Chaucer’s love of people and of taking every detail as far as he can is exhibited here, where he proceeds in making Absolon even more of a pathetic fool, by showing how dismissive Alisoun is of him when he tries to sing to her. Absolon buys her wine, mead, ‘wafres, pipyng hoot’, and even resorts to paying other people to try to woo her on his behalf. Her final dissmissal of him with the ‘misplaced kiss’ is even more effective due to this.
Once Nicholas has explained part of his curious plan to us, and has disappeared for some days into his ‘chambre’, the carpenter expresses great concern for the wellbeing of his cuckoling lodger. Chaucer’s humour is rarely as straightforward as a practical joke – it is often in the form of irony as seen here.
John integrates a great deal of superstition into his concern, revealing to us that that very day he had seen the corpse of a man he had seen at work a few days before, being carried to church. When the truth of Nicholas’ condition is revealed, John calls upon ‘Seinte Frydewyde’, ‘Seint Thomas, ‘Jhesu Crist’, and ‘Seinte Benedight’. The reason that Chaucer has him portrayed as such a God-fearing, overly religious man, is to help us to accept that he would have believed Nicholas’ flood predictions. Then, the silly old carpenter relays to us another story, of an astronomer who fell into a ‘marle-pit’ while studying the stars. He is trying to make the point that men should not attempt to understand ‘Goddes pryvetee’. This is a key theme throughout the tale.
Once the door to Nicholas’ room is finally opened, Nicholas’acting immediately fools John who has, by now, worked himself into a huge God-fearing passion. He begins to cry and shake the ‘hende’ student, and chants a short prayer to bless the house. He is rewarded with a small sigh from Nicholas, who has probably been trying very hard not to laugh at his stupidity, and so the next part of Nicholas’ deception of John begins.
Nicholas begins by flattering John; he tells him that he is the only man he will trust, and that John is not to tell anybody what he is about to hear. What John does hear is an extremely convincing prophecy, full of detail, about a ‘wild and wood’ flood – twice as bad as the flood of Noah, which will come and destroy everything in the world. Surprisingly, John’s first concern is not for himself, but for his ‘wyf’. He is overcome with grief, and ‘he fil almoost adoun’. At this point, we almost begin to take pity on the old carpenter. He has done nothing but try to protect and guard his young wife. He is undoubtedly a foolish and extremely gullible, but does he really deserve to be cuckolded in such a humiliating way?
Nicholas provides him with a series of instuctions, which would ensure that none of the three would perish in the waters. He urges John to hurry, and to gather three large tubs to hang from the ceiling of his large barn, so that the three of them can sleep safely within them until the flood is upon them, when they can cut the ropes suspending them, and float safely until the waters have subsided. The fact that John actually believes all of these lies is amusing enough, but when you add to this the thought of the three of them, hanging in ‘a knedyng trogh, or ellis a kymelyn’ the tale becomes absurd. The final detail that Nicholas adds is that the carpener is to hang in his tub far apart from Alisoun, so that no ‘sin’ is committed between them. He also emphasizes that they must not talk or cry out to one another, ‘for it is Goddes owene heeste deere’.
Chaucer uses Alisoun to mock the carpenter, by having her acting up to his panic when he announces the flood. She, of course, knows about Nicholas’ plan, and has to fake shock and panic when she is told for a second time. She reassures John, and reinforces the fact that she is his ‘trewe, verray wedded wyf’, delighting in the irony of her words.
Along with irony, Chaucer employs a degree of sarcasm to mock the carpenter – ‘Lo, which a greet thyng is affeccioun!’ He says that John’s love for Alisoun makes him overreact to the threat that the flood poses to them. We are told that John ‘bigynneth quake’, and fooloshly starts to believe that he can actually see the flood, coming ‘to drenchen Alisoun, his hony deere.’ Chaucer describes at length the trouble that John goes to in order to be ready for the flood, filling the three tubs with enough food for one day only, which is all the time that Nicholas and Alisoun want together.
The image of a ‘tipsy and trembling John, taking refuge in the makeshift ‘ark’’ is
Once the three of them are setled in the tubs, Nicholas begins to toy with John’s fear, by suddenly becoming very serious, and appealing to John’s religious faith – ‘Now, Pater-noster, clom!’ John, tired out after preparing so thoroughly for the flood, falls asleep shortly after.
This is the turning point in the tale. Now that John is safely out of their way, the would-be lovers can escape to his bedroom ‘ in bisynesse of myrthe and of solas’. The focus switches quickly from the bedroom to Absolon, whose ‘mouth hath icched al this longe day’, for thinking of kissing Alisoun. He has absolute confidence in his plan to woo her, but even if he should fail, he believes she would take pity on him and kiss him anyway. He has totally miscalculated her personality – she is feisty and youthful, and does not care if he is hurt. Although he does not know it, she is far more likely to laugh at him dismissively that to feel sorry for him.
The fact that Absolon tries so hard to make her like him is funny in itself. He takes great care over his appearance, and the way he smells, and tries to charm her with lines such as
‘Wel litel thynken ye upon my wo,
That for youre love I swete ther I go.’
Chaucer entices us not to see Absolon as an unfortunate courtly lover, suffering from ‘trewe love…so yvel biset’, but instead as a foolish and humorous ‘Jakke fool’, to be mocked and laughed at. Alisoun dismisses him in a bored manner, and Absolon employs his plan B, imploring to her sense of pity, promising that he will leave if she kisses him. The story climaxes when Alisoun, promising John that he would ‘laughen al thy fille’, ‘putte hir hole’ out of the bedroom window for Absolon to kiss ‘ful savourly’. There is no wit, irony, or sarcasm here – this is brutal, coarse comedy. The rhyme of ‘cole’ with ‘hole’ adds to the humour, as does the way that Chaucer describes the night in order to create suspense and anticipation.
Once Absolon has detected a ‘rough and long berd’, he jumps away in shock at the realisation of what he has just done. No longer such a priggish and ‘joly’ man, Absolon is now furious at his treatment, and claims that he wants revenge on her more than anything else in the world. Even in his fury, Absolon is amusing. Chaucer compares him to a weeping child, denouncing love and romance in his tantrum, before storming off to ‘daun Gerveys’’ workshop.
Unlike Nicholas’ plan involving the mystical flood, we know nothing of Absolon’s plan. We have never before met Gerveys, and we were more prepared for Absolon to run from the carpenter’s house crying, than to furiously seek revenge. Now, cured from his ‘love-longyng’, Absolon smugly tells Gerveys as he is picking up the white-hot poker that ‘therof, be as be may’. It is not only his personality that has changed – his leg-flailing dances have been exchanged for a soft creeping motion, as Absolon advances on the carpenter’s house for a second time.
This time, Absolon is cunning. He puts on an act of devotion to Alisoun, and claims to have brought her a beautifully engraved gold ring in exchange for a kiss. We are not laughing at Absolon anymore, but with him. As Nicholas ‘leets fle a fart as greet as …a thonder-dent’ in Absolon’s face, he is ‘smoot amydde the ers’ by the ‘iren hoot’. Nicholas displayed all of the qualities that Absolon once did – he was utterly confident that his plan would work and, like Absolon, he was rudely made to look like a fool.
The tale moves onward very quickly from this point, where ‘the quartet of fools’ are linked together in a hilarious, slapstick ending. The long-forgotten carpenter is brought back into the story in an unexpected twist. Hearing the student’s call for ‘Water!’ to cool his wound, John believes that ‘Nowelis flood’ has come, so he cuts the ropes suspending him from the ceiling. The cuckolded old man falls to the floor, breaking his arm, and the whole neighbourhood comes to stare at the ‘pale and wan’ fool.
From this point onwards, Chaucer makes a point of stressing the isolation of the ‘wood’ carpenter. Alisoun and Nicholas cruelly create a tale which explains the carpenter’s actions as those of a madman, and his efforts to reason with them are completely ignored. Chaucer says that they ‘turned al his harm unto a jape’. This is possibly there to emphasise his instruction to us at the end of the prologue not to ‘maken ernest of game’, and not to feel too sorry for the carpenter.
The tale ends with the conclusion that ‘swyvved was this carpenteris wyf, for al his kepyng and his jalousye’. Chaucer does not want us to take any moral from the tale, but it is packed full of them. It can be seen as a sort of sermon on the sins of pride and jealousy, hidden in the format of a ‘naughty story’. According to McDaniel, ‘the Miller tells this crude but hilarious story to remind the Host and all the other pilgrims that social pretense…is dangerous’. Even though it may be difficult not to pity the carpenter at the end when he is hurt, cuckolded, and taunted, we must refrain from doing it. John Lippitt said that ‘the tragic and the comic are not polar opposites, or mutually exclusive, but subtly and sometimes almost paradoxically inter-linked modes of experience’.
