Hybridity in Geoffrey Chaucer’S the Canterbury Tales: Reconstructing Estate Boundaries

Abstract

This study of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales reads his pilgrims as the hybrids of medieval borderline community, created by social mobility. Thus, drawing on Bhabha’s postcolonial concepts of hybridity, in–betweenness, third space and mimicry, this dissertation argues that Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales depicts a variety of medieval hybrid identities. Accordingly, Chapter I discusses the Knight as a medieval hybrid owing to the changes within his own estate, the nobility, and his consequent downward mobility putting him in-between the realms and required values of his old and new status. In Chapter II, similar to the Knight, yet moving from the nobility to the clergy, the Monk and the Prioress are examined as noble hybrids due to downward mobility. Finally, Chapter III analyses the Franklin and the Miller as the hybrids and mimics of upward mobility, who challenge the social order and ask for their own order by claiming gentility.