The Miller's Tale (Essay 1)

In the wake of the Knight’s Tale, a courtly romance that conspicuously skirts love’s physical consummation, we might expect the Miller’s self-dubbed “churlish” tale to be less evasive in this respect, to give us more of a show. Indeed, in his attempt to “quyte the Knightes tale” (MT 19) with his own, the Miller spins a narrative that seems very much concerned with the bodies of its characters.

Chaucer, likewise, seems to have anticipated this desire on the part of his own audience but, being altogether cleverer than his Miller, refuses us the facile satisfaction that we might derive from a straight, unadulterated fabliau about a carpenter, his wife and her lover. Instead, while the Miller might seem bent on brazenly parading bodies in front of his company of pilgrims, Chaucer is hard at work complicating these images, lacing our impressions of the Miller’s characters with overlapping social and sexual distinctions so that we come away not only skeptical of the Knight’s Tale’s tenuously maintained decorum but also with some uneasy questions about the Miller’s relationship to his own tale.

The Miller’s Tale is both a dramatization of and exercise in misdirection. By this I mean that, while the most gripping theme of the tale is that of Alison and her lover, Nicholas, actively staging pranks and purporting falsehoods at the expense of her suitor, Absolon, and her husband, John, our first and strongest impressions of these characters are equally staged and false. Though each first appears as a caricatured bundle of stock attributes, these appearances, like just about everything in Chaucer, become far too complicated over the course of the narrative for any simple type to support.

John’s image as the jealous husband, for instance, who locks up his wife Anarwe in cage” (MT 116) unravels as we see the basically unbridled freedom Alison enjoys in her infidelity and other chicanery. Nicholas and Absolon, likewise, hardly seem to cleanly fit their respective initial molds as the brusque, “queynte” (MT 173) groping lover or the foppish, perfumed dandy, for by the end of the tale Nicholas has preened himself repeatedly, both men have sweetened themselves with licorice, and it is Absolon who violently brandishes the glowing coulter after discovering Alison is hardly the “gay gerl” he had thought that she was.

Interestingly, it is Alison, ostensibly the subject of every other character’s desire and the tale’s only woman, that makes gender alignment such a sticky wicket in the Miller’s Tale. While, admittedly, she is the most graphically described of the characters (being grabbed by the “queynte”), she is strangely also the one whose appearance is most clothed in elision and metaphor. Now reference to a beautiful woman as if she were “...ful moore blisful on to see / Than is the newe pere-jonette tree” (MT 139-40), conventional as such a description is on its own, may hardly seem significant, but when compared with the only other description in the Canterbury Tales thus far of a woman who has clearly been around, some striking similarities arise. I am referring, of course, to the opening portrait of the Wife of Bath in which the reader feels a degree of the narrator’s coy embarrassment as his description descends to her red stockings, implies what must lay beneath, and sends him reeling back to a safer, more remote appreciation of her hat.

Something similar, though not parallel, seems to be going on with the Miller’s reticence about granting Alison’s body the same delicate, specific treatment he affords her clothing. Rather than averting his eyes as Chaucer the pilgrim seems to in the General Prologue, however, the Miller shifts awkwardly to Nicholas’s brutish attempt to seduce Alison by catching her Aby the queynte” and proclaiming clumsily that if he doesn’t have her right this instant he will Aspille” (MT 175) no, that he "wol dyen” (MT 178) just as we are on the verge of visualizing an individual.

One way to read this weird, but jarring descriptive shift is as a sort of macho wish-fulfillment, a pornographic projection of the ideal woman; a sexy but faceless coquette, Awylde and yong” (MT 117) with a "likerous eye” (MT 116). This, however, is only part of the story for the poet has equipped Alison with a strong sense of personal agency that vastly complicates the model of an empty tart or country wench. And, while she may still fall somewhat short of a fully actualized individual within the tale, the fact that she accepts Nicholas into her bed only “[w]han that she may hir leyser wel espie” (MT 185) sets her at least a step closer than the Knight’s Princess Emileye who would forfeit herself to whoever wanted her more. Further, while the ladies of the Knight’s Tale acted only when pressed to respond to the actions of others, Alison appears to be more fully the author of her own actions. The carpenter’s willfully adulterous wife, as a result, cannot truly be read as just a passive object or sexual idol for, though she is physically described within such a frame by the Miller, his relation of her non-physical attributes confounds such a reading.

The second and final instance of actual physical contact between two characters takes place when Absolon finds himself on a ladder with a mouthful of Ahir naked ers” (MT 631) in the infamous misdirected kiss scene. Here, and in the surrounding lines, Alison’s anatomy is both grossly specified as “hir hole” (MT 629) and described as Aa thing al rough and longe y-herd” (MT 635), characterizations which seem largely un-gendered, androgynous, erotically barren even in light of the clearly sexual context of a girl hanging her goods out the window, presenting for the mouth of her suitor one orifice in the place of another.

In the last fifty lines of the Miller’s Tale, so much happens, so many levels of resonance conflate together so rapidly, that the overall sense is one of collapsing associative demarcations. As Absolon attempts to “quyte” Alison’s ridiculous exchange of mouth for “ers” with his own violent exchange of mouth for coulter, Nicholas takes the brunt, having butted-in on the gag at the wrong time, an image overwhelming with homoerotic implications. As Nicholas yelps for water to soothe his scalded “toute,” the narrative strains of the Noah’s flood gambit and John the cuckold are introduced to Absolon’s ridiculed courtship of Alison. While precisely what this absence of a solid gender distinction like “queynte” here is meant to signify is at once unclear and unverifiable, the effect of Absolon’s misdirected kiss upon the narrative is unmistakable, devastating, anarchic. That the tale seems so neatly wrapped up at the end, so summarized, then suggests that either the Miller has intended this as a parody of the failed finale of the Knight’s Tale or that he too, in the telling of his own tale, has unraveled associations too close to home. Perhaps, then, it is the Miller’s own body, or at least his own relation to it, that really matters most.