Motherhood Interrupted: Borders, Bodies, and Chaucer’s Griselda
by Kate Koppelman
“DHS does not have a blanket policy of separating families at the border.”
“O tender, o deere, o yonge children myne,
Youre woful mooder wende stedfastly
That cruel houndes or some foul vermyne
Hadde even you!”— “Clerk’s Tale,” 1093–1096
According to a recent court filing by the ACLU, close to 1,000 migrant children have been taken from their parents at the border of the U.S. and Mexico since the government was ordered to stop the practice over a year ago. Pictures of children, adolescents, and adults behind chain-link fences, sleeping on concrete floors, denied access to basic necessities are a visceral reminder of the lengths to which those in power will go to maintain that power and of the capacity and incapacity of the human body to endure physical and psychological loss.
For these are all stories of loss. Each story of parents separated from children, of children left alone with no family to care for them, is a story of grieving, a story of diminution. Reading and hearing these stories while re-reading and teaching the story of Griselda in Chaucer’s “Clerk’s Tale” is an exercise in a kind of anguished time-travel in which we are reminded of the oppressive nature of governance as well as the somatic effects of being subject to governance. It is also an invitation to read both places/spaces with more critical compassion and with more awareness of the effects of governance on actual bodies.
I’d like to call attention here to the ways in which these current stories of family separation and the story of Griselda ask us to think of the maternal body and its responses to interruptions and disruptions forced upon it by those in governance.
Chaucer’s Griselda is one of the most difficult figures to teach because of her nearly relentless passivity and her apparent willingness to endure separation from her children without complaint.
Criticism of her is equally difficult to read, as much of it seems focused upon how we might reconcile her actions (or lack thereof) with either our own attitudes towards gender or with what appear to be more “progressive” attitudes towards women in other of Chaucer’s works. Griselda’s story is a story of motherhood disrupted, interrupted by male governance — her own voice and body subsumed by the increasingly fragile and anxious voice of her Lord/Husband, Walter. Her story is also a story of diminution and of loss — not only of her children, but of her self.
Modern reactions to Griselda focus, I think, on this notion in particular: Who is she? What is she? The text itself calls our attention to these questions when it refers to her unknowability (“Hem thought she was another creature”) as well as when it reminds us of Griselda’s positioning on various thresholds, various borders between spaces and identities (the doorway of her father’s house, the liminal space between rural and royal, her dramatic walk through town after being rejected by Walter).
For many readers, undergraduate readers in particular, her positioning on these borders renders her less clearly visible. She doesn’t speak when we think she should or to whom we think she might. She is repeatedly stripped of her clothing and “translated” (in Middle English, this word means first to move a body from one place to another) from one space or one existence to another. The text tells us clearly that she is one of Walter’s subjects before and after she becomes his wife and the mother of his children. But Griselda is, most certainly, a mother, and it is as mother that she speaks most forcefully, through a body that has been transformed through motherhood.
When she is told to leave Walter’s house and return to her father’s home, she reminds her husband of the body which has borne his children, “That thilke wombe in which youre children leye.” When her children are returned to her that voice disappears but her body does not and, in fact, it is her body that reminds us of what she has endured as it becomes so strong that it takes multiple men to tear her children from her:
And in hire swough so sadly holdeth she
Hire children two, when she gain hem t’embrace,
That with greet slieghte and greet difficultee
The children from hire arm they gonne arace. (1100–1103)
Griselda’s body cries out (her speech on her maidenhead is 75 uninterrupted lines — the longest speech in the tale). Hers is a body whose nakedness, shame, and guilt literally collapse under the weight of subjection to governance and which should leave us thinking of both representational and, at this moment in time in particular, real pain.
A Washington Post article from March of 2018 tells the story of Silvana Bermudez, a mother who fled El Salvador with her three children and who was separated from them upon entering the U.S.. They were ultimately reunited but when Silvana embraced her 3-year-old son after three months apart and asked him, “Who am I, my darling?”, he could not answer her. She asked again, “Who am I?”, and ultimately answered for him, “Mommy, [ . . . ] I am your mommy.”
Oh which a pitous thyng it was to se
Hir swownynyg, and hire humble voys to heere!
“Grauntmercy, lord, God thanke it yow,” quod she,
“That ye Han saved me my children deere!” (1086–1089)
It is certainly not a solace to families currently separated at the border that a fictional character from the 14th century was also separated from her children. It would be easy, in fact, to read the similarities and simply collapse further into a sense of hopelessness.
Rather, or also, I think these confluences might remind us of the work that consistent critical attention can do to remind us of what the body tells and has continued to tell us about suffering and the effects of unchecked power. And for medievalists, I think we might begin to re-read Griselda’s bodily insistence as a reminder of how the body might speak to power rather than as simply a moral exemplar who, we are reminded at the start of the tale’s envoy, gets only death for her trouble.
Kate Koppelman is an Associate Professor of English at Seattle University where she teaches classes on Medieval literature and culture, Post-humanism, and, occasionally, Detective Fiction. She has published articles on the violence of the Virgin Mary, on the Old English Judith, and on Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde.” She recently published a short reflection on teaching Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. She is currently working on a longer piece on Griselda, family separation, and translation, as well as a project on anger in the Middle Ages.
