Private Practices in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale

Private Practices in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale Marı́a Bullón-Fernández Seattle University In Chaucer’s General Prologue, we learn that Robyn, the Miller, is a champion at breaking doors and at lifting them off their hinges: ‘‘There was no dore that he nolde heve of harre / Or breke it at a rennyng with his heed’’ (lines 550–51).1 In The Miller’s Tale, another Robyn, the carpenter’s servant, lifts a door easily. At the carpenter’s request, Robyn goes to Nicholas’s bedroom door and ‘‘by the haspe he haaf it of atones’’ (line 3470). This Hitchcock-like appearance of Robyn the Miller in his own story emphasizes his habit of breaking doors, a habit that is manifested more generally in the pattern of breaking boundaries, both material and immaterial, and entering private spaces in the tale. Indeed, the Miller tells a story that revels both in the construction of and transgression against private and public boundaries. The tale’s exploration of spatial boundaries is further emphasized through the recurrent use of the word ‘‘pryvetee’’ and its derivatives ‘‘privee’’ and ‘‘pryvely’’—words that, proportionately, and given the shortness of the tale, occur more frequently in The Miller’s Tale than in any other Chaucerian work.2 I am grateful to Winthrop Wetherbee and Andrew Galloway for their detailed suggestions on early drafts of this essay. I also want to thank Frank Grady and the anonymous readers of SAC for their excellent suggestions. 1 All quotations from Chaucer’s work are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), with line references in parentheses. 2 Proportionately, there is a much higher occurrence of the term and its derivatives in The Miller’s Tale, where they occur a total of thirteen times, than in any other tale or even in any other Chaucerian work. Only in the much longer Parson’s Tale do the words appear slightly more frequently, a total of fifteen times. Private spaces, houses and rooms, of course, figure prominently in Troilus and Criseyde, but the terms ‘‘pryvetee,’’ ‘‘pryvee,’’ and ‘‘pryvely’’ appear only fifteen times. Given the length of this work, the comparative frequency of their occurrence in The Miller’s Tale is thus much higher. On PAGE 141 141 ................. 16094$ $CH5 11-01-10 14:03:55 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Due in part to this lexical density, a number of studies have examined the concept of privacy in the tale. Although the first sustained analysis of this concept, E. D. Blodgett’s analysis of privacy in the First Fragment , did not appear until 1976, the last two decades have seen several interpretations, ranging from analyses of the theological implications of ‘‘pryvetee’’ to studies of its gender and sexual connotations.3 While these interpretations illuminate some significant connotations of the term, there remains an unexplored link between the notion of privacy and the construction of urban space in late medieval England as it relates to merchants, artisans, and the market economy.4 Set in Oxford, The Miller’s Tale is one of the few stories in the Canterbury Tales that has a specific urban setting contemporaneous to Chaucer and that gives us a sense of urban life in late medieval England.5 There is a ‘‘detailed privacy in Troilus and Criseyde, see, for instance, Sarah Stanbury, ‘‘The Voyeur and the Private Life in Troilus and Criseyde,’’ SAC 13 (1991): 141–58. Critics have paid less attention to the use of these terms in another lengthy Chaucerian text, The Legend of Good Women. In this work the terms appear a total of fifteen times as well. 3 E. D. Blodgett, ‘‘Chaucerian Pryvetee and the Opposition to Time,’’ Speculum 51 (1976): 477–93, emphasizes the philosophico-theological meaning of private space in The Miller’s Tale, and sees ‘‘pryvetee’’ in the First Fragment as a space that tries to exist outside time, a space of ‘‘otium.’’ Thomas J. Farrell, ‘‘Privacy and the Boundaries of Fabliau in the Miller’s Tale,’’ ELH 56 (1989): 773–95, has analyzed the notion of privacy in its relationship to the fabliau as a genre and to the...