Chaucerian Spaces: Spatial Poetics in Chaucer's Opening Tables

chaucerian spaces Spatial Poetics in Chaucer’s Opening Tales

w illiam f. w oods

CHAUCERIAN SPACES

SUNY series in Medieval Studies Paul E. Szarmach, editor

CHAUCERIAN SPACES Spatial Poetics in Chaucer’s Opening Tales

William F. Woods

State University of New York Press

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2008 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Woods, William F. Chaucerian spaces : spatial poetics in Chaucer's opening tales / William F. Woods. p. cm. — (SUNY series in medieval studies) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7487-7 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Poetry, Medieval—History and criticism. 3. Poetics—History—To 1500. I. Title. PR1924.W66 2008 821'.1—dc22 2007033898 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my beautiful family

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Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction

1

1.

Dwelling Places of Chivalry and Nature

15

2.

Alysoun the Housewife

37

3.

The Solace of Open Spaces

49

4.

Symkyn’s Place

61

5.

Changing Places

79

6.

The Riches of Exilic Space

91

7.

The Domestic Market

105

8.

The Exile and Her Kingdom

117

9.

Chaucer’s Spatial Poetics

133

Notes

149

Bibliography

185

Index

197

vii

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Preface

“On whatever horizon we examine it,” writes Gaston Bachelard, “the house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being.”1 He devotes his leading chapter to attics, cellars, garrets, towers, and huts, providing at length a “poetics of the house,” which is at once the various ways we understand “our corner of the world,” and the way its memories, or images shadow forth the deepest parts of ourselves.2 As Bachelard puts it, “the house images move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them.”3 The house is not the only image he examines, for traces of the intimate self lie also in drawers, chests and wardrobes, and in nests and shells and corners, and even in “the dialectics of outside and inside,” and “the phenomenology of roundness.” Bachelard is concerned specifically with poetic images, which have “a sonority of being”4 that resonates with our own being and our own creativeness. Here he speaks directly to literary critics, who approach poetry with the same question: “What are the sources of its power?” In this book, I will have much to say about Chaucer’s images of the house, but also of gardens, towers, fields, fens, shops, and amphitheaters—the many kinds of significant space we find in his opening tales. In its quiet way, that space creates the ground rules, the spatial logic of what we soon come to know as the world of the Canterbury Tales. But while Bachelard, like Jung, uses spatial images to study “the depths of the human soul,”5 my purpose is to study them in the context of narrative, where extended space implies certain kinds of possibility, and the emplacement of characters (“where they are”) remains critical to our sense of who they are and what they intend. In narrative as in life, a character’s presence gathers the surroundings, giving them a center and an orientation. Thus, we can say that the person creates the place. But equally, by dwelling in place—through the experience of being in place and becoming part of that place—a character is revealed to us in surprisingly intimate ways. Inquiring into the relations of person and place, I have also found most useful the fine books by the phenomenologist Edward S. Casey (Getting Back into Place and The Fate of Place), yet beyond its fundamental orientation, this book is not a phenomenological approach to Chaucer. It is intended as a reading of Fragments I–III and the Shipman’s Tale that addresses what I would call the spatial affect of Chaucer’s tales: the emotional power and coded meaning

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Preface

of houses, shops, and gardens (indeed, enclosures of all kinds), as well as streets, journeys, exiles, heights and depths, and what they suggest about the characters who move among them. It is chiefly an attempt to describe as I best can the relationship between a person and a given place, for as with Bachelard’s houses, the image moves both ways: a person may be emplaced, but the place is also in the person, so that place becomes capable of reflecting what medieval characters are often assumed to lack: a subjectivity, an indwelling sense of self. More generally, as readers pass from one chapter to another, I hope to leave them with the impression that the open spatial relationships favored in the Knight’s Tale have given way to intimate ones in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale—that the “cold brilliance of public spectacle” has yielded to “the close comfort (or discomfort!) of domestic life.” If so, these tales demonstrate a turning inward toward individual sensibility, which is Chaucer’s great achievement in the Wife of Bath, and which continues to be a focal interest in the remaining tales.

 The ideas that began this book arose in conversations and debates that were the inspiration and the enduring value of David Benson’s 1987 NEH Chaucer Institute at the University of Connecticut. Many thanks to David, and to Linda Georgianna, Polly Stewart, Susanna Fein, David Raybin, Jean Jost, Jay Ruud, the late Peter Braeger, and to all that faire compaignye. Later, at Chaucer Review, David Raybin and Susanna Fein were a constant source of encouragement, as well as expert and patient editors. A thousand thanks to my students at Wichita State University, who, if they only knew it, have kept Chaucer alive at the edge of the Great Plains. And to my colleagues in the English Department, Ave atque vale—to their good books, mine is a grateful answer. A respectful nod as well to the Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wichita State University, for the sabbatical and two summer grants that allowed me to give the book its final shape. To the editors of Studies in Philology, Chaucer Review, Papers in Language and Literature, and Publications of the Medieval Association of the Midwest, I am grateful for permission to publish parts of articles that first appeared in those journals. Parts of chapter 1 were previously published in “My Sweete Foo: Emelye’s Role in the Knight’s Tale,” Studies in Philology 88, no. 3 (1991): 276–306. Earlier versions of chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6 appeared as “Private and Public Space in the Miller’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 29, no. 2 (1994): 166–78; “The Logic of Deprivation in the Reeve’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 30, no. 2 (1995): 150–63; “Society and Nature in the Cook’s Tale,” Papers in Language and Literature 32, no. 2 (1996): 189–205; and “Custance as God’s Merchant in the Man of Law’s Tale,” Publi-

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cations of the Medieval Association of the Midwest 7 (2000): 84–107. Chapter 4 was previously published as “Symkyn’s Place in the Reeve’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 39, no. 1 (2004): 276–306. For James Peltz, my editor at State University of New York Press, heartfelt thanks for believing in this project, and for helping me to do so. Paul Szarmach, the series editor, lent crucial and timely support, and the two readers—unnamed but scarcely forgotten—provided solid, helpful advice. Alison Lee’s editorial assistance at the press was gracious and dependable, and Wyatt Benner’s meticulous attention to the manuscript won my respect. But ultimate thanks must go to Alfred David and Paul Strohm, both at Indiana University, who eased me down the ways, years ago, launching me to teach, and finally to write a book of my own. For Annie, Eva, and Sara, thanks are hardly enough, since I owe them life itself, of which this book has been a part.

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Introduction

It remains the case that where we are—the place we occupy, however briefly—has everything to do with what and who we are (and finally, that we are). —Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place1

When the Tales of Canterbury were still a future project, it must have occurred to Chaucer that what they required was not merely the creation of a fictional world, as had been the case with the Troilus, but many different worlds, each one to some extent the reflection of its narrator’s and characters’ necessities and dreams. A knight’s world would be different from a miller’s, as given his estate and class he would see things differently. The difference would be selection of detail. And underlying the representative details would be the knight’s or miller’s sense of space: the way he saw possibility, promise, and constraint in his daily activities and his plans for the future. “Where can we go with this?” is the question that shapes space in narrative, and that question bears differently on every narrator and every tale. Knights ride out—hence the expansive space of the Knight’s Tale, even within the walls of the amphitheater—and millers (or carpenters) work, accumulate, possess: that is the spatial logic of John’s token house and the token wife it contains But amphitheater and house are more than mere structures. Each has what Bachelard calls “cosmicity”: “The house’s situation in the world gives us, quite concretely, a variation of the metaphysically summarized situation of man in the world.”1 The theater or the house projects a vision, and creates the feeling tone, of someone’s place in the world—an emplacement, even a sense of self. To the degree that Palamon, Arcite, and Emelye can represent varieties of selfhood, it is reflected by the wall paintings in the temples of Venus, Mars, and Diana; each goes to pray in a place that expresses the force determining his or her “condicioun.” The house of John implies his ambivalent status in the town. Again Bachelard: “A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality.”2 Surely, John’s house is both a proof and an illusion of stability. “A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward.”3 In its verticality, the house becomes associated with John’s hopes and the high prophecy of

1

2

Introduction

Nicholas (in the upper room), but also the punishment of Absalom, under the shot window. Its space is polyvalent, to use Henri Lefebvre’s term.4 It is social space, the battleground of class, but also mythical space, defended by John’s folkloric spells, transcended by Nicholas’s faux-flood story, and assaulted by the red-hot blade of Absalom. Most poignantly, “A house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality.”5 For all three men in the Miller’s Tale, the house is central, a desirable center: to be in it in some way—even in Absalom’s fantasy—is to enter the paradisal sweetness that Alysoun so abundantly and ambivalently represents. In a general sense, the theater, the temples, John’s house, and even the house of Symkyn are focal centers, places that resonate with a person’s character and ground our sense of his or her being-in-the-world; whether we are speaking of a fabliau house, or Custance’s boat, or the Wife of Bath’s (internalized) household, they are, in Bachelard’s inspired metaphor, the “tap-root of the function of inhabiting.”6 By giving us access to the complexity of a character’s emplacement in a particular kind of world, Chaucer’s metaphors of space and place bring us closer to the reflective experience of the medieval subject. This book is about the effect and significance of space and place in the first six Canterbury Tales, to which I have added the Shipman’s Tale, for the light it sheds on the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. In these tales, space is familiar to the eye, yet meaningful in relation to the identities and ambitions of the characters. We may call the Knight’s Tale an “allegory of will,” because its characters carry on their lives in a landscape and places within it that express and amplify their inner life. Theseus on campaign, framed by his “hoost of chivalrie the flour,” Emelye in her garden, Palamon and Arcite dueling in the grove—all occupy spaces or places that quietly manifest social identity and individual intention, furthering the narrative without seeming to do so. Relatively little has been written about space and place in the Canterbury Tales,7 yet the rewards for attending to this aspect of Chaucer’s aesthetic are considerable. Space and place are a powerful if scarcely visible way of establishing the symbolic nature of the narrative—our sense that it means beyond itself. In the Miller’s Tale, for example, the layers of moral, social, and psychological meaning are the more apprehensible because they are given shape by the vertical structure of John’s house and its central location within the town and the countryside that surround it. In a general sense, the house is private space. But places within the house, such as the bedroom of Nicholas, imply the significance of that space for individual characters. The depth of Nicholas’s character, such as it is, derives substantially from the various articles in his room and their arrangement, with the psaltery high above everything else, on its red cloth.8 “Faire Emelye” is wordless until part 3 of the

Introduction

3

Knight’s Tale, but her behavior in the garden scene speaks eloquently of who she is and what we may expect of her. Even Alysoun of Bath, known for the variegated tonality of her narrative voice, establishes the authenticity of her role through the household articles, voices, stories, and other domestic details that she brings into the narrative, creating her own place in the center of them. The following chapters will be about the significance of space, then, but also the significance of characters in place. Place in particular is useful for critical analysis because of its innate formality. Place is visual, it has parts, and those parts have reference to characters, ideas, and other places. Place gives us a concrete sense of surroundings, a certain place for a certain someone to be. To put it a different way, an emplaced character is already defined by his or her circumstances, by what lies around, under, and above, and that emplacement creates our sense of the character’s being-in-the-world, his or her constructed identity. Since the subjectivity of Chaucer’s characters is so often interrogated, it seems useful to inquire into a literary device that helps to create that illusion. Another advantage to place is that it brings our attention to somewhere in the world. Characters dwell in place, and within the cosmos. A character’s identity and “intente” are obvious enough in the context of chivalry, or in a country town or a suburb, but in the city of London the outlines of identity begin to fade, and in exile, in the vast uncharted space beyond Gibraltar, where is one, and who? Custance in her tiny boat, Alysoun in her household—both are exiles, yet both create a place for themselves by responding to their emplacement: they become themselves by dwelling in a place and making it their own. At the margin of the narrative, and underlying fourteenth-century consciousness, there remains the larger question: if the cosmos surrounding us is indeed an infinite void space—space that can only be filled by God’s immensity (as Thomas Bradwardine and others were arguing)9—who are we then in the face of it? Through various treatments of narrative space, Chaucer seems to imply this question, and his characters’ emplacement provides a kind of answer. As we move through the opening tales, moreover, the treatment of space and place changes. The Knight’s Tale begins with epic adventures out of Statius: Theseus rides to Scythia, to Thebes, and back to Athens, impressing upon us the reach of chivalric space and his centrality to it. The focus abruptly contracts to Palamon’s and Arcite’s near-final resting place in a heap of dead bodies, then widens again until, at the end of the tale, the great amphitheater and Theseus’s “golden chain of love” speech take in all of chivalry—indeed, the entire cosmos. The Miller’s and Reeve’s tales take place in a house within a town, then simply a house. Perkyn Revelour, last seen in transit between shops, seems even more isolated within the great town of London, and Custance, drifting in her little boat, is a mere speck between sea and sky. When

4

Introduction

we come within the intimate boundaries of Alysoun’s household, the place of her marriages, it is clear that the first six tales demonstrate a movement from space to place, from territory to dwelling, and from the horizons of consciousness to the core of human intent.10 With Theseus, even during his monologue in the grove, we witness identity’s public display, while with Alysoun of Bath, we contemplate the wellsprings of her identity. Having traversed the first six tales, we will have observed the narrative potential of space and place, their range of variance from the cold brilliance of public spectacle to the close comfort (or discomfort!) of domestic life. Surely we are prepared by now for the increasing pointlessness of the Monk’s Tale, told by a man who has lost his place in the world, or the confessional hell of the Pardoner’s Tale, a narcissism so confining and draining that when his voice ceases, the Pardoner has no place to go and virtually disappears. Chaucer has shown us how characters arise through emplacement, how they create themselves by dwelling in place. That is not the only function of the opening tales, but it is one worth exploring. The following sections will discuss the terms and methods of my approach to Chaucer’s spatial poetics.

Space The setting of a story is the scene of its action, but while the chapters in this book will often discuss setting, the spaces and places of Chaucer’s tales will not be treated merely as background. Rather, place is understood here as an index of character,11 and space as an area of characteristic potential.12 These formulaic terms will become clearer as they are applied in the following chapters, but until then, a brief explanation may be helpful. Strictly speaking, “space” is extension of three-dimensional volume, a volume infinitely extendable in Newtonian physics, as it was in the infinite void space imagined by fourteenth-century philosophers and theologians. But as it enters ordinary language, space becomes local and then metaphoric. “Air space” means the volume of air lying above a given area of ground. But “restricted space” can mean an area large or small, inside or outside man-made structures; it is probably not restricted for everyone. “Public space” is even more a matter for interpretation. For whom is the space of a city park public? For citizens, clearly, but does that include salespeople, political demonstrators, or the homeless? When we come to “personal space,” we are certainly on metaphorical ground: “personal” to whom, and for what purpose, and above all, where? Nonetheless, it is the personal element of space—the way in which it represents characteristic human potential, rather than simply a measure of volume—that makes it useful for thinking about narrative. What is “my space,” if not a projection—better, an interaction—whereby certain aspects of who I

Introduction

5

am reverberate in an area of felt or imagined potential and then return to me, their meaning enriched in the process? This interaction could refer simply to the confined space of my study. But equally it might involve my feelings or ambitions, voiced during a long-distance phone call, and it could easily involve future events in which my own potential for action (again, “my space”) might be at issue. And if personal space, then social, political, or economic space, and rhetorical (“contested”) space, not to mention gendered and intimate space. But the common theme of these usages is that they indicate the potential for characteristic action, development, and a more profound expression of being. Most of the Canterbury pilgrims are given the space of a portrait, and all seem eager to extend that expression of being, revealing and establishing themselves by telling a tale. But while it is possible to read the tales as extensions of their narrators, and many have done so, each tale seems to mean more than would normally concern a knight, a miller, or a reeve. With some imaginative effort we can accept the narrative as reflecting the views of the Knight or Miller, or the flinty northern parsimony of the Reeve: most readers would agree, in other words, that the Knight, Miller, or Reeve might have told such a tale. Yet finally it is a relief to agree with Donald Howard that much of what happens in these tales, and much of their significance, is conveyed by “unimpersonated artistry,” an unidentifiable narrative voice manifesting the artistry of a written text.13 So even though it is useful at certain points to think of a tale as the rhetorical or dramatic space of its narrator—an extensive opportunity for that character to express a point of view or “intente”—I will devote more attention to the characters within a given tale: their placement, the reach (or frustration) of their ambitions, and the significance of how they act within the experiential world of their tale. Their dwelling places reflect who they are and give resonance to what they do, while the extended social and natural space of their potential being implies both their ambitions and some inevitable constraints. In sum, the experiential world of the tale derives from our sense of how characters respond to, but at the same time create, their unique emplacement in space and place. In the Knight’s Tale, for instance, space is initially given shape by the heraldic figure of Theseus the “conquerour,” framed by his “hoost of chivalrie the flour” (line 982).14 When he has defeated Creon and razed the city of Thebes, he has extended the rule of law to protect the rights of the Argive war widows, just as earlier he imposed it upon the Scythian Amazons. In effect, Theseus has brought Theban tyranny and Amazon lawlessness within the bounds of “chivalric space,” an area that accords with his own “wisdom and chivalrie” and is filled by chivalry’s ritualistic culture. There are other kinds of space in the Knight’s Tale. There is, for instance, domestic space, as implied by Ypolita’s marriage to Theseus, and more centrally, by Emelye’s future marriage to either Palamon or Arcite. And then there is the natural space represented

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Introduction

by Emelye’s garden, or the grove where Palamon and Arcite have their duel. Each kind of space holds a potential for conflict, because the natural needs and personal ambitions it expresses must inevitably run counter to other aims, values, and constraints. If Palamon and Arcite fight like lions and tigers in the grove, that is because it is at once a refuge from the authority of Theseus and a forest of the heart, a savage forest where jealous love rushes to combat and death stares from their ashen faces. In other tales, we encounter different kinds of space—social, economic, and natural contexts that express different potentials. In the Miller’s Tale, the only space worth having is the private space of John’s house where Alysoun dwells. The tale’s space is concentric. Its center is the house, which reflects John’s ambitions and the social values of the town of Oxford. But while Alysoun’s youthful freshness and vitality imply John’s status, they also bring the natural virtues of the surrounding countryside into this central suburban dwelling. The rewards of this tale depend upon admission to the “privee” house, and its punishment is to be excluded from it. Thus, the significance of the house develops as an alternation between natural and social space as each of the men is thrust by his own excesses out or away from the private house and into the withering public gaze. In the Man of Law’s Tale, by contrast, Custance herself is recurrently forced away from centers of comfort and refuge to ride the barren seas of poverty and exile. Born a Roman princess, she marries twice, and each time satanic mothers-in-law set her to drift in small boats for many years. The comforts of marriage are illusory, in this tale, but the empty spaces of exile are full of divine presence for the saintlike Custance, often bereft but never poor in spirit. The potential of exilic space engenders action in the Knight’s Tale, but in the Man of Law’s Tale it engenders an identification with Christ and his mother. In either case, and whether space is chivalric, domestic, natural, private, or exilic, it is also an adumbration of potential identity, the promise of an enhanced state of being.

Place As the promise of being, space may be either large or small. And because it implies the change and flow of human ambition, space is also multiform and inherently mutable. But the description of character also requires limits and boundaries, a containing and defining metaphor to give it shape, and this is the function of place. The grove that is somewhere near the castle of Theseus is described simply as having boughs for Arcite’s garland and a bush for Palamon to hide under. That is enough to create it as a locus within natural space; like the amphitheater’s arena, it is a meaningful place for the young men to act out their pent-up love, fear, and anger.

Introduction

7

Emelye’s garden is also a natural place. It is her emplacement, a spatial metaphor of her state of being. For it is soon evident that this garden is more than a passive natural setting. The description of the garden itself is minimal; the lyrical, almost mystical language works instead to create a powerful sense of Emelye’s presence in it, an effect deriving mainly from her enclosure by and interaction with her surroundings. Famously, she picks flowers, white and red, and she strolls up and down the garden, conveying the idea of its dimensions and her evident acceptance of them. She sings like angel, “hevenysshly”: not only is she happy gathering flowers, but she is also in tune with the garden’s Edenic if not divine overtones, so that it becomes possible to think of her state of being as something close to beatific. The garden wall is “evene joynant” to the castle’s great dungeon-tower, “thikke and stroong” (I.1056–60). This means that the imprisoned Palamon and Arcite are suggestively near, but for Emelye, who is unaware of them, the tower is merely the massive backdrop to her peaceful garden, a rugged boundary that makes the delicacy and security of the garden even more comforting. Indeed, we are given several indications that Emelye is responding to this environing natural place. “The sesoun” has urged (“priketh”) her “gentil hert” (line 1043), reminding her to honor the spring, so she has arisen early, put on fresh clothes, and braided her hair, and is now walking, singing, and gathering blooms. Far more than simply responding, she has practically become part of nature, her cheeks red as roses, her neck long and graceful as a lily’s. Not through descriptive detail, then, but by Emelye’s interactions with this natural place, her state of being is given a definite, sensible expression. The garden is evidently her typical setting, and her active emplacement there grounds her character in felt experience. It is an eloquent symbol of Emelye’s being-inthe-world that continues to resonate in the tale, urging the validity of her point of view on marriage, despite the answering male pressure of chivalric culture. Other places in the Knight’s Tale that help us to understand the inner necessity and social determination of a character are the temples of Venus, Mars, and Diana, set into the walls of the great amphitheater and manifesting the power of nature at work in the three young people who come there to pray. There is also the funeral pyre, where Arcite and all the tokens of the chivalric world he lost are brought together in a summative grief that continues so long that it seems as though chivalry were mourning for its own lost youth. In a tale so long and complex, it is perhaps inevitable that the narrative should visit and revisit these meeting places of chivalry and nature—garden, temples, pyre—whose significance rises with each event toward the universal. Other natural and built places recur in the following tales. These structures saturated with identity create our sense of an inner being, an indwelling particularity of feeling and intention that helps us understand not only what

8

Introduction

the characters do but also what drives them. In the Man of Law’s Tale, even the Mediterranean acquires a sense of place; in a broad sense it is Custance’s home territory—Rome is its central locus—and her leaving and then reentering this familiar, almost womblike sea through the Strait of Gibraltar are significant turning points in this female-oriented narrative. For Alysoun of Bath, the central place is certainly her house, which we perceive not as a building but as a domain of gender politics, a place where a wise wife establishes her “maistrie.” The point of view of earlier tales is reversed in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, for here the narratorial center is always inside, not outside, the home-place. The men in her life end up inside her capacious (and contentious) house-of-life, and their necessity is not to possess more of life, but rather to let go of their hunger for it and to dwell meaningfully and purposefully within the boundaries of this marital place.

Women (and Men) in Space and Place Alysoun of Bath stands apart from the women in the earlier tales, because she has a voice, and the major story she has to tell is that of her own life. Told in confessional form, it is a life as seen from the inside, not the tale of a woman in the world, but of a woman’s world. This world is easy for us to imagine, because it is a densely woven experiential fabric, registering the manifold details of her dress, her household, her travels, and her friends, but most of all what she said to her husbands, how they replied, and how she felt about that. Through this strongly impersonated narrative voice, we are immediately placed within the marital scene and acquire a material sense of her emplacement in marriage. We come to feel not only what this experience was like for her, but also how it affected her: we have so much evidence of that experience that we lose our critical distance and find ourselves blaming, justifying, and making guesses about her behavior as though she were a neighbor or friend. This sense of Alysoun as a real person is sustained by her bodily presence, not the earthiness of her self-references so much as her matter-of-fact discussions of wine, sex, walking abroad, kissing, giving blows with her fist—all of which force us to imagine Alysoun herself carrying out these actions. Gradually, our underlying impression of her central emplacement in marriage, in the house, and in the social relationships of the surrounding town lends her a rounded, continuous presence in our imagination. The effect of these authenticating devices is that Alysoun becomes an individual for us. She is so solidly established that we may find ourselves generalizing from her behavior, thinking of her as a “typical” woman. Imagining Alysoun as typical is made easy for us by the vigor of her discourse. Her monologue begins as a debate with the imagined yet nonetheless powerful

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9

voice of the church and its clerks. Then the account of her marriages reproduces the give-and-take of her debates with the husbands, and this reporting frequently turns into a lecture for other wives. Alysoun speaks, and the world—her world—falls into place around her central point of view. This world also has a cosmic dimension. Alysoun is marked by the “prente of seinte Venus seel” (line 604), and she bears the mark of Mars on her face and in another private place. According to this “constellacioun,” she implies, fate has marked her for love and combat. As readers, we have been familiar with the influence of Venus and Mars since Palamon and Arcite were impelled by them in the Knight’s Tale, and we reflect that Alysoun has embodied these forces (that is her belief, in any case), internalizing their contradictory powers and making them part of every one of her marriages. Despite her idiosyncratic complexity, Alysoun is a representative wife who has pulled the world—the cosmos!—in around her, and made it her kingdom. Alysoun’s emotional strength and experiential wisdom—call it fortitudo et sapientia—is what men fear but also need in marriage and in her. For these reasons, and for the sheer space allotted to her prologue and tale, she is the climactic female figure in the opening tales, but she may also be understood as the cresting of a development in female character since the Knight’s Tale. The women have been central to the action because they are objects of pursuit, the men swirling about them in self-defeating attempts to advance themselves. The women are icons of the men’s desires and ambitions, perhaps as objects of adoration, but also as enhancements of self-image, and sometimes merely as means to an end. Alysoun of Bath is self-consciously, purposefully, and vocally such an icon. Yet like the other, quieter women, she is also much more than that. Each woman becomes in some way the metaphoric embodiment of the place-world of her tale, and in her actions, a central symbol of its inherent values. Emelye, for instance, is “my sweete foo” for the dying Arcite, not that she wishes him harm in any way, but pursuing her he will meet his cruel if glorious destiny. Emelye seldom appears in the Knight’s Tale. Nonetheless, the girl who plucked flowers white and red and rode all in green after the great stag is fate’s huntress. Lighting the fires of sacrifice links her with the fire images that so often accompany Arcite, and when one fire gutters out, and later, as she looks on, Arcite himself is crushed by his saddle bow, the association grows stronger. Finally, when she lights the towering funeral pyre, green at the top like Arcite, crowned with leafy garlands in the spring grove, we realize that Emelye represents the necessity of Arcite’s death. In effect, the fire’s embrace is her embrace. The romance maiden, cool and remote, has been displaced by the funeral pyre, a metamorphosis like that of Daphne’s changing into a laurel tree in the painting on the wall of Diana’s temple.

10

Introduction

And Alysoun in the Miller’s Tale? Alysoun’s is the most carefully worked portrait in any of the tales; the portrait ranges literally from top to toe, but is centered by her brass-beaded purse with its silken tassels. These eye-catching fripperies, like the black silk embroidery of her white smock, the black ribbons of her cap, her artfully shaped black eyebrows, and even the modish shoes, “laced on hir legges hye,” are signals directing our attention to the skirt, the low collar, and the “likerous ye”—entries, all of them, to the desirable center that is Alysoun. Since she is John’s petite-bourgeoise wife, and a very young wife for this established carpenter, Alysoun’s purse—her spending power— has much to do with their relationship and his standing in the town. Conversely, her feral vitality, clothed in gleaming white but winking out at us from the embroidery, the tapes and tassels, and the fetching “likerous” eye, is the power that draws Nicholas and Absalom to seek her within the private space of John’s house. The house, in turn, has three levels: Nicholas’s upper room, with its gable; the main floor, where John and Alysoun sleep; and the street level outside, below the shot window. But when the shot window comes into use, we reflect that Alysoun aligns perfectly with the house: her gaze is like the gable, looking toward a green future; her desirable center promises, like the bedroom, a dream of private life; and below, of course, each man is punished— falls—for his excessive folly. The purse, Alysoun, and her house are nested metaphors, perfectly aligned and richly significant. Money, woman, house— all suggest the promise of life in the town of Oxford, which seems a fair trade for country life, so vividly remembered in the apple-sweet breath, the frisky coltishness, and other rural metaphors of Alysoun’s fairness. For Alysoun herself is the central term. It is her attractive figure, enriched by her emplacement in Oxford and enlivened by her activities there, that creates the sense of place—better, the spirit of place that is the true focus of this suburban tale. John, Nicholas, and Absalom are all in tune with it, each in their way, but by overreaching, each falls out of tune, leaving Alysoun with the grace of being wisely and simply who she is, and perfectly in harmony with Oxford. Emelye, John’s Alysoun, and Dame Alys of Bath dwell in places that express their social and economic potential, their characters gaining physical, emotional, and voluntary presence thereby. They are in place, but for the men in their lives, and perhaps for us as well, place is also in them:15 bonded with the scene, held by the horizon of their emplacement, they merge in metaphor with the place that creates for them what Edward Casey calls “the phenomenal particularity of [their] being-in-the-world.”16 The focal female characters in the other opening tales are brought to life and given an existential weight and a kind of selfhood by similar emplacements within significant surroundings. We think of Symkyn’s wife, braving it in scarlet as she and her husband parade themselves on holy days, defended from assault, if not from snide com-

Introduction

11

ment, by the edged weapons Symkyn always carries with him. Both wife and daughter are means of increase (“grinding”) like the mill, so that the reversal (“the miller milled”), when it happens by means of the women, yields both a grim humor and a kind of sympathy for these long-term captives of Symkyn’s greed. Poor Malyne’s subjectivity is ironized, no doubt, yet we feel it strongly, if briefly, in her pathetically redemptive speech when she returns what remains of the stolen meal. In the Cook’s Tale, the thief ’s wife is equally identified with her place in life, again a household but at the same time her house of prostitution. John’s Alysoun is associated with her purse, and Alysoun of Bath preserves her maistrie by careful management of her bele chose. But if Perkyn Revelour supports his “riot and paramour” by emptying the vitailler’s cash box, this urban wife is herself the purse of her little business: the more she is plundered, the greater her yield. With this reductive formula for identity the tale breaks off, perhaps to our relief, for the mercantile emplacement of the wife’s character seems potentially grim and confining. As if in reaction to such narrowness, the Man of Law’s Tale expands into a practically limitless void of space and time. Custance spends a total of eight years drifting in a small boat. Her birthplace at the center of the Roman Empire becomes the no-place of exile, and englobed security gives way to the heedless forces of wind and current. By embracing exile, however, which means submitting to God’s will and later the will of her Northumbrian husband, Alla, Custance survives her sea journeys and conceives a future Christian emperor. To lose everything and be reduced to nothing (a tiny, rudderless boat in an endless sea) is, in her case, to find herself in the immensity of God.17 These paradoxical metaphors contradict the worldly views of the Man of Law—we remember his apostrophe to successful merchants and his complaint against poverty—and by contrast they seem intangible, less physical than even the garden emplacement of Emelye. Yet Custance is no less a mediator with mortality, no less a “sweete foo.” In her own way, Custance embodies what is most real in her tale. Her emplacements convey not a concrete sense of her being-in-the-world, but her exalted place in the infinite world beyond.

The Chapters in Review My initial chapter, on the Knight’s Tale, is a frank attempt to suggest the usefulness of space and place for giving type characters the presence and depth required by a narrative that is essentially a romance-allegory of will. This chapter sets out the main ideas of the book—the functions of space and place, and the tendency of female characters, especially, to merge with metaphors of place. I hope thereby to lay down a theoretical base. The chapter dwells on scenes or

12

Introduction

speeches where character emerges from emplacement, particularly in the case of Emelye. The blankness of her role has become something of a cliché in Chaucer criticism, but I attempt to show that if we are aware of how her character is derived, her function and significance also become more evident. I read the Knight’s Tale itself as a bittersweet retrospective on chivalric life, which it celebrates as splendid, expansive, absolute, self-serving, and dated. The chapter on the Miller’s Tale describes the elusive nature of private life in a small town like Oxford, using its concentric spatial plan and the vertical arrangement of place in John’s house as critical scaffolding. John’s wife, Alysoun, described along a vertical axis like the house, is also a possession, an emblem of the tale’s values. All three men want to be inside the house, with Alysoun, yet all three succumb to the excesses of their ambitions, banishing themselves from that desirable center. If the Knight’s Tale can be read as an allegory of will, the Miller’s Tale is a comic allegory of willfulness, where the desire for “pryvetee” spurs Nicholas, Absalom, and John to “woodness,” as perceived by the knowing public gaze. The first Reeve’s Tale chapter is in some respects a companion to the chapter on the Miller’s Tale, since both tales use a concentric setting, both use houses as the primary locus, and in those houses, women’s activities are crucial. Symkyn’s house and mill are both places by which he assimilates the substance of others to himself. The women are equally instrumental to his thievery: through them, marriage becomes a kind of milling, and by the crude logic of this tale, they become surrogate mills. But beyond the house lie the milewide fens, where the horse Bayard escapes to chase wild mares. The action of the tale parallels this expansive movement from mill to fens, moving from culture to nature and from the unbearable constraint of Symkyn’s cheating to a kind of natural balance. Chapter 4, the second Reeve’s Tale chapter, is an excursus that explores analogies between Symkyn’s clerkly rhyme about space and place—“Ye konne by argumentes make a place / A myle brood in twenty foot of space” (lines 4123–24)—and some contemporary philosophical and theological (and thus, clerkly) arguments. I discuss the condemnations of 1277, issued at the University of Paris, which threatened with excommunication anyone who professed that Aristotle’s theories of physics and cosmology could limit in any way the power of God—for example, God’s power to create an infinite number of other worlds, which would imply an infinite volume of space to contain them. After infinite void space, I turn to internal space, space folded in upon itself, which was at issue in “the physics of the Eucharist.” That is, how could Christ—the entire, physical substance of him—dwell within the host after the transubstantiation? I pursue these matters for the light they cast on Symkyn’s clerkly jingle. Even a faint awareness of these profound ideas would have brought the Reeve’s Tale into sharper focus for his contemporary audience.

Introduction

13

My chapter on the Cook’s Tale was initially an experiment to see whether the urban space of the tale and the place of Perkyn’s master’s shop would help us understand how this fragment connects with the earlier tales. I begin by distinguishing the controlled commerce of the master vitailler’s shop from the uncontrolled, free-market activities of theft and prostitution that operate from the thief ’s wife’s house. Perkyn’s move to the thief ’s house promises a contrast with the orderly shop, perhaps an inversion of it. What would it have meant for Perkyn to leave both the shop and the powerful Vitaillers’ Guild? The bitter controversies involving the greater and lesser guilds, and the tumultuous career of Nicholas Brembre—wealthy grocer, friend to Richard II, Lord Mayor of London in 1377, and dead on the scaffold in 1388—provide a context for Perkyn’s social and economic move downward. Chaper 6 on the Man of Law’s Tale, grew out of a determination to understand the appeal of Custance (most critics find her quite resistible) and the inner logic of her saintly drifting. Custance herself is a sentimental Christian answer to the Knight’s Tale’s Boethian stoicism, but her function in space and place is crucial to how the tale means. As one exile gives way to another, Custance’s tiny boat (a figure for self ) is guided by God’s unknowable “purveiaunce,” and the years of drifting contribute a sense of her spiritual character: the vast, almost dreamlike reach of space and time at sea suggests how Custance the Roman princess has forgotten herself, let go of earthly things, and found substance in emptiness, power in humility. Chapter 7, an excursus on the Shipman’s Tale, prefaces my treatment of the Wife. The action of this tale moves from outer to inner space, and is finally seen from a female perspective, as is the case in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. The merchant’s wife comes to embody the quid pro quo of her thoroughly mercantile marriage, controlling her situation by a kind of sexual tally (“Score it upon my taille” [VII.416]). This neat union of sex and commerce in the wife’s bed (a figure for the marriage, but also for the mercantile world) is a gesture toward the fully developed self-revelation delivered by the Wife of Bath, whose marital domain is an internalized world. In chapter 8 I argue that the Wife of Bath’s point of view inverts the world of the earlier tales, making us see its cares and necessities from its center in the littler, more intimate, profoundly metaphoric, and in some ways richer domestic space of marriage. Within the place of her household, Alysoun’s authenticating features are the infinitely varied tones and cadences of her narrative voice. The voice gathers pans and basins, husbands and their language, gossips, memories, knocks on the ear—all the marital circumstances that she dominates and that have formed her—into the charmed circle of her maistrie. This central authority represents marital power, but also the ability to create an inner space of acceptance where she can dance her attitudes and confront her own mortality.

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Introduction

In the final chapter I locate Chaucer’s use of place and space within the larger context of medieval literature, and then offer summary discussions of Chaucer’s poetics of space, his treatment of characters in place, and what I call “inner space”—“space transformed by the imagination, a reflective internal world oriented, sustained, and troubled by a character’s life experience.” The concluding section on spatial questions in the later tales indicates some ways in which an analysis of spatial relations might provide an interesting approach to Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale, Merchant’s Tale, Franklin’s Tale, Monk’s Tale, Prioress’s Tale, and, very briefly, the Second Nun’s Tale, Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, Manciple’s Tale, Pardoner’s Tale, and Parson’s Tale.

CHAPTER

1

Dwelling Places of Chivalry and Nature

As the first tale told on the way to Canterbury, the Knight’s Tale must carve a space for itself, and this the Knight does by describing the world, not as he finds it, perhaps, but as gentlefolk—“gentils” (line 3113)—have agreed to understand the world of chivalry. For them, his tale is a social myth of origins that provides an answer to Arcite’s great questions: “What is this world? What asketh men to have?” (line 2777). The world, in this view, is one of warring peoples1—thus, the need for order and rule. But those who rule others must first conquer themselves, curb their desires, take others’ needs into account, and exercise the power of a tempered will. Such a man is Theseus, Duke of Athens, and the extent of his awareness and potential force is what we may call chivalric space. Of course, chivalric space is also an imaginative dimension. The ideology of chivalry seems to extend uninterrupted between the age of Theseus and the present time of Chaucer’s Knight, as if there could be no civilized place or time that was not chivalric. But within this apparently inescapable space, troubling and vitalizing it, are human desires (“What asketh men to have”?): Emelye, Palamon, and Arcite dwell in limited freedom and their achieved identity never quite fills the mirror of their wishes. As a result, their imaginations and desires seek a release in places within what we might call natural space: an enclosed garden, then an open grove. In the second half of the tale, Theseus’s amphitheater encloses the grove, rendering it a field of chivalric combat, but finally Arcite’s funeral pyre—in effect, the entire grove in flame—sums up his life in chivalry and the natural rhythms of love and death that are its larger context. Within these emblematic, ambivalent places, Palamon’s, Arcite’s, and Emelye’s conflicting desires find their resolution and achieve their full significance.

I. Like the more famous beginning of the General Prologue, the opening of the Knight’s Tale is a worldview in brief, the return of Theseus to Athens with “greet solempnytee.” The passage opens with a heraldic fanfare—“lord and

15

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Chaucerian Spaces

governour,” “swich a conquerour”—and, swelling to “gretter was ther noon under the sonne,” lets Theseus ride into history “with al his hoost in armes hym bisyde.” It is less a description of Theseus than a conceptual frame for a chivalric icon: the wise and mighty sun of chivalry, blazing with memorable deeds rendered by a series of active verbs—wonne, conquered, weddede, broghte, ryde—that reflect the freedom and power of his will. In its structure and language, the passage celebrates both Theseus and the greatness of chivalry itself—its privilege, its will to dominate, and its evident strength to govern. In effect, it creates a tableau, an interval of celebratory space. The rhetoric of praise that fills this space rises toward the all-inclusive (“al the regne,” “al his hoost”) and the absolute (“swich a conqueror,” “Ful many a riche contree,” “muchel glorie and greet solempnytee”). Its intensity tells us that the Duke of Athens is a spectacle of self-evident public truth, like the floats in a parade.2 The aura cast about him by the language of praise, the cataloguing of deeds, and the resonant terms of order and rule create a representative domain of social praxis where princes reign and the people lining the way are there only to shout their praises to the skies. If this idealizing tableau bears any resemblance to late-medieval life experience, it is not that of a peasant, shopkeeper, merchant, or mayor, and perhaps not even that of a knight. Much of its detail recalls the aristocratic life, but on the whole it is a necessary fiction maintained by the ruling class and by those who depend upon them.3 “In more than one respect,” Huizinga says, life in late-medieval times “had still the colours of a fairy-story; that is to say, it assumed those colours in the eyes of contemporaries.”4 Princes were proud, magnificent, quick to anger, and cruel in battle, yet generous in their mercy. This is the folklore of governance and the governing class, commonplace wisdom painting its naive picture of the carefully guarded figures who govern, it is thought, by sheer power and will. Such is the world that unfolds before us in the Knight’s Tale. The social space embodied by Theseus, his deeds, and the language that adorns them is by extension a world space, a world of chivalry where princes’ wills preserve the order of things inherited from old times. Woven into this fabric of praise, nonetheless, is a different thread entirely, which deepens the opening lines. “With his wisdom and chivalry,” Theseus has conquered, not another “riche contree,” but the “regne of Femenye,” wedding the Amazon queen and bringing her back to Athens. The length of this incongruous, and thus faintly comic, clause and the repetitive drive of its phrasing (“And weddede,” “And broghte,” “With muchel glorie and greet solempnytee”) make it the climactic statement of the opening passage. It shares the expansiveness of the initial lines (“al the regne of Femenye”) and their grandeur of tone. But our view of chivalry, and of Theseus, has been complicated. Now there is “victorie” and “melodye,” not merely conquering but wedding the queen and bringing her home.

Dwelling Places of Chivalry and Nature

17

The change in narrative potential accompanies a shift in register of language. Chivalric terms have given way to those of domestic relationships, moving from the public to the personal, just as later in the tale the story of deeds is joined by an inward-turning narrative of feelings and desires. With this new story line, we encounter a different kind of social space. Here it is the private will to power that is at issue—not governance challenged by chance, fate, tyranny, and rebellion, but frustrated love, combative jealousy, and, not least, the ache of self-determination forever denied. The chivalric and sentimental plots mingle, in other words, as they do in every romance,5 complicating the apparently seamless world of chivalry that the opening lines project. As Theseus and his troops recede, the narrator recollects himself— indeed, this first occupatio is largely a self-portrait—and confesses that there is not time to tell about the battle, the siege of Ypolita the Amazon queen, the wedding, or the later tempest. Opinions regarding occupatio in this tale have differed over time, but it seems to have many possible effects. Here repeated terms of war and the suggestive rhyme of “feste” and “tempest” return our attention to battles lost, a hard truth softened earlier by pairing “victorie” and “melodye.” Recounting these events embeds them deeper, salting the wounds of gender conflict.6 Our suspicions about the narrator’s tone are confirmed when the Knight self-effacingly declines to continue the passage (“wayke been the oxen in my plough” [line 887]), and, with beautiful condescension, explains that he wishes to stay within his time limit and give “every felawe” his turn. We will notice a similar reticence when he describes Emelye’s ritual bathing in part 3. Is this modesty? More likely it is a moment of dry restraint. The battle of the sexes will resurface, but at the moment the Knight has retreated from an area of contested space where chivalry does not appear to advantage.7 The chivalric perspective re-forms immediately, as the narrator assumes the point of view of Theseus: He was war, as he caste his eye aside, Where that ther kneled in the heighe weye A compaignye of ladyes tweye and tweye Ech after oother clad in clothes blake; (Lines 896–99) The glances of this duke are not random but perceptive (“war”), theatrical, and charged with the potential of his will (see line 2469). Seeing the ladies is, for him, the prelude to a decision, the initiation of an action. His glance conveys his “intente,” the purpose that goes with responsibility, and following it we begin to see how the social space of chivalry is constructed. Here are ladies kneeling in the high road, cast down from their sequestered place by tyranny and bad fortune. In the world of chivalry it is shameful—worse, it is unnatural—for ladies

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to be groveling in the road, just as it is contra nature that Creon left their husbands on the battlefield to rot, turning the land of the living into a grave. “Ladies,” the narrator says; but how are we to know this? “Tweye and tweye, / Ech after oother,” these women are lined up, and their symmetry reassures the aristocratic eye. And so Theseus asks who they are: their sorrow seems immeasurable, and in the world of chivalry, a prince must share the ladies’ joy and mediate their grief. The eldest lady is the widow of Capaneus, struck down by the gods during the siege of Thebes, it is said, for his insufferable pride. His fall and his widow’s low estate are dramatized by her formal planctus, a passage in the high style, rich in the rhetoric of public lament: Nat greveth us youre glorie and youre honour, But we biseken mercy and socour. Have mercy on oure wo and oure distresse! Som drope of pitee, thurgh thy gentillesse, Upon us wrecched women lat thou falle (Lines 917–21) The passage amplifies their desperation, implying that only a high lord like himself could aid those brought so low. The pathos of her language—“routhe,” “greveth,” “starf at Thebes,” “I, wrecche!”—lends the scene a kind of grandeur. Rising at times to the language of prayer (“Now help us lord, sith it is in thy might” [line 930]), it emphasizes the tension between Theseus’s high fortune and the ladies’ miserable state. The scene is rendered in terms of high and low, the social axis of the chivalric world. The mention of Capaneus lends the scene a historical dimension, the weight of famous events, while the women clothed in black and kneeling in pairs create a sense of ritual. Consequently, when Theseus leaps down from his horse and, taking them in his arms, lifts them up, he seems to have entered a charged volume of representative space where aristocratic ideals are played out in a kind of chivalric allegory: aristocrats are born to high place, and it is there they should remain. The mannered gestures and the elevated language that goes with them re-create the color, purpose, and emotional tenor of chivalric life within the small but meaningful confines of this scene’s narrative space. The climax of the widow’s speech is provided by Creon, who Hath alle the bodyes on an heep ydrawe, And wol nat suffren hem, by noon assent, Neither to been yburyed nor ybrent, But maketh houndes ete hem in despit. (Lines 944–47)

Dwelling Places of Chivalry and Nature

19

Out of anger and “despit,” Creon has left the dead Argives on the battlefield to be eaten by dogs, a classic tyrant’s decree. There is no Antigone in this story, yet the near-dead Theban princes brought in by the pillagers are reminiscent of Eteocles and Polyneices, sons of Oedipus who fought each other for Thebes and died under its walls. Emelye herself is no Antigone, and has no need to be. Yet her relationship to Theseus is shadowed by Creon the tyrant, and by Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus who dared oppose her private will to his public authority. But it is the heap of dead bodies that seizes our attention. After the battle, Theseus honors the remains, but we are left with the haunting image of dogs tearing the bodies. Tumbled and chaotic, dead bodies in a heap are an affront to sacred ritual, while letting “houndes ete hem in despit” negates human identity because it disintegrates human form. Creon’s edict is unnatural, because it transforms something human into something that is not, and animals are the means for this grisly metamorphosis. In this tale, they become symbols of the loss of humanity through tyranny, or through any serious aberration of the human will. And with that loss, the action descends to animal passions and the social chaos against which chivalry is a bulwark. The linked motifs of animals and metamorphosis suggest the precarious human balance and its tendency to slide toward bestiality. The “beasts of battle” at Thebes were the dogs of Creon, but the golden pennant of Theseus bears an image of the Cretan Minotaur. Attempts have been made to connect the legend of Theseus and Ariadne with the Knight’s Tale, hoping thereby to complicate Theseus’s character, but the tale offers little to support it. The Minotaur simply recalls Theseus’s slaying of that dreadful half-beast in the heart of his labyrinth. The image implies the metamorphic slippage of man into beast, and the golden “penoun,” the victory of human reason over the darkness. As for the Amazons, they are led by one named for the horse that is the symbol of their freedom: Ypolita (“Horsewoman”), a woman both “fair” and “hardy,” which faintly suggests that she dwells beyond the periphery of what Athenians, and perhaps English dukes, would consider an appropriate lifestyle for a woman of the ruling class. Taken together, the Amazons and Thebans represent the kinds of social excess that do not belong in chivalric space. Athens being the center of this space, Scythia and Thebes are lawless outlying territories, while the Minotaur and the other animal motifs imply a blurring of the human image that threatens the humanity sheltered by chivalric space. The adventures of Theseus are thus forays into what we may call natural space, where the chivalric will is weakened or changed and animal passions reign. Natural space, like the domestic space created by the language of sentiment, will recur in the narrative. Despite their obvious differences, both suggest the inner needs and drives of human nature, as opposed to chivalric reason and form.

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Theseus must prevent chivalry from descending into natural chaos, and the source of his wisdom is a wise balance. In his “wysdom and his chivalrie” are the paired Roman virtues of fortitudo and sapientia, and in the recurrent readjustments of his will8 we hear distant echoes of moderatio and perhaps even the sophrosyne of Odysseus, the art of finding, not exactly the middle way, but the best way between impossible extremes.9 Theseus’s two campaigns also suggest the moderating influence of his will. In each case he tempers the chivalric with the domestic, justice with mercy. After killing Creon he “rente adoun bothe wall and sparre and rafter” (line 990)—in other words, he razed the city and canceled the blind laws of Creon’s tyranny; then he returned to the widows the remains of their husbands. In the country of the Scythians, by contrast, he was content to defeat their leader, Ypolita, in battle and marry her. The terms of peace are not described, but presumably making Ypolita his queen constituted something like the rule of law for the Amazons. Thus, he tears down the walls (and laws) of the Theban tyranny, but sets up laws for Amazons who apparently have none, ranging freely in the unwalled plains of Scythia. The two campaigns of Theseus are chivalric in the obvious sense that they involve battles, ways of restraining the recalcitrant and imposing order. But in his response to the Theban ladies we have seen his self-restraint, his “pitee.”10 With them he is wary yet open and compassionate, leaping down from his horse to help, for his “gentil” heart demands it: This gentil duc doun from his courser sterte With herte pitous, when he herde hem speke. Hym thoughte that his herte wolde breke, Whan he saugh hem so pitous and so maat (Lines 952–55) It is the nature of a wise prince to feel the needs of his body politic, and the feeling is not whimsical but heartfelt; it penetrates the core of his nature, so that in a direct, visceral way, he is one with those in need. His governance depends upon such feelings, which enable but can also constrain his chivalric will. Whatever happens, he will respond feelingly, then move to put affairs in order. In this intimate sense, the world of chivalry lies both within the heart of Theseus and in the vast reach of his power. Indeed, chivalry is ample, its horizons far. Yet having heard the ladies out, Theseus rides immediately to Thebes as if the journey involved nothing but his will to be there. Before that, we find him in Scythia, south of the Black Sea, but we do not count the miles, because distance vanishes in this tale, just as it does in Greek romance; the narrative takes place in what Bakhtin calls “adventure time,” which pays little attention to the mundane reality of movement over the ground.11 This ancient convention provides the chivalric space

Dwelling Places of Chivalry and Nature

21

of the Knight’s Tale with its nearly infinite breadth and potential: Theseus, we feel, can ride anywhere he needs to go (“rode,” “ride,” or “rit” occur five times as he sets out for Thebes), and whenever he gets there he will act as freely. This freedom of movement and act is a metaphor for the freedom of his will. Thus, the intimate heart and the far adventures of Theseus are inseparably paired; together, they reflect the inner and the outer dimensions of chivalric space, representing chivalric life both as a private, felt experience and as the public display of worthy deeds. The climax of Theseus’s adventure narrative is his Theban campaign. The events are briefly rendered, but these little tableaux can be brightly expressive. When Theseus sets out for Thebes, the red statue of Mars So shyneth in his white baner large That alle the feeldes glyteren up and doun .................................... Thus rit this duc, thus rit this conquerour, And in his hoost of chivalrie the flour (Lines 976–77, 981–82) This passage is a version of “the knight sets forth” convention, and like the opening passage it creates the emplacement of Theseus in chivalric space. The duke is riding to war, and the fields glitter all about, manifesting his brilliance and power. Moving into this contested space, Theseus will not go unnoticed by those who (surely) are there to see him ride, framed splendidly by “his hoost of chivalrie the flour.” Arriving at Thebes, Theseus “alighte / Fair in a feeld, ther as he thoughte to fighte” (line 984–85), so that the narrative can flow from fields of martial passage to the field of battle, from one chivalric space to the next. After the battle, with Creon dead, he pitches camp on the same field of battle, and from that representative space “dide with al the contree as hym lest” (line 1004). Specifically, he restores to the Argive ladies the bones of their husbands, so that these introductory adventures extend from wedding to funeral, as if tracing the course of life itself. Each of these focal—indeed, vital—events was enabled by battle, the exercise of chivalric will. Their social and geographical polarity make chivalric space a global construct, coexistent with the world of men (the civilized ones, at least) and presided over by the gods. Chivalry is not the tyranny of Thebes, nor the isolated freedom of Amazons, but an ideology rooted in social needs and natural necessities, the heartroot of every social transaction. At this moment of gathered symmetries, a troubling scene darkens the narrative, for after the battle the pillagers have come out. The subject matter is low, the language ugly (“To ransake in the taas of bodyes dede, / Hem for

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to strepe of harneys and of wede” (lines 1005–6), and the high ethic of noblesse oblige is displaced by profit motive (“the pilours diden bisynesse and cure” [line 1007]). Piled with the dead they discover two princes of Thebes, wounded but good prospects for ransom. This rapid descent to hard realism marks a departure from chivalric space, since Palamon and Arcite have lost the royal protection of Thebes. Their ambiguous condition (“Nat fully quyk, ne fully dede” [line 1015]) is like their new social status, an uneasy liminal and thus changeable experience.12 Their instability accounts for the puzzling alternation between motifs harsh and tender, between “grevous blody wounde” and “blood royal / Of Thebes” (lines 1010, 1018–20), between “of sustren two yborn” and “Out of the taas the pilours han hem torn” (lines 1019–20). They are carried “softe” to Theseus (their ransom might repay gentleness), but potential heirs to the throne of Thebes must not go free, so he consigns them to perpetual imprisonment in Athens. Anonymous and vulnerable in exile, they dwell uneasily between chivalric and natural space, participating in the spectacle of one and falling victims to the necessities of the other.

II. Theseus reenters Athens, Palamon and Arcite begin life in prison, and years pass. This narrative stasis is ended by Emelye. Despite her being “syntactically expendable” at the end of this and other clauses describing Theseus’ wedding,13 Emelye initiates the tragicomic suits of Palamon and Arcite simply by responding to nature. Critical opinion has often failed to find personality, identity, willpower, or any other individuality in this pink-and-white-flower girl; it points repeatedly to her failure to accomplish her desires or do anything at all for herself. In fact, Emelye is not an individual, but is a representative figure like Theseus and the others, not a personality but a type. Wheras Theseus is quick to anger, quick to feel “pitee,” and quick to act—these are the virtues of a prince—and Palamon is worshipful in love and Arcite aggressive (such are lovers), Emelye is merely responsive, not to men but to her natural surroundings and to the higher cosmic nature represented by the goddess Diana. So Theseus is drawn by social disorder, Palamon and Arcite by female beauty, and Emelye by her kinship with the natural world; their strength is in doing (or pursuing), hers rather in being. Like her older sister, Emelye is an Amazon, and the extramural freedom of Amazons is defined by its contrast with the tyranny of Thebes, “with his olde walles wyde” (line 1880). Yet Emelye seems also to represent an inner, personal freedom that walls can not contain. As she strolls up and down within the small world of the garden, gathering flowers, Emelye is simply and beautifully being who she is, responding freely as her nature (and Nature) dictate.14

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Emelye’s identity, with its natural overtones, has to be carefully established, because it is an absolute quality. Theseus becomes familiar to us through his public interventions, and Palamon and Arcite through their emotional struggling, but Emelye’s “intente” must always be assumed, except in this identifying garden scene and its structural twin, her prayer to Diana. Here she is mirrored by the (virginal) lily, graceful “upon his stalke grene” (line 1036); she is fresher than May flowers—even her healthy flush of youth is finer than the color of the rose, so that every human quality cools in metaphor to a natural one. Moreover, the voice of spring has called her—“The seson priketh every gentil herte” (line 1043)—and of course she responds, “starting” out of bed early in the morning, putting on fresh clothes, braiding her hair, gathering flowers, and singing like an angel. This typifying portrait shows us a happy young woman, happy because she is at peace with herself: she is in tune with her surroundings, expressing who she is within a natural space that resonates with the presence of her identity. In this Edenic garden, Emelye is profoundly in place, for she apparently has no wish to be any place else. At this moment, Emelye does not seem to be a victim of her circumstances, but appears to dwell as comfortably within chivalric space as she does within natural space. The flowers she gathers are “party white and red,” a balanced, symmetrical motif and a common design feature in late-medieval courtly decoration; they match the respective white and red symbolism of Palamon and Arcite’s banners in part 4. With the flowers, she fashions a “subtil” garland for her head, which implies taste and breeding, as well as identity with natural things. Her singing, angelic and pure, suggests that something of heaven’s harmony might exist within a palace garden. One might object that it is a walled garden, and that Emelye is as much a prisoner in the garden as Palamon and Arcite are within the “grete tour . . . so thikke and stroong” (line 1056) that adjoins the garden wall.15 But clearly, Emelye is free to enter and leave the garden, and she goes there for her own enjoyment. The larger issue is whether she is free to leave the castle walls, but since there is nothing to indicate that her cloistered freedom as Theseus’s sister-in-law is anything but agreeable to her, we must set aside our suspicions and accept that this castle pastoral represents what is most unusual and most to be valued, both in life and in Chaucer: a portrait of the soul at rest, a person expressing her innate freedom simply by being in place. But no careful reader can miss the rhyming of Emelye’s angelic “soong” and the tower (“thikke and stroong”), or fail to reflect upon the seasonal, and thus eternal, peace of the spring garden being “even joynant” to the prison. Emelye’s garden is for her a serene natural space encapsulated by and in harmony with chivalric space, but for the two lovers it provides only a means of descent, a spur to their contentious mortal nature. Palamon has risen early and is enjoying the view from the tower. From there he can survey “al the noble citee” (his eyes, at least, can go there); nearer at hand, he can see the green

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branches of the garden (“allas!”); finally, through the big, square iron bars of his prison window, he casts his eye on Emelye (“A!”), and now his prison is narrow indeed: she is where his eyes, his imagination, and his will must remain, so that the forbidden paradise becomes for him a kind of hell,16 an even more constraining prison, while for Emelye it remains a liberating place whose walls are hardly mentioned, since everything she wants is there. The contrast is reinforced. Both of them feel the energy of spring, but while Palamon was “romynge” (pacing) in his high chamber, Emelye “romed” (strolled freely) among the flowers. And when Palamon casts his eye on Emelye and loses what freedom he has left, we remember Theseus casting his eye on the sorrowing widows and having the sight enable his “pitee,” thus empowering his will and ultimately enlarging his rule. The purpose here, I believe, is less to emphasize Palamon’s discontent than to drive home a point the Stoics liked to make: happiness is not to want. Through no fault of his own, Palamon has been placed twice over in a situation of lack: the garden is for him a natural prison within the political constraints of chivalric space. Palamon’s discontent is broadened by his complaint at the end of part 1: Thanne seyde he, “O crueel goddess that governe This world with byndyng of youre word eterne, ....................................... What is mankynde moore unto you holde Than is the sheep that rouketh in the folde?” (Lines 1303–4, 1307–8) From his point of view, human life itself is a constrained freedom, an imprisonment divinely imposed.17 The second half of his complaint rises to matters of the will and spirit: “And yet encresseth this al my penaunce, That man is bounden to his observaunce, For Goddes sake, to letten of his wille; Ther as a beest may al his lust fulfille. And when a beest is deed he hath no peyne; But man after his deeth moot wepe and pleyne, Though in this world he have care and wo.” (Lines 1315–21) Unlike the animals, man is also self-imprisoned, bound by social and moral constraints; even his spirit may suffer infernal imprisonment for a misspent life. “What is this world?” For man it is a place where nature’s freedom is denied, and he must accept that denial as proper to his condition.

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Palamon’s complaint is the more striking for being dialectically paired with the discontent of Arcite, who is released from prison but must leave Athens and Emelye. Like Palamon at the window, he now finds his prison worse than before: “Now is me shape eternally to dwelle / Nought in purgatorie, but in helle” (lines 1224–26). The particular shape of hell for him is the emptiness of exile, “bareyne of alle grace,” where no earthly element or creature can help him: “Wel oughte I sterve in wanhope and distresse” (lines 1244, 1249). But again like Palamon, Arcite’s pathos is greatest in the second, universalizing half of his complaint: “We faren as he that dronke is as a mous. A dronke man woot wel he hath an hous, But he noot which the righte wey is thider, And to a dronke man the wey is slider. And certes, in this world so faren we; We seken faste after felicitee, But we goon wrong ful often, trewely.” (Lines 1261–67) For him, the human condition is not prison but exile, separation not only from what makes us happy, but even from knowing what could. That, surely, is too great a freedom (no freedom, if no constraint). In their philosophical pathos, Palamon and Arcite have described the limits of human will through spatial metaphors of prison and exile, places where the will either has no choices and cannot move, or is entirely free but with no place to go. We reflect upon Emelye, who is content to be in place because there is no other place where she wants to go; and we remember Theseus, who restored governance to the Thebans, so narrowly constrained by walls and tyranny, and brought governance to the free-ranging Amazons, thereby establishing both peoples within the controlled environs of chivalric space.

III. With the sight of Emelye, Palamon and Arcite are changed forever, and as they leave prison we become aware of how intimately they are bound to the world of natural change. Arcite returns, lovesick, to Thebes, and wastes away, “His hewe fallow and pale as asshen colde” (line 1364). An ambiguous dream and his changed reflection in a mirror send him back to Athens, where he poses as a poor squire, just as much in prison (since he can now see Emelye) as Palamon has been for seven years. At this point Palamon escapes from prison and hides in a nearby grove, waiting until night, when he can safely make his way

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to Thebes and raise an army to win Emelye. Thus, the devotee of Mars becomes an adoring lover, and the servant of Venus decides to wage war. We note the changes in both men, but especially Arcite, who undergoes what is essentially a metamorphosis by way of sickness, dream, altered self-image (the mirror), and a different social identity. These are images of descent, because they imply the increasing turbulence of each man’s nature. Both have given up their chivalric blood-bond for the tighter bond of love for Emelye, and this will lead to mortal change: one of them will die in her pursuit. The grove, a natural space that suggests the world of their inner natures, is indeterminately both “faste by” the prison tower and “a myle or tweye” from the court. We must conclude that this alternate space is “even joynant” to chivalric space, always an open door into the jungle, just as Emelye’s garden is her eternal refuge. Arcite enters the grove early in the morning of Palamon’s escape. Roused by the spring season and desire for Emelye, he rides into the fields on a warhorse “as startlynge as the fyre”; singing a Maying song so awkward only he could have composed it, he “roams” up and down the grove, gathering twigs and leaves. These details fall exactly into parallel with those of Emelye’s garden scene, except that whereas Emelye was fresh, “subtil,” and angelic, Arcite is lusty, loud, and energetic. He too identifies with natural space, but his garland is green leaves, not flowers. Like her, he is observed by Palamon, but Palamon in a bush, which conceals him so well it seems “That ‘feeld hath eyen and the wode hath eres’” (line 1522). Both men have entered a natural space, but as their greenery and then their actions begin to demonstrate, it has also entered them. The grove reflects inner space. It is a mirror of identity, just as the garden was for Emelye. The instability of love and human nature appears first and strongest in Arcite, probably because he is soon to die. Having sung his May song, he suddenly becomes melancholic: Right so kan geery Venus overcaste The hertes of hir folk; right as hir day Is gereful, right so chaungeth she array. (Lines 1535–37) Melancholy produces in him a full-dress apologia, beginning with his ancestral Theban roots and moving into love, then death for love, at which point he falls down in a deathlike “traunce.” Convenient as all this is for recognition’s sake, it also demonstrates how love has changed his life. Palamon reflects that change, feeling a cold sword glide suddenly through his heart, and he starts up, quaking with anger, “face deed and pale,” to challenge his cousin. The next day, ready to duel, both their faces change color, paling as if they were spear hunters waiting for a lion or a bear. Then they are dueling, not like men, but

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metamorphically, like “a wood leon,” “a crueel tigre”—like wild boars “That frothen whit as foom for ire wood” (line 1659). Close to death, Palamon and Arcite have reached the bottom of their descent. Deep in the grove and ankledeep in blood, they are like the Minotaur at the center of his labyrinth, surrounded by his own inner darkness, his human reason utterly submerged. However these Theban cousins may love each other, their passions have overwhelmed them, setting the scene for the tale’s striking midpoint reversal. “Destinee, ministre general” arrives exactly on time in the person of Theseus. His “appetite” for hunting has brought him out early this May morning, enabling the work of fate: For certeinly, oure appetites heer, Be it of werre, or pees, or hate, or love, Al is this reuled by the sighte above. (Lines 1670–72) Thus impelled, Theseus has ridden to the grove with Ypolita and Emelye (dressed as huntresses, all in green), pursuing the great hart (“herte”), and as the hunting theme mingles with the pursuit of love, it is obvious that the hunters (lovers) become the hunted. But surprisingly, the focus remains on Theseus. His heart has also become the quarry. Spurring between the young men, he hears their confession and as quickly decrees their death, but the women reply with a storm of weeping and he softens, as he did when the grieving widows threw themselves at his feet, “For pitee renneth soone in gentil herte” (line 1761). His anger accuses them, but his reason excuses the offense. But having acquitted them in the courtroom of his mind, Theseus finds a compromise between justice and mercy in an extraordinary monologue, spoken within the chambers of his heart: And eek his herte hadde compassioun Of women, for they wepen evere in oon, And in his gentil herte he thoughte anon, And softe unto himself he seyde, “Fy Upon a lord that wol have no mercy, But been a leon, bothe in word and dede, To hem that been in repentaunce and drede, As wel as to a proud despitous man That wol mayntene that he first bigan.” (Lines 1772–78) As the kernel of his subsequent public address on love, lovers, and the tournament, Theseus’s “inner speech” is a humble but truer reflection of his identity

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as prince. His appetite for hunting prevented Palamon and Arcite from killing each other (that was “destinee”), but it was his own “gentil” compassion for women (“pitee”), and consequently his mercy, that kept him from killing them. Aided by women’s emotions, Theseus has fought down the lion within his own heart, the “princely” anger that would prevent wise decisions, separating him from himself and from his body politic. For him as well, the grove is Dante’s selva selvaggia, the savage forest of the heart—both an outer and an inner space.

IV. When Theseus expands the duel of Palamon and Arcite into a formal tournament, one hundred armed knights on a side, he announces that “The lystes shal I maken in this place” (line 1860)—in the same natural space, that is, and in the savagery of their natures. But they will also be fighting a mock war by chivalric rules, within the public bounds of chivalric space. In effect, chivalry has been imposed upon nature, and the two spaces have merged (or perhaps chivalry had always been “nature methodized”?). Natural change will cast doubt on this chivalric confidence as we move from garden and grove to temple and amphitheater. Individual love and antagonism, which caused a duel in an isolated glade, will acquire universal significance through prayer to divine forces and an exercise in pan-Hellenic chivalry. The new venue embodies this greater mingling of chivalry and nature. Since no other building receives a full description and this one systematically recalls chivalric life, we may conclude that Theseus’s grand theater is in effect the House of Chivalry. A mile round and sixty feet high, it suggests the world horizons of chivalry and its connections with cosmic nature.18 Gate towers at the eastern and western sides point to Venus and Mars, respectively, in the eastern and western skies and enclose temples dedicated to those gods. On the north side, a turret high on the wall (no gate) contains the oratory of Diana, the virgin goddess of nature. No temple is dedicated to the frightening Saturn, but the south side of the theater is suggestively vacant, and his powerful presence later in the poem implies that he is the fourth of these cosmic forces. Thus, chivalry is aligned with the four corners of the natural world, and the theater’s temples imply the bearing of cosmic force on human nature. The theater is also, and pointedly, representative of chivalric space. The eastern and western gates, whatever their higher significance, are entrances for opposing bodies of fighting men. The height of the walls allows for the “degrees” of many seats, some of them high up, for royalty, and the lower ones for the public who witness the tournament, testifying to its importance. But chiefly, the theater is a constructed thing, an enormous, expensive building. The narrator dutifully lists the carvings and other artwork, the many artisans brought

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to create that art, and the money (“of gold a fother”) spent to pay them. The theater’s richness and size announce its social significance, and the tournament contestants, drawn from chivalry everywhere, indicate its political importance. Within this place, armed conflict is a way of life with its own customs (“gyses”), language (“sparth,” etc.), and tradition (“Ther shyveren shaftes upon sheeldes thikke” [line 2605]).19 The carvings on the walls assimilate the whole world to the House of Chivalry as if to say that chivalry, like nature, is worldwide. The deeds of arms within the theater have their source both in human nature and cosmic forces. Palamon, Arcite, and Emelye pay homage to Venus, Mars, and Diana, respectively—an association amplified by the paintings in the temples of those gods. The temple of Venus, for example, illustrates the “circumstances” of love—“Charmes and Force, Lesynges, Flaterye, / Despense, Bisynesse, and Jalousye” (lines 1927–28)—the all-encompassing and obsessive world of lovers. Within Venus’s love garden, and powerless to escape (“Allas!”), are more than a thousand illustrious men and demigods. Equally helpless are those who follow Mars (the temple of Mars in Thrace is windowless, a burnished steel tomb, its garden a waste forest). Within the great dome of the cosmos, and within chivalric space, men are prisoners, their wills bound to love or conquer. The third prison is nature itself, as we see in the paintings of Diana’s temple. The temple of “Dyane the chaste” receives a briefer description, and the significance of the four Ovidian scenes of “huntyng and shamefast chastitee” is elusive. As her portrait makes clear, Diana is goddess of three realms—the moon and childbirth, the hunt, and the underworld—and all four stories involve hunters. In each story, however, there is a reversal: the hunter becomes the hunted. Callisto and Daphne are both huntresses, and both are pursued by gods—Zeus, who loves Callisto, gets her with child, and in revenge the angry Diana turns her into a bear; and Apollo chases Daphne until her father (a river god) turns her into a laurel tree. Actaeon is also a hunter until Diana changes him into a deer, and his hunting dogs tear him to pieces. Maleager, whose wife is the beautiful Cleopatra, slays the Caledonian boar (sacred to Diana) as well as two of his uncles; in vengeance, and perhaps in jealousy, his mother burns the stick—his life—that she pulled from the fire at his birth. Consumed by inner fires, he dies in the middle of the forest. The stories are balanced and sequential, moving from Callisto, the more tragic female, to Maleager, the more tragic of the males. If life is a pursuit, then women and men are hunters, and inevitably as they chase their futures, life touches them and they are the hunted: their sexuality implies their mortality. These are nature’s changes, and Diana, the virgin huntress-goddess of childbirth and the underworld, life and death, presides over all of them as a principle of mutability. These stories tell the mortal necessity of moving from birth to death with all of nature’s dying generations. Seen in this way, life itself is a kind of

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prison, as Palamon and Arcite complain, and the sight of Emelye strolling freely among the flowers makes their confinement seem worse than ever. For Emelye, the garden seemed to express the timeless freedom of her identity with nature. But her prayer to Diana shows that even she has come to feel the press of natural necessity. The opening passage of Emelye’s prayer to Diana invokes the goddess painted on the temple wall: “O chaste goddesse of the wodes grene, To whom bothe hevene and erthe and see is sene, Queene of the regne of Pluto derk and low, Goddesse of maydens, that myn herte hast knowe Ful many a yeer, and woost what I desire” (Lines 2297–2301) But recalling the portrait of Diana as it was described earlier, we notice that Emelye invokes her selectively. She emphasizes chastity (“chaste goddesse,” “Goddesse of maydens”), mentions nature and thus the hunt (“the wodes grene”), and refers to the underworld, but Diana’s role as goddess of the moon is given only a glancing reference (“To whom bothe hevene and erthe and see is sene”), and childbirth is not mentioned at all. We remember that the Ovidian stories were said to be about “huntyng and shamefast chastitee,” even though childbirth is pivotal to the lurid tales of Callisto and Maleager. And we may wonder, too, why Emelye prays “As keepe me fro thy vengeaunce and thyn ire / That Attheon aboughte cruelly” (lines 2302–3), when it is the huntress Callisto whose sad tale of childbearing must frighten her the most.20 Clearly, Emelye wants to avoid even the mention of marriage and childbirth— “Chaste goddesse, wel wostow that I Desire to ben a mayden al my lyf, Ne nevere wol I be no love ne wyf. I am, thow woost, yet of thy compaignye, A mayde, and love huntynge and venerye, And for to walken in the wodes wilde, And noght to ben a wyf and be with childe. Noght wol I knowe compaignye of man.” (Lines 2304–11) —but in her repeated denial of those conditions (“nevere . . . noght . . . Noght”), she again ignores that Diana is also and equally goddess of childbirth and the moon, whose phases imply not only childbirth but all the

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changes of nature, including death. It is understandable, surely, that Emelye wants to remain in Diana’s company of maidens, walking freely in “the wodes wilde,” just as she did in the palace garden. In effect, she asks the goddess of chastity, childbirth, and death to preserve her from the changes that, as Ovid implies, must come to all the living. Does she not realize that her plea is a fantasy? Just before the bitter tears for maidenhood that end her prayer, she inserts a pithy, pragmatic request that acknowledges both the narrowness of choice available to her and her need to work within those constraints: “And if so be that thou wolt nat do me grace, Or if my destynee be shapen so That I shal nedes have oon of hem two, As sende me hym that moost desireth me.” (Lines 2322–25) For Emelye this choice is unwelcome, but it is necessary. Denying what is, for her, the necessity of marriage and childbirth would be more in character, as most of her prayer plainly reveals, yet failing to recognize the reality of one’s imprisonment is merely to yield to it and become a victim.21 By contrast, choosing a way, however painful, is a movement of the will that maintains one’s freedom from circumstances, no matter how tiny and limited a freedom it may be. Emelye is, of all the characters in the Knight’s Tale, the most limited in her choices. Therefore her gesture of will is the most significant one in the tale.22 Like Palamon and Arcite, she is a prisoner of her own nature: if Palamon must love and Arcite conquer, Emelye’s desire is to express herself through nature and lose herself within it, to the extent that even within the structures of chivalric space, she can happily remain an Amazon.23 But confronted with the necessity of a royal marriage (within the walls of Thebes), she moves against her natural inclinations to the degree that she is able to make a real choice that is still in some way liberating for her. Like Theseus in the grove, she has conquered a powerful tendency of her own nature, and in so doing retains a measure of freedom and identity.24 In this, at least, she remains herself, an Amazon by nature (as in Diana’s temple), but lodged within the House of Chivalry.

V. It would be tidy if Palamon and Arcite were also to confront themselves and stand free of their natures for a representative moment, but neither seems to achieve an identity separate from his ruling passion. Theseus tempers his will in response to the tears of women, and Emelye yields to the idea of marriage

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enough, at least, that she can choose the better husband. But Palamon remains fully devoted to Venus, and Arcite to Mars; it is Saturn who mediates their wills, killing one of them and granting each a part of his desire. Thus, Arcite has the victory, but not a life with Emelye; Palamon has Emelye, but the narrator’s claim that she loves her new husband “tenderly” in return seems a little dubious.25 Nonetheless, it is a solution that satisfies the requirements of both chivalry and nature. Theseus needs an alliance with Thebes, and if the victory honored Mars, then Venus needs a marriage. Saturn, in his “olde experience,” is able to find such a balance because the arc of his power is the widest of the planet gods, and thus the highest level of nature. His place in the heavens defines the largest natural space, for it encompasses Diana’s moon, Venus, Mars—indeed, all of nature. Diana represents the principle of nature’s changes, but the coldness of Saturn is—like death—an absolute natural law, the summation of all contraries and the hard limit of every ephemeral creation. That is why the litany of his powers, where life drowns in darkness, seems so hauntingly real and inevitable. All things have an end. For the timeless charm of a spring garden to have meaning, there must also be, somewhere, the sudden fall from grace— the ruin of the high halls, “the cherles rebelling,” pestilence, chaos, death.26 This is the deep chord that sounds in Egeus’s simple commonplace (there never was a man who lived who did not die) and in Theseus’s grander idea of the “ordinaunce” of the “Firste Moevere” that “speces of thynges and progressiouns / Shullen enduren by successiouns” (lines 3013–14). Chivalry itself must fall, someday, or fade quietly into memory while people pursue other dreams, and that, perhaps, and not the death of Arcite, is the note of sadness so many have heard beneath the elegant surface of part 4. Part 4 opens, nevertheless, with yet another bright morning, a parallel to the events of part 2; now as then, love engenders combat, and Theseus ensures proper decorum. The difference here is scale. Lists of tournament gear are followed by crowd scenes and “battle” scenes that create an impression of variety and multiplicity. The breadth of these public scenes is accompanied by an expansion in vertical field. As Theseus appears at a window of his palace, the people press forward with a “heigh reverence” (line 2531) to hear his “heigh discrecioun” (line 2537), and their cheering “touchede the hevene” (line 2561). In the theater, “Whan set was Theseus ful riche and hye” (line 2577), then “Unto the seetes preesseth al the route” (line 2580). In this tale, at least, the “route” is not oppressed by or even conscious of such secondhand treatment; rather, the sun is bright, the streets are hung with cloth of gold, and Theseus is in place—at a window “like a god in trone” (line 2529) or seated high above the tournament—imposing his “mighty dukes wille” (line 2536) to the great satisfaction of all. This expansion in scope prepares us for the cosmic vision of Theseus’s chain of love speech. But our immediate impression is of

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the generous reach of chivalric space, of the height of its ideals, of its infinite customs and complexity, and of the lords, knights, squires, and armorers all going about their business. The theater is a frame for the chivalric world, but this is chivalry itself, proud, exuberant, self-referential, and heedless. Soon the armies are assembled, the theater gates are shut, Palamon and Arcite fight like lion and tiger, and as before, Theseus separates them: Arcite has won. But this time, nature—Saturn—intervenes, making the separation permanent. It is a remarkable reversal. In the grove, Theseus turned Palamon’s and Arcite’s madness to docile joy; here, the change is from joy to grief. And if earlier his decree instantly transformed the natural space of the grove into chivalric space, here, as quickly, a chivalric place becomes a natural one, the site of Arcite’s funeral pyre. It is apparent from such reversals that chivalry alternates with nature because they are interpenetrant, both occupying the same space. At times chivalry seems to dominate—these are the interventions and public spectacles created by Theseus—but nature is always present, and as men pursue love, war, and the freedom to be, they themselves are increasingly the quarry, following nature’s path to their ends. Arcite, especially, is nature’s prey. Numerous metaphors predict his fate throughout the tale, and when he is thrown from his fiery horse, we are not surprised that his last appearance will be atop his funeral pyre. Yet as he confronts his death, we are given another extraordinary view into a human heart. Earlier, Theseus spoke from within his heart; now it is Arcite (“Naught may the woful spirit in myn herte / Declare o point of alle my sorwes smerte” [lines 2765–66]). Here again is natural space within chivalric space, chivalric man struggling with himself, except that this time the heart is not angry but literally broken, and the temptation is despair. Some have found the description of Arcite’s condition insensitive or clinically detached (Arcite’s sentimental complaint is bracketed and probably enhanced by the narrator’s lack of sentiment), for its chief effect is cool finality: “Al is tobrosten thilke regioun; / Nature hath now no dominacioun” (lines 2758–59). Where once was life and movement there is now “clothered blood,” “venym and corrupcioun”—the stark referent for Theseus’s main argument in his chain-of-love metaphor: “Nature hath nat taken his bigynnyng Of no partie or cantle of a thing, But of a thing that parfit is and stable, Descendynge so til it be corrumpable.[”] (Lines 3007–10) Arcite’s corrupted chest reflects the darkness of Saturn’s reign, because it demonstrates the chaos and stasis at the end of order. Et in arcadia ego. For every bright morning in nature and chivalry, there is in time this answering

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stillness. Just as the destructive anger of princes was examined within the heart of Theseus, Arcite’s breast presents the one narrow if appalling view of mortality in this tale.27 L. O. Aranye Fradenburg has written that “[w]hat emerges in and through Arcite is the Thing, that inert stuff of the real. . . . [I]t is that which is in him more than himself.”28 In other words, the corrupted mass represents the unconscious desire (the Thing, or jouissance) that he offers up in sacrifice by dying for Emelye. It does seem likely that Arcite’s broken chest signifies something concealed or repressed by chivalric discourse yet unavoidably, inescapably real—not unconscious desire, perhaps, but the unthinkable end point when the world will go its way without us. That reality, manifested as an unconscious fear so terrible it really cannot be thought but only felt indirectly and briefly through images, is what his wound represents for the world of chivalry. In despair, Arcite commends his cousin in his place. His paean to knighthood— “That is to seyen, trouthe, honour, knyghthede, Wysdom, humblesse, estaat, and heigh kynrede, Fredom, and al that longeth to that art” (Lines 2789–91) —is clearly a summary of his own virtues, preparing us for the solemn funeral where chivalry mourns for him and for itself. The funeral’s center is the pyre, and like the great theater, it will be built “in that selve grove, swoot and grene” (line 2860), a place to be in love, to fight, and now to die. The theater and pyre are carefully brought into parallel. While the theater is sixty paces high, the pyre is twenty fathoms broad. After the wood is piled on, Arcite is laid among cloth of gold, garlands, jewels, and spices—“richesse” analogous to the carvings and other expensive adornments Theseus lavished on the theater. The Greeks assemble in a “huge route” like the tournament audience, and as before, “goon / Hoom to Athenes, when the pley is doon” (lines 2963–64). Like the theater, the funeral pyre gathers to itself the world of chivalry in a ritual celebration. But the world of nature is also present. All the trees of the grove, it seems, were cut down to make the fire. Not only does Chaucer list each tree in an extended catalogue (a “world of trees” has fallen with Arcite), but he also deepens the sense of change and loss by rooting it in Ovidian myth, describing how the wood gods “ronnen up and doun, / Disherited of hire habitacioun” (lines 2925–26),29 how all the beasts and birds flee in fear, and how even the shady ground is startled by the sun. As all those trees burn along with dead Arcite, chivalry and nature mourn together, and there is the sense, as in Ovid, that an age is passing into oblivion,30 as if, somehow, a sort of innocence had been lost.

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But for Arcite, the important part of this emblematic scene is the pyre itself, That with his grene top the hevene raughte; And twenty fadme of brede the armes straughte— This is to seyn, the bowes weren so brode. (Lines 2915–17) The pyre is vaguely anthropomorphic, “his grene top” reaching and the “armes” stretching wide, and the narrator acknowledges this odd figure by explaining dryly that arms are boughs. When Chaucer’s narrative calls attention to itself, there is usually an implication we are meant to catch, and I believe that is the case here. In the Ovide moralisé, Daphne’s metamorphosis is described in an abbreviated effictio, moving from top to toe, and part of this description parallels Chaucer’s lines: Ses crins dorez et flamboians Devrindrent feuilles verdoians; Ses bras sont en lons rains muez: Tous ses cors le est transmuez (Lines 3029–32)31 [Her gold and flaming hair / Became green leaves; Her arms were changed into long branches: / Her whole body was transformed] We remember that Emelye wore a crown of (funereal) oak leaves when she sacrificed to Diana and chose the man who would love her the most. Her bright hair was not braided but combed out, “untressed al” (line 2289). She kindled both the fires for her sacrifice, and now she has come to light the funeral pyre. If Chaucer intended such a parallel, it would suggest that just as Daphne became a tree, Emelye “becomes” Arcite’s funeral pyre. The transformation of beautiful Daphne in the moralized Ovid is an unfamiliar frustration for Apollo—his “comic downfall,” as Mary Barnard says.32 But when Emelye merges in figure with the green trees of the pyre, becoming a fire of love and death with arms that stretch so wide, her “metamorphosis” implies that pursuing her has been Arcite’s life, and thus inevitably the cause of his death— his “downfall.” We have seen the worlds of chivalry and nature internalized and made relevant to Arcite’s fate through metaphors of his ruined chest and his summative funeral pyre. The broken body where “nature will not work” is not unlike the hopeless disorder of a fallen city—Thebes, perhaps—where “governaunce” is equally unworkable. The pyre, where so many man-made and

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natural things dissolve in flame, is a sad inventory of the life Arcite has lost in these two worlds, and a final embracing, as it were, of the woman for whom he lost them—his “sweete foo.” The very length of the funeral passage and the incantatory repetition of its occupatio formula (“Ne what . . . Ne how . . .”) create a powerful sense of an ending filled with inexpressible regret for the passing of young knights like Arcite, and for the long bloom of chivalry itself.33 But the true ending of the tale is instead a return to natural space on an epic scale, a cosmic view not unlike that of Troilus looking back on the world, in laughter, from the eighth sphere. When, after “certeyne yeres,” Theseus and his parlement see the need to ally with Thebes, he gives his chain of love speech that doubles as a consolatio for the death of Arcite and an argument that Palamon and Emelye should agree to be married. The argument has the effect of tempering the consolation, giving it an undertone of worldliness—philosophy as it is actually lived. The language reminds us that Theseus is a good rhetorician, aware of his audience and his need to reach them: “For it is proved by experience” (line 3001), he says, and “Wel may men knowe, but it be a fool” (line 3005). Nevertheless, the dominant effect is the sublime freedom of seeing the whole cosmos—“the fyr, the eyr, the water, and the lond”—extend before us, an order held “In certeyn boundes, that they may nat flee” (lines 2992–93). Thanks to the “faire cheyne of love” that binds them all, descending into the world and linking the eternal with the temporal, even mortal men have a part in eternity, for they, like other “speces of thynges and progressiouns / Shullen enduren by successiouns” (lines 3013–14). This calmly overwhelming idea sets the mind free in space and time. No doubt Theseus and the knight narrator understand chivalry itself to be an ordering principle analogous to nature’s order.34 But having read the Knight’s Tale, we are more likely to seek such an order within the private hearts of those who, like Emelye, confront necessity by confronting their own desires, thereby winning such small freedom as can be had within the constraining worlds of chivalry and nature.

CHAPTER

2

Alysoun the Housewife

The spatial setting of the Miller’s Tale is a concentric one. In the town of Oxford, a university town surrounded by countryside, is John the carpenter’s house, and within the house is Alysoun, John’s young wife. As we come to understand, these placements are significant to the tale. Alysoun, the house, the town, and the country round stand respectively for personal, domestic, societal, and natural domains that contain the plenitude (“God’s plenty”) that graces the life of this country town.1 The relationships between these spaces imply tensions between private and public, self and society, and society and nature that underlie the main themes of the tale. But the relations between characters, as well as the sentimental inwardness of their private lives, are conveyed by their placement in and around the house itself, and here space has a vertical orientation. Within the house are three levels at which the action takes place: the high gabled room where Nicholas speculates about fate and the flood, the middle or central space where John and Nicholas sleep with Alysoun, and the street-level shot window where Absalom gets his kiss. The house is John’s private world because it contains Alysoun, but the most private space in the tale and the richest metaphor for what men want in life is what Alysoun herself embodies: the promise behind those black eyes, inside the embroidered collar, above the long laced boots. In the course of the tale, Alysoun and her house are established as analogous, mutually signifying tropes for the forbidden paradise that constitutes private life in a small town like Oxford. All three men are somehow fitted to be in the house, with Alysoun, at the center of this little world. But finally each man, wanting her for himself alone, in “pryvetee,” reaches absurdly high and, falling from grace, displays himself to the knowing public eye.

I. Within its concentric setting, the tale unfolds as a busy sequence of activities contained within or relevant to a central domestic space;2 the action depends upon entry into and displacement from that space. On a Monday night, for example, Nicholas assumes John’s role as “man of the house,” while John, up in the rafters, becomes an outsider, and under the shot window, Absalom’s

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unfitness to be an insider is conclusively verified.3 Surprisingly, this concentric setting is a little like the setting of the Knight’s Tale. The Knight’s Tale might be described as moving through a series of progressively larger arenas, but Chaucer goes to some trouble to stack these spaces: the amphitheater is built in, on, or at least close enough to the grove to displace it, forcing an analogy between the events that occur in those two places. Furthermore, Emelye’s castle garden seems linked with the grove, and the temples set into the walls of the amphitheater are significant to the events occurring within those walls; each half of the tale begins with a private space, like the prison cell with its view of the castle garden, and later repeats that scene in a larger, public space, like the grove. Thus, Palamon and Arcite have their private love vision, contemplating Emelye, but later return to an analogous but larger garden surrogate—the grove—where they in turn are observed by Emelye and others, who represent the world of chivalry. As private dreams become public acts, in other words, the hunters become the hunted. We are going to find that the Miller’s Tale works in similar ways. To begin with, the house contains Alysoun, and so it becomes the setting—or better, the goal—of all the significant action in the tale. Each of the five episodes begins with one of the characters leaving or having left the house, creating an apparent opportunity for Nicholas or Absalom to approach Alysoun. Each time, the following interaction ends with a kind of music, which may or may not indicate harmony with Alysoun. The structural similarity to the Knight’s Tale is that these episodes are paired: Nicholas’s psaltery music (episode 1) predicts his “melodye” with Alysoun (episode 3); Absalom’s singing under Alysoun’s window (episode 2) is answered by his echoes from the Song of Songs (episode 4); John, the old (i.e., “unmusical”) husband who cages up his little songbird, is restricted to snoring (episode 3) and complaining (episode 5); and Nicholas’s “annunciation” to John about the flood (episode 3) is countered by his thunderous salutation to Absalom (episode 5). As in the Knight’s Tale, moreover, these pairs of episodes show a movement from idea to act, and from private intention to public display. That is, Nicholas first makes music alone with Alysoun, but later they make melody all night while John’s snoring accompanies them from up in the loft. Toward the end of the tale, this movement from private ideal to public reality engenders a climactic reversal for all three men. Absalom’s saccharine lines from the Song of Soloman, Nicholas’s fart-music, and John’s dizzy accusations all receive an appropriate audience response, as each man’s private pretensions are reductively brought to light, the private dwindling abruptly into the public. In a way, John’s house is like Emelye’s (actually, Theseus’s) castle garden, a private space, full of nature’s promise. As in the Knight’s Tale, each man will define, extend, and thus expose himself, when he tries to make that private space exclusively his own.

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II. In the garden-house of Alysoun, then, what are the promises of nature? The tale begins with something unnatural, an imbalance. John the carpenter turns a profit by renting a room to Oxford students like the poor clerk Nicholas, and he keeps a young wife in his house—“cages” her, for jealousy’s sake. This one detail signals the outcome: the wife learns to enjoy her narrow confinement with the enthusiastic aid of the young scholar, who (anticipating the Reeve’s Tale) finds in her an escape from the social inversion implied by the little room he rents from a rich peasant. In effect, John’s self-defeating efforts to contain his wife and his scholar-boarder bring about the inversion of private and public space that is characteristic of this tale. Each of the men tries to create for himself a private world with Alysoun at its center, and each time, “nature will out”: the sheltering individual world is transformed into communal entertainment. Private fantasy yields to public discernment, as the walls of the personal and domestic ideal fall away to reveal the individual excess caricatured within the much larger contexts of social and natural norms. “Pryvetee,” for each of these small-town dwellers, is thus a forbidden paradise. By the end of the tale, each one is denied his selfishly guarded inner kingdom when the household space he creates for Alysoun and himself is revealed by his own particular excesses to the public eye. Nicholas’s room in John’s house, for instance, gives us the background we need to understand his kind of “pryvetee.” High and solitary, it contains his books and instruments of astrology, his back door to the secrets of fate. Like Nicholas himself, the room is neat and sweet, appropriate for one who knows the secret paradise of “derne” love. A psaltery lies on the clothes-press, “al above,” as if on an altar, so Nicholas can fill his room with music—divine music like the “Angelus ad virginem,” but also an occasional annunciation in the vernacular, if that is what is meant by “the Kynges Noote.”4 Nicholas is a slightly tarnished celebrant of nature’s mysteries. He is well placed to know the high mysteries of both love and fate, and well equipped to perform both kinds of melody for others. If Nicholas is a mediator between heavenly and earthly music, Alysoun embodies earthiness, demonstrating its low transcendence, and its centrality to the tale.5 Alysoun’s portrait begins with her neat, slender body and its feral weasel’s energy. The effictio proceeds not from top to toe, but from mid body, a body made accessible and promising by her clothing.6 The initial detail, a colorful silk belt, leads the eye down to the milk-white apron over Alysoun’s loins. Underneath the apron lies her white smock, but the eye is drawn up to its collar, embroidered with black silk inside and outside, in front and also behind. The smock contains Alysoun’s body like a sort of skin, and the collar, strikingly visible and highly accessible to the narrator’s eye, is the opening to

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that surrogate body. Next, the white cap with its black ties frames the bright face, and a “filet brood of silk” lines the shining brow, just as the silk belt announced the white apron and the collar drew attention to the smock. Under that bright forehead, of course, is Alysoun’s “likerous ye,” accented by a slim, calculatedly expressive (plucked) eyebrow. Like the silken belt, the silkembroidered collar and the tapes of her cap, this sleek black eyebrow beckons toward an inviting entryway in the fair, bright exterior. Alysoun’s fairness, in other words, is a fair welcome, an invitation to a promising inner space.7 In the second part of her portrait, details like “the newe pere-jonette tree” (line 3248) begin to associate Alysoun with outer nature—the freshness and abundance of nature’s gifts. Alysoun is the focus of the tale and its central symbol for natural imperatives, because she contains in her own person the richness of the country round. These nature comparisons continue to reflect the movement inward that we noted above. The early-ripe pear with its suggestively shaped fruit is followed by “softer than the wolle is of a wether” (line 3249), and then the “purse of lether” with its silk tassels. These tassels, like the embroidered collar, the ties of the cap, and the artful eyebrows, engage our glance, drawing our imagination to the purse, where, if she had any, Alysoun would keep her gold nobles. The golden potential of the inner purse is signaled by a brassy exterior (“perled with latoun”), and, as forthcoming events will show, the same might be said of Alysoun herself.8 But the purse’s prominent place at the approximate center of the portrait and its unavoidable suggestion of riches to be sought within give us back Alysoun’s original description as a sweet, desirable center, announced by embroidered, plucked, or tasseled entryways, but clothed (or “caged”) in splendid purity.9 Our final image of Alysoun, “Long as a mast, and upright as a bolt” (line 3264) shows her full length, both “tall” and “long” (cf. “bolt upright,” [Reeve’s Tale, line 4266]). A massive broach invites the eye to stray down toward the “lowe coler,” and then we follow her shoe lacings as they rise up her legs. Always we are directed to her midsection, under the collar, and under the skirts, toward what might, as the focus of her natural vitality and freshness, be called the womb of (Alysoun’s) nature. But what of Absalom? If Nicholas celebrates “goddes privetee,” Alysoun embodies it, and John contains it, then Absalom is its hungry consumer. Absalom’s busy portrait is a collection of signs for his mediatory function in the Oxford community. Absalom is everywhere in Oxford, and everywhere trivial: the perfect go-between. He is not described as physically small, yet every detail diminishes him. In his red hose, he goes “fetisly,” he is laced up “smal” in his light blue tunic, he is a “myrie child,” he plays a “smal rubible,” his voice is a loud but high “quinible,” and it remains so, whether he is Heroding it on a “scaffold high” or singing under Alysoun’s window. He is like an active, highly visible child whose family is the community at large. His glowing face,

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abundant and carefully brushed hair, red socks, ventilated shoes, white surplice, and capering feet are all signs—advertisements, if you will—for the group vitality that sustains him. His barbering, making of charters/acquitances, dancing, singing, “sensyng,” and professions of “love” are reminders— or better, snapshots—of what constitutes social life in this small town. Absalom wants to taste the richness of life, but not to deny it to others, like Nicholas, or to possess it wholly, like John. Absalom implies the eternal (and infantile) human hunger for the world’s sweetness. If Alysoun is the central symbol for natural vitality in this tale, her sweetness like the fields, with their fruits and flowers, and her energy like that of the innocent beasts, then Absalom’s neat, agile, and gaily decorated yet somehow neutered body expresses the energy of the town and the variety, not of its riches, but of its transactions, its human commerce. Here again, as in the Knight’s Tale, is the opposition between nature and civilization, with village ritual taking the place of chivalry. But here, too, nature is central; Alysoun belongs in bed, not up in a tub, nor out in the church, just as Emelye is always found in some sort of garden surrogate. But Absalom is always out—in Osenye, or up on a scaffold, under the window, or visiting Gervys’s forge. He conveys the circumambient setting of communal transactions and values, in the center of which lies John’s house, the symbol of individual man and his world.10

III. What that world is really like, in the Miller’s Tale, is the courtship of Alysoun, held hard by the “haunchebones” while Nicholas makes his confession of love. His borrowed language of courtly love is less eloquent, however, than the haunche bones themselves, which tell us that in this tale, people’s bodies count; they put one in touch with the world, and are themselves real and significant. In the Knight’s Tale, a body is mainly a sign for “condicioun”—one’s station in life’s journey—as when Emelye washes her body before sacrificing herself (to marriage) on the altar of Diana, or when Arcite’s sick body shows how close he is to departing for the otherworld of glorious memory. The frequent crying, swooning, and bleeding of that tale are painful enough, but they refer to a higher order of reality that has fated overtones. In the Miller’s Tale, Alysoun’s desirability and also her identity depend on her having loins and haunch bones. She has plenty of spirit, and, no doubt, “a spirit,” but her presence in the story derives from her physical form, the acts it performs, and the physical needs that drive them. Each of the men, however, is able to ignore Alysoun’s tangible reality to the extent that he creates in his imagination a characteristic private world where he alone can have her. John the carpenter is, like Noah, a caretaker and

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a maker. By saying spells for the four sides of the house and by hanging his tubs, he is actually re-creating his world, trying to save and redeem it by fortifying or reconstructing its physical dimensions. “Hende” Nicholas is also a maker, but he transforms the world with his prophetic rhetoric; he realizes his “derne love” with Alysoun by imagining an upper world of words (or tubs) to contain John. Absalom’s art is to internalize, or re-create in his own person, the sweetness of the love he would have from Alysoun. Initially he is described as wanting to catch her, like a cat after a mouse. But even this diminished comparison to “hende” Nicholas gives way to preciousness. Finally he desires only a kiss—just a taste to confer reality upon the fantastic love-longing expressed by his manners, speech, and clothing. All three men create a private world with Alysoun safely in its center, then—Alysoun, whose apple-sweet breath is the promise of nature’s bounty. Following this logic to its end would mean that they seek (and find) the world in Alysoun herself, and that, I would argue, is exactly the case: Alysoun, like Emelye, embodies nature’s springlike freshness, but also like Emelye she becomes instrumental in its exilic punishment (funeral pyre::kiss/branding/fall). This metaphoric identification makes Alysoun the “sweete foo” of the Miller’s Tale, and her “pryvetee”—the private space of her body and her house—the desirable but problematic haven that marriage to Emelye is in the Knight’s Tale. But gaining the world in Alysoun is dependent upon knowing the world, and knowing—or not knowing—is here expressed by seeing. For example, when Nicholas is discovered in his room, “capying upright,” as if he were gazing at the moon, John’s knave, Robin, sees all this through a hole in the door that is low enough for the cat to creep through, and this narrow, depressed point of view intensifies the inwardness of the room and the apparent loftiness of Nicholas’s gaze. But appearances are deceiving in this tale. Of course, Nicholas is not reading destiny in the stars, nor does John see his future in the new world Nicholas projects for him, nor does Absalom see his “sweete bryd” when he peers into the dark shot window of Alysoun’s bedroom. Recurrent images of peering into the darkness convey the self-deception of each of these “wood” men. John’s night-long vigil in the tubs takes place in complete darkness. Nicholas gazes at the new moon, but it is only the darkness of the roof that he can see. Absalom confronts the truth face-to-face, as it were, yet it is only Alysoun’s “nether ye” (line 3852) that meets his gaze; like all narcissists, he meets his own blind reflection.11 These blind visions imply that John, Absalom, and even Nicholas are self-deluded, yet their misperceptions are made to seem inevitable. When Nicholas claims to have seen the new moon, that powerful source of (Monday) moon-madness and flood tides, his astrology is mere fancy, of course, but the chains of desire that determine men’s behavior in this tale are real enough. The moon implies nature’s influence on man, just as it did (in the person of

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Diana) in the Knight’s Tale. Nicholas gazes at the moon, John peers into the upstairs bedroom, looking for Nicholas, and Absalom, not seeing John, peers into the shot window, looking for Alysoun.12 These men are chained by their desire for Alysoun, which is, in effect, the fate of this tale, but each is also blinded and ultimately defeated by his desire to have her for himself alone. The force of nature draws all of them, but each one receives a punishment of his own making. The trap for each one is not nature itself, then, not the new moon or love for Alysoun, but the man’s excesses, which create for him an appropriate punishment. In Dante’s Inferno, this principle is called “contrapasso” (Canto 28, line 142); in the Miller’s Tale, it might be called “woodness,” for in response to the storm of desire (“a reyn, and that so wilde and wood” [line 3517]), each man is blinded by his own kind of irrationality, which banishes him from the desirable presence of Alysoun. John’s “woodness” (like Theseus’s wisdom) is an attempt to contain natural necessity by building a wall around it. John is quick to condemn the “woodnesse” (line 3452) of stargazing clerks, yet at the end of the tale, dazed by the fall in his tub, he is called “wood” by the whole town, and especially by the Oxford clerks. Nicholas’s visions are an open channel for John’s fears, but finally, when “scalded in the towte,” he himself cries “Water! Water!”—as if he too were “wood” (line 3814). Absalom is in some sense “wood or wrooth” (line 3394) throughout the tale. But once healed of his “maladie” (line 3757), he is free to reward the “woodness” of Nicholas, who has spent the night rewarding the “woodness” of John. At the climax, a chain of proper punishments reciprocates the earlier gazes blinded by desire and the chain of mad deeds that were driven by it. These characters dwell in a small world of village pragmatism, but they are moved by inner forces far greater and more obscure than they can fathom—an inevitable flood tide of passion, but one that affects the richest, the jolliest, and the most able (“hende”), each in accordance with his particular tendencies and circumstances.

IV. Such passion is distinguished, in the Miller’s Tale, by its sentimental inwardness. In the Knight’s Tale, passion is formalized, and thus externalized, by lovers’ complaints. Here it is the private despair John feels when he imagines “Noes flood come walwynge as the see / To drenchen Alisoun, his hony deere” (lines 3616–17), yet it is also (we may suppose) the flooding of his heart with bliss, when he imagines having the whole (drowned) world— and Alysoun—to himself. The emotional inwardness we sense in this tale is part of its social dynamic, its tension between private and public, inside and outside. John is Alysoun’s jealous husband, for instance, but he is also

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a householder, a townsman with a public character. His social standing derives from that public persona, but his personal fears and desires drive him into irrational, impractical and antisocial excesses that distance him from the private ideal by exploding his protective public role. If “al the toun” considers him “wood,” that is, he cannot revenge himself on Nicholas and Alysoun. “Woodness,” in its social sense, means the exile from public tolerance reserved for those who are not canny, not apt, and consequently, “not Oxford.”13 By contrast, character in the Miller’s Tale is understood as the expression of small-town savvy. Village life is close and competitive, its wisdom both private and dialogic; verbal fencing and the consequent lies, bribes, and gossip are villagers’ survival skills, having in common the necessity for maintaining a distinction between private passions and public fictions.14 Each of these fictions represents a different accommodation of private mental life to the communal setting of Oxford life. Nicholas is a prophet, Absalom a lover, and John, lord of his household. That none of the three men can sustain the fiction of his public role—that in each case the role is exaggerated until it trumpets forth its own absurdity—is less a criticism of fiction making than an indication of how very difficult it is for proud individuality to bear its public yoke. The relative utility, efficacy, and mobility of the public role is bound to seem too narrow for the outsize needs of the private self. Thus, “woodness” is, in effect, the inevitable inversion of “privetee”: the deeply motivated search for privacy develops as an ego-driven fantasy, extends itself above or across the boundaries of the private, and is recognized as “woodness” by the unerring judgment of the small-town public gaze. The quest for privacy in the Miller’s Tale acquires additional resonance from its religious symbolism. When Absalom’s love madness turns to real anger, he betakes his soul to Sathanas and plans a fiery revenge. Here the narrative modulates from water (with its ambivalent senses of grace and drowning) to fire, which is a punishment, yet also, for all three men, a cauterization, a drastic agent of healing. The imagistic transition from water to fire parallels the gradual movement in the Knight’s Tale from dewy grove to funeral pyre. In a more general way, the Miller’s Tale moves through its earlier scenes of sentiment, fraud, and sweet music to a climax of noise, force, and judgment. In these ways, it is able to suggest the overwhelming, multilevel force of nature in man, even when he leaves the Boethian cosmos behind to dwell safely within the city limits of Oxford.

V. Of Oxford itself, there is actually very little in the Miller’s Tale. Aside from Absalom’s brief presences in the church, at Osenye, and at Gervys’s forge, our

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sense of village ambience derives mainly from the social activities reflected in his portrait. The action of the tale takes place inside and outside John’s house. But the house is an extraordinarily representative one. If it shuts out Oxford, it creates a private cosmos in architectural terms, internalizing the three-storied world of ancient epic as the upper bedroom and rafters, the ground floor, and the street beneath the round shot window. Olympus, the home of the gods, was supposed to be on a mountaintop inaccessible to mortals. In John’s house, visions of high postdiluvian fantasy are conceived in Nicholas’s little upstairs room, and then staged in the larger space over the main room downstairs. As in the Knight’s Tale, the action is foreseen or dreamed in a small space, and then carried out, or launched, in a bigger one, in this case the floating world of John’s tubs. This private vision of a new world, shared in the little bedroom, will later become a public one when the villagers gape up at the tubs, just as Nicholas had gazed up into the roof. But the public exposure brought by this lofty vision and its tub reality is uniquely John’s. A common man seduced away from common sense by the secrets of fate, he appropriately seeks his doomed “pryvetee” with Alysoun in the upper house. If the upper story provides John’s vision of a second Eden with AlysounEve, the ground floor is middle earth, John’s private space where he enjoys “Goddes foyson,” as the Miller puts it. Here, the heavens and the earth are in tune. Here is the “melodye,” but also the “revel” (line 3652), since holiness is in heaven, but also in God’s creatures. John’s vision of a solitary paradise with Alysoun is a frightened, wishful dream, but her bed is as close to paradise as he can reasonably expect to be in this tale. Nicholas, that “hende,” capable man, may replace John in this Oxford version of paradise, but he cannot be content with it. Possession of Alysoun is satisfying only if he can demonstrate that John and Absalom do not have her—if they are exiled, one above, one below, from the Eden that is Alysoun’s bed. By flaunting his central position, and thus overextending his prophet’s role, Nicholas too falls from grace. Absalom never shares Alysoun’s bed, but he can be exiled from his own imagined paradise. Absalom’s Eden is his private drama of courtly love service, where he plays the leading—and indeed, the only—role.15 His paradise is a lived fantasy, sensual and sweet, that involves all of the senses but is shared with no one. In effect, Absalom has Alysoun all to himself until he kisses her: that, sadly, is where he overreaches himself and is driven from his solipsistic pleasure garden. In trying to keep Alysoun all for himself, each man violates the principle of plenitude, the ideal of abundance that offers everyone a share but never sole enjoyment. That is the fundamental norm of this household tale (surrounded as it is by the teeming countryside and the busy-ness of Oxford), as well as the basis of its central paradox—namely, that private life is a forbidden

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paradise for the small-town dweller. Where, exactly, does each man go wrong? Nicholas appropriates “Goddes pryvetee” for his own ends, John cages Alysoun, and Absalom is “squaymous / Of fartyng.” By contrast, the secret of Alysoun, who seems to embody the world’s richness, is that there is plenty for all: “Of the remenant nedeth nat enquere” (line 3166), as the Miller says. All three men receive their punishment at the lowest level of the house, at the boundary between the inner space of Alysoun’s bedroom and the public space outside; moving across that boundary, away from her, they exchange a dream of paradise for the hard reality of pride turned back on itself. John the carpenter built his arks to gain a house where the world could never intrude; his return to earth leaves him enlightened, but physically, mentally, and socially helpless. Nicholas’ great “thonder-dent” of a fart echoes his rain-andflood story, but the hot coulter is Satan’s reward for his pretending to divine wisdom. And in kissing his “sweet bird/bride,” Absalom has, like Narcissus, loved his own likeness. Each of these falls from grace is the result of a characteristic blind selfishness and a lack of insight, despite the premium placed on knowingness in this fabliau community. Alysoun remains the focal point of the tale, because seeing her as she is requires the highest wisdom of all, which is self-knowledge, and a sense of one’s place in the world. In the Miller’s Tale, a man’s place in the world is figured by the structure of John’s house. The house is the world in this tale, but then, so is Alysoun. She is central to the house, amplifying its social significance, and her frisky, natural charm is felt in every part of it. In metaphor, at least, Alysoun and the house are coextensive; each has three levels and each man seeks his private space at a different level, attempting to find with her, and in her, a private world that is peculiarly his own. Alysoun’s portrait early in the tale begins with her midsection, and in the house, the bedroom is really where she belongs. Both John and Nicholas spend nights in her bed, and while they are there, they are safe from harm— or, more accurately, from harming themselves. This central locus belongs to a cluster of associations that extend its significance—for example, Alysoun’s bed, Alysoun’s womb, the womb of nature, and “Goddes foyson,” or plenitude, which is a variant of that great metaphor for creation in the Knight’s Tale, the golden chain of love. All three men belong at this center, in some way, John by the authority of his marriage and his money, Nicholas by his fitness for “derne love,” and Absalom by way of his fantastical imagination. Not one of them remains at this source of nature’s plenty, though, for tragically (if such falls can really be tragic), none is content with the share of it he has deserved by authority, fitness, or fancy. Alysoun’s “upper story” is distinguished by her “likerous ye.” Perhaps the most compelling detail in her portrait, it sums up the promise of Alysoun, which is really nature’s promise of freshness and mutability. Much of the tale’s

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power is in these overtones of the paradisal, even when they are comically subverted—Absalom whining under the window in the accents of the Song of Songs, for instance, or Nicholas celebrating a postdiluvian paradise in nurseryrhyme style, with three tubs afloat like puddle ducks. One of the most touching features of that vision, however, is its reminder of the mortal limits to be crossed in getting there. Floating away from John’s house on the death-flood is impossible without breaking a hole in the gable, in the back of the house, “garden-ward.” That imagined hole is really the eye of the house, a blind entryway to an ancient, forbidden garden where earthbound John can never go. Absalom, at the bottom of the house, peers into a secret garden within, a bedroom where he can never go except in his blind fantasy. Alysoun’s “nether ye” is for Absalom a cruel but fitting transformation of her “likerous ye,” not the promise but the punishment of nature. Nicholas’s scalded “towte” is what he gets for counterfeiting Alysoun’s secrets at the bottom of the house, but it also punishes his counterfeiting “Goddes pryvetee” up in the rafters.16 And John, dreaming of a soft, green, and solitary world, leaves the sweet privacy of Alysoun’s bed for a bed that is low, hard, and very public. For all three men, Alysoun represents nature’s ambivalent promise, then, but Nicholas is most at home within the world of Alysoun’s house, where he celebrates her on all three levels, projecting an exalted vision of her floating toward a new paradise on earth, making revel and melody with her in her proper bed, and finally, thrusting himself out to amplify her terrible kiss. For Nicholas in particular, the house becomes coextensive, or “merged in metaphor,” with Alysoun, and Alysoun with the world. Her “likerous ye” gleams like the visions of its upper room, and like them it promises paradise; her womb and her bed are the sweet center of this domestic life; and her “nether ye” aligns perfectly with the shot window, which is, and is not, a public access to forbidden privacy. Alysoun and the house embody the world for all three men, but especially for Nicholas, who understands her, and handles her the best, even though he is finally unable to handle himself, in his proud state of felicity as the “man of the house” in the Miller’s Tale.

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CHAPTER

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The Solace of Open Spaces

The Reeve’s Tale is often read as reflecting the Reeve’s personal traits and social role, because Chaucer gave the Reeve something the Miller does not have— namely, a language, a home, a past, a history. The Miller has a “thombe of gold”—an icon of his estate and class—but the details of the Reeve’s portrait and prologue endow him with a particularized being-in-the-world. The Miller is the eternal wrestler and jokester; the Reeve is simply old, yet that is precisely what roots him in the historical present. His life, compressed as portrait or glossed as prologue, is expressed by motifs of age (duration), craft (implying the layered complexity of rural commerce), and bitterness (memory, “intente”). These motifs condition us to read his tale as a social allegory whose purpose, beyond what it reveals about Oswald’s own character, is to anatomize the attitudes and practices of an economic Everyman. In this tale are social settings, relationships, and purposes that create the miller Symkyn as an economic homunculus, a character whose attitudes and practices illustrate how private motives and public roles are accommodated to the necessity of economic competition. His schemes typify those (e.g., Chaucer’s Miller and Reeve) whose central place in rural commerce allows, and even compels, them to prey upon extended domains representing established capital bases. Lee Patterson has made the related argument that Chaucer’s Miller becomes a historically representative figure by resisting the Knight’s message and imposing his own presence and economic purpose upon the frame story.1 The Reeve, however, constitutes for Patterson an ideological retreat on Chaucer’s part, an internalizing and thus containing of potentially disruptive political aims by presenting them as motivated by an individual (hence politically insignificant) consciousness.2 Like the Reeve himself, that is, the tale has a hard-nosed, north country shrewdness that implies a social strategy, but not a political ideology. I would like to suggest, however, that the Reeve’s Tale has its own way of presenting class conflict. In this rural setting, the wealth, power, and prestige of church and nobility are not inverted, as the Miller might prefer, but (as is more practical and credible) gradually assimilated by the parasitic greed of a country entrepreneur. As the tale develops, Symkyn’s peasant cleverness, unsatisfied with his “curteis” miller’s theft, projects a fantasy world where a “false clerk” or miller prince could indeed displace his betters. His failure to do so is not Chaucer’s failure to grapple with real-world issues (like the Reeve’s

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own clerical ambitions, or the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381), as Patterson perhaps would argue, but a demonstration that private ambitions are subject to the realpolitik of market demand and human need.

I. What we might call the ideology of the Reeve’s Tale—the worldview expressed by its action and narration—is a “logic of deprivation,” associated with the Reeve’s appearance in his portrait and prologue but not delimited by it. This logic counters the primary message of the Miller’s Tale. The Miller’s fundamental assumption, expressed in both his prologue and tale, is that there is plenty for all: “Of the remnant, nedeth nat enquere” (line 3166). Each man has what he needs from Alysoun, in other words, whether that is marriage ( John), solace (Nicholas), or love-service (Absalom). Having her exclusively (in “pryvetee”), however, is the forbidden paradise of the Miller’s Tale, from which each man is banished by public ridicule he earns in his characteristic way. Plenitude is consequently the main idea of the tale, plenitude and the inevitable deprivation suffered by those who would privatize its bounty. If possession (“having”) is the ruling passion of the Miller’s Tale, then predation (“getting”) rules the Reeve’s Tale.3 In effect, Symkyn is a parasite on the land, since part of every sack of meal is assimilated by him in the process of grinding. Symkyn’s “sokene” has thus become his domain: by emptying the land he owns it. Yet milling is merely an applied art, a demonstration of the logic of deprivation that he and his parson father-in-law have followed and hope to pursue in establishing their lineage by gainful marriages. His marriage to the parson’s daughter involved a dowry payment (“pans of brass,” with their overtone of simony)4 derived from an equally large domain of parish dwellers. When Symkyn marries his own daughter to “som worthy blood of auncetrye” (line 3982), as he hopes, he will then have drained the resources of all three of the traditional estates (commons, clerics, nobles) into his own capacious pocket. Yet the wife and daughter—instruments of economic increase, like the mill itself—finally become the agents of Symkyn’s own reduction. He is overwhelmed by a revolt that is merely the neediness and frustration of the two clerks he has cheated, and of the two women whose social roles have been so long distorted and perhaps impoverished by the tyranny of his desires. The structural basis for the analogies between the two tales is that each has a concentric setting. The setting in the Miller’s Tale surrounds its source of plenty, which is Alysoun’s bedroom. In the Reeve’s Tale, the countryside surrounds Symkyn’s mill, but Symkyn is a miller who preys upon the country round, abusing his exclusive license to grind its grain. Symkyn’s monopoly includes the town of Cambridge and its university, so that as before, we have

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the clever clerks against the established tradesman. This fabliau débat provided the Miller’s Tale with its comic reversals; in the Reeve’s Tale, it provokes a cold dialectic of revenge, the grim hunger to get even. The two clerks find their “easement” not in lovemaking as such, but in sex that takes the place of swordplay. The governing metaphor of the Miller’s Tale, and the basis for its natural morality, was the paradise of Alysoun’s bedroom and the plenitude of her own abundant vitality. By contrast, the master trope for the Reeve’s Tale, and the basis for its severity, is the mill as a hungry mouth that devours the richness of the land, magically transforming it into the substance, the “yeoman’s estate,” of miller Symkyn.

II. Symkyn’s faux-dominion over the surrounding land is a shadowing forth of his swollen greed, a vision made tangible by his art of systematic theft. His response to the social awareness of these practices appears early, blazoned as it were by his red hose, which match the gown his wife wears to impose her own low eminence upon the townsfolk. The defense of these precarious gains, a consuming necessity, is expressed by the edged weapons Symkyn displays with varying degrees of phallic openness. There is the long “panade” (implying the public threat of swordplay), the Sheffield knife in the waistband of his hose, for closer work, and the jolly little dagger (“popper”) in his pocket, for intimate business. These motifs and the relationships they stand for constitute the “chivalric” expansion of Symkyn’s private space and social pretense. They define, in other words, a combative register of fraud and force, the cleverness and muscle by which Symkyn has made good his claim upon the world around him. Symkyn’s mill is the overt means of his predation, and it defines a locus of armed combat where the clerks feel they need to wear their swords to supervise the milling. The mill itself is a weapon. It is Symkyn’s means of putting the bite on his neighbors, a sense made concrete by the Cambridge manciple’s debilitating toothache. The manciple’s molars (“wanges”) being disabled, Symkyn steals (“grinds”) outrageously.5 In addition to these combative features, the milling described in the first episode has unmistakable sexual associations—which are not surprising, since, after all, the mill is for Symkyn an instrument of increase, and milling an economically reproductive act. It might occur to us to wonder, if indeed the mill is also a sexual metaphor, who is getting the worst of these transactions. But since the hopper “wagging to and fro” begins the account of the milling, and Symkyn owns the mill, the answer seems plain. Erotic and aggressive motifs are combined in the milling scene, then, just as Venus and Mars both had their influence on the

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prison/garden scene in the Knight’s Tale. This ambiguous combination also appears in the three remaining scenes. But while the milling and dinner episodes are like debates, and belong to a combative register of action, the fen and bedroom scenes are conveyed mainly by sentimental motifs, the language of the senses. The shifts in register from combative to sentimental reflect Symkyn’s own strategy. His economic reach is forcefully extended by his milling, but his limitless potential grasp is represented by the wife and daughter, and the gentler, stronger ties of blood kinship. Equally, however, these shifts in register imply the counterthrust to Symkyn’s scheming, the motives that drive the clerks and women. After the manipulation and threat of the milling scene, that is, the action moves into the fens, entering a softer ambience, a milder, murkier, perhaps deeper level of life where women, men, and even horses have feelings, crave “easement,” and will act to bring it about. Such is the pastoral freedom, the country of desire implied by the meadows, where Bayard (“O my chevalier!”) spends a long afternoon chasing the wild mares, while he himself is chased, endlessly, by Aleyn and John. Kolve has written extensively on horses as figures for sexuality,6 and I need only emphasize that it is not especially the sexuality of women—or, for that matter, men—that the fens episode suggests, but rather the part of life that provides a balance, easing the weary dialectic of competition in that market-surrogate, the mill. What goes on in the fens, in other words, is an assertion of natural law. The amplitude of this space, the open-ended, indeterminate patterning of the chase, and the elemental, and thus blameless (if also meritless), equine desires that motivate the action are motifs that express the ambiguous “natural” freedom craved by both horses and humans. It is true that while Bayard chases the mares, Symkyn is stealing the clerks’ flour, so that the meadows scene is co-opted by the competition of the milling scene. Yet when the clerks shed their swords and run like deer in pursuit of Bayard (“‘I is ful wight, God wat, as is a raa’” [line 4086]), shouting and sweating, to return wet and weary like their horse, they leave behind the towers of learned logic (Soler Hall, Cambridge) and the arena of economic combat (the mill) to enter the lower world of natural functions and simpler, but stronger and perhaps saner, intentions. Their northern accents, which make them “foreign” to the local competition between Symkyn and the college, help us to accept their accomodation to this alternate setting.

III. In the remainder of the tale, the action takes place in Symkyn’s house. In the first pair of scenes, Symkyn engaged the clerks in milling, then loosed them

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to a fruitless chase in the fens. Here, in two analogous scenes, they pay him back: Symkyn’s continued extortion in the house (his charging for bed and board) again creates a chase, and this time his own pretensions are deflated: exploitation within a restricted focus, and in a combative register of action, bursts out into a chase scene that occurs within a broader focus and in a sentimental register. The basic rhythm of the tale is thus a movement outward, an escape from controlled aggression to the narrow but uninhibited bedroom scene, where the clerks freely pursue their own desires, turning the tables on Symkyn. Why this happens—and, indeed, must happen—is the key premise of the tale’s logic of deprivation. During the bedroom chase, Aleyn and John will free themselves by constraining Symkyn, but as they enter the house, under Symkyn’s jealous eye, it is hard to imagine anything but their own containment.7 For as Symkyn himself points out, the interior of his house (lines 4122–26) is extremely limited. The house is like Symkyn’s yeoman’s estate, and like “deynous Symkyn” himself: it is what it is, after all, and common sense knows there is no changing a miller into (say) a franklin, any more than reeves can preach, or souters be shipmen or leeches (lines 3903–4). Nevertheless, Symkyn has created just such a metamorphic expansion, and the enabler of his art has been time. His mill-cheating yields relatively little, but he has the monopoly and time is on his side. Years before, his marriage to the parson’s daughter initiated what is perhaps an ongoing revenue drawn from the church, and over time the future marriage of Malyn to some noble scion could yield even greater sums. Later that night, conversely, the longer the clerks can sustain their energetic grinding,8 the lower Symkyn’s lineage, and the more disparaged his yeoman’s estate. The clerks make their love-revenge with both daughter and wife, and these two adventures recall John’s reply to Symkyn”: “I have herd seyd, ‘Man sal taa of twa thynges: Slyk as he fyndes, or taa slyk as he brynges.’” (Lines 4029–30) Aleyn’s night with Malyne is arguably “such as he finds,” while Symkyn’s wife, guided to John by the cradle, is clearly “such as he brings.” Beyond this obvious symmetry is the reversal of Symkyn’s own long-term scheming, in which his wife (whom he “finds”) and daughter (whom he “brings”) are both intended to be instruments for siphoning off the resources of the church and landed gentry. In effect, the spatial extension that reflected the carpenter John’s ambition in the Miller’s Tale is here replaced by extension in time. While John dominated a lofty, layered space (the three-storied world of his house) and dreamed of a timeless world after the flood, Symkyn’s narrow house offers no

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escape from his snoring, but time enough for the clerks to exact easement. It is in fact the snoring that begins the shift from spatial to temporal imagery. The drunken Symkyn “fnorteth,” horselike, in his sleep, and so do his wife and daughter—so much so that they could have been heard “two furlong” (lines 4163, 4166). Critics have rightly noted these horse motifs as links between the fen and bedroom scenes; what they have overlooked is John’s lying still, “a furlong way or two” (line 4199): less than a five-minute jog for a horse, but for Aleyn (the “rider”), a way of escaping the two-furlong noise level, and a start on his journey toward easement. Such are the “argumentes” by which the clerks “make a place / A myle brood of twenty foot of space” (lines 4123–24). How does this bedroom chase reflect the tale’s logic of deprivation? Readers are right to emphasize the animal spirits, the “horsiness” of the bedroom scene, which allows it and the meadows chase to transcend what is otherwise a rather oppressive story. Yet the swyving would not be satisfying for clerks, women, or readers if it were not perilous—forbidden (and thus, in a real sense, required) by Symkyn’s greed, pride, and anger. The careful, quiet creeping up and into strange beds has its parallel, and a justification of sorts, in the miller’s stealth in loosing the clerks’ horse. The galloping sex that follows (“Wehee!”), while echoing Bayard, derives its main effect from our sudden recognition that the women almost certainly desire released time as much as the clerks. The miller’s house is “streit,” but its close darkness, made thicker by the ale, opens up an inner space, a garden or perhaps meadow of the senses, where both clerks and women find a night’s refuge from Symkyn’s oppressive ambition. No small part of Symkyn’s reversal of fortunes is the role of the cradle containing his baby son, the future of the Symkyn line. The son would inherit the entire estate, which is to say the resources parasitically derived by means of the mill, wife, and daughter. The cradle is the symbolic center of Symkyn’s domestic kingdom, containing as it were the seed of his empire. When the baby is used to ridicule Symkyn, collapse his bullying, and thus constrain his predation, he has in effect been wounded from within, bled by his own blood. In Symkyn’s own spatial terms, the vast potential gains headed for the narrow cradle and house will pour back out, so to speak, through a breach made by the cradle itself. But the gentlest, and probably the most significant, gesture of loverevenge in Symkyn’s little house is Malyne’s pathetic attempt to play this farce as the sentimental drama of amour courtois.9 Her few words have the countrified flavor of street romance, yet they seem all the more vulnerable for being comic. At parting, she “almost weeps.” Is it acting, is it loneliness? In either case we feel superior, and are at once amused and shamed. As a result, we begin to see Malyne as a subject of desire and, in particular, someone with motives different from her father’s. Symkyn’s greed transforms the substance of others into his own substance; that is the significance of the clerks’ meal

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being baked into a half-bushel cake. But Malyne reverses that greedy assimilation with a love gift that proceeds from the grateful generosity or fullness of a long-deferred emotional well-being.10 The following milling/beating climax again shows the restorative power of love, this time in the hands of the wife, who is waked by Symkyn’s struggle with Aleyn. Assuming that Symkyn is still beside her and that the “false clerks” are fighting, she spies a glimmering white thing in the one tiny shaft of moonlight that pierces the lightless room, and strikes out in defense of her household and her mate. Symkyn is therefore brained and beaten through the loving loyalty of his own wife, a woman whose red gown reflects her husband’s defensive arrogance and whose capable staff work takes the place of his knives. Her violent gesture, like Malyne’s pathetic one, is uncalculated, driven by honest emotion—a loving, selfless act. Hence, the disastrous consequences of her blow can only be attributed to chance, fate, or perhaps the divine love that eventually restores all worldly imbalances through the strange, moon-drawn concatenations of man and nature.11 Thus, when Symkyn’s house becomes a substitute mill where Symkyn’s pretensions are ground fine, the wife and daughter assume a central role. They are sexually used, in an affront to “hooly blood” and “nortelrie,” but they are also the active agents of Symkyn’s own deflation, both in spirit and in substance. In this sense, it is not the house but the women themselves that are the surrogate mills. Forced together with the clerks, they become agents of Symkyn’s social and economic reduction, but that is only the equivalent of his having used them (as he uses the mill) as instruments of generation for raising himself and his lineage beyond his natural station.

IV. The transformation of wife and daughter into vessels of infinite increase has begun long before the story starts, of course, and it corresponds to another lifelong transformation in “deynous” Symkyn himself. His contempt for the clerks’ learning is a standard convention essential to his tradesman’s role, and it appears early in the tale:12 “They wene that no man may hem bigyle, But by my thrift, yet shal I blere hir ye, For al the sleighte in hir philosophye.” (Lines 4048–50) Yet by the time Symkyn goes to bed, after celebrating the triumph of his art with roast goose and strong ale, we begin to see a difference in him. He

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begins to “pale” (“Ful pale he was for dronken, and nat reed” [line 4150]), making a contrast with the red hose he often wears to match the red gown worn by his wife, in her glaring hauteur. This pale drunkenness (the result of “vernysshing” his head) looks forward to when his wife sees the moon shining on that bald pate and takes it for a clerk’s white nightcap. In smiting a clerk, she would, in a way, be attacking her own “lineage”—“hooly chirches blood”—since her father is a parson. Yet the blow is an oddly precise one, because Symkyn is himself a sort of would-be, or false, clerk, having increased his narrow holdings by the dialectical art of stealing from everyone. Symkyn announces his shadow identity as a pretend-clerk after Aleyn recounts his night’s work with the daughter, whispering it into Symkyn’s ear. “A, false traitour! False clerk!” (line 4269), Symkyn roars, and to some extent, he is right. Aleyn’s farewell to Malyne, a few lines earlier (“But evermo, where so I go or ryde, / I is thyn awen clerk” [lines 4238–39]), was anything but genuine. What Symkyn means, though, is that Aleyn has disparaged what we know to be the falsely elevated Symkyn family name. Then they fight, but as in some passages of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the streams of pronoun references begin to merge, until it is hard to know who is hitting whom—who, indeed, is the false clerk, and who the miller: And by the throte-ball he caughte Alayn, And he hente hym despitously agayn, And on the nose he smoot hym with his fest. Doun ran the blody streem upon his brest; And in the floor, with nose and mouth tobroke, They walwe as doon two pigges in a poke; (Lines 4273–78) The blurring of identities and roles in this passage is intensified by the befuddlement of the wife, when Symkyn and John fall on her during the fight, waking her from an exhausted sleep in the clerks’ bed: “Awak, Symond! The feend is on me falle. . . . Help, Symkyn, for the false clerkes fyghte!” (Lines 4290–91) She is right in both senses. John, who has lain with her all night pretending to be the miller, is certainly as false as Aleyn was to Malyne. But the other “false clerk” who has just fallen on her is Symkyn himself, and with her staff she will presently indict him both innocently and justly, despite all the “sleighte” in his philosophy.

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The choreography of this fight also bears watching: And up they goon, and doun agayn anon, Til that the millere sporned at a stoon . . . (Lines 4279–80) Aleyn and Symkyn are all over each other in this fight, up and down, trading positions like the spokes in a mill wheel, and surely that is the implication. Symkyn gives as good as he gets in this bathetic brawl, until his wife lays out the “false clerk.” Her blow is therefore pivotal to this final milling, which is the grinding of Symkyn himself, or “the miller milled.”13 The clerks’ activities with the wife and daughter have already brought about Symkyn’s social and economic reduction. His somewhat fortuitous physical beating is drawn out into three distinct stages (Aleyn and Symkyn fight, the wife brains Symkyn, the clerks beat him), and its effect is extended to the close of the tale by the narrator’s thrice-repeated mention of it (lines 4308, 4313, 4316). This added brutality shows us that in the course of the tale, the clerks have themselves undergone a transformation. Entering the mill with their ineffectual swords and broad country accents, they seemed ingenuous “ill millers,” or millers manqué: “‘For John, y-faith, I may been of youre sort; / I is as ille a miller as are ye’” (lines 4044–45). But here at the end, they give Symkyn his “flour of ilendyng” (line 4174), his ritual milling, just as he would have done to them.

V. In the action we have examined, millings take place in both mill and house, and the miller and the clerks assume each other’s roles in a mutually reductive struggle.14 These reciprocal patterns, including the reversals enabled by wife, daughter, and cradle, demonstrate a simple moral—“a gylour shal hymself bigyled be” (line 4321)—but they also imply a social imperative: nature seeks a balance (or better, “nature will out”). This fundamental premise is reflected by the clerks’ initial movement from Soler Hall, Cambridge, to the mill and into the fens—a necessary, perhaps inevitable flight from high to low, logic to instinct, and more generally, culture to nature that typifies the action of the tale. The mill is an economic boundary locus, a marketplace where public roles engage one another, where clerks and millers compete. But at the deeper, causally prior level of human intent, the mill is an arena of combat where private desires drive the public role. Beyond simple greed and vengeance, what drives both the miller and the clerks is their hunger for powers they necessarily lack, their need to be what they are not. This desire to go where the grass is greener is filled (and fueled) by assuming the role of one’s opponent. The

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miller, for instance, is driven to outsmart the university clerks. He cheats them as he has everyone in the country round—those unlimited green meadows where his greedy imagination no doubt plays. In return, the clerks try to be millers. Marginalized and then housebound, they embrace necessity to gain freedom and bounty. By the end of the tale, Symkyn, the clerks, and the women have each been driven to seek an imagined haven (“easement”) that holds, for them, the profound and even paradisal extension of self that Bayard, in his simpler way, seeks in the fens. If mill and fens suggest the economic agon and its promised reward, the milling itself reflects every sort of upwardly mobile,15 self-transformative act in which desire for gain and aggression toward competitors must be governed by sober craft, the discipline of the public persona. At the outset, the clerks’ exuberance makes them “ill millers.” They are loud and “lusty for to pleye” (line 4004), so it is not surprising that Symkyn gives them the runaround, while he quietly steals their flour. These open fens imply the expansionist paradise of Symkyn, but the economic exile of the clerks. In the second half of the tale, however, the clerks’ own craft transforms their situation. By applying the art of courtly love, and by manipulating what we might call a dialectic of time/space, they make the narrow estres (interior arrangement) of Symkyn’s house their paradise and his prison. The tale is thus a fable of identity, a wry affirmation of the durability of social roles: in the mill and fen scenes, Symkyn’s miller’s craft outwits the clerks, while in the house, Aleyn’s and John’s cleverness as clerks allows them to displace Symkyn, to be “millers.” Their cleverness is necessary, for the house represents a subtler, more essential art of milling. Symkyn’s “sokene” guarantees him a percentage of the land’s raw product, but through marriage alliances, he can hope to gain the land itself. The women, like the mill, have enabled Symkyn’s economic growth, but here the assimilation is organic, a genuine transmutation of self and substance, for just as seed can be milled to make wheat cakes, blood can be allied (“mixed”) to make heirs. Best of all, the grand paradigm for this parasitic magic is already present in the parson’s alliance with the church: For hooly chirches good moot ben despended On hooly chirches blood that is descended. Therfore he wolde his hooly blood honoure, Though that he hooly chirche sholde devoure. (Lines 3983–86, italics mine) Holy church’s blood nourishes the parson’s holy blood,16 just as some “worthy blood of auncetry,” transmuted by Malyn’s marriage, could increase Symkyn’s good.

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The initial scene in Symkyn’s house is nevertheless the point at which Symkyn’s greed and the clerkly scheming motivated by it overdrive his miller’s craft. Once more, Symkyn extorts money from the clerks, buying food and drink and again transforming their substance into his own (i.e., “their goose is cooked”). This perfectly unbearable constraint is exactly what reverses the roles of container and contained. By trying to restrain Symkyn in the mill, the clerks effected their own exile; but here, confined in the dark bedroom and oppressed by Symkyn’s cheating and snoring, they find freedom, because in this sentimental register, their boisterous, “natural” aggression and desire are suddenly advantages. In the house, the dominance of the aggressive over the erotic is reversed: here, among the oppressed, craft is necessary, but desires—and in particular the desires of women—are decisive. By crafty scheming, Symkyn has ended up like a helpless “false clerk,” but need drives the clerks to become merciless “ill millers,” and the women, so long the passive instruments of ambition or revenge, undergo their own reversal as being mastered by sentiment becomes a strength. Powerless, yet driven by selfless, natural feelings to aid their men, they restore the balance of power by a deed of love and a deed of arms. The logic of deprivation, then, is that greed, by preying upon others, creates an overwhelming need for restitution. For as John tells Symkyn, “nede has na peer” (line 4026). So when Symkyn, like many another rural opportunist, upsets the balance of trade by stealing outrageously (i.e., cutting into supply), need (demand) naturally increases, eventually restoring the balance. In effect, the long-attempted metamorphosis of Symkyn’s estate as a miller has prevented both clerks and women from carrying out their normal social and economic roles. Nevertheless, their exile (from the mill, from normal marriages) and their containment (in the house, in arranged marriages)—the two fundamental obstacles to human intent—are precisely what create their freedom. Economic alienation and personal constraint combine to generate the emotional necessity that causes them to break the bonds of their public roles and seek their private ease in greener pastures. Loosed by social and sexual deprivation, they annihilate Symkyn’s public and private resources in a parody of his own milling and marriage operations—a just yet sordid conclusion. Thus it is that neither Symkyn, the clerks, nor the women, in their violent, fraudulent, debased roles, can reward our investment in this tale. We respond, rather, to the seemingly inevitable and thus natural logic with which public roles (occupational as well as class identities) yield to the necessity of private needs. This easement comes to all, in some way, and is best remembered as a horse galloping joyously into the fens—the country of the heart—where the pursuit of desire displaces the weary grind of commerce, freeing the public role from the tyrannous hungers of the private self.

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CHAPTER

4

Symkyn’s Place

When Aleyn and John, the Cambridge clerks, make their way back to Symkyn’s house, they are weary and wet, having spent the day chasing their horse Bayard about the fen, and this is when he offers them his famous invitation: “Myn hous is streit, but ye han lerned art; / Ye konne by argumentes make a place / A myle brood of twenty foot of space” (I; lines 4122–24).1 The pithy sarcasm of these lines displays Symkyn’s resentment of the clerks’ education and their station in life, yet leads us to wonder whether, by “argumentes,” he might be implying something in particular, some clerkly craft that would shed additional light on the action of the tale.2 In a passage by Albert of Saxony, a fourteenth-century Aristotelian philosopher at that great center for learned clerks, the University of Paris, we hear a distinct echo of Symkyn’s words. Referring to the infinite extent of the divine power, Albert says God “could place a body as large as the world inside a millet seed and he could achieve this in the same manner as Christ is lodged in the host, that is, without any condensation, rarefaction, or penetration of bodies. Within that millet seed, God could create a space of 100 leagues, or 1,000, or however many are imaginable. A man inside that millet seed could traverse all those many leagues simply by walking from one extremity of the millet seed to the other.”3 What sort of man wrote this, and what was he writing? Albert of Saxony, or Albert of Rickmersdorf (sometimes called Albertus Parvus, to distinguish him from Albert the Great), was born in Helmstedt, Germany, around 1316.4 At the University of Paris, he studied with Jean Buridan and others, becoming master of arts in 1351; in 1353 he was named rector of the university and taught in the arts faculty for another ten years. He also studied theology, but along with a few other prominent thinkers, notably Jean Buridan and John of Jandun, he did not finish the degree.5 Yet in 1365 he became the first rector of the University of Vienna, and in 1366 was named bishop of Halberstadt, remaining in that position until his death in 1390. Although he is no longer considered an original thinker—his work is derivative of the ideas of Buridan and Nicole Oresme6—Albert was a prolific author; his writings, especially those in logic and natural philosophy, helped to spread the ideas of Ockham, Buridan, Oresme, and Bradwardine in western Europe, and had an influence upon subsequent scientific thought. The above passage, a thought experiment or imaginative exploration of contrary-to-fact conditions, occurs

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in De Celo, Albert’s commentary on Aristotle’s On the Heavens (book 1, question 9, 93v, col. 2). It is probably impossible to know whether Chaucer looked at, or had even heard of, Albert’s De Celo, although it seems likely that a university library such as the one at Oxford’s Merton College, or perhaps the even greater libraries at Dover, Canterbury, York, or Bury, might have acquired a copy. As Bennett has said, we cannot know if Chaucer entered any of these places or knew of their resources, yet such libraries did hold collections that were used and that testified to a culture of educated readers like Strode and others who were Chaucer’s acquaintances.7 Furthermore, Chaucer’s interest in cosmology, which we infer from his treatise on the astrolabe and the many astronomical references throughout his work, suggests that he was not unaware of the prevailing opinions and controversies on the subject. These are ideas that Chaucer could have encountered in sermons, popular anecdotes, or converse with his university connections. Theories of medieval cosmology, and the matrix of Aristotelian philosophy that sustained them, were in fact common knowledge among academics, for astronomy was part of the master of arts curriculum required for both philosophers and theologians. In addition, these issues were broadcast throughout the university community by disputation, and in a larger sense, the copying and circulation of manuscripts and the travel of masters between universities made Aristotelian thought a fairly homogeneous intellectual tradition in western Europe.8 My first objective will be to develop a context for Albert’s lines, and perhaps for Symkyn’s, by describing the theological reaction to Aristotelian philosophy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the changes in ideas— especially the idea of place—that resulted from this conflict. This general discussion of place will lead us to particular problems of containment that are implied by Albert’s reference to the dimensions of inner space and the eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation. In the final two sections, correspondingly, I will indicate some ways in which Symkyn’s desire to extend himself is suggested by metaphors of place and space, and then—his ultimate pretension!—the way Symkyn contrives to colonize inner space, as it were, by converting the substance of others into his own. In general, I attempt to evaluate the explanatory power and expressiveness of certain ideas drawn from cosmology and theology when they become metaphors for the crude ambitions of a “clerkly” mind like Symkyn’s.

I. The first thing to be said about Aristotelian thought in the thirteenth century is that it was dominant. Aristotle’s logic provided a powerful method for think-

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ing about theology, and his science offered precepts that continued in general use throughout the Middle Ages. Aristotle’s work on physics is a case in point. Lost to the West during the early medieval period, the Physics was preserved in Arabic translations and retranslated into Latin in the twelfth century by Gerard of Cremona. As such, it joined what has been called a “massive” translation of many texts written by Aristotle and Averroës, which led to Aristotle’s books on logic and cosmology becoming “the heart of the arts curriculum at Oxford, and, by 1255, Paris.”9 This energetic revival of Aristotle was so successful that theologians in Paris began to feel threatened by the strength of Aristotle’s thought, and by their colleagues, the Aristotelian philosophers of Paris. They wondered, that is, whether “the Aristotelian cosmology hamper[ed] God’s powers unduly.” For example, despite what Aristotle had argued, they asked, “Is the extent of God’s creative force limited to this admittedly finite world? Are not other worlds possible? Could not God jostle our world sideways in space, moving it into a new place and leaving an empty place behind?”10 In 1277, these and other concerns led Etienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, having received a request from Pope John XXI, and after consulting with theologians of the Sorbonne, to issue a series of 219 condemnations of (mainly Aristotelian) doctrines that denied or limited the power of God.11 The Paris condemnations were intended as constraints on the natural philosophers of Paris and elsewhere, in order to guard against the erosion of the authority of Christian doctrine. But their more pronounced and significant effect was to enable new ways of thinking about the natural world, and particularly the cosmos, the earth and heavens. Indeed, despite its flamboyant certitude, the claim of Pierre Duhem, the prominent early historian of science, that “[i]f we must assign a date for the birth of modern science, we would, without doubt, choose the year 1277”12 is worthy of serious consideration. One effect of the condemnations was to call into question the Aristotelian concept of place, and thus to make possible, and even to stimulate, imaginative explorations of spatial infinity (like that of Albert of Saxony), since infinite space could be seen as a necessary corollary to God’s immensity. Ultimately, these explorations “exceeded their theological origins; directly or indirectly they inspired the bold thought experiments of thinkers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, engendering the conceptual ventures that laid down the foundations of modern physics, above all its committment to the infinity of the physical universe.”13 It is exhilarating to know that the condemnations of 1277, and the discussions of place and space that they helped to initiate, look forward to the great work of Newton, Locke, and Leibnitz—in other words, the cosmology of the seventeenth century has its roots in medieval theology—but our interest here is with Aristotle’s concept of place and the alternatives to it that were proposed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Aristotle’s idea of place,

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to begin with, was not what medieval philosophers called the “vulgar” or “common” conception of place—which was like our own idea: location and extensiveness in three-dimensional space. His more precise description of place, as we find it in book 4 of the Physics, was “the limit of the containing body, by which the container makes contact with what it contains.”14 Or to put it a different way, it was “the immediate container of that of which it is the place.”15 Aristotle found it convenient, in other words, to define place as a two-dimensional containing surface that contacts the outer limits of a given body. Thus, each body has its own place that is exactly its own size, and in addition each body “naturally moves up or down to its own proper place and stays there.”16 For as a result of the rotation of the heavens, lighter things will move away (“up”) from the still center, and heavier things will descend (“down”) toward that center. Thus, even the cosmos—the earth and the heavens—has its proper place, because it has limits, and those limits define its place. And since, in Aristotle’s opinion, there could not be anything outside the heavens, because there was no reason to assume that there should necessarily be other worlds than this one, it also made sense to say that there was no place beyond the place of the world. Finally, to follow this idea to its extremity, if no place existed outside this world, then one could not go outside the world, for there was literally no place to go. The containing—or, from a different point of view, the comforting— nature of Aristotle’s concept of place may have had its primitive beginnings in finite models: the place that is a house, for instance, or a clearing in the woods, a field of battle, a town in the midst of fields. The parts of a place, as well as relations between places, could be thought of as analogous to the arrangement of the limbs of a body—everything in its proper place, in other words. But when applied to the world, such containment provoked curiosity. For if our world did have its limit, what would prevent us from reaching a hand, or perhaps a spear, beyond that limit, into the nothing, or something, that was there? Such questions had been asked since before the time of Plato,17 and were known throughout medieval times. There were also attempts to define the place of the world, which implied, although they did not specify, a larger cosmological context. Thomas Aquinas, for example, accepted Aristotle’s account of the outer sphere of the heavens, but he thought that if the place of the world is to be more than a simply a container, if we want to think of the world as being in a particular place, that emplacement is to be found “in a set of relations to the celestial spheres that surround earth itself.”18 Thus, the earth could be thought of as emplaced in relation to the surrounding heavenly bodies, which were, as Edward Casey argues, “an expanded domain that increasingly demands the term ‘spatial’ rather than ‘placial.’”19 This one example from Aquinas may suggest that perspectives on cosmological place were changing and expanding, but it was the condemnations

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of 1277, undergirded by the threat of excommunication, that most directly contradicted Aristotelian conclusions and encouraged theologians and philosophers to speculate about what infinite void spaces might open out if God willed them to do so. Two of the condemned articles or precepts are relevant here. Article 34 states “[t]hat the first cause [i.e., God] could not make several worlds.”20 But Bishop Tempier and the Paris theologians reasoned that if God is truly omnipotent, there is no reason why he cannot make worlds other than this world. Evidently, however, several worlds that coexist with each other must share a space larger than the place taken up by any one of them. And if there are an infinite number of such worlds—for why would an omnipotent God make only a few other worlds?—then the space shared must be infinite in extent. Another movement of the imagination toward infinite space was enabled by article 49: “That God could not move the heavens [i.e., the cosmos] with rectilinear motion (de moto rectu).”21 Rectilinear motion meant motion along a straight line, as opposed to rotation. Aristotle had said that such lateral motion can only be defined in relation to other bodies, other places. But if no other place existed beyond this place, then this place could not meaningfully be said to move at all. Bishop Tempier breaks this paradigm by allowing that God could move the world in and by itself without reference to anything else. In other words, God could produce “a sheer motion . . . in an absolute space,”22 and that is a model of space that Isaac Newton would have found quite acceptable. The thought experiments enabled by the condemnations of 1277 accustomed medieval minds to think in terms of infinite space, even if they believed, as most of them did, that in the material world, as opposed to the imagined world, things were as Aristotle had described them. What gave authority to that imagined world, what gave the imaginary infinite void space a necessary presence, because forever filled with God’s presence, was the rigorous, dogmatic, and theologically conservative De Causa Dei contra Pelagium of Thomas Bradwardine (1290–1349),23 who taught at Oxford and ended his career as archbishop of Canterbury and a confidant of Edward III. Bradwardine’s nine-hundred-page polemic was begun as a course of lectures at Oxford. In his preface, he writes that the origin of the work “lay in his revulsion against the emphasis upon free will and the disregard for God’s grace which he had heard preached as a student in the schools.”24 Bradwardine probably continued to lecture from his developing manuscript until its completion (manuscript evidence indicates that this occurred in 1344, late in his career). By that time, Leff argues, “since he was a member of a medieval university, Bradwardine’s ideas would have been known [through disputation] to his colleagues, opponents and pupils long before he published them.”25 The “Pelagians” in question were William of Ockham and his followers. Against their nominalist tendencies, and their emphasis on the importance of the

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human will, Bradwardine opposed the authority of divine creation, divine will, and man’s need to guide himself by God’s will, to the limited degree that it was humanly knowable (hence Chaucer associates him with the problem of “necessitee” in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale). Bradwardine was a brilliant mathematician and physicist, and his long, unrelenting, yet closely reasoned and coherent argument reflects an intensely disciplined mind. As theology, however, his treatise is in effect a conservative holding action, allowing very little latitude for free will and offering what Leff calls an “inhumane” program for the faithful that has something in common with the later, equally rigorous theology of John Calvin.26 Positing God’s omnipotence as “first cause,” Bradwardine set forth his evidence in a series of corollaries, two of which are relevant here: “First, that essentially and in presence, God is necessarily everywhere in the world and all its parts”; and second, that God is “also beyond the real world in a place, or in an imaginary infinite void.”27 God’s “‘presence . . . necessarily everywhere’ converts the void from what had been a purely negative and imaginary entity for other thinkers into something at once positive and real . . . real insofar as it is filled with God’s being (which is not only real but most real).” Furthermore, this void has parts (which can belong to things other than God); it has places (which are beyond the place of the world); and if it is beyond the world, then it is implied that God could move the world there, and if there, then anywhere within that infinite space that is coextensive with God.28 This was a way of thinking about infinite space followed by John of Ripa and Nicole Oresme in the fourteenth century, and by succeeding generations of philosophers and theologians. There were, however, philosophers who did not share Bradwardine’s grand conception of the cosmos, and here, finally, we return to the Reeve’s Tale, for one of these conservative thinkers was Albert of Saxony. Albert held with Aristotle that, in fact, no void space existed outside the world. “Merely because God could create such entities did not mean that he had actually done so.”29 Nonetheless, like most Scholastic philosophers after the condemnations, Albert appears to have taken a twofold approach: he followed Aristotle and “denied that a void space was naturally possible, but conceded that it was supernaturally possible.”30 Perhaps such concessions were difficult for him. In any case, in book 1 of his commentary on Aristotle’s De caelo, he envisions four imaginary situations in which God creates concentric or eccentric worlds inside our world or beyond our world that are located in what is presumably a void space. Most of these thought experiments (today we would probably call them hypotheses) illustrate the sometimes playful process of inquiry whereby new ideas were, and are, discovered.31 Here are two examples, one describing exterior space, the other interior space: “Similarly, we can imagine several eccentric worlds: either (1) one lies wholly outside the other, and this

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could be [imagined] in the way several globes are placed in a sack, or [it might be imagined that they are inside but] do not touch; or (2) that one does not lie wholly outside the other, but that there is another world in some part of our world, as if, [for example,] another world were imagined in the moon, or in the sun, and in the other planets” (bk. 1, question 11, fol. 95r, col. 1).32 One of the two remaining situations is the apparently whimsical sketch quoted at the beginning of this chapter, about how “God could place a body as large as the world inside a millet seed.” This certainly illustrated the power of God, and just as certainly it violated Aristotle’s (perhaps anyone’s) idea of place. Nonetheless, exasperated as he might have been with bishop Tempier and the theologians of Paris, Albert was not alone in speculating about whether there could be void space within the world. Bradwardine himself was interested in this ancient question, and in book 1, chap. 5 of his long polemic on God’s will, he concluded that “[i]ndeed, by means of his absolute power, God could make a void anywhere that he wishes, inside or outside of the world.”33 And so we return to Symkyn’s provocatively ungenerous offer: these clerks have “lerned art”—they can “by argumentes make a place / A myle brood of twenty foot of space.” Had we known about the condemnations of 1277, or about the kind of speculative thinking they inspired in sober clerks like Albert, Symkyn’s insulting paradox might have seemed to carry a bit more weight. Or if we had heard Bradwardine lecture, had we read the first book of his treatise, or known anything at all about this famous and dogmatic clerk who had risen so high in the ranks of the Oxford (Merton College) philosophers, and in the politics of the church, we might have been more sensitive to the social import of these lines, with their sly anticlerical overtone, tempered with the pride of knowing what the clerks were up to, what was really being debated—even at Cambridge, where there were not and would never be firstrank thinkers like Bradwardine.34 Surely, we would also have heard the common man’s scorn for philosophical notions that ran counter to his own myopic common sense—somewhat in the way that Albert of Saxony preferred the established thinking (which happened to be Aristotle’s), conceding to the infinite power of God the imaginary possibilities of infinite void space, and indeed, interior void space, yet conducting these thought experiments sometimes with an ironic air,35 sometimes with just a bit of wildness, for theology was not in fact his métier,36 and these imaginary scenarios were not really going to happen anyway, not in material reality.

II. Symkyn, of course, offers more than the possibility of a place within the place of his house; he grandly invites Alleyn and John to make an enormous,

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mile-broad place within those narrow walls, and this leads us to the part of Albert of Saxony’s thought experiment where he imagines God creating a space of one hundred leagues, no, a thousand—indeed, a potentially infinite space within a millet seed—and all this without altering its dimensions, without “rarefaction, condensation, or penetration of bodies.” As we have seen, the possibility of infinite void space received official validation from the condemnations of 1277. Take, for instance, number 49: “That God could not move the heavens [that is, the world] with rectilinear motion; and the reason is that a vacuum would remain.”37 The vacuum was an important objection, because Aristotle had argued in various ways that nature abhors a vacuum and that, in fact, God could not make a vacuum, partly because it was contradictory; indeed, it was absurd to say that God could create nothing.38 By condemning this assertion, it was allowed that God could move the world to a different place in space, and if to one place, then to infinite places, which would require the existence of infinite space. But the idea of introducing infinite space into a smaller, interior dimension, as both Symkyn and Albert propose, was a paradox that violated (Aristotelian) nature in a different way, and was validated by a different set of condemnations. “What articles 34 and 49 did for the existence of extracosmic space,” Grant has said, “articles 139, 140 and 141 did, somewhat less intelligibly perhaps, for possible dimensional spaces within the world.”39 These articles are somewhat redundant, and may be represented by the text of article 141: “That God cannot make an accident exist without a subject, nor make several dimensions exist simultaneously [in the same place].”40 In the language of Aristotle’s science, a subject refers to an underlying substance—not matter, but being, the fundamental identity of a body. Accidents, on the other hand, are the qualities of a body that inhere in it—its color, size, and weight, for instance. Accidents have their being in a subject, according to Aristotle, so that it would be nonsensical to imagine an accident without a subject—whiteness without anything being white, as Jean Buridan once said. Yet in condemning article 141, the theologians of Paris maintained that accidents could exist independently of a subject, and this was because Thomas Aquinas, among others, had used the philosophical language of substance and accident to describe the transubstantiation that takes place in the Eucharist, when the bread and wine is changed into the body and blood of Christ. The sacrament of the Eucharist is a miracle, a supernatural event, which Aquinas accepted as an article of faith. His arguments, which I will take to be representative,41 define the nature of the transubstantiation with the clarity of Aristotelian terminology, but the Aristotelian unity of subject and accident is violated in the interests of faith. The “physics of the Eucharist,” as this complex of ideas came to be called, would be a topic of philosophical discussion until the time of Locke, and its effect on fourteenth-century scientific thought was significant.

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We will follow these arguments briefly, for it is here in particular that we find the clerkly “art” that Albert echoes and Symkyn parodies in his remarks to Aleyn and John. In the synoptic Gospels, Christ says during the Last Supper, “This is my body,” and the meaning of the Eucharist depends upon the interpretation of these words. If understood symbolically, they would mean that the bread and wine of Communion represent Christ’s body, and the relationship draws the communicant toward heaven. But Aquinas understands “the body of Christ” as being literally inside the host: “We have under this sacrament—under the appearance of the bread—not only the flesh, but the whole body of Christ, that is, the bones and nerves and all the rest” (Summa Theologiae 3a.76.1 ad 2 [95]).42 This argument creates obvious difficulties. To begin with, if, at a certain point in the Mass, Christ’s body is the Eucharist, what happened to the bread and wine? Aquinas is sometimes thought to be saying that the bread and wine are annihilated and the body of Christ comes to exist in their place,43 but that would require Christ’s body to move from heaven to the altar, and a ubiquitous deity cannot be said to move. Thus, he argues for the change, or “transubstantiation,” of bread and wine into the body of Christ. On the other hand, it does not seem that the bread and wine have become the body of Christ, since their color, taste, and size remain that of bread and wine. Only the substance of the bread and wine—that which underlies its sense appearances—has been changed into Christ; the accidental qualities of the bread and wine have been left behind, and the substance of the body of Christ is now contained beneath their appearances. The accidents left behind are no longer accidents of the bread and wine, for it has been changed into Christ; but they are not accidents of Christ, either, for he does not look or taste like bread and wine. “We are left to conclude,” Aquinas says, “that the accidents in this sacrament do not inhere in any subject. God’s power is able to bring this about” (3a.77.1 [129]). Instead, he continues, “the other accidents which remain in this sacrament have as their subject the dimensive quantity of the bread and wine which remains” (3a.77.2 [133]). For “its dimensive quantity is the very first accident which affects a material thing. . . . And because the material substance is the basic subject in which all the accidents are received, it follows that the other accidents cling to the substance through the medium of the quantity” (3a.77.2 [133]). Aquinas does not mean that the body of Christ is coextensive with the bread and wine, or that when the bread is broken, Christ’s body is similarly divided. As Richard Fishacre had argued around 1235, in his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, “God’s infinite immensity always remains indivisible because he is wholly and indivisibly in every part of space,” an interpretation that came to be called the “whole-in-every-part” doctrine.44 Indeed, it makes no sense to say that the body of Christ can be divisible,

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because the dimensions of Christ’s body are not in the bread and wine, except in the way that they are implied by the “complete specific nature” of his substance (totalitas substantia). In fact, “the dimensions of the bread and wine are not changed into the dimensions of Christ’s body; it is substance that is changed into substance” (Summa Theologiae 3a.76.1 ad 3 [97]). It becomes clear, then, that even though “the whole ‘quantified’ and individuated living body of Christ” is contained by the quantity of the bread,45 it is there in a spiritual sense, as substance that contains the idea of dimensions, as it were, but no length and breadth. Consequently, it does not matter that the body of Christ is larger than the host. As Aquinas puts it, “[T]he whole specific nature of a substance is as truly contained by small as by large dimensions; for example, the complete specific nature of air is as truly found in a large as in a small amount, and human nature in its specific wholeness is equally present in a large and in a small man” (Summa Theologiae 3a.76.1 ad 3 [97]). Christ, contained whole and entire within the tiny host—this is a miracle of God’s power, but it is also a stunning paradox, God’s immensity in little, the universe within a grain of sand. It was at once an obstacle and a stimulant to philosophical investigation; as Albert of Saxony and Symkyn demonstrate, it had an imaginative impact both on scientific thinking and on the average person’s habits of mind. In regard to science, given the sacramental truth of the Eucharist, it appears, contra Aristotle but in accord with article 141 of the condemnations of 1277, “that God [can] make an accident exist without a subject, [and] make several dimensions exist simultaneously [in the same place].” Thus, Walter Burley could argue that just as in the Eucharist, God made a quantity (i.e., the body of Christ) with no inhering qualities (such as dimension), so also could he, in violation of Aristotle’s physics, make an extended vacuum (again, a quantity without qualities) through which light and heavy bodies could move.46 Or consider the case of Jean Buridan, who found in article 141 a support for his conception of the true nature of motion. According to the established thinking, motion was a disposition, an accidental form inhering in a body. But if God were to destroy that body, and the places it might occupy, then motion would remain as an independent entity, “a non-permanent, pure flow” (res pure successiva)—that is, it could remain as an independent quality (we would say, “phenomenon”), because it was forbidden to say that “God cannot make an accident exist without a subject.”47 The ability to postulate qualities without subjects aided also in the development of inertial theory and of the Merton College “mean speed theorem . . . which eventually served as the foundation of Galileo’s new mechanics.”48 In sum, the theological exceptions to Aristotelian science we have just examined were a significant influence on medieval scientific thinking, and on medieval thought in a broader sense as well. According to Edward Grant, “[T]he Condemnation of 1277 . . . was taken seriously throughout the four-

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teenth century. . . . [I]t encouraged innumerable invocations of God’s absolute power in a variety of hypothetical physical situations. . . . So widespread was the contemplation of such hypothetical possibilities in the late Middle Ages that it is no exaggeration to view them as an integral feature of late medieval thought.”49 In the context of the thought experiments provoked by the condemnations, we can see Albert of Saxony’s passage as a somewhat typical imaginative exercise, in which he applies the “physics of the Eucharist” to a millet seed, emphasizing the paradoxical nature whereby dimensions are folded into one another, as it were, and the tiny is simultaneously immense, but demonstrating all this from the mundane point of view of a man “walking from one extremity of the millet seed to the other.” Probably we are struck more forcibly by the paradox, the violation of commonsense physical laws, than we are by the underlying theology and its scientific implications. And that, I would suggest, is pretty much how Symkyn’s words on place and space are supposed to strike the informed reader. One is aware of the possible references to certain aspects of the art of clerks, yet this is a miller speaking, after all, and we can only wonder what significance his paradoxical lines might have for his own artful scheming.

III. For in his cheating, his scheming, his dreams of great estate, Symkyn is indeed an expansive character. His oppressive greed, betrayed by the clerkly jingle on place and space, gains its full expression through spatial relationships and metaphors that imply the tension between self and other, inner and outer, small and great.50 In these ways, cosmology and theology themselves become part of a chain of associations, attenuating into the mundane events of a miller’s life. The expansiveness of “a place a myle brood” resonates with Albert’s “space of 100 leagues, or 1,000 leagues,” and indeed with Bradwardine’s infinite void space; at the same time it looks in the other direction, toward Symkyn’s “greet sokene,” and his ambition to enlarge it even further through blood alliances. But some narrative sequences directly reflect the sense of Symkyn’s couplet, just as they imply Aquinas’s “physics of the Eucharist”—in other words, the outer and greater may be assimilated to a smaller, inner space.51 For if simple enlargement were desirable, how much better, and in fact more realistic, if by milling and marriage, Symkyn could create wealth and power—a lordly presence— within the humble confines of his yeoman’s estate? That is what he really means by the ironic paradox of the millet seed. And isn’t that what Oswald himself has done, by cheating his lord in a hundred ways, to build himself a house “ful faire upon an heath” (I.606), but out of the way, shadowed by green trees, a fair retreat only vaguely justified by his subordinate reeve’s duties? For

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clarity, and because they correspond, respectively, to ideas developed in the first two sections of this chapter, I will devote a brief discussion to each complex, the metaphors of expansiveness (section 3), and of assimilation (section 4). We do not have to read far in the tale to gain a spatial sense of Symkyn’s grasping nature. His very portrait might be said to express a kind of perimeter, establishing the conditions that other characters—wife, daughter, the two clerks, others—have to contend with, and giving us a thumbnail sketch of how the imagery of the tale will be configured. If we took the measure of Robin the Miller by scrutinizing his nose, with all its gross vitality, our first sustained image of the miller Symkyn is an array of edged weapons: Ay by his belt he baar a long panade, And of a swerd ful trenchant was the blade. A joly poppere baar he in his pouche; Ther was no man, for peril, dorste hym touche. A Sheffeld thwitel baar he in his hose. (Lines 3929–33) The general impression we take from these lines, surely, is that this is a resourceful, heavily defended, and dangerous man. The resourcefulness, and the threat that it projects, is implicit in the layered defenses that at once protect and express him. It is obvious, for instance, that no one anywhere near Symkyn is safe, for the “long panade” extends his reach considerably (Chaucer notes that its edge is sharp as a sword, emphasizing the length of the cutlass by association). But even those allowed within that reach, for reasons of business, perhaps, carry out their transactions virtually at knife point, for the Sheffield knife waits conveniently inside the waistband of his hose, quite visible, no doubt, as an aid to bargaining. And on the off chance that someone might lose his temper and lay hold of him, there is still the inner threat, the “joly” little dagger hidden in his pocket, for close work. We get the impression that this is how he appears even on holy days (line 3952), accompanied by his wife: Was noon so hardy that wente by the weye That with hire dorste rage or ones pleye, But if he wolde be slayn of Symkyn With panade, or with knyf, or boidekyn. (Lines 3957–60) Summing up the concentric, increasingly intimate boundaries of his person, these are all, essentially, phallic blades; their vaguely eroticized aggressiveness prepares us for Symkyn’s appropriate punishment, later in the tale, and their

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expanding zones of lethal potential prepare us for the rapacious greed that defines this haughty miller, his grand dreams so narrowly contained by his modest yeoman’s estate.52 As the story begins, Symkyn’s plans are already afoot, for within the tiny house are his wife and daughter—for his purposes, magic vessels of aggrandizement. Symkyn’s wife, for instance, brings to the marriage her education by the nuns, and “many a pan of brass,” her dowry from her simoniacal father, the parson. That was a good start, but what is really going to expand Symkyn’s estate of yeomanry is the baby in crib. This was a late child (the daughter is already twenty years old), a determined attempt to foster a male heir. The narrator calls the child “a proper page,” as if Symkyn were already imagining him in livery, working his way toward knighthood in a great house. The daughter—it is hoped—will bring off a similar conversion: “holy churches blood” (and, of course, its “good”) will lure “some worthy blood of auncetrye” (line 3982), some lucky young man from a good, or at least better, family that nevertheless has need of additional capital. Passing from marriage to milling—from Symkyn’s imagination to his practices—the practical reality that lends credibility to all his schemes is his “greet sokene” to grind the wheat and malt for “al the land aboute” (lines 3987–88). These are grand terms, and they reflect the thinking of someone for whom “al the land aboute” is far too little. Similar language is used to describe “a greet college / Men call the Soler Halle at Cantebregge” (lines 3989–90), which is part of Symkyn’s monopoly, but also a worthy adversary. Before, he stole from them “but curteisly” (we would not suppose that Symkyn stole courteously from mere peasant farmers!). Now, however, the manciple is sick (bad teeth), and Symkyn’s bite on the collegiate economy is increased “outrageously.” Consequently, when Aleyn and John appear at Symkyn’s mill, wearing their swords, they join the ongoing contest between university and country wits. Suffice it to say that “their preconceptions are no match for the wily, ad hoc stratagems of Symkyn,” as Brown says.53 Despite themselves, they are disarmed, forced to strip off their swords, just as Symkyn had stripped the bridle from their horse. They spend the remainder of the day chasing the horse about the mile-broad fens, while back in the mill, Symkyn steals freely from their sack of meal. Symkyn’s centralization of resources, as opposed to the clerks’ marginalization, is a typical demonstration of the spatial logic of his guile. The next episode takes place within Symkyn’s small house, and is again a reversal, but this time the clerks remain inside, while his social, economic, and even intellectual pretensions are reduced, restricted, and “contained,” as Brown puts it. In effect, the boys run to Symkyn’s girls, just as Bayard escaped into those glorious, extensive, wild-mare-haunted fens. In a way, they do make a place “a myle brood”—an erotic green meadow, as it were—within “twenty foot of space.”54 But the final and climactic way that “nature” reverses

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Symkyn’s expansion is by the light of the moon, and here Symkyn is returned to his low estate, his mundane place in the world, by a configuration of cosmic relations that any fourteenth-century clerk would have recognized. After the wife finds a staff—she knows the house perfectly, as we suspected—she looks around and sees “a litel shymeryng of a light”: the moon is shining in through a hole in the roof, and by its light, she identifies and smites the “false clerk,” her husband. Symkyn is illuminated—or, more precisely, spotlighted— by the radiance of that heavenly body, and thus a good target for his earnest, helpful wife. This is not to suggest that the finger of God has pointed to Symkyn, or even that the strange concatenation of man’s will and stellar fate has restored him to his proper socioeconomic niche—although both things are true in their way. I merely note that Symkyn’s place in the house—indeed, his unique place in the cosmos—is established in this moonlit moment by his observed relationship to the overarching heavenly bodies. For as Aquinas said, “The true immobility [or “placement”—the property of being somewhere] that is required if a place is to be more than a sheer container [as it was for Aristotle]”—“is not to be found in the centrated earth but in a set of relations to the celestial spheres that surround earth itself. Hence the place of something subcelestial is determined by these relations, or more exactly, by the ‘order and situation’ (ordo et situ) they offer.”55 Symkyn, in fact, has not risen to great estate, nor has he entered the infinite void space of his dreams in any way. He is precisely in this place, situated relative to the moon, and thus to the other heavenly bodies, but also to the “order and situation” of his house, family, and occupation.56 Quite possibly, it was the nature of this place that caused him to dream, but now it is his emplacement here, and here exactly, that has inevitably returned him to himself, with what Herman Melville—quite appropriately, one would think—referred to as “the universal thump.”57

IV. Thus, the containment of Symkyn, the reduction of his vast pretensions. And yet the greater part of his guile has been the subtler art of creating a kind of internal space, hoping to make great his yeoman’s estate from within by drawing into it the limitless resources of the nobility, the church, and “al the land aboute.” Such a transformation cannot be achieved by extension. A yeoman’s estate cannot expand into a duchy, not in social reality. Rather, the small estate must somehow be made to contain the great one. But how can there be “a place / A myle brood [in] twenty foot of space,” or, for that matter, infinite leagues within a millet seed? What is needed is a change of substance, on the

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analogy of what happens to the bread and wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Symkyn’s most ambitious craft is that of changing the substance of others into his own, as thieves try to do, and here it is helpful to remember the thieves in Dante’s Inferno, damned to exchange substance with serpents, who become the thieves, only to lose their substance to other serpents, ad infinitum (canto 25). Of course, he is not really able transcend himself in such a way— substance is being, and being can only be altered by its creator—but the will is there, as the tale demonstrates in several ways. When Symkyn encounters the clerks, he is already accustomed to stealing from their college. This time they try to police his activities, but the process goes very much as usual, its focus being the sack of grain they bring with them. Chaucer keeps the sack before us, noting when Aleyn loads it on their horse and when John lays it down at the mill. John says they have come to have their corn ground, and that he will watch it pour into the hopper, while Aleyn promises to see how the meal falls down into the trough. It is only when “hir corn was faire and weel ygrounde. / And whan the mele is sakked and ybounde” (lines 4069–70) that John finds the horse missing. They run off, and Symkyn steals half a bushel of the flour, giving it to his wife to knead and bake into a loaf of bread, his bread. While they chase Bayard, who is chasing the wild mares of the fens58—while they are milling around, in other words—Symkyn is grinding up their substance and making (baking!) it into his own. The series of changes by which the grain is reduced to a heap of infinite parts, and then transformed, raised again to form a round, unified loaf, is a little mystery that suggests the greater art of Symkyn’s self-enrichment; and both of them are reminiscent, at least, of that profound mystery, the eucharistic transubstantiation.59 The bag of meal is a model for other conversions Symkyn is attempting. Keep in mind that Symkyn’s house, where he raises his family, is also a means of his advancement, a kind of surrogate mill. For if the mill itself (with its sexual overtones)60 enables the transformation of grain into his own substance, his wife is a far greater source of wealth. By combining his life with hers, Symkyn received a substantial dowry. More important, he stands to benefit from his children being, in effect, heirs of the church. And here is the transformative magic. The parson is a man of the church—in fact he is part of that great ecclesiastical body—and so he intends to pass on, through his loins, as Kolve has said,61 the substance of that greater body: For hooly chirches good moot been despended On hooly chirches blood, that is descended. Therfore he wolde his hooly blood honoure, Though that he hooly chirche sholde devoure. (Lines 3983–86)

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This brilliant and famous chiastic passage contrasts with maximum effect the sublime and the base, charity and greed, the many and the one. The repetition of “hooly” in each line keeps in mind the Christian ideal, while the transition from “hooly chirches blood” to “his hooly blood” in the middle lines demonstrates the corruption of that ideal, and the final line, the grim consequences (“hooly [wholly] . . . devoure”).62 The flow of blood (and “good”) from holy church, to the parson, to his heirs, illustrates how, through the mystery of mingled blood, the substance of the church passes into Symkyn’s own dominion. When the daughter finally marries, perhaps into some great family, and when the little boy hoists Symkyn’s wealth upon fresh shoulders, then will Symkyn himself be transformed into the father of a dynasty—noble blood indeed! There is, however, a more intimate way in which Symkyn tries to assimilate the substance of others, and this is by becoming a sort of clerk himself. We have already heard what Symkyn thinks of clerks. His contempt for their “art” and “sleighte” combines professional and class resentment with a kind of envy: for isn’t he as clever as any clerk? Chaucer often indicates such feelings through apparently random echoes in the dialogue, and so here. The clerks, with their book learning and broad north-country accents are certainly “ill millers”— Aleyn answerede, “John, and wiltow swa? Thanne wil I be bynethe, by my croun, And se how that the mele falles doun Into the trough; that sal be my disport.” (Lines 4040–43) —yet when they chase their horse into the fens, Symkyn begins to swear like any clerk (“by my croun”), and in fact is echoing Aleyn’s words. Moreover, nearly all of what we hear in this tale about clerks and the art of clerks is contributed by Symkyn, in a series of passages culminating in his invitation to make his little house “‘rowm with speche, as is youre gise’” (line 4126, my italics). With Symkyn’s envy and resentment in mind, let us recall what happens when the clerks’ counterattack is discovered. When Aleyn finally creeps back to bed, he finds the cradle, stops, moves on, gets in bed with John, as he thinks, and immediately tells him about the “noble game” with Malyne. “Noble”? As we might expect, Symkyn loves/hates the word, and wakes with a roar. “‘Ye, False harlot,’ quod the millere, ‘hast? / A, false traitour! False clerk!’ quod he” (lines 4268–69). Then they fight, wallowing on the floor of the dark bedroom, as the personal pronouns, become indeterminate—“he smoot hym [who?] with his [whose?] fist”—until Symkyn falls down, falling on his wife, who calls out “Help, Symkyn, for the false clerkes fighte” (line

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4291). This confusion of identities climaxes when the wife finds a staff, and seeing what she thinks is the “clerk’s” white nightcap, brains that clerk—who turns out to be Symkyn, the moon gleaming off his “piled skulle.” The wife’s confused reasoning seems crucial for our understanding of Symkyn’s hybrid identity at this point, and Susan Yager, quoting from Murray Wright Bundy, offers an analysis of exactly what the wife has perceived: If we use the terminology of faculty psychology, the wife’s actions in sensing and judging the white thing are three-fold. These are, first, simply perceiving the white thing; then identifying it in what Bundy calls “a simple case of predication,” or what faculty psychology theory explains as the function of the cognitive; and finally, reaching a specific judgment about the thing, or in Bundy’s terms, attaching “further attributes” to it, the function of the aestimativa. . . . The wife slips into error at that point when, as Bundy puts it, through the “special power of the mind, one may attach to this white object further attributes of motion and magnitude, or reference to time.”63

Seeing only “a whit thyng,” in other words, the wife attributes other appearances, or accidental qualities, to it in order to arrive at a judgment of what it is. “She wende the clerk had wered a volupeer /. . . . And wende han hit this Aleyn at the fulle” (lines 4303, 4305, my italics), Chaucer is careful to say, focusing our attention on her reasoned choice. But what does Chaucer want us to understand about this honest mistake? Yager thinks it calls into question “whether opinions can be believed . . . whether knowledge, as distinct from belief, is possible,”64 and, certainly, the faultiness of opinion is demonstrated here. But the relevance of the wife’s error to the tale is probably that Symkyn’s identity as miller has been blurred by a recurrent series of slight misidentifications beginning with the milling episode, and hers is the crowning one, as it were. We really cannot know why the wife thinks a clerk (both clerks?) wore a nightcap, although she has been through a lot this night, and perhaps that has had an effect on her. The point is that she attributes clerkly (nightcapped) attributes to the person in the light, and when she hits that person, and it is Symkyn, he is being brained for his clerkliness—that is, his substance, or being, is concealed by the accidental qualities of a clerk. In a perverse way, it is like the transubstantiation of the Eucharist: beneath the accidents of a clerk (as she perceives them) lies the substance of a miller.65 Thus, with the wife’s ironically accurate blow, this hubristic, overbearing “false clerk” has been identified, and thereby reduced to his own modest yeoman’s place. We have reviewed Symkyn’s efforts to extend his reach, to assimilate the substance of others to his own, and even to beat someone else at his or her own game, which means to adopt someone else’s identity, to become him or her, in some way, and yet we do not finally believe that Symkyn wants to be a clerk.

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He is simply a miller who wants to be more than what he is; he longs to transcend himself, to become something he knows he is not. That is no more than what the men in the Miller’s Tale want from being in the little house in Oxford, or from Alysoun herself. Finally, each one overreaches himself and falls from grace, which is to say that none of them really belongs there. Symkyn’s little house is also a desirable interior—in various social, sexual, and economic ways, a source of plenty—yet he belongs there only as a miller yeoman, not as a clerk or anything other than who, in fact, he is. The larger sense of this theme is that we are what we are: being cannot be transcended, for only God, who created us, can change the substance of our being. Once again, Aquinas says (on transubstantiation), in a passage any clerk would recognize, “Form cannot pass into form nor matter into matter by the power of a created agent. But the power of an infinite agent which bears on the whole being of a thing can bring about such a change. To the form of each thing and to the matter of each thing the nature being is common; and the author of being is able to change that which is being in the one into that which is being in the other, by taking away what kept this from being that” (Summa Theologiae 3a.75.5 ad 3 [73]). This passage states the absolute limits of being,66 and, by extension, identity and even vocation. Not only clerks, but millers, too, were aware of this cultural truism, whether they liked the idea or not. The Reeve’s Tale is concerned with breaking the ranks of social hierarchy,67 but more centrally with the inner emptiness or lack that creates the desire to transcend these ranks. The tale turns upon frustrated desire—that of the clerks, and also that of the women and of poor (gelded?) Bayard—but the central emptiness must be that of Symkyn himself, driven to expand into outer or inner space, because unable to accept the nature of his own small place.

CHAPTER

5

Changing Places

The portrait of Perkyn Revelour and his London ambiance reassert in miniature, and in an urban context, the merging of social and natural space that we found in the earlier tales. In the Cook’s Tale as we have it, of course, there is no action, no sequence of events to fill the narrative frame of Perkyn’s descriptio, his typical activities, and his move from a good place of business to a bad one. Teeming with urban life and the oddly compelling energy of Perkyn’s vices, the Cook’s opening promises a vigorous story line, but since that narrative potential is never realized, it remains a brief summing up of his many escapes from his master’s shop, culminating in his move to what is, in essence, a house of prostitution. This transition—itself an emblem of historical change1— moves Perkyn from one kind of commercialized urban space to another. Extracting him from the protected confines of his master’s guild-regulated shop, it projects him into the larger, looser, faster life of the London streets, with their free-market promises and threats of dissolution. Perkyn’s career choice appears in the narrative’s initial context a socially and professionally disadvantageous one, antithetical to bourgeois values and good business practices. Yet the expanded potential entailed in Perkyn’s various escapes implies that within his limited perspective, this change is a necessary, even salutary one, a movement into the rich opportunity of free-market space, with its edgy promise of immediate gratification and unmediated gain.2

I. Roger of Ware begins his prologue by recalling, with low delight, some key terms from the Reeve’s Tale. He cites Symkyn’s “argument of herbergage,” and the sensitive matter of “pryvetee,” both of which express the bourgeois preoccupation with making and maintaining one’s separate place in the social world. These terms have a bearing on the central themes of Fragment I, because they suggest how a town-dweller might restate Arcite’s profound questions about fate and free will: “What is this world? What asketh men to have?” The echo of these great questions in the Cook’s Prologue predicts their reappearance in his tale, where a predatory urban hunger for sensation provides less comforting an answer than even the parasitic, expansionist rural

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greed in the Reeve’s Tale. What sets the Cook laughing for joy—a compulsive, unsettling laughter not unlike his excessive drinking later in the tales—is the revenge on Symkyn, the “jape of malice in the derk” (line 4338) that leads to his being thrice beaten, and thus robbed and defamed. It is apparently such an amoral, sensationalist pursuit of satisfaction that Roger means to recount in his own tale (“God forbede that we stynte heere” [line 4339]), where it will unfold, not in a rural university town, but less comfortingly, in the familiar streets of London, “in oure citee.” The change of setting from country to city accompanies a substitution of shopkeeper for householder and apprentices for clerks. Missing in this secular urban context is the stabilizing framework of church hierarchy and the moral imperatives implicit in the clerks’ offices in the church, if not in their conduct. The bureaucratic structure of the church casts a shadow, at least, of overarching values, but the Cook’s prologue and tale offer merely the social structure defined by commerce. Man’s service to God and his duties toward other men (as in a host-guest relationship) give way here to the reciprocal duties of commercial exchange.3 The locus of this exchange is the master vitailler’s shop, its nexus the cash box. The flow of cash from hand to hand suggests the larger world of urban commercial transactions in much the same way that the mill and “grinding” suggest rural commerce in the Reeve’s Tale. But before we are told about the vitailler’s shop in the tale, we encounter Roger’s own shop in the prologue. This is a shop in the poor district of Southwerk, full of flies and stale or tainted food. The Reeve’s maundering introduction about aging is matched here by the equally suggestive vision of decaying meat pies served up by a cook with an open leg ulcer. The Reeve’s initial remarks prepared us for a tale of avarice and its companion, “lack,” where social needs—both sexual and economic, familial and regional—are denied by Symkyn’s theft and the boundless greed that drives it. The Cook’s Tale also promises to deal with theft. But here the Reeve’s transformative motifs of deprivation and role shift (stealing another’s substance means that a miller becomes a “false clerk,” and the clerks, “ill millers”) are replaced by motifs of the decay of social and commercial norms that pervades the thriving London marketplace, the heart of plenty. The theme of mutability and decay—of the bad apple that spreads its rot to “al the remenaunt” (line 4407)—is the final variation (or better, devolution) of the theme of plenitude in Fragment I. In the Knight’s Tale, the golden chain of love represented the fullness of creation bound by divine law. In the Miller’s Tale, Alysoun is a “caged,” domestic source of nature’s plenty. But in the Reeve’s Tale, the fruitfulness of both milling and marrying is exploited by Symkyn’s expansive greed. In the Cook’s Tale, the “plenty” inherent in the act of exchange is also subverted, not by greedy milling or the vengeful lovemaking that mirrors it, but by the moral inversion that is implied by a commer-

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cialized, and thus infinitely replicated, act of love. In a moral sense and perhaps in a commercial sense as well, the thief ’s wife’s work—“swyving for sustenaunce”—is a way of life that famishes what it feeds. The erotic fullness of “swyving” is instantaneously rendered void—devoured—by the emptiness of doing this for “sustenance.” Free-market space, from this perspective, is simultaneously empty space. As the end point of this reductive progression from cosmic creation to the volume of trade, and from the “firste moevere” to reactive sensuality, the Cook’s Tale might seem, like the Age of Iron in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to represent both a moral mutation and an irreversible blurring of social identity.

II. But appearances can be deceiving. For what little we have of the Cook’s Tale itself is dominated and brought to life by the vivid portrait of the London apprentice Perkyn Revelour. As in the Miller’s Tale, where Nicholas, Alysoun, and especially Absalom seem to embody the small-town setting, expressing it through metaphors related to their clothing and their characteristic activities, Perkyn allows us to visualize the busyness (if not the business) of London as he dances, leaps, and hops from the shop to the ridings in Cheapside, to the streets where he plays at dice, and sometimes even to Newgate prison. The three young people in the Miller’s Tale convey, in a variety of ways, the vitality of Oxford town life, refreshed by its nearness to the country fields and flowers. Perkyn’s description is correspondingly vital, and carries details from all three of those earlier portraits. He dances as nimbly as Absalom, he is blackhaired and neatly made like Alysoun (“a propre short felawe”), and, like Nicholas, he is associated with “mynstralcye,” with singing and with playing on “gyterne or ribible.” Furthermore, he is as “sweet” and as “ful of love and paramour” as any of those three, and his nature asserts the claims of youth and sexuality just as theirs did. But if Perkyn’s energy is not much different from that of Nicholas and Absalom, his expression of it has a different significance, because it runs directly counter to the social and commercial codes of conduct for this urban setting, standards represented by the constraints imposed in the shop of the master vitailler.4 In this sense, Perkyn is like a male version of Alysoun, a dapper, restless, birdlike youth whose nature simply can not be pent up “narwe in cage”—or, in Perkyn’s case, in his master’s shop. Like Alysoun’s housewifery, every aspect of Perkyn’s social and even professional conduct is indirectly an expression of sexuality. His dancing is such a recurrent, characteristic feature of his behavior that it seems a compulsion, like a fever in the blood that will not subside until he has issued forth to dance it all away: “Out of the shoppe

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thider wolde he lepe— / Til that he had al the sighte yseyn, / And daunced wel, he wolde nat come ageyn—” (lines 4378–80). The vaguely sexual overtones of Perkeyn’s dancing-hopping-leaping are reinforced by the unmistakable double entendre of casting a pair of dice “in place of pryvetee,” and by the phrase that links “dys, riot [and] paramour” (line 4392), making them sound like equivalent activities. Furthermore, playing on “gyterne or ribible” is probably associated with the kind of “mynstralcye” that Nicholas performed with Alysoun (“He kiste hire sweete and taketh his sawtrie, / And pleyeth faste, and maketh melodie” (lines 3305–6). The difference is that while John suffered jealousy from Alysoun’s skittishness, Perkyn’s master pays for his “dys, riot or paramour” in good hard cash. Sex with Alysoun is one sign of John’s economic status, but in the Cook’s Tale, sex becomes the exact equivalent of money or moneymaking, since the fullness of Perkyn’s social life depends upon his emptying the master’s cash box. The opposition between Perkyn and his master suggests a division between two contrary worlds of exchange. The orderly transactions within the shop increase the master’s wealth and provide for his apprentices. Conversely, the dicing and other transactions outside the shop constitute a limitless, orgiastic consumption of those resources. This obvious contrast between getting and spending, reminiscent of Winner and Waster, or the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, is nevertheless crucial to this fragment of a tale. Perkyn is a hopeless apprentice because his hunger for the world drives him out of the shop to where he must see everything and then act it out—spend it all—in his dancing. In this he is not formally different from Palamon and Arcite, who watch Emelye roaming in her castle garden from their cramped prison cell, and then, much later, fight for her in the larger “garden” space of the forest glade. There are additional analogies to the Miller’s and Reeve’s tales, where the desirable is viewed in a constrained locus (like John’s bedroom or Symkyn’s mill), and then pursued in an ampler space (like John’s rafters or the fens). Gazing is translated into action that dramatizes, amplifies, and usually exposes to ridicule the ambitions stirred by the vision of the desired. In each tale, this formulaic release, or escape of vision into action, has seemed a natural, necessary, perhaps fated event, because it is driven by men’s fundamental orientations or desires. In the Cook’s Tale, Perkyn’s evident need for escape leads naturally and inevitably to stealing from his master’s shop. By contrast, “revel and trouthe” (“trouthe” meaning loyalty to the shop) are always at war—“They been ful wrothe al day” (line 4398), at least for young men of low degree like Perkyn. The youthful need to escape is by now a familiar motif in Fragment I, but only in the Cook’s Tale is youthful excess presented as an entropic drain on a domestic economy. Even in the Reeve’s Tale there is something redeeming in the night-long “easement” of Aleyn and John, because it leads to the healthy

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deflation of Symkyn. But the Cook’s narrative is cut off too soon for any such balance to be worked out. We are left with Perkyn’s move to the house of a fellow thief (another lover of “dys,” and so forth), and the possibility that the petty conversion of the master’s cash box will somehow repeat itself in this wilder street-locus, where the stakes may very well be higher. Nonetheless, the opposition between the master’s and Perkyn’s kinds of conversion assumes an elegant, if pointedly vulgar, symmetry in the last line of this fragmentary tale. Here at last (as when Righteousness and Peace, the daughters of God, kiss each other in ultimate harmony [Ps. 85:10]), mercantile “trouthe” and urban revel are finally “convertible”—“equivalent”—because the thief ’s wife has a shop but “swyve[s] for hir sustenance” (line 4422). Here, in the alternative locus of the wife’s shop, love and commerce undergo a metamorphosis not unlike the role exchanges in the Reeve’s Tale. Here love really is commerce.5 Unlike the vitailler’s shop, this is no fortress of comestibles surrounded by the hungry riot of the city, but a feast of revel and paramour. Here too, as in each of the earlier tales, the men’s pursuit of love or profit finds its goal, but also its embodiment, in a woman. In other words, Emelye merges, in metaphor, with Arcite’s funeral pyre; Alysoun’s body and her house become analogous, mutually signifying tropes for “pryvetee”; Symkyn’s wife and daughter provide a surrogate milling, by which Symkyn’s pretensions are rendered null; and the thief ’s wife, like the master’s cash box, has herself become a surrogate for this family business. She and her shop are a source of plenty6 linked with the “outer” world of revelry, preying on it while being preyed upon. In effect, the wife’s house functions as a version of pastoral. It is a mercantile oasis, a sort of Eden where the controlled, profitable, but tedious labor of the London shops (i.e., supply) is in harmony with—coupled with—the demand of riot and paramour that reigns in the streets to which Perkyn was always escaping.7 But this is cold pastoral. Commerce and paramour may be in tune, but neither love nor business—business as done in the master’s shop—can ever prosper in such a place.

III. In fact, what the Cook mainly provides, in this fragment with only one developed portrait and no action, is a powerfully suggestive urban setting,8 a sequence of briefly stated urban scenes that, taken together, create our sense of the urban space into which Perkyn is repeatedly drawn. The life in the streets is of low degree like Perkyn himself; its flow is ceaseless and its fundamental vitality, irresistible. Perkyn is drawn daily from his shop to merge with the life of the city, and to the extent that we too are drawn, the Cook’s Tale is a slice of raw urban experience, a measured (and measuring) glance at a lower,

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growing, and perhaps, to Chaucer’s audience, threatening social world that counters the worldviews implied by the Knight’s, Miller’s and Reeve’s tales, views proper to the court, the urban bourgeoisie, and the prosperous, ambitious dwellers of the country towns, respectively. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the Cook’s Tale as a setting is its ambivalence, a central feature of the realism peculiar to the Canterbury Tales. Perkyn’s world is divided between two shops: the master’s domain of merchant’s “trouthe,” and the wife’s shop, where good business practices are subsumed by the practice of revelry. Each shop is the symbolic center of an extended social group—merchant workers and player-thieves,—and each projects its own kind of moralized commercial ambivalence.9 The wife’s shop is certainly a false Eden in a moral sense; whatever its attraction as a haven where a banished apprentice is welcome to set up his bed (with potential bedswappings analogous to those in the Miller’s and Reeve’s tales), this is, after all, a house of prostitution, and it suggests a devaluation of both love and commerce even beyond what we find in the Reeve’s Tale. Perkyn’s endless play finally strikes us as childish and regressive, and like the wife’s shop it accomplishes and produces nothing. By contrast, the master’s shop would remain the moral center and the commercial norm of the Cook’s Tale, were it not that Perkyn’s life in the streets appears characteristic and even normal to the London that we are allowed to see in this tale. Contrasted with its urban background of communal gambling, dancing, singing, riding, and (“in place of pryvetee”) fornicating, the master’s shop (no game and play) seems proper enough but rather lifeless. For what is stirring about this base street life that charms Perkyn is not its social value, exactly, but its expansive public vitality. Not since the Knight’s Tale have noisy, happy crowds been a part of the narrative setting, and even there, the people were spectators only, a marginalized real-world frame for the higher, aristocratic “reality” of chivalry. But the enveloping, all-inclusive street life of the Cook’s Tale is “carnivalized,” to use Bakhtin’s term, and is itself, to a considerable degree, the substance of the Cook’s narrative. The call of the streets with their free-market gambling, sex, and thievery brings Perkyn away from his well-regulated shop, promising a narrative development that will reflect and celebrate, while also (no doubt) punishing, his move from the master’s orderly trade to the wife’s commercialized riot and paramour. Given what we have of it, the Cook’s Tale might very well have become a tale of exuberant low degree: its vitality, the continuing spectacle of life in the streets; its plenitude, the fullness, density, and immediacy of experience in this urban scene; and its terror, the formlessness of that experience, rendered best by dancing that ends only in satiety, or perhaps in death. The urban space surrounding the vitailler’s shop permits an analogy between the Cook’s Tale and the other tales in Fragment I, because it is really

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a version of nature. In both communal and individual ways, the persistent presence of London street life in this tale suffuses, subverts, and yet ultimately sustains the closely held order of social custom, because it forces compromises between will and necessity, between mercantile prudence and consumer appetites. Human nature in this larger sense has a grand ambivalence, which is in turn a sign of its completeness: it embraces all contraries, both sweet and bitter. In the other tales of Fragment I, the sweetness of nature is uneasily contained by social structures, framed by garden walls, or the walls of a house, and it is embodied by men and women who are, at least in a part of themselves— in their sensations and desires—nature’s minions. In the Cook’s Tale, similarly, Perkyn is as full of love and paramour “As is the hyve ful of hony sweete” (line 4373), and the wife’s shop promises to be yet another impossible promise of concord between nature and society, another illusory garden of earthly delight. By contrast, the penalty of (human) nature in these early tales is the chill of exile, when the paradise garden is no longer habitable. Surely, the wife’s shop could no more be a permanent haven for Perkyn or any other man than Emelye’s spring garden, Alysoun’s bed, or Symkyn’s darkened house. No matter. The revel of the streets, whose jangled “melodye” galvanizes young men like Perkyn, will continue to charm them as their lives are danced away. The Cook’s Tale is remarkable for the conciseness with which it states these paradoxes of human nature. Perkyn’s street charisma, which apparently makes it easy for him to gather “a meynee of his sort / To hoppe and synge and maken swich disport” (lines 4381–82), when seen from the master’s point of view, is merely a kind of social contagion, a valid ground for dismissing this “ripe” young man, who is “ny out of his prentishood” (line 4400), yet thoroughly corrupt, and likely to corrupt others. The wife’s shop is another instance of this social paradox of the ripe-rotten. Her place of business is certainly (like the homes kept in Westminster and probably Southwerk by wives whose housework was prostitution)10 a fruitful source of income, but at the same time, a rotten apple in the barrel that is London.

IV. Ending Fragment I with the Cook’s Tale is perhaps not so much a way of hinting at the increasing rottenness of late fourteenth-century English urban culture, as chivalry glides into obsolescence and both politics and commerce become centralized in London, but rather a way of restating a familiar dialectic. The conflict between social order and natural change—a recurrent theme in the tales of Fragment I—here becomes a tension between regulated and unregulated exchange in a mercantile setting. In the Cook’s simple terms, the orderly, guild-regulated exchange in Perkyn’s master’s shop is related to the

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compulsive and essentially ungovernable exchange of gambling and prostitution as ripeness is to rottenness. But are we justified in raising such a lofty structure of ideas upon such a slight, and admittedly commonplace, pair of metaphors? Whatever we might think of Perkyn’s relative ripeness, it is a fact that this ungovernable apprentice works in a vitailler’s shop. Here is a term that does recall a particular economic controversy, requiring a brief excursus into the politics of London trade during the decade before and the few years after the time in the late 1380s when Chaucer began writing the Canterbury Tales. London, like any large medieval town, was dependent upon a ready supply of staple foods, and upon the regulation of food prices. The daily importation of fish, for example, provided a necessary source of cheap protein for the poorer classes, and made the regulation of the price of fish a major source of contention between the fishmongers and the city government.11 The powerful fishmonger’s guild was the largest of what had become known as the vitailling guilds. Vitaillers, who were essentially importers, strove to monopolize the trade in fish, wine, poultry, meat, bread, fruit, and vegetables, and thereby to drive up prices. The nonvitailling guilds of London, by contrast, had no stake in food monopolies. Normally, they attempted to cut their overheads, as well as their own living expenses, by lobbying to expand the food market so that competition would drive prices down. In the parliament of 1382, for example, when the vitaillers were divided by internal “business jealosies” against the fishmongers,12 the nonvitaillers’ influence prevailed. The license to sell fish was thereupon extended to London citizens not belonging to the fishmongers guild, as well as to “foreigners” (Englishmen who lived outside London, and did not have the “freedom of the city,” which they ordinarily needed to trade there), and even to “aliens” (foreign nationals such as the Flemings). As for the “free fishmongers of London,” they “were forbidden altogether to buy fresh fish for re-sale, excepting only eels, pikes and luces.”13 Perkyn, then, as an apprentice in a vitailling guild, is dwelling in the midst of an ongoing struggle in which the vitaillers, led in the 1370s and early 1380s by the wealthy and apparently ruthless Nicholas Brembre, sought to control their own prices and to influence the politics of London trade. Perkyn’s master, we would suppose, is selling his unspecified foodstuffs as dearly as he is allowed to do by his guild and by the city government, and to that extent, at least, “regulated exchange” is an issue in this tale. It remains to find a connection with “unregulated exchange,” and here we may begin by observing that the economic status of Perkyn’s master is established by the very fact that he keeps a shop. As a retailer, he is neither a member of the poor, nor a great merchant who deals wholesale, making enormous profits on perhaps a wide variety of goods, but a member of the “middle” merchant class, the “mediocres,” which was a large group that included retailers, journeymen, and apprentices—all those not distinguished by their

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wealth or poverty.14 Perkyn is also, by definition, a member of this middle group, having somehow paid his fee of entrance into apprenticeship. But as the tale commences, he has requested and been granted release from his apprentice’s contract, and so has lost his avenue of entry into the guild. Perhaps it was inevitable that these things would happen to Perkyn. He is, after all, an apprentice “of low degree.” Yet for the purposes of the tale, that is probably the most important thing about him. For when Perkyn leaves his shop, he joins, or rejoins, a very different kind of trade brotherhood. No doubt it is appropriate that he has come to live among these thieves and prostitutes, but in so doing, he has pretty certainly moved downward into the ranks of London’s poorest class. The significance of this move lies in the contrast it creates between the vitailler’s shop, where prices are maintained as much as possible, and the house of the thief and his wife, where prices are held down, one would think, by the impossibility of a monopoly in either of their main trades. As it happens, there was in London a similar, politically significant contrast between the prosperous members of the vitailling and nonvitailling guilds, on the one hand, and the numerous lesser members of both groups, on the other. Vitaillers and nonvitaillers not infrequently fought each other in the streets, it is true, but as Ruth Bird has made clear,15 the most bitter controversy derived from the opposed interests of the wealthy merchants and the London poor. Nicholas Brembre, the wealthy grocer, became Lord Mayor of London in 1377 partly because he had influence with the heads of the powerful vitailling guilds, but also because he had friends in the city’s privileged class and because he was aided by the king. Brembre’s chief opponent was John Northampton, a member of a nonvitailling guild (the drapers), but more importantly, a self-proclaimed champion of the poor. Upon his election to the mayoralty in 1382, Northhampton’s attempts to reform London politics included the election of the city’s Common Council, not geographically by wards, but by guilds, which would have given by far the greater influence to the more numerous and less-wealthy nonvitaillers. Other reforms initiated by Northampton were to force bakers to make farthing loaves available for purchase by the poor, and, as mentioned above, to extend the license to sell fish, while restraining the fishmongers from buying up fish and cornering the market. While his ultimate goal was probably to break the political power of the wealthy merchant families of London, Northampton was at the same time something of a demogogue. As Bird says, “All the evidence points to the conclusion that Northampton’s secretary, Usk, was speaking the truth when he accused his master of attacking the wealthy and powerful merchants of London by encouraging the jealousies they roused among their poorer fellow-citizens—his object being to maintain himself in power.”16 Much of Northampton’s political leverage derived not merely from

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the London masses, but also from the city government’s uneasiness about those masses, who hated fishmongers, high prices, and the great merchants whose wealth and political influence were created by journeymen’s labor.

V. As Perkyn moves from the privately owned, guild-regulated, protectionist confines of the vitailler’s shop to the thief ’s free-market household, we may indeed be meant to hear an echo of the long-enduring London controversies over food prices, high or low, fixed or free-market. And we would have to be most insensitive not to feel, in Perkyn’s evident rebellion against middle-class constraints, the frightening resentment and ingrained bitterness of the poor. Of course, it could be argued that John Northampton’s low-priced-food regulations in 1382–84 were fully as restrictive for the fishmongers as the fishmongers’ or vintners’ monopolies had been for the buying power of the London poor. The point is that this tale is told by a cook—hardly an impeccable shopkeeper, yet still a vitailler, in effect—and his narrative voice conditions us to understand Perkyn’s downward progress from a guildsman’s point of view, to see it as a kind of dissolution, a personal, social, and economic failure of structure and control.17 Chaucer’s audience would not have sympathized much with this lower milieu, or with its social and economic implications.18 At the same time, it is true that Nicholas Brembre’s strongest supporter after 1382 was King Richard II, and it was that alliance, strengthened by Brembre’s loans to the crown, that led to his death on the scaffold in 1388.19 By the 1380s, Richard was an unpopular and, for many, a hated king. Yet he was Geoffrey Chaucer’s king, and it may have been that this little story of a vitailler and some thieves seemed a strong enough reminder of Brembre’s death and the king’s failed attempt to prevent it that it seemed wiser not to continue, not to give the tale an audience. We will probably never know. What we can be certain of is that in the years after Brembre’s death, “the old rivalry between [Northampton] and Brembre still dominated the imagination of their fellowcitizens and supplied their parties with catchwords, so that it was found necessary as late as 1394 to forbid the [public] mention of their names.”20 Returning to the microcosm of the Cook’s Tale, we find these great issues of price regulation and social class restated in the simpler but perhaps more suggestive terms of fabliau economics. While the master drives Perkyn out of the shop as someone linked to thievery and the hemorrhaging of capital, the wife welcomes him into the shop (along with many others), presumably because the more who plunder what she has, the more she profits. This neat equation recurs later, in a fully developed form, at the conclusion of the Shipman’s Tale, where the merchant’s wife transforms her bedroom into a count-

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inghouse, as it were, by telling her husband to “score it [her debt to him] upon my taille” (VII, line 416). This is domesticated commerce, where market forces are internalized, merging with the intimate economy of private life. In the Cook’s Tale, such an achieved resolution is still a mere potential, and we retain a sense of two kinds of commercialized urban space: the enclosed, regulated shops run by members of the London guilds, and the unregulated, anarchic space outside the walls of orderly society and commerce, an arena of urban naturalism as yet unmediated by even the compromised tradesmanship of the thief ’s shopkeeper wife. It is the sensible impact of these urban streets, the covert gleam of their myriad vices, promising quick money, pleasure, and social mobility,21 that sustains the truncated, unresolved narrative, bringing it to life by letting us hear the prudent mercantile disapproval in the Cook’s voice, at the same time that we are made to feel what is for Perkyn the exhilarating promise of a lower but larger world. Here as in previous tales, we witness a move outward, from culture to nature. For like nature itself, Perkyn’s London is an invigorating, mutable world that harbors both vitality and decay. Also like nature, it is a world that invades the orderly shops where the violence of market forces is somehow tempered. Most important, it is necessarily as much a part of the interior world of every character in this setting as Perkyn’s dancing is a part of him, thrusting him out of the quiet shop and into the streets to make his fortune, but more importantly, to hazard a new life of his own, with its peculiarly urban joys and hard compromises.

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CHAPTER

6

The Riches of Exilic Space

The Man of Law presents himself as a man of taste, a well-read man whose catalogue of women “of olde tyme” martyred for love seems an exhaustive list. What kind of story will this wordy, pretentious man tell?1 Since he recounts Chaucer’s list of martyrs for love, it is likely that his own tale will be in this vein. He also says Chaucer would never write “unkynde” abominations like the tale of King Antiochus and his daughter, so (knowing Chaucer) we suspect that the theme of incest will arise.2 His formal prologue, an encomium on the wisdom of merchants who lay up riches against hateful poverty, seems to predict a tale about the virtues of providence. In fact, the tale reverses each of these themes. It is indeed a love story, but it is divine love that changes the woe of Custance and her family to a brief earthly joy that looks toward eternal joy in heaven. The incest theme is announced by Custance’s two possessive mothers-in-law, but transformed when she loses her husband and dwells “in vertu” with her father, in anticipation of joining her heavenly father. The Man of Law’s celebration of merchants, however, prepares the way for the tale’s central reversal, the conversion of woe to joy through a sort of divine mercantilism. Merchants are “wise folk” who know “al th’estaat of regnes” and convert that knowledge into riches; the wisdom of Custance is to accept the world-wanderings God sends her, and by this recurrent and often painful self-investment, to convert the empty space of exile into the fullness of joy.3 Custance is a mediator like Christ and his mother, but her good works as well as her own gradual transformation of self from pathetic princess to maternal exemplar are contextualized and given a mundane concreteness through a master trope of commercial exchange: as God’s merchant, she represents men’s humble power to transform their private world, and even their public one, through an investment of self, just as the Man of Law’s merchants, in their lesser way, exchange goods and tales, swelling commerce between kingdoms and enabling such politic conversions as the marriage of Custance to the Sowdan of Surrye.4 But it is the larger, providential sense of Custance’s chapmanhood that has the greater impact. The immense reach of the divine will, which is the true context for the apparent passiveness of Custance, derives its affect from the vast spaces that open out between Rome, the Christian center, and the barbarian waste that stretches east to Syria and west beyond Gibraltar, toward

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Northumbria. In this empty, outer world, Custance meets force and fraud, and the moral tyrants—maternal figures, in this female-oriented narrative—who embody those vices. She engenders Christian faith and Christian governance in this barren world neither as a Roman princess nor as a Northumbrian queen, but by embracing the loss of these identities. Progressively stripped of every worldly possession, she accepts the world’s emptiness as God’s will and is fulfilled by divine strength and bounty. In a human, experiential sense, faint yet preceptible in her role, Custance loses home, family, name, wealth, and freedom of choice, all the social and emotional structures that identify the self. But her intent, like Emelye’s, remains constant, intangible yet more real than an earthly treasure; in poverty and isolation this true intent is revealed as an irreducible core self, manifested and emplaced by the various features of Custance’s motherhood, and by her identity with the great example of Christ’s mother. The Man of Law’s Tale is thus an allegory of will,5 a metamorphic fable of identity that provides—to modern ears, at least—a sentimental, often melodramatic early-Christian answer to the Boethian stoicism of the Knight’s Tale,6 and returns an ironic cross-light on the increasingly mercantile selfassertion that characterizes the later tales in Fragment I.7 But instead of condemning such a commercialized morality, this tale demonstrates that the mercantile formula of exchange, empty of spiritual or even social values, can, through the investment of self, become an expression of God’s “purveiaunce.”8 I. The Man of Law’s Tale has an elemental rhythm of exile and return, a pattern of separation and union.9 In the first two sections, both of Custance’s marriages begin joyfully but end in the woe of exile and bereavement. This movement from joy to woe is reversed in the third section, where Custance defeats a potential rapist and then drifts back into the Mediterranean to be reunited with her uncle, her husband Alla, and her father. In the brief aftermath, Alla dies, yet this woeful fortune brings the plot full circle, reuniting Custance with father and friends in a communal joy that prefigures heaven. The first half of Custance’s story moves from joy to woe, then, and the second, from woe to joy. As in the Knight’s Tale, such formal symmetries imply an iconic worldview (here moral, rather than philosophical) that is projected by the “firste moevyng” described in part 1: O firste moevyng! Crueel firmament, With thy diurnal sweigh that crowdest ay And hurlest al from est til occident That naturelly wolde helde another way (Lines 295–98)

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This “moving” refers not to creation, but to the outermost celestial sphere, the “primum mobile” that draws all the other spheres along with it as it spins from east to west. The other eight spheres are naturally inclined to spin from west to east, but they are spun backward (east to west) by the force of this highest, or fated, sphere.10 The push of fate is terribly strong, then, accounting for the configurations of the planets and the vagaries of earthly fortune. Yet the greater pull of God’s grace invites the turning of men’s wills toward the East, toward enlightenment, and away from the westward (deathward) rush of the heavens and all that blindly follows them.11 Custance, too, drifting on the tide, is borne away from Syria, into the western sea beyond Gibraltar. The passion of pagan kings and the aggression of their mothers are thus fated forces, currents of fate that sweep Custance ever farther from home until God’s will rewards the clear sight of her faith, guiding her exilic boat eastward, toward safe harbor. The Man of Law begins this allegorical tale by describing a company of Syrian merchants who have taken lodging in Rome. Their journey to Rome and back—a mirror (i.e., reversed) image of Custance’s exile and return to Rome—works like Theseus’s early adventures in the Knight’s Tale: his campaigns introduce Emelye to her long confinement in civilized Athens, while the merchants’ visit to Rome introduces Custance to years of barbarian exile. But like Palamon and Arcite, Emelye and Custance must endure prison or exile because these conditions sum up the constraints that life places upon the human will. Emelye, longing for a Scythian maiden’s freedom, finds a cloistered freedom of will by exercising the only choice available to her. Custance grieves for the protection of home, but in accepting her barbarous husbands, she makes the hostile world her kingdom by providing it with a future Christian emperor. The merchants supply the controlling metaphor for Custance’s commerce with the world because they imply a worldly standard of success. They are “chapmen riche” because they are dependable: “sadde and trewe” (line 135). Custance was born rich, yet her real wealth is not her possessions and privilege. As a merchant of faith, she too will be unfailingly “sadde and trewe”; her goods are her purity of intent and her virtuous acts, which are forever as “thrifty and newe” as the merchants’ satins and spices. But here at the beginning of the tale, Custance’s emblematic virtues represent the human ideal in both its outer perfection (beauty, youth) and inner perfection (virtue, humility, courtesy, holiness, charity). These seven virtues remind one of Gawain’s pentangle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Such ideal qualities are appropriate to moral allegory, but they are not adequate to express the force of will behind Gawain’s or Custance’s hard choices. Just as Gawain’s fear, anger, and shame temper his resolve to accept a mortal blow, so this Christian maiden must humble herself, marrying a barbarian king to conceive her son, Mauricius. Yet he will turn out to be the mirror of her virtue, the best of all her Christian good works.

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But at the beginning, virtuous Custance is herself the goods of trade. It is her promising “figure” (line 187)—the image conveyed by her reported virtues—that causes the Sowdan of Surrye to fall in love, initiating the politically expedient exchange of a Roman bride for Islamic converts. The Sowdan himself becomes a piece of goods in this exchange, having blindly surrendered his will to love, and thus to fate. But trading Custance and “certein gold” for a conversion of souls is equally blind, because it assumes that the necessarily shortsighted goals of politics and religion accord with the infinite and unforseeable providence of God. The sad irony of the Roman Emperor’s “purveiaunce” for his daughter is sustained throughout the remainder of part 1, helping us to identify with Custance’s plight and increasing its pathos. The human helplessness of these great proceedings is framed by terms of cause and effect, which remind us of the vast difference in perspective that separates mortal purposes (“cause” [line 252], “ende” [line 255]) from final causes and actual results (“ende” [line 266]). The immense distances measured in this tale acknowledge the separations between kings, emperors, and other worldly authorities; their formal, almost fussy meetings and protocols testify to a determined will to unite the world’s empty spaces and to dominate them. But for Custance, an apparently helpless, even faceless, sacrifice to a marriage of state, there is no question of purpose. Her pale passivity reflects a purity or transparency of intention, but it also suggests youth and tenderness—qualities that humanize her, increasing the pathos of her isolation. Her departure unfolds in nine stanzas that convey this pathetic inevitability: her three-stanza complaint (lines 267–87); the narrator’s three-stanza apostrophe (lines 295–315); and three narrative stanzas that introduce, divide, and follow the complaint and apostrophe. In Custance’s complaint, “straunge nacioun” (line 268) darkens into “Barbre nacioun” (line 281); the kindness of friends who kept her “tenderly” (line 269) gives way to the chill of her demise (“nofors thogh I spille” [line 285]); and subjection to a husband (line 270) descends into “thraldom and penance” (line 286). From her victim’s point of view, the opposed threats of exile and prison bracket the refuge of family in the middle stanza, where “fader” (line 274) and “my moder, my soverayn plesance” (line 276) surround, as if protecting “Thy yonge doghter, fostered up so softe” (line 275). The narrator’s three stanzas of apostrophe describe the marriage at the level of stellar influence, the higher cause of her misfortune. In the first stanza, the “cruel” primum mobile spins the lower heavens westward, counter to their normal course, enhancing the influence of Mars, with a malign effect on the Cupid-inspired marriage. In the third stanza, by contrast, the emperor and his astrologers are unable or unwilling to choose a more favorable date. Mediating between these stanzas of cosmic moving and human blindness is a sad allegory of marriage, in which macrocosmic and microcosmic misfortune are united:

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Infortunate ascendant tortuous, Of which the lord is helpless falle, allas, Out of his angle into the derkeste hous! O Mars, O atazir, as in this cas! O fieble moone, unhappy been thy paas! Thou knyttest thee ther thou art nat receyved; Ther thou were weel, from thennes artow weyved. (Lines 302–8) Mars, Custance’s birth sign (“atazir”), has fallen from a favorable position in the first house above the horizon (the “ascendent” house) to the least favorable one in the twelfth (the “derkeste” house because below the celestial horizon). Worse, this “cruel” Mars is in conjunction with the “feeble” moon (an icon for the “goddess of maidens” in the Knight’s Tale), in a cosmic prefiguration of misfortune in marriage. The complaint and apostrophe work as paired passages. In the complaint, descriptions of exile (line 268) and “thraldom” (line 286) bracket lines about Custance’s initial safety at home. This stanza shows how Custance sees the marriage. In the narrator’s apostrophe, impelling stars and passive men enclose lines about the fall of parental influence and the fateful surrender of maidenly freedom in a bad marriage: that is the narrator’s “cosmic” and sentimental amplification of Custance’s lament, in which social and sentimental elements mingle abundantly. The three narrative stanzas that introduce, separate, and follow the complaint and apostrophe tell the story of Custance’s reluctance to marry, the sadness of her household (weeping, like fallen Trojans), and her solemn woe at taking ship—in other words, these stanzas describe the family bond that resists separation. But the paired complaint and apostrophe—both of them envelope passages that encapsulate the bride’s wishes, as if to nullify them—imply the domestic and cosmic necessities that dominate that narrative of reluctance. Like the “firste moevyng” of the primum mobile, these grand necessities push against Custance’s natural resistance to her foreign marriage, making it seem inevitable (fated at the level of higher causes) that this young daughter, “fostered up so softe,” must descend to “mannes governance” in a foreign marriage that must seem to her a kind of death-in-life—a “derkeste hous” indeed. In their melodramatic terms, these opposing narratives convey the felt experience of Custance’s fall from the family nest. While far-off Syria and Northumbria imply her social and cultural exile, these images of descent describe her loss of self upon separation from the world of her youth, and they represent the inner or subjective dimension that critics have so often found lacking in her role. Custance’s progress from sad princess to fearless mother appears most clearly in the contrast between this imagery of loss and later images of union with divine strength, which

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demonstrate the endurance of her will and suggest her recovery—or better, reconstitution—of self. The ironic solution to Custance’s fears is the mother of the Sowdan, “welle of vices” (line 323). Her objections to the marriage, voiced in paired passages that are similar in structure to Custance’s complaint and the narrator’s apostrophe, reveal a possessive love that makes change equivalent with death. She plans to murder her son and all the other new converts at the marriage banquet. Thus, the baptism becomes a bloodbath, and the communal wedding feast, a sacrifice. For the Sowdanesse is herself inverted: her acts derive not from “femynynytee,” but from the serpent within her, her kinship with Satan. As an antimother, she defines by contrast the motherhood Custance longs for, and will eventually represent in part 2. II. Following the murder of her son, the Sowdanesse puts Custance to sea in a rudderless boat. This marks the beginning of the “steerless” voyages in which she expresses only the enduring resolve to let God be her guide. Thus, she displays a perfectly transparent will unclouded by self-interest, and an absolute investment of self. Custance lacks a profit motive, and has no resources for making her way in the world (none, at least, from a merchant’s point of view), yet because she puts her faith in a heavenly reward, and is not poor in spirit, her bounty is infinite—she is “ful of benignytee” (line 446). This unlikely strength appears in her prayer to the cross as she continues to drift: “O cleere, O welful auter, hooly croys, Reed of the lambes blood ful to pitee, That wessh the world fro the old iniquitee, Me fro the feend and fro his clawes kepe, That day that I shal drenchen in the deepe.” (Lines 451–55) The Sowdanesse vowed to drench Custance’s baptismal purity in blood, but of course it was Christ’s blood, shed in self-sacrifice, that cleansed the world. “Flemere of feendes out of hym and here On which thy lymes feithfully extenden, Me kepe and yif me myght my lyf t’amenden.” (Lines 460–62) Custance accepts her hardships as Christ accepted his; the limbs of the cross will extend over her (as if protecting her), because in the investment—indeed,

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the sacrifice—of her own will, she becomes coextensive with Christ’s great example, embodying its power. Committed through prayer, Custance drifts for “[y]eres and dayes” (line 463), finally passing through the Strait of Gibraltar—a symbolic death, but perhaps at the same time a kind of birth experience.12 For amid the indeterminate space and time of her solitary driftings, Custance dwells apart, in a space where worldly things are literally absent. Kolve pictures her as “universally spiritual . . . drifting outside the stream of ordinary life.”13 Raybin points out that “Custance’s drifting encompasses the larger part of her life’s growth from childhood to mature motherhood.” In effect, she enters an existence that is constrained but at the same time infinitely extended, spiritually liberated by the sea, “which in the vastness of its breadth and depth is the very symbol of her own holy timelessness.”14 For Custance, the sea becomes what the desert was for the prophets, a featureless, timeless no-place whose horizon is nowhere, its center everywhere. In such a placeless place—call it exilic space— surrounded and sustained by nothing, one either dwindles into nothing, the sound of self swallowed by emptiness, or forms a stronger awareness of oneself as participating in a higher existence. Custance, helpless in these wastes of time and space, nevertheless retains her freedom of intent, and thus her identity. In the Knight’s Tale, unenlightened Palamon and Arcite find themselves in prison or exile. Here the infinite possibilities of mortal bondage, implied by the paired stories of cave-prison (Daniel) and exile at sea ( Jonah), are transformed by Christ: the stanzas on cave and sea are divided by a stanza describing divine “purveiaunce,” which, in effect, grants freedom to man. Despite the world’s buffeting (here, storms) or its hunger (as in caves or deserts), God provides “his foyson,” a bounty or fullness that denies the emptiness of prison, exile, or the loss of self. Having crossed “oure” (English) ocean, Custance is stranded in Northumbria, and here especially (close to home) we are meant to notice her isolation. She begs for mercy in “hir [not our] langage,” and this “Latyn corrupt” (line 519), which reminds us of the enfeebled late Roman Empire, distances her as well. In worldly terms, Custance is now entirely without substance, identified not by her royal birth, language, or name, but only by will and act: She was so diligent, withouten slouthe, To serve and plesen everich in that place, That alle hir loven that looken in her face. (Lines 530–32) Revealed initially as a mirror of divine will, Custance is now a mirror of goodwill. People see their own goodness reflected in her and are converted by that

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selfless vision into better versions of themselves. This is a triangular relationship, an Augustinian trinity: their goodness is also God’s, and so they are reacquainted, through Custance, with God’s overarching love. Yet Custance’s holy works—her “goods”—can only bind men together if she evokes an emotional response. That is one reason why the overblown apostrophes voiced (one feels) by the Man of Law persona are useful for this tale. Custance’s tearful prayers, for example, create an empathy that enables Hermengyld to accept God’s grace; later, the warmth of her friendship enables Hermengyld to heal the blind man, leading in turn to the conversion of her husband the constable. This chain of good works culminates in Custance’s conversion of and marriage to King Alla. Earlier, word of her beauty and goodness captured the Sowdan’s heart; this time, the pathos of her own efforts calls forth Alla’s “pitee.” Like Emelye, Custance has become an active agency for change through the pathos of self-sacrifice. And while Emelye enabled both love and natural change (death), Custance reflects God’s love as well as divine providence. In each case, the woman’s ability to call forth an emotional response, and thus a willed act, is gradually revealed as essential to the concatenation of men and fate. This is precisely where the sympathetic magic of commercial exchange is crucial to understanding the affective miracle of selfsacrifice. Custance yields to powers greater than herself (“market” demand), and in a profoundly affective self-investment, or exchange, transcends her subordinate role (achieves a “yield” for one and all). But Custance’s good works are not unopposed, and appropriately, in this tale of a woman’s freedom of will and recovery of selfhood, her definitive enemies are evil mothers-in-law. The Sowdanesse and Alla’s mother, Donegild, are like Creon and the Minotaur in the Knight’s Tale, because they embody the apparent power of moral tyranny.15 Creon left his dead enemies unburied, recreating the land of the living as a moral underworld; the Sowdanesse transforms a wedding feast into a massacre. The Minotaur suggests human reason made monstrous by animal passions; Donegild, the false mother, misrepresents Custance as a “strange” creature because she herself is strange, a moral deformity whose “mannysh . . . / . . . feendlych spirit” (lines 782–83) must already (like the worst of Dante’s damned) be in hell, while her body still walks the earth (line 784). But Custance behaves increasingly like a mortal woman whose spirit is already dwelling in heaven—like the Virgin Mary, as we discover in part 3. These dark and bright mother figures create a dialectic of opposed loves and faiths, contextualizing and analyzing Custance’s maternal intent in somewhat the same way that Emelye’s role was framed and illuminated by the powers of love (Venus) and war (Mars), and by natural change (Diana) and chaotic misfortune (Saturn). In childbearing, Custance defines the maternal selfinvestment, the divinely inspired maternal “chapmanhood” that lies between

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the Virgin Mary, a God-chosen mother, and Donegild, the fallen monstermother. Donegild is associated with maternal possessiveness, which is akin to cupidity, a turning away from heaven’s light. Her icons—the corruption of language, drunkenness, counterfeit letters, lies, and monstrous births—are motifs of the loss of identity. The Virgin, on the other hand, is associated with motifs of union: God’s will (“the sonde of Christ” [line 760]), clear sight (lines 830, etc.), stars (to steer by [lines 831–32]), safe haven (line 852), and of course motherhood (lines 844, etc.). Donegild and Custance are both agents of transformation. Donegild intercepts Custance’s letter carrier and substitutes her own counterfeit “sonde,” initiating a chain of divisions and other motifs of missed communication. The messenger salutes Donegild “fair in his langage” (line 730), which of course is not the language of Custance. He drinks ale and wine “sadly” (steadily) that night (here is a “merchant” who is “sadde” but false). Donegild’s forged letter says to put Custance aboard ship and “croude hire from the lond” (line 801), aligning her own corrupted will with the sweep and drag of the “[c]rueel firmament” (line 295) that crowdest ay And hurlest al from est til occident That naturelly wolde holde another way (Lines 296–98) Donegild’s xenophobic refusal to invest in new brides, ideas, and babies implies the exilic undertow of worldly events, and more profoundly, the stellar fate that flows counter to God’s will as it is expressed through man. But Custance’s deep acceptance of “Goddes sonde” overcomes the divisions created by Donegild. Back at sea—a second symbolic death—her “deedly pale face” (line 822) is again an empty mirror filled with the purpose of God. But here, an investment of self brings God’s bounty to her child. Like the Virgin, she mediates, covering the child’s eyes but casting her own eyes “into heaven” (line 840). Quiet in the face of death, Custance contrasts with Eve, through whose “eggement” (egging, instigation, pushiness) mankind was lost, but also with the willful “male” busyness of Donegild, and the mindless “crowding” of the stars. Yet Custance’s sublime maternity at sea also reflects her mundane selfinvestment in marriage. Her profound prayer to the Virgin is not a contradiction but the fulfillment of the narrator’s bathetic lines about wives as “hooly thynges” who must endure the necessities of marriage: They goon to bedde, as it was skile and right; For thogh that wyves be ful hooly thynges,

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The whims of husbands are a sort of natural necessity—“it may no bet betide”—in this domestic kingdom.16 Yet by investing herself in such ordinary things, Custance conceives a Christian emperor. The sly irony of this passage echoes a similar tone in the lines about Emelye’s bathing in the Knight’s Tale. In each case, a woman who is explicitly presented as the object of male desire implicitly accepts her own sexuality and mortality, projecting the consequences forward as a kind of fate for everyone involved.17

III. In part 3, Custance’s boat runs aground and a steward from a nearby castle tries to rob and rape her, but the balance of power has shifted. In Surrye, Custance had to accept the Sowdan’s love and his mother’s deadly force; and in Northumbria, she had to accept the knight’s lust and Donegild’s fraud. Here, with the love of “Blisful Marie” and God’s “myght and vigour,” Custance struggles “mightily” (line 921), and the thief drowns.18 With this apparently random victory, Custance’s maternal identity and purpose emerge as dominant. In the tale’s first two series of events, male desire leads to marriages rendered sterile and void by female aggression. The men, even the lustful knight, act under the sign of Venus, as it were, weeping and bleeding for love, while the Sowdanesse and Donegild—“Viragos,” committing typically masculine crimes of force and fraud—seem influenced by Mars. In part 3, this sequence is chiastically reversed, and so are the gender roles. Here male force briefly dominates, but each time, female strength is empowered by divine love, the male dies (is voided, like the false hero at the end of folktales), and the female vessel of “unwemmed” intent enters a safe harbor of familial relations, maternal values, and the divine “potency,” which Custance has been mediating ever since she left home. After Custance overcomes the rapist, for instance, her ship drifts back through the “narwe mouth” of Gibraltar into the sheltered—one might almost say womblike—Mediterranean, toward mother Rome. Later, Alla’s death in far-off Northumbria eliminates even his benign governance, allowing Custance to live out her days in a “family” of Christian Romans, while her son grows toward emperorship.19 In effect, both male and female roles are transformed in part 3, where male

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desire is displaced by God’s love, and the viragos’ willful attempts to exterminate strange women and rival faiths give way to Custance’s sheltering maternity. One key to understanding this transformation is Custance’s identification with Mary. In her first voyage, she accepted and was strengthened by her own martyrdom; in this second voyage, like Christ’s mother she transcends herself by sacrificing herself for her child.20 The result of Custance’s self-transcendance, and her ultimate recovery of selfhood, is her delivery into the Mediterranean and return to Rome, where a chain of recognitions enabled by her little son unites her with husband and father. In Rome, Custance is again a wife, later a (widowed) daughter, but her moral authority is motherhood.21 This achieved identity is revealed, fittingly, at banquets. The marriage feasts managed by the Sowdanesse and Donegild, rituals of failed exchange, are here countered by feasts where Alla and later the emperor see Custance in her son’s face, seek her out, and pay her the recognition she has earned by her exchange of virtue. Each time, Mauricius’s little face is a pure (selfless) mirror of his mother, uniting the family and creating the same wealth of human relationships that Custance, God’s mirror-mediator, had created earlier in Northumbria. Hitherto, Custance’s pale face appeared at climactic moments of separation: embarking for Surrye (line 265), her trial in Northumbria (line 645), and her exile from Northumbria (line 872). Pure as the sacrificial lamb, her empty face reflected her absolute investment in the divine will.22 But in these reunion scenes, her ship has come in, so to speak, and her yield is identity— being recognized in the mirror of her child. This identity has been paid for by an exchange—a sacrifice of self—as difficult and painful as death. That is why, meeting the husband who, she must suppose, sent her and the child to their deaths, Custance swoons twice (we think of her two long “death” voyages), and then stands before him, “doumb . . . as a tree” (line 1055)—as dead to him as she is to every worldly authority. What brings her to life, uniting the family, is Alla’s identifying with and deferring to her innocence, as it is reflected in their son, Maurice: “[O]f youre harm as gilteless am I / As is Maurice, my sone, so lyk youre face” (lines 1062–63). In the fourth and final feast, Custance reveals herself to her father, redeeming an earlier time when the Sowdanesse’s feast of blood dissolved family ties, matrimony, political alliances, and religious conversions—the larger, social matrix of Custance’s identity. That is why it is here that she speaks her own name for the first time in the tale (line 1105). The joy of reunion with husband and father is ultimately made empirewide, shadowing forth a higher, spiritual identity. Describing the dinner, the narrator says Maurice will be made emperor by the pope, then buries this footnote immediately: “I bere it noght in mynde” (line 1127). Yet this narrative seed bears the future of Rome and the larger significance of Custance’s

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adventure in the world. As a boy, Mauricius unites Custance with her family; as emperor, he will mediate between God and his church. Custance, like Mary, has given the world her son, and he will make God’s law his gift to the world. Concealing this crucial relationship in a side comment, like Custance’s quiet submission to marriage and Emelye’s apparently insignificant choice in the Knight’s Tale, suggests (in a peculiarly Chaucerian way) how great causes work through humble intents. Custance’s ninth year away from Rome ends with Alla’s death, a mortal necessity amplified (as in Theseus’s chain of love speech) by metaphors of fleeting joy, time’s impatience, and the day’s journey into night, but most pertinently, the changing of the tide (line 1134). For a total of eight years,23 the cyclic lifetime of Palamon’s and Arcite’s courtships, Custance drifted at the mercy of wind and wave, that outer weather corresponding to inner “movings”: Who lyved euere in swich delit o day That hym ne moeved outher conscience, Or ire, or talent, or som kynnes affray, Envye, or pride, or passion, or offense? (Lines 1135–38) These are the inner tides that move the will, which is truly free only if one can, like Custance, accept God’s “sonde” and be lifted on the greater tide of divine love. Now, indeed, Custance has left exilic space—the broad Mediterranean, the vast emptiness beyond Gibraltar, and even her life in distant Northumbria. Now she will return to maternal Rome (perhaps that is why her own mother is not mentioned), where she will live a widow’s life with her father, in the house where she began. This collapse of narrative space is both frightening and redemptive. In a Christian sense it is fundamental to the tale. Custance’s recognition scenes mark the stages of her return to the center of her family, an ever-smaller place, as husband and, inevitably, father pass away. Yet at the same time, the space of family and spiritual relations expands. Reunited, Custance and Alla kiss one hundred times (line 1074); she and her father are a thousand times happier than one can express (line 1120); and at the end, having found her father again, she falls to the ground weeping and praises God one hundred thousand times. Reunion with friends and father will lead to life in the Christian community, “[i]n vertu and in hooly almusdede” (line 1156), where the individual soul is simultaneously one with a company of kindred souls, just as souls in heaven join the numbers of the holy company and enter the immensity of God. Custance’s return to Rome is thus a figure both for human transcendence and human mortality. But the central figure for death as a part of life is Custance herself. This “hooly wyf so

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sweete” (line 1130) is a Christian version of Arcite’s Emelye, “my sweete foo.” Emelye represented the promise and threat of life as a natural cycle; Custance represents the promise of a virtuous life, but also—and here too she is God’s chapman—the mortal exchange of this present world for the “hooly” company in the next.24

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CHAPTER

7

The Domestic Market

The merchant of Seint-Denys in the Shipman’s Tale is rich,1 for which men think him wise. He has a beautiful wife. The first three lines predict the outcome of this fabliau: how the merchant turns out not to be so wise, especially in dealing with his wife.2 But soon it appears that the real subject of the tale is merchants themselves—what it is like to be one, or married to one—and finally we are less concerned with the morality of the merchant’s wife than with the peculiarly mercantile way in which she maintains the balance of her marriage and provides for their future.3 Our impression of this merchant’s world comes to us mainly through the wife’s point of view. Often her worries are trivial and her attitudes preposterous, but it is gentle satire because we are also allowed to know how she feels about her situation with her husband and the monk daun John. Her sensibility, formed by the need to keep up appearances, by insecurity, by pride, by the love of pleasure, and by the ups and downs of buying and selling, manifests itself in her frustrations and complaints—for there is a rhetoric of such things, as the Wife of Bath demonstrates at some length—but chiefly it appears in the metaphors she chooses, and in the ways she inhabits space. The house is the merchant’s social and domestic space, and the places within it harbor action that demonstrates how such a house, and such a life, may be sustained. We never see the wife at the market, or anywhere outside this “worthy hous,” where she seems to be virtually confined; even within it there are places where she may not go. But over time, with the help of the monk daun John, she too becomes a merchant of sorts, bargaining for loans in a garden that serves as her domestic marketplace and counting her gains in the bedroom.4 The merchant has his countinghouse, where she is not admitted, but by the end of the tale it is clear that the bedroom is her own private mercantile space, where she tallies her domestic transactions and maintains the balance of her mercantile marriage.

I. The merchant is rich, and so men think him wise.5 In his life and in his trade, outer appearances speak for the inner man, and his wife adds to the impression, being “compaignable, revelous,” a good hostess who ensures a pleasant

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evening at the great house. It is partly for his own standing that she dresses well. But if the expense of her clothing were wholly the merchant’s responsibility, just a matter of cost effectiveness, we would have no story. The complication we anticipate, the tension between the merchant’s outer and inner life, between society and self, appears abruptly with the entrance of a woman’s point of view. The female narrator (surely not the Shipman) who confides that “The sely housbonde, algate he moot paye, / He moot us clothe, and he moot us araye” (lines 11–12) creates the immediate effect of distancing the merchant.6 The hammer blows of “moot . . . moot . . . moot” and the wry but slightly diminishing “sely housbonde” put him immediately in his place. He is no longer the subject of the tale, but a problem to be solved by a clever wife like the Wife of Bath (for whom the tale was probably written) or like the merchant’s wife herself. The subjectivity of the wife carries with it a certain amount of narrative weight. Her rich clothes are worn for the merchant’s “prow,” but like any other wife, she enjoys them too, dancing “jolily” in them (line 14). They agree on the necessity of keeping up appearances, then, but if he decides that the clothes cost more than they are worth, he risks the intimacy of his marriage. She will find other ways to dress well, and perhaps borrow money, which is bad for business and marriage both. At this point, it is clear that the merchant is not really in control of the relationship between outer appearances and his private life. With the addition of his wife’s point of view, appearances have taken on a life of their own. Thus, it is not the man but the house that is called “worthy,” for he maintains it generously to suit the “greet repair” of guests who are so often present. He is called a “noble merchaunt,” but it is his generosity that is noble: here is a merchant famous for his “largesse”—and because he has an attractive wife. We begin to see that the house is never more his own than when it is filled with admiring guests, “grete and smale,” crowds of people of every kind, as if he were a merchant prince and held court. But there is one familiar face, “famulier . . . / As it is possible any freend to be” (lines 30–31), and that is the monk daun John. The merchant and monk were born in the same village, and they like to call each other “cosyn,” claiming kinship to each other. Their original village was communal space, a place where personal identity was deeply known and kinship meant something. There they were villagers, with a common social horizon. Here they are united mainly by a similar need to impress others, and so they use each other. The merchant finds it in his favor to have this young, fair-faced monk circulating among the guests; he is, after all, an “officer,” quite possibly the abbey’s cellarer with the church’s resources at his disposal, a man who can make deals. The monk, for his part, values the connections he can make with the other merchants who are surely there, and of course there is

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pleasant discourse with the wife. They are not really kinsmen, but beyond the common business interests and the easy run of small talk, there is almost a wistfulness about “cosynage.” Perhaps both of them like to be reminded of how far they have risen above their village origins, but surely they are also aware of the distance that lies between the home village and this merry but (for the most part) impersonal suburban household. That is at least partly why the merchant feels it a “greet plesaunce” when daun John visits, and both claim to be “knyt with eterne alliaunce,” assuring each other of “bretherhede whil that hir lyf may dure” (line 42). These are value terms. If they are not entirely cynical, they are gestures toward a greater depth than either the worthy house or the host/guest relationships within it can provide. For many reasons, then, daun John is a favored house guest, and the entire household is “glad . . . as fowel of day” when he appears. After all, he is a most generous monk, “Free . . . and manly of dispence, / . . . and ful of diligence / To doon plesaunce, and also greet costage” (lines 43–45). He comes with gifts for everyone, from the master down to the littlest page, for which— again—they are “as glad of his coming / As fowel is fayn when that the sonne up riseth” (lines 50–51). Really, he has bought their friendship.7 And later when we hear that he has brought game birds (“volatyl”) to grace the table, the bird metaphors become unmistakable. In their response to daun John’s energy, the merchant and his household begin to seem passive and overreceptive, like the merchant’s own house guests, presumably, while the monk becomes purposeful, and if not wholly manipulative, then an operator, a salesman. The house has proven to be semipublic space; it is partly for family and friends, but mainly it is a mercantile-friendly place where merchants can present themselves to advantage and set up deals they will make in the future. And by taking on a merchant’s generous ways, the monk has displaced the merchant within his own house and assumed the key features of his role.8

II. The narrative gets underway as the merchant prepares for a journey to the town of Brugges, where he intends to buy some goods. In anticipation of this venture, he invites daun John to spend a day or two with them in Seint-Denys. The principle here is apparently the old heroic one of the hero arming for battle. The merchant is rising to the challenge of the marketplace, and before he goes he must gird his loins and muster his troops. In the merchants’ world, that means inviting guests and exercising his generosity for a day or two, so that he can issue forth with confidence, glowing with the reminder of his worldly status and the successful trading that underlies it. But the most significant motif is simply that the merchant rides out to distant markets. The

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reach of his trading suggests the power and resourcefulness of the man himself, somewhat in the same way that the Knight’s character is drawn largely from his foreign campaigns. But since daun John will be coming from Paris, he too is enhanced by the journey, and when we are told that he has license to ride out from his abbey to inspect church lands, we have an even stronger sense of his potential for movement and dominance of space. Neither man would seem remarkable, however, if there were not the implicit comparison with the merchant’s wife, who, unlike the Miller’s Alysoun or any other woman in these opening tales, never sets foot outside the house. In the event, “my lord daun John” is once again a house guest—“oure deere cosyn, ful of curteisye” (line 69)—and for a day or so they “ete and drynke and pleye” (line 73). The slight elevation of language works to convey an air of celebration during this little holiday, but it also echoes the language used earlier in the initial description of the merchant, who was noble, worthy, free, a man of largesse, for whom it was a great “pleasaunce” to make “alliaunce” with a man such as daun John. These courtly terms suggest a grand manner and broad ambitions, the amplitude of the lives that both merchant and monk are pretending to live. Each of them is generous—“large, free”—and lays claim to more social space than he did back in the village. Yet on the third day, as the merchant’s trip approaches, his preparation is to go up into his countinghouse, away from the company on the ground floor, where he reckons with himself, taking stock of gains and losses for the year. This is the merchant’s private place, and it shows us a different side of him. He “sadly” (soberly) shuts the door “ful faste” and sits there alone a good part of the morning, letting it be known that he is not to be disturbed by anyone as he does his accounts. The insistent, almost obsessive “counter-hous, counting-bord, countour-dore” reinforce the presence of his “bookes and his bagges many oon,” not to mention “his tresor and his hord” (lines 82, 84), giving us the sense of a defensive position, enclosed and carefully controlled. These are his books, his bags, his treasure and hoard, and when he reckons “if that he encressed were or noon” (line 81), the man and his money seem almost to be a single entity. The books and the bags of money, as well as the little room where they are so carefully guarded, are the merchant’s substance, and they create as accurate a vision of the inner man as we are likely to see in this narrative of proud surfaces. Then, suddenly, the tightly enclosed, cell-like countinghouse gives way to the gentle solitude of a morning garden, where daun John is pacing “softely” (i.e., not “sadly”) up and down, saying his monk’s “thynges . . . ful curteisly” (line 91), and reminding us that we have just been watching the merchant pore over his own “things” inside the house. The opening out of small spaces into larger, freer ones is by now a familiar motif in the opening tales (the transition from Palamon and Arcite’s prison cell to Emelye’s garden

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is one), and here as before it implies the projection of idea into act. While the merchant is counting his money and planning to purchase goods, daun John and the wife enter the garden and actually carry out such a transaction. The garden scene takes up the previously announced theme of the monk as a kind of merchant, displacing the merchant within his own house, and it will develop the main theme of the wife’s becoming a kind of merchant in her own right.9 But the underlying tenor of the scene is that of an opening up of possibilities and the bursting apart of wearisome, perhaps unbearable, constraints. More than one reader has remarked on the amoral quality of this tale, where the wife sells herself for a sum of gold francs, the monk sacrifices friendship and virtue to satisfy his desire, and the garden setting bears witness to their mutual falls. The garden, however, has more to do with the needs of the people in the story than with their moral condition. To begin with, it is more a private place than the house, so often overrun with guests, yet it lacks the hermetic control imposed by the merchant on the countinghouse, that cramped surrogate for self. Here the monk has the relative solitude to say his morning prayers, and the wife can enter discreetly (“pryvely”), accompanied by the maid child she is rearing; here they are not hidden, yet they can have a private conversation that eases the tension of their lives.10 The garden retains the resonance of what is natural in life—that is, its Edenic quality—while reminding us also of the gardens of love that grace the landscape of medieval romance. It is a place where the senses come alive, the pace of life slows, and essential needs can be contemplated, addressed, provided for. It is, moreover, a feminized, domestic space, the garden of the lady of the house. Her authority and, to a certain extent, her dramatic presence are established by her ability to speak quite freely here; the girl attending her is subject to that authority and will not bear tales.11 The busy markets of Brugges are far away from this gentle garden setting, with its overtones of love and nature. If the monk and the wife, especially, use this time to exchange confidences and strike a bargain in what amounts to a domestic marketplace, they are nevertheless trading with each other at a deeper level of emotional need than has been possible up to this point in the tale.

III. The greetings of the wife and monk are, as we might expect, a transition from the social protocols that govern life in this merchant’s house. “O deere cosyn myn, daun John,” she says, and “Nece,” he answers (lines 98, 100), even though he is no cousin, nor she his niece. These polite, even modish terms of endearment recall how the merchant and monk masked the real basis of their relationship. But gradually, during what resembles a romance recognition

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scene or a mutual confession of love, layers of pretense and social decorum are stripped away until both partners can declare plainly what they want and what they will give for it. Their exchange in the garden merges the language and the space of love and commerce, setting a precedent for the way we will understand the marriage of the merchant and the wife at the end of the tale.12 More immediately, it initiates a chain of mercantile contracts—the borrowing, buying, and paying off of loans that the wife and monk carry out in the house— while the merchant (always a little later) goes through a similar series of transactions in the real marketplaces of Brugges and Paris. In the process, the merchant’s wife will become a merchant in her own right, and her marriage will be a marriage of merchants. As she moves progressively further into her new role, it is interesting to watch how she identifies with the merchant’s outer behavior, then his inner fears, using the monk’s animal vigor to advance her affairs but finally rejecting him in favor of a revitalized, because mercantilized, relationship with her husband.13 In so doing, she acts out the otherwise inaccessible subjectivity of a merchant, showing what this life of buying and selling and quid pro quo feels like from the inside. After the polite greetings are over, the small talk takes a more serious turn. Why has he risen so early? Why does she look so pale? For daun John, it seems, five hours of sleep is quite enough, but not for an “old, appalled wight” (line 102), like these married men who cower in their beds like a weary hare, fearfully still while dogs come running into the meadow from all sides. The effect of all this is to distance the husband from their conversation, thus moving from an informal context to an intimate one, enhancing the privacy of the garden, and preparing the way for deeper subjects. But it also contributes the central image of the hare “al forstraught with houndes grete and smale” (line 105), an image of fear that gives us a sense of the wife’s feelings about her financial situation in this scene and implies the feelings of her merchant husband as well. Being torn to pieces by dogs is like being pursued by creditors—not that the merchant would admit this directly, but the image matches his appearance in the countinghouse too closely be easily dismissed. As if to validate that image, the wife replies that she herself has no interest in lovemaking14 but wishes she could simply run away, or do away with herself, “So ful am I of drede and eek of care” (line 123). We know that she will not run away or do harm to herself. She is a pampered bourgeoise and unlikely to do more than complain. Yet the anxiety itself is real and typical of this way of life; her wish that she could leave the country is no more than what the merchant and monk are in the habit of saying (both speak of pilgrimage as a way of fleeing pressures at home), and the monk’s banter about “appalled” (pallid, feeble) married men provides an appropriate context for her death wish. What she means is that being in debt is a living death. The monk replies that she can talk freely, he will swear to it by his “portehors,” his little book of hours (his own icon of authority). As a holy man, he

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should not have to swear to keep a confidence, but here in the garden, the manners of love-service and the service of God are also beginning to merge under the pressure of domestic commerce. She too makes an oath on the portehors: though men should tear her to pieces (we think of “houndes,” creditors, and the loss of public integrity), she agrees to keep his secrets, not for the sake of “cosynage ne alliance, / But verraily for love and affiance” (lines 139–40). This contract ritual moves her further into private space and another step away from the space of her marriage, for “cosynage” and “alliaunce” are terms that refer to the merchant and his relations with the monk, while “love and affiance” refer to the deeper attachment and loyalty she presumably shares with daun John here in the garden. We do not know that love and loyalty are lacking in her marriage, but the implication is that the bonds of loyalty in a merchant’s world are not as strong as contractual ones, and love is less fulfilling than profit. In this sense, the garden has become an emotional refuge, a retreat to real feelings and needs. Consequently, she now wants to talk: “[I]f that I hadde a space, / As I have noon, and namely in this place, / Thanne wolde I telle a legende of my lyf ” (lines 143–45). By “space” she means the amount of time she can spend in the garden, but it comes to much the same thing as personal space, which (despite her increasing candidness) she feels she does not have in her marriage. The merchant has his countinghouse, but she has no place in private for secrets, for possessions. Instead, she is like the house itself, a part of the merchant’s property. As part of it, she can have no role apart from it. Added to this constraint is her social role as a merchant’s wife: “But sith I am a wyf, it sit nat me / To tellen no wight of oure privetee, / Neither abedde ne in noon oother place” (lines 163–65). We recognize in her complaint the missing freedoms to own, to control, even to talk freely, which the Wife of Bath has already assumed and reasserts with customary vigor. Here we can see a wife in the act of breaking those bonds. Much of the wry humor of this scene derives from her hesitating and calculating; she clutches her respectability to her, reciting the old domestic maxims as though they were protective charms—“‘A wyf ne shal nat seyn of hir housbonde / But al honour, as I kan understonde”’ (lines 167–68)—and then plunging through to the truth, as she sees it: “As helpe me God, he is noght worth at al / In no degree the value of a flye. / But yet me greveth moost his nygardye” (lines 170–72). He is not generous; worse, he is not generous to her. Women in general desire—she desires!—a husband “Hardy and wise, and riche, and therto free, / And buxom unto his wyf and fressh abedde” (lines 176–77). Notice that hardy, wise, and rich describe the merchant fairly well, but that free, buxom, and fresh abed are qualities that daun John is pretending to offer. The merchant, apparently not generous with money or love, seems lacking in her account, and as a consequence, given her subordinate role in this marriage, she too lacks something, being in debt and threatened by “sclaundre or vileynye.” The garden provides

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a protected space for her negotiations—a marketplace of sorts, but one where a woman has an advantage—and daun John lends the generosity so lacking in her husband. Yet in her own feelings, she remains a kind of traitor, both to her husband and herself, or so she implies, repeating the key motif of dismemberment as she swears by “Genylon of France” (line 194) that she will do “plesance and service” in return for one hundred francs.

IV. Nonetheless, the garden scene has revitalized the wife. She has borrowed and covered her debts, and now feels able to stand at the countinghouse door, the gates of the merchant’s stronghold, and knock boldly: “What, sire, how longe wol ye faste? How longe tyme wol ye rekene and caste Youre sommes, and youre bookes, and youre thynges?[”] (Lines 215–17) “The devel have part on alle swiche rekenynges!” she says, her new self-confidence edged with impatience and dismissal. He has his merchant’s “things,” his money and his accounts, but they have never been her things, and now of course she has things of her own, her own accounts to manage. The merchant seems to sense the shift in the balance of his marriage, for he replies with a remarkably revealing defense of himself and his profession: “Wyf,” quod this man, “litel kanstow devyne The curious bisynesse that we have. For of us chapmen, also God me save, And by that lord that clepid is Seint Yve, Scarsly amonges twelve tweye shul thryve Continuelly, lastynge unto oure age. We may wel make chiere and good visage, And dryve forth the world as it may be, And kepen oure estaat in pryvetee, Til we be deed, or elles that we pleye A pilgrymage, or goon out of the weye. And therefore have I greet necessitee Upon this queynte world t’avyse me, For evermore we moote stond in drede Of hap and fortune in oure chapmanhede.[”] (Lines 224–38)

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His initial condescension (“litel kanstow devyne . . .”) seems inevitable in this marriage, but that tone is quickly replaced by a lament with ecclesiastical overtones, as if he were attempting to give merchantry a moral depth better suited to saints’ lives: his is a “curious bisynesse” (cp. curia); “Scarsly amonges twelve tweye shul thryve” (like the apostles?); they must “dryve forth the world . . . in pryvetee . . . Til we be deed . . . or pleye a pilgrimage” (as if merchants were monks).15 Through this language, the merchant accesses daun John’s professional space, assuming for himself and other merchants the commitment and the broader moral horizons of monachism, just as earlier daun John presented himself as a kind of merchant, as if he himself were master of the house.16 Both of them, it seems, crave the expansion of self promised by occupations—professional space—not their own.17 The merchant concludes with the sentiment of contemptus mundi (“this queynte world”), returning in the final couplet to the fundamental plight of merchants (“we . . . stond in drede / Of hap and fortune”). Despite his monkish accents of enduring the world, he has reasserted the perennial insecurity of those dependent upon market (and in a larger sense, worldly) forces, thereby underscoring the primary theme of the tale. It soon appears that the little speech on the toils of merchantry has introduced the merchant’s instructions to his wife, who remains at home while he ventures forth to the marketplace in Flanders. His is the challenge of trading in faraway places, and hers the waiting, the careful management of the home, the inner or domestic space. There is nothing remarkable about his attitude, which represents a hardy, perhaps inevitable, stereotyping of gender roles. Yet we note that the instructions he gives his wife (“be to every wight buxom and meke, / And for to kepe oure good be curious” [lines 242–43]) echo his own words about his profession (“curious busynesse”), and we reflect that the merchant’s care to maintain a great house for his many guests might be considered “buxom,” almost “meke,” in the service of public opinion. Again it is the wife, dwelling within the house and protected by the merchant’s sallies into the marketplace, who manifests the merchant’s subjectivity, his indwelling sense of self. Our sense of vulnerability in the man, his marriage, and even his business is reinforced when after dinner, daun John begins to give the merchant himself some advice: “I preye yow, cosyn, wisely that ye ryde. Governeth yow also of youre diete Atemprely, and namely in this hete.[”] (Lines 260–62) The apparent solicitude hardens into a form of manipulation when daun John asks (“O thyng . . .”) that the merchant loan him one hundred francs, since he

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intends to buy “certein beestes . . . / To stoore with a place that is oures. / God helpe me so, I wolde it were youres!” (lines 272–74). The friendly advice about diet warms the relationship between these “cosyns,” but the place that is “oures” refers plainly to the house, where daun John has been seen to displace the merchant, and probably to the bedroom as well. The merchant’s reply is accommodating, as we knew it must be. But he too has “o thyng” to add, which reminds us of the implicit competition between them: “But o thyng is, ye knowe it wel ynogh Of chapmen, that hir moneie is hir plogh. We may creaunce whil we have a name, But goldless for to be, it is no game.” (Lines 287–90) Gold is a merchant’s substance. It creates his identity as a merchant (his “name”), and thus his ability to negotiate a loan or a purchase. Moreover, gold is a merchant’s irreplaceable tool, the plough that breaks the market earth, with its associations of fertility, sexuality, and manliness. The merchant’s earnest caveat has little effect on daun John, who knows well the uses of gold and will find a way not to pay it back. Its force is best understood in reference to the wife, who is left at home with spending money (“‘Of silver in thy purs shaltow nat faille’” [line 248]), but not with the gold she needs to pay for her clothes and keep up appearances. Her anxiety over the hundred francs is a small, expressive version of the merchant’s perennial worries about financial capital.

V. In the events that follow, both men carry out their business transactions: (1) the merchant goes to Brugges and buys his merchandise on credit; (2) daun John arrives at the house, turns over the hundred francs, and sleeps with (i.e., buys) the wife; (3) the merchant goes to Paris to borrow 20,000 shields and pay off his loan; (4) daun John says he is leaving town on pilgrimage; (5) the merchant comes home, “murie as a papejay,” expecting a profit of 1,000 francs upon sale of his goods. Clearly, one business trip parallels the other. Daun John is first to borrow and first to pay; he has accessed both mercantile and domestic space by using the garden as his marketplace. The merchant, in contrast, makes his deals in Brugges and Paris, and then comes home to his wife, his fine house, and everything else his business has won (or bought) for him. No matter. Each has demonstrated his mercantile ability and each has profited. But the missing francs, which represent the capital the wife never had,

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the clothes she could not afford, and the anxiety over appearances that can hardly disappear from this marriage—the one hundred francs are spent, and somehow she must account for them, and for herself. Central to this homecoming scene, and to the relationship of the merchant and his wife, is her meeting him at the gate, “As she was wont of oold usage algate” (line 374). Here is the boundary between the public and private parts of the merchant’s life, and between his authority in the marriage and hers. He is now “riche and cleerly out of dette” (line 376), his reputation rests again on capital in gold, and his sexuality (a surrogate for his private life) rebounds accordingly. She happily receives him, at the gate and then in bed, as if she were the gatekeeper between the public and private parts of their marriage: “‘Namoore,’ quod she, ‘by God ye have ynough!’” (line 379). But the next morning, as they play in bed, the merchant reminds her of the one hundred francs, and wishes she had told him daun John had repaid them—not knowing this had caused a certain strangeness between them, when they met in Paris. She is left goldless, as it were, and it is hardly a game. She cannot admit that she spent the francs and borrowed from daun John; not only would that raise questions, but in this marriage, she has no authority to manage real capital: that is a merchant’s “thyng,” while she remains in domestic space—in the household and part of it. The reversal comes suddenly, when once more (as in the garden scene) mercantile and domestic space, which have been so carefully distinguished in this marriage, collapse into one another.18 “[B]oldely,” she defies the false daun John: she thought he gave her the francs for the merchant’s sake, and for her own benefit (“myn honour and my prow”). But since the francs are spent, “I am youre wyf; score it upon my taille, / And I shal paye as soone as ever I may” (lines 416–17).19 This is the boldness with which she knocked on the door of the merchant’s countinghouse, buoyant after contracting with daun John (“a fair man and a boold” [line 25]) to cover her debt for the francs. But now she does not need daun John (“‘Yvel thedam on his monkes snowte!”’ [line 405]), because, after all, the bedroom is her countinghouse, and the merchant is the one knocking at her gate. Inside the bedroom are no books and bags and merchant’s “thynges,” but simply the warmth and domestic comfort a wife can give: these are the priceless things of private life. But the reversal is more complete than a mere turning of the tables. This is a mercantile marriage, and if there is to be an easing of tension between his public and her private authority, there must be mutual accord and a mercantile logic. She must be a wife with the kind of authority a merchant can understand, and here is where mercantile and domestic space become one: “Ye shal my joly body have to wedde; By God, I wol nat paye you but abedde!” (Lines 423–24)

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“To wedde” here must mean “as a pledge,” because it forcibly recalls the “certeyn tokenes” (i.e., secret details) about her night with daun John, as well as the bond the merchant had to buy back from his Lombard bankers. The merchant’s wife is now as much a merchant as either man; her body is her pledge and because, under these conditions, her husband will be generous, he will be her sole creditor.20 But also, and necessarily, “to wedde” retains its root meaning: “You shall have my body in marriage.” For this marriage to work, the wife’s bedroom, her countinghouse, must be and is a place where public and private life, business and pleasure, can work usefully together. The wife, whose countinghouse is in its way a treasure house, its sexual gold her “plough,” has (through her husband) an access to the riches of mercantile space. The merchant can accept the wife’s domestic expenses because he can see a real return on his investment—not the shallow cheer of house guests (“Swiche salutaciouns and countenaunces / Passen as dooth a shadwe upon the wal” [lines 8–9]) but the domestic solace he needs (if the tale is any example) both before and after his forays into the “queynte” world of the marketplace. The stability of their final arrangement is acknowledged by the merchant himself, when he forgives his wife, telling her to “Keep bet thy good” (line 432)—not his good, or “oure” good, but her own things, which must include sexual favors (fabliau irony will have its way with us) but also the household and even the marriage itself. The wife, who had earlier been entirely dependent upon resources outside her, has discovered richer ones within her own person. By investing herself piecemeal, she has become whole, and having internalized the process of exchange, she has become central to their enterprise.21 At this point, the market anxiety (or “lack”) of the tale, conveyed by threats of dismemberment (“forstraught with houndes,” “into pieces tere,” “Genylon,” and finally the wife’s “disjoint” [line 411]), has been displaced by the comforting metaphor of a house where both man and wife have mercantile authority, emplaced in his countinghouse and her bedroom, and both these married merchants have “[t]ailynge enough unto [their] lyves ende” (line 434).

CHAPTER

8

The Exile and Her Kingdom

Alysoun of Bath is no stay-at-home, as witnessed by two pilgrimages to Jerusalem and plenty of other wanderings by the way, yet both her prologue and tale end in a domestic center—in a house, and finally, inside the curtains of a bed. Her account moves from theory to personal practice, from fields to house, and courtship to marriage, describing a movement inward from public to private, toward what we infer to be the source of her peculiar presence in the narrative. This movement contrasts markedly with her own restless behavior, and with the expansion from the staccato series of logical propositions with which she argues the case for her marriages, to the more discursive account of those marriages, and finally to the narrative amble of her marriage to Jankyn. These two focuses on the Wife’s experience appear contradictory, as if they reflected a division in her own complex persona. Yet the apparent opposition between turning inward and sallying forth becomes at length a kind of harmony, achieved by the imposition of the wife’s central point of view, which projects her desires ever more widely onto the world landscape, but at the same time internalizes that world by accommodating it to her needs. In effect, the farther she moves out into the world, the more it contracts into her own domestic space—the world according to Dame Alys. The importance of this shift in point of view from “What is this world? What asketh men to have?” (I.2777) to “What thyng is it that wommen moost desiren[?]” (III.905) is not that women have suddenly become central to the narrative, or that women, heretofore passive beings, have now the power to do things for themselves. Female characters in Fragments I and II consistently perform independent acts that determine the conclusion of the narrative. But we saw the Knight’s world, and even the Man of Law’s world, from outside, as it were, as geographical territories framed by political, cultural, or urban boundaries, informed at best by chivalric “gyses” (customs) or Christian virtues, but more often, simply by men’s desires to enlarge their holdings. The Wife’s discourse inverts that world, letting us see its cares and necessities from the inside out, from its center in the littler, more intimate, profoundly metaphoric, and in some ways richer domestic space of marriage. Marriage is also central to the earlier tales, both as a social structure and as a controlling metaphor. But in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, marriage provides Alysoun with means to an end, and perhaps even with a sense of purpose, an

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“intente,” which is fundamental to our sense of who she is and what she stands for. John’s Alysoun, the wife in the Miller’s Tale, makes no secret of her likes and dislikes; but Alysoun of Bath can offer both a strategy and an apology, or explanation, for what she does. Furthermore, she is experienced and old enough that her discourse has begun to suggest why she keeps struggling for “maistrie,” and why her situation might be representative, not only in a domestic sense, but in a broader human one. In Alysoun’s world, if not in her tale, fairy magic has disappeared, with its overtones of natural norms, but so has King Arthur’s court, with its swift, sure fairy-tale justice. What is left is friars, everywhere, not so much a blessing as a reminder to women that home, hearth, sex, and marriage dwell under an authority—indeed, a code of law—that is not their own. Alysoun has set herself against the friars, yet she has borrowed their arguments and adapted their habit of glossing,1 just as she uses the language and attitudes of the marketplace to describe her marriages, and assumes the language of chivalry—“maistrie”!—to convey her tragicomic sense of the human condition. The Wife of Bath is representative precisely because she does borrow, and is in some ways an exile. Without direct recourse to money, family, or even, finally, the bloom of youth, she makes her way by sheer ability and strength of character. The constraints imposed by husbands and friars contribute ultimately to her own defenses. Her “constancy” in this regard looks back to the equally firm yet quieter purpose of Custance in the Man of Law’s Tale; but her account of this struggle is amplified by a depth and variety of intimate experience that creates an “inner space,” an indwelling sense of self that conditions readers to look for similar subjectivities in later tales.

This Queynte World And therfore have I greet necessitee Upon this queynte world t’avyse me, For everemoore we moote stond in drede Of hap and fortune in oure chapmanhede. (VII, lines 235–38) This is the merchant’s complaint, as he prepares to go to market in the Shipman’s Tale, but it could apply equally to his wife’s personal and domestic transactions, and it could with some justice be used to describe the mercantile bondings of the Wife of Bath. The Wife begins her prologue by referring to the “wo that is in marriage” (line 3), but given the wealth of experience that fills the ensuing lines, this seems less a cry of despair than a hardheaded gen-

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eral statement about the difficulties of running a marriage. Difficulties, that is, from a woman’s relatively isolated position. From her very first declaration of marital identity—“Housbondes at chirche dore I have had five—” (line 6), Alysoun makes it clear that a wife is on her own: her practice of multiple marriages has been criticized by the church, even though it parallels men’s taking another wife if the first one dies in childbirth. The church’s restriction would be critical, if she obeyed it. Instead, she makes it an emblem of the irksome constraints on women’s lives—their implied duty to stay home, keep house, obey their husbands, refrain from gossiping, and of course refrain from having anything to do with other men. These restrictions imply a code of conduct that was surely more often breached than kept. Yet they also convey the exilic nature of “wyfhood,” both in the sentimental narrative of Custance and in the Wife’s satiric account. Custance’s piteous lament—“‘Wommen are born to thraldom and penance, / And to been under mannes governance’” (II, lines 286–87)—would probably strike Dame Alys as rank heresy, just the sort of attitude her own discourse is designed to “quit.” Yet there are ways in which even Alys’s marriages echo that folktale pathos.2 After all, how could she enter a marriage (at the age of twelve) unless she left her childhood home and the authority of her mother for a place where she herself would have none? Over time she acquired experience, the foundation of domestic governance. Yet this authority is not absolute. It exists as relationships, as bonds of identity between herself and household articles, clothing, cash, servants, neighbors, and not least, her husband. Her relations with him create her position in the house. To the degree that she manages the husband, the house becomes her domain. Thus, her authority as wife presupposes both an ongoing debate and a degree of separation, a kind of exile. But management also requires an investment of self. In this sense also, the Wife is like Custance, who was “sacrificed” on the altar of marriage to extend the reach of Christendom. To be sure, Alysoun invests herself in arranged marriages, not love matches, and she profits from her old husbands. Yet she too is aging, giving up her youth in exchange for a living. Husband number four is livelier, but now she is older, and even though she wins the game, making him jealous, we sense that this has cost her. Finally, she marries Jankyn, the clerk employed by her fourth husband, but this time she has to invest money and lands to seal the bargain. Jankyn’s contribution is the clerical tradition represented by his “Bok of wikked wyves.” She overcomes it by sheer endurance, but the physical, and, perhaps emotional, cost is deafness in one ear.3 Ordinarily, Alysoun’s marital reward, the “yield” on her long-term investment, has been her “good” (line 314). She trades sexuality and youth for control of the household:4

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In effect, she sells her “bele chose” (line 447), which is a way of saying she sells herself.5 But if everything she has—her domestic world—has been acquired through bartered sex, then the world so gained takes on the valuation of what purchased it: in other words, Alysoun’s world really is “this queynte world,” because that is how she got it, and how she must keep it if she can. Like the wives in the Cook’s and Shipman’s tales, Alysoun is herself the cash nexus of her domestic economy. She generates purchasing power through a physical act: hence, like the women in the Reeve’s Tale who become surrogate mills, she comes to embody the domestic world over which she presides. In this earthy—some would say immoral—way, Alysoun is wholly identified with her world. But moral outrage seems wasted on her: the “good” she trades for is richer than one might think. Certainly it can mean objects (“goods”), but logically it must also mean money and the control of it; freedom of movement (“at oure large” [line 322]); freedom from suspicion (line 321); freedom to trade (“Have thou ynogh, what thar thee recche or care / How myrily that othere folkes fare?” [lines 329–30]); and perhaps even that lucent pearl, free will (“I wol hym noght” [line 307]). By investing herself, Alysoun creates her wife’s estate and the well-being necessary to life. What else could she possibly want? Central to the Man of Law’s Tale is an astronomical trope, the primum mobile, or highest sphere of creation, which spins from east to west, drawing the stars and everything below them—including Custance’s boat—in a westward, or “deathward,” flow. That sort of fate, strong enough to test the human will, is also at work in the Wife’s account, except that for her it is the entropic drag of age. Custance finds herself drifting farther and farther from home, into a strange ocean, a new language, a world of anonymous exile. Alysoun drifts progressively farther from her original youth, beauty, and strength. Husband by husband she moves, like Everyman, beyond her splendid physical powers until she is sustained chiefly by the incomparable spirit that has captured so many generations of readers: But age, allas, that al wole envenyme, Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith. Lat go. Farewel! The devel go therwith! The flour is goon; ther is namoore to telle; The bren, as I best kan, now moste I selle; (Lines 474–78)

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For Alysoun, age is like the poverty that the Man of Law decries in his prologue. It is really the only thing she cannot fight,6 yet instead of diminishing her, it reveals with stark clarity the heroic aspect of her character. It is not her spurs and shieldlike hat, but her courage in the face of defeat, that reminds us of Byrhtnoth and his companions-in-arms on Maldon Field, their hearts ever stronger as their strength grows less. In the Wife’s domestic comedy, this core of isolated self-awareness anchors the narrative, creating the tragic dimension of her otherwise wholly ordinary character. “Ordinariness,” however, in the sense of our daily struggles, is precisely what saves Alysoun from the bloodlessness of Custance, who lives in the world, but is definitely not of it. Custance does experience adversity, yet the wild waves and rapist knights surge and slide away, leaving nary a trace. Alysoun merely has problems, but she has the scars to prove it. Custance, to be exact, represents an idea, while the Wife embodies our life experience. That is why her works and days of marriage can—indeed, must—be reported in such depth and variety of detail. Custance, of course, remains “unwemmed” through everything, a pure reflection, or mediatrix of the divine idea, while Alysoun is anything but pure. But while Custance holds her course despite (in fact, because of ) the winds, tides, and currents of the sea, not to mention the forces of the inner world (anger, envy, desire, and so on [II.1135–38]), the Wife’s constancy, constellating the myriad small crises of marriage, is her “maistrie” over the domestic realm of house and husband. “Maistrie” is a master trope in the Wife’s discourse because it is polyvalent. Most simply, it refers to her central position in the house. She is the chatelaine, directing its small economy. Then there is the husband, and his needs and wants, which must be taken care of, and his criticisms, which must be answered, canceled, “quit.” Overcoming the husband, getting “the soveraynetee” (line 818), as Alysoun finally does in her fifth marriage, is probably how she—and most readers—best understand “maistrie.” But more is involved than simply that. For there are women’s desires, too, in Alysoun’s domestic world. What do women want? Very often, perhaps, if we can interpolate from her tale, they vary in what they want and why they want it. They certainly cannot agree on it. But if Alysoun’s prologue is any indication, a woman’s many desires (no more, surely, yet no less conflicting than a man’s) dwell comfortably together under her domestic rule. From the outside, this “order” might seem anarchic. But from the Wife’s empathic center, “maistrie” creates a free or neutral space, a sort of charmed fairy ring where consistency is absent, or at least not a pressing issue, while variety and vitality find safe harbor. In this sense, “maistrie” is a guarantor of personal needs, a kind of substitute for the care, understanding, and respect that a wife should receive from a husband—but then, as the Man of Law says (in behalf of his young “client,” Custance):

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Are we justified in calling “maistrie” the “constancy” of the Wife of Bath? It does seem her invariable goal in marriage, whether she is married to rich old men, a playboy, or a clerk. In her tale, “maistrie” is initially the sentence of the queen that sends the thoughtless young knight into an aporia of women’s desires. Later, it is the necessity of marriage, thrusting him into the dilemma of his wife’s poverty and old age. Confronting this reality, he (with the aid of some fairy-tale magic) achieves a kind of freedom from it. For Alysoun as well, perhaps, “maistrie” is finally less a hunger for dominance than her profound need to be “at oure large” (line 322) within a domestic autarchy where, for want of other support, she can grant herself tolerance, self-respect, and care. The problem with “maistrie” is that men and marriages, like the world itself, are inherently unstable; under the best governance, they pass away and one is “forsaken,” exiled once again. This hollow-sounding word appears soon after the Wife describes her marriage to the “joly clerk” Jankyn. It refers to Simplicius Gallus (line 643) and another “Romayn” in Jankyn’s antifeminist book, men who “forsook” their wives (women apparently undeserving of such a fate). But if the threat that shadows “maistrie” is losing the marriage, to be cast adrift once more, then “maistrie” must be supported by “purveyance / Of mariage” (lines 570–71). A successful wife has a fallback position. This can be a backup story or argument, but especially, should disaster strike, she must be “purveyed of a make” (line 591). This prudent common sense also appears in the Man of Law’s Tale, but in that moral story it is God ’s purveyance that guides the rudderless driftings of Custance, easing her through one barbarian marriage after another. In the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, “purveiance” is a crucial term, because it spotlights her domestic responsibility. Such purveyance is a paradox— worldly, but in a durative sense a labor of the spirit. Sustained over the years of her many marriages, Alysoun’s prudence begins as a need for safety but eventuates as diligent vitality—a kind of strength. She habitually “provides” by walking abroad, traveling, wearing her scarlet “gytes” (her long, form-fitting gowns) so often that they cannot be eaten by moths. This restless moving about—call it drifting—is a worldly shadow of Custance’s voyages. Alysoun’s constant movement from procession to preaching to pilgrimage flushes the marital game, and is essential to her domestic “purveyaunce,” just as Custance’s passive drifting best revealed the divine foresight that guided her on the infinite seas. Alysoun’s mundane spirituality is conveyed most tellingly by the funeral of her fourth husband. Here she veils her eyes with a “coverchief,” partly

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because all widows modestly cover their faces, but also, we suspect, to conceal that she “wepte but smal” (line 592), being “purveyed of a make” in Jankyn, whose legs and feet “so clean and fair” are precisely what she would be seeing under the border of her coverchief. This moment is contextualized, made poignant, in a seriocomic sense, by the parallel scene in the Man of Law’s Tale, where Custance covered the weeping eyes of her little son, Maurice, blocking out the “salte see” (II, line 830) of their approaching exile, as she herself cast her eyes up to heaven and invoked the aid of the Virgin Mother. Both women here confront the imponderable in human experience that we call fate, and both act bravely, one turning up her face to receive heaven’s light, the other seeking the most significant view of her next “provider.” Inside Alysoun Alysoun’s story about domestic governance must, as we have seen, be about governance, but to be compelling, it must also be her story, something she has seen from the inside. The peculiar inwardness, the personal quality of the Wife’s narrative, derives partly from its central point of view, but there are other devices contributing to the illusion.7 I am going to mention the ones that help create our sense of an inner experience.8 Like John’s Alysoun in the Miller’s Tale, Alysoun of Bath is and is not a housebound wife. We understand her partly in terms of her house, for it defines her: she stands for her household and what it signifies. But to be shut in, “contained” by the house, is a different thing. To that she will not agree, even if it is Jankyn’s house: And walke I wolde, as I had doon biforn, From hous to hous, although he had it sworn; (Lines 639–40) It is characteristic of the Wife that she does not stop with rebelling. We see this clearly in her references to the chest where one of her old husbands kept his valuables. Apparently he did not share his wealth—he kept the keys of his chest away from her—but the real problem with such a marriage, from Alysoun’s point of view, is that she too is part of his “good”: Thou shalt not bothe, thogh that thou were wood, Be maister of my body and of my good; .......................................... I trowe thou woldest loke me in thy chiste! (Lines 313–14, 317)

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Turnabout is fair play, however. When the difficult fourth husband dies, it is not surprising that this philanderer is finally boxed up, as the Wife reports it, suffering his own domestic strategy: Lat hym fare wel; God yeve his soule reste! He is now in his grave and in his cheste. (Lines 501–2) The opposition of container and contained expresses Alysoun’s understanding of marriage, but also her inner, subjective experience of it. “Either you or me” is a hard game, and those who live by it may have difficulty believing in winwin solutions. To be fair, the Wife’s years of marriage have provided abundant evidence that husbands can be firm believers in “you lose, I win.” Great tracts of lines are dedicated to reporting what Alysoun’s early, but also her latest, husbands said about women as wives. Let Jankyn’s gnomic jingle stand for many: “Whoso that buyldeth his hous al of salwes, And priketh his blynde hors over the falwes, And suffreth his wyf to go seken halwes, Is worthy to been hanged on the galwes!” (Lines 655–58) His complaint typifies the proverbial (and thus, in a way, unimpeachable) posturing of such remarks, for in effect, every one of these proverbs is a definition. Taken as a whole, they “contain” Alysoun by making her the problem. Alysoun’s response to this pervasive body of opinion must deal with the three authorities implicit in the three sections of her prologue: ecclesiastical authority, traditional male attitudes about women, and men’s authority in marriage.9 As we move inward through these sections, toward the intimate center of Alysoun’s life, both her control over her goods and her freedom to range seem to diminish, and the final scenes actually take place within her house, within a reduced domestic space. Yet as the borders of her domestic authority draw in, her personal qualities seem better defined and more integrated. We begin to see her capacity for affection as well as aggression, and by the end of her prologue there are signs that she has at least some access to the inner freedom that comes with compromise, self-acceptance, and self-mastery.10 The Wife’s first words are a defense of her multiple marriages. She hedges a little over definitions of marriage according to the gospel, then shifts her ground to the relative merits of marriage and virginity. It is amusing to hear her rattling on, but it is pretty obvious that she is perfectly at ease with these old topics, and with the debater’s tricks she uses to manipulate them. As

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a piece of discourse addressed to the churchmen in the pilgrimage, as well as to the laypeople, it is a fluent performance and, in its raffish way, a technically proficient one—a bit of fancy footwork to establish her speaker’s persona, but not a serious apologia. True, these opening words challenge clerical authority, the view of marriage held by the Pardoner and others, but it can be light talk because she has the winning argument: her implied opposition might question her willingness to persevere in marriage, but she can and does reduce virginity to an isolated absurdity, marginalized by the universal necessity for procreation. Her argument invokes a central truth that cannot be answered by the keener logic or specialized knowledge of clerks: were the organs of generation made merely for purgation of urine, and to distinguish male from female? “The experience woot wel it is nought so” (line 124). Indeed, her claim regarding the Pauline marriage “dette” is that marriage constitutes her right—as wife—both to lovemaking and, possibly, payments in cash: An housbonde I wol have—I wol nat lette— Which shal be bothe my dettour and my thral, And have his tribulacion withal Upon his flessh, whil that I am his wyf. I have the power durynge al my lyf Upon his propre body, and noght he. (Lines 154–59) This is the voice of Alysoun the strong. It reveals her feeling of ownership (“I wol have . . . have . . . I have . . .”) as well as her conscious control of the physical and rhetorical situation that represents marriage as she knows it. In the middle section of her prologue, Alysoun lectures on her “practik,” her applied strategies for managing a marriage. Her implied audience now includes “Ye wise wyves” (line 225), her everyday auditors for this kind of discourse, and her arguments are an actual reprise of what her three old, rich husbands said about her, and what she said in return to “quit” them. This is her response to the social authority of entrenched male bias. She wins these exchanges, naturally, for when it suits her she can be a powerful, unrelenting nag: Whoso that first to mille comth, first grynt; I pleyned first, so was oure werre ystynt. (Lines 389–90) In one way or another—“By sleighte, or force, or by som maner thyng” (line 405)—she will get her way, that is plain. This tactic of force-or-fraud—a dilemma for Alysoun’s husbands—reappears as the judgment (force) and

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persuasion (“sleighte”) that “convert” the rapist knight in her tale. Later it surfaces in the Friar’s Tale (rhetorical force) and Summoner’s Tale (rhetorical fraud), which analyze and amplify these themes introduced by the Wife. Yet we also become aware in this section that the Wife has invested herself in these marriages. She has had to give something up to get something in return: For wynnyng wolde I al his lust endure, And make me a feyned appetit; (Lines 416–17) Quid pro quo is arguably the Wife’s favorite among the various formulas that describe her marriages. It typifies her businesslike outlook on marriage, and contributes to the matter-of-fact tone with which she describes her most outrageous stratagems. The frankness of this mercantile attitude prevents her from appearing cynical, and it endows her discourse with a degree of realism many have thought refreshing. Still, she has to pretend an appetite with these subdued old men, and this minor—even, in her view, negligible—sacrifice creates our own awareness of the private effort she must make to “govern.” It reminds us that Alysoun has feelings and reflects upon her experience—that she is not entirely a creature of primal drives and flinty ambitions. This almost accidental motif of sacrifice is a sign that the Wife’s narrative is moving inward, toward regions where she debates with herself, and is not so sure of what she wants. This hint is joined by the playful, almost kindly rendition of what she said to her old husbands after they had offered their “raunsoun”: Thanne wolde I seye, “Goode lief, taak keep How mekely looketh Wilkyn, oure sheep! Com neer, my spouse, lat me ba thy cheke![”] (Lines 431–33) This, after “thogh he looked as a wood leon, / Yet sholde he faille of his conclusion” (lines 429–30). These following words are intimate, simple, soft, the gentle sounds reserved for animals, children, and private life. Part 1 closed with the demanding, implacable language of a domestic tyrant; here, although we are never allowed to forget quid pro quo, a second point of view receives patient, even tender acknowledgment, and the language itself is that of compromise. Parts 1 and 2 have shown us Alysoun’s force and “sleighte,” then, but her account of husband number five amplifies both qualities, and in the process shows us more about her. The section begins as the Wife remembers how she

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wandered through the fields with her “gossyb dame Alys” (line 548), and in this pastoral, springtime setting paid court to Jankyn. She told him she dreamed of him all night—her bed was full of blood, and blood means gold. Wanting to show off her cleverness, she instead reveals the sacrifice she will make in her upcoming marriage. Blood is money, toil, substance, self, and Alysoun will be exchanging all of these, by far her greatest investment in marriage, for golden-haired Jankyn. We sense this in the wandering of her attention (lines 585–86), a narratorial disjunction that suggests other thoughts at perhaps deeper levels. Consequently, when she recovers and resumes her tale, we are not surprised that upon the death of husband number four she immediately gives her heart to Jankyn, an unprecedented yielding up of affection and jealously guarded capital. The difficulty is that Jankyn is no ideal guardian for her forty-someyear-old heart, and she soon regrets giving him her “lond and fee” (line 630) along with her affection. But at some level, Alysoun must have known she made a desperate choice. For after telling us his age, and how youthful she was still (a preemptive move), she explains what moved her to marry. This confessional description of her Venerean feelings and Martian heart is the central declaration of identity in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. Here, as far as she is concerned, is the essential Alysoun:11 Venus me yaf my lust, my likerousnesse, And Mars yaf me my sturdy hardynesse; Myn ascendent was Taur, and Mars therinne. Allas, Allas! That evere love was synne! I folwed ay myn inclinacioun By vertu of my constellacioun; (Lines 611–16) Here are the old attractive and aggressive virtues familiar to us since Palamon and Arcite’s adventures in the Knight’s Tale. The difference here is that they are combined in Alysoun, a woman whose conflicting “inclinaciouns” toward love and battle make her irresistible yet forever contradictory, a paradigm for the conflicts inherent in marriage itself. In the Man of Law’s Tale, there are analogous revelations, when Custance identifies, in apostrophe, with the crucified Christ (lines 451–62), and later with the enduring “pitee” of his sorrowing mother (lines 841–54); in these timeless moments, we perceive her identity with God’s will, the basis of her quiet strength. Alysoun’s “identity” with Venus and Mars is different only in the character of her signs. She will follow her “inclinaciouns” as if fated to do so, but they refer to natural qualities, not divine example, necessities as firmly anchored in the human heart as in the heavens. This deeply derived

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sense of identity is the basis of the Wife’s experience, the “authority” she follows in subduing the arguments of the churchmen, the bias of her old husbands, and, finally, even the natural authority of Jankyn’s youthfulness. Soon after the marriage, it is clear that he is by no means as infatuated with her, or as embarrassed by her, as the first four husbands had been; but she will outwit him, somehow. Born to conquer, she will burn the old book that tempers this young man’s will, and he in turn—like the knight in Alysoun’s tale—will have to confront the female reality of her conflicting strengths, because in marrying her he has made them his own.

Who Peyntede the Leon? Readers of the prologue have wondered if Jankyn would have been happy with Alysoun but without his venerable book. His absence, implying death, cancels all bets, but it allows the Wife to paint a fairy-tale picture-story—a cartoon, as it were—of how it could have been, a once and future tale that bears the full wisdom of her “scholeiyng” in five marriages. Who painted the lion? Some have read this tale as the Wife’s way of getting even; others see it as Alysoun’s wish-fulfillment fantasy, the marriage she could not have in real life. In fact, both Alysoun and her husbands are compared to lions at various points in the prologue. Moreover, both sides have already got in their digs, and although the tale probably does represent Alysoun’s wishes, the hungry-heart-fantasy theory seems excessively maudlin. I prefer to read it as an allegory of “maistrie,” not so much mastery over one’s partner in marriage as mastery of oneself.12 The tale begins with a rape described with such economy of detail (he came, saw, “rafte hire maydenhed” [line 888]) that its impact derives less from its brutality than from its pointlessness. Not only does the knight ignore the maiden’s wishes, but he himself seems utterly without direction (unless “lustiness” can be a goal in itself ). When he receives his sentence—a contrapasso, like the punishments in the Inferno—he is naturally perplexed: the women’s wants seem infinitely various, a polar contrast to his own blindly driven intent. This contrast becomes more striking as we realize that anything each woman loves the most is, if not necessarily a noble aim, at least a human trait—a love of flattery, for instance, or freedom, or freedom from blame. Even the inability to keep secrets, which the Wife illustrates by a story from Ovid, is less a weakness than the joyous release of forbidden knowledge (Midas has ass’s ears, i.e., husbands do not understand their wives). The women’s individual wants make them real: a world of women, full of purposes, not mere icons of desire, which is how the knight must have seen the maiden. After a year of listening to what women want, the knight turns homeward, despairing, when at the edge of a forest, he sees some ladies dancing,

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more than twice twelve. As he draws near, they vanish, and only one old, withered woman is left sitting on the grass. The forest itself is suggestive, a darker, alternative locus to the (no doubt) sunny hills of King Arthur’s realm. The dancing ladies may well be fairies. The time and place are right for that. But they are not called fairies, perhaps because that way they remain an emblematic two dozen, standing for all those women the knight had questioned throughout the year. They dance between forest and meadow, between fairy magic—deeply rooted, ancient, obscure—and the splendid, keen-edged fairytale justice of King Arthur.13 The Wife of Bath’s Prologue tempts us to see this forest’s edge as a meeting place of mother wit and social contracts, but in any case the dancers vanish, leaving one old, ugly, but, as it seems, wise woman. If the tale is an allegory, this old “wyf ” is like the Wife herself, her youth vanished, having to devise some way of continuing the “olde daunce” of marriage—and life itself—in the no-man’s land between what women want and what men want. The knight’s quest ends here, though he does not know it yet, because the old wife’s answer—“maistrie”—brings the charmed fairy ring of marriage with it. He plights his “trouthe” (line 1009), and while the answer is now his, it owns him: possessing the truth about women’s desires, he is contained by them, and by their sole representative. What “maistrie” means in marriage, we soon learn. As the knight reports it, “Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee As wel over hir housbond as hir love, And for to been in maistrie hym above.[”] (Lines 1038–40) “Maistrie,” in other words, is “sovereynetee” over her husband and over the love they share. “As hir love” has sometimes been taken to mean “as well as over her lover,” but it is clear from parallel passages— “But if thy wyf I were, and eek thy love.” (Line 1066) “I am youre owene love and youre wyf;” (Line 1091) —that what the old wife really wants is the assent of both her husband’s head and heart. Husband/love, wife/love—these are formulas for union and the resolution of differences. That is why the wife in Ovid’s Midas story says her heart is “al hool” (line 977) when the truth about her husband’s ears is finally

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out. “Maistrie” is simply the acceptance that frees a wife to dance her attitudes, and so maintain the complex integrity of her domestic space.14 Yet there are obstacles to that acceptance, just as there were in Alysoun’s marriage. Alysoun did gain control over Jankyn, but we suspect it was not a happy assent. How, then, is the old wife’s “maistrie” different? On the knight’s wedding night, he “walweth” (line 1085), piglike, twisting about in bed. There is no escape, and so he submits his complaints to his wife: she is ugly, old, her family common and poor. These are not individual qualities, however, like the women’s desires listed earlier, but external perceptions. Like the knight’s lust for the maiden he raped, they are artificial—better, “accidental”—valuations imposed by others, in this case, a husband. The old wife replies with a sermon on essential virtue. The dialectical terms of their disagreement (accidence and essence) recall the Man of Law’s denunciation of poverty, which introduced the story of Custance’s exalted poverty. We think also of Alysoun’s argument that “generation” is essential to life, and virginity a derived or marginal virtue. The old wife merely restates the ancient (Stoic) argument that virtue is as virtue does, thereby dismissing family name and wealth as inessential, trivial, fleeting. Men seek these things in women, of course, but under inspection they are shallow goals. Youth and beauty are harder to let go, but faced with the dilemma of beauty versus core virtues, the knight’s remaining willfulness fades. With tacit assent, he enters his wife’s charmed circle of “maistrie.”15 We have heard the arguments, and seen their conclusion, but why, and how, did they transform the knight? The old wife presents him with a cruel choice, yet it is also true that she leads him to accept the essential, both in her and in himself. What do men want? To live forever, of course, but youth and beauty cannot deliver it. The old wife, like Alysoun herself, has given up her youth, and represents the necessary acceptance of aging and death. Guided by her, and constrained by the dilemma of his fairy-tale marriage, the knight is able to let go of the outer, inessential things about his wife, his marriage, and—at a deeper, more intimately protected level—himself.16 The husband’s assent suggests “maistrie” over himself, then, in addition to the genuine identity that it grants his wife. But is that all she desires? Can she too be transformed, or must she continue to lead him along, dominating by Martian force or erotic “sleighte”? Does she make his assent a prison? In the tale, at least, the wife (and also, perhaps, the Wife), is able to give up control because, like a good governor, she makes a gift of her strength. The force and trickery of Mars and Venus are certainly present in the fairy-tale justice and eroticism of the tale. But it is through her wisdom—the clerk-lore Alysoun has been so long acquiring—that the old wife helps her young husband to let go of himself, thereby restoring him to himself as she is restored by

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his acceptance of her.17 Surely in the real world beyond Alysoun’s envoi, men will always want (the Venus in them), and her Martian heart will conquer. Yet within the lucid world of fairy magic and “maistrie,” she can imagine what it means to have one’s heart “al hool,” and perhaps for just a moment, she achieves it too.

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CHAPTER

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Chaucer’s Spatial Poetics

Chaucerian Spaces What is essential about narrative space, and why should it be an object of critical study? Let us begin with first things, the voice of the narrator and its effect. With the narrator’s first words, a space opens up in our imagination. So far it is not mediated by the assumptions and intentions of the narrator’s persona, which take time to develop, yet here is a perceptual ground, the onset of duration—a virtual space where things can happen. Quickly this space acquires definition. Given the possibility of human presence, features of landscape, built structures, yield a sense of high, wide, deep, and distant, and we begin to infer how human activity might develop within this conceptual frame—how people might dwell here, and what that would mean. We are now quite close to identifying this narrative space with a way of life—chivalric, perhaps, or domestic—with characteristic threats and promises, an ideology, an atmosphere. But underlying all of these perceptions is the impact of that space. Whether it is narrow or vast, class-connected, imagined, or merely potential, narrative space manifests itself in the reader’s sensibility. We internalize narrative space as we read, and that is the reason for its subtlety and elusive power. As readers, we project ourselves, entering imaginatively into the narrative—we could not follow the action if we did not—but at the same time, and more powerfully, those fictive places find a place within our own perceptual horizon, our personally felt sense of being-in-the-world.1 Through this halfinvoluntary, half-willed internalization of a character’s emplacement, we register the extent of Theseus’s freedom as he rides forth into chivalric space, and we gain an intimate, almost somatic sense of Emelye’s cloistered freedom in her spring garden. Thus, the study of narrative space leads to a sense of narrative affect, giving us a richer, more sensible appreciation of the medieval subjects in Chaucer’s poetry, and how, through Chaucer’s eyes, they saw their world It follows that our response to the literary forms of romance, fabliau, exemplum, or lai will vary according to the kinds of narrative space we encounter. Each of them uses space differently, and gives the emplacement of character its own kind of significance. It is difficult to understand the Knight’s Tale, for instance, unless we can appreciate the framing and the dominance of space by men at arms. Surely every reader responds to the heraldic moment when Theseus the

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“conquerour” departs for Thebes amid his “hoost of chivalrie the flour” (I, line 982). Then, having ranged the Grecian plains, we are all the more conscious of the limited confines of Emelye’s garden, and of Palamon and Arcite’s prison cell; we are prepared for the emotional imprisonment the young men suffer, deprived of Emelye, and the paradoxical freedom of Arcite, released to his narrow grave. Other tales with romance elements, such as the Franklin’s or the Squire’s, offer similar contrasts between open perspectives and intimate ones. But the fabliaux belong in or among the buildings of a town. Their significant space is inside or outside the walls of a house, a shop, a garden. It is a world of interiors, where entrances and exits, and ownership, are centrally important, a world where material things are prominent, peoples’ bodies count,2 and small-town savvy can dominate space. In the Miller’s Tale, John’s trips to the country have no bearing on the action except to remove him from it. What matters is the struggle of each man to be in John’s house, and to reserve its riches to himself. Seeing each of them banned from the house precisely because of his efforts to be there, we appreciate the function of private space in this tale, the source of its lighthearted but unyielding small-town poetic justice. Another way of understanding space and place in Chaucer is by analogy with the morality plays that were a familiar entertainment by Chaucer’s time. Here is the mansion of God, and across from it, the mansion of the devil, with mansions of the flesh, pride, and avarice at intervals about the circle. The players move from one mansion to the next, just as Everyman, discouraged by Kindred and Cousin, goes gladly toward (he thinks) the more promising locus of his Worldly Goods. I am not arguing that Chaucer was influenced by these plays, but that his audience had seen them; having read some of them, we too are conditioned by their use of space and recognize a similar use when we see it. In part, the similarity exists because space is dramatic in Chaucer, and is as much about relationships and significant movement and change as it is about character. In the Shipman’s Tale we watch the merchant’s wife coming up to knock at the door of her husband’s little countinghouse, which she is not allowed to enter. But at the end of the tale, when the merchant finally returns home from the market, he meets his wife at the gate to their house. For emphasis, the scene is repeated in her bedroom, where again he is the one asking entrance, and she is, in effect, the gatekeeper. In this tale, trips to the market alternate with walks in the garden (it becomes a domestic marketplace for the wife and the monk daun John), and we are continuously aware of analogies between the wife’s activities in the merchant’s great house and the merchant’s business in Brugges and Paris, out in the world of men. Similar configurations of places exist in the rest of Chaucer’s opening tales. The location of places in space is significant on a stage of any kind, and so it is in Chaucer. If the space of the morality plays is dramatic, it is also allegorical. As Charles Muscatine has pointed out, “In allegory we are free from ordinary

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verisimilitude and see space and locus in their deepest function.” Muscatine offers the example of Prudentius’s Psychomachia, where in a space “suspended somewhere outside the naturalistic world,” the virtues and vices engage each other in armed conflict.3 A later, more realistic use of allegorical space appears in Alain de Lille’s Anti-Claudian, where Alain describes the passage of Prudence through the celestial spheres. The space traversed, with its heavenly garden and House of Fortune, is nevertheless a reified concept, not a natural landscape. But in Dante’s Commedia, the “rationalized pattern” that supports the allegory is poised in balance with “the continuously personal and humane response of the pilgrim who traverses this moral landscape.”4 Dante has many ways of rendering the supernatural journey tangible and natural, and these touches of authenticating realism are integral to the poem. Our response to its moral suasion depends upon recognizing Dante’s journey as our own, a hard road that we must in some way travel. And here at the crossing of allegory and narrative, we have rejoined Chaucer. The way to Canterbury is an easy threeday ride through the fields and townships of Kent, but the voyage out corresponds with a journey inward, and if we never finally reach the shrine of St. Thomas, it is just as well, for that way its deeper sense looms larger. Dante is relevant in still other ways. Piero Boitani once said that in Chaucer we rediscover the sense of space that is so striking in Virgil and Dante. Surely he was referring not merely to Virgil’s underworld and the Inferno, but to the characteristic use of space in both these authors—how space as external grandeur, or threat, can express a character’s inner states or feelings. One thinks of (the character) Dante’s response to Geryon, the fairfaced effigy of fraud, whose scorpion tail quivers behind him where the moral abyss opens, beyond and below. Spatial effects on such a dramatic scale are not frequent in Chaucer, yet his settings resonate with a character’s feelings and intentions, and the interaction tells us, indirectly, where he or she is tending. There is John the carpenter, that heavily defended man, blessing the four corners of his house with magic spells, or Symkyn the miller, equally defended, who dominates a volume of space extending several feet in all directions with the long panade, Sheffield knife, and “jolly” little dagger he always has about his person. In each case, the man’s personal space represents a much larger social space he wishes to dominate—through money and marriage in John’s case, and in Symkyn’s by marriage and theft.

The Poetics of Space As we think about ways in which space and place are meaningful in Chaucer, it is well to bear in mind Archibald MacLeish’s quiet reminder: “A poem must not mean but be.” Spatial relations help us see more in the narrative and

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understand it better, yet by identifying and then codifying an effect that is more powerful for being implicit in the poetry, we run the risk of missing our critical path. Identify it we will—that and many other implicit things—but in all humility, space and place may remain below the threshold of a reader’s attention; they are subordinate features though important ones, and making them the focus of a reading can have the effect of blurring that focus. That said, let us proceed to examine how space and place develop their significance in Chaucer’s poetry, for they are fundamental to our experience as readers. In a spatial sense, the primary material of the Canterbury Tales is their height and breadth, and how the vertical and horizontal orientation of events affects our understanding of the worlds of the tales.5 In the Knight’s Tale, for instance, Theseus’s “olde fader Egeus / . . . knew this worldes transmutacioun, / As he hadde seyn it chaunge bothe up and down” (lines 2839–40); a few lines later he sums things up by saying, “This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo, / And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro” (lines 2847–48). As Egeus’s grim summary implies, nature’s changes in this tale—vicissitudes of fortune, birth, death—seem oriented to a vertical axis, a series of ups and downs, while the activities of men who endure these changes usually have a horizontal, here-and-there quality that ultimately leads nowhere but does serve to place them, to give them their brief presence in space and time. These two axes represent man’s ambiguous relationship with change and time, which imprison yet ultimately sustain him, offering a small share in eternity. The vertical axis, nature’s metamorphoses, reflects men’s endless ups and downs, but it also implies the constancy of change: it reminds us that change is eternal, cyclical, and thus timeless, the “eternity of nature.” The horizontal axis, movement here and there but also social change, reflects the limited durations of men’s journeys, loves, customs (“gyses”), and ambitions. Yet these brief, repetitive, and thus typical presences in time also imply a social continuity, the aristocratic “social eternity” that comes to mind when someone says that the characters and events of the Knight’s Tale resemble figures in a tapestry.6 The dimensions of the Knight’s Tale begin to emerge when Theseus raises the Argive ladies who grovel before him as none of the highborn should ever have to do, and when he brings down the tyrant Creon, who left the Argives to rot where they fell at the siege of Thebes. And then the many ups and downs of Palamon and Arcite: when one is in prison the other goes at large; but when Arcite returns to Athens (back to the prison of love, in effect), Palamon escapes. After all, they are lovers, “Now up, now down, as boket in a welle” (line 1533). But the long curves of their lives have the same alternating movement, first buried in a heap of dead bodies, then borne “softely” to Theseus, who sends them to prison perpetually . . . and so on until Arcite ends up in his “colde grave” (line 2778) and Palamon in the ashes of his grief. Did Cadmus follow the same rhythms when he buried the dragon’s teeth, only to

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have them spring up as armed warriors, fighting each other, then serving him eight years, as long as Palamon and Arcite courted Emelye? Cosmic events seem to have a similar up-and-down quality. Each of the four parts of the tale contains a sunrise that accompanies one of the main characters—first it is Emelye, then Arcite, Palamon, and Theseus—while at midpoint and at the end, a sunset signals the close of combat and later death. Of course, the fall of Arcite from his horse is also a vertical relationship: in his moment of victory he looks up at Emelye and she looks down at him—as if she were Diana in the temple painting, gazing down at a woman suffering in childbirth, and toward the underworld that is also her kingdom. And the horizontal dimension? Chivalric space in the Knight’s Tale is essentially two-dimensional—an area, infinitely extendable, where there is freedom to roam but nowhere to climb. As in other aristocratic romances, the action is discursive and cyclical, looping out and returning home at last because its true subject is not self-transcendence (as in tragedy or bourgeois romance) but extension: a gradual revelation of character through the varied adventures of an essentially unchanging literary type. In romances this revelation is achieved by engaging the hero with a succession of similar types—mirror figures—and that is the formal reason why Palamon and Arcite are so much alike: driven out into the “wyde world” by passion, they confront each other recurrently, and their similarity forces attention to the mysterious causality of their different intents and fates. Appropriately, Palamon and Arcite are themselves examples of the extensive, timeless activities of this chivalric society; their fitful passions lead them back and forth between Thebes and Athens, the extremes of decayed and upright chivalry, which between them sum up the chivalric world. In the other tales under discussion, vertical and horizontal dimensions remain evident, but for the most part they apply to a smaller world where merchants keep shop, wives keep house, and for years, Custance is confined to her little boat. In the Miller’s Tale, the vertical dimension appears, perhaps ironically, in the elevation of John’s house. Its highest part is Nicholas’s bedroom, where he gazes upward, he says, at the stars whose secrets (“Goddes pryvetee” [line 3454]) he claims to share. Its lowest margin, by contrast, is the shot window where silly Absolom receives his terrible kiss. In this social allegory of heaven and hell, man’s proper place is Alysoun’s bed (middle earth, so to speak); but all three men are banished from it, brought low by prideful folly. The world of the Miller’s Tale also extends horizontally, for around John’s house is the social space defined by the town of Oxford, and beyond it, the natural space of the countryside, with the fruits and flowers, morning milk, wooly sheep, frisky colts, and weasels that echo so fetchingly in Alysoun’s person. The house is representative, an ideal place where, it is implied, a man enjoys everything that is good in this town-and-country world. It follows that

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journeys away from the house seem irrelevant to the action, while each man seeks dominion within the house, whether by fancy, cleverness, or simple hard work. The house in the Reeve’s Tale is central to its world, but while John’s house seemed to contain the richness of its world, Symkyn’s house and mill represent a lack, a hunger that drains the resources of the country round. Extension in horizontal space—journeys to and from Soler Hall, Cambridge, and of course the fens—is once more associated with ambition and vocation, but vertical space is harder to find. The exception is the (providential?) light of the moon, which allows Symkyn’s wife to smite this “false clerk” on what she thinks is his white nightcap. The relationship between plenty and hunger reappears in the Cook’s Tale, where Perkyn’s move from a good shop to a bad one allows us a glance toward the lower depths of London. The vertical relationships in the earlier tales that hinted at cosmic and natural cycles, moral elevation, and the dynamic between earth and heaven are replaced in the Reeve’s and Cook’s tales by a social and commercial hierarchy whose height and depth are marked by mercantile transactions. Hence the jarring transition to the world of the Man of Law’s Tale, where merchants are praised in the headlink but displaced in the tale, which is about Custance’s divine commerce of self-sacrifice. Here too are journeys: years elapse as she drifts from one sea to another, but the vast emptiness is her bounty, because God’s power and will are her sail and rudder. The great moments of this tale are vertically oriented ones when Custance looks toward heaven, identifying herself with Christ and his mother. The tale is thus a Christian answer to the layered Boethian worldview of the Knight’s Tale. And after the infinite God-filled space of Custance’s sea and sky—the Wife of Bath, at home. Home is the seat of Alys’s “maistrie,” a central place where the glossing of friars, the nagging of husbands, and the male wisdom of old books is turned about, internalized, and brought to bear on the intimate problem of marriage. Even more than in the Man of Law’s Tale, the Wife’s world is oriented by a dynamic of outer and inner. The mercantile hierarchy of the Reeve’s and Cook’s tales has been internalized as a scale of ethical being. Custance invested herself in good works, and her yield was God’s bounty, a kind of freedom. Alys invests herself in a series of marriages, but finally what she has to show for it is not the wealth or security she appears to be seeking, not even the postadolescent love of a boy like Jankyn, but (at least in her tale) the kind of freedom and strength that comes with accepting her own mortal weakness and that of others. It is as if the vertical and horizontal worldscape of the Knight’s Tale had been diminished and mercantilized by the three fabliaux, then internalized, made personal: at the climax of this movement, the world is ordered not by the dynamic of society and nature, or the endless attraction and aggression of commerce, but by the centered, domestic point of

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view of the Wife herself, an interior dimension without artificial limits. This is the world according to Alys of Bath, and subsequent tales will be oriented less by geography, architecture, or cosmology than by the sensibilities and intentions of their tellers. A second major feature of spatial poetics, and a recurrent one in the opening tales, is the progression from a confined to a more extensive space. This pattern seems to be associated with the way Chaucer constructs narratives, starting with someone thinking, praying, dreaming, or peering out at the landscape from inside a small room, and then introducing that person into a larger space—a grove, perhaps, or even an amphitheater—where what had been thought is acted out in a dramatic conflict. A vivid example is the opening scene of the Book of the Duchess. The narrator falls asleep in bed, his eyes weary from reading and his heart heavy with who knows what, only to wake into a dream where light pouring through the wall of his bedroom makes a lucent page glowing with words he had read that night. The vision draws him up, out of the room (or through the text), and into the sunny meadow of his dream. The formulaic escape of idea into act, or seeing to doing, seems natural; it is almost a necessary event, because it is driven by fundamental desires. What was melancholic and suppressed is played out through an almost therapeutic exchange with the Black Knight. In the tales we are discussing, the mood of the transition varies; frustrated love can lead to combat, as in the Knight’s Tale, or the confining ambition of a man like Symkyn can drive two young clerks into bed with his wife and daughter. The relationship between what is thought in a narrow place and what is acted out in a larger one can be revealing, ironic, and even pathetic (one thinks of Arcite’s death), but always it amplifies and analyzes what earlier took the form of idea. Expansion in space tends to complicate the narrative and reveal character, whether it is Emelye’s tacit persona or the darkly ironic Symkyn or Perkyn Revelour. Such expansion resembles the habit of mind engaged in glossing a biblical text, teasing it out by dialectical reasoning and exempla until it forms part of a sermon. Another parallel is the rhetorical art of memory, as Mary Carruthers explains. The res, or inner idea, is “clothed” with words, phrases, tropes, and exempla that express but never perfectly match the inner idea, which has been learned and meditated on at length by the speaker or writer.7 In Chaucer as well, movement from a smaller to a larger space means going from potential to actual, from that which is implied or constrained to a more fully realized state of being. A third feature of spatial relationships is Chaucer’s habit of creating an opposition at the beginning of a tale—the rivalry between Palamon and Arcite is an example—and by granting each character a particular kind of space, increasing the separation until the climax, when the extremes (which are often simply men’s pretensions) collapse together in a more complex and realistic

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aftermath. Palamon has been in prison at the center of the chivalric world, Arcite in exile—one the obsessed lover-suppliant, the other a restless battler for victory and fame. The lover then escapes, while the warrior, lonely in exile, returns to the center. They encounter each other, fight, then fight again. Arcite dies, and his spirit leaves the world of chivalry, while Palamon remains to marry and create a blood-bond between Athens and Thebes. In their fated affinities for the center and periphery of chivalry, Palamon and Arcite recapitulate the distant campaigns of Theseus and his final return to Athens, now his domestic center. More profoundly, their characteristic emplacements (one in prison, one mobile) suggest the powers of Venus and Mars—attraction and aggression—that rule the intimate hearts of men. Other rival pairs are easily discovered—Nicholas and Absalom (“Alwey the nye slye / Maketh the ferre leeve to be looth” [lines 3392–93]) for instance, or Alleyn and John, and in the Shipman’s Tale, the merchant and the monk daun John. In each case, one man is central, the other peripheral, to the emplacement of the woman in that tale and to the values she embodies. These paired plots are ancient, joining the folktale tradition as early as the Egyptian Tale of Two Brothers, and figuring prominently in the European fabliaux. In Chaucer, their spatial relations may be associated with gender or class distinctions (we remember the female register of terms used to describe Absalom), or those of city/country, as when Symkyn invites the clerks to use their logic to make his tiny cottage larger. In the Shipman’s Tale, the two men’s professions are opposed, but soon the merchant adopts a monkish gravity and the monk a merchant’s willingness to deal, while the wife negotiates deals of her own in her market surrogate, the garden. Her final situation is a good illustration of how these neat oppositions collapse into a sustainable complexity—in this case, a mercantile marriage that unites the merchant’s strengths (“Hardy and wise, and riche”) with others that the wife seems to have borrowed from the monk, namely, “free . . . buxom . . . and fresshe abedde” (VII, lines 176–77).

Characters in Place We know characters by their looks and speech, and by the ways others react to them, but our sense of their indwelling selfhood does not spring solely from these overt features; if Chaucer gave them little to say, we would know little more about them than their initial portraits, were it not for the significance and the sensory effect of their emplacement. Perkyn Revelour, for instance, says nothing at all in his fragment of a tale, but he is a “propre short felawe” (I, line 4368) with dark skin and dark hair, neatly combed, who dances well and is fond of women. More important is his hopping, singing, dancing, and dicing in the streets of London, his fornicating (if that is what he does “in

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place of pryvetee” [line 4388]), and occasionally his being marched off to Newgate prison with others of his kind. These scenes, flashing vividly upon our imagination, establish the compelling lowness and vitality of this “joly prentys” (line 4399) and his chaotic street life. Perkyn is not safe, not businesslike, and he certainly does not belong in the master vitailler’s guild-regulated shop. Yet already he has given us a sense of why he belongs in the carnival world of the London streets, a world where he is in place, resonating with its jangled melody. An example of emplacement from the Knight’s Tale shows how little our feelings of inwardness depend upon realistic character portrayal. When Venus, opposed by Mars and Diana, turns to her grandfather (“aiel”) for a solution, he establishes our feeling for his power through an appalling dark litany: Myn is the drenchyng in the see so wan; Myn is the prison in the derke cote; Myn is the stranglyng and hangyng by the throte, The murmure and the cherles rebellyng (Lines 2457–60) This frightening passage achieves its effect through the sensationalism of its rhetoric, which subjects us to the physical and moral chaos of Saturn’s rule. Within this lurid vision there is no escape, no refuge, only the infinite horrors of violent death spiraling down into oblivion. Saturn is merely a life principle, not a character, yet when contextualized by his threatening world he takes on the power of its menace, personifying and focusing the threat, giving it the frightening possibility of intention. Thus emplaced, old Saturn becomes as “real” for us as Egeus or even Theseus; when we accept him as the lord of misfortune, we dwell within the horizon of events that define him, and for an awful moment, we feel his power. But if Perkyn Revelour and Saturn are essentially cameos, does it follow that the pilgrim portraits in the General Prologue are similarly emplaced by their clothing, manners, deeds, and the minutiae of vocation? It would be so, if each were situated within a narrative, or even within the frame story that develops after the General Prologue. In narrative a character belongs to a fictional world with a past and future and the necessities of remembering, being, and becoming. This person is instantly in movement through time, engaged in constant change, and every situation, every place, will be significant to the bundle of memories and possibilities that constitute condicioun for that person. Characters interact with their emplacement; indeed, the correspondence between person and place gives us access to character. If place is not meaningful, that too is significant, producing anomie.8 Place constructs character, then, and places anchor the fictional world in what we recognize as reality.

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Entering the world of Symkyn, for example, we are immediately aware of the horizon of his emplacement. “At Trumpyngtoun,” the narrator begins, “nat fer fro Cantebrigge, / Ther gooth a brook, and over that a brigge, / Upon the whiche brook ther stant a melle” (lines 3921–23). We are in or near a small country town, not far from the larger university town of Cambridge. There is a bridge across a brook, and on the brook—perhaps even on the bridge itself— there is a mill. Surely the miller’s business is enhanced by its location at a place one can cross the brook, and it seems likely that some business might come from nearby Cambridge. And since university business would mean dealing with manciples—or their charges, the half-educated clerks—there is potential for class rivalry, for friction between town and gown. We have not seen Symkyn at this point and do not know that he is proud as a peacock, that his presence is enhanced by a panoply of sharp blades, always at the ready, and that he wears red hose to match his wife’s assertive red gown. These latter details are vivid suggestions of who Symkyn is and what we may expect of him, but they do not create his emplacement. His fundamental situation, his place in regard to the land and its people, has already been established, and subsequent information will add substance to this schematic basis for character and plot. Not every character has the extraordinarily centered quality of Symkyn, of course, and often their emplacement is partial and fleeting. Palamon and Arcite begin in a heap of Theban and Argive dead; then we see them framed by their prison cell, the nearby grove, their oratories, Theseus’s amphitheater, and finally the funeral pyre and marriage to Emelye. Their emplacement changes but they do not; rather, each emplacement—natural, chivalric, or both—reveals a different feature of their already formed identities. Absalom’s place is not within the walls of his bedroom, like Nicholas, or in a house, like Alysoun and John. His place is the town of Oxford, the locus of his myriad activities, without which he would be unremarkable or even invisible. Custance’s narrative resembles Greek romance in its apparent placelessness. We see so little of Rome, Syria, or Northumberland that it might be said she has no surroundings at all in those places, just good deeds, relationships, and misfortunes. Only in her endless drifting do we discover her emplacement, framed by reaches of sea and sky where people and things are absent but God is ever present, an overarching, prescient power that vindicates her humble acceptance, guiding her through the labyrinthine waste of wind, wave, and current.

Inner Space The paradox of Custance is the power of her humility. Utterly alone, far from family influence or any worldly concern, she drifts beneath the open sky, sub-

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missive to the will of God yet achieving a quiet greatness that critics find hard to define. What happens, I believe, is that being in harmony with her emplacement, Custance seems essentially at one with it; the infinite heavens, filled with the spirit of God, are her intimate surroundings—better, they seem part of her own essence, as though their sublimity issued from her as it does from the grandeur of the sky. But her presence is a matter of perception, not theology. Just as we ourselves take in the majesty of storm clouds or a flaming sunset, or register within ourselves the familiar rightness of the trees and houses on our street, so that the neighborhood chimes in a comforting way with our inner sense of its shapes and intervals, characters in fiction may appear to embody the conditions of their emplacement, as if they had internalized its space.9 Here, for example, is Theseus, riding with Ypolita and Emelye into the May-time fields and forests, drawn by his sheer “joye and appetite” (line 1680) to hunt the stag in the service of Diana. Seeing Palamon and Arcite in mortal combat, he separates, questions, and condemns these unruly Thebans, but immediately all of the women fall to their knees, weeping. He reconsiders, and we hear an extraordinary monologue spoken within the heart of the angry duke: “Fy / Upon a lord that wol have no mercy, / But been a leon, bothe in word and dede” (lines 1773–75); the women have called up his mercy, and thus he is able to subdue the lion of his anger. This in contrast to Palamon and Arcite, who fight in blood up to the ankle like lion, tiger, or foaming boar. The young knights reflect the natural scene from within, as it were, embodying the savagery of nature. The grove is an emplacement for all three men: three hunters whose hearts are now the quarry. Yet Theseus’s heart is wiser—seasoned by experience, and perhaps by marriage—and it internalizes the power of this natural place in a way that is characteristic of “his wysdom and his chivalrie” (line 865). This chapter has reviewed some ways space is used in Chaucer, beginning with space as a world of potential or constraint and moving inward toward place as the horizon of a character’s emplacement, a containing and revealing volume of space. Now we have come to inner space—inscape—space transformed by the imagination, a reflective internal world oriented, sustained, and troubled by a character’s life experience. Like us, Chaucer’s characters imagine, and thus internalize, the world, as is revealed by their speech, action, thoughts, and feelings. Yet we will find no romantic Werthers in the Knight’s Tale, only a Palamon and Arcite whose angst and weltschmerz emerge in formalized complaints about their human condition, which holds for them the promises and limitations young men suffer everywhere. Occasionally, critics have tried to endow these boys with personality, or selfhood, yet they are not characters in a novel but character types; their typical unhappiness is most meaningful in reference to our own emotional lives, not theirs. They do have

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feelings, however, and to the extent that they feel imprisoned (Palamon) or exiled (Arcite) by love, fate, or the gods, they also have inner worlds: the worlds they so formally describe in their debates, and especially in their complaints and prayers. I am arguing that Palamon and Arcite have a kind of formalized subjectivity: their inner life, such as it is, consists of their feelings and other responses to the threats and promises of chivalric and natural space; their ties to their immediate emplacement (places like the prison cell or the grove); and their inward, internalized senses of the world, as reflected by their rhetorics of protest. In the sentimental, more realistic world of Boccaccio’s Teseida, Palamone and Arcita possess distinctive personalities; in the Knight’s Tale, they represent basic human tendencies, small parts of a complex, panoramic worldview. For other characters in Chaucer, the correspondence between being and behavior is usually less allegorical—it is typical, yet a more subtle representation of how we ourselves internalize our experience. Symkyn’s wife, for instance, is drawn into bed with John the clerk because that is where she finds her baby’s cradle—and it is so dark in the little house, and she has been exploited by Symkyn for so long. By contrast, when she gives Symkyn his thump on the head, this second error is an internalization of the estres of the house, which she knows so well; it is a blow struck in defense of her social station, as she imagines it to be. But Symkyn’s internal world is a reductive one of great riches within a narrow space. A sardonic host, he invites the clerks to “make a place / A myle brood of twenty foot of space” (lines 4123–24), but isn’t that what he himself has done in grinding the grain for the entire region, year by year, and steadily enriching his modest yeoman’s estate by appropriating the flour? Boundless ambition and limited resources collide in this tale, creating the paradox of a miller whose rural cleverness masquerades grandly as university wit. The “false clerk” that Symkyn’s wife strikes by moonlight is only a miller whose clerkly pretension was his only greatness. The Miller’s Tale is another ironic celebration of inner space. Each of the three men imagines a private world in which Alysoun will be exclusively his. John hangs three tubs (arks!) from the rafters, dreaming of an empty green world where no one but he will have Alysoun. Absalom performs constantly for the people of Oxford—Absalom the actor, Absalom the lover—and all he needs to confirm the “reality” of his narcissistic love-fantasy is a little kiss from Alysoun. Nicholas’s imagined world is the most compelling, because it comes close to the reality of his life in Oxford. His vision of the second flood is probably not very different from other predictions he makes for townspeople. And in making sure Absalom knows that he, not Absalom, is inside the house, Nicholas is merely reconstructing what everyone but Absalom knows to be true. In each case, the internalized world is a compensation for hurt pride:

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John’s, the awareness that Alysoun can never really be his; Absalom’s, the need for acceptance that even his endless activities cannot win for him; and Nicholas’s, the sure knowledge that despite his “hende” cleverness, he has no house or wife of his own, but must pay rent to a “riche gnof ” like John for a room and, in effect, for Alysoun. The most fully developed inner world in these opening tales, perhaps in any tale, is the woman’s world constructed by Alysoun of Bath. The inwardness of this world is suggested first by its opposition to the commonplace, male-oriented point of view that Alys sets herself against: having somehow disposed of five husbands, she is looking for another, and her extended prologue, a kind of apologia, answers every man’s curiosity about a woman for whom marriage is less a duty than a tool. Alysoun’s opposition is an inner truth defined against an infinitely extended outer space of men’s assumptions—the apothegms, sardonic verses, moral exempla, and wry jokes by which men reassure themselves that women are an exception to the rule. To marginalize these doctrinaire assumptions, Alys undercuts them, descending nearer the necessity of sexual life than any clerkly argument can go and reveling in it, magnifying its low reality in a series of metaphors about brown bread and wooden vessels that draw their power from everyday experience. Alysoun’s point of view derives from her centrality to the domestic space of her marriage. The basins, platters, spoons, pots, and other household items mentioned in this part of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue lend their significance to her marital role: she is as much a part of her husband’s belongings as any of her household goods, and if she is wise, she will make sure he pays dearly for what he has. Quid pro quo: “al is for to selle” (III, line 414). But logically, if she has traded sexual favors for her domestic space, it is an embodied domain won and maintained by her trading. In her tale, the device of embodiment appears again when the more than twenty-four dancing maidens disappear, and one old, withered hag is found replacing them, embodying all of the world’s women, if that is what they represented. At the end, when the ancient wife turns young and beautiful, we see the answering motif: she is the embodiment of a marriage in which man and wife find in each other the essential things of life. But as Alysoun would surely point out, my account of her inner space lacks the critical element of “maistrie.” Mastery, governance, control in marriage, it all comes down to the same thing—not dominance over a spouse, although many readers have seen it that way, but the ability to create a domestic space where one is in place, sustained by one’s surroundings and free to remain so. This domestic horizon can be described as an inner space because, as the metaphoric equivalent of her self-determination, it is constantly re-created, given new imaginative form, through the debates, disquisitions, and repartee by which she sharpens her wits and reestablishes herself in the face

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of advancing age. For Alysoun, as for other characters in these opening tales— Emelye in her garden, for instance, or Custance in her little boat—personal domain is an expression of subjectivity, a kind of selfhood.10 Both the Wife and the old wife in her tale are last seen in the heart of their households, by the kitchen fire and in bed, because in each case their “maistrie” within this space signifies who they are. Their rhetorical, sexual, and emotional attempts to create a free space in the midst of bondage remain with us as acts of emplacement, shadowing forth their identity. In the Wife’s case, these acts create for us her final triumph, her unique, indwelling, reflective sense of self.

Spatial Questions in Later Tales In the worlds of Chaucer’s later tales, space and place continue to be central. The need for spatial relationships is related to Chaucer’s fondness for enclosures and framing spaces, which calls for houses with their various rooms and windows, but also gardens, groves, and amphitheaters, oratories and privies, and coffins, boats, and bathtubs. Enclosures in turn create a potential, and practically a need, for distinctions between inside and outside, and for the answering distinctions of prison or exile, inclusion or exclusion, heavenly or hellish. Often these distinctions collapse ironically into each other, since a particular space might be heaven or hell, depending upon who is there.11 One enclosure may be paired with another, and thus amplified, contracted, or contrasted, with definite implications for those concerned. And then there is the possibility of enclosures whose smallness is constraining, scarcely to be borne, considering the vast spaces without—and equally the tiny places that somehow contain the vast resources of surrounding space. All of these spatial relationships and others like them occur within the opening tales, and we continue to discover them in other tales. We would not say that Chaucer has an architectonic vision, as is sometimes said of Dante, but rather that he has a strong sense of social identity, which accounts for the feast of rhetoric that is the Canterbury Tales and also for the enclosures and framing devices that divide people’s experience, or combine it, creating a necessity for dialogue, dialectic, role-playing, and subterfuge. Looking for enclosures in the later tales, we might begin with the fabliaux, since their practical realism, sustained by what Muscatine calls their “hedonic materialism,”12 usually calls for the detailed interiors of houses. In the Summoner’s Tale, for instance, we follow the friar into the house of Thomas, who has long been ill, and then into the sick man’s bedroom. The friar’s facile rhetoric enfolds the man, coddling and flattering him, probing for a weakness that might permit one more contribution to the already wealthy chapter house. “Put in thyn hand doun by my bak” (III, line 2140), replies Thomas,

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“and grope wel bihynde. Bynethe my buttok there shaltow fynde A thyng that I have hyd in pryvetee.” (III, lines 2141–43) The friar reaches far in—here, in this innermost place, are there riches?—but an enormous fart is all he gets for his trouble. Disappointed and angry, the friar spills the story to the rich man down the lane, and an adolescent squire, with deadpan irony, offers a practical way to share the fart with the brotherhood—for sharing was the point, was it not? The story turns upon the distinction between inside and outside, “pryvetee” versus the public good, and it is not deeply funny unless we can visualize the way in which inner and outer are reified, made literal by spatial dimensions. In another fabliau, the Merchant’s Tale, we find a bedroom, a privy, and a garden. None of these places is what it seems. The bedroom is where May, January’s young bride, most resembles Proserpina, goddess of the spring, who was abducted by the ruler of the underworld and forced to spend half of every year as his queen. May’s trip down to the privy is her underworld journey. Casting into it the pieces of a love letter she has just read, she seems to gain purpose and resolve, for the words have also entered her heart. And the garden, where January feels a springlike lustiness, is both heaven and hell— heaven, because that is where he has May to himself, and hell because that is where May is ravished by a squire called Damien. Note that May throws her letter down into the privy, but climbs up January’s back to be in the tree with her lover. The maid stoops to conquer, as it were, descending (to the depth of January’s own self-centeredness) to find her strength. The Franklin’s Tale with its garden is in some ways a companion to the tale of January, though it is more courtly and lyrical, more like a Breton lai, as some have said. Here too are depths—the treacherous channel with its “grisly feendly rokkes blake” (V, line 868)—but finally it is a bourgeois fear of falling that best describes Arveragus and his highborn wife. The garden is where Dorigen gambles her virtue for a fantasy world in which all the terrible rocks are gone away; but the permanent fall is that of Arveragus, to whom appearances seem more important, and real, than the life of Dorigen. The ethical hierarchy of the tale is illumined by a contrast between the sun, moon, and tides, which (like “gentillesse” itself ) smooth matters over, and the underlying channel rocks that endure despite any amount of polite words, magic, or sentiment. Spaces small and great are the basis of the Monk’s Tale, told by a man who cannot keep to his cell. The tales he has there, one hundred tragedies or more, issue forth in no particular order, but in ever expanding length, defying the most heroic attempt to invest them with meaning. The man himself has

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lost his place in things, and his tales reflect that. The Prioress’s Tale begins with narrow places that, for better or worse, express universal truths. The little clergeon of the tale walks through the narrow defile of the local Jewish ghetto twice every day, and finds his death in the even smaller confines of a privy. From there he is carried, singing, to the abbot, who gives him a martyr’s burial in a marble casket. The expansion in space from privy to joyous song to martyrdom is focused by the grain on the boy’s tongue, a gift of the Virgin, which signifies that the immensity of God lies within a single seed, or in a child’s innocence. The murky subtext of this expansion is the punishment of the Jews, torn limb from limb by wild horses. Toward the end of the Canterbury Tales, we encounter further contrasts between small and great, notably St. Cecilia, roasted night and day in a “bath,” or cauldron, yet carrying out her “leveful bisynesse” (VIII, line 5) by a saintly endurance that multiplies the faithful.13 Consider the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, where whole lives are sacrificed to the “elvysshe craft” (VIII, line 751) of “multiplying” base metals, but always the attempted transformation comes to nothing: “we concluden everemoore amyss” (VIII, line 957). Or the Manciple’s Tale, in which even the power of speech dwindles to nothing in an expanding cloud of words. Most frightening of all these reductions, it seems to me, is the end of the Pardoner’s Tale, where Harry Bailly’s unanswerable insult renders the Pardoner speechless. When those hauntingly elegant, multivariant tones cease, the Pardoner himself seems to disappear; his ethical capital spent, he becomes, like Conrad’s Kurtz, a mere voice, and when the voice is stopped, nothing. It is sobering but finally a relief to encounter the Parson’s “myrie tale in prose” (X, line 46), which turns inward from the worlds of the tales toward contemplation and a final conclusioun.

Notes

Preface 1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), xxxii. 2. Ibid., xxxvi. 3. Ibid., xxxvii. 4. Ibid., xvi. 5. Ibid., xxxvii.

Introduction 1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 27–28. 2. Ibid., 17. 3. Ibid. 4. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991): “Is space a social relationship? Certainly—but one which is inherent to property relationships (especially the ownership of the earth, of land) and also closely bound up with the forces of production (which impose a form on that earth or land); here we see the polyvalence of social space, its ‘reality’ at once formal and material” (85). 5. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 17. 6. Ibid., 29. 7. Peter Brown, “The Containment of Symkyn: The Function of Space in the Reeve’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 14, no. 3 (1980): 225–36, is required reading for anyone interested in place and space in Chaucer, as is Robert Worth Frank, Jr., “The Reeve’s Tale and the Comedy of Limitation,” in Directions in Literary Criticism, ed. Stanley Weintraub and Philip Young (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973): 53–69. Less directly, Sarah Stanbury, “Space and Visual Hermeneutics in the Gawain-Poet,” Chaucer Review 21, no. 4 (1987): 476–89, Kurt Olsson, “John Gower’s

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Vox Clamantis and the Medieval Idea of Place,” Studies in Philology 84, no. 2 (1987): 134–58, and John Ganim, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) are stimulating and helpful. Also useful for thinking about spatial relationships are L. Michael Harrington, Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michael Kobialka, eds., Medieval Practices of Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury, eds., Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 8. Cf. Peter Goodall, “‘Allone, Withouten any Companye’: Privacy in the First Fragment of the Canterbury Tales,” in Chaucer, ed. Valerie Allen and Ares Axiotis (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996): “The description of Nicholas’s room lingers on its sensual qualities—it is no Spartan scholar’s cell—and has a kind of ‘woman’s touch’ about it” (32). 9. Thomas Bradwardine’s De Causa Dei contra Pelagium was written in the 1330s and early 1340s. Selected translations of his writings on space are included in Edward Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). See also Gordon Leff, Bradwardine and the Pelagians: A Study of His ‘De Causa Dei’ and Its Opponents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). 10. Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), notes what is perhaps a similar effect, seen from a sociopolitical perspective: “The tales of Fragments I–III reveal an attitude toward history and the subject that is at once deeply ambivalent and characteristically Chaucerian. On the one hand is a persistent and penetrating interest in the specific historical conditions of life and a willingness not merely to represent but to accommodate dissonant voices and oppositional political forces. But on the other hand is a studied retreat from the sphere of history into a socially undetermined subjectivity, a realm of private values defined by its apartness from the public world of eve