The Chaucer Review

The Chaucer Review 36.3 (2002) 277-297

Chaucer's Squire's Tale:
Animal Discourse, Women, and Subjectivity

Lesley Kordecki

The view that the connection of women with nature should simply be set aside as a relic of the past assumes that the task for both women and men is now that of becoming simply, unproblematically, and fully human. But this takes as unproblematic what is not unproblematic, the concept of the human itself, which has in turn been constructed in the framework of exclusion, denial, and denigration of the feminine sphere, the natural sphere, and the sphere associated with subsistence. ¹

Val Plumwood

I believe that the construction of what we call human subjectivity has a great deal to do with the early storytellers in our language and how they built a sense of human-ness in tales that set the male narrator up against the female human and the animal. Today our often solipsistic and arbitrary view of consciousness is being challenged by various ideologies, not the least of which are feminism and anti-speciesism. We might very well gain a better understanding of our past and future paths by examining, as this essay attempts, how the construct of human subjectivity evolved through language, especially that of the first influential writers of English.

With the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer moves from the psychological schema inherent in dream visions to the overtly representational, dramatic genre(s) of the story within the story, and this move affects the experimentation that Chaucer conducts with voice, most interestingly, with the voice of the nonhuman. And with the Squire's Tale, we enter into romance, the highly self-conscious accounting of the "other" world, the exotic world, with its social dimensions intact and valuative. The genre of romance demands a more externalized perspective than the highly psychological dream vision with its internal self-conscious obsession. Similar to travel accounts, the Squire's Tale makes blatant the oriental other, the [End Page 277] magical other, the fantastical other, the feminine other, and the animal other--all associated in a discourse that skirts the perimeter of masculinist subjectivity, a verbal enterprise exploring these marginal voices.

I argue that the animals who dominate the story told by the pilgrim Squire reveal Chaucer's own mediated strategies of language and bring us closer to seeing why this particular tale serves a powerful purpose in the collection. Although the Squire's Tale partakes of romance, mimics travel accounts in its beginning, and enacts a surrealistic dream vision in Canacee's walk through the garden, the source that drives the tale is Chaucer's readily accessible subtext, the mythography of Ovid. The Metamorphoses may well have been a favorite of Chaucer for its combination of love and transformation, its ability to melt the frames of a frame story as fluidly as it dissolves the metaphysical limits of species. Here, horse can become eagle and woman can become falcon (or the other way around) in a world where distinctions between creatures seem less insurmountable than the obstacles to courtly love. The tale is one of transformation, magic in its mythic forms, and the prominent performance of animal discourse in the long lament of the falcon unites the exotic other, specifically here the nonhuman other, with the feminized world of romance and the gendered magic that critics have come to see in the tale.

Chaucer, like many writers before and after, could not resist shapeshifting, from its minor form of disguise to the all-out metamorphoses found in Dorigen's rocks and the Canon's Yeoman's coals. Most intriguing remain the tales of humans becoming nonhumans, and what this transformation means, especially for discourse and storytelling. The many myths of mortals and immortals turning into plants and animals in Ovid attest to the slipperiness of species, a sliding of signifiers that Chaucer exploits in the tale of the lamenting falcon. Women in myth often seem compelled to change their essence as a result of men's desires, sometimes even to extremes. Like the feminized world of nature, the...