Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

120
Geoffrey Chaucer
fashionable dress is typical of the kind of behavior condemned by
medieval churchmen [B&G 502] as well as by university authorities
(he is, after all, a clerk) [V33], and the mere fact that he fails to wear a
tonsure (not to mention his pride in his abundant hair) would by itself
have made him suspect [V33, V162]. That he has actually played the
role of Herod in local mystery plays (l. 198), combined with the fact
that he even dresses like the stage Herod in his everyday life [V43],
associates him symbolically with an obvious enemy of Christianity. It is
his undeniably irreligious conduct both in and out of church, however,
that makes this sort of symbolism almost unnecessary [B&G 557]. It
seems especially ironic, for instance, that Absolon walks up and down
the aisles of the local church with a “censer,” which was “an instrument
of symbolic purificiation” [V168], especially since he lecherously eyes
women as he does. Both when he is inside and outside the church,
Absolon (like Nicholas and Alison as well) violates numerous social
and religious taboos. In introducing all four of his main characters,
then, Chaucer comically teaches valuable lessons about Christian ideals
by showing us how those ideals are violated.
Nicholas, in fact, is able to implement his scheme to sleep with
John’s wife primarily because John is ignorant of the Bible and of basic
Christian teachings. If John had only remembered God’s promise
never to destroy the earth again by a flood (Genesis 9:11), John would
never have fallen for Nicholas’s false prophecy of just such a calamity.
The flood imagery, however, is ironically appropriate to Chaucer’s tale
for several other reasons. Thus, medieval commentators believed that
the original flood had been sent largely as a punishment for just the
sort of lechery exhibited by many of the characters in the Miller’s tale
[B&G 617; V196]. In addition, the biblical flood was also considered
a prefiguration of precisely the kind of spiritual baptism from which
all of these characters would benefit [B&G 519, 536]. Thanks, then,
to John’s ignorance of the Bible, as well as to John’s own idolatry of
his wife (ll. 336–38) and to his avarice (ll. 395–96; V205), Nicholas is
able to persuade John to rig up the elaborate mechanism of the three
hanging tubs—a detail that ironically echoes a famous episode from
the life of the truly virtuous Saint Nicholas, who saved three men from
death in pickling tubs [B&G 562, 570, 624].
The denouement of Nicholas’s scheme is, of course, hilarious, and it
is just as full of ironic details as is the rest of the story. Inevitably these
details remind us of all the social and religious taboos being broken