'The Reeve's Tale' and the honor of men

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1995 by Stewart Justman

In the charivari, a centuries-old practice with strong roots in folk culture including that of England, a noisy crowd would deride or even parade a passive husband, a tyrannical wife, or some other offender against customary norms. In this respect the charivari seems to express an attachment to traditional patriarchal values. And yet with its unstable hilarity and general rowdyism, the charivari might easily turn to mockery of authority itself, just as the clanging of pans mocks the ideology of the music of the spheres. The charivari, writes an eminent researcher,

is a hazardous instrument of social control. When neighbors or villagers disagreed strongly about the conduct of domestic life, or about the rights of folk justice, then the clamorous crowd could shatter the community and leave even violence and death in its wake. Envy or fury could push the social ritual of mockery beyond its usual bounds. (Davis 42)

Such dangers are both evoked and contained within the frame of the Reeve's Tale, which levies "folk justice" on the figure of Symkyn as well as his family. In the parodic spirit of the charivari itself, the commoners in this tale are stirred by a passion for honor quite as strong as any nobleman's, if not as lofty.

Because the Reeve's Tale must be read against the Miller's, we will begin by looking at that fabliau (itself aimed at the grandiosity and romantic idiom of the Knight's Tale). Though the foppish Absolon is scathed in the course of the Miller's Tale, the real goat of the story is undoubtedly the cuckolded husband John, so blind that he doesn't see his own horns, so gullible that he believes the story that he has been chosen by God to preserve the seed of the human race following a second Flood. As soon as we learn that John is married to a woman much his junior we know he is being set up for a fall, for popular customs looked with disfavor on marriages involving "a great disparity in ages" (Thompson 493). An oaf who does not know that "man sholde wedde his simylitude" (line 3228), John is a natural target for the kind of ridicule meted out in the charivari. Considering that the charivari tradition also singled out the man who submits without murmur to the infidelities of his wife (Thompson 493), we may say that John is at double risk, for he does just this. He protests not at all when Absolon serenades his wife, and senses no peril in lodging Nicholas under his roof.

In spite of two stock references to the jealousy of this husband, all the evidence of the Miller's Tale points the other way: rather than apprehending danger where none exists (in the true spirit of jealousy), John sees no danger where it is acutely real. In the Prologue to the talc we are told in jest that "An housbonde shal nat been inquisityf / Of Goddes pryvetee, nor of his wyf" (lines 3163-64), and this advice John has written on the tablets of his heart. As though in dread of forbidden knowledge, he does not want to know any more than his creed (3455), does not want to know what his wife is doing under his very eyes, and possibly does not want to know his wife carnally at all (Jordan 91). He seems completely dominated, fear-ridden. "I am adrad, by Seint Thomas, / It stondeth nat aright with Nicholas" (3425-26). His terrible God would destroy the human race (presumably for its lechery) even after having vowed to Noah never to send another flood (Gen. 9: 11).

John is shown as a sorry figure, then, unequal to his "duties" as a male in the patriarchal order. He is one of those husbands who "fail to establish [their] authority" (Thompson 493), a group ridiculed by the charivari tradition. As I have said, that tradition seems to have been deeply ambiguous, on the one hand enforcing the official norms of patriarchy against dominant wives and submissive husbands, on the other mocking official ceremonies in something like the spirit of carnival. We discern the same duality in the Miller's Tale, which upholds the norms of patriarchy at John's expense at the same time that it overthrows the Knight's Tale and the principles of hierarchy enshrined there, and for the figure of Jove wielding thunder and lightning substitutes Nicholas releasing a fart of blinding force, "As greet as it had been a thonder-dent" (3807).

At the conclusion of the Miller's Tale the charivari situation - the collective ridicule of one - emerges with clarity. The assembled "folk" jeer with delight at the fallen John, who fails to convince them that a second Flood is on the way.

The folk gan laughen at his fantasye; In the roof they kiken and they cape, And turned al his harm unto a jape. For what so that this carpenter answerde, It was for noght, no man his reson herde. (3840-44)

It is all against one. Like a cuckold who doesn't see the horns visible to everyone else, John doesn't see what is perfectly plain to his audience: that the news of a Flood is a tall tale. Whether the gathered "folk" know by common report of his sexual dishonor is unclear. Yet the Canterbury pilgrims, another assembled folk, know, and in part because he, like John, is a carpenter, Oswald the Reeve feels that he has been held up to the derision of the Canterbury company - in effect, paraded in ridicule. He takes the injury to heart and gets his revenge in the same coin, by telling an ad hominem tale. Probably reflecting the teller - for this theme does not appear in the analogues - the men in the Reeve's Tale are consumed with the thought of honor.