“On this goode wyf he leith on soore”: The Brutal Chauceroticism of The Reeve’s Tale

Gust, Geoffrey W.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-89746-2_4

Geoffrey W. Gust³

Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

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Abstract

This chapter presents the second test case for the prospective meanings of Chaucerotics by examining The Reeve’s Tale. In this poem, the “cloak of language” is shown to veil a far different, darker variety of Chauceroticism that has made many critics uneasy. Recalling that early forms of pornography were commonly satirical rather than overtly sensual, Gust demonstrates that The Reeve’s Tale is a work in which Chaucer thoroughly pushes social boundaries through bold and brazen erotic content, revealing—if not reveling in—the illicit underside of medieval sexuality. This is the dark side of Chaucerian sex, as the poet forces readers to acknowledge deviant sexual behaviors that may not be morally acceptable to many, but are a viable part of sexual endeavor for some.

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Notes

1.
Tison Pugh, Queering Medieval Genres (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 45, 46, 59.
2.
The General Prologue, I.587, 591, 605. Once again, for a sound and influential discussion of the physiognomy of Chaucer’s characters, Walter Clyde Curry’s Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences is a highly valuable resource. His discussion of the Reeve is located on pp. 71–79.
3.
See David, The Strumpet Muse, p. 111.
4.
Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, p. 228.
5.
Cf. Phillips, An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales, p. 65.
6.
The Reeve’s Prologue, I.3855, 3858.
7.
The Reeve’s Prologue, I.3865–3866.
8.
See Carol Everest, “Sex and Old Age in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Prologue,” The Chaucer Review 31.2 (1996): 107 [99–114].
9.
The Reeve’s Prologue, I.3868, 3874–3876.
10.
The Reeve’s Prologue, I.3877–3882.
11.
See Everest, “Sex and Old Age,” p. 112.
12.
The Reeve’s Prologue, I.3888–3894.
13.
According to Derek Pearsall, “the decline into old age is described in terms of an image which disturbingly associates life, being alive, with sexual potency, almost as if the Reeve himself were a character in a fabliau.” See Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales, p. 184.
14.
I borrow here from Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer, p. 108.
15.
The Reeve’s Prologue, I.3910–3912.
16.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.3921, 3926, 3939–3940.
17.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.3936–3938.
18.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.3929–3932.
19.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.3940, 3941, 3959–3961. I also draw here from Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales, p. 186.
20.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.3950, 3967.
21.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.3951–3956
22.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.3944–3945.
23.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.3942, 3948–3949.
24.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.3963–3965.
25.
I borrow here from John Plummer’s essay “Hooly Chirches Blood: Simony and Patrimony in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 18.1 (1983): 55 [49–60].
26.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I, pp. 108, 111.
27.
Holly Crocker, “Affective Politics in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale: ‘Cherl’ Masculinity After 1381,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 231, 235, 237 [225–258].
28.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.3973–3976.
29.
Historically, it was common for medieval women—or girls, in this case—to marry as young as twelve years of age, and many well before Malyne’s twenty years. It is also worth mentioning here that, in looking at the fabliaux analogues of the tale, Phillips suggests that in other versions the daughter is pretty but here, the poet seems to deliberately give her “the brutish appearance he reserves for peasants with pretensions” (An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales, p. 66).
30.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.3981–3984.
31.
See Tamarah Kohanski, “In Search of Malyne,” The Chaucer Review 27.3 (1993): 228 [228–238].
32.
Kohanski, “In Search of Malyne,” p. 230.
33.
On these points, see Crocker, “Affective Politics,” pp. 237, 242.
34.
See Daniel F. Pigg, “Performing the Perverse: The Abuse of Masculine Power in The Reeve’s Tale,” in Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter G. Beidler (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1998), p. 54 [53–61].
35.
See Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer, pp. 111, 112.
36.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4004–4005.
37.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4062–4065, 4067–4069.
38.
For discussion of this double-entendre, see Rodney Delasanta, “The Mill in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 36.3: 270–276.
39.
On these points respectively, see Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, pp. 245, 251; and Ian Lancashire, “Sexual Innuendo in the Reeve’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 6.3 (1972): 168 [159–170].
40.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4082–4083.
41.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4085–4086.
42.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4094, 4097–4098, 4108.
43.
See Sarah Melhaldo White’s essay “Sexual Language and Human Conflict in Old French Fabliaux,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24.2 (1982): 186 [185–210]; I also draw from Knapp, Chaucerian Aesthetics, p. 140.
44.
See Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer, pp. 114, 115, 116; I also draw from Richardson, Blameth Nat Me, p. 91.
45.
On these notions, see Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style, p. 97; and Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer, p. 116.
46.
See David, The Strumpet Muse, pp. 112, 170. David contends that the tale is “profoundly anti-bourgeois,” a characterization that highlights the importance of class to the tale, but that also raises questions about just how “bourgeois” the Miller really is meant to be in the tale.
47.
See Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style, pp. 102, 104.
48.
Phillips, An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales, p. 69.
49.
See Aram Vartanian, “La Mettrie, Diderot, and Sexology in the Enlightenment,” in Essays on the Age of Enlightenment in Honor of Ira O. Wade, ed. Jean Macary et al. (Geneva: Droz, 1977), p. 348 [347–367].
50.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4146–4148.
51.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4154. These terms are specifically used to describe the wife, but seem to fit well the mood of the entire party at this point in the evening.
52.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4162–4167.
53.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4170, 4173.
54.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4172, 4174, 4175.
55.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4176–4186.
56.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4192–4198.
57.
On the subject of rape in the Middle Ages, a useful starting point is Corinne Saunders’s Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001).
58.
Among the most convincing recent demonstrations that Aleyn does indeed rape Malyne are: Kohanski’s aforementioned “In Search of Malyne,” Chaucer Review 27.3 (1993): 228–238; and Heidi Breuer’s “Being Intolerant: Rape is not Seduction (in ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ or Anywhere Else),” in The Canterbury Tales Revisited: 21st Century Interpretations, ed. Kathleen A. Bishop (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 1–15.
59.
See the editorial commentary in The Literary Context of Chaucer’s Fabliaux: Texts and Translations, ed. Larry D. Benson and Theodore M. Andersson (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1971), p. 87. I also draw here on Kohanski, “In Search of Malyne,” p. 229.
60.
A number of scholars have addressed this infamous charge of raptus, and for a balanced and measured short overview an excellent source is Derek Pearsall’s Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 134–139. For a more recent discussion, see Richard Firth Green’s thoughtful review of this legal charge in “Cecily Champain v. Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Look at an Old Dispute,” in Law and Sovereignty and the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Robert Sturges (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 261–285.
61.
Nicole Sidhu, “‘To Late for to Crie’: Female Desire, Fabliau Politics, and Classical Legend in the Reeve’s Tale,” Exemplaria 21.1 (2009): 8, 15 [3–23].
62.
On these points, see Breuer, “Being Intolerant,” pp. 8, 9, 10.
63.
Kohanski, “In Search of Malyne,” pp. 231, 232, 234.
64.
Probably the most recognizable and (in)famous example of an author who prominently features the violent, domineering male figure in traditional pornographic writing is the Marquis de Sade. For instance, his novel The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage tells the tale of four wealthy libertines who shut themselves away in a castle for months with a harem of thirty-six concubines, with whom they seek to achieve the ultimate sexual pleasure through a variety of increasingly violent means.
65.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4204–4206.
66.
Cf. Peter Brown, “The Containment of Symkyn: The Function of Space in the Reeve’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 14.3 (1980): 228 [225–236].
67.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4202, 4208, 4209.
68.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4228–4233.
69.
See Carol Heffernan’s “Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and the French Fabliaux,” Italica 81.3 (2004): 318 [311–324].
70.
See Sidhu, “‘To Late for to Crie’,” p. 12.
71.
Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender, p. 101.
72.
Sidhu, “‘To Late for to Crie’,” p. 12.
73.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4319–4321. I have cited these lines as they are presented in the Riverside Chaucer, but it is worth noting that there appears to be an error in printing the quotation marks in this passage.
74.
Benson, The Literary Context of Chaucer’s Fabliaux, pp. 83, 87.
75.
See Glending Olson, “The Medieval Theory of Literature for Refreshment and its Use in the Fabliau Tradition,” Studies in Philology 71 (1974): 311 [291–313]. For a more extensive discussion of literature as being meant for recreation and pleasure, see Olson’s book Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).
76.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4263, 4265–4266.
77.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4240, 4247.
78.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4268–4272.
79.
Pigg, “Performing the Perverse,” p. 61.
80.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4306, 4308.
81.
The Reeve’s Tale, I.4313–4318.
82.
William Woods, “Society and Nature in the Cook’s Tale,” Papers on Language and Literature 32.2 (1996): 190, 191 [189–205]. Woods suggests that Perkyn Revelour has a similar “energy” as Aleyn and John, and is also like Alisoun from The Miller’s Tale, in that he is a “dapper, restless, bird-like youth whose nature cannot simply be pent up ‘narwe in a cage’,” while his professional and social conduct is “indirectly an expression of his sexuality” (p. 192).
83.
The Cook’s Prologue, I.4326–4328.
84.
The Cook’s Prologue, I.4332–4334, 4338, 4343.
85.
The Cook’s Prologue, I.4153–4155.

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School of General Studies, Stockton University, Galloway, NJ, USA
Geoffrey W. Gust

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Gust, G.W. (2018). “On this goode wyf he leith on soore”: The Brutal Chauceroticism of The Reeve’s Tale. In: Chaucerotics. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89746-2_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89746-2_4
Published: 13 July 2018
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