Muslim Griselda: The Politics of Gender and Religion in Geoffrey Chaucer'sClerk's Taleand Pramoedya Ananta Toer'sThe Girl from the Coast

The Girl from the Coast, composed in the 1960s by the acclaimed Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, has a plot line and authorial stance that in many ways parallel those of Chaucer's Clerk's Tale. In each work a powerful lord marries an extremely poor girl from an impoverished village; when the girl's reproductive value has been exploited, she is sent back to her father's house. Both works are set in the historical past, and each displays a particular interest in a peasant woman's opportunities for agency in a noble household where the practices of institutionalized religion sustain the husband's authority. Especially interesting are parallels related to the two works' opposed gender perspectives. The Clerk's Tale limits clues to Griselda's thinking to the words, expressions, and actions that her husband observes. A reader of The Girl from the Coast, in contrast, tracks the heroine's mind and, like her, knows the thoughts of her lord and husband only in so far as they are evidenced by his behavior and their rare conversations. Juxtaposing the two works provides a mutually illuminating gloss with respect to marital relations in a postcolonial patriarchal society.