Mª Beatriz Hernández Pérez

Universidad de La Laguna

A Woman's Legacy: Kinship Dynamics in The Clerk's Tale

Chaucer's awareness of folkloric themes derivative of patriarchy is gaining wide recognition. Such acquaintance might suggest the poet's deep interest in reproducing or even embodying in his writing diverse responses to 14th century debate over women. The Clerk's Tale is inserted within a thick net of reprisal activity which is added to the basic contest pattern. Through his particular interpretation and conclusion of the story, the clerk registers varying degrees of misogyny, thus contributing to further divergence. This learned piece combines the appeal to sexually marked audiences, for whom the final message is offered as a modern issue of discussion, with the depiction of an older unrevealed kinship system lying behind the protagonists' psychological or symbolic postures. This paper attempts to analyze those kinship relations and their involvement in the narrator's ideological stance.