Page 124 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 13: The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Non-detailed Study): Discussion and Analysis-V

Merchant’s apparent bitterness, perhaps, is the remark which follows January’s really rather beautiful Notes
pastiche (calling May to awake and come into the garden) of the Song of Songs: it refers to them in
a blunt, dismissive phrase as “olde, lewed words”.

In Merchant’s tale, beautiful women are really venomous, malicious tricksters-beautiful,
lyrical poetry is really only old, obscene words.
May, however, despite her low blood, proves herself hugely more intelligent than her noble husband:
we might also find analogues for this (at least in sympathy, if not in intelligence) in Griselde of the
Clerk’s Tale. There is nothing of the indulgent, joyful trickery of the Miller’s Tale in the Merchant’s
Tale, but instead a return to the signification of the Reeve’s Tale - the moment of sexual intercourse
is presented with the same unflinching, uneuphemistic detail, and the preceding action between
the illicit lovers in both tales is largely a matter of signs.
Secret signs are everywhere in the Merchant’s Tale: things which, like the mirror in the common
marketplace (the metaphor for January’s pre-wedding fanciful mind), leave a certain impression on
the mind. From the letter that May reads and then casts into the privy, to the secret handshake
between May and Damien, to the impression of January’s key which allows Damien into the garden,
this tale is focused on tricky actions rather than words, secret, illicit events rather than open actions.

Self Assessment
Short Answer Type Questions:
6. What is the literary genre of the Merchant’s tale?
7. What is the theme of the Merchant’s tale?
8. What is this story saying about marriage?
9. What does the Merchant reveal about his own marriage in his prologue?
10. Who sympathizes with him?
The bitterness of the Merchant, trapped in his unhappy marriage, can be felt, then, coursing through
the veins of the Merchant’s Tale at various points; but particularly in its bitterly unhappy (happy)
ending, in which blind January is entirely gulled into believing that he has not been made a fool of.
Moreover, when we consider that January happily strokes his wife on her “wombe” (“stomach”,
but also “womb”) at the end of the tale, the Merchant might even leave us with a taste of what
would happen next: has May just become pregnant with Damien’s baby? The suggestion is not as
ridiculous as it initially sounds-particularly when you consider that the pear (it is a pear tree in
which the couple have sex) was a well-known remedy to help fertility in Chaucer’s day. Perhaps
May–at the end of this tale–has actually got something (someone!) rotten growing inside her.

13.3 Summary
• Walter, however, wanted Griselde herself to assent before he married her, and, the two men
went into her chamber.
• The marquis told her that although she was dear to him, to the rest of the nobility she was not.
• The people came to loathe Walter, thinking that he had murdered his children.
• The narrator then defies Theophrastus, the author of a tract attacking marriage, arguing that
a wife is God’s gift, which will last longer than any other gift of Fortune.
• The authorial condemnation of May also departs from the other fabliaux of the Canterbury
Tales.

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