4 - “Translating” Female Bodies and (En)Gendering Mobility

Summary

The queering of sealed, stationary bodies that occurs as part of the quiting game in the First Fragment also manifests in individual tales on the Canterbury pilgrimage. A careful consideration of the Clerk's Tale, in particular, shows that movement authorizes female bodies who thoughtfully deploy it within the context of existing, patriarchal systems. Unlike Alison, though, whose leaky body dismantles marital, architectural, natural, and even sexual categories, Griselda stages resistance from within hegemonic structures. By expressing powerful iterations of movement from within, she reveals the instability of the status quo without having to tear doors from their hinges (à la John of the Miller's Tale), while also staging the potential for female empowerment through mobility and dispersal. In this chapter, I will begin by demonstrating that Griselda's perceived steadfastness is in fact a constant willingness to yield, resulting in a surplus of movement that, unlike the surplus of the Reeve's Tale, operates in accordance with current understandings of Christian virtue and wifely obedience. Though this surplus is frequently read as an “emptiness,” we might benefit from recognizing it instead as an “overfullness” that renders the female body enigmatic while denying the possibility of male inscription – the body is always already being inscribed. Moreover, by figuring her mobility in terms of fluidity, the Clerk evokes a liquid ecology that merges Griselda's tidal body with its physical environs to dismantle borders and boundaries. To evoke the language of contemporary social scientists, Griselda proves that “neither boundaries nor relations mark the difference between one place and another. Instead, sometimes boundaries come and go, allow leakage or disappear altogether, while relations transform themselves without fracture.” Griselda's movement has this very effect, erasing boundaries and transforming relations to reveal innovative, agentified ways of being.

Critics have repeatedly seen Griselda as lacking agency. Kathryn McKinley insists that she “has been purged of any human perplexity, anguish, or struggle which might be the indicators of an authentic subjectivity,” and in emphasizing her “stoic endurance” and “patience” critics including Marga Cottino-Jones and Alfred Kellogg suggest Griselda is only capable of deploying passive or static virtue.