May in January's Tree: Genealogical Configuration in the <i>Merchant's Tale</i>

Abstract

May in January's Tree:Genealogical Configuration in the Merchant's Tale Alcuin Blamires The episode of copulation between May and Damyan in a fruit tree at the end of the Merchant's Tale has by no means been neglected by critics, though they have often been reduced to coyness in writing of it. For instance, they soften the brazenness of sex in a tree with periphrases, writing obliquely of "arboreal activity" and "arboreal exploits."1 Other beguiling euphemisms in print include "treetop tryst" and "coitus al fresco."2 Indeed, something about the episode encourages conspicuous academic witticism—as in the self-conscious doubles entendres in the titles of a brace of articles in the early 1970s. The first (by Emerson Brown, Jr.) insinuated that Damyan does not have time to reach ejaculation with May (or rather, to "bring his arboreal activity with May to a completely satisfactory conclusion"). The alleged coitus interruptus appears in Brown's title under the punning guise of "Hortus Inconclusus." A response to Brown by Peter Beidler, not to be outdone, resolutely reinstates what Beidler's own article title calls "The Climax in the Merchant's Tale."3 Perhaps Chaucer may be said to have started all this by having May refer to her coupling with Damyan as a "strugle with a man upon a tree" (IV 2374).4 [End Page 106] One might well feel that enough has been written in Chaucer criticism about that "struggle," and about symbolic trees and sexual "fruition" in the tale.5 Yet I believe there is still room to consider an aspect of the episode that has, perhaps, been staring us in the face during several decades of discussion, without being acknowledged. Specifically, pondering January's pear tree as a site for sexual coupling, should we be thinking also of a genealogical tree? And if so, how might we reflect on the genealogical space that Damyan and May appropriate when they climb into it? To substantiate the suggestion that the horizon of expectation for the episode should include the concept of the family tree, it might be helpful briefly to recall salient allusions to that concept in medieval literature. Two examples should suffice. One is William Langland's panoptic idea of a tree that is simultaneously many kinds of tree, in Piers Plowman B, Passus 16. It is a fruit tree, variously pear or apple; it is the tree of knowledge in Eden; and a tree growing in the human heart whose fruit is charity, protected from the biting winds of the devil's attack by the power of the Trinity. Yet it is also a tree of three sexual options for humanity—marriage, continent widowhood, and virginity.6 When the dreamer asks to taste an apple and Piers shakes the tree, what rains down (in one of Langland's boldly imaginative transitions) is nothing less than a mass genealogy of pre-Redemption humanity, a veritable "hoard" of human fruit for the devil to gather up, from Adam to Abraham to Samuel to John the Baptist.7 The family tree of the whole of humankind under the Old Law is, as it were, systematically stripped of offspring, pending the Crucifixion. Elsewhere, family tree symbolism enters into a narrative of domestic drama that takes us particularly close to the specific genealogical imagination deployed by Chaucer. I am thinking of the twelfth-century lai of Le Fresne by Marie de France, a short narrative that subsequently became available in a Middle English rendering. Here the plot hinges on a noblewoman's envious [End Page 107] calumniation of a neighbor who has borne twin sons. Alleging that a twin birth implies impregnation by two men, the noblewoman thereby tries to cast doubt on the pedigree of the mother's boys. This is the trigger for a story intensely focused on legitimate family pedigree. When the calumniator goes on to bear twin girls herself, she feels potentially trapped in self-defamation. (Her situation is the worse, perhaps, in that she tacitly anticipates a social stigma for producing double daughters as against the more desirable objective of male offspring.8) One infant girl is therefore removed and abandoned close to an abbey, though...