Chaucer's The Miller's Tale

Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" is a little fable, or fabliau "a medieval verse tale characterized by comic, ribald treatment of themes drawn from life," and is one of several such stories in The Canterbury Tales ("Fabliau"). Most of the tales are humorous in a crude and bawdy way, as is this tale. However, a careful study of this story shows that it does have a moral hiding behind the bawdy humor, predicated on the carpenter's blind and trusting love for his much younger wife, Alison and the great disparity in their ages. John, the carpenter, realizes that by marrying a woman younger than he is that the unequal match makes him vulnerable:

For he was old and she was wild and young; He thought himself quite likely to be stung (Chaucer 104).

Despite his awareness of this vulnerability, though, he marries her anyway and then worries continually that she will betray him:

She was a girl of eighteen years of age. Jealous he was and kept her in the cage, He might have known, were Cato on his shelf, A man should marry someone like himself; A man should pick an equal for his mate. You

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Category: Literature - C