Chaucer is a SWERPF: Sexual Ethics in 'The Shipman’s Tale'

Rosalynd Rea is an undergrad at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA currently working on her senior honors thesis The Medieval Slut: Sexual Identities of Medieval Women in the Patriarchal Narratives of the Decameron and Canterbury Tales. She has previously been published with Counterpoint Magazine and her mother’s refrigerator. She hopes this article earns a spot there as well. Find her on Instagram @roz.rea or Twitter @medievalslut.

So here’s the situation: you’re young, you’re hot, you’re married, and it’s 1387. Your husband, though rich, is miserly and as such pays little attention to you, instead favoring his counting house and his best friend, the monk who happens to live with you. Your husband, being rich, expects your outward appearance to reflect his own economic situation, but remains inattentive. The dresses you’ve bought to live up to your husband’s expectations will go unpaid for and thus negate any positive reflection they might have been purchased for. Fortunately for you, the monk who lives with you has the hots for you and, as a medieval monk, also has the moral turpitude to turn you from wife to whore. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t have the funds. He borrows from his best friend (your husband, if you’ve been paying attention) a loan “for the church.” He pays you, you have great sex, you pay off your debt, and your husband is never the wiser. Nor, as it turns out, is he the richer. When your husband asks your monk for the money back your monk responds that he gave it to you to give to him. Well, shit. You claim ignorance and tell your husband to “score it upon my taille” essentially saying to him that you’ll work this debt off in addition to your marital debt. After being paid for sex, you pay another in sex. This is Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, and inquiring minds want to know: are you a whore?

According to the laws of the time, you don’t get to answer. While whore constituted an identity and a label, it was not a self-selected term the way modern sex-positive feminism reclaims the term slut as a force for good. Instead, the medieval prostitute was a loose category, wherein any “woman who took many lovers was a prostitute, whether she took money for her favors or not.”[1] As James Brundage argues, the law saw no difference between a prostitute and a wife like the one described above. This argument is so successful because it returns to the ever-present patriarchal anxiety of women working—even existing—outside the sphere of male dominance. Prostitution while it provided economic independence, as we will see with the following tale, does so at the risk to a woman’s ethical code, and in the medieval tradition to her very soul.

Medieval law, as both secular and religious, was deeply concerned with the protection of a woman’s soul. Luckily enough for medieval law, a whore no longer had a soul about which to be concerned. As Ruth Mazo Karras writes, “most identities in the past, for those who were not able to textualize or encode their own, came from without rather than from within—from societal systems of classification, from dominant discourses.”[2] Thus we see contrary to the modern prostitute, medieval prostitutes did not create their own identity as sex worker but instead were labeled as such by society. Such a label was tied intrinsically to the prostitute’s sense of sluthood and personhood as “society defined the prostitute as a member of a particular outcast group not because of the acts she committed but because of the kind of person she was, permanently marked with her sin.”[3] Not only were these women permanently marked with sin, but they were lost to it. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church and leading late medieval theologian goes so far in his labeling to call them “sewers” for men’s lust, taking the approach that prostitution, as a lesser evil, “was seen as a safety valve, preventing the seduction or rape of respectable women, or redirecting men away from sodomy.”[4] Like the insatiable wives of the medieval fabliaux (a literary tradition focused on short humorous poems), prostitutes made sex palatable for men while relegating all the sin to women. This time, the sin even takes the form of the whore or slut herself, as it plays into the original meaning of the term. Sluttish, as used in Middle English, describes a “slovenly” or “dirty” person regardless of gender,[5] perfectly fitting Aquinas’s idea of the sewer.

Setting the law aside and returning to our original question, Chaucer has also decided that you don’t get to answer. Working from the law and his own patriarchal biases, Chaucer constructs the Shipman’s Tale in order to purposefully make the unnamed Wife into a whore. Not only is she a whore, she is vilified for it. The Wife, unnamed as she is, is an autonomous woman. She is autonomous not only in the sheer volume of words she speaks (as the tale is mostly dialogue), but in how she speaks. She speaks of herself: of her desires, her needs, her expectations, and her own sense of sluthood. When she speaks, she exists as a person set apart from her partners, yet still relegated to her relationships with them. Her cause for speaking in a sexual manner to the monk comes from a lack of sex with her husband. Her cause for a sexual act with the monk comes from a need of money which in turn comes from a need to honor her husband. Her autonomy, while it exists, exists only in the vacuum of her male relationships. As such, her autonomy is male-dominated and not the true autonomy of a whore with ethics.

This structure of male-dominance, however, is a feature of the tale and its narrator, not the whore. The Wife, though relegated to relationships, takes an activeness in the relegation. Through her sexuality, she is an active woman. She presents her activeness through her expectations of relationships. She says that all women

Desiren thynges sixe as wel as I;
They wolde that hir housbondes sholde be
Hardy and wise, and riche, and therto free,
And buxom unto his wyf and fressh abedde.[6] 
 
meaning that all women deserve such an active and providing partner. She has the expectations necessary to an ethical slut to build a relationship, and yet her expectations are not met. Because she knows herself well enough to set such expectations, she has an ease with which she approaches sexual conversation and sexual activity. Upon being approached by a man who is not her husband and is therefore more likely to be “fressh abedde” as she deserves, she immediately launches into a sexual conversation. The Wife flirts with the monk, daun John, and daun John flirts back. In a sexually fraught parody of courtly love, the couple “in the gardyn walketh to and fro.”[7] The garden of medieval literature, but of Chaucer especially is a symbol of lust consciously created to be lustful. It is a place where sex and sexual conduct easily happen. The Shipman’s use of such a setting recalls the romances of the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales, and in so doing, also recalls the courtly nature of such tales. Daun John’s flirtation in such a setting also reinforces the courtly nature when he makes the oath “that nevere in my lyf, for life ne looth, / ne shal I of no conseil yow biwreye.”[8] The promise is reminiscent of the great claims of courtly lovers made to protect their beloveds. The promise is also made following a great flirtation reminiscent of the Miller’s Tale. Daun John says to the Wife “I trowe, certes, that oure goode man / hath yow laboured sith the nyght bigan,”[9] drawing to the Wife’s mind not only sex, but the good and deserved sex she is so undeservedly missing out on. With such a thought in mind the Wife lamentingly flirts back “that lasse lust hath to that sory pley.”[10] Thus she is active in attempting to step out of one relationship and into another. She is making the sluttish and slutty decision to ethically engage in an outside relationship.

            In return for such ethics in the face of demonstrated monetary need, Chaucer punishes the Wife, letting the reader know that while some of his Canterbury Tales can be read as proto-feminist, Chaucer’s particular brand of proto-feminism is sex worker exclusionary. Ultimately because of the male-driven anxiety of certain male characters, the Wife is punished. The payment for playing ethos—as Chaucer consistently encourages wordplay where “pay” stands in for “pleye”—of the tale is relegated to the men of the tale. A woman participating in such an ethos is seen as dangerous, amoral, and therefore deserving of punishment. Liz Scala makes the point that the Wife’s punishment is importantly nonviolent, for “in the end, no one is humiliated. The circulation of words follows (and explains) the circulation of money, itself a signifier, such that the wife can return symbolic capital to her husband by scoring it “upon [her] taille.”[11] The Shipman’s Tale is thus carefully crafted with punishment in mind; while the punishment of the Shipman’s Tale is not inherently physical like other Chaucerian fabliaux, it is still violent. This violence presents itself in the patriarchal and misogynistic ways the Wife is continually dehumanized. She is not a Wife but a whore, ensnared by the patriarchal institution that insists on shame, dirtiness, and sluttishness attached to such a label. When attempting to enforce her own ethical framework onto the term in order to not only remain honorable in the eyes of her husband and therefore society, but to reclaim the term for herself, she is relegated to sluttishness instead of sluttiness. She is relegated because she is duped out of what she is owed. She is further relegated by the return of a sexual economy to her husband. In “scoring it upon her taille” she is punished and humiliated because her sexual autonomy is flouted, returning to the very relationship in which she advocated for adultery. Scala does not account for the near-missed humiliation that caused such male-anxiety: the men of the tale are anxious because the Wife could have been easily caught and the men exposed for their part in the deception—daun John in physically fucking another man’s wife and the merchant in initially allowing his wife a way out. As Christopher Cannon writes, “a woman’s consent has the power to accomplish acts—in particular, to threaten her husband’s financial interest in the act that is marriage.”[12] The Wife has the power to lessen her husband’s wealth and very status as a husband and is symbolically punished in order to increase his wealth by playing with him without him paying her.

   

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      Neither Chaucer nor the medieval laws off which he works care about your answer. While they give certain power to a woman’s and a wife’s right to sex and more importantly right to autonomy. They do not afford whores the same basic human decency. That basic human decency that comes from respecting the autonomous choices of whores and sex workers, whether they be medieval or modern, exists in the Shipman’s Tale but only through back-flipping contortions in order to find the smallest glimmer of the Wife’s ethics. So then why do we read Chaucer? Why do we consider some of his works, like the Wife of Bath a proto-feminist icon, when he so clearly presents a case for SWERF-dom?

            Ultimately our answers relate back to the whorearchy. Ah, yes, that hierarchy of whores that classifies women just doing their job on a moral basis without ever discussing it with the women in question. The whorearchy was alive and well in the Shipman’s Tale and other late medieval narratives. Because of this hierarchy, Chaucer invites us to hate the Wife. We should hate the Wife because, by all accounts, she shouldn’t be a whore. She’s a wife, not a sewer. Due to her autonomous choice, she becomes both, something clearly amoral for the medieval readers judging her. But it leads modern sex-positive readers to question what exactly is wrong with being a sewer? What’s wrong with being a sewer, especially if you choose to be a sewer? Modern sex-positive readers looking at the Shipman’s Tale, with its clear vilification of women against the norm have a literary and historical example to point to, when describing exactly why whores don’t deserve to be villainized, no matter who they pley with or how they get payed.
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​Bibliography

Brundage, James A.. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Accessed March 6, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Cannon, Christopher. “Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty’s Certainties.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 22, 2000, pp. 67-92. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/sac.2000.0001.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Edited by Larry D Benson and Christopher Cannon, Oxford University Press, 2008.
Jones, Malcolm. "The Surprising Roots of the Word 'Slut'." The Daily Beast, Mar 21, 2015. ProQuest, https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.wellesley.edu/docview/1676149147?accountid=14953.
Karras, Ruth M. "Theoretical Issues: Prostitution and the Question of Sexual Identity in Medieval Europe." Journal of Women's History, vol. 11, no. 2, 1999, pp. 159. ProQuest, https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.wellesley.edu/docview/203246027?accountid=14953.
Scala, Elizabeth. Desire in the Canterbury Tales. Ohio State Univ Press, 2016.


[1]. James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1987), 248.

[2]. Ruth Mazo Karras, “Prostitution and the Question of Sexual Identity in Medieval Europe,” Journal of Women’s History 11, no. 2 (1999): 162.

[3]. Ibid.

[4]. Ibid.

[5]. Malcolm Jones, “The Surprising Roots of the Word ‘Slut,’” The Daily Beast, March 21, 2015.

[6]. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D Benson and Christopher Cannon (Oxford University Press, 2008), Fragment VII, Lines 173-176.

[7]. Ibid., 80.

[8]. Ibid., 132-133.

[9]. Ibid., 107-108.

[10]. Ibid., 117.

[11]. Elizabeth Scala, Desire in the Canterbury Tales (Ohio State University Press, 2016), 124.

[12]. Christopher Cannon, “Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty’s Certainties,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 75.