Kill Me, Save Me, Let Me Go: Custance, Virginia, Emelye

The inevitability of bad Fama worries a few of Chaucer’s heroines. Cresseid and Dido prefer that their shame not be spread about, while the Wife of Bath prefers to seize the means of narrative production.1 Each worries about what will be said about her; each justifies her actions; but none recognizes that, as a literary character, she could not have done other than she did. This is where Custance, Virginia, and Emelye differ. It is the difference between saying, “I wish you wouldn't talk about me this way” and saying, instead, “why are you doing this to me?” or, more precisely, “Why are you making me do this?” For each one knows, if only for a moment, that the responsibility for what happens to her and through her lies elsewhere. Each experiences the precise opposite of self-awareness, for each momentarily struggles against the narrative before realizing herself to be not a self but rather someone else's creature, destined to be rewarded or to suffer regardless of what she does, destined to be made to be satisfied with what happens, destined to be exemplary whether she wants to or not, because she comes to know that her wants are not her own. At once constituted and dispossessed by her tale, each implicitly repeats one of Žižek’s favorite maxims, Deleuze’s “si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l’autre, vous êtes foutu”2 [“if you're caught in the dream of another, you're fucked”]. One seeks death; another wants to be something other than a creature of her father; and the last tries to exempt herself from the tale’s political reconciliation. None gets what she wants: one forced to live, one to die, one to love, each gets just enough awareness of being in their stories to know that they want out. Then the door slams shut.