INTERPRETING THE CLERK'S TALE

“As the vast and and contentious critical literature on the tale amply demonstrates, with his translation the Clerk has managed to take an already difficult narrative and render it not just enigmatic but uninterpretable.”

Lee Patterson, “The Necessity of History: The Example of Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale’”

1. The Clerk's Tale is best read dramatically, as the Clerk's direct reply to the Wife of Bath. The Clerk has been scandalized by the Wife's outrageous behavior and offers up the tale of Patient Griselda as corrective, an example of how wives ought to behave. The reference to the Wife of Bath at the end of his tale is mocking and ironic.

2. The Clerk's Tale is best read allegorically, not as a realistic story. Petrarch's moral, translated at 1142-1162, is the best one: we should understand Griselda's patience and obedience to Walter as an image of the duty we all owe God, and "lyve in vertuous suffraunce."

3. The Clerk is in essential agreement with the Wife of Bath, and he finds the tale an example of extravagant if not pathological behavior, especially on Walter's part. There are no Griseldas in the real world, he says, and it's better that way; wives should not dread but dominate their husbands. The "Envoy" is his final word on the matter, and should be taken seriously, not ironically.

4. Chaucer was having a bad day when he penned the Clerk's Tale. He added too much realistic, pathetic detail to a story that's really about ideal models of behavior, and thus it can produce only contradictory responses in its readers. Aesthetically, the tale is not a success, whatever its moral lesson is.