A Jewish
Perspective
Both the Miller who tells his tale and the character who leads the
procession of pilgrims on their way from London to Canterbury and back playing
his bagpipe are among the best-known and best-loved of Chaucer’s creations in The Canterbury Tales. Rollicking and bawdy, the man and his story
seem to typify the very heart of the long poem of the mid-fourteenth century,
much more so than the aristocratic knight and his son the squire, and perhaps
more than the various ecclesiastical persons.
The Miller is a small-town businessman, a modern for his time, both
because of his technological skills in running a watermill to grind corn into
flour and because of his somewhat shady deals in cheating his customers that
mark him as a practitioner of a new capitalist morality.
What we can know about this fictional Miller comes in several ways. First, in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Simple
Geoffrey—the poet’s comical persona, a generic eiron, someone who seems more foolish and naïve than he actually
is—describes the character and his interaction with other pilgrims. Second, in the Prologue to his Tale, the Miller reveals other features of his
personality and his rapport with the men and women on their way to Saint
Thomas’s shrine in Canterbury Cathedral.
Third, from time to time in the rest of the long narrative poem Chaucer
shows the Miller speaking with other characters and commenting on the tales
being told. Fourth, not least, as the
filling out of the pilgrimage occurs and the stories that were set to be told
in a formal, hierarchical sequence and based on rhetorical concepts of decorum
between narrator and genre—appropriate tones, themes and situations to create
harmony and significance—the Miller proves one of the driving forces between
the breakdown of that order and meaningful progression of meanings. Fifth, most important of all, The Tale itself indicates the
character’s interests, predilections, skills, sense of humour and other
features of his personality, especially as Chaucer the Poet so manipulates the
details as to open up aspects of the whole conception of The Canterbury Tales,
making it more and other than other analogous continuous anthologies, such as
Boccaccio’s Decameron, or even than
what is the poet’s most explicit source, the two-part Roman de la Rose, the first part by Guillaume de Lorris and the
second by Jean de Meung.
Though I have written at length concerning Chaucer’s probable background
in a family of conversos just one or
two generations earlier—the great expulsion occurred in 1290 and the poet
flourished sixty years later and also about the legacy of Judaism lurking below
the surface in a city like London, where many overseas visitors from the
Continent could constantly stimulate memories and interest.[1] In addition, Chaucer often visited the court,
worked with international merchants, lived in the Inns of Court, and travelled
to Italy and Spain himself on official business.[2]
It is now commonplace to begin study of the poem by pointing out that the
Miller’s Tale provides a transition
from the Knight’s Tale, the first one
in the whole series and the cluster that used to be called the “Marriage Group”
because of certain superficial resemblances between aristocratic love (courtly
love or refined love) and middle-class or lower style love (fabliau, farce and
comical entanglements), but which really is a suite of more intricate
story-telling techniques, social relationships, and satiric views of human
nature.
As also is usual for critics to point out, the character of the Miller is
based on his fictional self-presentation in the General Prologue: where he appears in the catalogue of pilgrims,
where he fits in the procession on the way to Canterbury, and what
Chaucer-the-Pilgrim tells us about him. The
driving force behind the development of the whole Canterbury Tales must be seen in the way he and the other pilgrims
become involved in the storytelling contest, and how the efforts of Harry
Bailley, the Host (of both the Tabard Inn where the pilgrims gather for the
trip and will return upon completion of their religious duties) and
self-appointed judge in the contest, cannot contain the dynamic, organic and
comic energies of the pilgrims themselves.
But is also important to understand what a Miller was in the world of the late
fourteenth century and especially in the literary tradition of bourgeois and
aristocratic satire.
What is usually not discussed, or noted, or even accepted are the Jewish
elements in the Miller’s Prologue and
Tale, though some critics have spent some time playing with the
relationship between the language and situation of Chaucer’s text and the Song of Songs and its standard Christian
exegesis in the late Middle Ages. No one
really comes to grips with the idea that Chaucer might view this biblical
erotic poem in a rabbinical light, and therefore that he may support his
satirical intentions—the physicality, the wittiness and the psychological
implications of sexual activity—with an attitude that is more Jewish than
Christian.
To read a poem as a Jew means not necessarily to find in it explicit or
even implied Jewish content: objects and symbolic acts, people with covert
thoughts and feelings derived from Jewish families and education, comments for
or against the truth or value in Jewish ideas. What it means is to be honest with oneself, as
a Jew, in what one sees, remembers while reading, hears echoes of deep in one’s
soul, and understands within the contexts of the intellectual, aesthetic and
judicial concerns. It means, in a
negative sense, to stop using Christian/secular ideas, paradigms, jargon and
values to create “objective” scholarship.
[1] For more background on the persistence of Jews, Jewishness and interest
in Jews during ther fourteenth century in England, see Norman Simms, Sir Gawain and the
Knight of the Green Chapel. (Waltham, MD:
University Press of America, 2002.)
[2] Norman Simms, A New Midrashic Reading of
Geoffrey Chaucer: His Life and Works. (Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ont. and Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press , 2004.). Also see now Norman Simms, “Jews
on the Late Medieval Stage” Queens College Journal of Jewish Studies 12
(2010) 13-22.
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