3 - Rocking the Cradle and Quiting the Knight

Summary

Chaucer's attention to structured mobilities and hybridity in the frame narrative is significant not only because it redefines the Pilgrims’ Way and the bodies that circulate on and around it, but also because it comes to bear on the interplay between tales. This dramatic and literary interplay has been well established, and nowhere is it more apparent than in Fragment One, where settings evolve from the classical past to the familiar present, genres degenerate from romance to fabliau to fragment, and sex acts multiply, culminating in the prostitution of the Cook's Tale. Noting the significance of Fragment One to the narrative game of The Canterbury Tales, Lee Patterson writes that the Knight's Tale “functions in an important sense as the other against which the project of The Canterbury Tales is ultimately defined; and it therefore appropriately begins the game of quiting that will at once include and counter it.” And Helen Cooper observes that in the interplay between the Knight, Miller, and Reeve, Chaucer “constantly adds or adapts details to bring the [tales] together,” and in so doing “ensures that the tales are read initially in a specific relation to each other.” This relational practice of quiting has generated an abundance of critical conversation, but scholarship on the subject has not yet considered how mobility affects the tellers’ rhetorical play. In this chapter, I argue that movement in the Miller's Tale and the Reeve's Tale serves to position them within a sequence of quiting that ultimately parodies the Knight's meticulous regulation of politicized mobility. The Knight celebrates the ideological and actual practice of stasis, evincing its inherent value to chivalric fiction and its material practice as an imitation of stable and eternal god(s). He consequently denigrates movement, associating it with characters he deems politically and socially inferior. Meanwhile, the Miller and Reeve challenge this disparagement of movement and instead empower mobile bodies, celebrating chaos over order, and liberty over political, social, and religious bonds.

In the Knight's Tale, the Knight constructs a narrative around a preeminently chivalric character. He introduces the Duke Theseus as “lord and governour” who was “in his tyme swich a conquerour / That gretter was ther noon under the soone” (1. 861–3).