I found Donaldson's argument very strange. It seemed that he was criticizing previous interpretations of the General Prologue for being too one-sided (Chaucer as a "wide-eyed jolly, rolypoly little man" [928] or the descriptions expressing "an opinion peculiar to the Middle Ages" [929], "or else Chaucer's tongue is said to be in his cheek" [929]), and yet his view seems rather one-sided to me as well. I find it very hard to believe that "the reporter is, usually acutely unaware of the significance of what he sees, no matter how sharply he sees it" (929). Perhaps this assertion would be more believable if there were only a few cases where the narrator points out deliberate contradictions between the speech and actions of the other pilgrims, but he does this for almost every single pilgrim. Likewise, it seems too coincidental for the narrator to include three euphemisms for the Wife of Bath's salacious behavior (as is the case for other pilgrims).
I also find his analysis of the portrait of the Prioress unconvincing. Donaldson suggests that the pilgrim "cared little whether amiable nuns were good nuns." Her portrait did not seem to indicate so much to me that she was a bad nun, but rather that she was a shallow, fake person whose appearance was rather different to her true character. If he were actually trying to express his admiration for her, it would seem strange that he would present a good portrait of a nun but such scathing ones of the rest of the religious figures (again, I truly do not except Donaldson's notion that the narrator is "impressed by the Monk's virility" or shows "wholehearted approval" for the Friar [931]). It seems naive to me to think of the narrator as so naive, when there are so many obvious coincidences that cannot be accounted for should we not recognize the narrator's sarcasm.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Courtney, your well-made criticism of Donaldson's wish to find a naive narrator in the GP is very interesting. In some ways, it seems that you're suggesting that while Donaldson finds fault with critics who read the CT for evidence of the genial, roly-poly Chaucer author who exists outside of the text and masterminds it from offstage --- you find that he commits exactly the same kind of error with regard to the narrator. This is also Lawton's critique -- how can the critic rightfully assign the naivetee circulating in the lines of the GP to the closed persona of a fallible narrator? Or do you take issue with Donaldson's identification of a naive attitude in the GP in the first place? Do you want to argue for a closed-persona sarcastic narrator instead of Donaldson's fallible narrator? How then would you localize the GP's sarcasm in a narratorial figure?
ReplyDelete