Don't You Wish Your Creative Title Was Hot Like Mine: Troubled Binaries in the Physician's Tale

Hey, friends! I wanted to offer a brief response to Glenn Burger's reading of the Physician's Tale, as my reading differs on an intuitive level, and I'd like to hear other thoughts on it.

Burger's argument is that the Physician's Tale models the excision of the feminine from the masculine homosocial world/psyche: an excision that the Pardoner then performs by telling a tale with no female characters in it and that the pilgrims perform through their antipathy to the feminized Pardoner. However, I read the Physician's Tale as condemning the actions of Virginius and problematizing the ostensible meaning behind the "historial thyng," based on the differences between Livy's tale as it appears in Romance of the Rose and the Physician's Tale. For instance:

* In the story as told in Romance of the Rose, there is no pathos for the daughter-- Virginius leaves the court, he removes his daughter's head, he comes back. The Physician, on the other hand, describes Virginia with her arms around her father, asking for "grace" and "remedye" (236).

* The Physician's seemingly tangential (do Appias' actions constitute betrayal if Virginia did not know him, let alone store any faith in him?) preliminary invective:

And taketh kep of that that I shal seyn:
Of alle tresons sovereyn pestilence
Is whan a wight bitrayseth innocence. (90-92)

* And this weird seeming narrative mistake, when the Physician notes that, after Appias kills himself and Virginius pardons Claudius, "The remenant were anhanged, moore and lesse / That were consentant of this cursednesse" (275-76). Only no other villain was explicitly named in the story. Romance of the Rose explains that those "remenant" were the false witnesses against Virginius, but the absence of this explanation in the Physician's Tale seems loud. When I read it, I assumed it was the father who was the last "conentant of this cursednesse"-- the very next line explains, "Heere may men seen how synne hath his merite."

If we can read the Physician as in opposition to the actions of Virginius, the moments in the text when female becomes male--

* Nature (femininized) --> "vicaire general" (20)
* maistresses --> A theef of venysoun, that hath forlaft / His likerousnesse and al his olde craft" (83-84)
* Virginia --> Virginius

may not be instances of the masculine swallowing the feminine (as Burger suggests) but instances of gender transitivity. That relies, of course, on a subversive Physician, and it also implies a Pardoner at odds with Donald Howard's and Glenn Burger's "grotesque." But, uh, more on that anon.