Interspecies Mimicry

Animals and Lyric in Chaucer

When parrots dance, we are secretly amused and intrigued at their transgression of the boundary that excludes them from the human. A similar intrigue adds emotional power to the Manciple’s story of a speaking crow who tells Phebus about his wife’s adultery and then is defeathered and slung out the door. But such emotions risk opening up a minefield of animal-human ethics. For example, if we decide to view the crow as a bird, should Phebus’s abuse of his crow stand beside the murder of his wife as a crime which Chaucer’s readers deplore? And how should we view the depiction of birds in the Parliament of Fowls? In that tale, as well as the Manciple’s Tale, can “[birds] be permitted to resemble men for the very reason that they are so different” (as A.C. Spearing remarks)? Or does Chaucer present these birds as always domesticated by humans?

As Susan Crane’s 2007 lecture “For the Birds” showed, reading birds as animals, rather than allegorical humans, opens up new lines of interpretation. My paper will consider how lyric utterance incites violence, and how birds, inferiors, and women share an important community in these tales. Perhaps it is no accident that birds and animals are often victims of the violence which co-occurs with lyric.

Although birdsong is depicted as beautiful and meaningful in the Parliament of Fowls roundel, there were medieval thinkers who saw it otherwise. Augustine and Lactantius did not view birdsong as music, since birds cannot exercise scientia (understanding); and birdsong, which is wordless, thus contains no meaning. Others, however, followed Priscian in viewing musical melody as meaningful. Consonant with this view, birdsong can symbolize song that is closer to God, and unlike the “unnatural excesses of human singers.” (This summary is drawn from Chapter 1 of Eva Leach's book, Sung Birds).

In the Parliament of Fowls's depiction of birds, we are perhaps closer to Priscian. (For more on Priscian and language, see this Karl Steel blog entry.) In the Parliament of Fowls and other Chaucerian tales, birds sing meaningful songs with important meanings to their listeners. However, birdsong also sets birds in a domestic relationationship with humans. As such, it “others” birds.

My concept of othering is drawn from neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor. She says callousness allows us to ‘other’ people by engaging in negative stereotyping and social avoidance. In this paper I argue that othering animals demonstrates these problematic social processes. As such, othering animals is an important part of the formal work of lyric in Chaucer.

In my paper I will compare the representation of birds and birdsong in Alanus ab Insulis's De Planctu Naturae with the Parliament of Fowls, and in The Manciple's Tale and a late-medieval tale about parrots.

[Proposed for a talk at the XVII International Congress of the New Chaucer Society, Siena, Italy, 2010.]