Chaucerian Spaces: Spatial Poetics in Chaucer's Opening Tables

Examines affect and the significance of space and place in the first six Canterbury Tales.

Preface:


“On whatever horizon we examine it,” writes Gaston Bachelard, “the house
image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being.”1
He devotes his leading chapter to attics, cellars, garrets, towers, and huts, providing
at length a “poetics of the house,” which is at once the various ways we
understand “our corner of the world,” and the way its memories, or images
shadow forth the deepest parts of ourselves.2 As Bachelard puts it, “the house
images move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them.”3
The house is not the only image he examines, for traces of the intimate self lie
also in drawers, chests and wardrobes, and in nests and shells and corners, and
even in “the dialectics of outside and inside,” and “the phenomenology of
roundness.”
Bachelard is concerned specifically with poetic images, which have “a
sonority of being”4 that resonates with our own being and our own creativeness.
Here he speaks directly to literary critics, who approach poetry with the
same question: “What are the sources of its power?” In this book, I will have
much to say about Chaucer’s images of the house, but also of gardens, towers,
fields, fens, shops, and amphitheaters—the many kinds of significant space we
find in his opening tales. In its quiet way, that space creates the ground rules,
the spatial logic of what we soon come to know as the world of the Canterbury
Tales. But while Bachelard, like Jung, uses spatial images to study “the
depths of the human soul,”5 my purpose is to study them in the context of narrative,
where extended space implies certain kinds of possibility, and the
emplacement of characters (“where they are”) remains critical to our sense of
who they are and what they intend. In narrative as in life, a character’s presence
gathers the surroundings, giving them a center and an orientation. Thus,
we can say that the person creates the place. But equally, by dwelling in
place—through the experience of being in place and becoming part of that
place—a character is revealed to us in surprisingly intimate ways.
Inquiring into the relations of person and place, I have also found most
useful the fine books by the phenomenologist Edward S. Casey (Getting Back
into Place and The Fate of Place), yet beyond its fundamental orientation, this
book is not a phenomenological approach to Chaucer. It is intended as a reading
of Fragments I–III and the Shipman’s Tale that addresses what I would call
the spatial affect of Chaucer’s tales: the emotional power and coded meaning
streets, journeys, exiles, heights and depths, and what they suggest about the
characters who move among them. It is chiefly an attempt to describe as I best
can the relationship between a person and a given place, for as with
Bachelard’s houses, the image moves both ways: a person may be emplaced,
but the place is also in the person, so that place becomes capable of reflecting
what medieval characters are often assumed to lack: a subjectivity, an
indwelling sense of self. More generally, as readers pass from one chapter to
another, I hope to leave them with the impression that the open spatial relationships
favored in the Knight’s Tale have given way to intimate ones in the
Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale—that the “cold brilliance of public spectacle”
has yielded to “the close comfort (or discomfort!) of domestic life.” If so, these
tales demonstrate a turning inward toward individual sensibility, which is
Chaucer’s great achievement in the Wife of Bath, and which continues to be
a focal interest in the remaining tales.

The ideas that began this book arose in conversations and debates that were
the inspiration and the enduring value of David Benson’s 1987 NEH Chaucer
Institute at the University of Connecticut. Many thanks to David, and to
Linda Georgianna, Polly Stewart, Susanna Fein, David Raybin, Jean Jost, Jay
Ruud, the late Peter Braeger, and to all that faire compaignye. Later, at Chaucer
Review, David Raybin and Susanna Fein were a constant source of encouragement,
as well as expert and patient editors. A thousand thanks to my students
at Wichita State University, who, if they only knew it, have kept
Chaucer alive at the edge of the Great Plains. And to my colleagues in the
English Department, Ave atque vale—to their good books, mine is a grateful
answer.
A respectful nod as well to the Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and
Sciences at Wichita State University, for the sabbatical and two summer
grants that allowed me to give the book its final shape.To the editors of Studies
in Philology, Chaucer Review, Papers in Language and Literature, and Publications
of the Medieval Association of the Midwest, I am grateful for permission
to publish parts of articles that first appeared in those journals. Parts of chapter
1 were previously published in “My Sweete Foo: Emelye’s Role in the
Knight’s Tale,” Studies in Philology 88, no. 3 (1991): 276–306. Earlier versions
of chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6 appeared as “Private and Public Space in the Miller’s
Tale,” Chaucer Review 29, no. 2 (1994): 166–78; “The Logic of Deprivation in
the Reeve’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 30, no. 2 (1995): 150–63; “Society and
Nature in the Cook’s Tale,” Papers in Language and Literature 32, no. 2 (1996):
189–205; and “Custance as God’s Merchant in the Man of Law’s Tale,” Publix
cations of the Medieval Association of the Midwest 7 (2000): 84–107. Chapter 4
was previously published as “Symkyn’s Place in the Reeve’s Tale,” Chaucer
Review 39, no. 1 (2004): 276–306. For James Peltz, my editor at State University
of New York Press, heartfelt thanks for believing in this project, and
for helping me to do so. Paul Szarmach, the series editor, lent crucial and
timely support, and the two readers—unnamed but scarcely forgotten—provided
solid, helpful advice. Alison Lee’s editorial assistance at the press was
gracious and dependable, and Wyatt Benner’s meticulous attention to the
manuscript won my respect. But ultimate thanks must go to Alfred David and
Paul Strohm, both at Indiana University, who eased me down the ways, years
ago, launching me to teach, and finally to write a book of my own.
For Annie, Eva, and Sara, thanks are hardly enough, since I owe them
life itself, of which this book has been a part.