Bigyled: The Miller’s Tale and the Destabilization of Authority

This project looks at Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and asks how it manages to safely express messages that threatened and destabilized established power structures in fourteenth century England, a time and place more than willing to mete out harsh punishments to dissenters. The argument will be made that specific rhetorical choices allow the tale to breach ideological boundaries around knowledge, and that this breaching works to destabilize conceptions of human authority. The fabliau, the genre of the tale, will be explored along with recent scholarship that looks at how in Chaucer’s hands, and specifically in the Miller’s Tale, the fabliau’s ribald, comic façade comes to mask a deeply philosophical layer rich in Boethian resonance. The fabliau genre allows the Miller’s Tale to introduce philosophically and ideologically charged messages amidst a sense of play and laughter that works to distract attention from the messages and make them more palatable. At the same time, Boethian resonances offer a counterbalance to the tale’s destabilization of authority with a nod to the Providential authority of God. The tale uses distancing and denial as it opens to develop a space in which its rupturing of boundaries can occur. The rhetorical choices made in the Miller’s Tale allow it to raise destabilizing questions around the nature of knowledge, questions that work to undermine conceptions of human authority.