Beginning with the spectacle of hysteria, moving through the perversions of fetishism, masochism, and sadism, and ending with paranoia and psychosis, this book explores the ways that conflicts with the Oedipal law erupt on the body and in language in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", for Chaucer's tales are rife with issues of mastery and control that emerge as conflicts not only between authority and experience but also between power and knowledge, word and flesh, rule books and reason, man and woman, same and other - conflicts that erupt in a macabre sprawl of broken bones, dismembered bodies, cut throats, and decapitations. Like the macabre sprawl of conflict in the "Canterbury Tales", this book brings together a number of conflicting modes of thinking and writing through the surprising and perhaps disconcerting use of "shadow" chapters that speak to or against the four "central" chapters, creating both dialogue and interruption.
Author(s): Becky Renee McLaughlin
Series: Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 25. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 71
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 304
City: Berlin
Acknowledgments VII
Introduction, or A Long Preamble to a Tale 1
Oscillations 1
Chimney-Sweeping 8
Cutting Up 14
Objection! 22
Chapter 1: The Prick of the Prioress, or Hysteria and Its Humors 28
Dora and the Prioress 29
Prosthetic Body and Rim-Structure 37
The Breast and An Erotics of the Divine 53
The Beating Fantasy and Orphic Song 58
The Joke of the Host and the Prick of the Prioress 65
Chapter 2: Portrait of the Hysteric as a Young Girl 70
How I Lost My Body 70
How I Lost My Mother 72
How I Lost My Voice 76
Chapter 3: Masochist as Miscreant Minister: The Parable of the Pardoner’s
Perverse Performance 84
Father, Mother, Masochist 84
The Perverse Dynamic and the Double Standard 112
Of Parables and Pardons 118
Chapter 4: Confessing Animals 126
Door Number Three 126
Supercaving 132
Siren Call 136
Chapter 5: Before There Was Sade, There Was Chaucer: Sadistic Sensibility in
the Tales of the Man of Law, the Clerk, and the Physician 141
The Fat Lady Against the “Holwe” Men 146
“Holwe” Man Number One: The Man of Law 153
“Holwe” Man Number Two: The Clerk 169
“Holwe” Man Number Three: The Physician 186
Chapter 6: Sadomasochism for (Neurotic) Dummies 197
China’s Aftershocks 197
The Sphinx Speaks 201
Paradigm Shift 204
Chapter 7: The Reeve’s Paranoid Eye, or The Dramatics of “Bleared”
Sight 211
Persecution 211
Primal Scene 230
"Corps Morcelé" 238
Chapter 8: Farting and Its (Dis)contents, or Call Me Absolon 247
The Haves and Have-Nots 247
Things That Go “Toot!” in the Night 251
Classroom Gas 256
Chapter 9: Retractor 261
The Sleep of Dialectic 261
Upon Waking, Shipwreck 264
The Master in Pieces 265
Bibliography 268
Index 281
