Re-sounding natures : voicing the non-human in Medieval English poetry【翻译】

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The University of Iowa and its faculty have shaped my educational background
since my sophomore year as an undergraduate. Some individual professors and staff
members warrant particular mention. While patience is often considered a virtue of
passivity rather than activity, the patience of my dissertation committee was grounded in
active encouragement and animating support. I would like to thank them as a group and
severally: Kathleen Kamerick, Dee Morris, Kathy Lavezzo, Jon Wilcox, and my
dissertation supervisor, Claire Sponsler. Jon first imbued me with his relish for Old
English language and literature. The inspired teaching of Claire was both beacon and
path. Sara Levine, formerly of the Nonfiction Writing Program, reanimated and sustained
my interest in sentences and pushed me to write lively ones. Although I never formally
studied with him, I’d like to acknowledge the late Dick O’Gorman, erstwhile professor of
medieval French Literature, for being so provoking. Because we found one other
eminently amusing and disagreed about almost everything except for the intrinsic value
of medieval literature, his encouragement and friendship were invaluable as I returned to
academic life. It is to be hoped he is getting some sort of sardonic pleasure out of all of
this. I’d like to thank the staffs at the University of Iowa Libraries. In particular, Kathy
Magarrell fielded my frenzied and often eccentric questions with her wonted interest,
acumen, tolerance, and fine sense of camaraderie in medieval undertakings.
I’d also like to thank my dissertation writing group – Sonja Mayrhofer, Kerry
Doyle, and Tom Blake - who provided needed commiseration, advice, and support in a
particularly important phase of this project.
I acknowledge, although I may not have always positively thanked, the numerous
and various friends and family members, who distracted me – fruitfully or otherwise - at
timely and untimely moments during the course of this dissertation. A few merit
particular attention.
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I’d like to thank the late Doug Steckley who, when pressed, very reluctantly
described to me the screams of wounded and dying deer.
Jo Butterfield knows only too well how much I relied upon her technological
skills, her scholarly resources, and her academic insights to bring this dissertation to
fruition. Collegiality and friendship know no truer expression.
My brother, John Stuhr, shares my interest in things medieval, and can tell me
anything I’d like to know or would rather not know about the Hundred Years War. My
sister, Mary Yellen, has spent no small amount of time listening to my ideas and asking
astute and observant questions.
Growing up, I was fortunate to have my mother’s relations in and around
Allamakee and Clayton counties in northeastern Iowa who showed me both by precept
and example the dangers, rigors, and unexpected beauties and epiphanies of rural farm
life at a time when farming was something much closer to that practiced in medieval
England. In particular, I would like to single out my late aunt, Leah Zieman and my
cousin, Sue Zieman Miro for their forbearance and kindness to a hesitant city girl when
she truly needed it. They provided the ground for me to comprehend and appreciate the
(often perverse) power of chickens, the devoted intelligence of the farmyard dog
(whether named Coll or Nancy), the smell of spilled milk on wet stone, the peril of hay
chutes, the unexpected nimbleness of large and ungainly animals, the capricious
perniciousness of windmills, the importance of call and response between human and
non-human, the sighs of corn and the ill-omened silence of a watchful sow. It is they
who schooled me in the daily courage and tenacity required of those who practice the
unrelenting work of the farm and the impassioned (and almost entirely unacknowledged)
commitment to others – again human and non-human – that such courage and tenacity
bespeak.
No doubt this dissertation would have been very different without the camaraderie
of the dogs in my life who have helped me so assiduously and so buoyantly. For Saga
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who, as her name suggests, began this journey with me but refused to end it. For Bran
who gave up way too many rides in the car and walks in the woods to content himself
with sleeping directly under my desk in order to provide complete and continual
reassurance. For Tuuli who with surpassing elegance and joyful aplomb, tested
boundaries and limits in order to endow me with a proper – if humanly benighted -
understanding of them.
I am thankful for the sustaining presence of my mother, Gretchen Stuhr, who
always kept music alive in our house and on our travels, even though it was not always
the music she had imagined – or expected.
I may have written this dissertation, but it never could have been written and
never would have been written without the constant, unalloyed, and spirited support,
influence, and love of my partner, Robin Walenta. Her clarity of thought helped guide
me along many parlous paths and her lively intellectual perspectives helped endlessly to
clear – and to cheer – many dark and obscure places during this process. Who else,
when asked for a definition of a naysayer would respond “A horse who doesn’t want to
go the way you want it to?”
Well, perhaps one person: my father, Jack Stuhr. His keen sense of the ridiculous
was matched only by his intellectual flexibility and range, as well as his limitless and
often poetic curiosity. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t miss his verbal acuity,
agility, and resourcefulness, as well as his warmth, generosity, unquenchable sense of
fun, and unstinting love and support. Near the end of his speaking life he began using the
word “poet” interchangeably with “pilot” and “pirate.” Not bad, Dad. This is for you
now and always.
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ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines how the non-human (the natural, not the otherworldly)
world and its creatures were voiced in several late medieval English texts: Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Manciple’s Tale, and
the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play. The dissertation is organized into three chapters
which severally allocate voicing the non-human to three different (although conceivably
overlapping) modes of representation – acoustic, formal, and performative.
Underpinning this project is the objective to place these texts in a historicized ecocritical
context.
In the first chapter I analyze the figurative (and formative) sounds the natural
world “speaks” as it advances a crescendo of insistent clamor in Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight. I argue that this poem exploits the common (and serviceable) conviction
of the analogous equivalency of the two categories woman and nature – in order to
register the anxieties engendered by the encroachments of women and the natural world
in post-plague England. The second chapter addresses how the voices of domestication
and its discontents unfold in the use Chaucer makes of the protean genres of fable and
exemplum, proverbs, and the deployment of similes in two of his bird tales. I rely on
current theorizing of interspecies and intra-species domestication to identify and extract
the discontents I have found to be inhering in its processes: savagery/violence, hybridity,
uninvited and unintended transformations, and theft. The third chapter considers how
human and non-human voices confoundingly yet steadily implicated and entangled in one
another - performatively discover homes amid multiple ranges, including silence,
volume, laughter, and music. This chapter represents the effort to subtend and
complicate existing understandings of this popular late medieval pageant by thinking in
terms of ranges, variations, and multivalent characterizations, rather than slots,
hierarchies, stabilities, and characters who have become little more than canned effigies.
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In conclusion, I argue that late medieval poetic texts show a remarkable diversity
in the ways and means their authors chose to variously voice the non-human, and that the
particular forms this voicing took shaped, even as it was shaped, by the non-human world
around them. This diversity and variation enables a more complex understanding of the
different avenues and directions this voicing afforded to succeeding generations.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1
CHAPTER ONE: HOUNDING SOUNDS OF UNSECURED LOCATIONS:
WOMEN AND NATURE IN SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN
KNIGHT ..........................................................................................................16
The Noise of Unsecured Locations: Nature ....................................................24
The Noise of Unsecured Locations: Women ..................................................27
Hounding Sounds Away and at Home ............................................................28
Hounding Sounds of the Green Chapel ..........................................................49
CHAPTER TWO: “FOUL PRISOUNS”: DOMESTICATION AND ITS
DISCOUNTENTS IN CHAUCER’S NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE AND
MANCIPLE’S TALE .......................................................................................58
Anthropomorphism, Zoomorphism, and Domestication ................................61
Domestication’s Discontents ..........................................................................69
Domestication and Its Discontents in Chaucer’s England ..............................73
The Case of the Flemings and Rebel Peasants ...............................................75
The Domesticated Poet ...................................................................................84
Tales of Two Birds .........................................................................................93
Genre and Form ............................................................................................122
Conclusion ....................................................................................................140
CHAPTER THREE: HOME, HOME IN/ON THE RANGE: THE TOWNELEY
SECOND SHEPHERDS’ PLAY ....................................................................142
Home in/on Temporal Ranges ......................................................................147
Home in/on Spatial Ranges ..........................................................................156
Homes in Between: Staging and the Theater ................................................158
Homes in Between: the Cosmic and the Earthly ..........................................162
Home in/on the Characters of Animals ........................................................164
The Silence of the Ram and the Laughter of the Lamb ................................184
Home in the Range of Music ........................................................................187
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................191
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................196

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