Geoffrey Chaucer
1340?-1400
In two stories from the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer makes use of Arthurian material. In The Squire's Tale, the youthful Squire tells a chivalric romance of suitably amorous aspiration. Gawain and Lancelot are cited as exemplars of courtesy and courtly behavior but seen as distant, remote, and long-gone. As with The Wife of Bath's Tale, discussed below, Chaucer's later Arthurian allusions are oblique and wry in comparison with those of the Chaucerian Roman de la Rose translation.
The Wife of Bath's Tale offers a short (408 lines) but complex reworking of the Loathly Lady theme. Unlike his counterparts in ballad and Middle English romance (The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, "The Marriage of Sir Gawain"), the protagonist is not Gawain but an unnamed Arthurian knight. Having raped a maiden, he is granted his life by the Queen if he can say what it is that all women desire. Tutored by an old hag, the knight gives the correct answer to the assembled ladies of the court but is appalled when, as her promised reward, the hag claims him in marriage. On their wedding night, she answers his objections to her low birth, poverty, and age with a sermon principally on the theme that "he is gentil that dooth gentil dedis" and offers him the choice of having her ugly and faithful, or fair and sought-after. Resigning the choice to her, the knight effectively gives her the sovereignty women desire; she promises him permanent fairness and constancy.
Other Middle English Arthurian narratives (notably Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) use the delayed articulation of female roles to revise the ethical categories of chivalric protagonists. Here, the knight's initial act of rape provokes reconsideration of personal identity and its consequent rights and obligations in the more general terms of marriage rather than chivalry. Chaucer juxtaposes folkloric, patrisic, and courtly elements in a complex redirection of romance, affecting nonchivalric identities. The Loathly Lady's entirely inner-directed account of what constitutes a person challenges the knight's sense of how far birth, possessions, and appearance make identity, but she nonetheless acknowledges his creaturely need in her permanent fairness. The tale's Arthurian setting functions to place this realistic and accommodating application of the ideology of gentilesse as possible nowhere but in Faery, where mutual rights, obligations, and identities can be renegotiated. Often seen as wish-fulfillment for its teller, the tale is less a romance illustrating an individual psyche than an exemplum to provoke reevaluation of the ideologies of personal and social identity in us all.