“For yet under the yerde was the mayde”: Chaucer in the House of Fiction

Abstract

Abstract In a scene near the beginning of Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, a maid child stands as silent witness to a conversation between a wife and a monk within the garden of a wealthy French merchant. By using her as an observer to the scene in the garden, Chaucer, perhaps for the first time in English literature, employs the gaze of a child to highlight the narrative of experience. In this article I explore the maid child as a sign of Chaucer’s experiments with perspective. Since Chaucer probably first wrote the Shipman’s Tale with the Wife of Bath as narrator, the maid child looks forward to the old hag in the Wife of Bath’s Tale. In placing or keeping her in the tale, Chaucer anticipates modernist experiments with perception, looking forward to Henry James, whose What Maisie Knew describes the gaze of another child upon the unsavory bartering of an adult world.