Structuralism in Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale”

Structuralism establishes the fact that there is a natural order to things, and that everything follows this natural order. Moreover, not only does everything follow these structures of order, they are all “generated by the human mind” (Tyson 199). Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” very follows a structure and natural order of things and, to me follows a structuralist pattern in the eys of many readers of the tale.

Most readers of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” will admit that it seems to follow a natural order. Maybe this has to do with the fact that most people read this Tale in High School, and never really delve deeply into it. But nevertheless, there is a structure which it follows that is most likely created by us, the reader. In the Tale, you have the damsels in distress, the knights in shining armor, and the love triangle that leads to a battle to the death for the hand of the lovely maiden. (Never mind the fact that the damsels in distress just so happen to be the queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta, and her sister Emily. I mean, that’s got to be something to raise an eyebrow at, but apparently that is irrelevant, so we have to hush and don’t ask questions). Given this classic “Knight in Shining Armor Fights to Death for Hand of Lovely Maiden” type of plot, we see the “Knight’s Tale” follow this natural order. This is the order we expect it to take, for we have come to understand most stories of Medieval Knights and Ladies as having similar plots.

 

According to Tyson, “structuralism sees itself as a science of humankind, for its efforts to discover the structures that underlie the world’s surface phenomena” (200). To explain, the surface phenomena which relates to the Knight’s Tale would be the way which we think of women as opposed to men. Women are portrayed as weak, frail, and in need of saving from the first strong white man that happens to walk by. Especially in literature, we often see this trend of viewpoints play out. Hence, because we automatically read women as frail and in need of saving, when reading the “Knight’s Tale,” we might first see Emily as such. It’s a structure we’ve established in our minds to think of ladies in waiting as in need of saving from some handsome knight. So, when the story unfolds and Arcite and Palamon (the two knights in the Tale) fight to the death for her, we see this as a natural succession of events.

However, this system is rather flawed in reference to the “Knight’s Tale” because Emily really does not want to be saved (What?! You mean to tell me the damsel in distress isn’t always in distress?! Shocker.). She even prays to the goddess Diana for freedom from not just one of the two knights, but both saying: “I want to be a maiden all my life, I never wish to be [a] lover or wife” (Chaucer 145). She is still forced to marry one of the knights, but the fact that she blatantly didn’t want either of them is often overlooked by readers. Why do you think this is? I think that it is because of the structures we already have set up in our minds due to many years of grooming. We see the knights in shining armor who have fallen desperately in love with the lady (never mind that they never really met her,  it’s true love, meeting the person doesn’t matter in these tales), and we see the lady trapped without a man to save her (never mind that she wasn’t really trapped, that she was perfectly content ALONE) and automatically our minds avert to the familiar Knight in Shining Armor-esque tale. Because of our interpretation of women, and the way our minds have been groomed to think about them from the examples we often see other people portraying in the world, this is a structure we have adopted.

It may have flaws, but it is still our “norm,” the way in which our minds have interpreted tales of this kind. And while some people are working to change this normality, it’s still a structure that our brain concocts due to the surface phenomena we see around us, and thus it portrays structuralism.

                                                      Works Cited:

Chaucer, Geoffrey, and Sheila Fisher. The Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation. W.W. Norton & Co, 2011. 

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. Routledge, 2015.