Ariadne

The legend of Ariadne opens with another first-person narratorial intrusion, an apostrophe to Minos; rather perversely it asserts the Narrator's intention not to write about Minos mainly, but about Theseus. This villain of love is the same figure whom Chaucer had already included in a lost work about "the love of Palamon and Arcite" (F 420;G 408), probably the prototype of the Knight's Tale , whose hero Theseus is. He is thus as problematic a hero as Aeneas. As if to signal the shifty multiplicity of the Theseus tradition, Chaucer inserts a triple pun in the last line of his invocation. "Be red for shame! now I thy life begynne" (1893): "red" as colored with the blush of shame; "read" visually in the manner of a shameful example like the literary production about to be written; "red" as advised, in the matter of "synne" noted in the previous line, to avoid shame.

Despite the opening disclaimer, we are treated to a somewhat extended summary of Minos's past. This is perhaps justifiable because the Theseus story is set at the court of Minos in Crete (although line 1966 erroneously says "Athenes"). Thematically, though, the Minos prologue provides a warm-up story anticipating the main events: a story of filial treachery and a lover's cruelty. The deceitful

[5] On Cretan liars, see Ovid, Ars amatoria 1.297–98; Titus 1:12; and Higden, Polychronicoh 2.15.

girl is the daughter of Nysus, king of Alcathoe, with whom Minos is at war. She betrays the city to her father's enemy, whom she loves. He, however, "wikkedly ¼ quitte hire kyndenesse / And let hire drenche in sorwe and distresse, / Nere that the goddes hadde of hire pite" (1918–20). Quite apart from the irony of describing an act of filial betrayal and treason as "kindness" (with its informing meaning of "behavior according to nature"), we see that the deception of Minos by his daughters Ariadne and Phaedra on behalf of Minos's prisoner Theseus is poetic justice indeed. Doubly so, since one of them, Ariadne, will be abandoned by her lover as Minos abandoned his benefactress. I think there is less here of a proprietarian "repayment" of Minos through his daughter (daughter-as-property) than of the perception of reiterated structures in history, and particularly family history: today we call them "scripts."

Ovid's rendering of the abandoned Ariadne is little short of farcical. The comedy derives largely from the series of violent but pointless physical motions in which the heroine engages: her frantic groping of the bed to be sure Theseus is not in it; her hair-tearing; her running back and forth along the shore screaming her lover's name; her screeching after the departed ship ("flecte ratum! numerum non habet illa suum!": "Turn the ship around! she doesn't have everyone aboard!" [36]); her angry reproach to the empty bed. Ariadne even hoists her veil on a stick as a signal, just in case Theseus has accidentally forgotten her (Her. 10:42). Chaucer's version, while somewhat moderated from Ovid's, nonetheless retains the salient comical points. Ariadne "gropeth in the bed" (2186), reminds the deserter that "Thy barge hath nat al his meyne inne!" (2201), sticks her kerchief on a pole for Theseus "that he shulde it wel yse, / And hym remembre that she was behynde" (2202–4), and blames the bed. Besides the sheer futility of these actions, the vocabulary hints at comedy, for her behavior seems distinctly plebeian, more appropriate to a village girl than to a princess.

Well may the reader wonder: what about Ariadne's sister, Phaedra, now sailing off to Athens with Theseus, the husband who was to have been her brother-in-law? Ariadne will be rescued from her desert island by Bacchus in his tiger-drawn chariot and end her days as a great lady. But we know all too well—anyone who has read the Heroides knows—what lies in store for Phaedra in Athens: incestuous passion for Theseus's son Hippolytus (to whom, ironically,

Ariadne had proposed Phaedra be wed: 2099–2100) and a tragic death for both of them. Like so much else that is omitted from the Legend, this aftermath is eloquent, if silent, testimony to the fatal potential of sheer stubborn passion.

The tales of Lucrece and Philomela can be linked as a pair of rape stories, and an equally important pairing is that of the adjoining Ariadne and Philomela. Both of these myths have been resurrected in contemporary criticism as metaphors of writing, particularly by feminists wishing to locate the female voice, and its suppression, in Western culture. "Ariadne" is important because its central image of thread winding through a labyrinth can be seen as a representation of narrative; "Philomela" because its tapestry that tells all maximizes the relationship with weaving inherent in the word "text" and therefore represents representation itself.^[6] So the stories are linked by the common thread of thread—the thread that, carded, spun, and woven, was traditionally the stuff on which women worked, no less prominently in Chaucer's day than in any earlier one, for the textile industry that was England's boast in the high Middle Ages was largely staffed by women, both as employees and as masters in the industry. Indeed, it is another woman weaver, the Wife of Bath, who in the Canterbury Tales would be Chaucer's mouthpiece for posing outright the question of woman as producer of discourse. If Dame Alison's representations, her versions of authoritative texts and of her own biography, bear the mark of what Chaucer imagines as her subjectivity, then what can be said about Chaucer's Ariadne as unwinder of thread, as donor of a guide through the labyrinth, as generator of the narrative of herself and Theseus?

To begin, it is important to see the labyrinth or maze as no distant exoticism, but a fairly common medieval architectural artifact.^[7] In

[6] Naomi Schor writes of an "Ariadne complex, all readings that cling to the Ariadne's thread ('fil conducteur'), whether it be the 'synonymic chains' of Barthes, the 'chain of supplements' of Derrida, or the 'series' of Deleuze"; the thread is not only a metaphor for connection but "a metonym for femininity" (3–4). Also see J. Hillis Miller and Nancy K. Miller. On Philomela, see Marcus, "Still Practice" and "Liberty, Sorority, Misogyny," Hartman, and especially Joplin.

[7] For information in this section, I have used Knight, Mathews, Bord, and Beal. In Idea, Howard discusses the labyrinth as an image of interlaced thematic structure, but without relating it to the Legend (ch. 5). I do not know how appropriate the image is, because, although medieval narrative structure may well be (loosely speaking)"labyrinthine," no labyrinth has two parallel or interlocking paths as is the case with entrelacement. The definitive work on the subject is now that of Doob, who presents persuasive evidence that "Chaucer knew both visual and verbal labyrinth traditions well" (308), but does very little with the Legend.

France and Italy, mazes were built into the cathedral floors at Chartres, Poitiers, Rheims, Amiens, Arras, Sens, and other ecclesiastical buildings such as churches or chapter houses in Rome, Ravenna, Piacenza, Lucca, Pavia, Cremona, and elsewhere. In Britain, the west tower of Ely Cathedral has a pavement maze, as do several smaller churches, and some roof bosses represent a maze. Church mazes are rarer in England than on the continent, but even so England has numerous outdoor examples in earthenwork, stone, or turf in Winchester, Essex, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, Hampshire, and Dorset. Some of these structures are round, others square; some unicursal (without false turns), other multicursal (having dead ends or several routes to the exit). The church maze was often called the "chemin de Jérusalem," and to trace its convoluted course on one's knees was considered a substitute for pilgrimage. Or it might be considered a schematic representation of life itself (as, indeed, the pilgrimage was), with the central tile called "Le Ciel." Such Christian uses seem to have coexisted peacefully with explicit references sometimes made, in inscriptions alongside the labyrinth, as at Lucca, to the originary story of Theseus and Ariadne. But we have already seen this kind of Christian/classical coexistence in the tradition of medieval Ovid commentary: there the labyrinth is given doctrinal interpretation as world, flesh, and/or devil (e.g., Ovide moralisé 8.987–1082, 1395ff.). What we can derive from this real architectural and scholarly presence of the labyrinth, then, is that the episode did lend itself to contemporary moral application, that the labyrinth came to Chaucer already glossed as an image of life. Chaucer's earlier reference, in the House of Fame , to the House of Rumor as "Domus Dedaly, / That Laboryntus cleped ys" (1920–21) already links the labyrinth or maze to the image of (urban) life as a site of confused communication. I propose to extend these already-existing tendencies a short step further by adding the notion of narrative as another version of life, or conversely of one's version of life as itself a narrative.

The proleptic narrative that Ariadne unwinds to her sister is very

far from the one that actually comes to pass. Her firm expectation is nothing but good:

This lady smyleth at his stedefastnesse,
And at his hertely wordes and his chere,
And to hyre sister seyde in this manere,
Al softely: "Now, syster myn," quod she,
"Now be we duchesses, bothe I and ye,
And sekered to the regals of Athenes,
And bothe hereafter likly to be quenes;¼ "
                                      (2123–29)

The Ovide moralisé makes the lady even more certain of the outcome of her scheme, allowing her to express herself at length in simple future tense: "Par mariage / Me prendra," "Cest avrai je," "il m'enmenra," "je serai dame clamee," (OM 8.1200–1228). Ariadne has worked hard for this ending—indeed, she has betrayed her father for it, but since her father's use of the Minotaur is clearly unjust, this is not a substantial objection. She has also conspired in the death of her half-brother, the Minotaur: a deed recalled in her epistle (Her. 10.77) but effaced in Chaucer's text. And she has, like Medea, made a quick, businesslike bargain: her life-saving help in return for marriage. Who could say no? There is, therefore, an element of not-so-subtle coercion to the "love" of Ariadne and Theseus, an element clearly recognized by the Ovid commentators and, I suggest, by Chaucer.

Ariadne is thus ambitious and manipulative, but these are neither sins nor crimes. She has, however, made the mistake of overvaluing her creative powers, seeing as merely a character in her own story someone who turns out to be its co-author. In the effort to shape one's life, one is rarely completely autonomous. To the very last, Ariadne refuses to credit the autonomy of Theseus, who has, after all, his own story. She assumes against all evidence that he has merely forgotten her, that he merely needs to be reminded of what he was supposed to do. Theseus, her own creation (in that she saved his life), escapes the neat script she has prepared; he acts, perversely, against his author, who had not written him as a villain. This is her true exemplarity in the Legend . As a message about texts, the tale of Ariadne reinforces the oft-made Chaucerian point about their independence of authorial intent (even assuming such intent is knowable). As a message about life, it reinforces the orthodox

Christian point about preparedness for the adversities of Fortune. As a message about women, it suggests that the harshest critic of their productions will be the same as is faced by men: contingency.