8 March 1999

The Miller's Tale and The Merchant's Tale (and The Knight's Tale)

Chaucer and the Miller seem both to offer us The Miller's Tale in direct opposition to The Knight's Tale, and specifically, to offer us the Miller's ideas of bawdy love in opposition to the Knight's ideals of courtly love. I would be slow on the uptake perhaps not to think that you, having assigned Knight's Tale/Gawain one week and Miller's Tale/ Merchant's Tale the next, weren't up to something similar. So it seems, given these contexts, that courtly love honors the woman, glorifies her, celebrates her, pedestalizes her, values her beauty and virginity and virtue, never takes advantage of her, treats her as the most important thing in the world, and, above all, never shames her, whereas the fabliaux⁽¹⁾ are all about sex, lechery, jealousy and thus include relations with women which/who are not pure, respectful, virginal, honorable. In short, while we could certainly debate which make better characters, the men and women in fabliaux or in lais, we would seemingly rather be, or at least have over for dinner, the courtly lovers. That is, while we could debate which makes the better story, surely the women in courtly love stories are treated better by better men. This, I gather, is the point.
 

It is interesting then that it is the degraded, debased, used, embarrassed, sexualized women in the fabliaux who are in fact stronger than the women in the lais. Part of this, in the Miller's Tale and the Merchant's Tale, is because they trick jealous husbands, a strengthening exercise which maidens dating knights rarely have, but part of their strength comes from the fact that they have agency, voice, subject positioning. Such terms call to the fore the obvious fact that women like Emelye in the Knight's Tale are but objects in the story (that is, useful not as characters but as plot devices) and are objectified (which is to say valued for their beauty and not their personality - in fact, their beauty signifies their personality and so takes its place not only in the minds of the knights but also in the minds of the reader as Emelye comes to us without a bit of character development). But there is more going on here. Somehow, though Januarie and the carpenter are both jealous, lecherous old men instead of gallant knights, "their" women get personalities and moments of action (Alison more than May). Though these women are debased, they find ways to manipulate their situations. And though they are clearly as guilty as their courtly counterparts are virtuous, it is their husbands who get punished. So Alison, cheating on her husband, ends laughing whereas the three men in the Miller's Tale are all punished. Januarie is made to look like a fool while May gets to keep him and her lover. All this in marked contrast to the Knight's Tale, for instance, where Emelye is forced into marriage and presumably motherhood with a man she does not love though she prays to remain a virgin while the two men both (though this is seemingly impossible) get their wishes. So there are two strange things here. One: the virtuous women are punished while the sinning women are not only unscathed but victorious. And two: the women in the seemingly more appealing position (given that we would probably all rather be lauded than degraded) are in fact objectified and disregarded while the women in the worse position get independence, even dominance, and at the least voice, capacity, personality.
 

The women in the fabliaux are thus the strong ones, the feminist heroines (given our limited options) despite the fact that the courtly stories tell us again and again how great the women are and the bawdy tales tell us again and again (and have as their seeming moral) that women are all deceitful and contaminated (this is especially true of, say, the Merchant's Prologue, not really part of his tale, or really the most important part of his tale, depending on how you look at it). Thus I propose that not only are the women more active in the fabliaux than in the courtly stories, so is the reader. In the latter, authors/narrators seem to be pushing the reader out of the text, hoping we won't notice the weak woman who simply doesn't seem worth all the fighting over, whose beauty doesn't replace her personality for us though we are meant to believe it does for the characters within the story, and who, even despite her weakness on one hand and glorification on the other, still seems to deserve better than she gets. As the Knight seems not to notice, the genre asks that, as readers, we fail to notice as well. We have to be entranced in the fairy tale and overlooking the inconsistencies in order to buy the romance of the lais - and this is not an active overlooking and entrancing but a passive lulling of the reader/self out of the text and our awareness of it. The fabliaux, on the other hand, invite us in - to decide whom among these wholly imperfect characters to root for (the cunning but cheating woman? the dumb but sympathetic and wronged man? the complicit lover?), to decide to what degree we will be complicit ourselves, to involve ourselves as active readers in a plot involving active characters (as readers, we emulate Emelye and Alison and May, active when the latter are, passive when the first is, following their lead in the stories). And of course, the verb "to decide" here is only partially truthful. As readers we are manipulated into and out of the stories, often beyond our control, and though we relinquish this power willingly when we read literature, it is an important loss of power on our part nonetheless.

1. I am not sure I'm using this term correctly or that the Merchant's Tale really is one. In fact, I am not sure I am using the term "lai" correctly either.