Anti-Semitism and the Racial Triangle in the Prioress’s Tale: European Self, Asian Other, and Jewish Abject

Abstract

This essay aims at probing for a proper interpretation and understanding of anti-Semitism that is prevalent in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale in Canterbury Tales. So far, many critics have tackled the question of anti-Semitism and Chaucer's problematic treatment of Jews by introducing modern critical theories. However, my argument is that their interpretations by and large remain unsatisfactory or incomplete, mainly because their interpretive tools were founded upon the binary opposition between European Christians and Jews. Instead of this binary logic, therefore, I complicate the racial relationship in Medieval Europe by placing “Asia” on the position of the other of European Christians. We then have more complex racial model or what I would call “racial triangle”: European Christians, Asian Muslims, and Jews. Although the word “Asye” is the very first concrete noun of the tale, critics have paid little attention to it, only regarding it no more than a literary device of setting and exoticizing the story and possibly neutralizing anti-Semitism. Yet the critical survey of the historical development of Marian legends illuminates that Asia is not merely a setting for the story, but a primary signifier for an imaginary object of European desire for territorial expansion, or the absolute other against which European Christians identify themselves. The racial triangle is derived from Kristeva's psychoanalytic study on “abject.” By definition, “abject” is not an “object” or “the other” that exists outside the domain of the “subject.” It is part of the subject but something that must be purged out for the unity of identity - that is, the not-self within the self. In this model, Jews can be understood as part of European self but not quite. I conclude that anti-Semitism in the tale is a product of European Christians' historically overdetermined anxiety of the other (Asian Muslim) - that is, they attempt to master their fear of the other by abjecting Jews.