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The Clerk's Tale and the Grammar of Assent

The Clerk's Tale is the most elusive and least reassuring of Chaucer's religious tales. Though bad things happen to good people in the other religious narratives in the Canterbury collection, repeated assurances in those tales confirm that the world is governed by a powerful God intent on rewarding his faithful followers. By comparison, the Clerk and his tale are disturbingly silent on the subject of God's plan until the very end, leading many readers to categorize the tale as secular, developing in what seems "a moral void" (Cooper, 137), or worse, a perverse story of a bullying tyrant and his spineless wife.' In spite of Griselda's virtue, which is attributed to God's grace, she suffers alone, and the reasons for her suffering are made to seem arbitrary and weak. A domestic story of husband and wife set neither in the remote past nor far off in a heathenfilled land, the tale proceeds without the special effects of divine intervention that help guide our response to the stories of Constance, St. Cecilia, and the child-martyr of the Prioress's Tale. Miracles, mass conversions, and mysterious sea journeys seem out of the question in the closed and predictable world of Saluzzo. Even when Walter's people urge him to consider the problem of death, as arbitrary as it is inevitable, the solution they put forward is not transcendent or spiritual but prudential: Walter should settle down, take a wife, and produce an heir. Walter answers the people's mundane "preyere" to "delivere us out of al this bisy drede" in the pragmatic spirit in which it was delivered: he agrees to marry and promptly produces a child (albeit a girl child), removing what seems the only obstacle to complete "felicitee" in the realm.2 Even when religious motifs enter the poem, in the biblical allusions attending the description of Griselda's virtue, they enter quietly, with no apparent intention of upsetting the values of prudent accommodation and good government that guide the poem's opening scenes. On the contrary, Griselda's virtue is almost immediately "translated" into the "commune profit" (385, 431). Having observed her transformation from poor subject to wise co-ruler, the people surmise that she was sent by God to preserve the realm and promote the common good: