Abstract
“The Squire’s Tale” has attracted sparse and decidedly mixed commentary. To demonstrate the ultimate purpose of the Squire’s narrative, I focus on one self-contained section, the “peregrine falcon” episode in Part II of the tale, immediately preceding the Franklin’s interruption. Significantly identified by its teller as the narrative’s rhetorical “knotte,”1 this episode presents Canacee’s intervention during a female falcon’s attempted suicide—beating her wings violently against her body and mutilating it with her beak—and Canacee’s sympathetic encouragement of the bird to articulate her despairing “complaint” of abandonment by her “gentil lovere,” a tercelet (V.546). Raising issues of “trouthe,” “gentillesse,” and appearance versus reality, through the falcon episode, Chaucer anticipates major thematic elements of the Franklin’s subsequent story about human lovers, Dorigen and Arveragus. Many aspects of the noble birds’ and noble humans’ relationships mirror each other in subtle but unmistakable ways. Moreover, both distraught females, avian and human, consider suicide as a solution to their personal crises.
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Notes
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© 2012 Carolynn Van Dyke
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Stock, L.K. (2012). Foiled by Fowl: The Squire’s Peregrine Falcon and the Franklin’s Dorigen. In: Van Dyke, C. (eds) Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137040732_6
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