William Chaucer 's The Miller 's Tale

Throughout the Canterbury Tales, various characters are introduced and tell a tale, each of which tells a different story. All of the tales are unique and address different issues. “The Miller’s Tale” is the second of the many stories and varies from all of the rest. As seen from the “General Prologue,” Chaucer clearly depicts the Miller as a crude, slobbish man who will say anything. This reputation is held true as the Miller drunkenly tells a story full of adultery and bickering. Despite the scandalous nature of “The Miller’s Tale,” the story also displays some of Chaucer’s prominent beliefs. As “The Miller’s Prologue” and “The Miller’s Tale” are told, it becomes evident that Chaucer is challenging the common roles and behaviors of women, and he is also questioning the effectiveness of social class.

cheats Alan and John out of a fair amount of grain, and the scene  where

In “The Miller’s Tale,” John, the carpenter, is married to a lady named Alison. She is not the virtuous

Such an intense reaction to the Miller’s tale—in which someone of the Reeve’s vocation is bested by a younger, more virile man—seems based upon the Reeve’s sudden need to defend his manhood against another man’s slander. By telling a story in which a carpenter is bested by another man sexually, the Miller has wounded the pride of the Reeve, who now must display a story in which a miller is dominated by another man to defend his masculinity. As Angela Jane Weisl explains in “‘Quiting’ Eve:Violence Against Women in the Canterbury Tales”, the need to reclaim his ego informs the Reeve’s desire to “become[] powerful and thus, violent, masculine” through his warning to the Miller that he might endure corporeal harm (123). By having the Reeve devise to reassert dominance over the Pilgrim Miller in such violent ways before the tale has even begun, Chaucer prefaces the clerk to share the same anxiety over requiting the tale’s miller through sexual

He knew nat Catoun for his wit was rude, that bad man sholde wedde his similitude” (Lines 113-120). Absolon on the other hand just wanted sex, and as much Alisoun despised him he would not stop stalking her. The Miller’s tale is cynical, because love is either misguided or lust and humans often are confused between the two. The author wanted to point that humans must know the difference or else the outcome would most likely be devastating thus leading to one’s own fault. While others might say this theme was not about love, but more about sexual desires, it was not the case. Sexual desires was only part of the theme because sex has always been alined with love in every relationship good or bad. Chaucer want readers to get past the sexual imagery and look at the love theme which incorporated in this story. The love theme represented the trouble behind human minds and how lust can be confused as love.

It is obvious that while the older carpenter has married a young lusty woman who is full of life, it could be a difficult situation for him depending upon how other men are viewing his new wife. On the one hand, people will see her as a lovely innocent woman, while on the other hand, because she is too picture perfect and overly concerned about her appearance, she may (with her wanton eye) be giving people the idea that is interested in more than the

In “The Miller’s Tale” Chaucer explains how the Miller was a drunk and pale man that did not have a wife or children, but even before telling his story, it wasn’t his turn by interrupting the Monk before him and begins to explain his story. The miller start to explain about a young girl called Alison and her husband called the Carpenter, Alison was an only 18 years old when she married her husband and he was an old man. They lived in Oxford the Carpenter would admire the beauty of his wife and how the town man would be envious of him for his wife. It also involved two other man Nicholas and Absolon these men were also young, Nicholas was a clerk that would happen to be a secret love affairs, but also very clever and discreet and Absolon was a foppish clerk and a handsome man that every woman loved. Those three men were in love with Alison, but affording Alison only

from the barn rafters, and to cut the tub from the roof of the barn

In class, we were provided with the book Canterbury Tales, which was a very compelling story full of characters that seemed to give off their own individual charm. This made them especially memorable. Most of the tales found in this unique novel were either vulgar such as the Miller's Tale, wretched akin to the Wife of Bath's Tale, or downright disgusting as in the Cook's Tales. Reading further into this carefully woven collection of tales, two tales in particular that managed to stand out. One tale is a sweeping epic, simply known as the Knight's Tale while the other was akin to an Arthurian romance called the Clerk's Tale. I began to realize that both of those tales had some similarities between them. One similarity was that a certain man of higher social class who fell in love for an elegant and beautiful lady who either shares the same social class as the lover or is in the lowest social class. Analyzing the tales further, it can be noticed that there were many differences that clashed between the tales. For example, in the Knight's Tale, there were

“I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were” ( Tragedy and the Common Man). Arthur Miller follows his Millerian conventions of tragedy in the writing of The Crucible. Often literature uses tragedy to display a depressing theme represented by the tragic hero.

In both “The Miller’s Tale” and “The Reeve’s Tale,” Chaucer uses deception and cunningness as a form of persuasion. In “The Miller’s Tale,” Nicolas utilizes his cunningness to persuade Alison to have an affair with him. As he begins flirting with her,

The ‘love’ in their situation could also be said not to be love at all

The balance of the love triangle is also thrown awry in the Miller’s tale. Not only if a fourth man present, Alison’s wife John (who is not even included in any form of romance throughout the tale) but Alison’s affection seem to only be for Nicholas. She is easily seduced by Nicholas and has little, to no romantic interest in Absalon, fooling him into kissing her rear and then laughing about it with Nicholas. These elements merely add to the Miller’s tale of perversion, distancing and parodying itself from the Knight’s tale of honor and true love.

Farce is the most obvious form of humour in the Miller's Tale, but I think irony is the most important. Chaucer plays off text against text to great ironic effect, both inter and extra-textually. In fact, the carpenter is a perfect ironic antidote to the Miller's advice of the Prologue. We read there that the best way for husbands to escape the humiliation of being cuckolded is that:

love” makes evident Chaucer’s skewed views of love and marriage with underlying tones of misogyny. He expresses these views throughout the work, however, the theme of love and sex is most evident in the sub-stories of The Wife of Bath and The Miller’s Tale.