The Clerk's Tale and the expectation of astonishment
The suspense of knowing the ending
My Western Canon salon series with Interintellect continues on 11th July with Goethe. We are discussing The Sorrows of Young Goethe.
Penelope Fitzgerald mentions this as one of the stories that developed her love of plots with a twist at the end. But it appeared on the 1970 A-level exam with this question: “Whatever its other merits, The Clerk’s Tale does not achieve its effects primarily through surprise.”
So is it a plot with a twist or not?
Here’s the story. Walter, the Marquis, marries Griselda, a village girl. He decides to test her wifeliness and has her children taken away at birth. She thinks they have gone to die. Another Marquis, however, raises them in secret. Years later, Walter tests Griselda again: he sends her home and tells her he is marrying a younger woman. Griselda dutifully goes home but comes back to help with the wedding preparations. The big surprise is that the children are coming back. Instead of marrying one of them, Walter presents the young woman and the young man to Griselda as her returned children.
Obviously, in many ways, the ending is not a surprise. We know the children were secretly raised by the other Marquis. Maybe we would be surprised by the plot if we weren’t familiar with the genre, but that’s not a very good answer.
And I don’t think it’s true.