Geoffrey Chaucer's Hybrid Woman: The Prioress in The Canterbury Tales*

OpenAlex · Turkish

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales presents pilgrims whose place in the medieval three estates is not clearly defined. Prioress is one of those pilgrims who experiences in-betweenness, as she lives, in Bhabhanian term, in the “territories” (1994, p. 28) of her former and present estate, the nobility and clergy respectively. In fact, the members of the medieval monasticism were mostly of noble origin who used to live in a very different and luxurious way of life compared to the life in monasteries. It was not, generally, the heartfelt choice of the members of the nobility to enter monasteries; yet, it was the wish of their noble families which put them in cloister. Thereby, most of the noble men and women had to leave their previous secular and ostentatious life behind and live in line with the monastic rules which required entirely disparate way of living. Accordingly, the medieval monasteries turned into shelters for those of noble birth longing to belong an estate, the nobility or the clergy, yet, not entirely accepted by any of them. At this point, Chaucer’s Prioress of noble birth, just like her historical counterparts, becomes a medieval hybrid as she cannot find a suitable place or fixed identity neither in the nobility nor in the clergy, and lives in between her former noble way of life and present monastic life. In this sense, the Prioress develops her own identity in the interface between her former noble culture and present monastic culture, forcing to rebuild the boundaries of the traditional medieval class structure. Thereby, using a Bhabhanian approach and placing her hybridity in its historical context, this paper aims to discuss Chaucer’s Prioress in the Canterbury Tales as a medieval hybrid having no certain estate to belong in that she experiences an identity crisis between the fixed identities of the Middle Ages, the nobility and the clergy, and occupies a medieval third space.