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Natania Barron
Robert Brandon
Charles Tedder
Joe Falloco

A God of Violence: Chaucer’s Phebus

The study of violence has traditionally been dominated by the social sciences. Inquiries from these fields examine the causes and effects of violence within society in the hope of enacting change. Such studies often take the form of ethnographies or case studies, which assess the way in which individual communities create and react to violence. However, the social nature of narrative discourse has led numerous scholars, including but not limited to traditional literary critics, to explore the ways in which violence is represented within literature. Acting as a mode of research rather than a distinct school of criticism, the study of violence appropriates the theories and techniques of a number of divergent critical methods, most notably spatial, body, Marxist, historical, and gender criticism. As one scholar says, “The value of such studies lies less in their production of universal proofs (bad government causes violence, which destabilizes society), than in their power to clarify and make comprehensible the motives [of people], the systems and structures within which they acted, and the complex functions of violence within those structures” (Feldman 13). In this way, violence is a category of experience worth analyzing, not in order to promote it but instead to discuss its representations in the hope of expanding the scope of numerous fields of study and of explicating the way in which violence affects society.
At their core, explorations of violence within literature are exercises in social criticism. By examining representations of violence, literary study becomes valuable as a means of exploring the ideology of a society. After all, a culture’s literature is shaped by its collective imagination, and one factor which contributes to the construction of this imagination is violence. Thus, inspections of representations of violence are useful in exploring the community’s understanding of and reaction to violence. Allen Feldman explains that studies of violence can be used as a sort of “genealogical analysis of the symbolic forms, material practices, and narrative strategies through which certain types of political agency are constructed” (1). Looking at a culture in this manner is useful for what it can illuminate about the production of texts both by the victims and the perpetrators of violence. The way in which these cultures represent violence assists scholars in understating them. After all, every culture has its own ideas of what violence is and what it is not. Examining representations of violence illuminates what Maddern calls the “nexus between violence and sociopolitical order,” and in many cases, the arts offer some of the most accurate depictions of a culture’s ideologies (Maddern 40). For example, in Maddern’s study of domestic violence during the middle ages, she notes that because the legal and historical records of the period are so sparse that her “picture of intertwined discourses of violence, political order, and household relationships is derived largely from literature, rather than from any evidence of social -practice” (44). Ultimately, these readings are often historicist enterprises, which seek to illustrate the way in which society affects a text and the way in which society is in return affected by literature.
Examinations of violence are also useful for the ways in which they re-imagine existing modes of literary study. For example, violence scholars often make heavy use of the ideas of spatial theorists. Since the publication of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, critical examinations of “spaces of representation” within literary works have become increasingly important (35). Working from the premise that the creation of physical spaces are socially motivated, such studies explore the diverse ideologies bound within different representations of space, ultimately searching for what Brenda Schildgen calls “binary spatial oppositions” (49). In introducing their study of violence, Das and Kleinman explain that “whole areas are marked off as “violence prone areas,” suggesting that the more traditional spatial divisions, comprising metropolitan centers and peripheral colonies, or superpowers and satellite states, are now linguistically obsolete” (1). Ultimately, such arguments suggest that older theories regarding the way in which spaces relate one another are outmoded, thus requiring a new method of classification. While many possibilities for such reorganization have been proffered, one consistent theme is the way in which violence can be used to control and create social order. As Feldman explains, “Social space and body space continually predicate each other and are subjected to an ongoing reconstruction by violence” (4). Thus, in the place of obsolete binary oppositions such as urban and rural, scholars focus upon the ways in which violence realigns spatial boundaries and the methods by which an area is redefined by violence.
It could be argued that the central focus of nearly every piece of criticism regarding representations of violence is the relationship between violence and agency. Indeed, examinations of violence within literature often emphasize the way in which literature can be used as both a means of violence and a method of defense against it, as both an instrument of agency and an implement that restricts it. Certainly, the question of agency and violence dominates the school, and it could be argued that this is the central issue of the field. The ultimate thrust of many of these inquiries is that violence is a means of objectifying, and thereby controlling, some aspect of society. Examples of such studies abound, once again revealing the way in which the study of violence attaches itself to other modes of scholarship. In her discussion of rape in Chaucer, Christine Rose notes, “Feminists propose that rape does not signal a breakdown of social organization, but rather maintains the social system in which it occurs as an aspect of patriarchal power” (27). Mark Amsler argues that Christine de Pizan’s Daphne is “the silenced, disfigured, allegorical object of male knighthood,” Philippa Maddern acknowledges the role that violence plays in “constructing and maintaining systems of authority” and Allen Feldman sees violence as “an embodied force” which restricts political agency during the twentieth century conflicts within Ireland (93; Feldman 228, 2). In this way, the study of violence becomes an inquiry into the methods by which certain groups are objectified and commoditized and of the instruments through which agency is regulated within a society, ultimately illustrating the role in which violence plays in the creation and control of a culture’s ideologies.
Violence, in so many ways, paints the pages of the first poems and tales in the English literary canon. In Beowulf we read of Grendel as
He slipped through the door and there in the silence
Snatched up thirty men, smashed them
Unknowing in their beds and ran out with their bodies,
The blood dripping behind him, back
To his lair, delighted with his night’s slaughter. (Raffel 27)

And lest we think such savagery is reserved only for the monstrous, Beowulf’s later fight with the beast leaves Grendel writhing in agony as “the bleeding sinews deep in his shoulder/ Snapped, muscle and bone split/ And broke” (Raffel 49). Even noble Arthur is said to have slain a hag as he helped Culwch win Olwen, and “cut her in half, so that she became two tubs of blood” (Loomis 58). This is a culture where violence is a part of their lives, their greatest fears, and in some cases, their greatest triumphs.
Certainly such tales of gore often illicit horrified responses from modern readers. Were we to compile a survey of violence medieval literature, even in as focused a locale as England, it would still be an immense undertaking. So perhaps there is little we can take from looking at violence in general. A more focused view is then necessary to extrapolate any kind of motive or meaning from the use of violence in early English literature. No better example remains than Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales to illustrate the nuances of violence and narrative.
Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale is at first glance a hectic tale of jealousy and cuckoldry, told in a similar vein to many of the other Canterbury Tales. Yet, its glaring difference is embodied in its main character, the figure of Phebus; Apollo, god of poetry and light. It is he, not lowly Januarie or viscous Walter, who is the cuckolded and violent man of this so-called fabliau. And the antagonist, as the manciple casts him, is a bird--a lowly animal who pays the price for his loyalty by losing his most precious possession--his beautiful voice. Chaucer uses the Phebus of “noble Ovyde” (Merchant’s Tale 2126) to demonstrate that his violent tale functions very much in the same vein as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, casting Apollo as a constant failure in love, shadowed with brutality and ending in metamorphosis.
Michael Kensak, in his article “Apollo exterminans: The God of Poetry in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale” highlights the importance of this literary change-up. The story takes place just as the pilgrims are glancing Canterbury, and as placed before the Parson’s Tale, it falls in line with the tradition of contemporary pilgrimage tales--those of Dante Aligheri and Alain de Little--who “must abandon Apollo and invoke the Christian God before poet and pilgrim can reach their destination” (Kensak 144). Though Apollo fails in both Dante and Alain, Chaucer casts Apollo’s failure in an even more bizarre light, using the god of medicine, poetry, and music to “bring darkness rather than light, lies rather than truth, and silence rather than music” (144).
At the beginning of his tale, the Manciple makes mention of Apollo slaying the Python, a particularly gory section of Ovid’s Metamorphoses which Chaucer would have known well (Kensak 150). Ovid tells of how “Out of the quiver/ Sped arrows by the thousand, till the monster,/ Dying, poured poisonous blood on those black wounds” (Humphries 16). What follows are the sun-god’s numerous love affairs and innumerable bloody deeds, including the brutal flaying of the satyr of Phrygia who dared to challenge the god of song to a fluting competition (150). But setting the scene early in the Metamorphoses, Apollo scoffs at Cupid hovering above him, boasting of his recent kill of the Python, and damns himself for eternal failure--for as the winged god of love tells him:
Your bow shoots everything, Apollo--maybe--
But mine will fix you! You are far above
All creatures living, and by just that distance
Your glory less than mine. (17)

It is that arrow of love that will lead Apollo to never-ending doom.
Immediately after his encounter with Cupid, Apollo begins his wild chase after Daphne--running “one swift in hope/ The other in terror” he is able to finally overcome her--and at that moment, she is turned into a tree by her soft utterances to her father, the river-god (19). Cleverly he claims the laurel as his own, robbing her of agency even in her death. Later, when Apollo sets his eyes on Leucothoe, she “took his passion/ With no complaint” when he displays to her his true splendor (88). Alas, the ever-jealous Clytie makes the affair known to the maid’s father and “He had no pity,/ He would not heed her prayer, her arms, uplifted/ to the light of the sun, her cry He made me do it!” (89). Leucothoe is killed, “smothered and crushed” in a burial tomb under the sands, and Apollo in his despair, turns her to sweet frankincense, the holiest of incense burned in offering to heaven (89). In perhaps the most brutal of his tales, Apollo teams with Mercury, who both take advantage of the young girl Choine, begetting on her children, and help to seal her death; not only does Choine die--slain by an arrow of Diana through her boastful tongue--but her father, Daedalion, tries to throw himself upon her funeral pyre four times before flinging himself off a cliff in despair. In his usual form, Apollo denies him death and changes him into a hawk before he hits the ground (270).
Perhaps Apollo’s most ghastly and indeed gruesome failure is through the love of a young boy. While playing sporting games with young Hyacinthus, he inadvertently kills him with a flying discus:
It bounded once and struck him
Full in the face, and he grew deadly pale
As the pale god caught up the huddled body,
Trying to warm the dreadful chill that held it,
trying to staunch the wound, to keep the spirit
With healing herbs, but all the arts were useless
The wound was past all cure (240).

For the first time, Apollo’s grief is put into words as opposed to action, and Ovid grants us a most heart-wrenching speech. The sun-god says of Hyacinthus, “You are my sorrow,” a rare indication that the gallant Apollo can feel such pain. “Where is my guilt?” he asks, “except in playing/ with you, in loving you? I cannot die/ for you, or with you either” (240).
Each of these tales, given to us throughout the Metamorphoses, helps to solidify the character of Ovid’s Apollo. How strange that Ovid describes Apollo in more splendor than any of his other gods with “hair Golden . . . wreathed with laurel of Parnassus,/ His mantle, dipped in Tyrian crimson,” and yet, he fails completely, nearly every time he appears into a tale. Is it Cupid flying behind his head, mocking him with his little, but powerful arrows? Can it be that his greatest desire leads to his continual failure?
While it is impossible to know precisely what Chaucer may have thought about Ovid’s Apollo, it does seem plausible that he may have noticed such a pattern--probable, in fact, given his treatment of the god. He begins in much the same way as Ovid in his Manciple’s Tale, initially describing Phebus in terms most familiar. Chaucer tells of how Phebus “slow Phitoun” and of his prowess at “mynstralcie”; and unless we forget, “He was therewith fulfilled of gentilesse,/ Of honor, and of parfit worthynesse” (l. 106 ff). In fact the manciple puts it simply: Apollo is so great “What nededth it his fetures to descrive?” (l. 121). Yet by line five already we see that Chaucer’s manciple has already diverged significantly from Ovid as “this paragon of knighthood ambushed the serpent as it napped in the midday sun” (Kensak 146).
In speaking of Phebus’ household, Chaucer first indicates the existence of the crow, rather than the wife of Apollo; the crow, in its initial incantation, is white of feather and sings more beautifully than even the nightingale. Introducing the bird first sets up the central argument of the tale--that is between man and bird, not man and wife--and therefore foreshadowing what is to come. As the crow is caged, however, so is the wife, in much the same way as John the carpenter kept his young wife Alisoun. Perhaps she does not inhabit a metal cage, but the manciple indicates that even though “A good wyf, that is clene of work and thought,/ Shoulde not been kept in noon awayt, certayn,” Phebus, jealous as always, wants to ensure she is kept in line (l. 148-49). This moment, where the Manciple breaks from the narrative to chastise Phebus for his jealous actions is, as Kensak notes, where we first truly realyze that “the virile, young nobleman will, in fact, play the role of the fabliaux’s repulsive, aged husband” (147).
After a digression on caged animals and their behaviors, asserting that he is talking of men and not of women, the Manciple then move the tale along very quickly. We learn that, even though Phebus god of the sun, and virtuous and worthy as any, he has failed miserably, for his unnamed wife is indeed cuckolding him. Kensak holds that this is to reiterate the breaking down of Apollo as deity in the face of the Christian world the pilgrims are in (144). But this is not necessarily the only way of interpreting the cuckolding of a god. In a way, we might see Chaucer painting Phebus as finally getting his just deserts, too blind to his own charms to realize that his wife is having a tryst under his very nose. And to hold with a theme of the Tales themselves, the Manciple’s Tale reiterates that men--regardless of age, class, or pantheon--will suffer should they oppress their wives.
“Cokkow! Cokkow! Cokkow!” sings the crow, and that is enough to undo Phebus. For though the bird may be singing, one cannot mistake what Kensak calls the “hammering” of the bird’s voice (148). It is a musical violence, a taunting carol:
For al thy beautee and thy gentilesse,
For al thy song and al thy mynstralcye,
For al thy waityng, blered is thyn ye
With oon of litel reputacioun,
Noght worth of thee, as in comparisoun,
The montance of a gnat, so moote I thryve!
For on thy beed thy wyf I saugh hym swyve (l. 249-256)

The “hammering” with the repetition of “for al” and the final “for on thy beed” tells Phebus all he needs to know, all he has feared, and all he has worked so hard to prevent. And worst even, his wife chose another “of litel reputacioun”--no better than May choosing Damyan, or a freed bird eating worms.
The tirade that follows is perhaps the most shocking of any that Chaucer gives us. Without consulting the wife, and with no intention of questioning the bird further, Phebus fits his bow with an arrow “And in his ire his wyf thanne hath he slayn” (l. 265). Kensak notes that the line indicating her death is told in the present tense “as if the deed is performed before Phebus realizes what he has done” (148). However, it would be difficult to imagine a god as calculating as Apollo losing sight of what he is doing in relation to love--as the Manciple says: “This is th’effect; ther is namorre to sayn” (l. 266). Women in Ovid are never given much description, save their breathless beauty, so it is no surprise that Chaucer chooses not to flesh out the wife of Apollo. What is shocking, however, is the underplayed violence, the detached nature with which the slaying is committed; she vanishes from the tale in one single line. Not to mention that her death merely sets the stage for the next five lines, whereupon this god of “gentillesse” wreaks havoc upon his instruments. Ovid describes the god’s lyre as “inlaid with jewels,/ With Indian ivory,” and the Manciple gives more time to the destruction of the instruments than to the death of the wife, making it almost appear to be the more costly loss.
It is appropriate, then, that Phebus changes his tune, as it were, once the instruments are destroyed. He does not blame himself; instead he turns his ire toward the bird: “‘Traitour!’ quod he, ‘with tonge of scorpioun,/ Thou has me brought to my confusioun” (l. 271-72). A servant could commit treason in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as Phillipa Maddern notes, by “subverting the interests and marital authority of the household head was . . . tantamount to treason against one’s ruler” (Maddern 42). Though it could be argued that the crow spoke the truth, if we hold Kensak’s “hammering” theory, then the crow’s intention was very much verbal violence, a clear attempt to spur the great highborn god to some kind of ire. Regardless of the intent, the result is certainly effective. The word confusioun, after all, apart from its modern connotation, is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a cause of overthrow or ruin”; this particular usage is cited from Chaucer himself. So the god of music and poetry is admitting a kind of defeat, a ruin, and repays the violence with more fury.
It is a strange moment, for though he laments the death of his wife, Phebus does nothing to immortalize her, as he did with Hyacinthus and Leucothoe--he sees her “deed, with face pale of hewe” and appears unable, or unwilling, to create any sort of restitution (l. 276). He even goes as far as to call her “giltelees” and to rant and rave for over fifteen lines on the danger men fall into when they act rashly in judging their wives’ fidelity. Where is the tender moment, as with Hyacinthus, where he attempts to heal with his powers of medicine? Gone, for Chaucer has truly implemented his failure. Phebus destroys his wife, and she his reputation; he destroys his musical instruments and his bow and arrows, and then claims at the conclusion of his first speech: “Allas! For sorwe I wol myselven slee!” (l. 291). But his claim is short-lived. By the next line he has turned his ire toward the crow.
The punishment of the crow is twofold. First, Phebus robs the crow of his song, which once rivaled that of the nightingale. The “hammer” of song is destroyed, the implement of Apollo’s “confusioun” and “sorwe.” By disarming the crow of his beautiful yet taunting song, Phebus destroys the true gift of music, and takes with it the witness to his cuckoldry. And true to form, as with the satyr, Phebus’ rage turns barbarically violent. The anaphoric verses that follow, depicting the torture of the crow, echo those of the “hammering” song:
And to the crow he stirte, and that anon,
And pulled his white fetheres everychon,
And made him black, and refte hym al his gong,
And eek his speech, and out at dore hym slong
Unto the devel, which I hym bitake;
And for this caas been alle crowes blake (l. 303-309)

“And” is repeated seven eight times in this section, accentuating the pulling of the feathers “everychon” and adding punctuation to the brutal motion. The metamorphosis of the crow works as the final turn of the wheel in the tale of the sun-god; yet the transformation is not through pity or love, as in so many in the Metamorphoses. No, here Phebus changes the crow out of pure hatred and desire to destroy. For once the crow is silenced, his cuckoldry will be safe. In his actions, Phebus becomes the thief. The word “refte” comes from the word reven, or reave, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains it is “to despoil, rob, or forcibly deprive (usually a person) of something.” This ruin reflects Phebus’ past “confusioun”--he is repaying the crow in full for the damage he has done. Phebus is able to, at the end, “deny the truth and make reality subject to his will” (Kensak 149).
The manciple takes the last lines of his tale to bestow upon his listeners the wisdom his mother told him regarding the tongue: “Right as a swerd forkutteth and forkerveth/ An arm a-two, my deere sone, right so/ A tonge kutteth frendshipe al a-two” (ln. 340-42). The blame, it seems, at least from the point of the manciple, rests in the violence of the “Cukkow!” and not in the nearly sociopathic actions of Phebus. We do not know, as Kensak points out, if Phebus does kill himself, but he successively “destroys the symbols that represent him in medieval iconography” (149). The conclusion of the tale then seems an odd contrast to the god’s constant brutality, jealousy, and violence.
What remains is that Chaucer, as Jane Chance has explained, “inverts typically allegorical signification for psychological or political and ironic purposes . . . In doing so, he rewrites--vernacularizes--the Latin and patristic tradition from an English and medieval perspective: his is an antimythography” (Kensak 149). Though this is case to a certain extent, through demonstrating Apollo’s failures, much in line with Ovid’s rendition of the god, Chaucer also sets the story in perfect line with the Metamorphoses. Chaucer’s Phebus differs little from Ovid’s; it only seems that he is slightly out of place in 14th century England, and though he has finally settled down and taken a wife, he is as cautious as ever, perhaps still filled with paranoid delusions of winged Cupid, giggling behind his back. Though he may be the god of prophecy, Phebus’s failure is in his “blered ye.” He cannot see the doom he has brought upon himself.
Once, Ovid tells us, Apollo won his way through to Leucothoe by declaring: “I am the one who measures/ The long year out, I see all things, and all men/ See everything through me, the eye of the world” (Humphries 88). His affair with her then leads to her immediate death and suffering, as with so many others. Chaucer’s ironic inversion of “the eye of the world” casts the sun-god in a most comic role, a cuckolded old man, violent beyond reason, who not only destroys everything he stands for, but everything he desires; he is, at the end, a most violent failure.

Works Cited

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Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

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