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

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1995 by Stewart Justman

And so it is throughout this tale. The miller does not parade his wife, does not test the limits of the possible with his thievery, does not dare the students to widen the house with their learned arguments, nor do the students bring their grain to him for the sport of it or imagine themselves as figures of ridicule when the grain is taken. All these details are original with Chaucer. Nor is there any sign of them in the version of the tale appearing in the Decameron. Clearly the Reeve's Tale is meant as a tale about the honor of men. But meant how?

According to an old dictum, "villeins have no honor" (Tocqueville 2: 253), and on this showing the more obsessed the boors of the Reeve's Tale are with honor, the more ridiculous they make themselves. In their aggressive daring and grandiose concern with reputation, they simply live out a parody of "real" honor. This probably isn't the reading intended by the Reeve, who has no wish to demean his own surrogates the honor-mad clerks, but it may possibly be intended over the Reeve's head by Chaucer. For in truth there is something risible in the pretensions of all three males to honor. Where honor "acts solely for the public eye" (Tocqueville 2: 253), Symkyn absurdly parades his honor in the person of his illustrious wife, and where honor "prefer[s] great crimes to small earnings" (Tocqueville 2: 244), Symkyn raises pilferage to the level of epic by stealing a hundred times more flagrantly than ever before (3996). By the same logic of the ridiculous, the students imagine their escapades being retold like the deeds of heroes, and outdo one another like the noble cousins of the Knight's Tale. In this point of view it is fitting that a blow with a stick should decide the tale (4296), for the stick was the churl's sword, and in the final analysis the men of this tale are churls and act like churls.

However, this reading of the Reeve's Tale simply generates the most predetermined of all conclusions: that men should keep their station. Boors like Symkyn and Aleyn and John should leave honor to their betters. As I say, this may be the reading Chaucer intended (no one knows), yet if the men of the Reeve's Tale parody honor, sometimes a parody reveals the original. If the charivari, as raucous and "countercultural" as it is, reflects the norms of patriarchy, may not the Reeve's Tale too reflect and not just distort ruling norms? After all, the Knight's Tale, for all of its loftiness, begins with the physical capture of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. It is this act that inaugurates the theme of the taking of women that connects the first fragment of the Canterbury Tales. The Reeve's Tale descends through the Miller's Tale from that of the Knight, and on the critical point - the reduction of women to pawns of men - it is a true likeness of the original. And so if the Reeve's Tale shows that churls should leave honor to their betters, it also shows the honor ethic for what it really is. Stripping that ethic down to a violent mania, the tale poses an ironic commentary on nobility itself.