The Espresso Stalinist

The Role of Class, Ideology and Production in Chaucer’s

Canterbury Tales
Posted on January 19, 2011

Geoffrey Chaucer, more than any other medieval author, showcases the new ideological
superstructure that was to accompany the radical shift of the economic base during the
transition from feudalism to mercantile and, eventually, industrial capitalism in Europe. To
put it simply, the purpose of his work was to ready the historical period for the dominating
role of the new bourgeoisie rising to power from the ashes of feudalism. The social
dilemmas haunting English culture at the time, such as the preoccupation with class, race,
property, finances and marriage are dealt with almost without exception in the Canterbury
Tales, each one given the treatment of examination through the bourgeois lens.

To exhibit such unique ideological turns, Chaucer must have lived in quite tumultuous
times, which indeed he did. “They were years of social and political unrest. [....] Wyclif and
his followers were challenging the institutions and beliefs of Christendom; and the whole
idea of the feudal hierarchy was under pressure from the peasant’s demands for rights, the
demographic collapse following the Black Death, and the continuing rise in the importance
of money rather than land or rank in the social machinery” (1). In short, the economic base
of society was greatly disrupted to the point of bourgeois revolution. In some ways, this
collapse would prove fortunate for Chaucer’s art. Artists in the feudal era often faced a
unique obstacle to their works in that the production of all art required a wealthy backer,
almost always the royalty or the clergy, to support the efforts of the sculptor, painter,
musician, et al. The role of the artist only began to take on a more uninhibited form when
the concept of the bourgeoisie began to emerge from mercantile capitalism. In this way we
can see Chaucer’s work as relatively progressive petty-bourgeois relativist literature before
such terms even existed.
Within the Prologue to the tales, the pilgrims and their roles in medieval society at first
seem like a characterization of all the classes and divisions of labor, a simple mélange of
social and political groups. This is statement is essentially true-Chaucer was aware of the
class structure of the society that willed him into being and is making a commentary about
the flaws in that system and what he would like to see replace it. Chaucer’s work frequently
shows characters who are members of or are representative of certain social classes that
overstep boundaries and then are not scolded by the text to fulfill their allotted role in
society. In addition, while he begins the Prologue as a tyrannical and authoritarian “voice of
the author” who seeks to cease any further discussion of ambiguity, Chaucer seems to
intentionally avoid using any central moral framework for the story. Christianity is
frequently presented, but one moral code alone is never chosen as supreme, and in fact the
entire work seems hostile to such a concept. There is a hidden motive behind this particular
portrayal.

Despite his fine upper-class language and romance writing, Chaucer displays a fine set of
what we as modern readers might vulgarly term “neo-liberal values.” His tales are journeys
into the consciousness of the individual that at first seem to transcend their roles in society,
but unintentionally expose how their individual superstructures are dependant upon
dominant forms of production (such as the examples of the noble knight and the vulgar
miller, whose personalities are determined by their social class). This truth is lost on
Chaucer however, since the very notion of class transcendence in the first place is
revolutionary for the Middle Ages. Chaucer is therefore “[...] ironically substituting for the
traditional moral view of social structure a vision of a world where morality becomes as
specialized to the individual as his work-life” (2). Chaucer is aware of his and humanity’s
status as individuals defined by humanistic subjectivity, and thus demands his own
bourgeoisie to earn their soon-to-be-had leadership by falling in line with such a
philosophy. Even more concealed is the idea that Chaucer has no control over his work, that
he really is a simple “narrator” standing outside his tales as he is in the Prologue. The fact
that the author loses control of his own writing once published is a structural fact of
capitalism and feudalism alike.

Each pilgrim of the Tales carries forth Chaucer’s vision of neo-liberal individual rights and
a bourgeois-ruled society. Witness for example the Knight’s Tale, an introduction of a
wonderful chivalric knight (literally) stained with the blood of imperialism. In it, two
knights use the principles of chivalry and courtly love to fight to the death over a woman
and are manipulated by the “gods” into foolishly killing each other. Chaucer is mocking
“chivalric” imperialist principles here-”the Knight’s Tale [...] can support both an ironic and
a positive evaluation of the Knight’s moral character, seeing him both as an ideal and as
anachronism” (3). It becomes clear through his prologue that he is a Crusader, one
magically able to attend every Crusade. He is described chiefly in moral attributes rather
than appearance, highlighting the gaping difference between the ideal and the blood reality.

In a similar vein, the prologue of the squire has an air of mocking about the young man. He
is a twenty-year-old man that is highly lustful yet covered in finery, and has pretensions of
being an artist and painter even as he is the son of an imperialist soldier. It is nothing less
than the refutation of “an authoritative and malicious mystification by those who rule in
order to control the ruled” (4). These two stories are clearly criticisms of the entire
institution of knighthood and not just jabs taken at a particular icon. The knight is a
historically obsolete character, a feudalist ideal whose values are ridden asunder by his
liberal squire.

It is significant that the Tales starts with the knight, who is then interrupted by the various
assembled peasants and drunks. The Knight’s Tale is at the head of the Canterbury Tales
pilgrims-the one with the highest social standing. The interruption of the miller shows a
very different sort of hierarchy: characters are refusing to stay in their place. There are
contradictions between adjacent stories such as the miller’s, the knight’s and the reeve’s.
There is a complete disregard of nobility going on here. The ordered and the vulgar sit side-
by-side in Chaucer’s world-he has shown the finery of culture and also spun it upside-down
to reveal its underside, the crumbling of feudal ideas in the 14th century.

This sort of motif is in line with the genre of the estates satire. “Estate satires, which aim to
give an analysis of society in terms of hierarchy, social function and morality, were
widespread throughout Western Europe. They work by enumerating the various ‘estates,’
the classes or professions of society, with the object of showing how far each falls short of
the ideal to which it should conform” (1). Chaucer has gathered under one roof many
different strata: those who fight, those who rule, those who pray and those who work. Each
pilgrim is named by his profession or standing-rarely is any name given to them. They come
as individuals, the author and audience of what they are expected to do.

The miller, much like the knight, is an implicit refutation of feudalist morals even as he is a
refusal of the refined world, a self-imposed division which not only fails, but refuses, to
achieve solution. The transition between the two shows the ideological contradiction at the
beating heart of the Canterbury Tales-the double dialectic at work in the text. “‘Petty-
bourgeois ideology’ exists as a strikingly pure and contradictory unit of elements drawn
from the ideological realms of both dominant and dominated classes in the social
formation,” (6) as typified by the knight and the miller, respectively. But the miller is also
an important symbol of a deeper fissure in Chaucer’s new mercantile society-the transition
of the main productive forces to urban areas from rural ones.

The pilgrims themselves may be interpreted as mostly rural folk, some of which have never
been out of their small peasant towns, on a journey to a city setting. This is not a meeting
free of clashes-the miller’s personal flaws and sheer vulgarity come from his class position
as a product of predatory mercantile capitalism, which is uprooting the rural world. He is
the protest against the traditionalist values of the political and cultural by means of satire.

Chaucer’s ideological paradox between the old feudal writer as a servant of the crown and
the new role of production as the mouthpiece of the rising petty-bourgeoisie showcases,
more than anything else, a fight-to-the-death between hierarchal vision and radical
subjectivity. Unfortunately for Chaucer, he sees this contradiction within his society not as
the rise of one class over another but as the fight between abstract and reactionary concepts
of “personality” over “bureaucracy.” His humor contains realism only inasmuch as it
contains elements of the real-laughter for him contains social use-value in the form of his
ideas of personality. Thus the parody of the miller and his respective tale becomes an
important weapon against the ideas he strives to tear down.
Chaucer’s treatment of religion through the symbolism of religious figures continues his
methodology thus far by ushering in that most dreaded of all academic philosophies,
relativism, in the tales told by the friar, the summoner, the monk and other figures of the
prevailing religious order. Chaucer calls attention to the failure of human institutions to
impose any final authority and insists that such a task must be left to the Almighty. Just as
the Prologue reveals no overarching purpose to the tales, so does he refuse to give it a
dictating overarching morality.

In the Monk’s Tale for example, a monk simply refuses to stay within his cloister, and
enjoys good living at the expense of the townspeople, violating his vow of poverty and
obedience. He refuses the doctrines of St. Benedict and St. Augustine, to whom he pledged
his fealty. “Chaucer avoids any simple conformity to the stereotype, and what conformity
there is takes a highly individualistic bent” (1). Indeed, the monk favors money over god, is
lustful towards barmaids, wears opulent clothes and is generally rebellious. He freely
commits what the Church terms “sin,” and yet Chaucer seems to fittingly have little bad to
say about him.

In fact, Chaucer seems to admire the monk’s personal strength and his willingness to
challenge established orders, even the one he is representing. He claims he is “fair for the
maistrye, an outridere…a manly man, to been an abbot worthy.” Chaucer genuinely likes
the monk and is fond of what he symbolizes within the story-unlike the other religious
figures presented, such as the friar and the summoner, who wear a virtuous face and merely
hide their corruption, the monk’s honesty and undying control over his own life has
rendered it a moot practice to conceal his fleshy desires.

Chaucer’s mission in presenting the reader with characters such as the monk is a re-
alignment of class society. Chaucer demands his bourgeoisie be a class with cultural
knowledge that is worthy to assume their roles. The spiritual predominance in aristocratic
rule is therefore liquidated in order to show that the court and clergy will fail in their tasks
to assimilate the masses below them, whose ideologies are at the present time more liberal
then theirs, unless they learn to relax the religious doctrines of the old order. Chaucer
thereby liberalizes the absolute moral values of the Catholic Church out of existence for his
(and the bourgeoisie’s) purposes. Chaucer never goes all the way with his individualism,
however, since he is careful within the Canterbury Tales to confine it only as a debased
egoism and never allow it to drift into nihilism.
To avoid such an unthinkable path for the time, he makes sure to keep his characters closely
linked with their positions of work within society, even as they find ways to drift beyond
them. “The pilgrims become individuals who have been assigned these functions, men and
women enacting externally imposed roles toward which each has his or her own kind of
relationship” (5). The ideological interplay thus generated within creates a gripping
dialectic of interests as social groups come together to achieve power over one another,
within the Tales themselves as well as Chaucer’s own mind. Often a power interest has been
pre-generated by the pilgrim’s investment in an institution, such as the aforementioned
examples of the knight and the reeve. The particulars of behavior are thus linked with their
institutional sponsors to produce a conflict of unique superstructures.
The Tales is thus one of the earliest examples of literary organicist values, which integrate
class ideology forcibly as a train-wreck into a unitary humanist “worldview.” As a result we
are left with competing classes and modes of storytelling-fabliaux, poem, prose, romance
and Gothic alike-all meshed together. The very structure of the story makes its thesis clear,
as all the stories work together as organs to become a greater whole, more than the sum of
their parts. This sort of metaphysics could be the basis for nothing else than liberal
capitalism.

Feudal ideology in 14th century England among the aristocratic classes faced significant
fractures. Chaucer therefore offers an idealist bourgeois critique of social relations while
affirming the virtues of capital. Realism, as Chaucer envisions it, involves the unraveling of
pretensions, the egalitarian distribution of personality and individuality, the holding of
irreconcilable rules in precarious balance. The general ideology of the text is of course,
liberal reformism. The aristocrats are losing their economic supremacy. The traditional
intellectual of Chaucer thus unites, as they have done many times historically, with the new
dominant bourgeois classes. This line of thought would give rise later to the Romantic
humanist tradition of writers such as Coleridge and Lord Byron.

While it is not true that subjectivity only comes forth as a result of certain systems, since it
has always been a part of history, to be institutionalized to the extent it has by bourgeois
culture authors like Chaucer are needed to saturate the market and thus the culture. This
sense of literary production and the works of great authors played an important role in the
development of the sense of the “British nation” and the resulting imperialist identity
politics. Thus it is a habit of history to viciously assimilate the author and his works as
pawns of the formation of a hegemonic bourgeois empire.

The Cook’s Tale is the easiest and most readily available encapsulated example of the rot
and seedy underbelly of the London people’s society that Chaucer hopes to expose. The
cook’s story is not necessarily solicited, but he forcefully interjects his tale as a response to
the reeve. The cook is angered by the reeve’s malevolent words, and decides to take matters
into his own hands. This is a rather revolutionary metaphor on the part of Chaucer-the
working class man of the group is publically objecting the actions of a feudal serf lord, an
exploitive landowner who is the old servant of the crown. The cook discusses working for
land-owning characters in his fabliaux, which seems to revel in prostitution, gambling and
other lower class vices. This portrays the opinions of different classes, with one class
content with the status quo and another seeking to condemn its unfairness.

In the Man of Law’s Tale, there is a contrast between the struggling philosophy student and
the greedy lawyer. The lawyer admits that his knowledge has no aim except making him
money. The tale’s “repeated motifs of the sufferings of the high-ranking suggest tragedie in
its non-dramatic Chaucerian form” (1). A large part of the tale is devoted to legal
explanation of the proceedings as well as Biblical verses-the story itself seems to be about
divine intervention when Custance is repeatedly stricken with suffering and yet remains
wholly Christian. The tale is as much a caricature as it is a story encouraging Christian
principles, though this is kept at bay by Chaucer’s inclusion of reminders that the story is
being dictated by a corrupt lawyer.

Chaucer’s societal analysis continues throughout each of the tales-the Friar’s Tale, which
shallowly appears at first to be a moralist Platonic “warning fable,” is actually an appeal to
view the greed of officials as logically resolvable. The Shipman’s Tale shows that like all
capitalists, thievery, piracy and murder are the shipman’s chief methods of capital gain, and
shows the crumbling of the domestic as a sheer ironic exercise inevitable given the
oppressive social relations between people. One might mistake Chaucer’s criticism and
sarcastic condemnation of the excesses of British culture as genuine attempts to destroy,
rather than alter, the system producing corrupt characters like the summoner, the friar and
the prioress. While the Shipman’s Tale may in fact be a criticism of the values of mercantile
capitalism, it is also more of a criticism of the limits of such commercialism instead of a
condemnation of the system as whole. Readers often fail to see the tree for the forest.

Likewise, the famous Wife of Bath’s Tale is a plea for equality on behalf of women, with a
female character giving a reaction to the subjugated and “well-behaved” woman in the man
of law’s story. She says that she has been married five times and, instead of discussing the
honesty and virtue of matrimony and chastity, she turns her tale into a shocking
justification of multiple marriages and multiple sexual partners. This cannot be seen as
anything but a criticism of women’s role in marriage under the feudalist system, where they
were treated much like property instead of reciprocal partners and equals to the men.

The progressive elements of Chaucer are frequently used (or rather exploited) by his
western liberal critics, who use such ideas of equal rights and of cutting oneself off from the
past to become a “modern person” as a tool to make his works another simple catalogue of
western liberal anxieties. This is partially true, since the complexities of Chaucer’s historical
context challenged the clergy, class society and medieval imperialist organizations of
Catholic feudalism in general. However, it is exceptional to note that the Canterbury Tales
also serves as a preview of the characteristics of the emerging “modern” bourgeois nation-
state and gives insight to Chaucer’s unique status in elevating it through his fiction.

Works cited:
1) Cooper, Helen. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1989.
2) Mann, Jill. Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the
General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. CUP Archive, 1973.
3) J. Carruthers, Mary. “Review: [untitled].” Modern Philology 89(1992): 390-394.
4) Ann Knapp, Peggy. Chaucer and the Social Contest. Routledge, 1990.
5) Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. University of Wisconsin Press,
1991.¬¬
6) Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology. 2006. Verso, 1976.