The outrageous Pardoner has often seemed among the most real of Chaucer's pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales. Although only a few have thought him an actual portrait from life, the majority of modern critics has believed in the essential truth of the characterization. Paul Ruggiers speaks for many when he asserts that the Pardoner's performance provides "the ultimate example of Chaucer's subtle handling of human psychology.
Kittredge, who at the beginning of the century demonstrated so brilliantly how much could be made by critical inventiveness from almost nothing. Kittredge's dramatic interpretation culminates in his finding the Pardoner's unremarkable three-line statement that Christ's pardon is best C 18 an expression of extraordinary emotional crisis in which the pilgrim "suffers a very paroxysm of agonized sincerity. The various critical re-creations of the Pardoner tend to be ingenious, and most are interesting, but they are also overly subjective because they rest on little actual evidence in the text.
In recent years, most Chaucerians seeking to reveal the "real" Pardoner have focused on the supposed irregularity of his sex life, and it is the assumption that the Pardoner's sexuality can be exactly. Of course it is impossible finally to prove a negative, but I will suggest that the various precise diagnoses of the Pardoner's sexual condition offered by so many critics are much less reliable than most Chaucerians have come to believe. My purpose is not to offer a new explanation of the Pardoner's sexuality but to show the weakness of this entire approach, which is given a specious authority from its claim to be based on hard scientific evidence.
The poet undoubtedly hints at sexual disorder of some sort as one part of the Pardoner's general corruption, but the excessive modern preoccupation with the pilgrim's sexuality distorts Chaucer's method of characterization by demanding certainty where none exists.
The sexual interpretation of the Pardoner is quite new and first begins with Walter Clyde Curry's claim in to have discovered the Pardoner's "secret. Indeed, although most critics today seem to agree that the Pardoner's odd sexuality is crucial to his performance, the exact form of that sexuality is as much an open question as other aspects of his character.
