4 - Reading Alison's Smock in the Miller's Tale

Summary

In the Miller's Tale, Chaucer provides an extensive introductory portrait of Alison, a winsome and nubile wife of an elderly carpenter. Her description is replete with arresting costume details. Such effictio is normally part of the “formal artistry” employed as rhetorical decoration in medieval romances at a “first appearance” of a character in a story and “when an account of their beauty could explain the attraction of one character for another.” However, Chaucer employs this artistic, rhetorical convention within the early lines of his Miller's Tale (MilT), a fabliau, a genre in which it is not quite so much at home. Noteworthy because of its generic displacement, Chaucer's elaborate depiction of an artisan's wife is further enhanced by his fusion of artifice with “realistic similes and imagery.” According to D. S. Brewer, this lengthy passage is “partly a rhetorical joke the point of which is the absurdity of describing a carpenter's wife, a wanton village wench, as if she were a heroine, a noble and ideal beauty.” Brewer states that Alison's “clothes are also part of the joke” but does not elaborate this point. More recently, Hope Phyllis Weissman characterizes this description as “a parody of the rhetorical descriptio of the romance lady” – a “Courtly Damsel.” In this portrait, as Weissman comments, “considerable attention is … lavished on ornament.”