Chaucer’s Discourse of the North-South Divide in The Man of Law’s Tale

The primary purpose of this essay is to survey the cultural imperialism represented in “The Man of Law’s Tale.” Chaucer’s “Tale” has often been discussed in terms of Edward Said’s Orientalism, and critics have delved deeply into the Man of Law’s discourse of cultural imperialism. However, few critics have attempted to analyze the tale’s regional politics, which develop a sort of internal colonialism. In the narrative, we find two episodes, which are thematically inseparable: the first one is about Islamic Syria, and the other is about an ahistorical and imaginary sixth-century, pagan Northern England. This essay, by focusing on the latter episode, surveys pre-modern English regionalism and how it is inseparably associated with cultural imperialism. Chaucer’s imagination connects these two episodes through Custance’s two incidents of marriage—first by matching her to a Syrian Sultan and then to Alla, the King of Northumberland, whose name uncannily evokes the Islamic God. Thus, the tale conveniently extends its Orientalist discourse to a certain provincial area in England. In Man of Law’s own tale (or in Chaucer’s own cultural depiction), Northern England—a culturally isolated area north of the Humber and east of the Pennines—represents a type of cultural ambiguity—it is a sort of other community with its paganism and barbarity, but it is also an English territory that should be protected from the Scots and a land to be converted to Christianity. If the entire scheme of The Canterbury Tales portrays a pilgrimage from Southwark to Canterbury, and thus epitomizes the religious experiences of the south, it inevitably Otherizes the religious lives of the north—definitely, “The Man of Law’s Tale” best illustrates such alterity.