What the Tale argues about

Marriage

The Tale's whole opening is a case for marriage that nobody in the poem believes. Marriage is ‘a paradis’, a wife is God's gift, wedlock is ‘esy’ and ‘clene’: the mock encomium (1267–1392) rehearses the church's praise of marriage in the voice of a man who has just told the pilgrims his own wife could outmatch the fiend. The praise is framed by its opposite, the Merchant's ‘snare’, and by Justinus's one honest line in the whole debate: ‘I wot best wher wringeth me my sho’ (1553).

Beneath the theology, marriage in this poem is a purchase. January shops for a wife in an imagined mirror set ‘in a commune market-place’ (1583), weighs candidates like goods, and takes May ‘of his owene auctoritee’. The wedding is a contract, ‘feffed in his lond’ (1698), the language of conveyancing rather than love; his last bid for her loyalty in the garden is an offer of deeds and inheritance sealed with a kiss. When the Tale asks what marriage is, its own answer keeps arriving in the vocabulary of trade.

Youth and age

The names carry the theme: January, the dead of winter, marries May, the month of opening leaves. The poem's own couplet does the arithmetic, ‘tendre youthe’ wedded to ‘stouping age’ (1738), and the wedding night stages it without mercy: the bristly beard ‘lyk to the skin of houndfish’ (1825), the slack skin of his neck, the morning song delivered ‘al coltish’ while the bride watches in silence. January insists he is like a blossoming tree, ‘neither drye ne deed’ (1463), evergreen ‘as laurer’; the laurel in his own garden stays green all year because nothing about it changes, which is not the compliment he intends. Only once, in the garden, does he say it himself: ‘the unlykly elde of me’.

Sight and blindness

The proverb arrives long before the affliction: ‘love is blind al day, and may nat see’ (1598), set down while January is still shopping. His metaphorical blindness, the ‘heigh fantasye’ that furnishes his marriage in imagination, simply becomes literal when Fortune strikes; the narrator's Argus digression insists that seeing was never protection, ‘For also good is blind deceyved be, / As be deceyved whan a man may se’ (2109–10). The ending turns the theme into a choice. Sight restored, January watches his wife in the tree, hears her explanation, and elects to believe it: ‘He that misconceyveth, he misdemeth’ (2410) is May's aphorism, and it works because misconceiving is what he has done from the first line. The final blindness is voluntary.

Deception

Everyone deceives, and the poem grades them. May's deceptions are external: the wax impression, the rehearsed tears, the answer supplied by a goddess. January's deception is internal and total; he is, as the class lecture notes put it, the only person he deceives. Damian, the ‘naddre’ in the bosom, betrays the lord whose bread he eats, a treachery the feudal frame makes social as well as sexual. Even the Prologue is a deception by genre, praise of marriage built out of the tradition of dissuading men from it. And the Merchant, whose trade in the General Prologue runs on concealed debt, may be the largest deceiver in the frame: a seller telling a story.

Gender and the antifeminist tradition

The Tale inherits a clerical shelf of warnings against wives, quotes it, mocks it and stages it. The Prologue's ‘good wives’, Rebecca, Judith, Abigail and Esther, are all women who deceived or overrode men; the marriage service itself asks May to be like ‘Sarra and Rebekke’, two more. Pluto recites Solomon against all womankind; Proserpina answers that Solomon was a lecher and an idolater, and wins the exchange while conceding the form of obedience. Whether the Tale endorses the misogyny it ventriloquises, or holds it up by the scruff of the neck, is the essay-question underneath every other essay question on this text.

Sex and religion

January wants licensed appetite: a wife young enough to satisfy him and a sacrament to make it sinless, ‘a man may do no sinne with his wyf’ (1839). The poem keeps colliding the two registers he wants fused. Aphrodisiacs are prescribed by a monk; the marriage bed is blessed by a priest and then described like a workshop; the Song of Songs is recited by a jealous old man at a garden gate while his wife signals her lover into a tree, ‘swiche olde lewed wordes’ the narrator calls the scripture. Sacred language survives in the Tale only as costume.

The garden

A theme and a place at once: Eden, the enclosed garden of the Song of Songs and the Garden of Love out of the Romance of the Rose, rebuilt ‘walled al with stoon’ (2029) by a man who thinks paradise can be freehold. The wall, the small wicket and the single silver key are ownership made architecture, and the garden's traditions turn on their owner: the serpent is his own squire, the forbidden tree bears pears, and the fall lands on the man who built it. The theme's hinge is the key of warm wax: January wanted a young wife he could shape ‘as men may warm wex with handes plye’ (1430), and wax is exactly what May shapes against him (2117).

Fortune, rank and the rest

Three quieter themes reward attention. Fortune: the apostrophe at the blinding, ‘o thou fortune instable’ (2057), with its scorpion that flatters before it stings, frames the plot as the fall of a man who trusted ‘brotil’ joy. Rank: a merchant tells a knight's tale; a knight marries a bride of ‘smal degree’; a squire cuckolds his lord; and May's protest that she is ‘a gentil womman and no wenche’ is spoken while her low-born lover waits in the branches. Expert advice: Placebo the flatterer and Justinus the just divide the theme of counsel between them, and January's ‘Straw for thy Senek’ (1567) settles how much advice weighs against appetite.