Myers, Jeffrey Rayner. “Chaucer’s Pardoner as Female Eunuch.” Studia Neophilologica: A Journal of Germanic and Romance Languages and Literature, vol. 72, no. 1, 2000, pp. 54–62. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/003932700750041603.
Myers contends that unlike what has been argued for many years, the Pardoner in Chaucer’s work is not a homosexual, but rather a cross-dressing woman instead. Myers points out that the argument that the Pardoner is a homosexual is based on the reading of one line from the General Prologue in which it states the Pardoner is “a gelding or a mare” (GP Line 691). He argues this is problematic because the word “mare” has been misinterpreted for too long. He states, “a large body of criticism examining the implications of the Pardoner’s supposed homosexuality has been built on an interpretation of one word with no linguistic evidence whatsoever to support that interpretation” (55). Myers sheds light on this point by explaining that the word “mare” does not have a homosexual interpretation during Chaucer’s time, nor before or after, so it doesn’t make sense that it does in his tale. He further develops his point that the Pardoner is a cross-dressing female by highlighting other parts of the Pardoner’s character, such as the Pardoner’s relationship with the Summoner (seen instead as homosexual as heterosexual in this article) and with the Wife of Bath (seen as two women talking instead of one scared of marriage). Myers also notes Chaucer was not the first author of his time to use a cross-dressing female as a character and this concept would have been familiar to his audience. Myers ends his argument by saying that while we don’t know for sure, there is more evidence that points to the Pardoner being a cross-dressing female than there is to the Pardoner being homosexual, but that because the tales are not complete, we cannot know for sure.
-Rachelle Durrant
