May in the Marketplace: Commodification and Textuality in the Merchant's Tale

Abstract

May in the Marketplace:Commodification and Textuality in theMerchant's Tale Christian Sheridan We have been led by the Merchant's narrative,especially by his rhetoric, to make someemotional investment in the relationship, thejuxtaposition of January and May, and I for onefind it hard immediately to liquidate theinvestment.1 —E. Talbot Donaldson AS critics since Donaldson have noted, the Merchant's Tale affects its audience by manipulating their responses to its characters. First encouraging us to sympathize with May as her face is scratched by January's rough beard on their less-than-romantic wedding night, it then shifts its focus to reveal May as a scheming adulterer. The tale forces us to respond to its characters, but it does not allow us any firm ground upon which we can base that response. As one critic notes, the Merchant's Tale "shows that while author and reader must participate in attempts to bridge that gap [of interpretation], such attempts consistently founder."2 The diction of the Donaldson epigraph highlights a second, related aspect of reading the tale: the similarity of the experience to that of an investor whose financial scheme has gone wrong. After the "Merchant's Prologue," in which the Merchant complains [End Page 27] about his "wyf, the worste that may be,"3 the reader encountering the tale for the first time would reasonably expect a tale that recounts an unhappy marriage sympathetically from the point of view of a wronged and long-suffering husband. Instead, the tale portrays no character sympathetically and discourages the reader from identifying with any one. The reader's expectations have been thwarted, and tellingly, Donaldson uses financial terms to convey this disappointment. His first use of "investment" may be conventional, an offhand remark anyone might make to describe one's attachment to nearly anything. But when Donaldson repeats the word and combines it with the financial term "liquidate," he draws attention to the way in which the tale's ability to make its readers uncomfortable is linked to the commercial world. More recent critics have located this effect in various features of the tale. Some see it as a reflection of the Merchant's character. R. A. Shoaf, for instance, describes the Merchant's attitude toward his Tale and its reception as usurious because the Merchant insists "that he alone determine their [the words that make up his Tale] structure and their meaning." 4 In this view, the Merchant-narrator manipulates his audience in much the same way he might currency markets in order to maximize his profit. Other critics, such as David Aers and Lee Patterson, turn to history to locate the tale's disconcerting effect either in its portrayal of the dehumanizing medieval marriage market5 or in the bourgeois Merchant's awareness of himself as out of place in a still feudal world.6 Despite their differing emphases, these critics all agree that the Merchant's Tale is mercantile; I, too, consider it to be quite commercial, but I have always been bothered by the location of that commercial sentiment. To argue, as Patterson does, that the mercantile sentiment reflects the Merchant-narrator's character and his position as a bourgeois subject 7 does not take into account questions raised about the tale's attribution to the Merchant.8 In addition to the problems with attribution, [End Page 28] there are no details in the telling that suggest its narrator is a merchant steeped in the complexities of medieval commerce. While there are several examples of legal diction as it pertains to the marriage market, the tale is not as concerned with the niceties of medieval finance as is, for instance, the Shipman's Tale, because the main male character is not a merchant, but a knight. Still, even if one questions the connection between the Merchant as teller and the tale as we have it, there is no denying that the tale has a middle-class, mercantile (as opposed to a courtly) feel, and that effect must be accounted for. In this essay, I argue that the origin of the commercial ethos of the Merchant's Tale is its attitude toward textuality itself...