, and insists that Griselda serve the new bride. The bride he produces (as he knows but Griselda does not) is their own daughter, who has been brought up in a foreign household. Griselda is thus made to wait on a girl the age of her daughter. And Griselda does it.
At this, Walter finally relents, and admits that he has been testing her (in Boccaccio’s version, “Griselda, it is time now for you to reap the fruit of your long patience, and it is time for those who have considered me cruel, unjust, and bestial to realize that what I have done was directed toward a pre-established goal, for I wanted to teach you how to be a wife”!27). Their children are alive; they are in fact present with him; Griselda is restored to her place as Walter’s wife, and all ends happily.
Happily except for the post-traumatic stress Griselda feels, anyway, and the shock the children feel upon being reunited with birth parents they never knew. Even the song that follows the tale says that such a result is not really possible in the time when the tale is told:
Grisilde is deed, and eek hire pacience,
And bothe atones buryed in Ytaille....28
It is a dark, dark narrative, very hard for moderns to read. I always stall in trying to finish it; I can’t take the brutality. Many treat the Clerk’s Tale as a horror story, and James Sledd’s The Clerk’s Tale: The Monsters and the Critics29 has only partly changed that. Walter is a sadist, and Griselda is a masochist, and she should have abandoned him long before the tale ended. The story goes back to Boccaccio’s Decameron (Chaucer made much use of Boccacio as a source); Petrarch translated it into Latin, and this is likely Chaucer’s direct source.30 Boccaccio’s other stories for Day Ten of the Decameron seem to have been intended to instruct, sometimes with a sledgehammer31 — but what is he trying to teach here? The problem is so extreme that some have tried to excuse it by maintaining that the tale is a sort of rationalized version of the Cupid and Psyche myth,32 an hypothesis which “explains” the situation but gives no reason for why actual human beings to do such a thing. Others try to write it off as an allegory,33 though it is not clear how this actually helps (and Chaucer doesn’t seem to have liked allegory much anyway, as we shall see below). It is no excuse to say, as George Lyman Kittredge did a century ago, “Whether Griselda could have put an end to her woes, or ought to have put an end to them, by refusing to obey her husband’s commands is parum ad rem. We are to look at her trials as inevitable, and to pity her accordingly, and wonder at her endurance.... We miss the pathos because we are aridly intent on discussing an ethical question that has no status in this particular court.”34
It may have no status, but it is an ethical question. “In the Tale of Griselda the moral positives seem to be confused, and there appears to be a lack of real motive and purpose in the actions and thoughts of the characters.”35 “[G]iven a tale of inhuman cruelty and of endurance equally inhuman, how can the author make it believable in human terms?”36 Why did Chaucer, who was unusually modern in his rejection of the sort of rigid Augustinian harshness common in the medieval mind, tell such a tale? Why did he even, it has been suggested, make Griselda’s suffering more extreme than in his sources?37 On its face, “we are asked... to tolerate an intolerable tyrant, and to admire a dolt.”38 Why? What does Chaucer see in the tale of Griselda?
The answer is probably found in the way Walter and Griselda came to be married. Walter, when he wed Griselda, had asked her to be a loyal wife:
“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 nevere ye to grucche it, nyght ne day?
And eek whan I sey ‘ye,’ ne sey nat ‘nay,’
Neither by word ne frownyng contenance?
Swere this, and heere I swere oure alliance.”39
In other words, Walter calls on her to obey him absolutely, not just in deed but in word and appearance. What is her response?
But as ye wole youreself, right so wol I.
And heere I swere that nevere willyngly
In werk ne thought, I nyl yow disobeye....”40
In other words, he has asked of her an extreme vow — and she gives an even stronger vow than is asked of her. She gives trouthe to the extreme.
Much of the problem here, I think, come about because Griselda is Walter’s wife. In Chaucer’s time, men expected to lord it over their wives, so Walter was considered to have the right to be abominable to Griselda. Critics think the tale is about the marriage. But it isn’t. We can only understand it if we realize it is about the vow.
The vow is not Chaucer’s invention; it is in Petrarch, his probable source, where Griselda says “I know myself unworthy, my lord, of so great an honor [as to marry the ruler of the land]; but if it be your will, and if it be my destiny, I will never consciously cherish a thought, much less do anything, which might be contrary to your desires; nor will you do anything, even though you bid me to die, which I shall bear ill.”41
In her sufferings, Griselda offered a mantra that maintains her trouthe:
“I have,” quod she, “said thus, and evere shal:
I wol no thyng, ne nyl no thyng, certayn,
But as yow list.”42
Her next sentence accepts the killing of her two children because it is his command: “I have noght had no part of children tweyne.”43
It is sometimes said that Griselda’s actions parallel the submission of a good Christian to God — indeed, this was Petrarch’s justification.44 She is casting herself as a second Job (a comparison also made by the Clerk himself).45 But even if we ignore the fact that this perverts scripture,46 surely the logical flaw here is obvious. God is, in Christian doctrine, assumed to be the fountainhead of good; momentary trials are endured in hopes of earning, or becoming capable of receiving, a reward. But neither we nor Griselda have any reason to think Walter is such a source of good. “[T]he woman Griselda, unlike the man Job, never curses Walter, for to do so would be to give up the integrity for and through which she lives.”47
What does it say that Chaucer, like Boccaccio but unlike Petrarch, “is critical of Walter’s ‘tyranny,’”48 yet still tells the tale? Indeed, the Clerk’s Tale stands closer to its sources than any other romance he uses; why not fix it, as he improved the Knight’s Tale or the Wife of Bath’s Tale?
Chaucer knows the situation is dysfunctional. Walter, in wedding Griselda, has asked too much — and Griselda has responded by giving even more than was asked. It is an unstable situation — and the instability quickly reveals itself as Walter goes out of control and Griselda sits there and takes it. Walter, with his request, has violated trouthe. Griselda, with her extreme trouthe, accepts and accepts and accepts, until the situation is so lopsided that it must be resolved. And it is resolved, with the right balance of things restored. All because Griselda kept her trouthe even when tested beyond what most of us could endure.
E. Talbot Donaldson had much to say on this topic.49 I can’t quote all of it, but Donaldson contends that Chaucer adopted a “daring plan” to keep Griselda human. “In the first place the virtue he endows her with is not really the traditional patience which often suggests... a kind of monumental passivity, but rather constancy. Unlike patience, which can be ascribed to a dumb animal, constancy demands that its possessor be fully aware of the cost of what he is doing even while he continues to do it.” “The value Griselda places upon Walter does not blind her to the many other values of life; but of her own volition she has made constancy to him supreme.” “While Walter remains the visible symbol of the vow Griselda made him, it seems less Walter than the vow itself that Griselda is thinking of.” “It is Griselda’s perfectly human integrity — her trouthe — that she and the reader prize above all.”
The Middle Ages had a very different view of Griselda from what we have today. She was praiseworthy, not crazy. Petrarch wrote to Boccaccio: “My object in thus re-writing your tale was not to induce the women of our time to imitate the patience of this wife, which seems to me almost beyond imitation, but to lead my readers to emulate the example of feminine constancy, and to submit themselves to God with the same constancy as did this woman to her husband.”50
To them, trouthe was real. Especially, perhaps, to Geoffrey Chaucer. Fortunately, the rest of what he had to say on the topic was not so unpleasant.
Travelers on Pilgrimage