Insistent, Persistent, Resilient: The Negative Poetics of Patient Griselda.

Author / Editor
Morrison, Susan Signe.

Title
Insistent, Persistent, Resilient: The Negative Poetics of Patient Griselda.

Published
Medieval Feminist Forum 56, no. 2 (2020): 73-92.

Description
Uses "lessons from trauma studies concerning silence, as well as new materialist and ecocritical approaches," to explore the resistance of Griselda's patient silence. "[T]hrough a preponderant use of negative words"--a "poetics of negation"--Griselda enacts agency and "undermines" her vow not to "grucche" against Walter's treatment of her. She reinforces her "covert silence" with body language, and her "naying [of] Walter's ye" resonates in the figure of Echo in the Envoy to ClT.

Chaucer Subjects
Clerk and His Tale