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Paul Olson's Book, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society.


by Amy Beasley
Web posted at 1:34 PM on 4/16/96 from 26.salc.wsu.edu.
Paul Olson. The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Part I:

"Chaucer, Social Theory, and Fourteenth-Century History" contains the Introduction and first chapter. The remainder of the book examines tales grouped around particular areas of social and historical significance.

Introduction:

"On Looking at the Meaning of Chaucer's Language." Chaucer's language, for Olson, is about his society's estates, laws and institutions, and about "social obligation and its violation" (3). Working against critical approaches which view Chaucer as detached from issues of his day, Olson studies Chaucer as a servant of a royal government "in quest of social order" during a "period of . . . intense debate about what constituted a good society -- what the direction of European and English society ought to be" (3).

Olson's project is to reconstruct the view that Chaucer and his court circle held toward social issues relevant to the Tales in order to achieve an accurate reading of Chaucer's work. He eschews studies of Chaucer's sources unfamiliar to the poet's contemporary audience, as well as modern critical approaches concerned with social class, capitalism, romantic love, and political marriage which were not articulated in Chaucer's time. Instead, he examines "Chaucer's language from within the linguistic and semiotic system available to the poet's court" (17).

Chapter 1:

"The General Prologue, the Three-Estate Theory, and the åAge and Body' of the Time." For Olson, the pilgrims are not characters but sets of roles based on estate stereotypes. Those pilgrims who Olson argues fit the "ideal" of their estates (Knight, Clerk, Parson, Plowman, and perhaps Yeoman) represent virtue; others represent "scorned" images of their estates, are motivated by personal profit, and "systematically violate the specific function assigned to the estate by Chaucer's ideal pilgrims" (30). The prologue invites the reader to assign each pilgrim to an estate and anticipate the content of the tales. Those pilgrims who "usurp the powers and properties of other estates" (the Monk and Prioress as clerics-turned-courtiers, for instance) "tell stories that abuse a recognized decorum relating narrator, form, subject, and style" (41).

Chaucer's ultimate goal, according to Olson, is to use an artistic representation of "the clichés of his age's social construction of reality" combined with references to details and topics familiar and significant to his court in order to "entice . . . the imagination of his time to seek a more artful, more graceful condition of life" (46).

Strengths:

Olson's is a heavily researched and extensively footnoted study, making it useful for connections between Chaucer's work and social and political views held by Chaucer's court. His examination of this particular perspective of medieval society is very thorough.

Weaknesses:

Since the study relies solely on the views of court circles during Chaucer's time for its basis, those interested in applying modern critical theories or readings of Chaucer's sources unfamiliar to his general readership might find Olson's work limiting.

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