Chaucer among the Victorians and Edwardians

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Chaucer among the Victorians and Edwardians Candace Barrington (bio) Chaucer as Children's Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras, by Velma Bourgeois Richmond . Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004. Any time we approach the topic of medieval literature as children's literature, we're forced to confront the often contentious issues of the canon. Not only do we have to determine what belongs in the canon, but we also must determine how we teach to children literature from a long-ago era not written with children in mind, such as Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Because Chaucer's work was not meant for children, it must undergo extensive transformations before the post-medieval classroom can accommodate it. Velma Bourgeois Richmond's study, Chaucer as Children's Literature, traces the ways nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century English and American authors, illustrators, and editors made these transformations in order to appeal to the sometimes conflicting demands of children, parents, and teachers. Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is a particularly intriguing literary work to study in this fashion. For two hundred years, from the time English literature began to supplant Latin and Greek literature in English-speaking schools until the present, educators wanting to equip their students with the full range of English literature have grappled with ways to include the works of Chaucer, generally considered the father of English verse. The problems with this project are obvious, and the solutions can be drastic. First, because Chaucer wrote in a fourteenth-century English undeniably alien to modern readers, the text's spelling is usually modernized, the unfamiliar words are updated, and the syntax is rearranged. Secondly, Chaucer's content poses a problem for presenting to children; many of his tales are forthrightly indecorous, featuring adultery, thieving, sex, and—to the horror of parents and the delight of children—farting. More problematic, however, are the tales [End Page 198] presenting values incongruous to post-medieval readers. For example, in the "Clerk's Tale," Griselda is praised for silently and patiently suffering years of torment inflicted by her husband, Walter; and in the "Man of Law's Tale," Constance endures exile and deprivation rather than disobey her father or her husband. Undeterred by these complications, compilers of children's literature have modernized Chaucer's language, omitted bawdy passages, and chosen tales consistent with coeval mores. When faced with which tales to present to children, editors have made choices based on conventional values of the period. Thus, early nineteenth-century anthologies often turned to the chivalric tale of the Knight or the fairy-like tale of the Wife of Bath, each of which (with a bit of cutting) could be made into a tale deemed suitable for children—and their parents. At the end of the twentieth century, editors and retellers reacted to new concerns about foisting tales of passive women onto young girls by rethinking the presentation of women and girls in The Canterbury Tales. They found no easy solutions. The obvious device of foregrounding the female tale-tellers was only a partial answer. Of the three women on the pilgrimage—the Wife of Bath, the Prioress, and the Second Nun—the two women of religion present tales saturated in violence. And any editor with the notion of focusing on tales about children would quickly be dismayed. The two tales featuring child protagonists end with the child dead: the Prioress's small boy has his throat sliced by malevolent Jews and the Physician's Virginia is decapitated by her father. These were tales not likely to appeal to twentieth-century adults choosing books for twentieth-century children. In order to reflect contemporary values, editors ended up refashioning women and girls within the tales. Tales of demure, even pathologically passive females, once presented as the fitting role model for girls, disappeared. Misogynistic outbursts were attenuated. And Chaucer's famously outspoken Wife of Bath was given a greater, more positive role. For example, a 1988 illustrated children's edition recasts the Wife as a contemporary businesswoman quite at ease in the company of men. The textual selection tells us so little about the Wife herself that the illustrations could freely depict her as a...