The Co(s)mic Lovers
Alisoun, the jolly and vigorous young wife, is described in naturalistic[1]
figures that associate her with the lively and lusty animals and plants that are
filled with sexual energy and make her dangerous to keep in a bourgeois
household, such as the carpenter’s dwelling in Oxford. The little white weasel she is compared to,
and other white cloths and objects associated with her, ironically configure
her innocence, in the sense, however, not of chastity but of uncontrolled nature,
pure animal passions.[2] She gathers into and around herself all the
formulaic figures of speech, allusions, and cultural attributes of the spring topos, as though she were herself the
landscape of new life returning to the scene, the garden of life bursting with
vigor and fertility, and, to keep the fabliau’s
preference for the low style, the semo
humilis, a farmyard crowded with rutting birds and domesticated
creatures. These descriptions are
organized in the same way as the characters in the General Prologue, as partly
an effictio—a description from head
to toe of her external appearance—and a notatio—a
catalogue of her moral and ethical qualities.
But it is the mixture of styles, tones, and points of reference that
break apart the traditional courtly decorum and reduce the whole presentation of
Alisoun as a comical, even farcical imitation of a courtly lady: “She was a prymerole, a piggesnye,/ For any
lord to leggen in his bedde”—She was a primrose, a pig’s eye, for any lord to
lay in his bed.[3]
As with aristocratic praise of the ideal lady in courtly songs, the
description of Alisoun, the Carpenter’s wife, is constituted of allusions and
echoes of the Song of Songs, and in this way too, as with the erotic courtly
lyrics, she is compared and contrasted to the Virgin Mary, Queen of
Courtesy—the mystical mother-wife of Christ.
This triple vision of the young wife as fabliau heroine, aristocratic ideal, and mystical bride are matched
by the terms used to describe the three foolish men who seek to possess her—the
carpenter, the student and the priest—and all become enmeshed in the elaborate
and farcical trick by which all are humiliated: the old husband, senex and jaloux, by being cuckolded and publicly ridiculed when he thinks
Noah’s Flood has returned; the parish priest Absolon who thinks he is climbing
into her bedroom for a night of erotic frolicking and instead kisses her arse;
and hende Nicholas, after farting in the face of his rival, gets a red-hot
poker thrust in his bum. The Miller sums
things up:
Thus swyved iwas
this carpenteris wyf,
For al hs kepyng
and his jalousie;
And Absolon hath
kist her nether ye;
And Nicholas is
scalded in the towte.
So the carpenter’s wife was screwed,
For all his keeping and his jealousy.
And Absolon kissed her nethermost eye,
And Nicholas is scalded in his hole.
For the teller of the tale, all this is just an enormous alcohol-fueled joke,
and at most, besides entertaining the crowd of pilgrims on their way to
Canterbury, makes fun of cuckolds and bourgeois prudes. For Chaucer, though, the tale is far more
complex and meaningful, as well as more witty and comical. It is a text that means more than anyone in
the fiction, whether the inside fiction of the fabliau, or the outside fiction
of the pilgrimage, can fathom. More than
that, once the Jewish perspective glass is looked through, the figurative
language can begin to generate rabbinical meanings. Though not strictly according to Talmudic themes
and debates, the allusions reverse the normal Christian direction of the joke:
the echoes of the Song of Songs and
its kabbalistic interpretations starts to poke though the reference to erotic
play, the pun on the lower eye, and the very meaning of jealousy—sexuality for
rabbinical writers was a means of inviting the Godhead into the conjugal bed to
participate in the sexual act and ensure that the foetus produced will grow
into a law-abiding and communally-orientated young man or woman; the process of
perceptions in organic and intellectual; terms must proceed through the created
world in order to understand the higher dimensions of the on-going processes of
development personal and national history; and the jealousy of God is not envy
or desire to be like human beings but to protect and enhance His handwork
through the provision of law, intelligence and a universe amendable to rational
comprehension.
Nicholas is overly proud of his wit and when he makes his advances on
Alisoun he does not think beyond his own physical pleasures, except for the joy
in tricking his landlord. In fact, it is
the intricate trap he sets up that seems to delight him most. He is, in other words, a typical alazon and suffers from the inordinate
pride of the over-reacer, the hubris of the misguided ego-maniac. “A clerk hadde litherly biset his whyle,” he
tells Alisoun as they plan out their night of love while the old man is to be
right there in front of them, “But if he koude a carpenter bigyle.” A clerk isn’t worth his salt, as it were, if
he can’t out-fox a mere carpenter.
All this while, as Nicholas puffs himself up on his own pride—he is the
typical alazon, or boaster and
self-deluder in his own skills and intelligence—Alisoun plays along with him,
but pretends to be a pious, modest Christian wife—even as she allows Nicholas
to put his hand under her skirts and give her a foretaste of the erotic pleasures
to come. Pretending to be coy and
chaste, she acts the part of the eiron,
the classical type of the person who presents herself as less capable and less
wily than she really is. Her role as
good Christian wife is obviously false, and her pudor, her modesty, never is sustained or adequate to the
temptation she so easily gives in to or the seduction she denies is in progress. In fact, very much so: she is fully active
and instrumental in the game, along with hende
Nicholas, since she believes she can have her cake and eat it, that is,
cuckold her husband, enjoy an extra-marital affair, and have no obligations to
the virile young clerk—or two of young lovers, if it comes to that.
But her pretense is part of the game, both the little joke to be played
on her husband, and the bigger joke Chaucer shows unfolding in the tale: the
parody of the popular mystery plays and, beyond that, the epistemological game
of exposing the hubris and arrogance
of a society that believes itself able to pry into the privacy and secrets of
God’s mysteries and thereby to arrogate to itself the power to determine what
is just, moral and divinely good. It is
this hubristic tendency that the whole tale mocks and exposes, so that the
moral economy of the Christian universe seems to be affirmed: not merely that
the good are rewarded and the evil punished, but that the tricksters are
outwitted by their own inability to foresee consequences, that the arrogant are
publicly humiliated, and those who arrogate to themselves the names, privileges
and rewards of Christian piety are made to wear the stigma of their sins. At
the same time, hidden in the nooks and crannies of the language, iconography and
choreography of the poem are more subversive questions about the efficacy of
the Christian universe and the need to focus on its secret slippage back into
chaos and confusion, the primal anarchy where sexual differences and class
distinctions fall apart, and the witty encounter of Adam and Eve is replayed in
order to avoid the strict, dogmatic interpretations imposed by Church exegetes:
Eve is chosen by the wily snake—the embodiment as well as the parody of the nefesh, or soul—in order to rescue human
domesticity from the sterile and unchanging prison-house of an earthly Eden (a locus
amoenus), or fool’s Paradise, and into the world of historical change,
natural development, and intellectual challenge.
Absolon, as parish priest, has free entrance to the homes of the middle
class families of Oxford, and he takes advantage of his position and its
privileges to seduce the women of the parish.
He abuses the privacy of confession and behaves with shameless
arrogance. He dresses and behaves like a
courtier, but without the sophistication, grace or self-control such a role
requires. Vain and pompous, Absolon
comes to woo Alisoun, as though he were a courtly lover, and like an
aristocratic lover, but without the finesse or education that the convention
requires, he only mouths the words and gestures of the genre, puts into play
the language of the Song of Songs and
all its implications for late medieval piety.
What he says and how he is described bring in standards of personal
behavior and ideals of Christian and courtly love that none of the players in
the Miller’s jocular story can live up to.
These flagrant acts of adultery violate the tenets of Christian
marriage, just as the delusion of being involved in a refined aristocratic love
relationship is exposed by the crude physicality and adolescent egotism of the
actual relationships. Like the thief in
the night who sneaks unexpectedly into the home of the men and women who rest
overly assured of their place in the natural and spiritual order of the
Christian universe, the sneaky acts of Nicholas—like Santa Claus before the
commercial character was invented, and more like Black Pete in the Netherlands—upsets
the balance, surprises the expectations, and sets in motion a demonic
punishment, as well as unloosing the the flood waters of the deep. A primary mythic event is repeated and this
time with a new creation of comic justice.
The old gnof of a carpenter is
too easily fooled by the young student.
Nicholas tells his landlord that a great deluge is coming, signalled by
the planets and stars, and that he ought to save himself by hoisting up a
kneading-trough as an emergency boat to sleep in, so that, when the flood
comes, he will be saved like Noah in his ark.
Foolishness piles on foolishness.
The carpenter is flattered by the notion that he is now privy to the
secret plans of God. Instead of seeking
to warn his neighbours or anyone of his friends to join him in the boat he is
putting up, he keeps the good news a secret.
His superstition and stupidity are matched only by his selfishness and
utter lack of Christian humility or charity.
As he knows Bible stories only from popular street plays which he tends
to reduce to their crudest and most superficial level, he is oblivious to the
fact that God swore to Noah and subsequent mankind that there would never again
be a deluge of the kind that drowned all the world, other than the few people
and creatures Noah saved—a promise confirmed each time a rainbow appears in the
sky. The promise moreover can be understood
as confirmation of the brit or
covenant between God and the nation of Israel, a contractual agreement not only
for human beings to participate in the returning of the world to its original
order and on to a messianic sanctification of history but for the Godhead to
subject Himself to the Law and its rabbinical interpreters, that is, as José
Faur puts it, to establish a horizontal society where all men and woman are
equal before the Law and God voluntarily and ontogenetically also an equal
signatory: with the circumcision as the flesh-inscribed sign, the ot-ha’brit.
Nor is the old jealous husband aware of Nicholas’ secret plot to sleep
with Alison, to save himself from the sexual frustrations he is drowning in,
and to expose the carpenter as a cuckold for public ridicule. He thinks that Nicholas is his friend who acts
on behalf of himself and his wife. All
the student seems to be doing, however, is saving the young wife for
himself. When the old man hangs a
kneading trough from the rafters to sleep in, the joke resonates way beyond his
cultural awareness. For a kneading trough is used to mix dough to make bread,
and bread resonates with the cultural meanings of Eucharistic bread that is
through the mystery of the priestly mass the body of Christ, corpus christi. The simple domestic act of transforming ordinary
ingredients into the staff of life is part and parcel in this milieu of
Catholic doctrine with the transformation of a material substance into a
spiritual essence. Yet close examination and sensitivity to the bawdy humor
undermines too much certainty in such a dogmatic reading. The yeast of charity, love and loyalty is
lacking and what comes out is not a Eucharistic wafer but a dry piece of matzah (unleavened bread, the bread of
affliction) all soggy from the flood of passion.
[1] These are similar to the planst and animals found in the margins of
contemporary manuscripts, where they sometimes add a bit of grotesque wit to
the appearance of the page, sometimes add a satirical comment on the text
transcribed on the page. And rarely actually illuminate the passage they stand
next to. There can be nop geneal rule
for such drawings. But in Chaucer, the
figurative extension of signifying power in the context reinforces the
poetic—perhaps, midrashic—elaboration of subversive meanings the teller of the
tale and his or her characters may be completely unaware of. While drawn from folkloric depictions of
farmyard and domestic spheres of experience, they are also to be found in
satirical discourses—complaints, as they are called when lacking anything but
the broadest of ironic touches, in sermons and passion plays; but more
specifically here, they coordinate with the references to stain glass windows in
regard to descriptions to the person and dress of Alisoun’s near homonym
Absaloum.
[2] Weasels in the animal fables and Bestiaries were thought to copulate
through the ears, and thus could be taken as parodic antitypes to the
depictions of the archangel Gabriel impregnating the Virgin Mary through the
ear with his clear beam of light. These
creatures belong to the same category of visual signals as the rabbits or coneys that often run about the margins
of parchment leaves and extend out from the frame of illuminated letters, their
very name proving a pun on the female pudendum, just as the bawdy wordplay in
in this poem does.
[3] It should not be forgotten that Hebrew manuscripts were similarly
enhanced by both marginal drawings and illuminated letters. Whether by Jewish or by Christian specialists,
both working under the direction of patrons or guided by professional
model-books, the consequent products could gain a Jewish valence merely by the
immediate context and eventual function of the books, but also by subversion of
the traditional classical and Christian ordering of the tales depicted,
generated by puns across Hebrew, Latin and profane languages. Where fables, for instance, might celebrate
the triumph of the prevailing social hierarchy or dominance of ecclesiastical
values, the Jewish drawings would have the subordinate, seemingly weaker and
more foolish characters--the eirons—gain
the day over the alazon creatures
with their superficial appearance as wise, clever, handsome or prowess. This could sometimes be done by a mere flock
of direction in a line, a change in color scheme, or a shift from one species
to another, such as a monkey, a duck or a mouse.
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