Document Type
Article
Peer Reviewed
1
DOI
10.17077/1536-8742.2155
Access Restrictions
Full text restricted to subscribers.
Abstract
This essay argues for silence as a dynamic actant and vibrant rhetoric. While Walter commits slow violence against her, Griselda in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale resists the predatory practice of exploiting nonhuman objects, which, within misogyny, women embody. Ultimately framed within an ecocritical paradigm, this essay is grounded in lessons from trauma studies concerning silence, as well as new materialist and ecocritical approaches. Whether focusing on emotional distress, environmental devastation, or the agency of materiality, these critical approaches cohere by making manifest and heard what has been repressed, silenced, or overlooked. Griselda writes her own narrative, patiently and resiliently enacting agency through her poetics of negation.
Keywords
resilience; silence; Patient Griselda; negative poetics; ecocriticism; trauma studies; critical plant studies; medieval muteness; new materialism
Rights Information
Copyright © 2021 Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship
Recommended Citation
Morrison, Susan Signe "Insistent, Persistent, Resilient: The Negative Poetics of Patient Griselda." Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 56, No. 2 (2021) : 73-92.
Included in
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Medieval History Commons
