Excluding ‘The Knight’s Tale’, the first fragment of The Canterbury Tales is characterised by “harlotrye” referring to crude jesting, not exclusively of a sexual nature as harlotry particularly means now.1 Chaucer represents harlotry as the antithesis of morality, or “virtuous conduct and thought” as in the ‘Miller’s Prologue‘ Chaucer the pilgrim (the voice narrating the poem as opposed to Chaucer the author) advises the reader to skip the upcoming pages if they seek “moralitee and holinesse”.2 Through the Miller and the Reeve’s tales, Chaucer explores harlotry as a spectrum, using the harlotry within ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ and its wider context to depict amorality, and ‘The Miller’s Tale’ to demonstrate how harlotry can remain humorous. As the object of the game is to quite the prior storyteller by telling the most entertaining story, Robin and Oswald’s tales demonstrate the centrality of harlotry in both their ideas of fun but by using the fabliau genre for both tales, Chaucer emphasises the differences in the nature of Robin and Oswald’s harlotry.
In ‘The Miller’s Tale’, Chaucer’s reliance on humour that appeals to our carnal nature and his early characterisation of Robin as brash but jolly obscures the tale’s immorality. Robin’s profile in the ‘General Prologue’ describes him as a lover of lewd jokes and an enthusiastic brawler and his tale is preceded by his insistence on following the Knight in the storytelling, against standards of propriety.3 This establishes him as a renegade among the pilgrims, leading us to expect a subversive tale which he fulfils in his choice of an old, foolish man and a young, wily woman as the married couple on which the tale’s events are focalised. By highlighting John and Alisoun’s marriage as unusual and ill-advised due to the ‘fact’ that “youthe and elde is often at debaat”, Chaucer presents the tale’s transgressions as quirks of a world in which follies such as John’s belief that he and Alisoun could live harmoniously are commonplace.4 This is furthered by the subversion of the privacy of the marital home into a public matter by inviting us to experience Nicholas’ appropriation of John and Alisoun’s bedroom. As Nicholas’ grabbing of Alisoun’s vagina is the tale’s defining violation of decency and occurs towards the beginning, Robin capitalises on the extremity of this transgression to incorporate the elaborate actions that occur later which confirm the tale as comical in nature.
The precedent set by the lewdness of the initial contact between Nicholas and Alisoun makes the tale’s subsequent action less shocking and more humorous, aided by its already juvenile nature. The emphasis on bodily functions and physicality in Alisoun’s tricking Absolon to kiss her bottom, and Nicholas farting in Absolon’s face and receiving a coulter to his bottom depicts the behaviour as more childlike than malicious which diminishes its capability for real harm. In actuality, Alisoun is an adulterer, Nicholas is lustful and scheming, Absolon is unprincipled, misusing his position as a parish clerk to ogle the female congregants, and John is foolish and averse to knowledge. By exploiting the childishness of already outlandish activities, Chaucer obscures these realities, making us comfortable to playfully consume what is, in essence, the bastardisation of Christian morals. The tale’s liveliness therefore not only masks the immorality of its world’s inhabitants, it also challenges the reader’s own morality. In the chapter of Chaucerotics titled ‘“Ther was the revel and the melodye”: The Playful Cloak of Language in The Miller’s Tale’, Geoffrey Gust argues that our enjoyment of the tale’s ending represents our “persistent, pleasureful gazing in on private interaction”.5 By giving pre-eminence to the humorous elements of the characters’ behaviour, Chaucer trivialises the tale’s immorality so it eludes condemnation from the reader, with our doing so reflecting our base nature.
Where Robin’s success in trivialising immorality is most evident is in the common reading of Alisoun’s sexuality. Because of the directness of the language, the sexual material of ‘The Miller’s Tale’ is more overtly coarse than that of ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ but is often read as tongue-in-cheek. Robin describes the moment of Nicholas and Alisoun’s first sexual interaction graphically with the lines “As clerkes ben ful subtile and ful queynte,/ And prively he caughte hire by the queynte”.6 The double entendre of “queynte” contributes to presenting this as playful but the use of “prively” begins to indicate that this attention is not necessarily welcome, confirmed in Alisoun’s emphatic protestations:
And she sprong as a colt doth in the trave,
And with hir heed she wryed faste awey,
“I wol nat kisse thee, by my fey.
Why, lat be,” quod she, “lat be, Nicholas,
Or I wol crye ‘out, harrow’ and ‘allas.’
Do wey your handes, for you curteisye!”
(Chaucer, ‘The Miller’s Tale’, ll. 3282-87)
It is clear from the language that Alisoun is resistant to Nicholas’ sexual aggression, a fact underscored by the imagery of a young horse wrestling for freedom. As her eventual submission to Nicholas is due to his harassment of her, the ensuing affair is therefore coerced. That Alisoun’s initial resistance has been virtually erased from criticism of ‘The Miller’s Tale’ in favour of a narrative unsubstantiated by the text—one in which she is perpetually and joyfully receptive to men’s urges—demonstrates critics’ conflation of female flirtatiousness with permanent and unconditional consent, a view of female sexuality unchallenged by the text itself. In ‘“Ther was the revel and the melodye”’, Gust rightly notes that the audience is implicated in the “lecherous ogling of Alisoun’s body” and through the reverse effictio of Alisoun that Chaucer offers, we are indeed encouraged to ogle her.7 Yet despite beginning to touch on the reader’s role in Alisoun’s hypersexualisation, Gust ultimately rewrites Alisoun as the wanton woman, echoing the popular view that “she plays the role of the tease, leading him along while denying him his urges — at least until she finds a better time to be “at his comandement””.8 Yet this is not even remotely implied in the tale; although Alisoun’s profile is certainly laden with details that are sexually suggestive, only in the lines “sikerly she hadde a likerous ye” and the sentiment that she was suitable “For any lord to leggen in his bedde” is she described explicitly as a sexual being.9 The reconstruction of Alisoun as unrestrictedly sexually available in the collective imagination is therefore coming from outside the text itself — from the readership’s continuation of Alisoun in their minds, encouraged by the seduction of her profile.
The prevalence of criticism that, if acknowledging it at all, trivialises the violation of Alisoun’s boundaries reflects what is encouraged by Chaucer as after her noes are ignored in favour of Nicholas’ sexual gratification, Alisoun metamorphoses into an obsequiously obliging host, formally beginning their affair. That Chaucer himself makes little of her cries and the coercive nature of Nicholas and Alisoun’s first sexual tryst through the swift change from victim to enthusiastic participant has facilitated the recasting of Alisoun as whore that is endemic in criticism of ‘The Miller’s Tale’. The ubiquitousness of this reading of Alisoun’s sexuality, resulting in the dismissal of the true nature of the tale’s most famous moment again reflects the reader’s own lusts and more importantly, demonstrates the way in which Robin, through his prioritisation of play is able to marginalise the immorality that is in plain view.
‘The Reeve’s Tale’ also features subversive elements, being centred on the marriage between a thieving miller and the town parson’s daughter and the destruction of the miller’s hopes for his daughter’s marriage prospects. However, while Robin’s intention with his tale is to merely outshine the Knight while mocking the pretensions of the upper estates, demonstrated by his insistence that “I can a noble tale for the nones,/ With which I wol now quyte the Knightes tale”, ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ is born out of Oswald’s perceived slight on his masculinity.10 As a result, his tale is intended to avenge himself as upon learning ‘The Miller’s Tale’ will involve a cuckolded carpenter, which Oswald also is by trade, he protests:
Lat be thy lewd and dronken harlotrye.
It is a sinne and eek a greet folye
To apeiren any man, or him defame.
(Chaucer, ‘The Miller’s Prologue’, ll. 3145-47)
Unlike in ‘The Miller’s Tale’ where the female body is exploited in one regard but is also autonomous in Alisoun’s ability to use her body to humiliate Absolon, in ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ the female body is predominantly the site for male power struggles, resulting in the tale’s harlotry being nefarious rather than playful. John and Aleyn’s rapes of Maleyn and Simkin’s wife are presented as morally dubious but pointedly not criminal; rather, according to Aleyn he is in keeping with the common law that dictates “if a man in a point be agreved,/ That in another he sal be relieved.”11 Although Chaucer takes care to present the interaction between Aleyn and Maleyn as non-consensual through the fact that Maleyne is asleep when John makes them “aton”, little is made of this incident as a rape.12 By not challenging this rape, especially within the context of its legimitisation by Aleyn, Chaucer demonstrates that what is heinous in the eyes of most is apparently not so to the narrating Reeve who interrupts the narrative to spiritedly encourage Aleyn to enjoy himself in the aside “Now pley Aleyn!”13 The tale’s casual treatment of rape depicts the amorality of the Reeve’s internal world by demonstrating that in his mind, a tale where female bodies are brutalised to make an example of a trangressing figure is justice.
Through the introduction to John and Aleyn as two young students “lusty for to pleye/ And only for hire mithe and revelrye” and the repetition of this playfulness throughout the tale, Chaucer characterises the clerks’ sexual violence as just one aspect of boyish fun.14 This indistinction between joke and harm, reinforced by language which masks the reality of the sex as acts of rape (Aleyn and Maleyn being “aton” implies mutuality, the night’s events are labelled a “joly lyf”, and the act of rape is referred to as having “swonken”, meaning laboured) further displays the Reeve’s degeneracy which distinguishes his harlotry from the Miller’s.15 Further, the negative characterisation of the Reeve in the General Prologue as so cunning and deceptive that his neighbours were “adrad of him as of the deeth” suggests that his attitude towards sexual violence is a manifestation of the unpleasantness only hinted at prior to his tale.16 Thus in quiting the Miller with the rape of a young woman and her mother, Oswald demonstrates his perverse morality, furthered by the fact that those primarily violated are not responsible for the clerks’ troubles.
The distinction between what motivates the individual clerks’ actions highlights the degradation of harlotry into immorality expressed in the transition from ‘The Miller’s Tale’ to ‘The Reeve’s Tale’. While Aleyn justifies his rape of Maleyn with common law, John’s decision to rape Simkin’s wife is born out of the fear of male derision as he laments that because, “I lye as a draf-sak in my bed” while Aleyn recompenses himself, “when this jape is tald another day,/ I sal been halde a daf, a cokenay!”, echoing Oswald’s fear being seen as a cuckold by the other pilgrims due to ‘The Miller’s Tale’. 17Stewart Justman in The Reeve’s Tale and The Honor of Men observes that Simkin is “an effigy of the Miller” and “acting for the Reeve, the students will dishonour their tormentor sexually as the Reeve himself cannot”.18 Chaucer’s inclusion, therefore, of John as specifically driven to act by a crisis of masculinity mirroring Oswald’s own implies that in John’s rape of Simkin’s wife, Oswald is narrating the kind of violence he would wish to inflict upon the Miller were it possible. This reading of ‘The Reeve’s Tale‘ — as an actual imagining of Oswald’s fantasised ‘justice’ upon the Miller rather than a tale told to win a frivolous game — makes the Reeve an even more disturbing character, confirming the first fragment’s descent from harmless antics into unequivocal immorality.
Right at the beginning of The Canterbury Tales Chaucer alerts us to the fact that both the Miller and the Reeve’s tales involve harlotry but where Robin the Miller is forthright with the obscenity of his tale’s events, leaning fully into the fabliau mode with intimate body parts being uninhibitedly on display, Oswald the Reeve is less so, instead exploiting the fabliau genre to achieve his principal aim of avenging his masculinity. Robin’s transparency and liveliness transforms immorality into tomfoolery, depicting his tale as convivial humour. By contrast, the convergence of Oswald’s reserved nature and his vengeful motives renders his tale a display of deviant morality. What makes ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ so outrageous in comparison to ‘The Miller’s Tale’ isn’t the nature of the sexual content alone — as despite its understatement in criticism, ‘The Miller’s Tale’ does also feature forms of sexual violence — but that the sexual violence of the tale is supplemented by Oswald’s demonstrable glee at what he views as a restoration of his masculinity. Further, through the combination of the extent of the immorality depicted and the emphasis on quiting in ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, ending with Oswald’s assertion that “A gylour shall himself bigyled be” Chaucer suggests that the notion of retributive justice is in itself antithetical to morality.19
Bibliography
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, Third Norton Critical Edition, (2018)
Gust, Geoffrey, ‘“Ther was the revel and the melodye”: The Playful Cloak of Language in The Miller’s Tale’ in Chaucerotics: Uncloaking the Language of Sex in The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
Justman, Stewart, ‘The Reeve’s Tale and the honor of men’, Studies in Short Fiction, 32, (1995)
Middle English Compendium, s.v. harlotri(e), n. 2., (2021)
<https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED20006/track?counter=1&search_id=12243918> [accessed 15 December 2021]
Middle English Compendium, s.v. moralite, n. 1., (2021)<https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED28608/track?counter=1&search_id=12243966> [accessed 15 December 2021]
- MED s.v. harlotri(e), n. 2., <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED20006/track?counter=1&search_id=12243918>.
↩︎ - Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Miller’s Prologue’, in The Canterbury Tales, Third Norton Critical Edition, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), ll.3180-84.
↩︎ - Chaucer, ‘General Prologue’ ll. 560-61, ll. 547-48, ‘The Miller’s Prologue‘ ll. 3125-3133.
↩︎ - Chaucer, ‘The Miller’s Tale’ l. 3230.
↩︎ - Geoffrey Gust, ‘“Ther was the revel and the melodye”: The Playful Cloak of Language in ‘The Miller’s Tale’ in Chaucerotics: Uncloaking the Language of Sex in The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 100.
↩︎ - Chaucer, ‘The Miller’s Tale’, ll. 3275-76.
↩︎ - Chaucer, ‘The Miller’s Tale’, ll. 3233-3270; Gust, Chaucerotics, p. 84.
↩︎ - Gust, Chaucerotics, p. 87.
↩︎ - Chaucer, ‘The Miller’s Tale’, ll. 3244, 3269-70.
↩︎ - Chaucer, ‘The Miller’s Prologue’, ll. 3126-7.
↩︎ - Chaucer, ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, ll. 4180-4187.
↩︎ - Chaucer, ‘The Reeve’s Tale’. ll. 4194-97.
↩︎ - Chaucer, ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, l. 4198. ↩︎
- Chaucer, ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, ll. 4004-005.
↩︎ - Chaucer, ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, ll. 4197, 4232, 4235. ↩︎
- Chaucer, ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, ll. 603-606. ↩︎
- Chaucer, ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, ll. 4205-06.
↩︎ - Stewart Justman, ‘The Reeve’s Tale and the honor of men’, Studies in Short Fiction, 32, (1995), 21-27.‘The Reeve’s Tale’, ↩︎
- Chaucer, ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, l. 4321.
↩︎
