Chaucer can just deconstruct my arse
The thoughtful marquis, speaking with an air
Of sober gravity, said thus to her:
‘Tell me, Griselda, is your father there?’
In all humility, without demur,
She answered, ‘He is here and ready, sir.’
She rose at once and of her own accord
Fetched out her father to his overlord.- Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales “The Clerk’s Tale” (emphasis mine)
there is a certain deconstructive force in Griselda that goes beyond the usual reading of her as merely the oppressed victim of monstrous patriarchy personified in her marquis-husband.
Walter’s (marquis) question if closely examined seems to be rather ambiguous in that there is a question we would ask if it signified a request for Griselda to humor her ruler’s curiosity and to fetch her father out for him. whichever the case is, it is interesting to note that Griselda describes her father as “here” and goes “of her own accord” to fetch him. we could easily read Griselda as the one who initiates Walter’s political imaginary. it is through her own voluntary will to serve that is the condition to Walter’s powers. she, in fact, displaces the ontology of power from the oppressor to the oppressed “here.” it is through the ‘oppressed’ that the ‘oppressor’ acquires any modicum of power.
yet, it is reductive to think that this is a reversal of power positions. this is a subversion of the unilateral fantasy of power on her part. and Griselda does not fully implicate herself in the binary game of Walter. it is a double(d) discourse, when she oppresses herself into oppression. she now becomes a liminal figure. she now destabilizes the erected boundaries between the two discursive ‘spaces’. more importantly, she questions the term of “overlord” when used on her. for Walter was her father’s overlord; “his overlord” and not hers. not because she lies outside Walter’s ideological discourse but rather any insistence on a ‘pure’ appropriation of the word “overlord” would be a misrepresentation of Griselda’s deconstructive force.
