Sin and Sensibility: The Conscience of Chaucer's Prioress

R. D. Eaton, University of Amsterdam

The emotionalism of Chaucer's Prioress—evident in her portrait in the General Prologue, in her selection of a Canterbury tale to tell, and in her narrative style—has been doing good service for modern scholarship for many decades and in a variety of causes. Her habitual reliance on feelings has been taken to reveal something fundamental to her character. Feelings have seemed close to what the Prioress is all about as a moral agent, a social actor, and a woman—one of the precritical elements in her character that provides the framework for interpretative work. As Michael Calabrese has recently remarked, "Critics have often rightly noted her overwhelming feeling." Feeling in the Prioress is, according to Calabrese, absolute: "The Prioress cannot mean; she can only feel" (Calabrese, p. 69). Calabrese's primary interest is in the anti-Semitism of the Prioress's Tale and the way in which modern critics have addressed it. The Prioress provides a model of how not to deal with multicultural issues. Her feelings, according to Calabrese, are absolutely unreliable: "she feels all the wrong things," and her feelings are "pure but perverse" (Calabrese, pp. 69 and 77, respectively). In this, she provides a cautionary instance for modern criticism, which according to Calabrese is too often governed by emotions in its attempt to deal with anti-Semitism in the Prioress's tale. According, too, to some modern criticism, the simple fact of the Prioress's choice of a story richly informed by traditions of affective piety can be accounted for in terms of the Prioress's emotions. An emotional woman herself, she is attracted by the powerful emotions that the tale represents and is likely to generate in its readers. And if the tale can be attached so comfortably to the Prioress, Chaucer can therefore not be held accountable for the tale's appalling bigotry.