What women want?

If what men want is to replace (or embrace) their mothers, and what women want is to supplant them, their respective ambitions can be caught by the narrative analogues of Lacan’s Discourse of the Master and Discourse of the Analyst respectively, namely $ → S₁ → S₂ → a and S₂ → a → $ → S₁. Jack and the Beanstalk and Cinderella if you like.

The respective narrative types are not confined to male and female protagonists, but nevertheless may be thought of as embodying stereotypical gendered aspirations. It is interesting, then, to see how they are treated in two of the Canterbury Tales where Chaucer seems to subvert the apparent message.

The texts I have in mind are the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale. In the first we have a knight who finds himself in the wilderness ($) when he is reprieved from sentence of death for raping a girl encountered by the riverside; the queen and the ladies of the court dispatch him to find the answer to the question what women want.

After a long and fruitless search the knight falls in with an old woman (the Donor), who provides him with the answer on condition he will agree to perform the first task she asks of him.

             ‘Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee

             As wel over hir housbond as hir love,’

is the answer provided, and when he returns to the court (the city), the ladies have to agree that he has satisfied them (and for those who want a point by point deconstruction of the narrative, this is the easy task).

The Hero must now, however, encounter the Villain: the role now taken by the ‘olde wyf’ in her insistence that the knight marry her: he protests

            But al for noght; the ende was this, that he

            Constreyned was, he nedes moste hire wedde;

            And taketh his olde wyf, and gooth to bedde.

(the easy journey).

Now he is in the new place, where the ‘olde wyf’ has the role of King: that is, she explains what true gentillesse consists of, and faces the Hero with the difficult task to choose

                                    oon of thise thynges tweye:

            To han me foul and old til that I deye,

            And be to yow a trewe, humble wyf,

            and nevere yow displese in al my lyf:

            Or elles ye wol han me yong and fair,

            And take youre aventure of the repair

            That shal be to youre hous by cause of me ...

The knight finally leaves the choice up to her: his reward is to find himself at last in the garden (a), where the woman, now his Princess, has made the choice not only to be young and beautiful, but faithful as well.

What women want? To help an abusive male live out his gendered fantasy? Couldn’t the fairy bride have done better for herself? Let’s compare this story with the Clerk’s Tale. Once again, the transition to the new place (for Grisilde) is connected with a wedding – here, by the surprising revelation of the marquis Walter’s desire to marry her.

Then he, in the role of King, faces her with the difficult task, or difficult ask, at least, of agreeing to submit without question to whatever he requires:

            I seye this, be ye redy with good herte

            To al my lust, and that I frely may,

            As me best thynketh, do yow laughe or smerte,

            And nevere ye to grucche it, nyght ne day?

Having sworn, Grisilde is now in the garden; Walter is her Princess. This completes the second part of the tale.

Parts 3, 4 and 5 are laid in the wilderness, and concern the trials put upon Grisilde by Walter in the character of antagonistic Donor. She is first made to believe that her daughter has been done away with, then her son, and finally that her husband is repudiating her in favour of a younger woman (the daughter, now twelve years old). All of this Grisilde bears without question or complaint; which brings about the ‘happy ending’:

            And whan this Walter saugh hire pacience,

            Hire glade chiere, and no malice at al,

            And he so ofte had doon to hire offence,

            And she ay sad and constant as a wal,

            Continuynge evere hire innocence overal,

            This sturdy markys gan his herte dresse

            To rewen upon hire wyfly stedfastnesse.

It is an easy task, it seems, for her to fall in with his change of heart, and we are back in the city, the polity restored:

            Ful many a yeer in heigh prosperitee

            Lyven thise two in concord and in reste ...

In both tales an abusive male gets what he wants, in the wife of Bath’s Tale as Hero, in the Clerk’s Tale as Other; however the narrative is gendered, it seems the women can’t win.

They are sort of depressing and reassuring at the same time, he thought, looking back down the aisle and turning over in his mind the possibilities of a review. Those Blue Mountains vistas hazed over with purple, and there are always a lot from round Yass or somewhere with a river at a distance between bare paddocks in a wiggle of trees, and sheds with rusty iron and old abandoned farm machinery. And that man that does river stones – he’s always there. Maybe it’s just always the same picture – who would know? Here and there are people taking photos of each other in front of the displays. Perhaps they’re the artists. It’s something to get hung, he thought, however meagre your talent. But just once in a while, there’s a picture that has something.

In front of him was a desert, or semi-desert scene done in overlapping glazes. There were areas where the paint had been applied so sparingly that the texture of the canvas was the chief thing you noticed, but others where the ground disappeared while the colour maintained a paradoxical appearance of transparency. And here and there verticals, thick strokes, almost calligraphic, were suggestions of trees, vegetation, people even, glimpsed from afar off.

Cliche, perhaps, but among the purple-headed mountains and the sheds and the not-quite-Streetons, not to mention the river stones, there was something about this picture that was not trying so hard to be representational – something of the dreamlike, a landscape in a mirage. Dennis liked the implicit metaphor that gave to the temporal beings their own dimension while the flat land stretched in boundless timeless surface all about them. He looked at the catalogue.

Untitled – Deniliquin, it said, and $800. That was pleasing. For all that this painting had reminiscences of Fred Williams, it was a sure touch, he thought, to let the metaphor of the picture flow through into its name. For what can we call those landscapes other than ‘untitled’ – and yet, as long as we presume to occupy them, whether our title is of the traditional or Torrens kind, we will put up our obsessive little signs like ‘Sandy Gully’ and ‘Ten Mile Creek’. Ghost towns too had street names once. This artist saw more deeply than most. He checked the catalogue again; the name meant nothing. Now he was about ready to move round the corner and begin on the watercolours.

‘Do you like it?’

Dennis didn’t immediately take the words as addressed to him. But they had to be, it seemed, for they clearly came from the only other static presence in the immediate neighbourhood. The lateral current shuffled the crowd along the aisles: they two alone, caught in an eddy, were slapping the seawall side by side. He had been conscious that there was someone else pausing near the picture, but hadn’t taken much notice.

It was a young woman, or young enough anyway – say 25 to 35. Jeans, a white shirt with unbuttoned cuffs, a long cardigan the way people were wearing them then: a patterned knit in a sort of weed-green.

‘It’s got something,’ Dennis said warily – was this perhaps the artist? ‘It’s certainly saying “look at me”, but I don’t think it’s saying “buy me”. But I’d sooner look at it than most of what’s here.’

‘Do you buy things?’

‘I have sometimes. And I think you always know when you really want to; I’ve never bought anything I wasn’t happy with afterwards.’

‘So you’ve got an eye – or you’re just pleased with yourself.’

‘Was that a question?’

‘Not really.’

This insolence from a total stranger was a precious thing.

‘I will tell you why I don’t want to buy it, then,’ said Dennis. ‘To me, the coloration is just a tiny bit vulgar.’

‘Vulgar – isn’t that a bit harsh?’

‘See that pink there, and that shade of green up here in the sky?’

Leaning over the barrier to make the point.

‘No touching the works of art, please, sir,’ from a security guard.

‘What really upsets me – no, it doesn’t upset me, it disappoints me – is that the artist, who is obviously an intelligent person, has let him- or herself down, and if someone comes along and buys it, it will only encourage them and they will keep on doing it.’

‘You’re very sure of your opinion – I’ll give you that. But you can have a few points for “him- or her”. You’re not as completely hateful as I first thought.’

‘I don’t find myself specially hateful. If I seemed a bit over-critical, perhaps I was just annoyed by that guard calling me “sir”. I don’t know about you, but I always find it irritating.’

The Goldsworth students had been profuse with their ‘sirs’.

‘I don’t get called “sir” much.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Shall we look at the watercolours?’

‘Why not? Do you like licorice allsorts?’

‘Intensely.’

‘Have some.’

The aniseed, the musk, the banana. Flavour and colour: perfect synaesthesia. They chewed in front of the watercolours.

A saint’s progress – a quick look at Ælfric Catholic Homilies II, X: Depositio Sancti Cuthberhti

It’s interesting to see some familiar patterns in how the life of St Cuthbert unfolds as Ælfric tells it (based on Bede’s Latin lives of the saint).

1. At the beginning of the Homily tout est luxe, calme et volupté, as it were: we find Cuthbert as an eahtwintre cild ... plegende mid his efenealdrum. But God has other plans:

Ac se ælmihtiga god wolde styran þære nytennysse his gecorenan cuðberhtes

2. God sends a 3-year-old child to let Cuthbert know that this behaviour is inappropriate in a future bishop. By implication Cuthbert must now take an unwished-for journey from the heedless life of a child to the commitment of a religious calling.

3. During his apprenticeship to the religious life, Cuthbert has four miraculous encounters:

• He receives advice from a mysterious stranger on the treatment of his afflicted knee

• He sees Aidan’s soul conducted into heaven

• He is sustained in the wilderness by the appearance of a loaf

• He offers hospitality to an angel, who disappears leaving heavenly bread behind (whiter than lilies, smelling of roses, sweeter than bees’ honey)

4. Cuthbert is ministered to by animals on two occasions: seals who dry and warm him on the beach, and an eagle that feeds him and a doubting companion.

5. He does successful battle three times with the devil;

• Quenching an ignis fatuus that is terrifying villagers who have lapsed from their faith

• Diverting a fire which is menacing a house

• Casting out a devil from the wife of a pious man

6. He decides to retreat from his popularity: ferde ða to farne. on flowende yðe. His retreat to the solitary island is facilitated by the discovery of a spring of fresh water, by the ministry of grateful ravens who bring him pig fat to waterproof his shoes, and by the sea casting up a sill-beam for his outhouse.

7. Cuthbert reveals the future to Ælflæd; he is drafted into the office of bishop, thus fulfilling the prophecies of the 3-year-old child and of Boisil; while bishop his saintliness is manifested by his healing of

• an ealdorman’s wife with holy water

• a bedridden girl by anointing her with oil

• a man at the point of death with consecrated bread

• a man borne on a litter with his blessing

• a half-dead child with a kiss

By clairvoyance Cuthbert perceives the death of one of Ælflæd’s woodmen; he foresees his own death, and is able by his prayer to obtain a simultaneous death for the priest Hereberhtus; his tomb is opened, and his body found to be uncorrupted:

þa wearð þæt halige lic. hal on eorðan gemet. gesundful licgende. swilce he slapende wære

Something about plot in general, and one work in particular;

An episode is one configuration of the variables that define a plot.

These variables are:

• Subject – let’s call it S. Its coefficient, which we’ll call α, has two values:

+ indicating that the subject of the episode is the Hero, - that the subject is (an)other

• Transitivity – T. Its coeffieient, which we’ll call β, also has two values:

+ indicating that the action of the episode is Affect, - that it is Effect

• Cost – C. Its coefficient, γ, has two values:

+ indicating that the cost of the action is borne by the Hero, - that it is borne by (an)other

If α_n, β_n and γ_n are the values of these three variables in episode n, then α_n+1 is defined as -α_n, β_n+1 is defined as -α_nβ_n, while if α_n = β_n,  γ_n+1 = -βγ_n and γ_n otherwise.

This gives us eight ordered configurations of the three variables, which are set out below, beginning for convenience with the configuration in which all variables have the value - (the ninth configuration in order would be the same as the first, the tenth the same as the second, and so on, so any starting point will produce the same eight possibilities in the same cyclically repeating order).

α	β	γ	(Lacanian equivalent)	My names for these episodes
-	-	-	$	the wilderness
+	-	-	—	the easy task
-	+	-	S1	the city
+	+	-	→	the easy journey
-	-	+	S2	the new place
+	-	+	—	the difficult task
-	+	+	a	the garden
+	+	+	←	the difficult journey

I’m not going to discuss the homology of this schema with Lacan’s Discourse of the Master here, but simply introduce his terms, which can be a convenient shorthand for stages in the narrative.

Let me explicate how this applies on the ground. In the first episode the Subject of the action is Propp's Donor. The effective action is the conferring of power on the Hero (a magical agent, a helper, etc). This power comes from the Donor’s own bounty, and so the Donor bears the cost. We will assume that an episode has a fixed cost, which must fall one way or the other.

In the second episode the Hero as Subject effects a task. The task is easy, or at least facilitated, and so comes as it were cheap to the Hero. The cost must therefore be borne elsewhere.

In the third episode the Subject is Propp’s Villain. The Villain is affected by contest with the Hero, the brunt of which falls on the Villain. Therefore the Villain bears the cost of the encounter.

In the fourth episode the Hero has an easy (or facilitated) journey, so again the cost falls elsewhere. Note that affect for the Hero typically involves a journey, while effect typically involves a task: the Hero’s journeys are often passive or facilitated. Where a journey is on the initiative of the Hero it may count as effect.

In the fifth episode, the King, as Subject, gives information, not power, to the Hero – cheap to the giver and hence the cost is borne by the Hero.

The sixth episode requires the Hero to perform a difficult task: the cost is borne by the Hero.

In the seventh episode the Princess subject is affected, but not overpowered, so the cost belongs to the Hero once again.

Finally, in the eighth episode, the difficult journey is made at the Hero’s cost.

Some obvious equivalences: costly/taxing/burdensome/unwelcome. Cost places demands on the Hero’s resources, means a lot to the Hero, so cost also = meaning.

Easy/facilitated/pleasant, etc. The Princess’s experience in the garden is pleasant for her, meaningful to the Hero.

The episode as sign: it seems to me that we may see S as a rheme, T as a dicent, C as an argument, and the chain of episodes as a chain of semiosis. Accordingly, there is no point in prolonging the chain beyond the eighth term – to do so is to start another narrative. Equally, the audience can be relied on to supply the missing terms of any narrative that is truncated, because the chain is self-generating.

Suppose we apply this to an example: here I’ve chosen The Twins at St Clare’s (Enid Blyton 1941).

We begin with episode 8 – the difficult journey. Pat and Isabel O’Sullivan are dispatched much against their will to a new school (affect/undergoing). when they arrive they face hostility/criticism from some of their schoolfellows (Janet) and teachers (Mam’zelle).

The next episode is three times repeated: Kathleen volunteers to show Isabel how to clean the boots of the Sports Captain, Belinda Towers, Mam’zelle volunteers to give the twins extra coaching in French, Belinda selects Pat for the lacrosse team even though Pat has broken bounds by pretending to be her twin.

The easy task is overtly fulfilled by Isabel's success in cleaning boots and lighting Belinda’s fire and impliedly by the facilitation of the twins’ French studies and Pat’s play in the team.

The episode of the city is also three-branched. Here the first form, to which the twins belong, is initially the Villain, playing tricks on the ineffectual Miss Kennedy. Pat and Isabel (who have not directly instigated the pranks) nevertheless lead the class in owning up (thus conquering themselves as it were). Later they organise a mass apology to Miss Kennedy when they find she is teaching to support her ailing mother. In between these two instances of general self-reproof is Kathleen’s confession that she is a thief, and her acceptance by her classmates (the poor girl was driven to it by not having enough pocket money). In each case we see the cost of righteousness exacted from the transgressor.

Pat, Isabel, Janet and Kathleen sneak out to the circus – this is the easy journey. The cost is borne by the others, who have been unjustly gated in punishment for a broken window.

Then we have a quarrel between Janet and Sheila, a girl desperate to conceal her humble origins. These are revealed to the twins by Winifred, the Head Girl – information they are burdened with, because it behoves them to be understanding. But the unmasking is not confined to Sheila: Janet is revealed to be magnanimous (getting Sheila the job of prompter in the class production which leads her to inherit the main part when the girl playing it falls ill) and Kathleen is revealed as an animal-lover, rescuing an injured dog that the girls find when on a walk.

This episode is clearly parallel to the 'makeover' episode of reality shows, which have an analogous episodic structure.

Then we have the difficult task: Isabel accidentally sees the geography paper the night before the exam. What is she to do? She resolves to fail deliberately, but is reprieved when it turns out that the paper she saw was intended for the second form.

And then finally, the garden. The school concert is a success, the end of term arrives, the twins sing the praises of St Clare’s. Which is, of course, the Princess, and now means everything to the girls.

It’s a romance, in short, and one that very well exemplifies how a plot begins at one place and develops to a conclusion just short of its starting point (which is where we will pick up in The O’Sullivan Twins, the next book in the series. And that, as they say, is another story.