The Power Struggle in The Clerk’s Tale

Through layers of narrators, The Canterbury Tales frequently critique meaningless conventions and abusive uses of authority. The Clerk’s Tale struggles with the subversive power inherent to passive submission, showing how it enables an inferior to exert control over those who cannot be dominated through direct means because of their complete and unquestioned authority. In the context of The Clerk’s Tale, Griselda and Walter have a very strange relationship in which a confusing power struggle develops out of Griselda’s complete submission. In her “goodness” she is able to force Walter into damaging his own honor and proving his own faults. Ultimately, her submission is able to strip Walter of his power and manhood just as he strips from her, literally, of clothing and maidenhead. She mocks his ways of wielding power and punctures his ego, belittling with her simple acceptance of his behaviors his construction of authority.

Chaucer uses two parallel relationships to establish his point. The plot of the story itself and the dichotomy between Griselda and Walter (a vie for dominance) set up the base of his argument. Chaucer uses the position of the Clerk to Petrarch (a vie for literary authority) to twist the way the story creates meaning. This leads directly into an interpretation of the tale that resists Petrarch’s authority/interpretation. As Griselda relishes in her misery and enjoys her penitent suffering she is able to control Walter through her seeming “goodness” and lack of pride. This stance is really nothing but an internal perversion of faith as she uses humility to convince Walter of his inferiority, because he is not as selfless or virtuous. Griselda’s use of submission is subverting because it dislocates the abil...

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...o look at the clerk’s submission and read it as a technique to gain power. If the clerk is not praising Petrarch, he is critiquing him and his interpretation of the tale. Petrarch believed the tale to represent submission to God, through the clerk’s false submission he twists the tale, making it about the way submission can be used by some authorities to control and abuse. The masochistic acceptance of punishment on the part of Griselda correlates the internal corruption that flourishes in those who hold power and strive to maintain that hold.

Works Cited

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Trans. Nevill Coghill, New York: Penguin, 1951.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. Madison: The University Wisconsin Press, 1989. 132-155.

Hansen, Elaine. Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. 188-207.