Performative Passivity and Fantasies of Masculinity in the Merchant's Tale

Abstract

Chaucer's Merchant's Tale has a mixed critical record. While a few schol ars over the years have made arguments for the tale's comic potential, many critics agree that the tale's narrator, a sour and disillusioned char acter, has an unsettling effect on the tale.1 The narrator, often identified with the Merchant from the tale's headlink, has been variously described as bitter and self-lacerating, traits that lend the tale its reputation as brutal, bitter, and hence un-Chaucerian.2 In a welcome feminist inter vention, Elaine Tuttle Hansen argues that the impulse to identify the tale's cynical antifeminism with a character distinct from Chaucer is the attempt to salvage an authorial position that remains insulated from the disinte gration of gender difference enacted by this story.3 Foreclosing the poten tial comedy of the tale, the bitterness tradition attempts to deny the joke that May's performative passivity makes of gender. As I shall argue, May's conduct demonstrates that the feminine passivity upon which masculine performances of agency depend is of course 2M act, and by playing out this act, exposes the ridiculous nature of all claims to masculine author ity, whether they are based on knowing rawness, ironic detachment, or blind naivete. Scholars aligned with the bitterness tradition seek to do what the tale itself cannot: they set up a binary of gender, creating two masculinities distinguished by separate claims to agency. While Chaucer is empowered by the ability to resist defensive cynicism, the tale's speaker is debilitated by his retreat into frustrated attack. This scheme of masculinity is ranked by the ability to contain feminine agency, suggesting as it does that aloof detachment implies more self-control than disillusioned disappointment. The fantasy of masculine agency that the bitterness tradition natural izes is a tempting gender-fiction, one to which even Hansen concedes in her acknowledgment of the tale's bitterness. Hansen pulls back from her most radical insight, that May is different and has something that can