과거의 몸 / 몸의 과거 -면죄사의 경우 = The Body of the Past / The Past of the Body: The Pardoner`s Case

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

There have been a lot of disputes among Chaucerians concerning the line, I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare. But the medieval evidences and the modern critical positions derived from them are discursively fragmentary and contradictory. And the fictional body these discourses produce is as unstable and discoherent as they are. As Carolyn Dinshaw remarks. the Pardoner is uncertainly sexed and uncertainly gendered, a man who is not a man, womanish but not a woman. There have also been a 1ot of disputes concerning the Pardoner`s offering to the pilgirms relics he had already admitted to be false. He said just before the beginning of the performance that Christ`s, not his own, pardons are best. Kittredge described it as a paroxysm of agonized sincerity, but it grew out from the view in which the Pardoner`s behavior was understood in terms of heterosexual normativeness. The Pardoner is an unstable creature who is uncategorizable in the binary gender terms of heterosexuality. He is in fact a man who is faking there and being sincere here and thus wanders between truth and falsehood. What the Pardoner shows in his performance is a dubious standard to distinguish between truth and falsehood, normality and abnormality and wholeness and deficiency. The Pardoner`s behaviors of disturbing the heterosexual normativeness remind us of the queer theory. The queer critics try to subvert the difference between the normality and the abnormality and defend the otherness of marginalized men and women. Chaucer`s study of sexuality in the Pardoner represents a deliberate intention to explore the inner reality of an outcast despised by his society and misunderstood by his church. Chaucer, through the Pardoner that figure utterly different from the other men and women, that figure of fundamental absence leads his listeners to contemplate another being entirely out of their bounds.