The Mill in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale

Abstract

It has been convincingly argued, gon is gret while, that the Oxford clerk Nicholas's staging of phony flood in Chaucer's Miller's Tale paro- dies not only Noah's flood story in Genesis but its larger apocalyptic mean- ing as well. Routine exegesis of that larger meaning has been expressed thus: As Noah was alone found righteous on all the earth, every one else but he perishing in the flood while he with his household was saved . . . so when the Lord comes to judge the world by fire, he will put an end to all the wickedness of the fallen angels and to all the enemies of the world. 1 Although neither the apocalypse, nor any other theological topic, has exactly dominated the attention of the current generation of Chaucerian critics (most of whom have preferred to read Chaucer through the lens of New Historicism, Marxism, Feminism, Deconstruction, et al.), 2 much of the artistic achievement of the Miller's Tale cannot but be credited to the comic incongruities that are implied between the flood of Genesis and the deluge manque of the fabliau; between old Noah, the carpenter, heeding the call of God to build an ark, outside of which there is no salvation, and old John, the carpenter, gulled by clerk into build- ing attic tubs, inside of which there is the sexual revel and . . . melodye. What the parody produces, to quote David Williams, is a neo-Noah, nei- ther wise nor virtuous, his kneading trough the Ark of the New Covenant, and his adulterous wife and her paramour his 'saved' family. . . . Although no water flows in John's world, the non-flood that occurs has the same effect, the destruction of misconstructed world where ways and direc- tions have grown corrupt. 3 Another important apocalyptic image with extensive biblical warrants, not hitherto noted in Chaucerian criticism, appears in the Reeve's Tale, and that is the mill. Univocally understood, of course, Simkin's mill at Trumpington is only mill; it simply serves the narrator as the setting for farce that, in Charles Muscatine's words, makes of the miller vessel of preposterously inflated social and intellectual pretension, then deflates him by the crudest means possible. 4 For readers who prefer to take their Chaucer univocally, that—notwithstanding the larger untapped comic plentitude of the tale—is that.