Eunuch Hermeneutics
- Author / Editor
- Dinshaw, Carolyn.
Eunuch Hermeneutics
- Published
- ELH 55 (1988): 27-51.
- Description
- Most of the objects and language associated with the Pardoner mirror his fragmentation of incompleteness. Significantly, the literary background in the "Roman de la Rose" follows the account of the castration of Saturn and Raison's defense of plain speaking. As the "focus of anxiety about language," the Pardoner is incapable of accepting the Word made flesh.
- A revised version of this essay is included in the author's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1989).
- Chaucer Subjects
- Pardoner and His Tale.