Page 103 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes “He promises to tell a tale in prose, for example, but instead we get a poem in rime royal. The
“poverte” Prologue seems to have only the barest, most expedient relation to the Tale itself…. Most
puzzling of them all is the Man of Law’s specific insistence, on the one hand, that he will not tell a
tale of incest, and his choice, on the other hand, of a narrative whose motivation in well-known
analogues is, in fact, incest...”
The critic Margaret Schlauch has suggested persuasively that in all of the sources to the Man of
Law’s tale, Constance’s father makes sexual demands upon his daughter, and Dinshaw wonders
whether Constance might be escaping from a father with incestuous desires. What, we might ask, is
the relevance of this incest theme to the idea of Constance as a mercantile pawn?
Levi-Strauss has the answer. If marriage (and the marital sex it makes permissible) is a pawn in a
merchant’s transaction, and the social order is maintained through trading women and trading
marriage, then forbidding incest is the best way to maintain that order. For a daughter–a father’s
mercantile asset–is no longer an asset in circulation if the father sleeps with her himself.

Incest breaks down the idea of a woman as something to be traded: breaks down,
in short, the law.

Dinshaw’s interpretation is a fascinating one, and one which ties together the prologue and the tale,
as well as some of the key notions explored about female identity in the Tales: (i) the idea of the
woman as something to be traded, as merchandise, (ii) the idea of a patriarchal society keen to keep
women “in circulation”, and (iii) the idea of the woman as duplicitous and evil, as presented by the
two malicious mothers. What it misses, however, is the over-riding religious nature of the tale; and
the good fortune visited on Constance (herself, literally a child of Rome) for maintaining her Christian
faith.
Yet Constance is not simply merchandise. Chaucer’s–and the Man of Law’s tale–also keeps
“Constance”, (or “a Constance”, in precisely the way that “Geffrey” is “a Chaucer”) in circulation;
within the context of the tale-telling game, it uses Constance’s story as a potential avenue for profit.
There is an interesting moment early in the first part of the tale when Constance is described as
“pale”, as if, pre-marriage, she is white, blank, hardly visible. The tale itself dresses Constance-
clothes her, and makes her palatable to an audience in order to exchange her-and remember that
“text”, “textile” and “cloth” (a major piece of merchandise in the Middle Ages) have shared linguistic
roots.

Self Assessment

Short Answer Type Questions:
1. What concession does the Sultan of Syria make in order to obtain the hand of constance in
marriage?
2. How does constance end up a widow landing on the coast of Britain?
3. What type of wife is constance entended to represent?
4. How does this contrast with the wives in the preceding stories?
5. What device is employed extensively in the structure of the tale?
Perhaps part of the reason that the tale is the “Man of Law’s” and not the “Lawyer’s” is precisely to
emphasize the fact that Constance, exchanged by men for profit within the tale, is also being
exchanged by a Man within the tale-telling framework. The Man of Law and Chaucer, by writing

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