"Countrefete Cheere": Kitsch, Taste, and The Prioress's Tale

With her particular and prim manners, extreme sentimentality, religious fanaticism, and highly stylized poetics, Chaucer's Prioress exemplifies many of the aesthetic, ideological, and contextual ambivalences of kitsch. In this article, I enable the critical language of kitsch from theorist Theodor W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (published in 1970) and the paradox presented in the Nazis' "Anti-Kitsch Law" to present a new framework for understanding the complexities of Chaucer's The Prioress's Tale. Kitsch, I argue, disrupts rather than sustains the text's aesthetic appeal to religious sensibility and communal affirmation. In the process, the Tale raises aesthetic and ethical questions regarding the ideology of forms that aestheticize or "harmonize" ugliness, especially death.