Censors call to cancel … Chaucer?

You’ve no doubt heard about the schools and libraries banning Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Closer to my own home I felt incensed but not at all shocked that a number of books that included Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian were banned from the Raymond School library in Racine County, Wisconsin.

But what about the concerted effort to cancel Geoffrey Chaucer? I was surprised to read that one. 

Ye goodley barde Geoffrey was a government undercover spy for the King of England, wrote some mansplainy characters into the Wife of Bath who compare women to worms that destroy trees, and had characters repeat some nasty antisemitic fake news that Jews were killing Christians. All that is true.

But as Chaucer scholar and Texas A&M University prof Jennifer Wollock writes in The Conversation, these would-be censors fail to recall the freshman lit observation that an author writing about or having a character say something doesn’t necessarily represent their own views. 

If it did, the Bible’s depictions of rape in Genesis and mass slaughter in Exodus alone make it a prime candidate for removal. Should we conclude from “Going to Meet the Man” that James Baldwin advocated police violence and brutal lynchings. Clearly, literature can serve as an act of protest by depicting deplorable worldviews.

Need proof of what Wollock might describe as Chaucer’s protofeminist and antiracist streak but don’t have time to read the Canterbury Tales aloud yourself? There’s an app for that. (And it’s free.)