Whats Really Being Tested in The Clerks Tale? :: Chaucer Canterbury Tales

By any contemporary standards of behavior, Griselda actions are reprehensible non only does she renounce all semblances of personal volition, she deserts all duties of maternal guardianship as she forfeits her daughter and son to the--in so far as she knows--murderous intent of her husband. irrespective of what we think of her personal subservience to Walter, the surrendering of her children is a hard point to pay back around. Even the ever-testing Marquis himself, at his wifes release of their second child phrases he would have suspected her of malice and hardness of her heart had he not known for sure that she enjoyd her children (IV 687-95). It is little wonder our students, in whom we render to foster a sense of personal responsibility and human sensitivity, ab initio find Griselda an insipid and morally reprehensible wimp.   But we retrieve enduring Griselda for them. Or at least we try. We say this tale is not close a real woman look, it is in rhyme royal. That mea nt something special to Chaucer. The tales stanzaic fig signals a tale of high moral, even religious, sentence its flat movie and formulaic epitaphs distance Griselda and Walter from real people. Then bowing toward Petrarch and siding with the Clerk, we say this tale is not about wives duties to their husbands it is about the duty of the human understanding to God. As Griselda was to the tests inflicted upon her by Walter, so should we be to the adversities visited upon us by God. And so is Griselda redeemed for real women. But is she--really?   If we look very carefully at the language used as Walter frames the rationales for his intent for testing Griselda, we find that it is not for the proving of her pre-marital vow per se that he put her thorough his series of low-down and humiliating ordeals. True to its title, Petrarchs A Legend of Wifely Obedience and reliance (De Obedientia ac Fide Uxoria Mythologia) clearly and consistantly pictures Walter testing his wife for her fidelity and conjugal love promised before their marriage. Chaucers Walter, however, more often frames his designs as trials of sadnesse, corage, or, ultimately, wommanheede (IV 452, 787, 1075). The result is that in the Clerks tale, Griselda is well-tried not so much for her marital fidelity as she is for her womanly virtue. And the implications of this may be as frightening as the thought of a mother adandoning her children to the hands of a murderer.