Sex, drugs and medieval rock'n'roll
[‘The Canterbury Tales consistently present natural energies escaping socially-constructed order.’ Substantiate, modify or refute this view.]
The common themes of love, lust, sex and jealousy in The Canterbury Tales certainly suggest a trend towards natural anarchy over social order, yet the idea of there being any true consistency within the tales is a hard one to grasp due to Chaucer’s tendency to subvert or undercut our expectations. Nothing runs its conventional course: characters are flawed or go against stereotype, seemingly-moralistic tales shrink from morality and accepted norms of social conduct are not just broken, but broken with such casual abandon as to suggest that they weren’t really all that important to begin with. Exploring this sense of anarchy, one begins to question whether it is nature, or in fact Chaucer’s own contrivances at work behind the tales’ almost exuberant demolition of order.
That most of the tales have marriage as a central theme makes it an obvious representation of socially-constructed order battered by the natural forces of lust and jealousy. The knee-jerk response to this is that marriage almost always loses out - after all, Nicholas gets Alisoun, John and Allan sleep with the Miller’s wife and daughter while May and Damian make a cuckold out of old January even as he sits waiting below… Not only do these acts of adultery generally go unpunished, the cuckolded husband, and the idea of marriage itself, is exposed to ridicule, esentially treated as the butt of each tale’s joke. Yet to judge Chaucer’s treatment of marriage by his fabliaux only would be unfair. The Miller, Reeve, Shipman and Merchant’s tales represent but a small proportion of those tales that deal with marriage, though their bawdy nature tends to make them more memorable to the casual reader. As Howard points out, “the spectrum of morality in the tales is broad,” (53) and there are plenty that still uphold the sanctity of marriage over adultery and generally unbridled passion. The most interesting (and somewhat unexpected) of these is the Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale. Calculating, cynical and highly sexualised she may be, freely admitting to both enjoying sex and accepting money for it, but the Wife of Bath does still restrain her passions within the bounds of wedlock. Moreover though her admissions make the motive behind her five marriages seem purely materialistic, the idealism of her tale suggests otherwise, particularly with her summation that what all women really want is “to have sovereigntee/ As well over hir husband and hir love,/ And for to been in maistry him above.” (182-4). It is potent that the Wife of Bath, arguably Chaucer’s most strong-willed and modern character, does not so much escape the social-construct of marriage as repeatedly breaks back into it.
Of course, taking any of Chaucer’s tales too literally would leave oneself open to accusations of not getting his irony. The Wife of Bath’s serial monogamy can be seen just as much as a subversive indictment of the ‘sacred’ bond of marriage as it could be an endorsement, while even the most idealistic tales are undermined, often by the sincerity or naïveté of the teller. Take the Knight’s tale for instance: courtly love, classical setting, winning a fair maiden’s hand through honour… the ingredients for a classical romance are all there. Unfortunately, the Knight that Chaucer chooses to depict is a pretentious preener, full of confused classical references and collapsed nobility. The self-important tone and length of the tale, particularly followed by the Miller and Reeve’s bawdy efforts, turn the Knight’s tale into a petty quarrel between two unrealistic and rather pathetic rivals (I can’t help thinking that had any of the other pilgrims told the story, Palamon and/or Arcite would have jumped into bed with Emily long ago) while the Knight himself is reduced to a right royal laughing-stock. Other more idealistic tales about marriage such as those by the Franklin and Clerk fall down due to their sense of misguided morality. Poor Griselda’s marriage may be described as “of sovereyneteem noght of servyse” (114) but the brutish trials set on her by her husband makes that it a hard assertion to swallow. Meanwhile, Griselda’s infuriatingly passive constancy leads even the Clerk himself to admit that, “This storie is seyd, nat for that wyves sholde/ Folwen grisilde as in humylitee,/ For it were onportable, though they wolde.” (1142-4). The Franklin’s tale seems like the closest we get to an earnest endorsement of a faithful marriage, yet its anticlimactic ending (husband forgives wife, lover lets off wife, magician forgives lover…) as well as the oddly incidental-seeming magical narrative leave the tale feeling oddly limp and unconvincing. There is no real conflict, even if “women of kind desiren libertee” (60), since Dorigen is not even tempted by Aurelius. The shaky moral may be something like ‘true love conquers all’ but it doesn’t seem very important as not very much had to be conquered anyway and besides, the audience have probably fallen asleep. So though Chaucer may subvert the convention of marriage and pit it against natural and carnal desires, the tales are inconsistent in their message and rarely break out of the mould completely and the overall sense is more cynicism towards marriage going well than outright rebellion against getting married at all.
After lust and jealousy, violence could perhaps be the most uncontrolled ‘natural’ force also dealt with by the tales, though again it is uncertain whether it so much as breaks out of the social order of things as subvert or run alongside it. Indeed, the fight between Palamon and Arcite, rather than run its natural course, is halted and transformed into the honour of a formal duel (well, battle) by king Theseus, just as the fight seems to have been taken out of his ‘tame’ court of Amazon women. Meanwhile, though passion and wounded pride drives Absalon to violence, the act seems inconsequential save for metering out “in passing” (Craik 6) some sort of dubious poetic justice against Nicholas. Overall the act serves more as a lewd punch-line rather than any indication of moral judgement or escaped natural forces. Chaucer seems, in fact, to shy away from any real violence in his tales beyond the slapstick to the extent that even the battle in the Knight’s tale is almost absurdly regulated by health and safety-style precautions. Social convention doesn’t seem so much the issue here, as a vague ‘make love not war’ mentality, not so much reflecting the social constraints of honour and decorum (Medieval society was by no means a peaceful one, after all) as a general preference for comedy and wit over mindless violence, a stylistic preference that he shouldn’t be blamed for.
It is possible to make an argument for magic and the supernatural (as opposed to the unnatural) as a force that breaks out of and subverts the norms of convention though the examples are somewhat limited. The Franklin’s tale presents magic as a possible source of chaos resolved only by the reasonable consciences of the characters. This is similarly true of the squabbling gods in the Knight’s tale, though they don’t so much represent escape from social order as suggest there’s no such thing to begin with, since all fate and morality is arbitrary and human life is controlled by the whim of the deities’ wilful quarrels. To add to the confusion, magic in the Wife of Bath’s tale is used to enforce the notions of marriage and social responsibility between husband and wife, while the Squire begins a tale of such fantastical magical whimsy that Chaucer has left it unfinished. What a mess… again, no real trend can be found between the tales, perhaps except for their inconsistency.
“Sownen into sin” is Chaucer’s own summation of The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer’s Retraction; Howard 55), suggestive of the heady sense of subversive rule-breaking that dominates the tales. Yet what the investigations so far suggest is not so much an invocation of wild, natural forces escaping the confines of society as a far more calculating trend towards one-upmanship and the power of wit for personal gain. Trickery runs amok throughout the tales from the scheming Nicholas to the various trials concocted by Griselda’s impossible husband; Palamon’s disguise to the cheating Miller and John and Allen’s revenge; the Wife of Bath’s caprices and May’s deception of January… Chaucer doesn’t seem so much to be depicting a society going back to nature as a society where social order is eroded and almost entirely undermined by pride, greed and avarice. Schemes win out over conventional morality while clever interpretations of the Bible such as by the Wife of Bath) justify blasphemy. Indeed, Chaucer paints an image of “a world in decline” (Howard, 110) on several occasions both in the tales themselves, such as the Clerk’s, “This world is nat so strong it is no nay,/ As it hath been in olde times of yore…” (1139-1140) and also in a short poem he wrote around the same time as The Canterbury Tales that invokes the simple innocence of a Golden Age: “A blissful life, a paisible and sweete,/ Ledden the peoples in the former age.” (Howard, 126) Though the bitterness of Chaucer’s satire feels somewhat diminished by the cheerful tone of his comedy, there is a definite sense of the power of human wit taking control in less-than-ideal times rather than any wayward caprices of wild nature.
Ultimately it would seem that the most anarchic and uncontrolled elements of The Canterbury Tales are in fact the pilgrims themselves. Far from the pious contemplation expected of a holy pilgrimage, these travellers are loud and bawdy, turning the journey into a riotous storytelling contest. The knight is exposed to ridicule by his pride, the miller gets drunk, the reeve vengeful, the wife of Bath unintentionally self-effacing in her justifications… In each case, Chaucer cleverly subverts the stereotypical expectations of his characters by showing up their inconsistencies and inadequacies so that each, in turn, gives in to their natural inclinations rather than the roles society expects and dictates of them. Similarly, language in The Canterbury Tales breaks free of the social bounds that expect literature to be elevated and hold a superior moral viewpoint though the differing voices of the narrators. What keeps cropping up is a re-assertion of the colloquial over the literary and contrived, as if everyday natural speech is bursting out of the confines of literary verse - the pilgrims digress, butt-in, forget or repeat themselves, make mistakes and asides… It is realism through the convention of language that seems consistent in The Canterbury Tales beyond any sense of overarching morality or social judgement. The pilgrims reflect real people of Chaucer’s time whose tales, in turn, make varying comments on his society. This is perhaps a facet of The Canterbury Tales that offers the greatest sense of consistency and also goes some way to explaining the lack of regularity in the individual tales themselves: that each tale represents a different viewpoint and personality therefore none of them can entirely agree.
So perhaps a better statement would not be that the tales present natural energies escaping socially-constructed order as the narrators themselves, and then only because of their realism and Chaucer’s reflection on the fragmentation of the order in his time. Bearing this in mind, a search for consistency in the minutiae of The Canterbury Tales immediately becomes somewhat redundant as Chaucer’s point was to reflect a broad range of viewpoints and voices. Realistically then, not everyone wants to break free of society, though everyone wants to live it in his or her own way, especially in times as uncertain as the Middle Ages, and this is ultimately what the tales bring across to its readers.
Sonya Hallett
November 2007
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Bibliography
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1996.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Trans. Nevil Coghill. London: Penguin Classics, 1977.
Craik, T. W. The Comic Tales of Chaucer. Edinburgh: University Paperbacks, 1967.
Harrington, Norman T. ‘Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale: Another Swing of the Pendulum’. PMLA 86.1 (Jan. 1971): 25-31.
Howard, Donald R. The Idea of the Canterbury Tales. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976.
Lawrence, William W. ‘The Marriage Group in the "Canterbury Tales"’.
Modern Philology 11.2 (Oct. 1913): 247-258.
Owen, Charles A. Jr. ‘Morality as a Comic Motif in the Canterbury Tales’. College English 16.4 (Jan. 1955): 226-232.