Seductive Violence and Three Chaucerian Women. O'Brien, Timothy D.

In part, isolating the seductive violence in these portraits builds upon a focus in recent literary, cultural, and theoretical commentary on violence done to women, ranging from physical dismemberment to textual silencing. In Chaucerian, and more widely, Middle English studies, such commentators as Carolyn Dinshaw, Elaine Hansen, Kathryn Gravdal, and Louise Fradenburg, to name just a few, have observed the ways in which male authors--as well as male scholars and critics--support their hegemony by positioning women characters as objects of violence, whether the aim is some form of violation or an equally threatening rescue. Often such commentary is supported by psychoanalytical, post-structuralist theory concerning the origin of gender and language--Derrida, Lacan, and Kristeva are among the usual sources. Such theory expands enormously the scope of violence beyond ravishing, torturing, and stabbing. Entry into language and the associated differentiation of genders; scraping parchment, writing, and reading a text; recording history; and looking at a woman (the gaze)--all these and more are acts of violence. They enact violence insofar as they divide and differentiate, insofar as they work to determine the indeterminate, and insofar as they establish boundaries and mark something as alien in order to determine individual and/or group identity. Because woman is the indeterminate or the object that can stand in for the original loss of the "real," to use Lacanian terms, she is the focus of a determining, differentiating violence. Without a clear demarcation between inside and outside, she becomes the site whereon man can define borders and thus his masculinity. [1]

This isolation of violence as the origin of gender helps to take us beyond such important observations as Hanks's that love and sex in Chaucer are often violent affairs. It uncovers the underlying structure of that violence. But it also remains limited without a sense of how the self-representations of these three female characters also originate in the texts-particularly the schoolbooks, saints' lives and romances-that helped to shape male identity in terms of violence toward females. Chaucer's characters attract us because they uncannily reflect "human nature," but at same time they are textual, products of Chaucer's literate experience. Perhaps this distinction does not amount to a difference: even characters who strike us as real do so precisely because they are composed of the "texts" from which our expectations about what is authentic have themselves been formed. Certainly these three female characters present themselves in terms of texts that confirm the expectations of their male audiences.

The notion of the feminine as liminal, as a force or place that obscures boundaries, but at the same time as the site upon which difference and sub-jugation can be, in all senses of the term, conceived, pervades the representation of violence in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. The scenes of violence are hardly rare: they include the slugfest between Alison and Jankyn at the end of the Prologue and certainly the rape beginning her Tale. However, I would like to focus on a much less frequently noticed representation of violence, one that perhaps more startlingly than these others expresses the complexity and illustrates the cultural foundations of Chaucer's linking violence with seduction. I am thinking of the dream Alison devises in order to secure Jankyn's interest in her. Still married to her fourth husband but like the wise mouse always preparing an alternative hole into which to scurry, she contrives for Jankyn a story about a dream she had of them. Here is what she shares of her scheme:

I bar hym on honde he hadde enchanted me--

My dame taughte me that soutiltee--

And eek I seyde I mette of hym al nyght,

He wolde han slayn me as I lay upright,

And al my bed was ful of verray blood;

'But yet I hope that ye shal do me good,

For blood bitokeneth gold, as me was taught.'

And al was fals; I dremed of it right naught,

But as I folwed ay my dames loore,

As wel of this as of othere thynges moore. (III.575-84) [2]

By telling Jankyn she dreamed of him, Alison not as subtly as she thinks lets him know that he occupies her thoughts; and more strongly, that an intimate marital relationship between them is predicted by the dream-world. But why the violence--the apparent stabbing and the vivid image of a bed full of blood?

Alison's reading of the blood is characteristically econometric: it means gold; it suggests prosperity. And to an extent her focus on the value of blood fits nicely with Caroline Walker Bynum's analysis of how medieval women were represented in art. According to Bynum women were depicted in the late Middle Ages in terms of breaches of boundaries, "openings, exudings, spilling forths" (1991, 109). As penetrable, as incapable of maintaining the border between inside and outside, women represented pollution; but at the same time their identification with fluids from the inside connected them with mystery and holiness. Though menstruation was pollution, breast milk

was blood twice cooked (1991,214). Both women and Jesus bled; both yielded nutritive fluids. Girard, too, emphasizes the dual role of menstrual blood, as the sign of undifferentiated, mimetic violence on the one hand and the sacrificial,"civilizing" way of allaying that violence, of establishing difference and order on the other hand (33-36).According to Girard (1997) "mimetic desire," the desire of one person to be the other and to have what the other possesses, is at the root of barbarism and culture. The basis of culture, though, is the establishment of ritualistic substitutes for the original victim murdered as a result of total outbreak of mimetic violence. That original victim becomes a taboo and holy object precisely because of the original recognition--itself produced by mimesis--that any member of the original hoard could just as well have been the victim. The scapegoat itself is turned into the cultural brake to the violence produced by mimetic desire. Woman's association with blood identifies her with the taboo, making her both the reminder of original violence and the imagined cause of it. Such symbolization of woman, according to Girard, emerges from some "half-suppressed desire to place the blame for all forms of violence on women. By means of this taboo a transfer of violence has been effected and a monopoly established that is clearly detrimental to the female sex" (1997, 36). However startling and grotesque, then, the image of Alison spilling blood into her bed is designed to appeal to Jankyn because it reestablishes her at the most basic, conventional level as woman, as distinct from man because of her porousness and as nutritive to him. [3] This imagined dream's suggestions of the sexual act are undeniable: the slaying takes place as Alison lies in her bed and she seems to have been penetrated by some weapon. But its violence is seductive not because, or just because, it simulates sex, but because in these more elemental ways it reestablishes the essential terms of sexual difference. [4]

What we have argued so far is that the dream's suggestions of violence and the image of blood make it appealing to any "red-blooded" male. But the violence also targets the particular audience, the clerk Jankyn. Jankyn's education would have subjected him to the grammarian and to the mnemonic techniques that schoolmaster would have enforced. One of these techniques, according to Mary Carruthers, is the use of violent images to fix learning in the memory. As an example of this technique she refers to a pas sage from Thomas Bradwardine's De memoria artificialis in which he demonstrates a technique for training the mind to arrange images (in this case, of the zodiac) in a location:

Likewise one places a very red bull to the right of the ram, kicking the ram with his rear feet; standing erect, the ram then with his right foot kicks the bull above his large and super-swollen testicles, causing a copious infusion of blood. And by means of the testicles one will recall that it is a bull, not a castrated ox or a cow. In a similar manner, a woman is placed before the bull as though laboring in birth, and from her uterus as though ripped open from the breast are figured coming forth two most beautiful twins, playing with a horrible, intensely red crab, which holds captive the hand of one of the little ones and thus compells him to weeping and to such signs, the remaining child wondering yet nonetheless caressing the crab in a childish way.. .To the left of the ram a dreadful lion is placed, who with open mouth and rearing on its legs attacks a virgin, beautifully adorned, by tearing her ornate garments. With its left foot the ram inflicts a wound to the lion's head. The virgin truly holds in her right hand scales for which might be fashioned a balance-beam of silver with a plumb-line of red silk, and then weighing-pans of gold; on her left is placed a scorpion wondrously fighting her so that her whole left arm is swollen, which [scorpion] she strives to balance in the aforesaid scales. (Carruthers 1990, 283-84)

Like Albertus Magnus (Carruthers 1990, 274, 279) and Geoffrey of Vinsauf (Enders 1996, 34) for instance, Bradwardine emphasizes here the function of the unusual, the startling, and the violent image in the discipline of memory. Images of violence are certainly not the only memory devices and indeed all images of violence as means of fixing learning in the memory are not directed as clearly as they are in this passage toward women. However, such emphasis on the arresting image as part of a discipline into which young males were indoctrinated, along with the fact that lessons in grammar, logic, and rhetoric were reinforced with violence or the threat of it, established a mechanism by which females were positioned as the objects of violence. Medieval schoolmasters staged learning as a process controlled by "good" violence, as a shared experience among males, memorialized by the violence of the lash. Though males, not females, were the objects of this schoolmaster's violence, the doctrine that this violence was part of a disciplining of boys into men made effeminacy its object. The rod or the switch targeted all that was associated with women: lack of discipline and a weak or sinister memory. As Jody Enders explains in her examination of the violent underpinnings of medieval rhetoric, the aim of the master, as depicted, for example, in Thomas Murner's woodcut illustration of the master with the switch, was to beat the softness, the female elements, out of the youth under his charge (1996,39).As Enders explains, "this is a complex epistemological move according to which softness is cast as feminine-and then beaten out of men at the same time that masculinity is beaten in" (1996, 42).Though their bodies are at one time the target of such attacks, the schoolboys later become the disciplinarians who target the youths of another generation. Always the legitimizing target of such violence is the undifferentiated and unorganized. Like the violence of bodily discipline, the systematization of memory also opposes what was unformed and fluid (what was female) about the human memory in the first place (Carruthers 1990, 7). For the males these violent techniques enable disciplined, grammatical speech. Violence toward women, however, functions to silence and ultimately to sexualize them (Enders 1996, 42).

At issue here, again, is male rivalry, the effect of which on females Dinshaw characterizes in this way: "violence between men and the prior masculine identity formation are enabled by an unacknowledged violence against the feminine. To put it in stronger and more general terms: at the moments when these men seem most explicitly preoccupied with each other, they are most fundamentally misogynist" (1998, 141). No surprise then that a tale such as the Wife of Bath's about education--about authority vs. experience, about paternal teaching vs. maternal lore--is also about violence: the dream we have been discussing, the exchange of blows between Jankyn and Alison at the end of the Prologue, and of course the rape at the beginning the Tale--not to mention Alison's tearing leaves out of Jankyn's anthology (III.789-90). No surprise also that Alison's dream captures not just the violent aspects of sex, but the gendering of medieval education whereby women must be turned into the porous body and the object of violence so that men can feel complete, so that they can be potent, and so that they can speak.

As Woods (1996) helps us to understand, this gendering of education is also reinforced in a more obvious way--by the occurrence of sexual violence in the most frequently read school texts of the Middle Ages. Statius' Achilliad, Ovid's Ars amatoria, and the anonymous 12th century Pamphilus all promote rape. The cross-dressing and sexually confused Achilles differentiates himself as man through his rape of Deidamia. Ovid archly argues that women love to have men force themselves upon them. And the play Pamphilus concludes with the hero's rape of Galathea, as orchestrated by an old hag whom the heroine has come to trust. None of the glosses in these works leads students to allegorize the events; they clarify the grammatical function of words or matter-of-factly explain what happens (65).As boys are developing in their manhood, then, they are studying grammar in texts depicting rape as realistic event. The nexus is quite astonishing: women being raped, boys developing skill in language, and boys becoming men. The rape scenes so frequently depicted in those schoolbooks and studied in all-male classrooms function, according to Woods, "as the paradigmatic site for working out issues of power and powerlessness" (73). In this world of the text, of writing, in which women do not belong except as sex objects and rape victims, males "learn about sexual violence as a method of defining their manhood and control ling their lives. That all this takes place in the context of acquiring language gives new meaning to the association of the body with the text that has been the focus of much modern criticism" (73). [5] If, as is likely the case, Jankyn is a product of this sort of education, Alison contrives a dream that presents him with an empowering connection between woman as the object of violence and woman as a text for men's study. In a sense, then, Allison's dream places him in his formative years and depicts herself as the object of violence in those very texts that formed his manhood.

This connection between violence done to women and the male's security in his power occurs at a deeply ingrained level; it is processed as natural, though in fact it is a cultural product. In this way it is far more elemental even than the more doctrinal justifications for exercising violence against women discussed by Angela Weisl (1998). For her the two foundations for what she calls "normalized violence" against women in the Middle Ages are, first, that women must be kept under control and, second, that they must suffer retribution for the sins of the first mother, Eve (116-17).These are rationalizations for punishing and silencing women, however, not the foundations of the acts. Because she is a construct of Chaucer's imagination and thus of his schooling and reading, Alison seems to know the texts circulated among males and the way they portray her as the object of violence. In her fabricated dream she represents herself in just such a passage of violence toward women as Jankyn--and perhaps Chaucer-might have been trained to parse, or in just the kind of situation that he might have been trained to conceive in order to remember a passage or fact. In this sense the passage re-creates Jankyn's culturally, pedagogically established maleness in terms of violence upon women. The bloody vision of violence to herself that Alison provides constructs Jankyn's manhood and seduces him at the same time. [6]

The representation of violence in this passage from the Wife of Bath's Prologue involves some fundamental complications. First Alison herself activates conventions of violence against women as a means of securing Jankyn. Second, in so doing she claims to be following her mother's lore, the collective wisdom of her gender. Such gendered wisdom emerges for instance in la Vieille's advice to "Fair Welcome" in The Romance of the Rose. She says that the woman receiving the lover into her house must dramatize the potential violence in the situation-the possibility of her husband discovering them and slaying her before the lover's eyes, or the two of them being punctured by helm, hauberk, or spear, and disemboweled in some secret room (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun 1962, 13815-3829). Third, Chaucer, the male author, is impersonating--creating his own dream of-both the individual woman and her gender's self-destructive, self-violating contrivances for securing men. The third of these elements, of course, overrides the other two and makes easy generalizations about Chaucer's feminist sympathies problematic. [7] The issue here is not simply, as Weisl (1998, 117) explains, that Chaucer's tales show how profoundly women became what was said about them; the fact is, Chaucer, the male author, has these female characters become what males say about women.

Many of the elements that operate in the Wife's contrived but culturally dictated dream reemerge in the Shipman's Tale. Again a single episode captures the dynamics of this seductive violence. That episode involves the wife's arranging to sleep with the monk for a hundred franks, which she needs in order to buy a special piece of clothing for her next appearance at church. While her husband is in his counting house, the wife moves from hinted complaints about her marriage to a solid agreement to sleep with the monk once the merchant sets out on his business venture. During this exchange the wife several times stylizes herself as the victim of violence, and these stylizations, I would like to propose, are based on the violence toward women in saints' lives.

The conversation between the wife and Daun John begins with the wife vowing by the following oath that she will maintain confidentiality: "I swere/Though men me wolde al into pieces tere,/Ne shal I nevere, for to goon to helle,/Biwreye a word of thing that ye me telle" (VII.135-37).Along with her earlier claim that she is about ready to "make an ende" of herself (VII.122), this oath is fairly traditional and, by itself, hardly gender specific. Pandarus, for instance, uses a similar oath when he tries to get Troilus to entrust him as his go-between: "To pieces do me drawe and sithen honge" (I.832). However, the wife specifically describes men tearing her to pieces; and she tells the monk that concerning her mistreatment in marriage she could tell him "a legend of [her] lyf (VII.145). [8] When she justifies her desire for the new piece of clothing she intends to buy with the hundred franks, the merchant's wife continues to use imagery that evokes the violence of the saints' lives. She tells the monk:

But by that ilke Lord that for us bledde,

For his honour, myself for to arraye,

A Sonday next I moste nedes paye

An hundred frankes, or eliis I am lorn .... (VII.178-81)

This evocation is complex and ironic. As Gail Gibson (1977, 104-12) and to a lesser extent John Hermann (1985, 328) have explained, medieval discussions of clothing and women inevitably lead to the distinction between literal clothing-visiblia--and metaphorical clothing--humilitas. Typically in the saints' lives the female saint rejects promises by the lustful, heathen male and/or his representatives that he will provide her with the finest clothing and other adornments. She replies that her spouse, Christ, has already clothed her, or will soon clothe her, in the most beautiful of spiritual array. She does not need the goods of this world. Thus a typical feature of the saint's torture is that she be stripped, the physical marks of her torture replacing her clothing. Those marks highlight the breaking of borders, the emergence of the inside through the surface, the holy. And this event is remarkable because, as Karma Lochrie has pointed out, the religious life for women "consists primarily in adopting boundaries and maintaining an unbroken body" (1991, 24).The wounds become a kind of array, the blood depicted as a beautiful, decorative covering, as in one of the 13th century French versions of the St Agnes legend, Gesta Sanctae Agnes, in which the unclothed saint is described as being stabbed in the breast with a sword and "covered with her own beautiful blood" (Cazelles, 1991, 98). In taking this kind of imagery to its logical, metaphorical conclusion, Cyprian, in fact, argues that the only proper adornments (array) for the martyr honoring Christ are wounds and blood (Bloch 1991, 106). Thus the wife's words identify her as a parody of the female saints: she wants to array herself in visiblia rather than the spiritual and sacrificial clothing of the saint. Despite the parody, however, the evocations of violence remain strong: violence, often with sexual overtones, is the primary means by which the female virgin saint can achieve imitatio Christi. She weathers sexual advances, and thus remains pure while suffering. The merchant's wife says she wants to array herself in "honour" of" that like Lord that for us bledde" (VII.178-79). However hypocritical, her words invite her audience--the monk particularly-to see her in terms of the female saints' attempts to honor Christ through violent victimization.

Having referred to the "legend" of St. Agnes, I must point out also the remarkable echo from The Golden Legend's version of St. Agnes that can be heard in the wife's words to the monk. Immediately before telling the monk that she must array herself to honor Christ, the wife complains about her husband, saying that he does not measure up to the six things that women desire their husbands to be:"Hardy and wise, and riche, and therto free,/And buxom unto his wif and fressh abedde" (VII.176-77), "fresh abedde" ironically rhyming with the "for us bledde." In the legend of St. Agnes, the young maiden encounters the prefect's son, who has fallen in love with her. He tells her that he will give her jewels and great wealth if she marries him. She responds that she is already married to another, Christ, and goes on to commend her "lover" for "the five things that the betrothed look for in the men they are to wed, namely nobility of lineage, beauty of person, abundance of wealth, courage and the power to achieve and love transcendent" (Jacobus de Voragine 1993, 102).To this she adds a metaphorical description of the spiritual jewels her spouse has placed upon her hands and around her neck and of the gown in which he has robed her. With the exception of the difference in details--five marital benefits rather than six and the metaphoric rather than material nature of those benefits-the situations are remarkably similar.The actual spouse is absent as the other male seeks sexual satisfaction from the "wife." The wife discusses the traits of the exemplary husband during the potentially or actually seductive exchange. The difference emerges from the way in which the merchant's wife turns the spiritual discourse into a material one. The overriding similarities, however, add up to an identification of the merchant's wife with the female saints, and, in the case of Agnes, with a saint whose story, at least as related in the Golden Legend, builds upon the connections among violence, sexuality, and holiness, and returns repeatedly to the theme of marriage. When the prefect's deputy finds that he cannot burn Agnes because the flames part and scorch the crowd on either side, he finally has a soldier "thrust a dagger into her throat." Jacobus characterizes this violent act as the culmination of her relationship with her spouse: "and thus her heavenly spouse consecrated her his bride and martyr" (1993, 103).

If this evocative but nevertheless quite clear connection of herself with the saints--and perhaps with a saint--were not enough, the wife ends her encounter with the monk by agreeing to trade sex with him for a hundred franks and by sealing that agreement with an oath that continues to represent herself as the object of violence: "And but I do, God take on me vengeance/As foul as evere hadde Genylon of France" (VII.193-94). Genylon, of course, was torn apart by horses for betraying Roland. As with her claim that she needs to "array" herself to honor Christ, this vow functions to expose her moral turpitude: in the one claim she does not measure up to the martyrs and in this one she measures up all too well to Genylon because of her treachery toward her husband. However, more central to my argument than the ultimately satiric function of this irony--to condemn the materialistic misappropriation of spiritual values--is the way in which she positions herself as sexual object by saturating her speech with images of violence to herself, images evoking the kinds of violence done to women in the legends.As readers we need to recognize the incongruity between the values her language evokes and the aims to which she actually puts it. But we need to recognize also the way in which the images of violence toward women make up the core of the story's action.

John Hermann (1985) has done much to highlight the violence in the tale. According to Hermann the tale's central metaphor is dismemberment, especially as it connects with eroticism and sexuality. Hermann does not address the echoes of the legends in the tale. Instead he examines the metaphor of dismemberment in terms of the traditions of the hunt--the hounds, for instance, dismembering the hare; the literary figures of Orpheus, Pentheus, Jezebel, and Actaeon; and the conception of the individual, the marriage, and the body politic as unified or, when corrupt, disjointed bodies. His thesis is that the tale turns the authoritative imagery of unity--the head in charge of the body, the spirit given precedence over matter, etc.--upside down so that there is no longer a way to assign blame to any of the characters, as for instance, in the case of the frequently debated question of who seduces whom in the encounter between the wife and the monk. The central figure of dismemberment eliminates the notion of a single authority operating within the work and represents a world "disjointed," ripped from its spiritual meaning.

Though it is important in underscoring my emphasis upon the violent imagery behind the wife's portrayal of herself, Hermann's thesis, by ignoring some of the culturally determined problems in the relationship between women and the "clerks," as the Wife of Bath describes it, too fully positions the work; of these "clerks" as the indisputable truth. By highlighting the way in which the merchant's wife evokes the saints' lives, I am suggesting that the images of violence reflect some of the troubling features in the normative works themselves, the works from whose values Hermann sees the tales' characters diverging. In other words, the wife's modeling the saints' lives and her tangling up violence with seduction says as much about the imbedded values of the models as about her misguided, perverted behavior.

The monk belongs to the establishment for whom the legends of the female martyrs were prized documents, prized in part because they provided its male members with the opportunity to express what often seems a sexual interest in the women's bodies. Margaret Miles frames the issue in this way: these "male authors' respect and esteem for women martyrs vies with textual interest in their bodies or concern to establish inferiority of the sex" (1989, 57). According to Weisl, the desire for the perfect life of virginity "often led to self-mutilation," which was assumed in turn to seduce men into robbing the virgin of her chastity (1998, 123).The focus in narratives of mar tyrdom often became the destruction of the female body: Agnes, as I have mentioned, is stabbed in the breast with a sword; Agatha's breasts are cut off; Barbara is whipped with heavy lashes and has her breast severed with a sword and is then decapitated; Apollonia's teeth are torn out and she is then burned to death; Juliana is broken on a wheel and then plunged into a lead bath; Catherine of Alexandria is merely beheaded, but not without an elaborate description of an instrument of four wheels studded with iron saws and nails designed to mangle her body and not without also a full account of how the Queen, who tries to protect Catherine from her husband, has her breasts torn off with iron spikes and is decapitated. According to Weisl," the dwelling on the details of martyrdom, often including quite graphic depictions of torture and dismemberment, shows an enthusiasm for the violation of the female body made palatable by its implicit result--ascension of the virgin into heaven" (1998, 124). Gravdal, moreover, describes the vitae authors aseager" to indulge in descriptions of the nubile attractiveness of thirteen-year-old virgins. Hagiography affords a sanctioned space in which eroticism can flourish and in which male voyeurism becomes licit, if not advocated" (1991, 24). With few exceptions the torture is part of what Gravdal calls the sexual plot of the saints' lives in which the saint's torture results from the unsuccessful pursuit of her as sexual object (41). But while the plot of the saint's story makes the sexual aggression finally serve the eternal purpose, the imitatio Christi, the rhythm and energy of the descriptive details betray a parallel plot at the level of the relation between the author and his material-and between the author and his audience--of heightened sexual interest. The saint is almost invariably disrobed, and the disrobing often occasions some further commentary on her attractiveness, if it is not shown in fact to create lust in the fictional onlookers to the scene of exposure and torture. However, the saintly seduction is incomplete without the depiction of wounds, especially wounds to those parts of the body-eyes, mouth, breasts, and joints-that exude fluid or suggest an interruption of a border or of continuity. [9] While the saint, then, has to be disrobed and thus exposed as porous, the genre, it seems, must also rehearse the male's need to imprint this porousness upon her.

When the merchant's wife speaks with the monk, she represents her body in terms of the martyrs whose torture and dismemberment, even self destruction, the male clerics would have both authorized and sexualized. Perhaps the strongest indication that Chaucer has her use these highly charged images of violence to attract a cleric in particular is, in fact, her adaptability when deflecting her husband's curiosity later about why she failed to tell him the monk had returned the hundred franks. Here she depicts herself as an instrument appropriate to his profession, the tally-stick upon which he can score her debts to him. Again, she represents herself as the object of violence and thereby creates the desire that springs from difference. Moreover, the pun on taille, tail and tale at the end of the narrative links the tally stick (of the merchant's profession) with the body and the text (of the monk's profession) as objects, the violence upon which establishes manly identity and superiority. As in the passage from the Wife of Bath's Prologue, it is not the resemblance between violence and sex that is ultimately seductive but rather the identity-creating, phallus-constructing depiction of woman as permeable, fluid, and fragmented, a medium upon which to mark difference, a site that for the merchant in the Shipman's Tale is indistinguishable from the "queynte world" (VII.236) that he tries to manage through his finances. Power seduces; but in this case the woman quite readily constructs the male as powerful by evoking conventional representations of violence toward her kind. This process is part of what Teresa de Lauretis, after Foucault, calls "the technology of gender" (1989, 245), a cultural system for differentiation and therefore attraction.

Depending on whether we read in terms of date of composition or projected placement in The Canterbury Tales, the wife in the Shipman's Tale either anticipates or revisits what, as a short hand, I will call "the Wife of Bath complex." This complex involves a female character representing herself as the object of male violence in order to render herself desirable. As I have tried to show, this process requires that she activate all too readily available conventions of violence toward females; her ability to activate these conventions equates to her knowing her "mother's lore," to use Alison's terms--though ultimately this is the father's law concerning women's difference. Whatever other reasons there are for the Prioress's Tale following the Shipman's Tale, its placement continues this exploration of "the Wife of Bath complex." [10] In telling a saint's life of sorts, the Prioress reflects upon the violent imagery in the Shipman's Tale concerning the wife's dealings with the monk. Moreover, by reciting to the largely male audience her suggestively violent prologue and tale, she repeats in a more subdued way the merchant's wife's "come on" to the monk and even Alison's attempt to attract Jankyn.

If it were not for the portrait of the Prioress in the General Prologue, however, the connection between desire and violence in her tale and prologue would not be nearly as apparent. That portrait, as commentator after commentator has remarked, hinges on the narrator's suggestions that the Prioress presents herself as desirable more in men's terms than in God's. At the end of that portrait, than, the Amor vincit omnia on her brooch implies a meaning more suitable to the garden in The Romance of the Rose than to the nunnery. Along with this desire for courtly attractiveness comes also a striking concern with violence and identification with its victims. In the General Prologue, for instance, the narrator tells us that "She wolde wepe, if that she saugh a mous/Kaught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde" (I.144-45) and that "soore wepte she ifoon of hem were deed,/Or if men smoot it with a yerde smerte" (I.148-49). By including these details about the Prioress, Chaucer suggests something about her particular brand of pity and the quality of her conscience, but he also establishes her attraction to violence.

As its readers invariably notice, her tale continues this attraction.The victim-identification and violence in the tale, moreover, complicate in an unexpected way the credo by which she lives-amor vincit omnia: the vincit, not the amor, begins to dominate. The violent details of the tale are unmistakable: the child's throat is cut; he is thrown into a privy; and his murderers are drawn by wild horses and after that hanged. The Prioress describes the little boy, moreover, as saying that he will learn the Alma redemptoris even if he is "shent" (VII.541), punished, and "beten thries in an houre" (VII.542). As if these violent events were not enough, the Prioress lingers over them, relishing the details (Cohen 1962, 232). The Prioress does not, of course, consciously construct a fiction about being victimized by a man so as to attract that man, as does the Wife of Bath; nor does she cast herself as the tortured, erotic martyr, as does the Shipman's wife when she tailors for an immediate audience her representation of violence to herself. Her need to be desired is more general, more sublimated, something captured by her name, Madame Eglentine, a trace of the romance genre by which she partially configures her identity. [11] And her attraction to violence emerges through identification with both the boy martyr and the tortured Jews. According to Dinshaw (1998), Gravdal (1991) and Margherita (1994), this identification with both the romance heroine and the martyr is entirely predictable: both romance and the legends depend on, only deflect in different ways, violence toward women. In fact, Roberts points out that the grouping of romances with didactic genres in many medieval manuscripts suggests an awareness of the "ideological homogeneity" in both genres concerning the representation of violence toward women (1998, 9). For the Prioress to see herself as the object of desire in terms of romance is inevitably to feel herself to be, and to identify herself with, the object of male violence in the saints' lives.

Again, as in the case of the merchant's wife's connecting herself with the authorized saints' lives, the at first arresting combination of the "romantic" and the devotional in the Prioress's performance betrays something about her conflicted character; but it also reflects upon the erotic and violent under pinnings of the devotional and romantic literature out of which she is constructed, or has constructed herself. In terms of both the General Prologue and the Prioress's Tale, the Prioress displays herself as the schoolboy beaten by the master, the boy mutilated while walking through the Jewish community, the trapped mice, the whipped dogs, the tortured Jewish murderers, and the silenced female. [12] And this indirect form of self-display expresses ultimately her fervent identification with the Mary in the prologue to her tale, who "ravyshedest" (VII.469) upon herself the forceful male deity. Though this is the language of mysticism, it also expresses the violence underpinning the courtly discourse as well: "at base, courtly discourse encodes the bodily violation and destruction of woman" (Dinshaw 1998, 148).The more obvious pairing of the devotional versions of the female with the romance ones that we see in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale emerges in the Prioress's performance as well.

In Madame Eglentine Chaucer advances his exploration of the connection between violence and desire, nudging it toward a more subtle, sublimated state. In an eerie way it also seems as though he is advancing the exploration back toward himself. If the wife's presentation of herself in the Shipman's Tale as attractive martyr and object of man's violence prefigures the Prioress's indirect identification with, and presentation of, seductive violence, it perhaps is as true that the Prioress's Tale anticipates the transition to the tales about Sir Thopas and Melibee, the one a knight who violently "prikes" (VII.774, 776) the sides of his horse in anticipation of fulfilling his love-longing and the other a knight who returns home to find his wife and daughter (Prudence and Sophie) beaten and stabbed by his male enemies and, in the allegorical terms of the tale, by the violent inclinations toward women in his own psyche. The movement from the Prioress's Tale to these two "autobiographical" performances amounts to a transition to Chaucer himself and his own complicity in violence toward females.

His own complicity involves, of course, the very portrayals we have been examining, culminating in the Prioress, whom Chaucer, through the eagerly attentive persona, represents as trying to be sexually attractive to men while unconsciously exposing her identification with victims of violence by men. The association between sexual attractiveness and violence is Chaucer's, then, more than it is the Prioress's. The portrayal of "the Wife of Bath complex" turns back upon Chaucer. And it does so, in part, because of the kind of anxiety Elaine Hansen describes as inevitable for the male author in the late Middle Ages. The male poet, in writing about women and about men falling in love with them and thereby destabilizing notions of clearly differentiated, integral maleness, risks obliterating the borders that separate the genders. When "the difference of the female is not fully clear and plausible, it has to be repeatedly reconstructed" (Hansen 1992, 14).This reconstruction involves killing women, mutilating them, violating them, and silencing them, all to the end of remaking gender difference and masculinity (1992, 14). A bold conclusion, but one that makes sense in terms of what we have discov ered about the education of boys in medieval schools: the way it depended on violence as a memory device and on scenes of violence toward women in schoolbooks to help develop both the boys' manhood and their skill in grammar and rhetoric. The conclusion also makes sense in light of the combination of violence and sexuality in both the female saints' lives and romance. And Chaucer is unavoidably a part of this cultural code, even though (quite like the Wife of Bath) he is at the same time aware of some of the forces that have made him, and other males, construct and respond to women in the way they do. In these three characters, he depicts women as objects of violence, but even more significantly he portrays them as having to represent themselves to men as objects of violence in order to be desired. That he does this, that he creates such openings onto the sources of this cultural mechanism of engendering, testifies both to his gender and his genius, even if it disturbs us.

O'Brien is professor of English at the United States Naval Academy. His articles on Middle English romance and Chaucer have appeared in Mediaevalia, Mosaic, Modern Language Quarterly, and Chaucer Review.

Notes

(1.) This brief description of the theoretical discussions of violence toward women depends largely upon the work of Dinshaw (1989, 1998), Gravdal (1991), Delany (1983) and Joplin (1989). Scarry discusses the ways in which the Old Testament identifies holiness in terms of artifacts that suggest the emergence of the "inside" (1985, 185-91).Thus, the connection between women, taboo, wells, and holiness.

(2.) This and all subsequent quotations from Chaucer's works come from the Riverside Chaucer.

(3.) For an analysis of Girard's concepts of mimetic violence in light of Derrida, see McKenna (1992, 60-86). For applications of Girard's concept of mimetic rivalry to Chaucer and medieval literature, see Amtower (1996), Dinshaw (1998) and Joplin (1989).As Dinshaw acknowledges, Joplin extends Girard's suggestive commentary on woman's function in this mimetic rivalry to that of being the original scapegoat, the expunged victim that coheres the male tribe.

(4.) In his rich article on the "Eva-Ave palindrome," Hanning says that Alison fabricates "dreams of a highly sexual content in order to lure a prospective young lover" (1977, 589). For Hanning, the sexuality of the dream emerges in its setting, the bed, and in its anatomical simulations of intercourse, not, as I'm arguing, in its gender differentiating violence. No doubt, one could argue that the blood in the dream is hymenal blood, in which case Alison, despite her age and experience, is displaying herself subliminally as virgin and Jankyn as her first sexual partner. In this case, the dream is part of the rather pitiful wish-fulfillment pattern in Alison's discourse and tale, an expression of her desire to return to youthfulness and beauty and even of her conformity to the patriarchal system of valuing virginity above all else in the prospective bride. This is another way in which the blood "bitokeneth gold."

(5.) Dinshaw discusses the implication of this convention of woman as text. She points out, for instance, that "rape" connotes textual violence" and it "is the way misogynistic literary history is inaugurated and proceeds" (1989, 127). See also Donaldson's discussion of Alison's body in the Miller's Tale as a text glossed by men (1992). Camille (1997) discusses this convention as it emerges in manuscript illuminations.

(6.) Even in the essentializing terms of the castration complex, Alison's fabricated dream works toward the same effect. "Female blood," according to Brose's analysis of Petrarch's rhetorical appropriation of female creativity, establishes associations with the "spectre of castration" and thereby "urges the male poet to his compensatory speech." The economy of this spilling of blood and mutilation is simple: "female bodily members purchase male speech" (1993, 15).

(7.) While focusing on the Prioress's Tale, Ferster, notes the "oscillation" of meaning resulting from the "ventriloquizing structure" built into the Canterbury Tales: "The meaning" of the tale "oscillates as we attribute it to the different speakers: the Chaucer who is a friend to women, the Chaucer who is a captive of patriarchy, the Prioress who asserts or who asserts and then undermines females as religious speakers" (1990, 160).The problems with arguing that Chaucer is a feminist of sorts are discussed by Hansen (1992, 6-14) and Delany (1993, 47-76), to name a few.

(8.) My view that the wife's using "legend" here requires us to consider her exchange with the Monk in terms of that genre is at least indirectly supported by Benson's explanatory note about the way the Miller uses the term--"I wol telle a legende and a lyf/Bothe of a carpenter and of his wyf" (II.3141-142): "This phrase might suggest a saint's life ...and, indeed, a challenge to the Monk, who has been displaced ...,and a playful claim by the Miller that he will be a good substitute" (Chaucer 1987, 842). If the Miller's words amount to a nod to the Monk's genre, the wife's words to the monk in the Shipman's Tale likely reflect a similar "consciousness"--whether Chaucer's or the wife's--about the genre. Predictably, the Second Nun uses the term to describe her tale: "I have heer doon my feithful bisynesse/After the legende in translacioun ...(VIII.25-26).

(9.) See in this regard Mary Douglas's discussion of pollution and the rupture of external boundaries (1980).

(10.) Hill bases the connection between the Shipman's and Prioress's Tales on each "teller's concern for particular exchanges": the Shipman's, economical; and the Prioress's, spiritual--virginity and helpless innocence traded for martyrdom (1991, 110). In establishing la Vieille in the Romance of the Rose as in part the source for both the Wife of Bath, of whose composition the wife in the Shipman's Tale makes up at least half, and the Prioress, Hanning (1977) also offers rationale for the transition from the Shipman's to the Prioress's Tale.

(11.) Rex (1995,78) cites Laura Kendrick's observation: "The word eglantine, especially in conjunction with the phrase 'simple and coy' (which is often applied to the shepherdesses of pastourelles), suggests the sexual quest and love-making outdoors--especially with a peasant girl ('wild rose')" (1988, 149).

(12.) Robertson (1990) focuses on this silencing of women and their compensatory responses as the source of many of the narrative's details and even its violence.

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