Follies and Fabliaux: Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale"

Overview of Plot and Characters

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales chronicles the stories told by a motley band of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket 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 ridding herself of her husband for the night, Nicholas convinces John that the Second Flood is nigh, and that everyone must build a small, personal ark for protection. While her husband hides away in fear of the coming tide, Nicholas and Alison conspire to enjoy themselves.

Unfortunately, Absolon comes by at that very moment, and the tale ends with Absolon receiving a "kiss" through the window in the dark from Alison's nether parts, Nicholas being branded with a hot poker, and Alison's husband being revealed as a foolish cuckold to the entire town. As Nicholas calls for water to soothe his burning behind and John prepares for the flood by releasing his makeshift "boat" from the ceiling, 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 receives a kiss from his beloved Alison's behind rather than her beautiful face, the husband is shamed for marrying a woman far too young for him, and the young adulterer Nicholas is literally branded for being too clever for his own good.

The Fabliau Genre and Chaucer's Comic Vision

Given the tenor of "The Miller's Tale," and especially 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 contemporaries, 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 surprising to a reader of the Canterbury fabliau — a term 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).

"The Miller's Tale," by contrast, 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 irreverence: his parodies of the clergy in the "Prologue" to the Canterbury Tales are surely one reason, but the presence of sexualized tales such as 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. Nearly a third of the Canterbury Tales can be classified under the designation of "fabliaux."

Contrasting the Miller's Tale with the Knight's Tale

The production of fabliaux should not necessarily be seen as antithetical to Chaucer's Christian morality. 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 and articulates the concerns of the "lower" orders regarding articulations of faith and nobility, as in "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," though 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, the foolishness of the husband's literal belief in the Bible, and 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 gross-out comedy. However, it is a story presented as being of the people, and it deflates the pretensions of scholars who try to elevate themselves, through pranks, knowledge, and piety, above the demands of the body.

Works Cited

Blamires, Alcuin. "Philosophical sleaze? The 'strok of thought' in the 'Miller's Tale' and Chaucerian fabliau." The Modern Language Review. 102. 3 (July 2007), 621–640.

Heffernan, Carol Falvo. "Chaucer's 'Miller's Tale' and 'Reeve's Tale,' Boccaccio's Decameron, and the French fabliaux." Italica. 81.3 (Autumn 2004), 311–324.

Morgan, Gerald. "Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales." The Modern Language Review. 102. 2 (April 2007), 477–478.

Spearing, A.C. "Narrative Voice: The Case of Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale." New Literary History. 32.3 (Summer 2001), 715–746.

Turner, William. "Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907.