Carnivalesque Canterbury Tales

Again, it is not a stretch to liken the student’s carnivalesque attitudes toward the classroom to a rendering of the fabliaux. In The Canterbury Tales there are three specific carnival aspects—the marketplace, the grotesque, and laughter— clearly outlined within the fabliau of the Miller’s Tale. This section will exemplify these aspects in the Miller’s Tale in order to thresh out a clearer understanding of the Carnivalesque in literature, much as a teacher would to teach students how to identify carnivalesque themes as a literary critique. The discussion will also include how those carnival aspects appear in the classroom and how an English teacher can use the teaching of the Tales as a framing narrative which establishes a carnivalesque approach to classroom society.

An initial detail that stands out from the beginning of The Canterbury Tales, is the use of the English language, rather than the more common literary languages of the time, such as French. In writing the Tales in English, Chaucer

The Host attempts to persuade the Miller to "Abyd, Robyn, my leeve brother/Som bettre man shal telle us first another/Abyd, and lat us werken thriftily” (3129) but the Miller insists on telling his tale. Chaucer provides a commentary on why he has “allowed” the Miller’s “cherles tale” to be included, explaining that he must include all the tales “Or elles falsen som of my mateere” (3175). This “authorial speech” personifies the marketplace as a site to be trusted—that even though vulgarities may occur, they are presented congruently with all “… storial thyng that toucheth gentillesse/And eek moralitee and hoolynesse” (3179) as an equalizer to “permit a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships” (Bakhtin