"The medieval notion was... what choices [one] made in his will determined the character of every act. Hence the deepest reality of the pilgrimage was not at all a matter of horses or sights or places, but was in the heart of the individual pilgrim.... Seen this way, what the narrator of The Canterbury Tales remembers is central. He remembers the group itself, what each said, what tales each selected from the storehouse of his own memory" (Howard 162).
The central idea of Donald R. Howard's The Idea of the "Canterbury Tales" is that the tale told by each pilgrim is not merely a representation of that pilgrim's ideas, but that the inclusion of details above and beyond strict necessity reveals more about each pilgrim than he or she intends, that Geoffrey Chaucer allowed his characters to not only tell tales which present their worldviews and opinions, but to betray significant details about themselves which must be interpreted appropriately to place the tale in question into an appropriate and understandable context. Beryl Rowland concurs with Howard's assertion that the Knight's Tale, rife with references to chivalric codes, the insurmountability of the whims of fortune, and ever-present historical revisionism with undercurrents of (in Chaucer's time) contemporary social interaction, is representative of the tales as a whole. "The deliberate effect of this style," she writes, "is a sense of obsolescence--the depiction of cultural ideas and practices which [have] lost their luster. The presentation of the Knight... serves as a reminder of the decline of the chivalric ideal; the Prioress, the Monk, and the Friar show the contamination of the religious by the secular; the Yeoman and the Plowman represent old values... obsessed with the past." This is perhaps the core element to bear in mind when reading and interpreting the Knight's tale: that he is a man on the precipice of a new era, one in which he will be obsolete, and thus, his tale is one that not only presents his lifestyle as noble and necessary, but forces his chivalric ideals, via anachronism, into a pagan myth, which is--or should be--obsolete as a reference point for morality and heroism within the Christian world he inhabits. But, as Rowland elaborates: "The idea of the world in decline from a former Golden Age is... a fundamental medieval concept" (Rowland 392), not originating with or solely attributable to Chaucer. This allows for yet another interpretation: this is a rallying cry to return to the ideals of the ancients, a denouncement of the entropy the Knight perceives around him, and the call for a return to that which he sees as more noble.
The conception of nobility holds a prominent place in the Knight's Tale, as well as the "Canterbury Tales" as a whole. The Knight is called upon by the host, Harry Bailey, to tell his tale first, as he is a member of the first estate, the aristocracy. Immediately following his narration, the "natural" order of storytelling is usurped by the Miller, a member of the third estate, who wishes to "quyte" (repay in kind) the Knight's Tale with his own. The Miller's Tale immediately precedes the tale of the Reeve, who, in his own way, attempts to quyte the Miller, albeit with much less success. In "Anger and Community in the Knight's Tale," John Lance Griffith draws a connection between the quarrel of these two third estate men and the argument between the Friar and the Summoner following the Wife of Bath's prologue, citing interactions such as these as "[exposing] the tensions and anxieties inherent in medieval social relationships" (Griffith 1), regardless of estate. While the host fails to maintain the order of the classes, the Knight is able, through his story, to maintain what he, as a noble, perceives as the correct method of introduction: he begins with Theseus, a Knight and a king--Louise Olga Fradenburg refers to the glorification of Theseus as painting him as both "like a god and like God" (Fradenburg 53)--and descends the ladder of the estates to describe the lowliest of the Theban soldiers. Author Jane Chance states "Chaucer seems to suggest his characters are out of control," that the Knight's "spiritual commitment is ambiguous" (Chance 9). She further likens the usurpation of the Knight's position by the miller to the Peasant Revolt of 1381, which occurred during Chaucer's formative years, and suggests that the explicit delineation of social order within his tale may be a reaction to the upset of social norms which will follow his tale. This may appear to make little logical sense within the chronological order of the narrative of the tales as a whole, but Chaucer's fondness for playing with the boundaries of his medium is well known.
Perhaps most interestingly, however, is the interaction between the thoughts and statements which appear to be Chaucer's and those which appear to be the Knight's. The Knight, often apparently in spite of himself, allows his construction of Theseus to do those things which he cannot, to demonstrate an attitude toward change that the Knight himself does not possess: "Theseus's openness to 'pitee' [when confronted by the widows of Thebes] was equally an openness to change, a willingness to respond and adapt to 'adventure', the unforeseen and arbitrary interventions of chance.... This readiness to change, to drop one set of plans and conceptions or attitudes, characterizes Theseus throughout the tale" (Griffith 11). Theseus is the Knight's analog within his tale, the man the Knight wishes he could be, yet his role as object of admiration is curious. Theseus, as he is presented in a classical context by Ovid (Ovid's mythologies are those with which Chaucer was likely most familiar, as evidenced not only here in the Knight's Tale, but The Wife of Bath retells, or, more correctly, mistells, the story of King Midas from Ovid, citing the author by name), is not as well remembered or beloved as the Knight would have his listeners believe; in fact, the most famous story in which he is a participant involves assisting his friend in the rape of Proserpina (Hamilton 220). This places Theseus in a much less flattering light, and reveals quite a bit about the personality of the Knight in his admiration of such a man.
Further, Theseus exhibits weakness of which the Knight does not seem to be aware: "[Theseus] immediately turns to Thebes and establishes himself as the principal force of his and his subordinates' destinies" (Griffith 12), but he is subject to the whims of Fortuna, fate embodied, who appears to hold sway even over the pantheon of gods who play an integral role in the conclusion of the tale. For instance, Chaucer was well aware of the analogous nature of the construction of houses of worship, such as cathedrals constructed in his time, the shape of which was evocative of the imagery of the Christian cross. In the tale, when the arena is constructed with temple-like structures within it, the depictions of the acts of the gods upon the walls of their respective devotion rooms are not representations of the kindness and benevolence the characters seek. Instead, they are of actions of questionable morality, such as Diana's destruction of Actaeon, a youth who glimpsed her nudity while searching for a stream of water in which to cool himself: "a death... completely undeserved; he had done no wrong" (Hamilton 374). Of the many tales of antiquity in which the gods' interaction with man was beneficial, the Knight chooses these, forcing the reader to question his true intent, as well as a frame of mind which would result in the glorification of such an individual.
Perhaps the Knight is more aware than is at first apparent of his own subservience to Fate, acknowledging that he, too is subject to her whims, fading as he is into obsolescence through no fault of his own, in a way that he cannot alter or avert, except to make his way of life survive him by making it part of a story with historical relevance.
The Knight is, however, unaware of those things which connect him to the men of lesser classes; like the Yeoman and the Plowman, he, too, glorifies older values and is obsessed with the past. His glorification of a long-dead era is made that much more interesting when he is viewed as a man descending into obsolescence. Griffith suggests that the Knight's representation of Theseus is the product of two distinct traditions "the French tradition...which sees the Knight's Tale as a celebration of the romantic-heroic values of chivalry, with Theseus as the embodiment of those values; and the English tradition which views those values with skepticism, identifying in Theseus' order the potential for chaos" (Griffith 3). When viewed through a historical lens, this idea is born out. The French system of Knighthood (with which Chaucer would be intimately familiar), and its differences from the British standard, starting with the Knighting of Louis VI while he was still a prince and without his father's knowledge, an action which ultimately resulted in all French kings being Knighted before coronation. Further: "In the late 13th century, a decision of the Parliament in Paris forbade the count of Artois from making unfree men into Knights without the king's consent; interesting to note, the two men who had been so Knighted were allowed to remain Knights subject to the payment of a fine. This marked both the closure of the Knightly class as well as the beginnings of a new form of access, by purchase" (Velde 3). Doubtlessly, Chaucer’s feelings on the subject are conflicting, as he himself was only a part of the nobility by virtue of purchase and not by birth. The Knightly class and the noble class were not so intricately linked before the 12th century as they would become, Knights being men who could afford armor and the means to engage in battle, to be sure, but not necessarily members of the aristocracy. It is at the end of this age of interconnected nobility and knighthood that Chaucer's Knight finds himself, on the edge of a new era where the duties that were once solely that of the nobility were contracted to freelance mercenaries. Caught in the middle, it is no surprise that the Knight's tale is an archaic one, an insertion of his own worldview into a world completely unlike his own, almost as if he is anticipating a coming era where his lifestyle will be likewise outdated, an attempt to apply nobility to history retroactively. He is trying to make his ideals, and thus, himself something eternal and immutable, to fight the diminishing he knows is coming. Fate has thrust this fading upon him, and he once again demonstrates that his heart is tied more to the pagan world than to the Christian Britain in which he lives, as he seeks immortality not through salvation, but through memory, just as did the heroes of myth.
Fradenburg says of nobility that it is likely the result of the conceptions of community and duty espoused by Thomas Aquinas in his attempts to justify the classicist views of Aristotelianism to "[re-theorize] the [concepts of] just war... on behalf of the newly consolidated states of the thirteenth century" (Fradenburg 54). Nobility, she says, arises from genuine emotion towards one's community or state, but evidence of this emotion in the Knight himself is hard to find; his loyalty is to the idea of nobility, not nobility itself, and these two things are not identical. The Knight perceives his obligations as not to be the protector of the people and the kingdom as a knight, but to the memory and preservation of the knighthood. On one hand, Fradenburg notes that "[W]hat cannot be read in the tale is what is in the heart, whether of Jupiter or Providence or Emelye" (60), but she goes on to say that the tale is "preoccupied with hiding... and removing the things that emerge or become manifest inside it" (61). Much can be made of the conflicting points of view of the chivalric tradition, which the Knight invokes in the ancient world via anachronism, and the realities of the nature of war. It may be argued that the soul-killing nature of war was not a sentiment of the medieval mindset, but David Aers states in his Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination that "Chaucer's imagination had great sympathy with the growing criticism of war (the lust for conquest and its economic foundations) among late medieval writers" (Aers 176), so this idea is not without precedent. The Knight attempts to paint a picture of idealized sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for one's king, while he himself arrives at the Tabard Inn still dressed for battle. This can be interpreted in one of two ways: he has either just come from war to engage in his pilgrimage, or his physical description indicates that he carries his war around with him, unable to escape it. The question then becomes, what is this war? Is it a war against a foreign nation, did he serve the land and its people in its protection, or is it a war to maintain the status quo, a war existing among the social castes, an internal struggle made manifest by his outward armaments?
The Knight is a complicated individual, and a curious case study, even within the broad range of well-developed characters that populate the world Chaucer created. He is at first glance noble, but this is an informed ability more than anything; the adulation of men with morals contrary to the Christian world in which he lived subjects him to an interpretation of his tale that is less than flattering. His position on nobility, his defense of it, is born not out of a true affection for this system, but out of a desire to prevent his own slide into oblivion and history. The Knight is a symbol of the nobility which is slowly fading before his eyes, into the recesses of history; his tale is an attempt to eternify his own values by placing them in a historical context, a pre-emptive measure to ensure that chivalric codes outlast him by inserting them into a context which is not only historical but mythological, a story untouched by time. Whether or not his ventures were in vain must be decided by the reader; surely the fact that his tale has survived eight centuries must be some indication that it was, in fact, timeless, and the amount of academia devoted to its study has ensured that the Knight’s viewpoint outlived Chaucer, and the era of the three estates.
Works Cited
Aers, David. Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination. 1st ed. London: Routledge, 1980. Print.
Chance, Jane. "Representing Rebellion: the Ending of Chaucer's Knight's Tale and the Castration of Saturn (1)." Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: International Review of English Studies. (2002): Print.
Fradenburg, Louise Olga. "Sacrificial Desire in Chaucer's Knight's Tale." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. 27.1 (1997): 47-75. Print.
Griffith, John Lance. "Anger and Community in the Knight's Tale." Fu Jen Studies: Literature and Linguistics. 2008. Print.
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. 11th ed. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1998. Print.
Howard, Donald R. The Idea of the 'Canterbury Tales'. 1st ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Print.
Rowland, Beryl. "The Idea of the ‘Canterbury Tales’." Modern Language Quarterly. 38. (1977): 390-395. Print.
Velde, Francois. "Knighthood and Chivalry." Heraldica.org. 01 09 1996. Web. 20 November 2009.
Note: This post is comprised of selections from a previous term paper for an English course at Lousiana State University (Engl 4137 - Chaucer, Professor Jesse M. Gellrich). Using all or part of it and presenting such as your own ideas in all likelihood violates your institution's plagiarism policy. Be advised.
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