Public fantasy and the logic of sacrifice in The Physician's Tale

Michael Uebel. ANQ. Lexington: Summer 2002.Vol. 15, Iss. 3;  pg. 30, 5 pgs

Abstract (Document Summary)

In Chaucer's "Physician's Tale," Chaucer depends for the resolution of troubled virginity or chastity upon the public, rational, and legalistic background, or context, within which threats can be momentarily neutralized, but within which new threats can also appear. Another dimension to the Chaucerian understanding of the struggle to become virgin frames virginity within an economy of sacrifice.

Full Text (1546   words)

Copyright HELDREF PUBLICATIONS Summer 2002

Channel surfing recently turned up a rerun of Law & Order in which an American father protects his biracial daughter by murdering an uncle who is determined that the young girl be ritually circumcised. With the motherin-law's blessing as well, an Egyptian doctor was to perform the surgical operation that the traditional African side of the family believed would preserve the girl's virginity and faithfulness thereafter and thereby protect the family's honor. Before the father stands trial, expert witnesses are called, including a Columbia University professor of African culture, and a debate is opened around questions of the value of sexuality and its subjection to cultural belief systems, systems powered by violence. The father defends his own violence with the claim that he just wanted to ensure that his daughter, unlike his own wife, would be able, someday, to experience the pleasures of sex. What seems to me remarkable here is the specter of violence that appears to haunt the very conditions of virginity and chastity, as well as the way public culture assumes a spectral dimension around the construction of virginity.1

Despite the ways Law & Order articulates it, virginity does not seem to depend for its social meaning upon issues of sexual pleasure and pain-the pleasure that is worth murdering for-but virginity seems rather to depend for its social value and efficacy upon its inseparability from the acting out of fantasies of violence, more erotic (in the Freudian sense of building unities) than strictly antisocial. In short, what I wish to emphasize here is that, because virginity is bound up with brutality and the nearly always selfdestructive "battle for chastity,"2 it is better construed as a kind of political process-that is, public and collective-than as a static condition, private and narcissistic. Virginity, as the preservation of a singular state of nature, appears necessarily open to the violence of erotic fantasy, thus finding its fantasmatic support in public aggressivity.

A Chaucerian understanding of the violence producing virginity and chastity as collective passions entails an acute attention to the public contexts in which virginity functions, or fails to function, as antidote to aggressivity. In the Physician's Tale, as well as, for example, in the Franklin's Tale and The Parlement of Fowles, Chaucer depends for the resolution of a troubled virginity or chastity upon the public, rational, and legalistic background, or context, within which threats can be momentarily neutralized, but within which new threats can also appear. Virginity seems always to be a matter of public rather than private affect. Indeed, the most famous narratives of virginity's incorruptibility tell a story of resistance to public power: St. Catherine of Alexandria (against Emperor Maxentius), St. Margaret of Antioch (Governor Olybrius), and St. Pelagius (King Abdrahamen).3

Another dimension to the Chaucerian understanding of the struggle to become virgin frames virginity within an economy of sacrifice. In the Physician's Tale, the unrepeatable singularity of Virginia's maidenhood, expressed in Nature's imagined boast that the young girl cannot be made "countrefete" (VI. 13; 18),4 necessarily renders it open to catastrophic change: what Nature had labored over, and familial and religious law had policed, finds the ultimate refuge in violent death. Virginius's beheading of his daughter can only be understood as a social act, a sacrificial process where the sanctity of the group is at stake. Neither the fulfillment of desire nor capitulation to power, Virginius's infanticide is on the contrary an act of transmutation, whereby the body of his daughter is transformed into a symbolic relation. Here is the transformation of the body in and through social exchange. In the logic of sacrifice, killing is divested of its antisocial meaning and takes its place within the usual flow of social exchanges. Sacrificial murder thus supports the idea of the socius. As Jean Baudrillard explains, "the essence and function of sacrifice" is "to extinguish what threatens to fall out of the group's symbolic control and to bury it under all the weight of the dead" (138-39).

The virgin must die, must be killed from time to time, if precisely because the sacrificial mechanism, which her privileged place in society calls into being, would otherwise be merely the expression of repressed or regressive individual drives-unconscious sadism/masochism, narcissism, shame or pride, and so on. The murder of Virginia is a definitively public act whose effect is the absorption of an adversarial will. Appius's violation of public trust, his perversion of the law, and his transgression of licit desire all get absorbed by the violent spectacle of sacrificial death. In political terms, the virgin's sacrificial death is perhaps more symbolically significant than the king's as, through her passing, the virgin, unlike the king, always has something left to exchange. The virgin's symbolic significance transcends the moment of death. The king, despite his two bodies,5 can only die a flat, one-dimensional death, becoming a social effigy, a kind of alibi for the living, whereas the virgin demands a collective, symbolic response.6

The end of the Physician's Tale dramatizes well the arousal of a social passion for justice that is at the same time a sacrificial passion. A crowd of a thousand people distribute justice: Appius is imprisoned, Claudius exiled, and, we are told, "the remenant were anhanged, moore and Jesse, that were consentant of this cursednesse" (VI. 275-76). This mysterious residual group, who are hanged, it seems, on account of their passivity, functions as the supplement that lays bare the fantasmatic support of symbolic authority in its full inconsistency. The system of justice instituted at the end of the tale functions only as it had under Appius's authority, that is, illegitimately. As a social remedy, the arbitrary persecution of the "remenant" reminds us that the maintenance of symbolic authority depends upon exorbitant sacrifice. Thus the brilliance of Virginius's murderous act and the transportation of his daughter's head to court: he adheres to the law to subvert the law. A perverse strategy to be sure,7 and one that troubles us because it appears to be a form of private sacrifice, a violence to self and to family, while it is in fact violence to the justice system masquerading as moral choice.

To conclude: virginity is less a way of fashioning an impervious, quiescent subject than it is a way of generating a radically open and sacrificial one. Virginity appears devoid of meaning unless the social group has a role to play in it: if virginity is bound to the self-monitoring (which is to say, self-obsessed) subject, or to the policing Oedipal family, then it is completely banal, no longer the proper subject of collective passion. It seems reasonable then not to regard the Physician's digressions on the responsibilities of guardians and parents-responsibilities always tied to "surveiaunce" (VI. 95)-and on Nature's pride in Virginia's manifest unrepeatibility as obtrusive, but rather as necessary in establishing precisely what must be overcome on the way to becoming symbolically, hence collectively, virgin. Virginity is best understood, it seems, as a peculiar kind of social relation, one that is radically equivalent to death, comprising as it does death's traumatic core. Virginity and death: the two are radically equivalent, not only, or merely, analogous. They are identical in their orientation to quiescence; that is, virginity, like death, to follow a Freudian insight, is nothing other than a detour-Umweg-to civilization.