Estate's Satire And The Miller's Tale

teleological narratives

• work towards a larger purpose or end ie. moral code, philosophical, large sweeps of time

• Miller’s tale is the opposite

Fabliaux History

• comes from northwestern france

• flourished in 13th century france

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Fabliaux

• scatological humour (interest in excrement)

• no aim to teach us anything

• common plot of a love triangle

• small tightly focused narrative

• no real sense of communal life → individualistic culture

• fierce competitive struggle with winners and losers

• attempt to outdo others with trickery

• bawdy, crude humour

Fabliaux in Miller’s Tale

cast fits: jealous husband, Alisoun the prize, Nicholas the trickster, Absolon the foolish rival

conclusion → abrupt with a punchline

bawdy, bodily humour

practical morals - no large theological truth, just little maxims

• the stupid and self righteous suffer

• the quick witted get lucky and survive

Important Practical Maxim

"People say this: 'The sly one who is near always makes the loved one who is far away hated.'”

Narration

Chaucer puts the Miller between us and the story

• narrator distances himself

• adopts the Miller’s voice

• chauncer (the poet) → chauncer (the pilgrim) → the miller → the story → us

• Chauncer offsets narrative responsibility

Structure

works to model a predictable surprise

fast paced narrative

we know how it will end

Style

• "Tehee!' quod she, and clapte the wyndow to. (3740)

• speech and action in single line

• short words

• direct, unsophisticated speech

• abundance of rhetoric

• uncomplicated syntax

• animal imagery (farmyard not noble beasts

Materialism in The Miller’s Tale

• based and rooted in stuff

• money, food, property, bodily enjoyment

• takes us into a world where things are important but description things about the environment → the door and how it is fixed on it’s hinges

Miller’s vs. Knight’s Tale

the Miller’s tale follows the Knights tale as a literary peasant’s revolt

• follows a similar plot but imbues it with sex, farts and bottoms

The Grotesque vs. The Classical Body

• Mikhail Bakhtin

celebrates unclassical human body - open, unfinished, orifices, protrusions, focused on eating, drinking, sex, defecating, birth and death, associated with popular carnival culture

rejects classical body - smooth, finished, greek statue, controlled by the mind and the soul, associated with the elite

medieval tension between the elite and grotesque

• gargoyles on a cathedral (exist side by side)

• marginalia (margins in texts full of grotesque doodles)

Rabelais and His World

1940s French renaissance writer whose books were full of feasting, bodily functions and comic excess
alongside official, elite culture - there was a powerful popular culture of laughter and it offered a genuine alternative way of seeing the world

The Miller

• plays the bagpipes - associate with sexuality, coarseness and the bawdy

• runs as the door with his head

• ridden by bodily energies

• grotesque animal body

• great, wide, giant face

• wart, hair, orifices

Emilye vs. Alisoun

• located in her social worth (the carpenters wife is her limit)

• we are closer to Alisoun than socially acceptable

  • male gaze

• weasel - elegant but slippery

• clothes that tie her in and push her out and help us imagine her body

• created and manufactured beauty

• she is the gold of a coin not the rising sun

• world of finance, exchange and trade

The Miller’s Prologue

• The knights tale was favoured and reverred

• the miller is a disruption to the tale telling order of telling a story more noble than the last

• miller describes tale as noble - detaching notion of rank from idea of excellence

• ‘quite’ to get revenge

The Pilgrimage

• medieval society was rigidly structured

• cross section of society presented

• pilgrimage is the only way to bring them together

• Chaucer projects himself into the pilgrimage

• Chaucer is not above or outside - within narrative

• provides a vision of society

pryvetee

‘prively’ → frequent usage modifies characters actions

these secretive actions culminate in the final humiliation of john private vs. public theme
“goddess pryvetee” god’s private affairs also a pun on physical private parts

Absolon

• is a foil for Nicholas

• traditional courtly methods of wooing → singing and gift giving

Chaucer

• secular writer - medieval

• Christian framework

• social commentator

• time of social change and resistance to social change

• uses many voices

• hides himself, allows audience to find own attitudes

Medieval Estates

• three estates - nobility, church, labourers

• growing, prosperous middle class that doesn't fit in

• social position becoming less fixed

Canterbury Tales

• collection of texts

• fictitious pilgrimage as framing device

• wide range of occupations and ranks

• written towards the end of his life

• written in fragments but we know the first fragment is in the right order

• reflects on relationship between literature and society

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Decameron Of Giovanni Bocaccio

• literary reference

frame narrative recounts how a group of aristocrats withdraw from plague-infested Florence and pass their time by telling one hundred stories over the course of ten days

Tale Telling Contest

• scheme is that they all tell two tales and two on the way back

• the tale telling contest is entertainment that undermines the religious idea of the pilgrimage (penitential, religious devotion)

• best sentence (wisdom and instruction) and most solaas (delight or pleasure)

  • conflict between the two?

  • the knights tale vs. the millers tale