Hysteria, Perversion, and Paranoia in "The Canterbury Tales": "Wild" Analysis and the Symptomatic Storyteller

Description

Beginning with the spectacle of hysteria, moving through the perversions of fetishism, masochism, and sadism, and ending with paranoia and psychosis, this book explores the ways that conflicts with the Oedipal law erupt on the body and in language in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", for Chaucer's tales are rife with issues of mastery and control that emerge as conflicts not only between authority and experience but also between power and knowledge, word and flesh, rule books and reason, man and woman, same and other - conflicts that erupt in a macabre sprawl of broken bones, dismembered bodies, cut throats, and decapitations. Like the macabre sprawl of conflict in the "Canterbury Tales", this book brings together a number of conflicting modes of thinking and writing through the surprising and perhaps disconcerting use of "shadow" chapters that speak to or against the four "central" chapters, creating both dialogue and interruption. Acknowledgments VII Introduction, or A Long Preamble to a Tale 1 Oscillations 1 Chimney-Sweeping 8 Cutting Up 14 Objection! 22 Chapter 1: The Prick of the Prioress, or Hysteria and Its Humors 28 Dora and the Prioress 29 Prosthetic Body and Rim-Structure 37 The Breast and An Erotics of the Divine 53 The Beating Fantasy and Orphic Song 58 The Joke of the Host and the Prick of the Prioress 65 Chapter 2: Portrait of the Hysteric as a Young Girl 70 How I Lost My Body 70 How I Lost My Mother 72 How I Lost My Voice 76 Chapter 3: Masochist as Miscreant Minister: The Parable of the Pardoner’s Perverse Performance 84 Father, Mother, Masochist 84 The Perverse Dynamic and the Double Standard 112 Of Parables and Pardons 118 Chapter 4: Confessing Animals 126 Door Number Three 126 Supercaving 132 Siren Call 136 Chapter 5: Before There Was Sade, There Was Chaucer: Sadistic Sensibility in the Tales of the Man of Law, the Clerk, and the Physician 141 The Fat Lady Against the “Holwe” Men 146 “Holwe” Man Number One: The Man of Law 153 “Holwe” Man Number Two: The Clerk 169 “Holwe” Man Number Three: The Physician 186 Chapter 6: Sadomasochism for (Neurotic) Dummies 197 China’s Aftershocks 197 The Sphinx Speaks 201 Paradigm Shift 204 Chapter 7: The Reeve’s Paranoid Eye, or The Dramatics of “Bleared” Sight 211 Persecution 211 Primal Scene 230 "Corps Morcelé" 238 Chapter 8: Farting and Its (Dis)contents, or Call Me Absolon 247 The Haves and Have-Nots 247 Things That Go “Toot!” in the Night 251 Classroom Gas 256 Chapter 9: Retractor 261 The Sleep of Dialectic 261 Upon Waking, Shipwreck 264 The Master in Pieces 265 Bibliography 268 Index 281