Chaucer's Worldview and Ecological Biocentrism

• Main Authors: Shu-O Huang, 黃淑娥
• Other Authors: Yuan-guey Chiou
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/01623580134247974384

博士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系碩博士班 === 97 === In Chaucerian study, most criticisms center on issues of human society, politics, ideology, gender or psychology. In comparison, how Chaucer relates humanity to nature is a more neglected topic. However, the author believes that Chaucer has a strong notion of natural order. The notion seems to be outdated or superstitious from modern scientific, humanistic viewpoint, and is thus underestimated or disregarded by modern literary criticism, which emphasizes human issues, hardly taking Chaucer’s notion of cosmic order into consideration. In this study, the author seeks to relate Chaucer’s cosmology to deep ecology and environmental ethics, and to re-read Chaucer’s works in light of ecological biocentrism. Ecology in postmodern age is no longer a technical matter of environmental protection, but a study involving ethics, worldview and belief. Hence, there is a distinction between so-called deep ecology and shallow ecology. The latter is concerned only with passive conservation of natural resources, while the former, more radically with worldview and environmental ethics. As modern scientific civilization has been destructive to the environment and humanity itself, deep ecologists advocate that human beings have to review or restructure their cosmology in order to ultimately salvage the destruction. Therefore, the worldview of the religious, agricultural and feudal Middle Ages informed in Chaucer’s works is a meaningful contrast for us to reflect on. Medieval worldview might be related to deep ecology because both deep ecologists and medieval men believe that man should be pious, humble and respectful toward nature, and that there is a higher, natural order beyond humanity. Both medieval view and deep ecology oppose anthropocentrism or the belief in human power which has developed since the Renaissance and Scientific Revolutions. Medieval values and belief in God or natural order have been regarded as conservative or superstitious. But in this postmodern age, deep ecologists have called for a return or re- recognition of medieval belief in cosmic, natural order, in order to modify the harm done by the modern belief in anthropocentrism, which is the main cause of our environmental crisis, according to ecophilosophers. In this study, the author tries to redefine Chaucer’s belief in cosmic order from the perspective of deep ecology. That is, Chaucer’s worldview, his belief in natural order is equated to ecological biocentrism. Firstly, in this study Chaucer’s skepticism toward alchemy in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale is associated with ecophilosphers’ criticism of modern science, which has been regarded as a kind of alchemy in treating nature as a lifeless object to be exploited by humanity. Chaucer’s skepticism toward alchemy signifies medieval man’s piety toward nature, and thus corresponds to the environmental ethics that postmodern age needs to modify modern scientists’ and capitalists’ anthropocentric approaches toward nature. Next, modern scientific civilization and medieval worldviews are compared to manifest that in medieval view man and nature are organically one, while in modern scientific worldview, man and nature are alienated. Thirdly, Chaucer’s concept of nature revealed in the Parliament of Fowls, some tales in the Canterbury Tales and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, is explored to manifest that Chaucer’s worldview is similar to holistic biocentrism, according to which, man is not the lord of nature but one of the species humbly subject to the rule of natural law. Fourthly, the Canterbury Tales is read as an ecosystem, in which diverse voices, natural elements and creatures (human beings, animals and constellations) interacting with each other organically. Besides, the metaphor of pilgrimage significantly integrating the earthly world and the spiritual order, land and religion, is thus probed in light of deep ecology and Bakhtin’s theory of chronotope. The fifth chapter focuses on the dualism between nature/womanhood and culture/patriarchy in Troilus and Criseyde and some tales of the Canterbury Tales, to manifest that the cosmic, natural order Chaucer adheres to is based upon recognition rather than denial of the earthly, the physical and the feminine entities. Despite his repentance and retraction as seen in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s listing all the tales that “sownen into synne” bespeaks that he is an artist, not a moralist, and what he follows is natural law rather than limited ideologies or religious dogmas. Therefore, “Al that is writen is writen for oure doctrine.” Everything of nature must be meaningful in terms of deep ecology even though humans do not understand it. Natural order has never been absent from the (modern) world since the Middle Ages.