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FIRE IN THE HOUSE: RALPH WALDOEMERSON’S MISREADING OF LINES1139–45 IN CHAUCER’S WIFE OF BATH’S TALEby Peter G. BeidlerIf I were a professor, I should make all young people with a poetictalent, read Chaucer, Herrick, and Shakspeare.—Ralph Waldo Emerson1The rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael, haveobviously no limits to their works, except the limits of their lifetime,and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to renderan image of every created thing.—Ralph Waldo Emerson2There is no question that Emerson knew and admired the works ofChaucer, though his references to Chaucer tend mostly to be general, asin my two epigraphs above. Only once does he make a more extendedallusion to Chaucer. That allusion comes in his 1844 essay, “The Poet.” In1925 Caroline Spurgeon briefly mentioned this allusion to Chaucer,3butso far as I have been able to determine, virtually no one, among eitherEmerson scholars or Chaucer scholars, has discussed the allusion. Indeed,most editions of Emerson’s essay “The Poet” do not bother to give the ref-erence for Emerson’s allusion. Although Spurgeon did not tell what inci-dent Emerson is alluding to, it is not hard to discover that the referenceis to the old wife’s pillow lecture in the Wife of Bath’s Tale. My central pointin this essay is that in his brief allusion to the Wife of Bath’s Tale in “ThePoet,” Emerson quite misreads the Chaucerian passage that he refers to.I shall begin by discussing what Chaucer was about in the passage, thenshow in what ways Emerson misreads that passage, then suggest some rea-THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2002.Copyright © 2002 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA02/37/1/2nd PROOF 9/17/02 10:53 PM Page 86PETER G. BEIDLER87sons why Emerson may have misread it, and, finally and perhaps mostinterestingly, indicate why I believe Emerson may well have known thathe was misreading the passage, and may, indeed, have done so willfully.Emerson does not give us the context for the lines he cites and theparaphrases in “The Poet,” but they appear in the pillow lecture of thenew old bride to her reluctant young husband on their wedding night inthe Wife of Bath’s Tale. In the passage below I quote from Chaucer’sCanterbury Tales and Other Poems, published in London between 1823 and1832.4I use this edition, which reproduces almost exactly Tyrwhitt’s lateeighteenth-century text, because this is the one that Emerson almost cer-tainly read in the 1840s.5In these difficult lines the bride is respondingto her new husband’s unchivalrous complaint that she is loathly, old, andlow-born. She answers his charge by pointing out to him that true gen-tility or “gentillesse” is not something we are born with, not somethingwe inherit from our ancestors, not something that comes with wealth orpossessions. Part of her argument is that if gentility were an inheritedcharacteristic, it would be like fire, true to its own quality, consistent inits own elemental nature, no matter what the consequences. The specificlines that Emerson alludes to, in my boldface below, are spoken by thenew old wife to her new young husband:“Eke every wight wot this as wel as I,If gentillesse were planted naturellyUnto a certain linage doun the line,Prive and apert, than wol they never fineTo don of gentillesse the faire office,They mighten do no vilanie or vice.“Take fire and bere it into the derkest housBetwix this and the mount of Caucasus,And let men shette the dores, and go thenne,Yet wol the fire as faire lie and brenneAs twenty thousand men might it behold;His office naturel ay wol it hold.Up peril of my lif, til that it die.”(Cumberland, 194; cf. III 1133–45, Tyrwhitt 6715–27)We can read Chaucer’s passage, roughly, thus: if men took fire and car-ried it to the darkest house between here and the far-off Caucasus Moun-tains, then left that fire in the house and shut the door and went away,the fire would still burn with the same qualities it would have if 20,000men were watching it. So long as it burned, it would maintain its “naturaloffice” as fire whether or not anyone were there to see it. So-called02/37/1/2nd PROOF 9/17/02 10:53 PM Page 87“gentle” men, in contrast, those who claim their gentility from theirancestry or their wealth rather than from their virtuous actions or thegrace of God, do gentle deeds only when they are watched. When no oneis watching, they do churlish or vicious deeds. Such gentility is not aninvariable or elemental quality, like that of fire, consistent whenever it isfound, but is variable depending on whether someone is watching. Theold wife is defending herself against her new husband’s accusation thatbecause she is low-born she is not worthy of a gentle-born man like him.Her point is that so-called “gentle” men behave one way when they arein public, but when they are alone they are capable of all manner ofviciousness. True gentility, then, comes not from birth or wealth but fromGod’s grace, and is demonstrated in consistency of virtuous action. Forher husband, then, to criticize her because she is “of so lough a kynde”(III 1101) is wrong, since her birth is irrelevant to her gentility. Impliedin her statement, of course, is the fact that her husband, because of hisrapacious actions when he is alone with the young maiden and hisunchivalrous words when he is alone with his new old wife, lacks gentil-ity despite his more aristocratic birth.To understand Emerson’s quite explicit allusion to this passage, weneed to understand the context for his allusion. In “The Poet” Emersonspeaks of poets as “liberating gods” who by their use of stunning symbols“emancipate” men by bringing them “out of a cave or cellar” of their ownignorance. Emerson gives many examples of the wonderful freedom thatresults when a reader is struck by the brilliance of poetic metaphor. Hementions Vitruvius’s analogy between a house and a human body, Plato’scalling the world a heavenly tree growing with its root, which is its head,upward, and so on. One of Emerson’s many examples of a liberating useof symbolic poetry is Chaucer’s use of the fire image in the passage weare considering. Here is the way Emerson puts it, with my boldface indi-cating all that he says about Chaucer: The use of symbols has a power of emancipation and exhilarationfor all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes usdance and run about


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CSUN ENGL 414 - FIRE IN THE HOUSE

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