"The Miller's Tale" as a Parody of Courtly Love

A lady is a creature to be treated like an angel of God. She is beautiful, respectable, and chaste. The sanctity of a lady is not just worth defending, it is worth passing away for. Her glove on plate mail is a harmonious battle cry, an inspiration both powerful and divine. Always painfully correct and never ever morally compromised, she is the embodiment of righteousness. I shall love her from afar, as she will love me back. Never ever will our love come to physical fruition; it is more holy than that.

Her, as well as my, marital relationship is below our love, our love of affection and total commitment. She will swoon for me as I shall combat for her, and our spirits are forever intertwined. Physical love and lusty temptation are too worldly for us.

These would be the thoughts of any correct knight towards his girl. "The Miller's Tale" is a satire of courtly love and its truth in times contemporary the setting of The Canterbury Tales.

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The characters Alison, Absalon, and Nicholas are exacerbated examples of the deterioration of courtly love that happened in middle ages times, a direct result of male's inclination to enjoy earthly satisfaction.

Alison does embarassment to the idea of courtly love. She personifies deceit, cheating, and ethical perversion. Towards the item of what should be her courtly love, as she was wed before ever experiencing him, she extends guarantee of physical engagement up until now as to the point of sex. She tricks her partner so that she can philander with John, who she must be the object of her worship, not her lust.

She is the total opposite of the morally upright woman she should, and her "courtly" love for John is bit more than indulgence in sin. Also, in her negotiations with her other pursuer Absalon, "she looked upon him as her private ape."

As a lady she should have appertained and at least civil in her transactions with him, yet she treated him like a puppet. She had no look after his feeling or his well being. When Absalon asked for a kiss from her, instead of continuing that he treat her as a lady and enjoy her from afar, she had him kiss her back. A woman needs to never act in such a manner. Her actions are so perverse that by her traits one would believe her one and the exact same as the miller telling this story.

Absalon, unrequited lover of Alison, is not free of sin himself. He too does shame to the idea of courtly love. Rather than love her in a holy, worshipping manner, he chases her pruriently, "if she had been a mouse and he a cat, she'd have been pounced upon." If he had been pure and morally strong, he would have loved her like a knight, chastely, without any physical desire.

Nicholas, like Absalon, loves his lady hotly rather than worshipfully. If Nicholas had been a true man, he would have loved her as an angel, his lady on high. Her beauty should have been his strength, but it was his passion. He carried on an affair with the wife of his landlord, the woman who should have been his object of Christian affection. Instead of wearing a piece of her clothing as a reminder to do right, he "stroked her loins a bit and kissed her sweetly."

Chaucer's intention for creating such morally deranged characters is to illustrate the degree to which courtly love had become just a synonym for physical lust. The reason for this tale is to show that extramarital affairs are only an engagement in immorality, especially if the affair be under the guise of holy love. As men, Absalon and Nicholas should have loved Alison with the love of highest admiration, and she should have loved them the same way. Rather than love each other in the right fashion, they succumbed to physical temptation, and thus were morally devoid characters. A woman is an angel, not an object of lust.