A Bakhtinian Reading of Geoffrey Chaucer

The Wife of Bath is perhaps the most notorious of the pilgrims in her reversal of gender relations: ‘five times married; and that’s to say in church, not counting other loves she’d had in youth.’ She is a businesswoman in her own right, taking the role of the man, although her weaving, making her ‘so skilled a clothmaker that she outskilled even the weavers of Ypres and Ghent’ places her firmly into the category of female. Her role is an odd mixture between the two, allowing for a carnivalesque element. ‘The public sphere, the domain of men, encompasses the worlds of politics, legal rights and obligations, and the market. . . the private or domestic sphere, to which women are confined by virtue of their role as wives and mothers, encompasses the family and the immediate household.’ The wife of Bath has moved beyond the sphere of influence given to her as a woman, and such has, in her everyday life, taken on the role she might fulfil in carnival.

John M. Ganim has pointed out that ‘the carnivalesque seems an almost irresistible metaphor for The Canterbury Tales, Bakhtin seems to uncover at a stroke an entire social dynamic implicit in monastic satire, popular folklore, and goliardic parody, all of which offer an 'unofficial' medieval comic tradition for Chaucer's tales and frame.’ The tales do indeed lend themselves well, with Bakhtin claiming the presence of a ‘folk carnival part whose organizing principles were laughter and the material bodily lower stratum’ within every official ecclesiastical feast. Carnival, for Bakhtin was the representation of the life of the common people, just as The Canterbury Tales are. Bakhtin also claims that ‘it is only in literature that popular festive forms can achieve the ‘self-awareness’ necessary for effective protest.’ As such, The Canterbury Tales can be seen as a protest against accepted, everyday culture, a protest that would reach more people than the small pockets of Carnival spread across church festivals.

The carnivalesque allows for the world of the ‘feast of fools’, where normality is turned upon its head. Relations between the male and female are often reversed, as are social roles. ‘Carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance.’ The variety of social classes included by Chaucer perhaps adds to the sense of carnival: the world, whilst not ‘topsy-turvy’, as a carnival would be, and as some of the tales are, the journey brings all of the pilgrims to the same level, be they a knight, a justice of the peace, or a simple miller. The sense of the theatrical is certainly present in carnival, hence Bakhtin’s use of the analogy of the stage: ‘carnival may be seen as a huge play in which the main streets and squares became stages, the city became a theatre without walls, and the inhabitants the actors.’ The carnivalesque can be thought of as a liberation, releasing people from their typical daily lives, just as literature, including The Canterbury Tales allows liberation into the lives of other people, particularly in the case of carnival, those of other social statuses.

The grotesque is also common in Chaucer’s work. Bakhtin describes the grotesque as having to do with ‘the lower bodily stratum… (Food, wine, the genital force, the organs of the body)’. As such, the many bodily references in The Canterbury Tales come into play:  sex is dealt with in a very informal manner in the texts and scatological humour is frequent. Damian, the squire in ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ ‘at once yanked up her smock and in he thrust’, and earlier in the tale, January orders May to ‘strip stark naked, for her clothes got in the way, and he was looking for a bit of fun.’ Again, we have a sense of marriage being placed into the world of brothels and prostitutes. Bodily functions, too, are often casually dealt with: the Miller’s wife ‘goes out to pee’ and Absolon ‘was a bit squeamish of farting.’ Indeed, ‘The Summoner’s Tale’ is dedicated almost entirely to farting, and the inability to control the body.

Thomas W. Ross claims that in Chaucer’s works, ‘there is hardly a word of bawdiness for its own sake… Chaucer uses risqué words for one major purpose: to delineate comic characters and thus to make us laugh.’ This is true, in the more epic or serious tales; there is less of the grotesque. ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ is comic in its farcical nature, as is ‘The Miller’s Tale’, the tale most noted for its grotesque and ‘bawdy’ nature. However, as Ross also points out, Chaucer is not truly offensive in his choice of words, choosing instead terms which can often have a double meaning, adding to the comedy. Absolon’s dislike of farting would, according to Ross, have been seen as a comic aspect of his character as “excretion was an accepted and semi-public event.”

The social variety present in The Canterbury Tales, with such a diverse group of people gathering for their pilgrimage, presents an opportunity for a heteroglossic reading. Bakhtin stated that ‘The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized.’ The tellers of the tales speak in different ways, with the miller as crude: ‘the miller would not curb his tongue or language for the sake of anyone, but told his vulgar tale in his own way’, whilst the squire could ‘joust and dance, and also draw and write’ and his father, the Knight, who ‘in the King’s service had fought valiantly.’ ‘The Oxford Scholar’s Tale’, however, is written in a high style, as is ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, in the style of a Breton Lay.

Some of the characters in the tales themselves speak in dialects: despite the fact that ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ is set in ‘Trumpington, which isn’t far from Cambridge’ the two scholars, students at Cambridge, speak in something like a Scot’s dialect, having both been born in ‘place called Strother- far in the North.’ The teller of the tale declares that he cannot say where it is, although the name suggests Anstruther, in Fife. This case of two broadly-spoken, lewd young men attending Cambridge is yet another example of the carnivalesque, in particular, the ‘feast of fools’, in which the great take the lower place, and the lowly act the part of their betters for the day.

The structure of the collection of tales makes it particularly suitable to exemplify heteroglossia: besides the differing voices of the characters, the voice is sometimes difficult to identify, even ambiguous. We have not only the voices of the characters within the tale, but also those of the teller of the tale, the author, and occasionally, the host. In ‘The Miller’s Prologue’, we are told that ‘I am bound to tell, for better or for worse, all of their stories.’ Whether this is Chaucer himself or the host speaking is unclear. A similar situation occurs in ‘The Franklin’s Tale’: at the end of the tale, a question is raised: ‘Which of them was most generous, think you? Now tell me before you go any further.’ Whilst in the context of the question, who we answer is of little importance, but it does raise the question of which of the author or the franklin we are to address in response.

Bakhtin comments on the presence of the author within the text in his essay on the chronotope. He claims that the presence of a rogue or a fool within a novel often represented the author themselves: ‘they influenced the positioning of the author himself within the novel (and of his image, if he himself is somehow embedded in the novel), as well as the author’s point of view.’ He also claims that ‘the position of the author of a novel vis-à-vis the life portrayed in the work is in general highly complex and problematical.’ For example, Chaucer was probably happy in his marriage to Phillipa de Roet, or so David Wright claims in his introduction to The Canterbury Tales, therefore the diatribe against marriage in ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ and ‘The Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale’. The Merchant is warned that, ‘if you take a wife into your household, you’re very likely to end up a cuckold.’ Justinus claims that ‘though people may extol the married life all I have found in it is cost and care and obligation.’ It is not only the Merchant’s characters who despise marriage: the merchant himself claims that he suffers ‘weeping, wailing, worrying and mourning’ by his wife. We are unsure where Chaucer’s voice is in this situation, hence alerting us to the fact that the text is not only a dialogue between the author and the reader, but also between the author, the characters contained within it, the characters in their own tales and the reader.

The presence of these relationships between authors, two different levels of fictional creations, and the reader allows Bakhtin’s list of compositional-stylistic

 unities to be applied:

We list below the basic types of compositional-stylistic unities into which the novelistic whole usually breaks down:

1. Direct authorial literary-artistic narration (in all its diverse variants)
2. Stylization of the various forms of oral everyday narration (skaz)
3. Stylization of the various forms of semi-literary (written) everyday narration (the letter, the diary, etc)
4. Various forms of literary but extra-artistic authorial speech  (moral, philosophical or scientific statements, oratory, ethnographic descriptions, memoranda and so forth)
5. The stylistically individualized speech of characters

These heterogeneous stylistic unities, upon entering the novel, combine to form a structured artistic system, and are subordinated to the higher stylistic unity of the work as a whole, a unity which cannot be identified with any single one of the unities subordinated to it.

We have the author’s speech, or ‘authorial literary-artistic narration’ in his occasional apologies for the contents of the tales, such as in the authorial interruption in ‘The Prologue to the Miller’s Tale’, in which Chaucer claims that he sorry to have to repeat the tale, but that he is ‘bound to tell.’ There is little of the ambiguity of speaker here, this cannot be the host that is speaking, as he is not repeating the tales, but merely refereeing them, and the miller himself considers his tale perfectly valid. Chaucer still makes no reference to the fact that these are in fact, fictional creations though: he points out that ‘the miller is a lout, as you’re aware, so was the reeve, and so were many more. They both told bawdy stories.’ Chaucer himself does not admit to telling these tales, although the distinction between the author and is creations is problematised by the appearance of Chaucer as a pilgrim- it is he who tells the tales of ‘Sir Topaz’ and also ‘The Tale of Melibus’, the first of which is rejected by the host as unsuitable.

        The everyday language is found in the heteroglossic nature of the text, such as the dialect spoken by the scholars in ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, which also shows the ‘stylistically individualized speech of characters’, and in the obvious difference between the styles chosen for tales by the differing levels of society: the bawdy nature of ‘The Miller’s Tale’ as compared to the higher Breton lay style used by the Franklin. We also have the use of speech rather than the more formal storytelling in the prologues, in which the host often makes judgement on the stories, or some other pilgrim may take offense to or agree with the moral of the tale.

The oratory and moral speech, which Bakhtin places as number four on his list is also present: ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ ends with a moral question: ‘which of them was most generous, think you?’, although the word originally used by Chaucer was ‘gentilesse’. ‘The virtue of "gentilesse" combined a courtesy of manner with a courtesy of mind. That it is not the inevitable adjunct of aristocratic birth (though most appropriate to it) was a medieval commonplace.’ Rhetorical devices are relatively common in the text; In ‘The Prologue to the Franklin’s Tale’, the franklin claims to have a homely style and speech. I never studied rhetoric, that’s certain’, but yet, in his tale, uses rhetorical devices, such as the use of Justinus and Placebo to debate the benefits and downsides of married life.

Bakhtin states that ‘the process of assimilating real historical time and space in literature has a complicated and erratic history, as does the articulation of actual historical persons in such a time and space.’ One would think that The Canterbury Tales, being set firmly in the past, in Chaucer’s own life and time, would not be accessible to a modern audience. However, the characters are timeless: ‘of Chaucer’s characters as described in his Canterbury Tales, some of the names or titles are altered by time, but the characters themselves forever remain unaltered, and consequently, they are physiognomies of universal human life.’ Blake also claims that ‘I have known multitudes who could have been monks in the age of monkery, who in this deistical age are deists.’ As earlier pointed out, the tales are ‘a mirror to the England of Chaucer’s times, and the world we live in.’

The fact that Bakhtinian theory can so easily be applied to Chaucer, writing in the fourteenth century, proves the versatility of the text. Four hundred years before Mikhail Bakhtin theorised on the nature of laughter, particularly in carnival, on heteroglossia and dialogism, Chaucer had written using those very techniques. This demonstrates the timelessness of both The Canterbury Tales, and of Bakhtin. His sense of chronotope, or time and space, along with his other theories, stretch out beyond his own time and space.

Word Count: 4,022

Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, (Aldershot: Wildwood House, 1978), p.182

Bakhtin, Mikhail, Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, (Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981)

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981)

Blake, William 'Prospectus of the engraving of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims' in Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, Nonesuch Press, 1943) p.637

Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)

Chaucer, Geoffrey, ‘General Prologue’ The Canterbury Tales, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)

Chaucer, Geoffrey, ‘Gentilesse, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams, et al., 5th ed., vol. 1,(London: W. Norton, 1986), pp.229-230,

Erler, Mary C. and Kowaleski, Maryanne, Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1988),

Pugh, Tison, ‘Queering Harry Bailey: Gendered Carnival, Social Ideologies and Masculinity under Duress in The Canterbury Tales’ in The Chaucer Review, Volume 41, Number 1, (2006), pp. 39-69, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/chaucer_review/v041/41.1pugh.html (accessed 2nd of April 2009)

Ross, Thomas W., Chaucer’s Bawdy, (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972)

Wills, Clair, ‘Upsetting the Public’ in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory’, ed. Ken Hirshkop and David Shepard, (Manchester, Manchester University press, 1989) p.86

---