Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

114
Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer himself seems to have anticipated that The Miller’s Tale might
offend many members of his original audience, and so his narrative
alter-ego in the tales invites any reader who might take offense to
“Turne over the leef, and chese [i.e., choose] another tale,” and he
even warns such readers, “Blameth nought me if that ye chese amis”
(Introduction, ll. 69, 73). Of course, having been admonished in such a
tantalizing fashion, few readers can resist the temptation to read the
tale, but the Miller’s pride in violating taboos is evident long before he
begins telling the story that bears his name.
Nearly all the taboos the Miller flouts can be defined, to one degree
or another, as religious taboos—rules rooted in a strong sense of what
was proper, sacred, and holy, particularly in Christian terms. Christian
ideals and beliefs were a tremendously strong influence on Chaucer’s
culture, even if those ideals and beliefs were (inevitably) not always
perfectly or universally practiced. Chaucer and his audience lived in a
society in which basic Christian teachings were taken for granted and
in which most thinking and conduct was judged in Christian terms.
Chaucer himself seems to have been strongly convinced of the merits
of Christian thought, and, in creating characters such as the Miller (as
well as the various persons who populate the Miller’s tale), he seems
to have intended to teach Christian truths by depicting people who
fail to lead exemplary Christian lives. The Miller’s Tale, in other words,
seems to have been intended as an elaborate exercise in extended (and
often quite humorous) irony. Readers are expected to supply the moral
and spiritual values so obviously lacking in the Miller himself and in
the people he describes, and readers are also expected to use those
values to judge the thinking and conduct the tale presents. Chaucer
and his audience would have had a very strong sense of all the social,
intellectual, and behavioral taboos that the Miller and his characters
violate, and they would have recognized that all the transgressed
values—both in the Introduction and in the Tale itself—were ultimately
grounded in Christian thought. By showing so many people
living in direct contradiction of Christian teachings, Chaucer reminds
his readers of the kinds of lives that they themselves were expected
(but often failed) to lead.
Modern scholarship has documented many of the taboos the
Miller and his characters reflect, but rarely have the transgressions
been discussed comprehensively or conveniently in a relatively brief
space. Providing such a survey, therefore, is the chief purpose of the