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Chaucer's Merchant's Tale: Another Swing of the Pendulum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Norman T. Harrington
Norman T. Harrington*
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, N. Y.
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Abstract

Despite a recent tendency to consider the Merchant's Tale outside the dramatic context of its prologue, and to read it primarily as a broadly humorous, if discordant, piece of anti-feminism, the tale is actually unified by a consistent narrative point of view that successfully accommodates the apparently incongruous themes, tones, and styles of the poem. The final effect, moreover, is not comic at all, but rather sardonic, a dark and unsettling view of an aspect of man's experience. The Merchant's Prologue, though probably written after the tale, is carefully adjusted to the climate of the tale, and must be considered in any critical account, especially since it is through the strong, viable presence of the narrator that the tale is held together. Two features characterize this narrator, one tonal, the other attitudinal. The first is the cool, acidulous voice we hear narrating the story, the expression of an ironic intelligence deeply at odds with the world. The second is the narrator's heightened awareness of sex, particularly in its more grotesque and violent forms, which gives the tale its unsavory atmosphere. These marks of a single unified narrator, together with the ironic finale of the plot, result in a literary mode that is not finally comic, but which suggests comparison with the so-called “problem comedies” of Shakespeare.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 1 , January 1971 , pp. 25 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Note 1 in page 31 George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and his Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1915), pp. 201–02.

Note 2 in page 31 J. S. P. Tatlock, “Chaucer's Merchant's Tale” MP, 33 (1936), 367, 375.

Note 3 in page 31 Largely in agreement with these views, though developing special aspects of the tale more fully, are the following major treatments: Germaine Dempster, Dramatic Irony in Chaucer (New York, 1959), pp. 46–58; G. G. Sedgewick, “The Structure of the Merchant's Tale,” UTQ, 17 (1948), 337–45; C. H. Holman, “Courtly Love in the Merchant's and Franklin's Tales,” ELH, 18 (1951), 241–52; R. M. Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk (Austin, Texas, 1955), pp. 152–75; ?. T. Donaldson, Chaucer's Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York, 1958), pp. 920–23; Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley, Calif., 1964), pp. 230–37. Paul G. Ruggiers, while accepting the validity of the Merchant's Prologue, places the tale at the “furthest, most sardonic range of comic art” : The Art of the Canterbury Tales (Madison, Wis., 1965), pp. 109–20. Other central interpretations, all focusing on the moral realm of the tale, are: Paul A. Olson, “Chaucer's Merchant and January's 'Hevene in Erthe Heere,' ” ELH, 28 (1961), 203–14; Bernard F. Huppé, A Reading of the Canterbury Tales (Binghamton, ?. Y., 1964), pp. 147–62; and Gertrude M. White, “ 'Hoolynesse or Dotage': The Merchant's January,” PQ, 44 (1965), 397–404.

Note 4 in page 31 J. C. McGalliard, “Chaucerian Comedy: The Merchant's Tale, Jonson and Molière,” PQ, 25 (1946), 343–70.

Note 5 in page 31 ?. H. Bronson, “Afterthoughts on the Merchant's Tale,” SP, 58 (1961), 584.

Note 6 in page 31 Bronson, p. 596.

Note 7 in page 31 Robert M. Jordon, “The Non-Dramatic Disunity of the Merchant's Tale,” PMLA, 78 (1963), 293–99. This article, with some revision, appears as Ch. vi in Jordan's Chaucer and the Shape of Creation: The Aesthetic Possibilities of Inorganic Structure (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 132–51.

Note 8 in page 31 “Non-Dramatic Disunity,” p. 293.

Note 9 in page 31 Thus, Tatlock maintains that Chaucer, following his usual practice in the Canterbury Tales, wrote the prologue after the tale, in this case to account for the “extravagant animosity” of the Merchant-narrator: Development and Chronology of Chaucer's Works (London, 1907), pp. 200–01. J. M. Manly and Edith Rickert also cite evidence to show that the composition of the prologue was “rather late” : Text of the Canterbury Tales, ii (Chicago, 1940), 266.

Note 10 in page 31 “The Structure of the Merchant's Tale” p. 340.

Note 11 in page 31 Including the authoritative Ellesmere and Harley 7334. For a complete list of the MSS see Manly and Rickert, Text of the Canterbury Tales, m, 376.

Note 12 in page 31 Chaucer and the French Tradition, p. 172.

Note 13 in page 31 My quotations from Chaucer, here and elsewhere, are from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd éd., ed. F. N. Robinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1957).

Note 14 in page 31 Following McGalliard, Sedgewick, and Lumiansky, I interpret “seculeer” to mean a layman who is unprotected from sin by holy orders; see McGalliard “Chaucer's Merchant's Tale and Deschamps' Miroir de Mariage,” PQ, 25 (1946), 194; Sedgewick, “Structure of the Merchant's Tale,” p. 339; Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk, p. 158.

Note 15 in page 31 “Non-Dramatic Disunity,” p. 294.

Note 16 in page 31 The term is Muscatine's: Chaucer and the French Tradition, p. 233.

Note 17 in page 31 “Chaucerian Comedy,” pp. 343–70.