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Performing Understandings: The Prioress’ Tale, Orientalism, and Austinian Performative Utterances Ryan Carroll, The George Washington University Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Prioress’ Tale, one of the most intriguing and ambivalent entries in The Canterbury Tales, is a rich work that offers insight into the simultaneous power and conflict inherent to speech. In this paper, I will endeavor to study this speech conflict through the lens of J.L. Austin’s “Performative Utterances” and Edward Said’s Orientalism, studying the way in which language manifests as a potent force in the poem, with utterances themselves altering both material and psychic conditions. Using Austin’s Speech Act Theory and Said’s theory of Orientalism in a pragmatic linguistic analysis of the text, the entirety of The Prioress’ Tale1 can be viewed as a series of speech acts, all of which produce powerful forces of utterance that, through rhetoric, enact ideologies into reality. Considered this way, we may find that both the text and metatext of The Prioress’ Tale are comprised of a number of speech acts, which, beyond making simple descriptive proclamations, perform rhetorical positions into concrete realities—even, at times, doing so unintentionally. Within the story, the character of Christian boy, in performing a song, unintentionally asserts an ideological affront against the city’s Jewish community, while Satan’s manipulative description of the boy’s song functions to assert another ideology that turns the Jewish crowd against the boy. Metatextually, Chaucer’s narrator utters the story in such a way as to rhetorically separate the Prioress from himself, implying a kind of irony to the tale and its problematic Orientalist rhetoric— while simultaneously, the very utterance of The Prioress’ Tale also edifies a problematic conception of the East, regardless of any ironic intent. Thus, The Prioress’ Tale, Orientalism, and “Performative Utterances” all work to shed light on one another. With Austin’s framework in mind, The Prioress’ Tale can serve to expand the idea of performative utterances, emphasizing that speech acts contain a rhetorical power of utterance (a concept that Austin indirectly posited) that can often occur inadvertently, but that nonetheless performs certain understandings of the world into existence, consequently producing tangible consequences—often, in such a way that may 1
Periodically, I will abbreviate The Prioress’ Tale as Tale.
