The Miller's Tale

Just as (the Manciple reminds us) a countess can be laid as low as a peasant girl, a miller (or, at least, Chaucer's Miller) can make a tale to match a knight.
Carl Lindahl, Ernest Games

When Absolon begs Alisoun for a kiss in the dark of the night, she offers him not her mouth, "sweete as bragot or the meeth" (3261), but "hir hole" (3732).^[20] Alisoun's substitution of what is perceived as foul for what is described as sweet is a revealing gesture; in more ways than one, it exposes what is usually kept hidden by polite discourse. It seems to confirm what the churlish male storyteller has already suggested: this female character's frank sexuality and animal nature, that "free, instinc-

[20] The epigraph appears in Ernest Games: Folkloric Patterns in the Canterbury Tales (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1987), p. 13.

tive, sensual, untamed" brand of femininity depicted earlier in the Miller's opening barrage of similes comparing Alisoun to animals and other natural or material objects.^[21] The Miller expresses this same view of women from the moment he first speaks, even before the tale begins, in the linking matter. In response to the Reeve's objections, he clarifies the presupposition that women's sexual desires are in fact naturally excessive, and the only sure way for a man to avoid being humiliated by female promiscuity is to forgo marriage: "Who hath no wyf, he is no cokewold" (3152). For those with wives, like the Miller himself, he goes on to suggest another strategy. A man may simply close his eyes to the likelihood that he has been cuckolded; "I wol bileve wel that I am noon" (3162). His final generalization reiterates the principle that the inevitable excess of female sexuality should not be looked at too closely by men whose own needs are adequately satisfied (or who wish to believe that that is the case):

An housbonde shal nat been inquisityf
Of Goddes pryvetee, nor of his wyf.
So he may fynde Goddes foyson there,
Of the remenant nedeth nat enquere.
                                             (3163–66)

Here, it could be argued, the Miller seems happy enough toaccord women not only sexual desire and experience but also the freedom and privacy to enjoy their sexuality, powers most often denied to women in the plots of Chaucer's fictions as in the authoritative discourse of the Middle Ages in general. Bearing out this unusual attitude, the tale that follows punishes the three male characters for their sensuality and blindness, while Alisoun teases and frolics and giggles and is "swyved" but not hurt in the final fray.^[22] Modern critics have almost unanimously relished and praised this "triumph of Alisoun's fresh and lusty animal-

[21] The quoted adjectives are taken from V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), p. 163. See, too, Kolve's analysis of the portrait of Alisoun for his suggestion that her clothing symbolizes the constraints of her position as a bourgeois wife.

[22] I am following here the traditional assumption that Alisoun is not punished, although one might read the ending differently if one were to emphasize, as I will later, the change in Alisoun's status from agent to passive object. But usually the fact that Alisoun is pronounced "swyved" at the end is read as part of John's punishment. Lee Patterson, for instance, lists her fate as the first (perhaps least, perhaps most important?) of three ways in which John is "most severely punished" at the end of the Tale: "his wife is 'swyved,' his arm is broken, and his reputation as a man of probity is ruined" ("'No man his reson herde': Peasant Consciousness, Chaucer's Miller, and the Structure of the Canterbury Tales ," South Atlantic Quarterly 86 [1987], p. 479).

ity," the "entirely successful" performance of "Nature's female."^[23] The story has been judged "not only funny but also oddly innocent and imaginatively gay."^[24] And Alisoun, like her namesake the Wife of Bath, may represent to many readers Chaucer's unprecedented understanding, defense, and even celebration of female desire.

There is a darker, less liberal and innocent side, however, to the Miller's tolerant, churlish, frank view. What is odd about this tale is not its innocence, but the modern critical insistence on its innocence; and at the risk of displaying that poor sense of humor often attributed to feminist scholars, I want to take this poem seriously by considering what is revealed by Alisoun's prank that is not so funny and not so openly treated by the Miller, this tale, or many of its readers. Most obviously, Alisoun's freedom from punishment, like the Miller's tolerant injunction not to inquire too far into the natural and uncontrollable excess—the "remenant"—of female sexuality, may reflect the familiar judgment that Woman is not immoral but amoral.^[25] Her animality is all there is; it is not worth examining a woman's moral or spiritual qualities, the tale implies, because she has none that are available to either correction or representation by husband or storyteller. One recent critic describes Alisoun as "the good they [the three men] have chosen, as innocent in herself as gold or rich food or drink. The choice, not the object, is punished."^[26] As this formulation unintentionally (I assume) reveals, Alisoun's "triumph" only further clarifies her objectification and guarantees her erasure. By such a reading, the male characters are, as we might expect, the subjects and agents of the tale and its morality; and they, like their counterparts in the Knight's Tale and like the Miller and the Reeve, are less interested in Alisoun than in besting each other and proving their threatened manliness in ways I shall explore. If I find it hard to see Alisoun, therefore, as a triumphant or liberating or harmless sign of female desire, I find it even more difficult to praise or enjoy, as so many

[23] See, respectively, Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction , p. 156, and Earle Birney, "The Inhibited and the Uninhibited: Ironic Structure in the Miller's Tale ," Neophilologus 44 (1960), p. 337.

[24] Kolve, Imagery of Narrative , p. 161.

[25] Kolve argues that all three younger characters in the tale are not even amoral, but just quintessentially young and therefore unjudged; "the condition is too transitory, and some lessons are learned" (p. 173). My point is to investigate more fully which lessons are learned by whom. In doing so, I suggest that the two young men are regarded very differently from the young woman, that in the question of age and its cultural meanings we again see gender asymmetry.

[26] Schweitzer, "The Misdirected Kiss," p. 227.

critics do, the "wholesome sexuality"^[27] of a tale in which the more polite of the two male rivals intends and attempts to assault the "pryvetee" of the woman he claims to adore with a red-hot iron blade. I also want to open up for discussion the fact that it is only an accident, a side-effect of Nicholas's intervention in Alisoun's prank, that saves the female from punishment of a particularly vicious sort and ask again the question raised in the Clerk's Tale : Who can be liberated by humor, and at whose expense?

At the same time that I interrogate the significance of the female character's (alleged) freedom to desire and (narrow) escape from judgment, I also want to suggest that this tale does not in fact let the topics of female sexuality and imperiled manhood go quite as easily or lightly as the Miller himself recommends to the Reeve, or as most critics have been eager to do. Reexamining Alisoun's final self-exposure of her "hole," I submit that the Miller's description of her gesture reveals not so much a straightforward representation of a woman's desire, which we might read as either celebratory or dismissive, but the actual and strategic vagueness, or obfuscation, in his portrayal of female "pryvetee," as he at once focuses on and just fails to bring into focus Alisoun's genitals, in a rhetorical move subtly comparable to the Knight's elaborate refusal to say more about Emily's rites in the temple of Diana. In the beginning of the Tale, the Miller speaks quite frankly and unambiguously, it seems, about Alisoun's "queynte," the "woman's external organ" (as the Middle English Dictionary puts it) that Nicholas grabs.^[28] What Alisoun exposes to Absolon at the end, however, is referred to as her "hole," a term that may refer either to her anus or to her vaginal orifice.^[29]

[27] Howard, Idea of the Canterbury Tales , p. 241.

[28] See entry for queint(e) n., Middle English Dictionary Q, p. 37.

[29] The Middle English Dictionary suggests this possibility under hol (e n.2, sense 2 (a) (H.4) without specifying whether the quotation from the Miller's Tale , which it cites, refers to the anus or "the orifice of the female pudendum." There are more instances of the term "hole" referring to anus, although often there is a specifying modifier such as "hinder hole" or "hole of the ars." In line 3852, as the Miller sums up what has happened to each character, he says that Absolon kissed Alisoun's "nether ye"; this phrase is unambiguously glossed "anus" by the MED and taken as a variant of "nether ende" (see nether (e adj.," N.2). However, since the only example cited for "nether ye" is the Miller's usage in this line, the dictionary does not offer the confirming evidence we might seek. (It also cites the Wife's reference to her husband's "nether purs," which pushes the sense of the phrase slightly at least toward a genital interpretation.) Again, under "eie n," the phrase "nether ye" is glossed "the anus"; again, the only example of this usage is line 3852 of the Miller's Tale . The specification of Alisoun's "naked ers" as the part of the body he kisses in line 3734 may seem to confirm that the hole in question is her anus, but the ambiguity still persists in determining what she meant to offer him, since her gesture would be the same in either case, and the possibility that he has kissed the vaginal opening is reinforced by his reference to her pubic hair. In any event, of course, what I see as important is both the ambiguity and the clear shift of focus from genitals (the "queynte") to the anus, possibly of Alisoun and certainly of Nicholas.

Reflecting the absence of nomenclature for female sexual organs in the lexicon, the Miller does not distinguish between these two proximate parts of the female anatomy, and it actually remains unclear what Alisoun intends Absolon to kiss, what Absolon does kiss, and what he thinks he has kissed.^[30] As far as I know, Chaucer scholars have not pursued this particularly rich case of semantic and structural ambiguity; to do so, however, proves instructive.

Insofar as the word "hole" may refer to Alisoun's vaginal orifice, the Miller seems to be moving onward and inward in his examination of female sexuality, progressing from the "external" organ, the pudendum, to the gateway to internal organs. Most readers seem to have assumed that the "hole" in question, however, is Alisoun's anus. And since this assumption is at once likely and unverifiable, the word "hole" suggests both that the Miller as inspector of woman's private parts is actually in retreat, moving here and in the tale as a whole away from the female genitals, and that his move, moreover, effects the conventional association or conflation of (female) genital and anal functions, of women's sex (or sex with a woman) and dirt, decay, and dissolution.

This association has in fact been assumed, however unself-consciously, by many modern critics. Derek Brewer, for instance, in expressing sympathy for Absolon, notes in the Miller's Tale the "injustice" typical of fabliaux: "They rub the nose of a young man in the dirt , simply because he is fastidious in love" (my emphasis).^[31] Earle Birney writes that Absolon "offers up his sweetened effeminate lips to the unsavory bearded female fact " (my emphasis); and V. A. Kolve (reading the pun in line 3754) notes that "though fastidious Absolon may . . . have missed his mark by a few millimeters, the real nature of what he sought has been made unmistakably clear to him" (my emphasis).^[32] It is assumed by these scholars that the "fact," the "real nature" of female sexuality is

[30] For discussion of the lack of names for various female organs of reproduction, see Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," in The Making of the Modern Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 1–41.

[31] "The Poetry of Chaucer's Fabliaux," in Chaucer: The Poet as Storyteller (London: MacMillan, 1984), p. 110.

[32] Birney, "The Inhibited and the Uninhibited," p. 336; Kolve, Imagery of Narrative , p. 196.

what Alisoun exposes—that is, its "dirt." By this quite traditional view, the anal and the genital have been confused and hence connected. The reference to Alisoun's "hole" thus succinctly performs the contagious magic at the center of the tale's plot, whereby exposure to the desired "queynte" entails a shocking encounter with female dirt and danger that both sickens and (therefore) heals the lovesick man.^[33] Or as the Miller puts it in a pun that semantically pulls "hole" away from the anus and back to the female organ: "His hoote love was coold and al yqueynt" (3754).

The tried and true cure that the Miller provides for lovesick Absolon, however, may be as painful as the disease. For the use of the term "hole" also shifts attention from something that is anatomically female, the "queynte," to something that men have too, something that is anatomically undifferentiated in males and females, the anus. This shift sets up and is writ large by the subsequent substitution of Nicholas's body for Alisoun's, a maneuver that returns agency to the male but in doing so also exposes the humiliating and frightening lack of difference between male and female bodies.^[34] While the Miller's semantic strategy realizes an implicitly and conventionally hostile view of women and of sex with women, then, it also returns attention simultaneously to men, to the instability of gender difference, and hence to the particular problem that the Knight's Tale , from a different angle, also tackles: the vulnerability of masculine identity.

Nicholas and Absolon compete with each other and with John for sexual access to Alisoun, and, true to type, the male rivals actually demonstrate less interest in the female object of their alleged desire than in their own gender and class identity and hence their relations to each other in a closed sphere of male activity. Alisoun herself may seem most important to the uxorious John, whose first thought, when he believes the second flood is coming, is "Allas, my wyf!" (3522). John, however, is the least developed of the male characters and the biggest fool of the three; moreover, his explicit motivation for cherishing Alisoun (and therefore keeping her "narwe in cage," 3224), according to the beginning of the tale, is his jealousy and his expectation that other men will makee

[33] Schweitzer, in "The Misdirected Kiss," notes that Absolon's cure, his contact with Alisoun's "hole," accords with actual medieval medical prescriptions for (male) sufferers from the lover's malady.

[34] Britton J. Harwood also points out the "failure of differentiation in both sexual and cosmological codes" in "The 'Nether Ye' and its Antithesis: A Structuralist Reading of 'The Miller's Tale,'" Annuale Mediaevale 21 (1981), pp. 5–30.

him into a cuckold (3224–26) and thus disprove the manhood that the old man's possession of the young wife is meant to confirm.^[35] Absolon and Nicholas, the more fully characterized males in the story, are in their respective roles of bachelor and clerk excluded from the possession of a wife and so even more in need of proving their manhood through Alisoun, and it is possible to see in some detail how and why they struggle—with only partial success—to do so.

Absolon is the more obviously worried about his manliness, for he is the effeminate man par excellence. Other critical studies have already detailed the ways in which Absolon is "too ladylike" and have located the sources of his characterization in patristic readings of the biblical Absalom and in the figure of Mirth in Le Roman de la Rose .^[36] Most often such studies suggest that the purpose of Chaucer's emphasis on Absolon's effeminacy is both humor and "organic unity"; his squeamishness, it is thought, makes Alisoun's joke all the more fitting.^[37] Attention to the carefully narrated details of his response to actual contact with Alisoun's "hole"—with the general neighborhood, at least, of the female parts he presumably desires—suggests, however, that Absolon figures underlying issues that make effeminacy a source of both masculine humor and masculine anxiety: in general the fluidity and instability of gender difference, and in particular the possibilities of homosexuality and castration.

After kissing Alisoun's "naked ers/Ful savourly" (3734–35), the kneeling Absolon jumps up:

Abak he stirte, and thoughte it was amys,
For wel he wiste a womman hath no berd.
He felte a thyng al rough and long yherd,
And seyde, "Fy! allas! what have I do?"
                                                   (3736–39)

[35] Brewer, in "The Poetry of Chaucer's Fabliaux," suggests that his broken arm at the end symbolizes his sexual impotency.

[36] Studies include Paul E. Beichner, "Absolon's Hair," Mediaeval Studies 12 (1950), pp. 222–33 and "Characterization in the Miller's Tale ," in Chaucer Criticism , vol. I, ed. Richard Schoeck and Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1960). Many commentators note in passing Absolon's effeminacy; see Donaldson's comment on his "rode" complexion in "Idiom of Popular Poetry in the Miller's Tale," in Speaking of Chaucer , pp. 20–21, and Macklin Smith's discussion of the parallels between Absolon and the adulterous woman in "Or I Wol Caste a Ston," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 8 (1986), p. 16. Smith observes: "For all his fantasizing, I can only with difficulty imagine him paired with a real woman" (p. 18).

[37] This is Beichner's conclusion in "Characterization."

His first vague thought that something is wrong, because he knows women don't have beards, suggests that what's immediately upsetting is the apparent displacement of what he thought was a certain and visible sign of fixed sexual difference; it may also suggest that he hasn't had much experience with certain parts of the female body. It may imply, too, that Absolon wonders initially whether he has kissed a man's face, rather than a woman's—that the fear of homoerotic experience is uppermost in his mind. At another level the subsequent actuality of an unwitting homosexual exchange—the branding of Nicholas—is also anticipated by the initial reference to the secondary male sex characteristic.

Then Absolon overhears Alisoun sniggering and Nicholas repeating the word that most directly indicts Absolon's confusion: "'A berd, a berd!' quod hende Nicholas" (3742). At this point Absolon seems to realize whom, or at least what, he has in fact kissed, and he responds by furiously biting and scouring his polluted lips: "Who rubbeth now, who froteth now his lippes/With dust, with sond, with straw, with clooth, with chippes" (3747–48). This hysterical response indicates his deep sense of the foulness of Alisoun's "hole" and the self-scourging that contact with this dirt demands. After he vows revenge (3744–52)—using precisely the term that the Host and Miller have used, in the linking matter, to speak of the verbal competition, "'I shal thee quyte'"(3746)—the narrator tells us he has been "heeled of his maladie" (3757) and that he weeps "as clooth a child that is ybete" (3759).

This last simile is particularly telling, for it suggests that Absolon feels both infantilized and punished by oral contact with female "pryvetee." The Freudian fiction seems to be anticipated here. Absolon is like the putatively generic little boy who sees female genitals for the first time (and his childishness has already been suggested in line 3704, in his parody of the Song of Solomon: "'I moorne as dooth a lamb after the tete'"). The boy-child has in this case felt, although not seen, the lack that seems to mark the place of women's sexual organs, and his response indicates both guilt and fear for his own as yet unproven difference and dominance, his phallus. Like his initial confusion (and like the subsequent interchangeability of male and female posteriors), this reaction identifies what is most disturbing: the actual and feared lack of distinction between women and men, which in turn suggests the related possibilities of castration and homosexuality.

A relation between (the fear of) castration, homosexual behavior, and the rape or mutilation of the female (who is presented in this tale as definitely asking for it) is equally clearly brought out in the revenge Absolon hastens to enact. Absolon borrows a hot "kultour"—the iron blade at the front of a plough—from his friend Gervase, the blacksmith, and his own professional skills, we may remember, include barbering (and hence surgery). Gervase has been taken as a figure of "plain masculinity" who serves to confirm that Absolon may be effeminate, but not homosexual: according to Cornelius Novelli, "one never supposes that Absolon has anything but a masculine desire for women."^[38] But what happens afterwards problematizes modern efforts to distinguish homosexual desire so clearly from "masculine desire." It seems plausible that Absolon urgently, stealthily, and seriously seeks out the masculinity represented by the smith, who swears and makes jokes about Absolon's lovemaking, because this masculinity is indeed what was already at risk in his squeamishness and parodic courtly behavior and what Alisoun's gesture has openly challenged. He borrows the violent maleness, the phallus-as-weapon, that the coulter symbolizes simultaneously to avenge and display his vulnerable manhood.^[39] The choice of instruments, incidentally, also takes us back to the sexualized terminology used both to differentiate and to link as gendered male the approaches and motives to narrative taken by the Miller and the Knight. Absolon realigns himself with the phallic Miller, who ambiguously swears that he won't believe he's a cuckold "for the oxen in my plogh" (3159), instead of with the "gentil" knight whose first use of occupatio ends with the allegation that "wayke been the oxen in my plough" (887).

But what Absolon does with the borrowed blade of the plough is not exactly what he apparently intends to do; he is fooled again in a second moment of even more explicit gender confusion and cross-undressing. His reaction to the first substitution of Alisoun's "hole" for her mouth indicates that Absolon's effeminacy is an outward sign of the precariousness of masculine desire in the ways I have suggested; the second substitution of Nicholas's private parts for Alisoun's blocks Absolon from

[38] "Absolon's 'Freend So Deere': A Pivotal Point in the Miller's Tale ," Neophilologus 52 (1968). pp. 65–69.

[39] Harwood also suggests that "the disjointed male part may show itself in the colter and the symbolic anal intercourse," "The 'Nether Ye,'" p. 16.

affirming his masculinity through violence against the woman who has humiliated him. It is no accident that the actual recipient of Absolon's blade—the surrogate of his imagined, frustrated desire for a woman—is a man, and a man in a social position very similar to his own in many ways; and this turn of events has several interesting consequences. It frustrates the effort to prove manliness and emphasizes the ambiguities of gender difference, and it further unmans and humiliates the effeminate male both by demonstrating that he is not even capable of taking revenge against a woman and by forcing him to engage unwittingly in an act that must suggest sodomy.^[40] At the same time, the substitution of Nicholas for Alisoun, together with the tale's humorous treatment of the episode, covers up the will to violence against women that is represented in Absolon's case as an effect of male fear and sexual anxiety.

It should be emphasized, however, that such violence, as in the Knight's Tale , is occluded but never denied or condemned. Because nothing happens to Alisoun, readers never seem to notice what Absolon intended to do with the hot coulter, and Absolon's cruel and exaggerated retribution for the woman's practical joke is both presented and read as a normal, appropriate response by a man whose masculinity has not been able to express itself honestly and naturally: as Kolve, for instance, puts it, "The hairy kiss restores him to his proper person, ending the make-believe and role playing . . ." (my emphasis).^[41] Finally, the inefficacy of the effeminate man's sudden conversion to violent misogyny also indicates one aspect of the actual illogic of extreme woman-hating, for the more women are the overt target of male hatred, the more their centrality and power over men is implied. (This point is quite overtly addressed, as we shall see, in the Merchant's Tale .) Nicholas's intervention in the plot allows the tale to sidestep this issue, however, and to reaffirm that the only real social and moral agents are male.

In arguing for the importance of the fact that the actual recipient of Absolon's blade is male, however, I do not want to lose sight of the fact

[40] What Absolon does to Nicholas also imputes to homosexual acts the displacement of violence against women, and this perception might be explored more fully in a discussion of representations of the complicated relations between misogyny, male homosexuality, and homophobia.

[41] Imagery of Narrative , p. 197. One of the rare exceptions to my claim that readers do seem to notice what Absolon intended is Raymond Tripp, "The Darker Side to Absolon's Dawn Visit," Chaucer Review 20 (1986), pp. 207–12; Tripp notes the "ugliness of Absolon's intentions" but does not pursue the point much further.

that Nicholas's part in the joke foregrounds the way in which his own masculinity is also put into question by this tale. Nicholas has often been taken as the antithesis of Absolon, a type even of "uncomplicated male maturity."^[42] But in fact the "hende" clerk reflects the same complicated lack of certain manliness that Absolon flaunts. Most dramatically, the substitution of his body for Alisoun's discloses that the region of the female's private parts is, in the dark night of this tale, interchangeable with the male's: what might seem to be a grounding line of gender difference is thus blurred. When Nicholas puts himself literally in the woman's exposed position here, he may intend to tap into her power and her immunity to one-up his rival, and, as I have said, he certainly reappropriates the role of prankster and agent that Alisoun has momentarily played. But at the same time he acts out the feminization he too, only slightly less obviously than and in different ways from Absolon, has displayed throughout the tale.

"Hende Nicholas" is first described as "sleigh and ful privee" (3201), with a wiliness and secrecy more often associated, in other fabliaux as in the Miller's opening comments on women's "pryvetee," with women.^[43] In the same couplet, he is, like other clerks, literally described as feminine and/or virginal in demeanor: "lyk a mayden meke for to see" (3202; compare the last words that Absolon speaks before he is cured: "'I may nat ete na moore than a mayde'"[3707]).^[44] His unequivocal and direct lust for Alisoun would seem designed to contradict this maidenly appearance: the first words he speaks, while grabbing his land-

[42] Birney, "The Inhibited and the Uninhibited," p. 336. For a discussion of the two men in another respect, focusing on Absolon's dancing and discussing the all-male folk dances evoked by the tale, see Margaret Jennings, "Ironic Dancing: Absolon in the Miller's Tale ," Florilegium 5 (1983), pp. 78–88. Jennings notes that in the dances alluded to in lines 3328–30, "the dividing line for participation was not between peasantry and gentry but between old and young," and thus she implies the similarity or common factor between Absolon and Nicholas.

[43] For evidence of this claim see R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

[44] The fact that "maiden" could mean "virginal man" in the period in question (see Middle English Dictionary , M.1, maiden n . 2(d), "a man who abstains from sexual experience for religious reasons; also, a man lacking sexual experience") does not vitiate my point but rather extends it beyond the tale into the lexicon. The appropriation of the term for an unmarried woman to describe the sexually chaste or uninitiated man reflects the perceived feminization of the celibate position and suggests too that the most important thing about a woman—so important that it floats free of her historical specificity as a woman—is her sexual status. The asymmetry in gender is also telling: the corresponding term "boy" or "bachelor," for instance, is never borrowed for an unmarried woman or used to represent gender-free celibacy.

lord's wife "by the queynte," are: "'Ywis, but if ich have my wille,/For deerne love of thee, lemman, I spille'" (3277–78). The action and texture of the tale, like the formulaic nature of his words, reveal, however, that his real interest lies elsewhere, in his own "queynte" skills, his clever tricks. When an intrusively parenthetical reference interrupts the narrative of his first approach to Alisoun, the conflation of female genitals and clerkly ingenuity is blatantly signaled in the dissolution of rhyming difference into mere repetition and synonymity:

    . . . this hende Nicholas
Fil with this yonge wyf to rage and pleye,
Whil that hir housbonde was at Oseneye,
As clerkes ben ful subtile and ful queynte;
And prively he caughte hire by the queynte . . .
                                             (3273–76)

Note, moreover, that the ruse Nicholas cooks up will not provide him with what he professes to want, gratification of his alleged desire for Alisoun, on a routine basis. In fact, his cleverness is bound to be found out, or at best to work only once, and to destroy John's dim-witted faith in the "queynte" clerk as completely as it verifies his instinctive distrust of his wife's "queynte."

What Nicholas's scheming does offer him, more than a single night in possession of Alisoun's "queynte," is the chance to prove that he is "queynte," that he can play the parts of both actor and director in this once-in-a-lifetime performance of an elaborate and supremely tellable, highly formulaic drama, in which the "hende" clerk once more outwits the old married fool. The energy of the narration in the tale matches and defines the energy of Nicholas not as sexual but as authorial. He plans in splendid detail and complication for an actual sexual encounter that is itself described in less than ten lines (3650–56). By one reading, then, what is excessive in this story is neither female sexuality nor sex itself, but fiction-making.

Fiction-making, moreover, is not a gender-neutral activity, and both the benefits and risks of authorial daring and excess are clearly (re)attached to questions of gender, sexuality, and power at the end of the tale. While Nicholas is literally feminized, and literalizes his feminization in the ways I have suggested, he also does his best to reaffirm gender hierarchy and restore the action to a competition between men. His substitution of his male body for Alisoun's female body, his "ers"

exposed instead of hers, preempts the woman's initiative, just as it seems to disambiguate the earlier reference to Alisoun's "hole." Even in play, or perhaps especially in play, it seems that the female cannot be left in the unsuitable role of agent for long; what is exposed, whether it is the similarity or difference between queynte (n.) and queynte (adj.), is too dangerous.^[45] As a result of his appropriation of her attempted joke, Alisoun escapes the retribution that would too clearly mark the fact that women can't defend themselves with humor, as men can, that they can't merely refuse to suffer. She is also refixed in a position that is clearly marginal to the action and the message of the tale and that is now even passive. For when she is referred to in the closing recapitulation—"Thus swyved was this carpenters wyf" (3850)—Nature's female has suddenly become the grammatical object of the verb and a nameless possession of her husband in a way that does not seem to reflect what we saw earlier of Alisoun any more than it supports a reading of her as "triumphant."^[46]

Nicholas's punishment is in part the price he pays for reasserting his control and firmly ousting the woman from the position of visible importance and potential liberation she momentarily occupies; however, the price might have been higher. He is merely "scalded in the towte" (3853), and while it hurts so much that "he wende for to dye" (3813), a few lines later he is perfectly capable of more self-defensive jesting, running into the street to make everyone in town laugh at John. Just as the near miss of Absolon's attack on Alisoun obscures the reality and the horror of male violence against women, so too Nicholas has a near miss, if we think about it, one that suggests that if he is not really like a maiden to begin with, he comes close to being like one in the end. If the hot iron of Absolon "brende . . . his toute," then those same few millimeters that separate (and connect) Alisoun's two holes save him from castration, the fate of so many other promiscuous medieval clerks, real and fictional.

Nicholas's potential castration, like Alisoun's rape or mutilation or the sodomy of Absolon's attack, lurks not at some deep level in this tale but quite close to the surface, where it clarifies part of the threat to masculine

[45] Smith also points out that Alisoun's remark, "Or I wol caste a ston," might be a threat of castration ("Or I wol Caste a Ston," p. 19).

[46] Smith, again, says that the Miller's grammar at the end puts Alisoun "among the Victimized"; "she has been done to, screwed, and her pleasure is passive past perfect" (Ibid., p. 28).

identity that the Miller's story recognizes and averts; and yet no castration, rape, or sodomy is literally said to take place. The humorous substitution of the male body for the female body, again, together with the sudden, tightly closed denouement, occludes the consequences for women of male anger and anxiety, and for men of the vicious circle of feminization. The Miller has warned against inquiring into a woman's "pryvytee," and the tale follows and proves the wisdom of his counsel. By deflecting attention from Alisoun's threatening self-exposure as he does—blurring the focus to begin with by the use of the word "hole," and then replacing Alisoun altogether—he mystifies and averts the threats that any representation of female sexuality seems to entail: the feminization of the man who tells "queynte" stories, as well as both the homoerotic and self-mutilating aspects of male competition for the "queynte" of a woman.

But God forbede that we stynte heere.
The Cook's Prologue , 4339

At first glance, the Knight and the Miller might appear to be as different in their attitudes toward women as the pairs of male rivals within their tales—Palamon, devoted to Venus, and Arcite, follower of Mars; courteous Absolon and "hende" Nicholas—are different. In other words, disagreement within each tale between men who view Woman as goddess and those who view her as "creature" seems to be restaged between the two tales. But the differences between antithetical discourses about Woman are flattened out by the narratives in which they are embedded, in the respective tales and in the meta-tale in which each storyteller also takes part. Palamon and Arcite, never as far apart as the other rivals, are elaborately yet easily reconciled, and on his deathbed the latter putatively proves his nobility and his true bond with his brother through the generous transmission of Emily. Absolon and Nicholas, at the end of the Miller's Tale , parody the consolidating exchange of a gift, whereby Emily is equated with a fart, and their perspectives on Alisoun also draw literally and figuratively closer and perhaps even cross. So too the tale-tellers, the Knight and the Miller, are not as different as they seem; in fact, when we look more closely at their representations of women and their definitions of Woman in the ways I have suggested here, we may see their common interests and the collective effect of their two tales, the first two blows exchanged in the Canterbury tournament.

Most prominently, the first two tales similarly inscribe violence against women at the margins of their respective plots—in what happens just before Arcite and Palamon's story begins, and in what nearly happens at the end of the Miller's—so that this violence frames the tales as a pair. Moreover, what the Knight doesn't have time to talk about, like Emily's rites in the temple of Diana, is often equivalent to what the Miller doesn't want to inquire too closely into, like Alisoun's (or his wife's) sexuality: again, women are thereby characterized in divers ways as fundamentally dangerous in the world just outside or narrowly averted by each narrative. The ideals that contain women in the polite genre and the joke that lets women go in the churlish genre direct attention away from the remote violence and the threats it brackets. In each tale, moreover, women's initially marked presence—in the foreshortened story of the conquest of Femenye and in the prefatory encounter with the Theban widows, as in the rhetorically rich opening portrait of Alisoun—is gradually recast as absence. At the same time, each narrative moves to confirm the most orthodox medieval view of Woman, her fleshly, fallen reality; and, given the ordering of the tales, the progressive movement from the apparent idealism of the Knight's treatment of Emily to the apparent, although equally formulaic, realism of the Miller's representation of Alisoun also validates the Miller's highly conventional view as real, as frank and open and natural.^[47] This reiterated movement, from presence to absence and from ideal to real, accounts for the seemingly paradoxical cultural alignment of female absence and reality, of Woman as both marginal and material.

At the same time that the contrast between the paired, sequentially presented genres thus effects a sense of what is true about women, the way each of these tales also defies certain generic conventions and interacts with the other manages the potential for female presence and power more securely than either genre might in isolation. Fabliau elements in the courtly tale, including the rivalry of the two male courtly lovers and the tone of some of Arcite's, Theseus's, and the narrator's remarks, establish both the marginalization and the lack of spirituality in Woman. Courtly elements in the fabliau, such as the narrator's long

[47] I have already cited above several references to the "reality" of Alisoun; to add just one more clear statement of this position, note Patrick J. Gallagher's comment: "Alison . . . brings us uniquely into contact with what is real" ("Perception and Reality in the Miller's Tale ," Chaucer Review 18 (1983), p. 40).

portrait of his heroine or the language of Absolon's wooing, parody the rhetorical elevation of Woman to confirm that Emily and Alisoun are not so different "under their clothes."

Taking the tales together, however, it is also possible to see the instability in both genres or positions that is opened up by the topic of Woman and the hazardous, irresistible urge to inquire into (and thus try to control) female sexuality. The importance of the idealized lady for whom men fight and die in the courtly model, for instance, calls into question the Miller's claim that the problem is so easily solved by looking the other way, that women can be "swyved" and disregarded as moral or legal agents. When Alisoun takes the initiative to trick and humiliate Absolon, it is telling that she is called to the window by his own pseudocourtly summoning: polite love in fiction grants women just the kind of power that Alisoun perversely wields, momentarily at least. The churlish view—again, appearing by virtue of its contrasting tone and content as well as its place in the sequence to offer the real, natural view—thus provides a pervasive exposure of what the Knight's Tale might on its own cover up more successfully. The character of Absolon, in particular, focuses attention on what the Knight really does refuse to talk about, the risk of effeminacy for men in polite attitudes toward women and in excessively courtly behavior. Absolon follows the logic of a Palamon, as it were, to its logical absurdity, and he is both punished and apparently locked out of the heterosexual gratification that is made available, at last, to the patient yet stalwart nobleman. Nicholas's feminization suggests the more successful usurpation of feminine strategies, the substitution of his "queynte" wits for her "queynte," to return moral agency to males. But in creating Nicholas as a type of storyteller, the Miller's Tale firmly and irrevocably destabilizes the clear gender difference and the possibility of unstrained male bonds that were reinforced by the Knight's Tale .

Such destabilization and play with the fluidity of gender need not, and in this case does not, empower women or alter the fundamental drive to define Woman in a familiar way. The function of misogyny in the fourteenth-century literary text may thus be comparable to what Peter Stallybrass finds over two centuries later in English court drama. Stallybrass argues that contradictory conceptions of woman's body in early modern England reflect "the contradictory formation of woman ["women-as-the-same" and "women-as-different"] within the categories of gender and of class." In the interests of differentiating among classes, Stallybrass argues, women may also be differentiated, so that "those in

the dominant social classes are allocated privileges they can confer (status, wealth) . . . back on men ." Oppressed groups, on the other hand, may attack aristocratic privilege by denying the class differentiation of women, constructing "women-as-the-same." But the potentially subversive conflation of women as different into "a single undifferentiated group," such as I see in the Miller's and Knight's tales, is, Stallybrass adds, "commonly articulated within misogynistic discourse."^[48]

The Miller's challenge to certain aspects of the Knight's vision of men and the social order they make tends to open up the fictions of aristocratic masculine identity to discourse (between men) across class divisions on the question of women. Despite the Miller's unchivalric view of what male bonds might amount to, then, the possibility of male bonding across class lines is precisely what is affirmed by the first two tales. And the Miller explicitly introduces Alisoun, taken as "Nature's female," as the woman for whom men of different ranks can feel common masculine desire, even as they have sexual relations with her in class-specific ways: "She was a prymerole, a piggesnye, / For any lord to leggen in his bedde, / Or yet for any good yeman to wedde" (3268–70). The gender disorder and feminization of the storyteller subsequently imagined by the Miller makes possible class satire and sustains the leveling discourse about women that enables these genres to interpenetrate so easily and these two stories to cohere so neatly.

For potentially divergent reasons, both genres and both tales seem to wish profoundly that it were as they try to say it is: that masculine identity and male bonds were possible without the problematics of what I have called the woman outside—the overt markedness and power, in different specific articulations, of the feminine position in both courtly romance and fabliaux—and the woman inside—the covert universalization of the negative feminine position that we see throughout the Canterbury Tales . What predictably seems to horrify and titillate men in both the Knight's Tale and the Miller's Tale is the thought, and/or the sight, of what women look like "under their clothes": we can call this, as Freud does, "the fright of castration," or, as I have been calling it, the perception and fear of gender instability, a lack not of the phallus but of stable sexual differentiation, and the consequent charges, for men, of male

[48] "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed," in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe , ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 133.

homosexuality and feminization. In the Canterbury Tales men loathe, fear, and deny Woman because their efforts to construct masculine identity and discursive authority on the ground of Woman as Other, as properly and stably different, are constantly necessitated and undermined by the experience of both Woman and women as the same, of their own femininity as a function of both external circumstances and inherent, unruly nature. Concomitantly, what is really excessive is not (only) female sexuality but (also) authorial energy—the elaborateness of the Knight's rhetoric or of Nicholas's scheme—which displaces but does not finally conceal the anxiety about manliness that any representation of Woman entails.

Such excessiveness reappears in the remaining tales of the A-fragment, the Reeve's Tale and fragmentary Cook's Tale , and in closing I would like to sketch out some ways in which these works might be more fully explored along the lines I have laid out here. Although the Reeve says that he is out to "quite" the Miller, in several respects his tale resembles and rewrites the Knight's offering more than it does the Miller's, while at the same time it sustains the Miller's interest in what men of different classes have in common.^[49] The Reeve's story of (yet again) three male characters—the miller Symkyn, and the two clerks, John and Aleyn—restages the familiar contest between the old man who legitimately possesses a woman and the young men who don't; readers of the tales as a sequence might at this point begin to wonder if there were any other plot. The Reeve himself and the Knight's Theseus share a common trait, their "ire" (compare, for example, 1762 and 3862), and the Reeve's miller of Trumpyngtoun more closely resembles the Duke of Athens than old John the carpenter. Both Symkyn and Theseus have legal control over two women, in the miller's case a wife and a daughter, in the Duke's case a wife and a sister-in-law. Just as Theseus's marriage to Hippolyta represents proof of his aristocratic male prowess, Symkyn's marriage, in keeping with his far lower rank, is intended "To saven his estaat of

[49] Lee Patterson argues that the Reeve's Tale subverts the Miller's subversion first by revealing "disunity within the peasant class itself" and second by "requiring us to read the Reeve's Tale as the expression of an individual psyche" (Negotiating the Past [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987], p. 182). But I am not convinced that we must read the Reeve's narrative as only "psychological and spiritual"; in comparing it here to the Knight's Tale , I am sketching Out a meaning that is also political and social, once gender and the representation of women are seen, as feminism insists they be seen, as political and social issues.

yomanrye" (3949); and in his later concern for the shame of his daughter, "that is come of swich lynage" (4272), the Reeve's miller also replicates the dynastic anxieties of Arcite and Palamon. Theseus's use of Emily to stabilize his patriarchal rule is further parodied by the Reeve's Tale in the otherwise extraneous character of the miller's father-in-law, a parson about whom we know nothing except that his corruption extends to his ludicrous desire to arrange his granddaughter's marriage "for to bistowe hire hye / Into som worthy blood of auncetrye; . . . Therfore he wolde his hooly blood honoure, / Though that he hooly chirche sholde devoure" (3981–86).

Theseus's reputation for martial prowess, born out by the beginning of the tale, is also matched and defined, in a reductive sense, by the portrait of formidable Symkyn that opens the Reeve's Tale . Never to be caught like Absolon without a blade, this miller bears a profusion of swords and knives on his belt and in his pouch and hose:

Ay by his belt he baar a long panade,
And of a swerd ful trenchant was the blade.
A joly poppere baar he in his pouche;
Ther was no man, for peril, dorste hym touche.
A Sheffeld thwitel baar he in his hose.
                                                            (3929–33)

And the tournament Theseus arranges is patently reenacted in the struggle with staves at the end of the tale.

More like Arcite and Palamon than like Nicholas and Absolon, too, the young men in the triangular schema of the Reeve's plot, the "testif" (4004) John and Aleyn, come from "o toun" (4014). They are related through both a kind of brotherhood, an alliance of age and class interests in the hope of besting the miller (and representing the all-male institution, a college at Canterbury, whose tights they hope to protect, just as Arcite and Palamon represent Thebes), and a competitive engagement to each other. John openly casts this low form of chivalric rivalry as a jealous concern for his own reputation," 'when this jape is tald another day'" (4207), and thus implicates storytelling and masculine sexual adventure. So too it is precisely the urge to tell—comparable to Palamon's odd confession to Theseus in the grove—that initiates the final pseudotournament/brawl, when Aleyn cannot resist boasting of his conquest of the miller's daughter to the wrong bedfellow.

The female characters in the Reeve's Tale may also recall Emily in that they are much less realistic than Alisoun appears to be, and the extent

of their interest in sexual play is at least slightly ambiguous, like Emily's. Symkyn's unnamed wife and his daughter, Malyne, are more overtly than ever the means by which men compete and prove their masculinity and power over each other; the initial conflict between the clerks and the Miller, notably, is about grain, and the thieving Symkyn's wife and daughter are explicitly referred to as the "esement" (4179) to which the cheated clerks claim a legal tight. Male sexual gratification is subordinated to and conflated with other male entitlements: money, possessions, and professional honor. The women do seem to enjoy sex, although Mrs. Symkyn's pleasure is referred to only in a line that dearly serves to cast aspersions on the husband's sexual capacity: "So myrie a fit ne hadde she nat ful yoore" (4230). The Reeve's description of the rape of Malyne, who is presumably a virgin, hints at her unseemly, instantaneous pleasure, but speaks of her potential pain in a way that both reminds us of it and belittles it: "This wenche . . . faste slepte / Til he so ny was, er she myghte espie, / That it had been to late for to crie, / And shortly for to seyn, they were aton" (4194–97). Malyne also recalls the romance heroine more than Alisoun when she almost weeps in saying farewell to her "goode lemman" (4247); in this same speech, however, her effective purpose is to betray her father by telling the clerk where to find the cake that has been made out of his stolen meal. So too, when the more well-intentioned wife mistakes her husband's bald head for a clerk's nightcap and smites Symkyn "at the fulle" (4305), we see most clearly of all what both the Knight and the Miller have been able to obscure but not overcome in their tales: women are literally as well as metaphorically dangerous, wittingly or unwittingly, because even very different men sometimes look too much alike.

Were we to go on in this vein, moreover, to the Cook's Prologue and Tale , we would be able to see the only possible outcome that the tales can imagine to all this quiting and requiting among male storytellers. The Cook's response to the Reeve's Tale acknowledges the bonds of pleasure, mutual irritation, and reciprocal service between male comrades that such tale-telling affords: "For joye him thoughte he clawed him on the bak" (4326). And when the Cook encapsulates and focuses what he sees as the moral of the Reeve's story, using a proverb from Solomon, his comment in fact spells out the link between all three preceding tales:

"Ne bryng nat every man into thyn hous";
For herberwynge by nyghte is perilous.
Wel oghte a man avysed for to be
Whom that he broghte into his pryvetee.
                                                        (4331–34)

In these very different versions of the domestic crisis, all three older men have found it threatening to bring younger men into their houses (or their prison towers) at night. The Cook refocuses attention on what is at stake: not only access to the women's "pryvetee" that is guarded within the domestic walls, and from which Knight and Miller both explicitly avert their eyes even as they wish to take a quick, thrilling peep, but also men's "pryvetee"; and when the gender changes, "privacy" also changes from a question of sexuality to a matter of place and property.

The Cook wants more of the same back-scratching—"But God forbede that we stynte heere" (4339)—and his call for an endless proliferation of authorial voices, all saying the same thing, reminds us as in the Miller's Tale and the Knight's Tale that what is excessive is a certain kind of masculine fiction-making, in which Woman is both quintessential fiction and inescapable, unspeakable reality. What we have of his own tale also suggests endless repetition of the same thing, the joke about the cuckolded husband, as the Cook sets up the story of a riotous servant—something of a cross, if possible, between Absolon and Symkyn—who is going to be taken into another man's house by night. These are the last five lines of the A-fragment:

Anon he sente his bed and his array
Unto a compeer of his owene sort,
That lovede dys, and revel, and disport.
And hadde a wyf that heeld for contenance
A shoppe, and swyved for Mr sustenance.
                                                       (4418–22)

The last line leaves us with another strong verbal echo of (the end of) the Miller's Tale —"Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf . . . ," although "swyved" in the Cook's Tale is an intransitive verb, rather than a participle, of which the wife is the subject. The Cook doesn't want to stop, and the literal fact that there is no end to this degenerative sequence of tales must be read as accidental. The repetition seems at the same time to effect a kind of curtailment that is highly appropriate. The in-

completion of the tale and thus of the sequence as a whole implies on one hand that there can be no end to such tale-telling and on the other hand that we have finally reached natural closure in this hardly newsworthy vision of the real truth that underlies men's dreams and jokes, that unifies and divides them across age and class differences: women are prostitutes. This is the common denominator, the familiar, traditional definition of Woman that is exchanged and fixed by the opening voices of the Canterbury Tales , as they look away from the violence against women on which the sequence is founded and instead lead the way into reality, defined here as the inevitable and progressive disillusioning of Palamon's painfully naive view that the woman in the garden is a goddess.