How does the tale of the Merchant reflect the character of the Merchant himself?
How does the tale of the Merchant reflect the character of the Merchant himself?
Soumik Datta, Essay 4, 10 December, 2003
By including a merchant among the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer brought to bear across the entire interpretive range of his poem, an aspect of his personal experience of London that had deep resonances for an England in the process of developing its own mercantile character and accommodating itself to the burgeoning of fourteenth century continental mercantilism. Chaucer underscored the contemporary conditions in which through social station and occupation he was personally enmeshed, by including in various tales, characters who are merchants. The careful punctuation of the Canterbury Tales with figures with figures representative of the merchant class should alert modern readers to the social, political and moral tensions that permeated fourteenth century London society resulting from emerging market conditions.
It is no accident that the 'Merchant's Tale' like the 'Clerk's Tale' is set in Lombardy. One can see in the relationship of the two tales, at least three kinds of association: hearing the 'Clerk's Tale' might simply have caused the merchant to think of the story he knew about the Lombardy in his experience. ; the behavior of Walter and Griselda might also have reminded him by contrast rather than comparison of his own Italian tale of marriage; finally the Merchant might have consciously balanced the Clerk's account of aristocratic values and behaviors against his own account of the business-like deportment of January. Each of these three relationships to the 'Clerk's Tale' can act as a springboard for one of the many readings that can be done of the 'Merchant's Tale'. However, for the present purposes, it must suffice to demonstrate that the tale the Merchant tells very much describes a world of commercial transaction, even in a situation in which exchange is apparently inappropriate, and that this description to some extent implies - if not defines - the Merchant's engagement with such a world. As we read about January's decision to take a wife and his subsequent treatment of May, we realize that the story 'is about buying and controlling, about what can and cannot be bought and controlled. One posit either a Merchant who fully understands the import of his tale or-a familiar move for this fiction-one who inadvertently indicts the entrepreneurial temper, but in either case, he is an appropriate teller.' (Knapp)
As the Merchant appears to be approving of January's aspirations and his behavior towards May, he is nonetheless painting a picture of married life that David Aers calls an 'appalling human reality' at least from the point of view of the fictional May and historical wives bound by law to their husband's dominion. Aers considers the 'Merchant's Tale' to be one of the most 'disturbing visions of traditional Christian marriage as an institutionalization of human and sexual degradation' that accepts the premise that women 'exist as objects in the acquisitive male field of vision, commodities to be purchased and consumed'. This idea is crucial since it yokes together a traditional religious way of understanding the subjugation of women (and the related denigration of their sexuality) and a market based social formulation that accomplishes the same end. The latter is a purely secular rationale that seems at odds with the religious perspective until one examines the two systems of the texture and quality of marital relations.
When considering this issue, we must recall not only the personality of the Merchant who is speaking the tale, but also the complex map of social relations that is suggested by the interaction of the various pilgrims and the tales they tell. The tale of January and May must call up for the reader not only the Merchant's relation to his own tale but also other marriages, other husbands and wives discussed on various fictive levels in the poem, the 'Wife of Bath' and the characters in the 'Clerk's Tale' and the 'Miller's Tale' figuring as exemplary among ...
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When considering this issue, we must recall not only the personality of the Merchant who is speaking the tale, but also the complex map of social relations that is suggested by the interaction of the various pilgrims and the tales they tell. The tale of January and May must call up for the reader not only the Merchant's relation to his own tale but also other marriages, other husbands and wives discussed on various fictive levels in the poem, the 'Wife of Bath' and the characters in the 'Clerk's Tale' and the 'Miller's Tale' figuring as exemplary among them. Any effort to come to terms with what Chaucer is saying about the union of matrimony requires that we hold before us the polyvalence and disparateness of each of the voices we hear on this subject and the complicated harmonies they produce. The Merchant is of course a man who is deeply embittered by his own marital experience for 'ne koude in no manere/ Tellen so muchel sorweas I now heer/ Koude tellen of my wyves cursednesse'. The Merchant goes on to claim that he is unable 'for soory herte' to refer more specifically to his own marital troubles but it soon becomes clear that his tale is in effect his personal indictment of feminine promiscuity and disobedience in marriage.
While he implicitly identifies with the cuckolding of his character January whom he presents as a victim of his spouse's deceit, that very own identification turns back on the Merchant as his own narrative progressively reveals January not only as a misogynist but a violent man. Furthermore the discourse of commerce that permeates the tale creates another level of association between the Merchant and January's deplorable behavior that reflects negatively on the speaker. The Merchant's apparently unwitting intrusion of commercial linguistic patterns becomes the verbal equivalent of the attitudes about women as property, displayed by the knight, who believes he can purchase marital contentment.
January is well aware that his 'great prosperitee' will enable him to buy the bride he desires despite his advanced years. The Merchant concurs with January's decision that it is wise to find a young wife to provide heirs: 'Thanne is a wyf a fruit of his tresor./ Than should he take a yong wyf and a feir, /On which he myghte engendren him an heir'. This attitude can be understood as characteristic of both the nobility to which the knight belongs and the fourteenth-century merchant class in the business of consolidating wealth - yet another indirect identification with the Merchant and his character. Moreover the description of a wife as the fruit of her husband's treasure is essential in both the unfolding of the Merchant's story in itself and the relationship between the tale and the teller since the phrase conjoins the fertility of the wife with the estimation of her worth as part of her husband's holdings while it anticipates the appearance of the pear tree which will be the locus of May's adultery.
The Merchant follows the words quoted above with a lengthy and impassioned discourse on the benefits and drawbacks of taking a wife. His commercial language continually reveals the devaluation of women as property even as he professes to speak on the inestimable worth of wives: 'A wyf is Godess yifte verraily;/ Alle other manere yfte hardily, /As londes, rentes, pasture, or commune, /Or moebles-alle been yftes of Fortune/ That passen as a shadwe upon a wall'. When he finally returns to his account of January' search for a wife the Merchant provides a list of requirements for a wife which January recites to his friends. Here the narrative even while shifting voice remains within a world of male assessment of prospective female property. Chaucer forcefully underscores this fact by sustaining here, as elsewhere in the tale, references to eating, to the woman as food and the husband as consumer - he who both eats and spends wastefully. January himself reflects that 'bet than old boef is the tender veel'.
The eating imagery becomes directly tied to January's concern about heirs when he remarks that 'were me levere houndes had me eten/ Than that myn heritage sholde falle/ In straunge hand'. It is January's assumption that the world of marriage arrangements like the world of commerce is one in which one must eat or be eaten: it is the role of the powerful male to provide for his appetites and to protect his possessions. To the extent that a wife can be useful in accomplishing these ends, January believes that the union in which husband and wife 'yelde hir dette whan that is due' can be both pleasurable and advantageous. We shall see that he maintains that belief at the end of the tale even though the Merchant has provided ample evidence that January is mistaken.
The introduction of Justinus and Placebo allows for yet two more male views of wives and the marriage contract. The emphasis remains explicitly on the male point of view as January begins to consider his female neighbors for their suitability: 'Many fair shap and many a fair visage/ Ther passeth thrugh his herte nyght by nyght, / As whoso tooke a mirrour, polished bright, / And sette it in a commune marketplace'. January is doing his mental shopping and he eventually settles on a woman who displays all the qualities he seeks - 'fresshe beautee', 'ange tendre', 'wise governaunce' and 'gentillesse - despite the fact that she is of low social status, of 'small degree'.
Strohm remarks that 'just as Chaucer's life was intersected by contrary social experiences and competing systems of social explanation, so does his poetry provide an intersection for different, ideologically charged ideas about social relations'. What the Merchant says, what January says, and how January ultimately behaves in relation to his wife reflect very different views, but the critical point of intersection is that all three consider May to be 'of smal degree'.
As May and Damian move closer toward the consummation of their desire, we see January's attempts to control his wife- to hoard his treasure. His extreme jealousy is testament to his unconscious awareness of his own impotence and ineffectuality and even to his knowledge that treasures must inevitably be spent, no matter how closely 'wyket' and 'clyket' they are guarded. At the same time his blindness reflects his moral bankruptcy and his inability to see the woman he professes to value so highly. With his wife's act of adultery, January's enclosed garden of delight becomes the scene of his humiliation ( May even stands on his back to begin her climb towards her lover, figuratively reversing the relative social status of husband and wife) and also the site of a reinterpretation of a marriage debt, defined and controlled not by male assumptions but by female assertions.
The Merchant continues the tale with his own assertion of January's continuing delight in his wife and we are very much aware that despite what we know has transpired in the garden it is a male voice that appears to have the final authority to ascribe meaning to what has occurred. January is content, but the Merchant knows better and his own use of irony requires that the story be understood as an indictment of adulterous wives. Clearly however, Chaucer expects us to read beyond the Merchant's motivation and to see both the inhumanity of January's treatment of May and the Merchant's implicit approval of it. In a sense, May has spoken, despite her status as a lower class woman, in a voice that perhaps overwhelms the two male perspectives that structurally encompass her. As we now see - three apparently mutually exclusive possible ways of understanding the Merchant's narrative, we must be made uneasy by the dissonances among them and it is precisely to recognize what these dissonances mean that we must return to Chaucer's relations to merchants in fourteenth-century England
The knight January and the Merchant are allied with respect to their attitudes toward women and property, and it is this alliance which makes the telling of the tale possible. Beyond that bond, however, are differences between the characters' assumptions that resonate throughout the Merchant's discourse. January attempts to establish for himself a private, ordered world in which things are as they appear- an effort that eventually renders him blind. The Merchant, on the other hand, is aware from the start that January's efforts are in vain, that wives cannot be controlled no matter how closely their actions are curtailed. His is a world of newly married experience set off against January's refusal to acknowledge experience, and in this sense merchant and knight are men of their social classes, the merchant recognizing (however reluctantly) the reality of what Strohm calls 'horizontal' social interaction and the knight clinging to established assumptions despite his deep reservations. Set against both these points of view are the implied religious views marriage as a sacred bond, the views represented by Placebo and Justinus and the various classical figures introduced and May's experience of marriage. Chaucer has indeed created in his text, a place , as Strohm puts it, 'crowded with many voices representing many centers of social authority'.
While the 'Merchant's Tale' is obviously, and primarily, important because of the issues it raises about the relations between spouses, it is given to the Merchant to tell precisely because of his experience with trade and his familiarity with the language of commerce - in turn drawing attention to the fact that the air in fourteenth-century England was full of different conceptions of social order that traversed traditionally understood categories in uncomfortable ways and could not be neatly compartmentalized. If feudal hierarchies and sexual boundaries and religious discourse and classical social systems were to some extent becoming brittle, fragmented, or even supplanted in Chaucer's world, one can imagine that for the poet it would be precisely the voice of the Merchant-with his professional experience of the world - that could highlight this disintegration by negotiating the spaces in between and thereby challenging these inherited systems.
In his own social position, Chaucer must have experienced firsthand the collision of different ways of imagining social relations. He probably saw in mercantile interactions a powerful demonstration of the possibility that new market based social relations could transect, puncture or even replace feudal and religious social assumptions in ways previously unimaginable. For Chaucer the public citizen and employee of the crown the social role of merchants may have put into high relief the potential for enormous social flux which Chaucer the poet would seek to engage imaginatively through the voice of the 'Forked Berd[ed]' Merchant.
Aers, David Chaucer 1986
Knapp, Peggy Chaucer and the Social Contest 1990
Strohm, Paul Social Chaucer 1989
Thrupp, Sylvia The Merchant Class of Medieval London 1948
