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The Degradation of Chaucer's “Geffrey”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Thomas J. Garbáty
Thomas J. Garbáty*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Abstract

The nairator in Chaucer's poetry, a pose which is neither completely separate from nor identical with the poet himself, develops stylistically as he declines intellectually from the dream vision poems to the Canterbury Tales (1369-87). In the early works he is neither naive nor sophisticated, but represents a type we know in legal terms as the “reasonable man” who personifies the social-moral norms of society in an unemotional, unintellectual, and unimaginative fashion. This character “Geffrey” seems dull-witted and absurd only in contrast to the unusual situations or irrational and autocratic individuals he confronts. His “reasonable” perception is on a lower, second, level to their sophisticated first, an ironic structure which foreshadows that of Jane Austen. In the Canterbury Tales, the pilgrim “Chaucer” drops to the lowest, or third, level; he is an uncomprehending caricature who “agrees” with the first-level ironist, but who misunderstands his irony. Herry Bailly usually acts the part of the prosaic “reasonable man,” but the poet raises the reader-listener to his own highest (first) level of perception. Thus Chaucer's degradation of his own pose brings about a progressive and significant intensification of his humor.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 1 , January 1974 , pp. 97 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 104 George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poeiry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 37–72; E. Talbot Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” PMLA, 69 (1954), 928–36.

Note 2 in page 104 William R. Crawford, Bibliography of Chaucer 1954–63 (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1967), pp. xxiv-xxviii; Dorothy Bethurum, “Chaucer's Point of View as Narrator in the Love Poems,” PMLA, 74 (1959), 511–20; Bernard Huppé, A Reading of the Canterbury Tales (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1964), pp. 21–28; John Livingston Lowes, Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), p. 100; Kemp Malone, Chapters on Chaucer (Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins Press, 1951), p. 38.

Note 3 in page 104 Bertrand H. Bronson, “The Book of the Duchess Reopened,” PMLA, 67 (1952), 863–81, rpt. in Chaucer: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Edward Wagenknecht (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 271–94; Bertrand H. Bronson, //; Search of Chaucer (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1960), pp. 25–32; Wolfgang Clemen, Chaucer's Early Poetry (London: Methuen, 1963); James R. Kreuzer, “The Dreamer in the Book of the Duchess,” PMLA, 66 (1951), 543–47; R. M. Lumiansky, OfSondry Folk (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1955), pp. 83–95; John M. Major, “The Personality of Chaucer the Pilgrim,” PMLA, 75 (1960), 160–62; J. Burke Severs, “Chaucer's Self-Portrait in The Book of the Duchess,” PQ, 43 (1964), 27, n. 1.

Note 4 in page 104 Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966),p. 104; Bronson, in Wagenknecht, p. 290.

Note 5 in page 104 But cf. Severs, who sees no evidence of any “love sickness” in the narrator of The Book of the Duchess.

Note 6 in page 104 All citations are to the edition of F. N. Robinson, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1957),

Note 7 in page 104 A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962), p. 465.

Note 8 in page 104 The amusingly (and alliteratively) violent poem “Abuse of Women” in Rossell Hope Robbins, ed., Secular Lyrics of the xivth and xvth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1952), p. 225, has the scribal postscript: “ffinis quod chauceir.”

Note 9 in page 104 Joseph E. Grennen, “Hert-huntyng in the Book of the Duchess,” MLQ, 25 (1964), 139.

Note 10 in page 104 Nodes Atticae (Amsterdam: Daniel Elzevier, 1665), Liber vi, caput 8, p. 160.

Note 11 in page 104 Gellius, Liber iv, caput 18, p. 126.

Note 12 in page 104 Donald R. Howard, “Chaucer the Man,” PMLA, 80 (1965), 337–43; rpt. in Chaucer's Mind and Art, ed. A. C. Cawley (London: Oliver & Boyd, 1969), p. 42.

Note 13 in page 104 Paul G. Ruggiers, The Art of the Canterbury Tales (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 17.