| Anger is a central theme in Chaucer, if not necessarily an obvious one. Chaucer is commonly associated with stories of love, marriage, and patience, yet anger proves a preoccupation if not one of his conscious organizing principles in the Canterbury project, precisely because Chaucer is interested in the maintenance of society, aware of the double role anger plays in both undermining and sustaining the good society. I would suggest that anger rises to the level of a philosophical and ethical problem for Chaucer, and that we enter an important dimension of his text when we, as readers, treat it as such. As a poet, Chaucer sees that questions of identity, self, criticism, and poetic fame are bound up with questions of anger, and with the idea---beginning to emerge in fourteenth-century Italy---that anger has the power to define the self. It was another century until these Renaissance ideas took firm root in England, but Chaucer's work demonstrates the way in which uncertainty about how to value anger concerned moral thinkers in his own time. For Chaucer, the complications of narrative, more so than the strictures of scholastic analysis, prove to be the medium best suited to the study of anger and of the passions in general. At the heart of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is the principle that if community is to be viable, the pervasiveness of human anger must be addressed, and its effects---for better or worse---must be explored through the multiplicity of situations in which it surfaces. It was an important principle for Chaucer's culture, moving toward the Renaissance yet still struggling with scholastic doctrines of anger, and remains so for us today in a violent post-modern world still grappling with the problem of ever recurring anger. |
