Chaucer - Prologue to CT

Jill Mann – way to view the prologue is as an estates satire, a satiric representation of all classes of society. One’s estate is clearly demarcated in Chaucer’s work with reference to one’s job, and the pilgrims are almost exclusively defined as being somehow at the height of their respective professions. Chaucer does not bother to put the order of his pilgrims in the technical hierarchy of estates other than by starting with the knight. Mann looks for some sort of abstract significance in the face of this lack of order – that one’s view of hierarchy has much more to do with one’s own standpoint within the world than it does with any abstract perfect hierarchy of estates. Chaucer uses the estate form to show that the specialized duties of each estate, when taken to extremes, work against rather than for a productive, content society.
Estates literature works to reflect, play with, consume, and produce stereotypes of each particular group. Social stereotyping allows for a wider scope of understanding in that it 1) forms a possible source for the form, content and satirical techniques of the Prologue; 2)use the Prologue as evidence for the prevalence of certain estate stereotypes common in Chaucer’s time; or 3) evidence of the sort of conceptual frameworks Chaucer himself would be drawing on.
Each pilgrim is drawn as being superlatively skilled in their trade, regardless of what that trade is, this seems to be representative of a sort of romance style Chaucer uses throughout. Pilgrims are often described with their respective professional accoutrements, and their personalities are also part and parcel with what one would expect of them in their work.
Estate work can go two ways – it can evoke the ‘idealized’ version of an estate that would define how the estate should work, or a more ‘normal’ version with all the malpractices and frauds that typically define the workers in it. Regardless of what version one is being presented with in any particular pilgrim, the other version is always kept in mind, thus the good and the bad are represented as mutually definitive. Through the details that Chaucer gives us about the working lives of the pilgrims, it is often the estate itself that we are gaining information about, rather than the actual pilgrim.

Chaucer is consummately aware of point of view and plays with these ambiguities constantly, so that in the most fully realized accounts of pilgrims, we are understanding them largely from their own perspective. Thus in giving us the Monk as pilgrim, we get the typical sins and excesses that are often associated with monks in anti-clerical literature, but in a way that makes those sins and excesses seem excusable and even good – that is to say that according to Mann’s argument, we are getting the Monk from the Monk’s point of view, rather than from the over-moralizing point of view of someone else.
When giving us idealized estates, such as the clerk, the parson or the plowman (the last of which seems to owe something to Langland or the tradition surrounding plowmen at the time), Chaucer may be using estates ideals against themselves. By giving each estate representative such a perfect version of their own specialized labor, he shows how these ideals don’t necessarily always work together in a full society – like the Parson and the Plowman seeming to exist in a closed off dichotomy which other pilgrims are totally unengaged in. The Clerk, meanwhile, is an ideal and lives to that ideal without any clear notion as to how that ideal furthers him in society or even what that means his place in society actually is. What this does is exploit the concept of ideal: when acting as ideals, are they necessarily fitting into society as well as they could, or does acting in an “ideal” fashion as commanded by the estates model force a sort of alienation from social intercourse?

There is a big argument between whether we are encouraged to read the pilgrims Chaucer describes as “types” or as “individuals” – as types of their particular professions/sets of stereotypes versus individuals Chaucer would have drawn from real life people. Mann’s contribution to this argument is to say that perhaps Chaucer was relying on reader-response – that how we are encouraged to read the pilgrims individually comes in how we are encouraged to respond to them as individuals. Chaucer encourages the ‘pilgrim-as-individual’ response through an awareness of the effects of time on the characters, their reactions to traditional views of their jobs and behaviors, a specific awareness to their individualized points of view, their terminology.
Conversely, however, Chaucer aims at a sort of universality by the very comprehensiveness of its scope. It constitutes a wide range of characters and of moods. Characters and values are played off each other in the tales themselves in a way that is relative until the Parson steps in with a set of absolute, incontrovertible values (which simultaneously seem to apply only to him as a character). The omission of the victim that Mann describes can be used in a way to help relativise the value system of the individual pilgrims, in that without a victim we are able to see the pilgrims largely from their own perspectives.
Chaucer plays with our own senses of morality further in his descriptions of his pilgrims, in that he presents us wholly good people such as the Knight or the Parson, people like the Friar and Monk who aren’t so good but whose charm makes up for it, and wholly disgusting people like the Summoner, who sin and who physically repulse us. In this, Chaucer is pointing to and playing with the various ways we inherently judge our neighbors – while morality seems to have a part in it, physical appearances and a jovial manner do a lot to help us excuse people where morals are lax. Mann uses a good dichotomy between the Friar and the Summoner here, the Friar is fun, jovial, a musician, and quite handsome; the Summoner is thin, hollow-looking and reeks of garlic and onions – we thus instinctively like the Friar more than the Summoner despite the fact that their moral failings – both of them participate in simony – is identical. Thus Chaucer illuminates that our personal senses of good and evil are not only based on morality, but also on aesthetics. Verbal ambiguities and ironies, such as wordplay with particular words or equivocations in lines also help to add up to the idea that Chaucer consistently removes the possibility of making a reliable moral judgment on any of the characters, or indeed of making one at all. It is this lack of a moral judging ground that ironically gives us the sort of social cohesiveness we see in the Prologue.
The values that are presented in the Prologue are the values of the world, and are drawn in a manner consistent with the general way that the world works. We have a sort of worldly ethic, and our individual takes on that ethic have more to do with us as readers than it does any sort of judgment within the text itself. (Mann cf’s to Criseyde, and the subtle psychological machinations presented in her as the story progresses – here we get more outward signs or shows of who/what people are, such as the brooch of the Prioress – it is the outward that helps us to determine what people are, and the inward is largely left alone.) The ethics of the world are basically relativist. In the Prologue, as arguably in the world and history, it is “specialized work which ushers in a world where relativised values and the individualized consciousness are dominant.” (202)