12—
The Unhousing of the Gods:
Character, Habitus, and Necessity in Part III

Although the description of the temples in Part III provides a wedge for the entry of many of the Knight's central concerns into the Knight's Tale, the images of the gods are not wholly satisfactory for him as representations of those concerns, in part because those images are too concentrated and visual. The temples and statues, precisely because they are able to symbolize psychological and social forces compendiously, lend themselves too easily to the counterallegorical kind of visualization or imagining seen most strongly at work in the description of the temple of Mars. Even the account of the temple of Diana, with its more intellectual listing of aspects of the goddess that need to be decoded and its relative impatience with the traditional iconography of the virgin huntress, is still too compacted and scenic—indeed, too brief—to render the agency of psyche and society in human life with the particularity they exhibit in concrete conditions. These "defects" of the temples emerge most clearly in retrospect when seen in the context of the drift of Part III as a whole, which moves from the initially formidable temples of the gods to the individually realized prayers of newly differentiated and more complex characters. This move from ekphrasis to dramatization, visual to verbal, has the effect, among other things, of reducing the gods to antiquated comic appendages of the human situation by the end of Part III.^[1]

The account of the assembly of the warriors of Palamon and Arcite, centered on the portraits of Lygurge and Emetrius, forms an intermediate state between the temples and the prayers. In it certain aspects of the temples, particularly that of Mars, are brought down to earth. We may note in passing the effect on the atmosphere and feel of the story that the Knight's introduction of his own experience into the tale via

[1] The whole tale is characterized by this general movement; it is worth remembering that it ends with a long, complex speech.

the temple of Mars allows. He seems to find it much easier to put himself into the scene and imagine the preparations for the tournament as if it were to happen now:

For if ther fille tomorwe swich a cas,
Ye knowen wel that every lusty knyght
That loveth paramours and hath his myght,
Were it in Engelond or elleswhere,
They wolde, hir thankes, wilnen to be there—
To fighte for a lady, benedicitee!
It were a lusty sighte for to see.
        (I, 2110-16)

The Knight's listing of the armor and weapons of the combatants (2119–27), his "Ther maistow seen" at 2128, and the extended occupatio that lingers over "The mynstralcye, the service at the feeste" and other particulars of a full and distinctively modern chivalric world while pretending to dismiss them (2197–2206) testify to the concrete and contemporary reality with which his imagination invests the scene and to the attraction it holds for him.^[2] Within this context the descriptions of the two kings undoubtedly function to increase, with metonymic compactness, the richness and splendor of the world of the noble life, as Charles Muscatine saw:

Here the imagery is . . . conventional, framed in the flat to express the magnificence that befits nobility. I have noted that after all the description of these two kings they hardly figure in the narrative. The inference, however, is not that the portraits are a waste and an excrescence, "merely decorative," but that they perform a function that is not directly related to the action and is independent of the question of character. They contribute first to the poem's general texture, to the element of richness in the fabric of the noble life. More specifically, Chaucer solves the problem of describing the rival companies by describing their leaders; not Palamon and Arcite but their supporting kings. Their varicolored magnificence, like Theseus' banner, makes the whole field glitter up and down—black, white, yellow, red, green and gold. Their personal attributes—the trumpet voice of Emetrius, the great brawn of Lygurge, their looks, like lion and griffin—give both a martial quality that we are to attribute to the whole company.
(Chaucer and the French Tradition, 182.)

[2] Robinson, following Cook, notes that the passage is full of "medieval realism." See Chaucer, Works , 2d ed., 678, note to 1, 2095ff.

All true. Yet Muscatine's protostructuralist tendency to apply his perceptions too broadly, a tendency that limits his fundamental and pioneering study, leads him to neglect the bearing of the passage in context and give its more specific connections with what precedes it and its function at this particular point in the tale less weight than they deserve.

For one thing, the placing of these set pieces immediately after the temple descriptions allows the portraits of the two kings to resonate with the temples, especially that of Mars. Lygurge and Emetrius are something like the statues in the temples: they are described with the same technique of formal, static portraiture, and each is in a commanding position with fierce animals at his feet, reminiscent of Mars's wolf and perhaps Diana's hounds. The looks Muscatine mentions are something like that of Mars, "grym as he were wood" (2042). In addition, Emetrius is specifically described as "ridyng lyk the god of armes, Mars" (2159), and his sanguine humor and voice "as a trompe thonderynge" (2174) connect him to his planet and his profession. Although I am not convinced by Walter Clyde Curry's argument that Lygurge and Emetrius represent Martian and Saturnalian man, respectively, any more than I am by those scholars who have tried to find allusions to specific historical figures in the portraits, I can see what inspired both enterprises.^[3] The descriptions are portentous; they convey the feeling that they allude to and contain more than they specify. The description of Emetrius in particular has a specificity that creates a "reference effect"—we want to know the why of details like his "citryn" eyes, his golden ringlets, his humor, and his freckles—that invites equally iconographic or historical explanation without settling clearly on either.

The point would seem to be that these are real men who also embody and carry with them forces allied with those presented in the temples. Lygurge and Emetrius are semiallegorical in that they are a way of moving threats and powers like those of Mars off the temple walls and into characters, giving them a specific locus in the action of the tale. These are men like gods insofar as they dispose of and (barely) control destructive forces that they may unleash at any time.^[4] This

[3] Curry, Medieval Sciences , 130–37. The most thorough attempt at historical allegory remains Cook, Historical Background .

[4] I cannot, therefore, agree with Elizabeth Salter that "when we are told that 'The grete Emetrius, the kyng of hide . . . cam rydyng lyk the god of armes, Mars' (2156–, we are clearly meant to recall only one aspect of the martial god: misery, cruelty, death are obscured by magnificence" (Knight's Tale and the Clerk's Tale , 28). Salter does not specify who "means" us to forget the temple of Mars and under what conditions. As readers we are of course free to remind ourselves by going back to the more disturbing passage (and there are some worse ones yet to come). If the reference is, as seems likely, to the speaker of the poem, the question of intention is undecidable in the passage itself since what Salter takes as a cover-up could as easily be seen as a giveaway. I have chosen the latter option on the basis of the transitional character of the passage between the temples and the prayers, though I am willing to admit that the undecidability of the passage taken by itself can also easily be seen as a function of an ambivalent attitude on the part of the speaker. To take the Knight seriously as a speaker is to see that he is both disturbed and stirred by the manifestations of Mars.

resemblance is clearest in the workings of the pervasive animal imagery in the portraits. The two kings'"pets" function symbolically, as Muscatine also sees, to give us information about the men themselves—they are masters of the beasts they have tamed and muzzled and are akin to them. But this symbolic dimension gains added resonance as part of a larger chain of animal images stretching back at least to the grove and consistently focused on the animal ferocity that always lurks beneath chivalric display. Given this context, what stands out about these descriptions is how little the violence is concealed, how barely it is controlled, how close it is to the surface. Emetrius's griffin nature glares out plainly in his feral, glowing eyes from beneath the barbaric splendor of the wreath of gold "arm-greet" that crowns him. The effect in both portraits of a rich magnificence that only just covers the potential savagery beneath is summed up for me in the cloak Emetrius wears in lieu of "cote-armore": "With nayles yelewe and brighte as any gold,/He hadde a beres skyn, col-blak for old" (2141–42). Emetrius takes on the power of the bear totemically (one imagines that he killed it himself), and that power, like the bear's claws, is only thinly gilded with the rich fabric of the noble life. His alaunts do not go "with mosel faste ybounde" (2151) for trivial reasons.

Emetrius is superficially more civilized, less barbaric of physique and ornament, and somewhat more individualized than his companion. Yet the continuity of his portrait with that of Lygurge is sustained by the lion look, the trumpet voice, the tame eagle, and one final detail that is perhaps more disturbing in its implications than anything else in the passage. Muscatine's observation that Lygurge and Emetrius function metonymically for the assembled chivalry, that we are to attribute their martial quality to the whole company, is brilliantly right but not

pursued far enough. He seems not quite to see how specifically the language of the end of Emetrius's portrait points the metonymy:

An hundred lordes hadde he with hym there,
Al armed, save hir heddes, in al hir gere,
Ful richely in alle maner thynges.
For trusteth wel that dukes, erles, kynges
Were gadered in this noble compaignye,
For love and for encrees of chivalrye.
Aboute this kyng ther ran on every part
Ful many a tame leon and leopart .
          (2179–86, emphasis added)

The displacement of the last of Emetrius's symbolic animals to a position following the description of his knights has the effect of assimilating them to one another. The knights are figuratively (and not so figuratively) the predators, as Lygurge's hundred are muzzled hounds "as grete as any steer,/To hunten at the leoun or the deer" (2149–50). By the logic of metonymy the violence concentrated in the two kings is properly to be distributed to the companies they lead. What began as a painted symbolic landscape on the wall of the temple of Mars—the landscape of violence—is now an active potential presence in the story waiting to be unmuzzled. Though Lygurge and Emetrius may not figure much in the narrative directly and by name after all this description, they do so figure in the tournament, and the force their description here carries into the poem is a large determinant of the atmosphere of that battle and its edgy aftermath. The expansion of the metonymy and the potential effects of an encounter between two hundred such men are what Theseus must anticipate and try to control.

As I have already suggested, the prayers of Palamon, Arcite, and Emelye, taken together, complete what might be called the undoing or deconstruction of the gods, whereby they are replaced, in a special and complex sense, by the characters. I will begin the explication of this process by examining the complementary prayers of Palamon and Arcite, which are often noted, plausibly enough, as one place in the tale that offers a relatively unequivocal means of differentiating between the two protagonists because Palamon prays to Venus for Emelye whereas his cousin asks Mars for victory. For reasons that will emerge I do not find it easy to take a straightforward stand on the question of

whether the two heroes are significantly different from one another;^[5] but I think it is fair to say, to begin with Palamon, that this is the most individualized view of him the poem gives us,^[6] though the effect arises not so much from what he requests as from the way he requests it. There is perhaps something attractive and touching about his humility and his admission of helplessness before Venus, "I am so confus that I kan noght seye/But 'Mercy, lady bright'" (2230–31), as well as his renunciation of renown, vainglory, and "pris of armes" (2241). Yet Palamon's eye is still firmly on the main chance; he will forgo victory if he can be assured of its fruits, to "have fully possessioun/Of Emelye, and dye in thy servyse" (2242–43). Nor can we say, for all his disregard of arms and his sense that love is something that takes place in an enclave cut off from other concerns,^[7] that Palamon transcends the fundamental masculine sense of love as a zero-sum competition embodied in the temple of Venus. Give me my love, he says:

And if ye wol nat so, my lady sweete,
Thanne preye I thee, tomorwe with a spere
That Arcita me thurgh the herte ere.
Thanne rekke I noght, whan I have lost my lyf,
Though that Arcita wynne hire to his wyf.
This is th'effect and ende of my preyere:
Yif me my love, thow blisful lady deere.
        (2254–60)

Palamon's "I don't care" is a way of saying he cares so much that he would rather die than see Arcite win Emelye, and the fact that this sentiment concludes his prayer suggests how fully he remains involved in the idea of eros as a competition.^[8] Possession is a key notion here, "So that I have my lady in myne armes" (2247), and what differentiates Palamon from Arcite is primarily his conception of what it means to possess the object of desire.

[5] The most trenchant proponent of the view that they are not significantly different has been Donaldson in Chaucer's Poetry and again in The Swan at the Well . Lumiansky's full discussion. Of Sondry Folk , 39–49, is reasonably representative of the other side.

[6] The same is perhaps not true of Arcite's prayer since his dying speech has also to be considered.

[7] See the above discussion of love as deduit in the temple of Venus, 270–72.

[8] Compare Palamon's speech to Theseus in Part II, "But sle me first, for seinte charitee!/But sle my felawe eek as wel as me;/Or sle hym first" (1721–23).

In his prayer Palamon thinks of Venus in terms that the courtly tradition usually assigns to the beloved lady. He calls the goddess "lady myn," "lady bright," "my lady sweete," and "thow blisful lady deere" and asks her for mercy and pity from his position of helpless subservience. Further, he announces his intention to continue his courtly service to Venus until death, even (or especially) after he has gained his desire, and this intention produces an odd declaration:

As wisly as I shal for everemoore,
Emforth my myght, thy trewe servant be,
And holden werre alway with chastitee .
That make I myn avow, so ye me helpe!
          (2234–37,   emphasis added)

What can he mean? Though I do not suppose that Palamon consciously intends the slightly libertine or otherwise indecorous implications of his statement, there is a problem lurking in his language precisely in the context of "possessioun," of actual marriage to Emelye.^[9] At the very least the statement brings out how little Palamon is concerned with Emelye as a person, and our view of her in the following prayer at her most human and embattled cannot but heighten this

[9] Something of what Palamon has in mind may be indicated by a passage from the Teseida that is not represented in the Knight's Tale . At the very end of the poem, after Emelia and Palemone are married, Boccaccio reports:

Vero, è che per le offerte, che n'andaro
Poi la mattina a'templi, s'argomenta
Che Vener, anzi che'l di fosse chiaro,
Sette volte raccesa e tante spenta
Fosse nel fonte umoroso.
       (12.77)

It is true that because of the offerings sent to the temple in the morning, it was thought that Venus, before the day turned bright, had been seven times enkindled and as many times extinguished in the fountain of love.
          (Book of Theseus , trans. McCoy, 327, apparently reading "amoroso" for "umoroso")

If this passage does explain Palamon's meaning here, it hardly eases the problem of decorum: does he suppose his prayer is what Venus, his "blisful lady deere," wants to hear? Does he suppose it is what Emelye wants? One can see the advantages for a male lover of general projections of "feminine" character like Venus and Diana, as components of the institution of woman in society, when it comes to forcing erotic attention on an unwilling woman since they allow him to make assumptions about her nature that need not take her preferences fully seriously. It is more comfortable to have goddesses struggle over these things than persons.

impression. This lack of concern makes it harder to maintain, as critics sometimes do, that Palamon deserves to win Emelye for reasons of poetic justice because he wants her for herself.

It seems more accurate to say that what Palamon wants is both to possess Emelye and to sustain the image of woman as courtly goddess that he has associated with Venus from his first sight of the lady. He envisions success in his enterprise as a continuation of love service, of worship:

Youre vertu is so greet in hevene above
That if yow list, I shal wel have my love.
Thy temple wol I worshipe everemo,
And on thyn auter, where I ride or go,
I wol doon sacrifice and fires beete.
          (2249–53)

Palamon emerges in this prayer as an example of the sort of psyche that built the temple of Venus and structured its own nonconscious assumptions into the idea of the goddess, the institutions of courtship and marriage, and the succeeding generations of men who internalized that institutional framework as a "natural" way of organizing and understanding their own drives. Though Palamon is not aware of it, his strategy for dealing with desire is to sublimate it into worship, which is among other things a way of safeguarding the purity of the desire in the mode of courtly suffering, and keeping the difficulties of relationship with a real woman at a safe distance. Such a Venus is an ideal no real lady could fulfill or would want to fulfill, though she may be constrained to it. The venerian construction of woman is aware of this difficulty without attending to it, and the dichotomy in the speech between goddess and possession as well as the hint of the double standard in "holden werre alwey with chastitee" may not bode well for Emelye.^[10] Whether this uneasy possibility is so or not, Palamon stands

[10] I wonder similarly about the implications of Palamon's invocation of Venus "For thilke love thow haddest to Adoon" (2224). According to Ovid (Met . 9.519–52), Venus loves Adonis fearfully, in the conviction (accurate, as it turns out) that if he is allowed to engage in virile pursuits she will lose him. It appears that Palamon expects Venus to be moved by his humility but also that he expects her (and women) to try to restrain him in the exercise of masculine "vertu." There is a slight tinge of mauvaise foi in Palamon's prayer because of the sexual and martial restlessness that stirs in it beneath the professions of humility and service. Does it matter in this poem that Adonis was a boar hunter? Might it have been in Thrace?

forth here as a genuinely venerian personality, not in the sense of one dominated by a planet, a balance of humors, or a goddess but as an example of the use of the habitus or way of holding oneself toward the world that is embedded in practical consciousness. "Venus" is a set of preformed attitudes that are available for the character to deploy in expressing himself and articulating what he feels and wants to say without having to reinvent the whole of sexual relations and the structuring of desire for himself. More clearly and more complexly than previously in the poem, Palamon's goddess is the image of his own condition, his desires and tensions, drawn from the cultural stock and written on the sky.

The same is true of Arcite with respect to Mars. The interest in Arcite's prayer, as in Palamon's, lies in his characterization of his god as a key to his own personality. As with the travailing woman in the temple of Diana, listening to a devotee at prayer rather than looking at an image makes it easier to ask what such a god is for, what needs and desires in the worshiper the god answers to. His own prayer reveals Arcite as a martian personality whose habitus produces a different but allied set of habits of response from those of Palamon to the fundamental contingencies of desire and otherness. His stance is a kind of mirror image or Blakean contrary of Palamon's, indicating that there is a common system of assumptions behind them. Arcite's basic image of desire is as an offense , a word he continually returns to: "I am yong and unkonnynge, as thow woost,/And, as I trowe, with love offended moost/That evere was any lyves creature" (2393–95).^[11] The offense is constituted by the threat desire poses to the self-sufficiency and independence of heroic will—in Lacanian terms, to the illusory, hoped-for specular unity of the self. Arcite sees Mars as such a successful will from the beginning of the prayer—"And hast in every regne and every lond/Of armes al the brydel in thyn hond,/And hem fortunest as thee lyst devyse" (2375–77)—and he reminds the god of an experience of desire that tells much about Arcite's own sense of it:

Thanne preye I thee to rewe upon my pyne.
For thilke peyne, and thilke hoote fir

[11] He uses it, in fact, just before he sees Emelye for the first time in Part I, when he inquires of the stricken Palamon, "Why cridestow? Who hath thee doon offence?" (1083).

In which thow whilom brendest for desir,
Whan that thow usedest the beautee
Of faire, yonge, fresshe Venus free,
And haddest hire in armes at thy wille—
       (2382–87)

Not only is desire a torment and a burning fire, a kind of attack (the image is repeated at 2503–4); its object is something to be used, subjected to one's will almost like a prisoner of war, as the flicker of a pun on "armes" in the last line suggests.

Arcite does not confine himself to the satisfaction of desire; he reminds the god also of its consequences:

Although thee ones on a tyme mysfille,
Whan Vulcanus hadde caught thee in his las,
And foond thee liggynge by his wyf, alias!—
For thilke sorwe that was in thyn herte,
Have routhe as wel upon my peynes smerte.
       (2388–92)

The example seems an odd one, at least in the sense that one might suppose Mars would prefer not to be reminded of this experience, but Arcite urges it on the god to gain his sympathy and remind him of what it feels like to be at the mercy of desire. The assumption is that the feeling is so peremptory and lawless that it may be expected as a matter of course to break through the constraints of ordinary social arrangements—I am reminded of Arcite's earlier "A man moot nedes love, maugree his heed. / . . . /Al be she mayde, or wydwe, or elles wyf" (1169–71). The attempt to satisfy desire is therefore exposed to the constant threat of vengeful retaliation, or at least humiliation, and one must suppose that these threats (those of Theseus) weigh on Arcite as he speaks.

The whole passage is so classically oedipal that I am almost embarrassed to point it out; but there is more, and worse, to come. The idea that women have the power to arouse uncontrollable desire independently of what men may will is common to both venerian and martian consciousness, to both Palamon and Arcite. In the former case it leads to the deification of female power and the attempt to sublimate desire into worship. In the latter case, however, the idea leads to the definition of woman, reduced to the desire she causes, as an enemy—the dying Arcite will call Emelye "my sweete foo" (2780). The venerian

decision to worship a woman from afar is in part a response to the fear of Diana, that is, the fear that the woman may refuse closer contact. This fundamental fear and distrust of feminine independence, the inability to believe that a woman might want him for himself, comes out more explicitly and rather more disquietingly in the martian attitude:

For she that dooth me al this wo endure
Ne reccheth nevere wher I synke or fleete.
And wel I woot, er she me mercy heete,
I moot with strengthe wynne hire in the place.
       (2396–99)

Though Arcite is "only" talking here about winning the tournament, the last line quoted is sufficiently vague in reference that, coupled with the active and hostile role assigned to the lady ("dooth me al this wo endure") and the earlier image of Mars using the beauty of Venus, it allows us to wonder to what extent the idea of doing battle for Emelye is separated in Arcite's mind from doing battle with her for her favors. The rather raw image of relations between the sexes in the prayer as a whole allows the specter of rape to flicker behind the language of war here. I have already disparaged Palamon's concern for Emelye; I am not sure it is entirely a defense of Arcite to point out that his prayer for "victorye" may not in fact neglect the lady—it may include a request for victory over her.

I do not mean to imply that Arcite intends to rape Emelye, or even that, consciously or unconsciously, he wants to. What is involved in tracing out the rhizomatic connections of the language at work in these speeches is seeing how they register a set of quasi-institutionalized psychosocial structures and contradictions that invade and unsettle the most innocent and "personal" experiences. On the one hand, what speaks here is the general dynamic of the lack—the dynamic of invidia and the objet petit a , which moves from the temples into more complex and diffuse representation in the characters. It is worth remembering that in this dynamic possession of "The" woman is evidence of control over the offense of the lack, castration: she is what makes the denial of castration possible by "proving" that her possessor has the phallus she lacks. Insofar as this control is what they are really fighting over whether they know it or not, Palamon and Arcite may be said to instantiate the general dynamic. By this point in the poem, however, this sort of observation is of fairly limited range. Psychoanalytic theory

(as opposed, one expects and hopes, to psychoanalytic practice) provides a general framework within which certain aspects of human behavior can be understood, but it does tend merely to reproduce itself—and thereby invite the criticism that it makes every story the same story—at the level of individual and, historically, social differentiation. As I have tried to suggest, the prayers of Palamon and Arcite articulate the differing inflections of their uncertainty , their inability to resolve, for instance, the institutionalized contradictions between eros and aggression that make any act of love an act of war as well, and vice versa.^[12] Any analysand will attest that there comes a point, as here, when the way the primary structures of desire are inflected and deployed is of more consequence than the fact of their simple presence, and that deployment is a social as well as a personal matter.^[13]

Arcite's prayer makes particularly clear the specifically psychic functions of Mars as an idea and an institution. Arcite subordinates himself to the god as an ego ideal, an image of what he would most like to be. His final vow is illuminating in this regard:

And eek to this avow I wol me bynde:
My beerd, myn heer, that hongeth long adoun,
That nevere yet ne felte offensioun
Of rasour nor of shere, I wol thee yive,
And ben thy trewe servant whil I lyve.
Now, lord, have routhe upon my sorwes score;
Yif me [victorie]; I aske the namoore.
       (2414–20)

The recurrence of "offensioun" here points once again to the importance of the absolute integrity of the heroic individual. As in folk magic, where hair retains part of its owner's life, to refrain from cutting one's hair is to preserve the integrity and independence of one's body as an emblem of the inviolability of one's heroic being. To cut it is conceived as an offense because it involves submitting to a diminishment of wholeness and power, becoming morcelé , losing pieces of oneself. Arcite does not feel strong enough or confident enough to assert such absolute self-sufficiency for himself; he is diminished by

[12] For an excellent detailed analysis of extreme forms of this situation, see The-weleit, Male Fantasies , vol. 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History .

[13] See Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice , 78–79, and the theoretical remarks of Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering , 49–50, and her argument throughout.

desire and beset by the uncertainties of the coming battle. But he can conceive a being who is that powerful, a being already institutionally in place as a cultural ideal, and he submits to it to make its power his own. He offers to offend himself in honor of Mars to forestall being offended in more consequential ways by others. Like Palamon, Arcite comes into focus in his prayer as a relatively specialized type, a specific form of consciousness that has been differentiated and defined by the progress of the tale out of the more general heroic-chivalric context of the early phases of the story. The Knight comes to use Palamon and Arcite to outline the fundamental components of chivalric romance—in the broadest terms love and war—in a way that both separates those components from one another and defines them more precisely, at the same time remaining aware of how they form an interdependent system. The basic masculine situation the tale develops is one in which, for example, simultaneous fear and desire of women and feelings of aggression and worship toward them are taken by the characters as constants, as what they all have to deal with. Within this basic situation there are various structures of practical consciousness or institutional routes that may be said to organize the fundamental contradictions (while perpetuating them) so that practical choices are possible for individuals within the system, and it is the range of these choices—the human uses of divinities—that the Knight's own practice in Part III reveals.

Because the process is a differentiating and developing one, it is not particularly helpful to try to read Palamon and Arcite in any detail in these martian and venerian terms back from the prayers as consistent and differentiable character structures in the earlier parts of the poem. The two cousins develop toward these positions from a more undifferentiated set of similar dispositions and tensions, and from one point of view their choices of gods must be seen precisely as choices they come to make, though not necessarily consciously, from the available stock that culture supplies for meeting the situation in which they find themselves.^[14] From another, and ultimately more relevant, point of view by

[14] This is one reason it is difficult to take a straightforward position on the issue of the difference or lack of it between the two knights. That question has various answers at various times; but even when they are relatively well-differentiated, as here, they are still presented as the same in important ways: they are masculine as opposed to feminine (as the tale develops that opposition), naive as opposed to disenchanted, and so on. Inone sense the question as formulated is pitched at the wrong level. Palamon and Arcite are not persons with consistent personalities throughout the story; they are characters in a story with affinities to other stories of the same kind (generic types) whose sameness or difference is a function of the interaction of those generic characteristics with the practical needs of this telling by this narrator. The real bearing of the question, in any event, is on the issue of ethical difference as it affects their desserts in the outcome of the tale, and that is an issue better left to later.

this stage in the tale Mars and Venus, especially as they are characterized in the prayers of Palamon and Arcite, are habitus , clusters of practices developed by the Knight as a way of differentiating and describing elements in the story that his sources in their unrevised form do not supply. This development is a function of his practical preference for concrete experience as the context in which he can let what he knows—practically—about love and war come out in the particular life of individuals. The general, the "structural," whether in the form of the pagan pantheon, Boethian philosophy, or the codes of chivalry, only takes on meaning for him as it is encountered in practice, and that is why he is always more interested in how conventions are used than in what they claim to be in themselves. The tale is, among other things, an unfolding record of his own encounter with his own tradition as embodied in the noble old story, and his consistent tendency is to make that story reflect and respond to his own experience. By this point in the tale the characters are patently doing the same thing: they respond to the problems they face by giving emphasis and credit to what they can use in their own traditions and culture; they make individualizing, practical choices that commit them not only to particular courses of action but also to particular personalities. They are thus instances of how personality itself—the subject—is institutionally constructed, not as an unconscious expression of institutional structure and power, but as the result of the active use of them.

Because the characters do become more like the narrator as the tale proceeds, they become realer to him: he takes them more seriously, their dilemmas take on more existential bite, and he sympathizes with them more. This change is nowhere more evident than with Emelye, both because, in contrast to Palamon and Arcite, her individuality is developed so much more fully than it was at the beginning of the tale and because she is so much more constrained in her choices and in what she can hope for from her goddess. The Knight brings out her

humanity more completely than that of either Palamon or Arcite perhaps because he himself is more ambivalent about what her situation entails. Though he is critical of the two cousins for their mystification of women and uses Theseus to say so directly, he is himself tempted by some of the attitudes he disparages. His ambivalence comes out most clearly in his description of the rites of Diana, which engage him more than those of Venus or Mars. He begins with the famous line that associates Emelye with natural cycles and subordinates her to them, as she was when she appeared as Venus in the garden: "Up roos the sonne, and up roos Emelye" (2273). The lines that follow record a curious struggle in the speaker's voice, a complex wavering of attention. His description of the rites has at first a certain summary tone reminiscent of the dispatch with which he handles Palamon's sacrifice to Venus a few lines earlier, "Al telle I noght as now his observaunces" (2264). He points to the archaic quality of Diana's ceremony as if to dismiss it: "The homes fulle of meeth, as was the gyse —/Ther lakked noght to doon hir sacrifice" (2279–80, emphasis added). As his narration proceeds, however, the Knight lingers self-consciously over the rites:

Smokynge the temple, ful of clothes faire,
This Emelye, with herte debonaire,
Hir body wessh with water of a welle.
But hou she dide hir ryte 1 dar nat telle,
But it be any thing in general;
And yet it were a game to heeren al.
To hym that meneth wel it were no charge;
But it is good a man been at his large.
Hir brighte heer was kembd, untressed al;
A coroune of a grene ook cerial
Upon hir heed was set ful fair and meete.
Two fyres on the auter gan she beete,
And dide hir thynges, as men may biholde
In Stace of Thebes and thise bookes olde.
       (2281–94)

The Knight seems to place himself momentarily and a little voyeuristically in Actaeon's position, peeping at Diana bathing as if about to reveal the secrets of the goddess and provoke her wrath. Taking a lesson from Actaeon he pulls back, yet his continued fascination is evident: I dare not tell; it would be fun to tell; it is better not to; well,

I'll tell just a little. The Knight's imagination seems drawn to participate in the male look that constitutes woman as a creature of sexual mystery and threat and thereby deprives her of individuality and independence. To see Emelye as the embodiment of feminine daunger, as Diana, is to lock her up again in the institutional constraints and mystifications that the Knight associates with the old books. It is amusing that his final dismissal of this perspective keeps his ambivalence in play by providing what amounts to a footnote telling us where to go if we really want to know the secret he dares not reveal, but his relegation of the rites to "Stace of Thebes and thise bookes olde" nonetheless represents an act of self-control.^[15] As in the description of the temple of Mars and elsewhere, we see the Knight working through and mastering his own attraction to a point of view he ultimately considers inappropriate and misleading.

The image of woman projected by the temple of Diana counters the worshipful empowering of the feminine enshrined in the image of Venus by providing an example of female suffering and helplessness. As I have suggested, this image is connected to other instances of the dependence of women in the tale, such as the Theban widows and the ladies of Theseus's court. It seems likely that these versions of woman do not altogether escape the masculine constructions of chivalric consciousness insofar as they partake of the stereotype that makes true knighthood a matter of the defense of helpless women. The Knight seems to share the feelings of Theseus along these lines, in the relatively benign form expressed when the latter allows the court women to persuade him not to kill Palamon and Arcite but to let them tourney for the hand of Emelye instead: "And eek his herte hadde compassioun/Of wommen, for they wepen evere in oon" (1770–71). Like Theseus, the Knight in the early parts of the tale feels protective of women, but he also patronizes them: he is willing to lump them together as "they" in ways that stress their generic lack of virile fortitudo. This sense of superior, protective distance allows the Knight to be as critical as he is of the more worshipful and fearful image of woman as goddess, whether Venus or Diana, that dominates the ro-

[15] The fact that, as Kittredge pointed out, the reader will not find a description of the rites in Statius, who of course has no temple of Diana, simply enforces the sense that the reference is to a genre—books of that sort—rather than a specific source, the literary as opposed to the actual.

mance sensibilities of Palamon and Arcite. If he can be tempted by those stereotypes, as his momentary hesitation over the rites of Diana suggests, he can also draw on his sense of the helplessness of women as a counter. As I have also suggested, the role of the suffering worshiper in the temple of Diana, in recalling the Knight from the disturbances generated by his imagining of Mars, shows that this image can also function as a way of mitigating and controlling the ferocity of masculine aggression. From this point of view Diana's votary need not be thought of as anything much more individualized than a reminder of "what we are fighting for," in the idealized and desexualized version that has served knights in shining armor from the Sir Galahad of the Arthurian vulgate cycle to the more hard-bitten and ironic but no less protective Philip Marlowes and Travis McGees of our own day, with whom the Knight at times has some affinity.

Emelye as she manifests herself in her prayer, however, is something else again, for if she is not Diana, she is not Callisto either: as the Knight presents her here, she is the most complex character in Pan III. Emelye knows she will probably have to be married despite her preferences, and this knowledge puts her in a position where it is difficult for her to identify completely and confidently with the aggressive daunger of Diana. Like the Knight, and like Callisto, she fears the goddess's harsh response to what may happen to her: "As keepe me fro thy vengeaunce and thyn ire,/That Attheon aboughte cruelly" (2302–3). The potential similarities of her situation to those of Callisto and the nameless worshiper in the temple of Diana give added resonance to her desire to remain chaste. Emelye is painfully aware not only of the independent pleasures she is about to lose but also of the new burdens she will have to take up:

I am, thow woost, yet of thy compaignye,
A mayde, and love huntynge and venerye,
And for to walken in the wodes wilde,
And noght to ben a wyf and be with childe.
Noght wol 1 knowe compaignye of man.
          (2307–11,   emphasis  added)

Confronted with the masculine world and her entry into it, Emelye is not aggressive in her rejection—unlike Diana, she can ill afford to be. Rather, she prays to be effaced from it:

And Palamon, that hath swich love to me,
And eek Arcite, that loveth me so soore,
This grace I preye thee withoute moore,
As sende love and pees bitwixe hem two,
And fro me turne awey hir hertes so
That al hire hoote love and hir desir,
And al hir bisy torment, and hir fir
Be queynt, or turned in another place.
       (2314–21)

Emelye's fantasy here is one of escape from the impersonality of her own sexuality, from the fact that a woman attracts masculine desire and has effects in the male world whether she wants to or not. Her wish is not to appear, to be effaced from the male look as if she had not been and had not produced the effects she never wanted or even knew about until too late. Once again, as with Palamon and Arcite, we are given an image of the concrete human needs and tensions out of which the gods are created, larger and simpler than life because untrammeled by the pressures that lead their worshipers to project them; but in Emelye's case Diana does not supply an institutional model and support, as Venus and Mars do for Palamon and Arcite. Emelye must somehow come to terms with a situation in which she, as the nominal cause and center of all the trouble, has little to say about its outcome. She has to hedge all her bets:

And if so be thou wolt nat do me grace,
Or if my destynee be shapen so
That I shal nedes have oon of hem two,
As sende me hym that moost desireth me.
      (2322–25)

Emelye is trying to find such possibilities as she can for personal fulfillment in circumstances that offer her no good choices, and because of her dilemma the troubled woman stands out—she is far more real and compelling than the goddess to whom she appeals. As with the worshiper in the temple of Diana, the poignancy of Emelye's condition is heightened because the goddess, who is in reality no more than a flattened and mythologized version of the place of woman in the system that disposes of her, cannot grant her prayer. The mumbo jumbo of sputtering fires and bloody firebrands that accompanies Diana's refusal to help forms a compact and enigmatic prefiguration of

a sorrow greater than Emelye can anticipate, the funeral pyre of Arcite that she will have to light near the end of the poem. It is as well an echo of the pyre lit at the behest of the Argive women at the poem's beginning; hence, in its participation in a larger structure of images, it reads as a figure of the fate of woman in a world where men kill one another competing for women who have not asked them to.

In place and in context, however, Diana's manifestations are no more than epic and narrative machinery that heightens by its flatness the humanity of the baffled and fearful woman whose last words in the poem, "What amounteth this, allas" (2362), leave her suspended and alienated as Palamon and Arcite are not. The Knight evokes in Emelye a character whose situation, in what might be called her forced disenchantment, is in some ways closest to his own. Venus and Diana are, the poem suggests, aspects of the institution of woman as the society of the tale constructs it. Precisely because neither of these institutional identities fits her while both constrain her, Emelye appears not as a woman defined and absorbed by mythic archetypes or "feminine nature" but as a person caught between competing role definitions and trying to find a place of her own and a set of practices she can use. As such, she is a figure of the Knight's understanding of the problems generated for a woman by her difference from the institutions that are supposed to define her, an index of his own disenchanted distance from the conventions that shape his tale and his world and of his selfconsciousness about that distance. What is most extraordinary of all about Emelye is the Knight's ability to imagine her, to put himself in the place of the other and try to think what it must be like for a woman to live in the world that men have made. She is testimony to the uses of impersonation.

One of the points I have been concerned to make in dealing with the presentation of the divine machinery in Pan III of the Knight's Tale is fairly well represented already in the critical literature and is economically expressed by Richard Neuse:

In the first place, therefore, the gods stand for things as they are, moira. The artists who have adorned the temple walls see no chasm between earthly reality and the divinities that rule over it. Second, the divine presences sum up certain ways of life to which men dedicate themselves.

In another sense, they have a psychological function: the god a person serves is his ruling passion. The gods are men's wills or appetites writ large.
          ("The Knight," 303)

A number of other commentators have also noted that the gods are "merely extensions of the human personalities,"^[16] but Neuse's formulation remains the most suggestive for me because it outlines compactly the three levels of causality that are discriminated in the Knight's presentation of the gods: in reverse order, individual psychology, institutions or the social construction of reality, and necessity, Neuse's moira. Widespread as these insights are, they have not had as much effect as they deserve on the interpretation of the tale—largely, I would argue, because they have not been connected with the issue of voicing or seen in terms of something the Knight does to the story, and does progressively. The order in which Neuse presents the three levels of meaning is in fact the order in which they are developed in the tale. It moves from a world in which whatever happens is presented in mystified form as external to the agents, as "the way things are," through a presentation of the institutional constructs that structure experience, to a world in which psychological vectors and human actions are paramount. If the Knight hesitates in the temple of Mars between the causal claims of psychology and external necessity, by the time he reaches the end of Part III he has chosen the former. Issues first raised and imported into the tale in the temples have, by the time the Knight gets to the prayers, found their way into the psychology of the characters, who emerge not only as complex individuals but also as venerian, dianan, and martian personalities, versions of those institutional aspects of the human psyche that produced the pagan gods. The direction of the Knight's interpretation of his "matere" is consistent; it allows us to assign priorities among the symbolic elements Neuse and others have isolated and say something definite about the relation of the gods in the poem to its characters. That the gods are merely extensions of the humans is something the poem uncovers. Far from being a means of importing into the story a level of true and objective

[16] Fletcher, "Role of Destiny," 48. See also Whittock, Reading of the Canterbury Tales , 66; Schmidt, "Tragedy of Arcite"; Kean, Making of English Poetry, 2:5; and Gaylord, "Role of Saturn," 179.

order external to humanity that is operative in the universe and only hidden from imperfect human knowledge—what we might call the Lady Philosophy reading of the poem—the gods are, or become, human creations, ways men and women try to make an order they cannot find outside them.

This is not to say, however, that the Knight entirely neglects the aspect of what I have called necessity in his presentation of the gods. That aspect, though kept relatively recessive, is also kept running in the poem, largely through astrological allusion. I have already discussed some of the ways the Knight shows his awareness, in the temples, of forces either entirely extrahuman, like "infortune," or within humans but not directly amenable to human will, forces like aggression or the biological rhythms of generation that may be dealt with in various personal and institutional ways but cannot be eschewed. In his account of the prayers of the three protagonists the Knight, while focusing on psychological and social factors, maintains this perspective in his framing of the scene. He reports that Palamon went to the temple of Venus "In hir houre" (2217); that Emelye made her sacrifice "The thridde houre inequal" (2271) after Palamon, that is, two hours later; and that Arcite made his "The nexte houre of Mars folwynge this" (2367), that is, three hours after Emelye. As several commentators have demonstrated, the tale aspires to scientific exactitude in matters of dates, hours, and astrological houses.^[17] This interest is sufficiently strong that the conflict of scientific timekeeping with the more "poetic" methods of the old books is occasionally noted by the Knight, as when he includes his own skeptical aside along with the information that Palamon rose with the lark, "Although it nere nat day by houres two,/Yet song the larke" (2211–12). The effect of these references to the planets that govern the hours of the day is to keep before us the medieval (modern for the Knight) revision of the pagan deities into the planets and therefore keep the pressure of larger cosmic forces at least marginally in play.

Yet it is misleading, I think, to maintain with Curry that "Chaucer" simply discarded the ancient mythological machinery, substituting

[17] Skeat, in Oxford Chaucer, 5:86, notes to I, 2217 and 2271; North, "Kalenderes Enlumyned Ben They," 151–51; and Robinson, in Riverside Chaucer, 837, notes to I, 2217 and 2271.

Boethian destiny and the planetary influences of medieval astrology.^[18] The Knight has a use for the older view of the gods as personalities as well as the newer one that takes them as impersonal influences, and therefore he gives us both side by side. I have already analyzed this effect in the description of the statue of Mars (see above, pp. 281—84); it is continued by the planetary allusions that frame the prayers and highlighted by the speech of Saturn that concludes Part III. The point of this procedure, in line with the analytical and differentiating thrust of the Knight's imagination in this part of the poem, is that it registers his sense of the distinction between the psychological and social components of the situation in the story (and in human life generally) and those that come from somewhere beyond, the distinction between human and nonhuman agency. By the end of Part III this distinction, previously concealed or confused by the mystifications of chivalric convention and the characters, has emerged more clearly in the dual treatment of the gods. On the one hand, they have, so to speak, descended into the characters and taken on their fullest life precisely as human personalities. The Knight knows and shows that a great deal of what is taken in literary tradition, chivalric consciousness, and ordinary life as the product of powers above is in fact humanly produced, and the gods are his major vehicle for registering this insight. On the other hand, as planets the gods also and independently become a way of calling attention to powers that, if they are not precisely above, are at any race beyond. They evoke the role of the entirely other in human life. I might point out here that this discrimination says little about the nature of necessity and in particular that it should not be taken to imply a benign Boethian or Dantean cosmos ruled by the sight above or a First Mover dispensing order in a fair chain of love. Though these are issues better left to a consideration of the last part of the poem, we have abundant evidence already of the Knight's dark imagining, his suspicion that whatever is running the cosmos does not concern itself with human needs.

Thus, by the end of Part III the Knight has reduced the gods to their origins, and one result of this process is that the antique and literary machinery of personifications is left rather stranded between the forces whose contradictions that machinery originally functioned to reconcile, forces the Knight has used the machinery itself to reevoke and

[18] Curry, Chaucer and the Medieval Sciences, 119ff.

separate. This means, among other things, that the machinery comes increasingly to be seen as only machinery, and archaic and outmoded machinery at that. The latter half of Pan III is full of touches that recognize and dismiss what is out of date in the story, from the unfamiliar and highfalutin titles like "Cytherea"—"I mene Venus, honurable and digne" (2216)—to "alle the rytes of his payen wyse" (2370) that we do not get to see Arcite perform. The fiction of the power of the gods is maintained throughout the narration of the prayers themselves in the portentous series of omens and answers that follow each prayer. Though these contain a number of comic touches, like the darkly muttered "Victorie!" of Mars, that suggest that the Knight does not take them seriously, the gods are generally allowed to speak with authority: "Among the goddes hye it is affermed,/And by eterne word writen and confermed,/Thou shall ben wedded unto oon of tho" (2349–51). Working against such assertions of the unalterability of divine purposes and the "eterne word" is a gradual buildup of mythological allusions to the affairs and quarrels of the gods: to Daphne, Actaeon, and Adonis; to Venus, Mars, and Vulcan. By the time Arcite reminds Mars of his adulterous affair with Venus and their humiliating capture by her husband, the characters may be said to be actively, though apparently unwittingly, embarrassing the gods by calling attention to their all-too-human inability to control their own passions and destinies.

This perspective, what we notice that the characters do not, is confirmed when we get backstage:

And right anon swich strif ther is bigonne,
For thilke grauntyng, in the hevene above,
Bitwixe Venus, the goddesse of love,
And Mars, the stierne god armypotente,
That Juppiter was bisy it to stente,
Til that the pale Saturnus the colde,
That knew so manye of aventures olde,
Foond in his olde experience an an
That he ful soone hath plesed every part.
As sooth is seyd, elde hath greet avantage;
In elde is bothe wysdom and usage;
Men may the olde atrenne, and noght atrede.
Saturne anon, to stynten strif and drede,
Al be it that it is agayn his kynde,
Of al this stryf he gan remedie fynde.
        (2438–52)

As Joseph Westlund noted, there is more disorder among the gods than there is among the humans, who at least have tried to establish an impartial institutional method for deciding the conflict.^[19] It appears that Venus and Mars have promised victory to their respective worshipers without bothering to consult one another or anyone else and that Diana does not tell Emelye who will win her because the goddess does not yet know. This confusion is a measure of how the Knight's presentation of the gods has developed from the formidable figures of the temples. Whereas there it was possible to see them as dominating and influencing human beings so as to make them what they are, here it is clear that the positions have been reversed: the actions and responses of the gods are dictated by what happens on earth, and Olympian society is a reflection of its earthly original—chaotic, political, and in need of guidance and authority.

Olympian society is also subject to various forms of manipulation, special interests, and backroom dealings, as the presentation of Saturn and his "remedie" reveals. The tone of the Knight's introduction is noticeably ironic, and the promise that Saturn will allay the strife "Al be it that it is agayn his kynde" is not reassuring. Though we do not yet discover what the solution is, Saturn gives a fair idea of where his sympathies lie, more on the side of his kin than with any abstract idea of justice. He addresses Venus as "My deere doghter" (2453) and tells her to dry her tears and not to worry about nasty old Mars:

Though Mars shal helpe his knyght, yet nathelees
Bitwixe yow ther moot be som tyme pees,
Al be ye noght of o compleccioun,
That causeth al day swich divisioun.
I am thyn aiel, redy at thy wille;
Weep now namoore; I wol thy lust fulfille.
        (2473–78)

This is really the only place in the tale where the Knight gives direct expression to a sense of the way things work in the world that is more dominant in the Man of Law, though it can be felt in the tacit political implications of such things as Theseus's original imprisonment of Palamon and Arcite, in the suggestion of an old-boy network operating to bring about the release of Arcite from "perpetual" imprisonment at the behest of Perothous, and, as we shall see, in a number of the events

[19] Westlund, "Impetus for Pilgrimage," 530.

of Part IV.^[20] This characterization of Saturn as behind-the-scenes operator evokes a fully disenchanted view of social and political life (it surely belongs in Terry Jones) as constituted simply by the interplay of conflicting wills: by deals, power struggles, and shifting collocations of individual and group interests. The experience that gives Saturn's eld its "greet avantage" scarcely seems like a garnering of higher truths; it seems to represent instead an understanding of the fundamental competitiveness of life in the world of this tale that makes diplomacy the continuation of war by other means.

Saturn is particularly grotesque here because of his grim self-characterization, sharply and rather jarringly juxtaposed to his words of grandfatherly comfort. His speech to Venus presents his double aspect as personification and planet so baldly as to render conspicuous the comic incompatibility of the two perspectives:

"My deere doghter Venus," quod Saturne,
"My cours, that hath so wyde for to turne,
Hath moore power than woot any man.
Myn is the drenchyng in the see so wan;
Myn is the prisoun in the derke cote;
Myn is the stranglyng and hangyng by the throte,
The murmure and the cherles rebellyng,
The groynyng, and the pryvee empoysonyng;
I do vengeance and pleyn correccioun,
Whil I dwelle in the signe of the leoun.
Myn is the ruyne of the hye halles,
The fallynge of the toures and of the walles
Upon the mynour or the carpenter.
I slow Sampsoun, shakynge the piler;
And myne be the maladyes colde,
The derke tresons, and the castes olde;
My lookyng is the fader of pestilence.
Now weep namoore; I shal doon diligence
That Palamon, that is thyn owene knyght,
Shal have his lady, as thou hast him night."
      (2453–72)

Saturn presents himself as the lord of disasters that appear to occur independently of any consistent principle or cause. He operates sometimes in the interests of justice, sometimes in the interests of disorder

[20] This view is perhaps also involved in certain aspects of Palamon and Arcite's Theban past; see above, chapter 10, nn. 7 and 8.

and rebellion; sometimes his effects are humanly mediated and motivated, sometimes (and here particularly I feel the traces of the Knight's dark imagining) they occur without reference to human concerns: the walls fall indifferently on the (military) miner and the carpenter, on those who are trying to build them up and those who want to bring them down. It is thus generally accurate to say that Saturn is a way of locating and giving a name to the Knight's intimations of chaos and dark meaninglessness as well as an image of mischance less schematic and simplified than Fortune and her wheel.^[21]

But the presentation of Saturn as a whole diminishes the impact and seriousness of this perspective at this point in the poem. The sinister implications of his activity are chastened, turned off by their ascription to a comic and melodramatically boastful old man plotting to please his granddaughter. This effect seems to me entirely in keeping with the Knight's use of the gods in Part III of the poem. He has used them to introduce what he sees as a set of perennial facts about the human situation. But the more successfully the gods do this, the more they call attention to their own limitations in their own time and their difference from what they have been used to convey. As we have seen, the pagan deities are used in the poem to evoke large-scale forces, psychic, social, and destinal, that cannot finally be fully anthropomorphized and located in a god or goddess. One might venture the generalization, for which I am indebted to Harry Berger, Jr., that for the Knight the reality of evil is felt in inverse proportion to the extent to which the evil is personified. This rule is particularly true of the kind of evil that the figure of Saturn alludes to. The forces in the psyche represented by Venus, Mars, and Diana are amenable to human control by some such process as the Knight has applied to them. If they are understood for what they are, not projected into the external world, there is some hope that people may be able to contain and direct them either through experienced self-knowledge and self-control, like Theseus in the grove, or through relatively rational institutions such as the tournament aspires to be.^[22] This is the burden of the first half of Part IV, up to the

[21] It is interesting that the characterization of mischance is thus shifted from a feminine figure to a masculine one. Whatever else this shift means, it is consonant with the general tendency in much of the tale to revise or replace traditional antifeminist images and identify the sources of violence and mishap with masculinity.

[22] Though this seems to me to be an accurate statement of the assumptions that operate behind the working of the poem, it also seems important to note that there issomething missing in the view of the world it implies. It is characteristic of the deep structure of the Knight's imagination to prefer a vision of life as essentially a matter of the confrontation of fate by heroic individuality. There is a certain equivocation or wavering in his portrayal of institutions between seeing them as constitutive of such confrontation itself and seeing them as necessary but supplementary epiphenomena of it, which successful heroism can master and transcend. I will return to this issue at the end of this reading of the Knight's Tale .

death of Arcite. The end of Part IV, and of the poem, concentrates on the human resources available for dealing with contingencies men did not make and cannot predict. In the Knight's view it is inappropriate to treat such forces as if they had a single directing source and will behind them because, as we shall see, such a view encourages the abrogation of human responsibility for the sustaining of human value and human meaning and pulls toward passivity and despair. As the Knight's presentation of Saturn suggests, a god is not a good way of talking about this kind of threat, which is better examined as it is actually encountered in human life in particular situations. The gods have served their purpose, and it is time to return to narrative:

Now wol I stynten of the goddes above,
Of Mars, and of Venus, goddesse of love,
And telle yow as pleynly as I kan
The grete effect, for which that I bygan.
      (2479–82,)