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

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1995 by Stewart Justman

It is while John lies in bed at the miller's that evening that the dread of being ridiculed becomes a goad to action. His partner Aleyn has taken the miller's daughter by surprise, as a way of striking back at the miller. If the husband in the Franklin's Tale initiates a competition of honor by his "noble" decision to turn over his wife, Aleyn sets off a competition of a lower kind. In the words of John, Aleyn has "auntred hym" (4205), or dared, and John imagines that when tales are told about the incident, he will be a laughing-stock (4189) because in contrast to his partner he lies immobilized by fear of Symkyn (Cowgill). (Like Palamon and Arcite - also preoccupied with honor - the students in this tale are at once brethren and rivals.) John practically insults himself into acting: "And when this jape is raid another day, / I sal been halde a daf, a cokenay! / I wil arise and auntre it, by my fayth!" (4207-09). Significantly in this context of male domination, a "cokenay" is glossed as an "effeminate youth" (Pratt 105n). John rouses himself by imagining being held up to society as a sort of unmarried cuckold. The act roughly parallels Hamlet's taunting himself as a lily-livered coward who would submit to having his beard plucked and his nose tweaked, mortal insults to a man of honor (2.2.573-74).

The revenge John takes is obscene, if by obscenity we understand the defilement of the body. Using Symkyn's wife as an instrument of revenge against him (an act that outdoes even the rape of his daughter), John violates her with a kind of crazed fervor. "He priketh harde and depe as he were mad" (4231). To the teller of the tale, oppressed with thoughts of his impotence, it is no doubt pleasant to recapture sexual power thus, and no doubt poetically just to bring down Symkyn by the very means the miller used to magnify his social importance - his wife. Raping Symkyn's wife and daughter is probably the most vicious revenge the students, and through them the Reeve, could take. In the world of the Reeve's Tale, men too low to have "real" honor nevertheless adopt the ruling values of their culture, with the result that women are entirely subjected to the power-games of men, reduced to counters in male conflicts. Didn't Nicholas use Alisoun as a means to unman John?

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The males' obsession with honor - their dares and taunts, their dread of ridicule, their games of outdoing, their sense of being in the public eye - distinguishes the Reeve's Tale from its closest cognate. In the fabliau of "The Miller and the Two Clerics," the second student does not imagine being jeered or taunt himself to work tip his courage before shifting the cradle:

Before daybreak the miller's wife got up from beside her husband and all naked went into the courtyard. And she passed before the cleric where he lay abed. When he saw her go by, he thought of his friend who was taking his pleasure [with the miller's daughter], and he had a great longing for the same kind of pleasure. (Hellman and O'Gorman 55-56)