May as a Figure of Resistance in the Merchant’s Tale

Abstract

As a popular genre of medieval English literature, fabliau is a short, bawdy, and humorous story of the adultery of a young wife who is married to an old husband. In the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer includes the Merchant’s Tale as a fabliau in which May, the young wife of January, is engaged in an extramarital affair. May’s representation as adulterous and lecherous seems to reinforce the antifeminist claims of the genre; however, at the same time her active participation into the action of the fabliau empowers her to subvert and re-define her subordinate position as a woman. Although May is subject to the forces of the dominant ideology of the patriarchy completely, she creates oppositional meanings and pleasure by using resources of the dominant power. Indeed, she employs the tactics and guileful ruses of the weak to follow her illicit sexual adventure and gain partial freedom of her body and space. By examining May’s resistance to dominant structures in the context of John Fiske’s popular culture theory, this article analyses May as a figure of resistance who evades her subjection and transforms it to her advantage by making use of, what Fiske calls, the tactics, artful stratagems, and tricks of the weak.