Minority Agency in The Canterbury Tales and Its Adaptations

Agency, a person’s ability to freely make independent decisions, stems from a variety of sources. Similarly, there are many structures that limit a person’s agency. Prisoners have limited agency because they lack physical freedom. Soldiers have to follow the orders of higher-ranked officers, so their capacity for free decisions is limited. But besides more superficial structures like prison or military rank, there are more intangible factors that contribute to someone’s agency. The ability to advocate for oneself often leads to free decisions and control. For example, protesters who speak up about injustices often make an impact on the world. Similarly, people who can’t speak up have little control. People living in dictatorships who can’t speak out for fear of government retribution have no control over their lives as a result. Such an inability to communicate is what robs minorities of their agency in The Canterbury Tales and two of its adaptations: Saving Fish from Drowning and Refugee Tales. When these minorities gain outlets for communication, they’re able to impact their environments and take control of their lives.

The main minorities in The Canterbury Tales are women. The women that lack agency are all unable to communicate. Some are physically unable. For example, in the Reeve’s Tale, the miller’s daughter doesn’t get a chance to call out for help before she is robbed of her agency and raped:

This wenche lay upright, and faste slepte,

Til he so neigh was, er she mighte espye,

That it hadde been to late for to crye. (I.4194 - 4196)

Had she been able to call out, she may have been able to get help and stop her rapist. Other Canterbury Tales women, while physically able to advocate for themselves, are manipulated into keeping silent. In the Clerk’s Tale, Grisilde appears to be unaffected when Walter tells her that her children have been killed. But Grisilde’s calmness is likely a product of Walter’s manipulation, since the only time when Grisilde asserts herself to Walter is after their marriage is over:

O thing biseke I yow, and warne also,

That ye ne prike with no tormentinge

This tendre maiden, as ye han don mo. (IV.1037 - 1039)

This shows that Walter was suppressing Grisilde’s capacity to communicate. Clearly, physically fighting back or running away weren’t feasible ways to fight back against Walter. And Grisilde’s only potential recourse, communication, felt unviable. These factors combined to strip Grisilde of her agency and ability to control her situation.

In a similar vein, the women who do have agency in The Canterbury Tales exert it through communication—or a deliberate lack thereof. In the Man of Law’s tale, Custance keeps quiet after landing on foreign shores:

But what she was, she wolde no man seye,

For foul ne fair, thogh that she sholde deye.

She seide, she was so mazed in the see

That she forgat hir minde, by hir trouthe. (II.524 - 527)

By keeping her story a secret, Custance is able to stay safe in a non-Christian country. Her ability to control how she communicates is what gives her agency in a potentially dangerous situation.

While Amy Tan’s Saving Fish From Drowning isn’t a direct adaptation of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s work did provide inspiration. The two books share structural elements: both concern several characters with a variety of experiences making a journey together, for example. But beyond structure, Saving Fish From Drowning’s inspiration from The Canterbury Tales can be seen in the way that it treats its minorities, their ability to communicate, and how this impacts their agency. Rather than women, the main minorities in Saving Fish From Drowning are the Karen tribe of Burma. The Karen tribe has little agency while hiding out in the jungle to avoid military persecution. But they believe that in order to be saved, they simply need to be seen:

The tribe had fantasized that they might one day have a TV show … If they had a show, everyone would admire them. And then SLORC would be too ashamed to kill a tribe that was number one. (Tan 295).

The members of the tribe believe that if they can communicate with the outside world, they will change their circumstances. When Black Spot indirectly gets Roxanne’s tape on the news, the American foreigners are rescued and the Karen tribe is saved. The tribe’s mode of communication—television—is just a detail. Fundamentally, Black Spot and his tribe only have agency when they get a chance to communicate with the outside world.

Refugee Tales and its associated humanitarian project draw influence from Chaucer’s depictions of agency in order to help refugees in the real world. The Refugee Tales project involves a walk across England in a path similar to that of the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales. At different stops along the walk, authors publicly read stories that they’ve written from the point of view of refugees and people who help refugees. The book Refugee Tales is a collection of the tales told along the walk. In giving these people a voice, the Refugee Tales project is actually giving them agency to change their lives. While many of the refugees whose stories are told in Refugee Tales are detained and can’t physically participate in the Refugee Tales walk, what matters is that their stories are still being told. This is similar to Black Spot’s mode of communication: while he himself didn’t do any talking, he still was able to spread his story.

But beyond following the same physical path and using a tale-telling structure similar to that of The Canterbury Tales, the Refugee Tales project draws inspiration from Chaucer’s work in the way that it elevates voices from a variety of social classes to achieve its goal of granting a wide range of people a platform to share their stories. The Canterbury Tales subverts the rigid class structure of its time by having its pilgrims tell their stories in a seemingly random order, rather than a class-based, hierarchical one. The focus on equality in Refugee Tales can be seen in the way that its final tale discusses Christians and Muslims, groups that are said to initially be at odds:

We prayed there together, Christian and Muslim, [… ] I thought I forget but their love I never forget. (“The Refugee’s Tale” 129).

If Refugee Tales only focused on refugees, or if it didn’t place equal value on the voices it represents, the reader wouldn’t gain the same depth of understanding of the issue the project seeks to address. Additionally, a book entirely focused on the tribulations of refugees might seem more hopeless than it does in its current state. The project has a higher potential for achieving its goals because it shows readers that there are many people helping refugees, thus removing a sense of hopelessness that might make readers less inclined to take action.

The Refugee Tales project requires visibility in order to have a chance of being successful. Indeed, this itself is part of the project’s goal: ending indefinite immigration detention by raising public awareness about the issue. The refugees that the project concerns are often invisible or mistrusted. They’re out of the way, either locked up in detention centers or already deported to the countries they tried to flee. Those who are seen are mistrusted:

Someone who dared to sit and look at him for longer than most looks had been.

Spoke to ask not where he’s from, why he’s here, but how he is, who he is?

Jim was the first.

The first one to show this young boy that he cared (“The Deportee’s Tale” 102)

The project’s approach of having established authors retell other people’s stories becomes not just a practical decision to keep refugees safe, but also a decision that helps achieve the project’s goal. Granting a voice to the people most affected by the issue of indefinite detention won’t impact the issue if nobody hears that voice. Therefore, by leveraging the status of established authors, the project and its book are able to gain credibility and potentially appeal to a wider audience.

In The Canterbury Tales, Saving Fish From Drowning, and Refugee Tales, a minority’s ability to act freely is determined by their ability to communicate. In Saving Fish From Drowning, the Karen tribe only has agency when they take advantage of an opportunity to communicate with the outside world. This connection between communication and agency is similar to that found in many of the women in The Canterbury Tales. The refugees in Refugee Tales also have a similar lack of agency. The Refugee Tales project uses aspects of Chaucer’s work in order to give these refugees agency via an outlet for communication. Despite taking entirely different approaches to adapting The Canterbury Tales, Saving Fish From Drowning and Refugee Tales both incorporate some of the same fundamental aspects of Chaucer’s work.

Works Cited

Chaucer, Geoffrey, and Jill Mann. The Canterbury Tales. London: Penguin, 2005. Print.

Tan, Amy. Saving Fish From Drowning. New York: Ballantine, 2006. Print.

Herd, David, and Anna Pincus. Refugee Tales. 2016. Print.