Burne-Jones, Chaucer, and the Slippage of Everything

Okay, since spending some time recently watching a lot of episodes of South Park with my first-year writing students and reading Mandeville's Travels with my M.A. students [see previous post here], we can now call this an obsession of mine--by which I mean: noticing all the ways in which various anti-semitic discourses and even meta-anti-semitic discourses [whether in the form of apocryphal stories, reductively stereotypical tropes, satire, etc.] are made to kind of "disappear" in or move into the background of our "readings" of various texts: whether travelogues, television shows, or even paintings. My interest is not in delineating the contours of the anti-semitic discourses themselves [which are obvious], but in trying to take note of how we subvert a certain way of "taking note" of them [if that makes any sense].

I recently attended a show at the Saint Louis Museum of Art, "Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites from the Deleware Art Museum," in which I was able to view a painting of which I had formerly been completely unaware, Edward Burne-Jones's The Prioress's Tale (1898), based on Chaucer's tale of the same name. It was his last "produced" painting (he died that same year), and he had apparently been working on it for over thirty years. Burne-Jones had also worked with William Morris on his 1896 Kelmscott edition of the Canterbury Tales, and earlier in his career had also illustrated a wooden cabinet with scenes from this particular story. "The Prioress's Tale," of course, has generated much critical scholarship, especially as regards its virulent anti-semitism, with some critics feeling discomfited by what appears to be Chaucer's comfort with telling a supposedly uncritical story about a Christian child being savagely murdered by Jews and thrown into a communal privy, and others maintaining that since it is the Prioress's story, Chaucer is obviously doing something more subversive--i.e., this brutal and hate-filled tale, coming from the mouth of the nun who wears a necklace that declares "amor vincit omnia" and who is so "pitous" she would weep over a small mouse caught in a trap and whose table manners make her "ful semely" [but in a contrived manner--she "apes" politeness], cannot possibly be read "straight," and part of its shock value comes from who is telling it. I tend to agree with this latter view, and I actually believe Chaucer made some of the details in the tale as crude as possible in order to make this cliched martyr narrative both "cute" ["litel"] and sublimely horrible at once. With Chaucer, it's all about the layering. The layers, my friends, the layers.

By "referencing" this story of Chaucer's in a painting, there is already somewhat of an undermining of Chaucer's framing, because it is no longer the Prioress's story, per se, but is Burne-Jones's "lifting" and re-framing [literally] of two particular moments in that story: the murder of the boy--seen in the right-hand middle-third of the canvas, one woman can clearly be seen holding the boy down against his will, a dagger in her hand pressed against his back, with which we know she is going to slit his throat, while another women looks on, apparently an accomplice--and the moment at which the Virgin Mary places the grain on his tongue so that he can continue singing even though his throat has been cut. To a certain extent, Burne-Jones quite purposefully minimized the violence of both of these scenes. In the central image of the painting--where the Virgin Mary is bending over the boy who can be seen to be standing in a kind of grave in a garden of poppies and lilies, hands clasped in a prayerful pose--the boy is completely unmolested, his body whole and complete and beautifully boy-like. His actual murder is relegated to the background at the moment just before it actually happens. There is nothing in the painting to suggest that the boy is in the Jewish ghetto of the original tale. You have to look hard to notice the dagger.

I assume the original audience of this painting would have been more familiar than the museum-goers in Saint Louis with the original story and may have filled in the missing details, as well as looked for the murder weapon, and the imminent moment of the boy's murder. For the contemporary audience, the accompanying wall plaque and the iPod audio tour provide the necessary glosses on the painting, and to my surprise, while both mention that the painting is based on a story by Chaucer, the only narrative details provided are that the story is about a boy who is murdered while singing a hymn to the Virgin Mary, and that she is placing a grain in his mouth so that he can continue singing even though he has been murdered. All of the provided detail--brief as it is--focuses on the foreground of the painting, and no mention is made of what is happening in the background. I was looking for the murder scene, but I doubt other museum-goers were, and the detail will be lost to many without some kind of narrative guidance. Simply put, much of the content [and context] of Chaucer's original story is drained in this painting [by Burne-Jones], and the museum curators and exhibition authors have not seen fit to fill in much of what is missing, thereby flattening the painting's possible effects upon its viewers, as well as covering over the story's richly multi-layered history. For now, it's just another pretty picture in the room.

There are other interesting details in this painting which I am sure were intended by Burne-Jones as narrative "cues," but I did not have sufficient time to study them all, so if others have further thoughts about the painting, I would love to hear them. I wonder why Burne-Jones labored over this particular painting for so long? Does anyone know? I would love to know more about that, too. To a certain extent, the story obviously had some kind of hold on him, as it still does on us today.