Rebellious female characters in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
Jack Probert
For many, one of the first lines of the Knight’s Tale, describing how Theseus ‘conquered al the regne of Femenye’, is representative of Chaucer’s attitude towards women in The Canterbury Tales at large: Chaucer’s women are reduced to being props in tales c oncerned with concerns he has deemed beyond them. However, Marion Wynne Davies’ view that Chaucer’s women are either ‘repressed by a misogynistic regime’ (indeed, we see women like Griselda and Emelye very much trapped within the narrow role afforded to th em by their society) or ‘discovered to have challenged that system and forged relatively individualistic identities for themselves’ seeks to challenge this position, arguing that Chaucer’s rebellious women, through their construction of their own identity, thus resist the medieval patriarchy. 1 What Davies fails to recognize is that her assertion that Chaucer’s women have ‘individualistic identities’ proves problematic when considering their lack of a truly female voice. Chaucer succeeds in giving his rebellious women a voice; yet he cannot give them their own. One such rebellious female character is Alisoun of the Miller’s Tale, a deceptive wife whose sexuality is actively celebrated, not condemned, by the story, which, in fact, pins more of the blame for her extramarital affair with Nicholas on her husband for attempting to control such a young wife; yet while she manipulates structures and figures that would repress her, she still falls victim a degree of sexual possession at the hands of Nicholas. We see Absolon’s advances ridiculed as Alisoun makes him ‘her ape’, a metaphor bursting with suggestions of Absolon being a source of hilarity through the associations that ‘ape’ has with a sense of humanity twinned with an animal inferiority, as he tries to gain her affections in what might be considered a courtly manner (he is, after all, commonly identified as the courtly lover archetype). Moreover, we see her husband fall into her and Nicholas’ trap because of his constant desire to possess her, demonstrated by his first fear upon hearing of the coming flood being for ‘[his] Alisoun, [his] wyf’. It is certainly significant that he is persuaded to go along with Nicholas’ outlandish request because of Nicholas’ promise that ‘[his] wyf [he will] wel saren, out of doute’. Both men arguably fail to gain Alisoun’s affections because they objectify her: Absolon’s serenaded formalities of courtly love and her husband’s desperate attempts to control her are both sources of such comedy because they both deny her any sort of autonomous sexuality in such a relationship. That it is Nicholas to whom the Miller tells us Alisoun has actively ‘graunted’ her love is significant: he is not as easily identifiable as a figure of religion as Absolon, a monk, is or as a figure of the patriarchy as her husband is, instead being an astrologer. Unlike the other men, he seems to recognize her sexuality in a way that he can arguably only do due to this suggested lack of affiliation to the repressive system of Christianity and the wider misogynistic views of society that the carpenter and his attempts to domesticate Alisoun represent: Nicholas represents a relationship dynamic that, through transgression away from traditional gender roles, allows Alisoun a greater deal of autonomous sexuality. While his approach is also one of objectification, it does acknowledge her as a sexual object in how he ‘[holds] hir harde by the haunche - bones’, ‘haunche - bones’ implying her to be an object through its connotations of meat, which suggest that she is like a piece of meat or even a farm animal
1 Davies 1992: 108.
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