The Merchant's Tale: Literary Contexts, the Play of Genres, and Institutionalized Sexual Relations

Abstract

The Merchant's Tale is the most ‘literary’ of Chaucer's fabliaux, and critical response is deeply divided, particularly over the degree to which it may reflect its nominal narrator. Though overall a fabliau, this tale is a virtuoso evocation of several genres – encomium, moral and love allegories, debates and mock-heroics – and parodies forms and rhetorics, satirizing the range of social institutions and literary genres within which sex and love are contained, constructed and represented. Freed from the ‘dramatic narrator’ construct, the encomium can be read, not as either inconsistent or cynical, but as a balance between domestic ideals and acknowledgement of human reality. The allegorical debate between Placebo and Justinus for the mind or soul of January, echoing the debate between Friend and Reason for the heart of Lover in the Romance of the Rose, is both mock-heroic with regard to January, and also parodies literary elevation of the sexual impulse. And the Garden of Love scene, in which Damian and May, the rightful inhabitants in courtly love tradition, behave like Nicholas and Alison, and possibly Adam and Eve, complexly parodies courtly love, the Fall of Man, and the authority of the gods, while ending in sensible accommodation rather than ridicule: with January in possession and Damian “alone withouten companye”, up a tree.