The death of a silent woman: voice and power in Chaucer's Manciple's tale.

Women in The Canterbury Tales generally come out well. The situations in which they are placed are often difficult, but with only a handful of exceptions women characters in the tales overcome their disadvantaged positions to emerge with self-respect and with remarkable control over their own lives and often the lives of some men.(1) This essay examines the moral logic governing Chaucer's presentation of women by exploring a tale in which a woman's fate is particularly unhappy. In the Manciple's Tale one finds the one voiceless woman in The Canterbury Tales, a woman assaulted by both husband and narrator, Phebus's nameless wife. Like Alisoun, May, and the quick-witted French wife in the Shipman's Tale, Phebus's wife arranges an adulterous liaison in a plan that goes awry. But unlike those other women, whose timely speech allows them to become active subjects in both the determination of their fate and the narrative progression of their stories, Phebus's wife is not granted the textual opportunity to speak or in any way act on her own behalf: she dies immediately, the object of her husband's anger, and her death is less a dramatic climax than it is a simple turning point in the plot.(2)

The narrative disinterest in a woman's mortality is not Chaucer's invention entirely, but the transformations he makes in the popular explanation of the reason some birds are black highlight the female marginalization. The Manciple's Tale's most obvious focus is on Phebus (Phoebus Apollo in Chaucer's sources, but more human than divine in his adaptation), an extraordinarily attractive and attentive man whose wife nonetheless takes a lover. When Phebus's pet crow (the tale's second principal) informs him of the cuckolding, Phebus suddenly kills his wife and then, in a surge of repentence, plucks the bird's white feathers, takes away its ability to speak and sing, and throws it out the door. Chaucer borrows the motif of sudden death from his sources, but he adds the wife's silence,(3) contrasting it sharply with the voicefulness of the Crow and also of Phebus. Indeed, when the Manciple's Tale is considered in the context of Chaucer's other fabliaux, and most especially the Merchant's Tale, one sees that the Manciple's Tale's narrative stress on the relative efficacy of the different characters' voices ties in with a moral stance that informs Chaucer's treatment of female voices in The Canterbury Tales generally.(4) In this, the last of the poetic tales in The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer offers a powerful response to questions about power, freedom, and gender that he has raised throughout the collection.

The opening lines of the Manciple's Tale suggest the importance of voice as a theme. Phebus is a singer, possessed of a natural vocal talent so beautiful

... that it was a melodie To heeren of his cleere voys the soun. (ll. 114-15)

His voice surpasses even that of Amphion, whose singing raised the walls of Thebes.(5)

Phebus's other qualities include his matchless beauty, his mastery of all kinds of music, and his possession of a bow, a crow, and a wife. The snow-white Crow, trained by his master in the human arts, sings splendidly:

Therwith in al this world no nyghtyngale Ne koude, by an hondred thousand deel, Syngen so wonder myrily and weel. (ll. 136-38)

Phebus even has taught his pet to speak, so skillfully that when the bird tells a tale he is able to "countrefete the speche of every man" (l. 134). In marked contrast, of the wife's voice one is told nothing. Indeed of the wife generally, except as regards Phebus's anxieties and Phebus's perception, one is told next to nothing.

Phebus's bird and wife are introduced in successive verse paragraphs:

Now hadde this Phebus in his hous a crowe . . . (l. 130) Now hadde this Phebus in his hous a wyf. . . (l. 139)

The parallel phrasing that announces Phebus's possession of the bird and of the woman suggests both the similarity in their valuation by Phebus and the narrative importance of their linkage: for all Phebus's affection for his pet, the Crow is kept "in a cage" (l. 131); and for all Phebus's love for his wife, "Jalous he was, and wolde have kept hire fayn" (l. 144). Both are zealously possessed and closely restricted. Where they differ is in the power associated with the use they make of their voices.

"Nothing?" Lear rages in the famous play, when his youngest daughter has not matched the eloquence of her sisters. "Nothing can come of nothing. Speak again" (King Lear, I.i. 86-87). The unstated female "nothing" in the Manciple's Tale's silent wife warrants notice precisely because it is so unusual in The Canterbury Tales. Like Shakespeare, and indeed like the many writers of the Middle Ages who argued for the silencing of women,(6) Chaucer insists that speech grants power. One might consider the examples of Saint Cecile, Dame Prudence, the old women in the Wife of Bath's Tale and the Friar's Tale, the fabliaux wives, Dorigen: Chaucer's women not only tend to speak, they use their voices effectively. Perhaps the extreme example of a story in which female vocal ability matters is the Merchant's Tale, which contains an adulterous situation very similar to that in the Manciple's Tale.(7) In May's connivance one witnesses the power that Chaucer typically places in a woman's voice, but withholds from Phebus's wife.

May is a notoriously complex character. She lies easily and often, is a blatant hypocrite, and is shamelessly blasphemous in her forswearing. Yet it is difficult not to feel for her marital position. Apollonian a singer as January is ("he sang ful loude and cleere" [MerT, l. 1845]), he also is old, ugly, rough-faced, crude, sexually demanding, egotistical, and - much like the Manciple's Tale's Phebus - unbearably and intrusively jealous,

Which jalousye it was so outrageous That neither in halle, n'yn noon oother hous, Ne in noon oother place, neverthemo, He nolde suffre hire for to ryde or go, But if that he had hond on hire alway. . . . (ll. 2087-91)

The seven negatives highlight the absurdity and even the cruelty in the blind old man's enactment of his phobia. A reader knows that January's fears are not unwarranted, but January himself is unaware of May's adulterous intentions regarding Damian. When at the tale's climactic moment the husband's jealous viewpoint is seconded by the rapist god Pluto, who names January an "honurable knyght" (l. 2254) and "worthy" (l. 2259) and argues from "experience" that women are not only treasonous but "notable" for their "untrouthe and brotilnesse" (ll. 2238-41), one feels strongly the self-centered, self-righteous, self-deluded voice of patriarchy, which would deny to women any right of sexual choice.

What allows May to outwit her imposing husband is her voice. Upset by May's brazen adultery, Pluto vows to restore January's eyesight at just that moment when he may witness May's harlotry. Proserpine, Pluto's rape victim in the myth but a strong-voiced wife in the Merchant's Tale,(8) responds: all women will benefit from the power which, in remembrance of May, Proserpine assigns to her gender, the ability to raise their voices and face out their guilt:

". . . I shal yeven hire suffisant answere, And alle wommen after, for hir sake, That, though they be in any gilt ytake, With face boold they shulle hemself excuse, And bere hem doun that wolden hem accuse. For lak of answere noon of hem shal dyen." (ll.2266-71)

As Morton W. Bloomfield notes, for all his bravado "Pluto controls Proserpine with the same poor success as January does May."(9) Authorized, even inspired, by Proserpine, May's bold lies when caught in flagrante delicto enable her to evade male retribution and succeed in convincing January that it is he who has erred, in a manner typical of his gender:

"Ful many a man weneth to seen a thyng, And it is al another than it semeth. He that mysconceyveth, he …