In Chaucers Knigthts Tale, a tale rich in overlays of visual narratives, one of the first accounts of the operations of the gaze effects a similar kind of inversion, one fully authorized by medieval amatory metaphysics. ...
Nevertheless, one of the texts most mesmerizing fictions is the fiction of Emelyes agency, the fiction that she has power and that the Theban knights live and die as her love slaves. ... In many respects the Knights Tale, prodigal in its displays of masculinity, parades its mesmerizing fictions in a scotoma, in a blink of comfortable delusion that seems remarkably similar to fictions of heterosexuality underpinning 20th century mass-market cultural productions. ... " The personal moment fueling this essay is the question, "how do I read the Knights Tale? ... Recognizing that Emily is profoundly unimportant to this tale, observing the erasure of her body by the narrator, the cooption of her gaze by the men who love her and the usurpation of her will by everyone in the text, I continue to trust in the patent fiction of her centrality. ... And although numerous recent scholars have pointed to the ways in which the Knights Tale inveighs against itself, serving as a parody and demonstrandum of chivalric excess or enacting a story about masculine communities at the expense of Emily (Hansen 216), a first encounter with the text (though never an innocent one) would still be likely, I believe, to float it as an idealizing story of derring-do, honorable action, and true love for a lady. One of the most remarkable features of the Knights Tale is its insistence on its own fictions. ... Marshall Leicester, in a series of rich and complex essays on the Knights Tales shaping of subjectivity, argues that the text constructs "an extended treatment of the masculine gaze" through a "rhizomatic network" of visual relations, particularly in the account of the temples. ... The question is a basic one for issues of both female fantasy and feminist politics, addressing not only how we read the tale, but how we watch it, drawing together reading and watching in a monocular optic. ... Furthermore, the Knights Tale consistently seems to displace or replace Emily with a story about male-male relations, even figured visually in terms that invert the gendered structured of male fantasy.
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