Chaucer's the Miller Tale the

¶ … Chaucer's "The Miller Tale" "the Miller's Tale:" the follies of human agency in Chaucer's fabliaux Geoffrey Chaucer's the Canterbury Tales chronicles the stories told by a motley band of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Saint Thomas Beckett in Canterbury. The pilgrims include noble members of society, such as a knight who tells a story of courtly love, and a miller who tells a story of the follies of rampant sexual desire.

In contrast to the noble knight, the miller's philosophy "is the philosophy of intoxication" and excess (Morgan 2007, p. 477). In "The Miller's Tale," a young woman named Alison is married to a much older man, a wealthy landlord named John. She is courted by two younger men, a student named Nicholas and a parish clerk named Absolon. As a way of getting rid of her husband for the night, Nicholas convinces John that the coming of the Second Flood is nigh, and everyone must build a small, personal ark for protection.

While her husband is hidden away in fear of the coming tide, Nicholas and Alison conspire to enjoy themselves. Unfortunately, Absolon comes by that very minute, and the tale ends with Absolon receiving a 'kiss' through the window in the dark from Alison's nether parts, Nicholas getting branded with a hot poker, and Alison's husband being revealed as a foolish cuckold to the town.

As Nicholas calls for water to soothe his burning behind and John prepares for the flood by releasing his 'boat' from the ceiling to dry ground, the absurd plot comes together in a kind of strange logic. "With such tales the falling out of sheer plot bulks larger in the reader's pleasure than in most other types of story in the Canterbury Tales" (Blamires 2007, p.624).

Everyone is punished in the story: Absolon is given a kiss from his beloved Alison's behind rather than her beautiful face, the husband is shamed for marrying a woman too young for him, and the young adulterer Nicholas is literally branded for being too clever for his own good.

Given the tenor of "The Miller's Tale," and especially after its sudden juxtaposition after "The Knight's Tale" it might surprise the reader to learn that Chaucer was often called a philosophical poet' by his cotemporaries, and received considerable praise for poems such as "Troilus and Criseyde," about a faithful, young Trojan warrior of the Homeric age who was cuckolded by a beautiful widow when she was sent to the Greek camp (Blamires 2007, p.621).

Perhaps even more surprisingly to a reader of the Canterbury fabliau (another word for the genre of French-inspired, irreverent sexual folktales) is that Chaucer was also famed for his translation of the early sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, a Neo- Platonic philosopher who focused upon the transience of worldly existence (Turner 1907). But "The Miller's Tale" instead is "a piece of comic wizardry focused on the capacity of heedless youth, armed with cunning imagination, to inflict ingenious sexual and intellectual humiliation on the sentimentally incompetent, the middle-aged, the patriarchal.

Illicit sex in the marital bed while the husband sleeps in the roof in a makeshift lifeboat readied for a new World Flood; an incompetent rival made to kiss the heroine's behind in the dark; an explosive fart in the pitch darkness that guides the rival's aim in a revengeful and quasi-sodomitic retaliatory attack; a flood of the imagination brought on by screams for 'water!'; and all this only in the first fabliau of several -- small wonder that in modern Western culture, with its considerable relish for irreverence and its relaxation of sexual inhibitions, the stock of Chaucer's fabliaux has risen and the 'philosophical' identity of the poet has been eroded" (Blamires 2007, p.621).

Today, Chaucer has a reputation for being irreverent: his parodies of the clergy in the "Prologue" to the Canterbury Tales are surely one reason for this, but the presence of sexualized tales such as that of the Miller's is surely another. "The Miller's Tale" sets the tone for the other fabliaux present throughout the incomplete catalogue of tales, many of which satirize divinity and old men who believe they can satisfy much younger women.

And nearly a third of the Canterbury Tales can be classified under the designation of 'fabliaux.' The production of fabliaux should not necessarily be seen as antithetical to Chaucer's Christian morality, however: carnivals and 'world upside down' motifs were common even in the hyper-religious atmosphere of the Middle Ages as a kind of cultural release valve.

"In a refinement of this view, the fabliaux are a form of play which is held to have abounded in the Middle Ages as a flip side to the solemnity of cultural productions sanctioned by church and state, a flip side to Official Culture" (Blamires 2007, p.622).

Low literary forms comment on high literary forms: this both elevates the high yet also articulates the concerns of the 'lower' orders for articulations of faith and nobility, such as "The Knight's Tale." In other words, "the pointed juxtaposition 'makes the very lack of significance [in the Miller's Tale] significant'…the one tale 'seeks endlessly for meaning in the world', the notion 'that there might be any meaning never enters the other'; and if the one [Knight's] tale 'raises questions about the providential ordering of the universe', the other [Miller's] 'refuses to look beyond the individual's immediate interest'" (Blamires 2007, p.623).

There are no heroes in "The Miller's Tale," in stark contrast to "The Knight's Tale." Everyone is corrupt: instead of a young, innocent couple cruelly separated by fate, Alison is lusty and Nicholas, although clever "is a self-styled student of astrology and a weather-forecaster. He is also a great creator of plans and schemes, as though he were in the driving seat of providence himself," although such a view proves to be hubristic in the extreme (Blamires 2007, p.624).

Because of the 'naturalistic' knowledge of Nicholas, the earthy style of the tale, and the foolishness of the husband's literal belief in the Bible, combined with Absolon's sexualized comeuppance, "The Miller's Tale" is often called 'naturalistic.' It is not realistic of course; it is almost a medieval version of the modern guy's 'gross-out' film. However, it is a story that is presented as of the people, and deflates the pretensions of scholars to elevate themselves with pranks, knowledge, and piety, above the demands of the body.

The miller, in response to the knight, asserts that life has no meaning other than the desires of the body "The tale confirms the limited foresight of an Oxford student of astrology, even one expert in storm-forecast, whose plans, albeit they are a mischievous fantasy, are precisely to contrive makeshift shipping in which to escape a 'flood', of whose coming he has hypothetically been forewarned by astrology and divine communication" (Blamires 2007, p.628).

Absolon believes he loves Alison in a pure fashion, but when he actually touches her in a 'real' way, he is disgusted by the sexual act: he wishes to enjoy her in a pure manner. The miller, of course, uses this sanctity and prurience as a source of humor. Some have interpreted Chaucer's tales as not incompatible with his interest in higher-level Christian Platonic philosophy.

The world is by nature corrupt and inferior to the ideal: the ideals that Absolon, John, and even Nicholas have about making love to Alison fall short of the reality, and are tainted with jealousy, homoeroticism, fear, and violence. Nicholas believes himself to be above others because of his knowledge, and thinks he can defy providence but "Providence comprehends, from outside, all events and the whole of time in an instant, as if from a fantastic height: in effect no 'time' attaches to the events from this perspective" (Blamires 2007, p.9).

Nicholas fancies himself to be an author of a tale, a tale about a great flood that will end in his future happiness: but he is wrong, and only fate, providence, or the godlike power of the narrator Chaucer can decide his fate. "Genuine providence outdoes human planning by light years. Perhaps in this sense 'The Miller's Tale' rather precisely matches 'The Knight's Tale'" (Blamires 2007, p.632). A final aspect of Chaucer's desire for both Nicholas and Absolon's 'comeuppance' in the tale, despite.