K–I–S–S–I–N–G: Transforming Obscenity in Children’s Adaptations of Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale Open Access

ABSTRACT

It is tempting to imagine Chaucer’s May and Damyan as the original subjects of this dreaded chant, familiar to readers who have spent time on anglophone streets and playgrounds in the late twentieth century. Indeed, “The Kissing Tree” shares many of the preoccupations of Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale: marriage, love, potential offspring. Youth derides age and its encumbrances with humiliating comedy; arboreal hanky-panky is never quite described out loud. As if to further pique medievalists’ interest, the chant’s first documentation by folklorists dates tentatively to the 1930s, the same decade that saw the first full prose retelling of the Merchant’s Tale for child readers.

Alas, the connection between chant and tale is most likely a historical coincidence, given the geographic expanses at play. The chant appeared first in Vermont, while the children’s retelling appeared in Britain and was reprinted in the US only decades later.¹ And as any childhood target of “The Kissing Tree” can attest, the young lovers from the Merchant’s Tale are hardly its fixed subjects. To place Chaucer’s May and Damyan in that treetop embrace nevertheless captures the subject of this article, namely, the complex and historically rooted interplay between the explicit and implicit that arises when “children’s” texts confront the subject of sex. As I explore here, this dynamic complexity gives rise to a curious adaptational poetics—one that, like both rhyme and tale, juggles discomfort and pleasure as it attempts to serve both “child” and “adult” audiences.

Children’s adaptations of the Merchant’s Tale, while few in number, expose a tension between two sides of Chaucer’s canonicity: the memorable obscenity of his stories versus a pervasive urge—readerly, scholarly, adaptational—to solemnify his persona as filled with wise virtue. Why have any children’s adapters engaged at all with the tale’s sexual obscenity—and, in particular, with its notorious pear tree scene? How do their strategies attempt to distill the tale’s sexual content for an “innocent” audience? And how might those strategies enrich our understanding of obscenity’s textual afterlives? I approach these questions by examining three “full” children’s adaptations of the tale with an emphasis on how the adaptation process “forgoes” (in the words of Brian Boyd) “exact fidelity to solve new problems, but in doing so, necessarily creates new problems that invite new solutions.”² However fraught, children’s versions of the Merchant’s Tale can render us more sensitive to rich possibilities in Chaucer’s text, as well as to the tenacity of sexual, erotic, and social obscenity in even the most “sanitized” of adaptation processes.

The Merchant’s Tale and Children’s Chaucer

Alfred David declared in 1976 that “the Merchant’s is the only one among the tales of the Canterbury pilgrims that contains real obscenity.”³ Indeed, given the pear tree sex scene for which the Merchant’s Tale is most famous, it is remarkable that children’s adapters have dared touch on it at all. As already evident from the “hanky-panky” in my own opening paragraph, the pear tree incident spawns in criticism dozens of “beguiling euphemisms,” such as “arboreal exploits,” “treetop tryst,” “coitus al fresco.”⁴ Such witticisms betray a blend of amusement and discomfort, as well as a nodding toward the Merchant narrator’s professed coyness:

Even in isolation from the tale’s other potentially obscene aspects, this moment aligns closely with Mary Caputi’s definition of obscenity: it “truly offends, shocks, or fascinates” in “determined violation of established norms.”⁶ May’s husband is within arm’s reach; the participants are outdoors and fully clothed; and they are, lest we forget, in a pear tree.⁷ Despite the Merchant’s excuse that he is a “rude man” who cannot “glose,” his blunt description nevertheless withholds details artfully. Body parts remain unnamed.⁸ May’s body disappears entirely, hidden behind the “smok” that Damyan moves aside, just as he had earlier opened the garden gate “in swich manere / That no wight myghte it se neither yheere” (IV 2153–54). Only several lines later are the genital logistics of the thronging finally confirmed, in one of Chaucer’s most ringing uses of swyve, the Middle English equivalent of “fuck” (IV 2378).⁹ The obscenity of the scene thus relies on a combination of obscene language (swyve) and suggestive description: a transgressive, absurd sex act is presented via a speech-act that the Merchant overtly expects to “offend, shock” and, perhaps, “fascinate” his listeners. Geoffrey Gust points out that while Damyan’s “throng” is “arguably the most explicit instance of sexual penetration in the entire Middle English literary corpus,” it also makes titillating demands upon the reader’s imagination to “determine the nature of this penetration.”¹⁰ The pear tree encounter contains not only sexual obscenity, but erotic obscenity as well: it functions, to a certain extent, pornographically, in order “to provoke some kind of response, or satisfaction, in the reader.”¹¹

The pear tree episode is also one of the few sexual encounters in the Canterbury Tales where the participants’ mutual desire and imagined enjoyment make possible a critical attempt at humor that does not inevitably reveal itself as a rape joke. Nevertheless, the Merchant’s Tale figures prominently on Christine Rose’s list of Chaucerian “rape-tales,” largely because of the sexual encounters between May and January on their wedding night (and thereafter).¹² In these instances, January enacts his lecherous fantasies of “manac[ing]” and “streyn[ing]” his youthful bride, who is brought to their bedroom “as stille as stoon” (IV 1752, 1753, 1818).¹³ Rose argues that January is a marital rapist, a dynamic reinforced by the tale’s later conjuration of Pluto and his “ravysshed” victim-bride Proserpine (IV 2230).¹⁴ For Rose, the tale is “a story of traffic in powerless women, of rape encompassing and defining both heavenly and earthly relations between the sexes, and of marriage as legalized rape, inscribed in the heavens and acted on earth.”¹⁵

Neither impression of this text—as pornographic romp or as insidious rape-tale—immediately recommends it to modern readers as a suitable story for children. Readerly assumptions about such suitability are based on a concept of the child as a particular type of vulnerable reader: one whose exposure to certain material, including obscenity, carries the potential for moral corruption, contamination, or harm.¹⁶ Children’s adaptation of canonical works thus turns on two competing but generative principles: on the one hand, the inadmissibility of certain material in the source-text; on the other, the perceived literary, cultural, and economic value of transmitting the source-text even in altered form.

Emerging in Britain in the early nineteenth century, the canonical children’s adaptation applied the premise of chapbook retellings of popular stories to the increasingly lucrative market for children’s literature.¹⁷ Charles Cowden Clarke’s Tales from Chaucer, the first of the so-called “children’s Chaucers,” appeared in 1833.¹⁸ Following in the footsteps of Charles and Mary Lamb, his personal friends and the authors of the wildly popular Tales from Shakespear (1807), Clarke retold the General Prologue and ten of the Canterbury tales in “easy prose” to inspire his young readers to be “wise and good, by the example of the kind creatures” in Chaucer’s stories, as well as to urge them to read Chaucer’s original text in their later years.¹⁹ The anthology format established by the Lambs conveniently allowed for the wholesale omission of certain “coarse and indelicate” tales, in service of presenting Chaucer and his characters as generally prudent, kindly, and virtuous.²⁰ Although adapters have been quiet on the subject, such selective transmission also echoes the manuscript tradition of the Canterbury Tales, where tales appear in various orders, with occasional omissions or with tales presented individually.

More than forty children’s adaptations of the Canterbury Tales have been published since 1833, not including reprints. As did Clarke, the vast majority omit the Merchant’s Tale as well as the other fabliaux. Mary Seymour, the first children’s adapter to present all of Shakespeare’s plays, shied away from doing the same with the Canterbury Tales, claiming that “some of [Chaucer’s] poems are lamentably coarse—with a coarseness that no desire nor effort may attempt to disguise.”²¹ Indeed, in the rare cases when adapters reference inappropriate material in their justifications for omitting certain tales, they almost always resort to the same word: coarse.²² Coarse appears as a euphemism for “rude” or “vulgar” material from the sixteenth century; in a Victorian context, it is unremarkable.²³ Such coarseness is usually attributed to the poet’s “rough, unrefined times”; if anything, adapters are at pains to insist, its presence demonstrates Chaucer’s skill as “one of the greatest of realists.”²⁴ The child reader, by extension, is everything such coarseness is not: soft, finely-grained, even fragile or “delicate” (to refract Clarke’s term)—and, crucially, living in a modern and more enlightened age.

While children’s adaptations of the General Prologue routinely included the Merchant as a pilgrim, it took over seventy years for children’s Chaucers to mention the content of his tale. When they finally do, the pear tree is nowhere in sight. Instead, four collections—those by William Calder (1892), F. J. Harvey Darton (1904), Katharine Lee Bates (1909), and Mary Sturt and Ellen C. Oakden (1923)—summarize the Merchant’s offering in a single paragraph or less, affording it far less space or detail than they do the more popular tales. Its brief inclusion nonetheless points to a growing tendency during this period for children’s Chaucers to acknowledge and even expand upon the “pilgrim links” rather than presenting the tales in isolation (as had Clarke). For these four collections, the tale’s Chaucerian capital derives not from its content but from its placement in the pilgrimage frame, as reflected in the choice of “Canterbury Pilgrims” or “Pilgrimage” in their titles, rather than “Tales.”²⁵ To include the vague outlines of the Merchant’s Tale is thus to claim an adaptational authenticity that conveniently sidesteps problematic content.

Because these brief versions function as short, relatively vague dismissals rather than as equal treatments, in comparison to other tales in their respective collections, I suggest that none of these summaries of the Merchant’s Tale should be considered a “full” retelling. (One adapter, Darton, even assigns the Merchant a second full tale, “The Tale of Beryn,” which he transparently discloses is non-Chaucerian in origin, as if to underline the point that the Merchant’s Tale somehow fails to properly represent the author.²⁶) Such mini-retellings are nevertheless valuable for thinking about later full adaptations because of what they suggest about the problem the tale presents to the adapter. For these turn-of-the-century adapters, the problem is not, seemingly, the issue of an age gap in marriage, or possibly even the sexual intercourse in a tree. The problem is May and the combination of youth, sexuality, and initiative that she possesses. The Merchant in Calder’s 1892 collection tells “the well-known tale of January and May” to explain why, as husband, January is truly a “martyr.”²⁷ A decade later, Darton squarely casts May in the role of the shrew, a “fair and false young wife” who plots to “take advantage of [January’s] blindness” and “r[un] off” to her “true lover.”²⁸ Darton scrubs all traces of rape: Pluto’s “strange miracle” of January’s restored sight is wrought anonymously, and January’s lasciviousness is erased.²⁹

The women adapters are no kinder to May. Bates repeats the Merchant’s accusation of shrewery before explicitly declining to tell his tale:

Bates then narratively elides the Wife of Bath’s shrewish, “vengeful tongue” that “pursue[s]” the Merchant “with her wrath.”³¹ In parallel, Sturt and Oakden’s Merchant tells the story “of a wife who was the exact opposite of Griselda, and much more akin to the Wife of Bath.”³² May is inappropriately sensual and aligned with the “buxom” and “gossip[ing]” Wife; as “the opposite of Griselda,” she becomes the wife who does not “bear with . . . meekness the rough assaults of a husband.”³³

One reason for early adapters’ fixation on May is that, as a mal mariée, she herself functions as an obscene figure for social, as well as sexual, reasons. Nicole Nolan Sidhu points out that the “strictly hierarchical culture of the Middle Ages also invests disobedience and resistance to the established order with a level of obscenity equal to the display of lower body functions, body parts, or sexual acts”; and, as Kristen Haas Curtis notes, social obscenity frequently attends transgressive female figures.³⁴ Victorian and Edwardian adapters, working in a largely didactic framework, revivify older ideas of social obscenity to define a (unnamed) wife in opposition to virtue (Griselda) and in comparison to “blatant” and “unashamed” transgression (the Wife of Bath). May, the unpunished shrew, is inadmissible within the alleged world of “kind creatures” that early children’s adaptations strove to construct. Hence, Darton’s forced ending: the deviant wife’s plans to run off are foiled, and “though she made a clever excuse, [January] took her home and kept her more safely.”³⁵ This is, after all, the tale of a merchant, and May remains a commodity. We may ask: From what—or from whom—is she kept safe?

Even later adapters did not consider children safe from the full tale until many alterations had been made. To these two obscene problems—shrewish May and pear tree sex—we can add another, one perhaps more cogent in today’s literary and political landscape, which threads through the tale’s spheres of reception in children’s literature. This problem is May’s own proximity to childhood. None of the summaries mention May’s precise age, nor does Chaucer. Yet in attempts to rehabilitate May—and, in so doing, to reframe the tale and its central sex scene—later children’s adapters deployed the idea of youth against the tale’s inherent obscenity in innovative yet complicated ways.

Three Adaptations of the Merchant’s Tale

Only three children’s collections feature the Merchant’s Tale as more than a brief summary: Eleanor Farjeon’s Tales from Chaucer (1930), Geraldine McCaughrean’s The Canterbury Tales (1984), and Usborne Classics Retold: The Canterbury Tales by Sarah Courtauld, Abigail Wheatley, and Susanna Davidson (2008).³⁶ All three are also vague with respect to their intended audiences within the category “young readers.” Farjeon, publishing decades before suggested age brackets appear in publishing guides, targets in her preface “young people” who may be bored of long or overly moral tales.³⁷ McCaughrean provides no preface, but the first edition’s big format, glossy pages, and large-scale illustrations by award-winning children’s illustrator Victor Ambrus align with expectations for children’s books in the 1980s. To this day, her version (which is still in print) is marketed “for children” by its publisher. The Usborne edition addresses itself to “modern readers” ages eight and up.³⁸

Why adapt the tale, when so many others had not? As with earlier adapters’ reasons for omitting it, our knowledge of exactly what transpired in these later cases is limited, but there are some clues. While each tale is recounted in only a few pages, Farjeon ambitiously determines to include all of them, and it is perhaps due to this enthusiasm for completeness, shared by some of the earlier summarizers, that we owe her version of the Merchant’s Tale. We can also consider potential competition with other children’s Chaucers. Farjeon’s Tales from Chaucer appeared in 1930, at the extreme tail-end of the so-called Golden Age of children’s adaptation. Steve Ellis has noted that in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century children’s Chaucers were released “practically at the rate of one a year” and industriously reprinted throughout the 1920s and ’30s.³⁹ To include not just summaries but full retellings of every tale would have set Farjeon’s version apart, if only to the adults who comprise, then and now, the main purchasers of these books. McCaughrean and the Usborne adapters may also have considered the value-added component of their adaptations. McCaughrean’s is one of the first children’s Chaucers to embrace the fabliaux, adapting the tales of the Miller, Reeve and Shipman as well as that of the Merchant. The Usborne collection, arriving in the first decade of the twenty-first century, takes a similarly pugnacious approach, adapting the tales of the Miller and Reeve while also positioning itself as a beacon of contemporary popular feminism. For all three projects, then, tackling Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale may serve as proof of adaptational competence aligned with contemporaneous ideas about what makes Chaucer simultaneously valuable and unsuitable for the child reader.

Farjeon wrote only seven years after Sturt and Oakden, but unlike the latter, who were educational historians and psychologists, Farjeon had made her career as a children’s writer.⁴⁰ Consequently, her solution to the problem of May turns to what Judith Hillman identifies as a hallmark of children’s literature: her protagonists become children themselves.⁴¹

Farjeon transposes sexual desire into the juvenile realm by effectively making the lovers children themselves, with childlike wants: May desires a “playfellow,” while “young page” Damian’s Chaucerian lust is refigured as a “longing” for access to a physical space. In keeping with the earlier displacement of his sexual desire onto physical access, Damian later achieves a moment equivalent to his “throng[ing]” in the pear tree scene. Once January becomes blind, May signals to him one day, and he “slip[s]” into the garden, “full of delight,” immediately climbs the pear tree, and begins “to enjoy himself.”⁴³ Seeing this, May begins “to long for a pear.”⁴⁴ May and Damian’s pleasure is transformed from sexual to gustatory, from deceptive to authentic. May’s desire for the pear is genuine and, moreover, she gets exactly what she claims to want: “Damian, laughing, gave her a green pear.”⁴⁵ Damian’s offense, in turn, becomes theft—not of the commodity of May, but of January’s pears. Indignant, Pluto remarks that “This young May . . . means to make game of him, and eat pears with Damian in the tree.”⁴⁶

As comical as this moment may be to readers (or scholars) of Chaucer, it is hard not to applaud Farjeon’s move to juvenilize the young characters’ desire by using Chaucer’s own “obscene symbol[s].”⁴⁷ The garden, always recognizably Edenic to adult readers, replaces May’s body as the object of Damian’s desire, physically manifesting David’s comment that “In a literal sense, May’s private parts are January’s garden.”⁴⁸ Scholarship on the pear tree has reveled in its sexual connotations, from potential contraceptive properties to the allusive season of its fruiting to its genealogical implications and possible analogy to the tempting biblical tree of knowledge.⁴⁹ Pear trees in Chaucer’s sources and analogues connote adulterous sexual activity, and certainly the fruit’s shape has inspired much comment: it may evoke a woman’s breasts, a pregnant female body, or male genitalia.⁵⁰ For Farjeon’s purposes, however, the pear’s most potent property concerns its potential literal pleasure: it is delicious. She reconfigures sexual desire in her source-text as nonsexual desire, whether for a physical space (the garden) or a food (the pear). Penetrative sexual intercourse, in turn, is transposed into the gratification of the respective desire—the gaining of access or the sating of hunger. Maria Nikolajeva has observed that there exists a “parallel between sexuality in general fiction and food in fiction for children,” and in this vein Farjeon’s repurposing of the pear gestures, perhaps, to the erotic potential of the pear tree scene.⁵¹

Three additional points are of interest here. First, unlike earlier summarizers, Farjeon also frames the young people’s desire as legitimate and eminently understandable. Readers might even derive vicarious pleasure from May’s gustatory success. Second, Farjeon also deploys a curious reenactment: after January reiterates that he has seen Damian “eating [his] pears,” May actually slaps Damian “on the cheek.”⁵² The implied sexual intercourse in the Chaucerian text is thereby bifurcated into a pleasurable aspect (eating pears) and a physical, even violent act (a slap). Finally, for all her careful tweaking of May’s life stage, Farjeon does little to alter January’s portrayal. As in Chaucer’s version, he remains a “hoary old man,” white-haired and frail, seeking a young woman “to whom he will give his body.”⁵³ I will return below to the question of age, for it also bears on another of Farjeon’s departures from the standard Chaucerian text: the upper age limit for January’s prospective bride. “I warn you, don’t offer me an old woman of twenty years,” says Farjeon’s January. “I’ll not have my wife a whit past sixteen. For the older I am, the younger should she be.”⁵⁴

Published fifty years after Farjeon’s Tales from Chaucer, McCaughrean’s 1984 version polarizes the couple’s ages still further:

Reading both Farjeon’s and McCaughrean’s versions, even of this short opening scene, is a stark reminder of the slippery relationship between what Linda Hutcheon refers to as “knowing” and “unknowing” audiences.⁵⁶ In Hutcheon’s model, “knowing” audiences are familiar with the source-text for a given adaptation; “unknowing” audiences are not, and it follows that an individual’s impressions of an adaptation will vary based on where they land on this spectrum. Children’s adaptations of sexual obscenity complicate this issue by introducing additional spectra, namely, the extent to which a given reader is conceptually familiar with human sexuality, and to what extent that reader can parse related euphemistic and figurative language.⁵⁷ These spectra, it must be emphasized, do not map neatly onto the distinctions between “child” and “adult,” as much as adapters might imply. To the Victorian and Edwardian adapters, for instance, the projected child reader is simultaneously ignorant of and vulnerable to instances of sexuality: hence, perhaps, their dismissals of the tale’s “coarseness.”

What emerges in the adaptations by Farjeon and McCaughrean are moments in which a reader’s experience is bifurcated or even trifurcated along the spectra described above: where a “knowing” reader—knowing of Chaucer’s text, knowing of sexuality, knowing of euphemism—may have a markedly different experience than one who is “unknowing” along one or more of those axes. For instance, while Farjeon completely elides the wedding-night sex scene, the language that follows is nonetheless suggestive: where Chaucer references colts, magpies, and roosters to describe January’s postcoital exuberance, Farjeon’s January is “pleased as a cock in the morning.”⁵⁸ As seen above, McCaughrean appears to play even looser with double entendres (“she had a mind to let him see it”).⁵⁹ The irony is that such innuendoes are among the most Chaucerian aspects of the adaptation. Chaucer’s own text invites us to read into May’s duplication of January’s phallic “clyket” (IV 2046). When Damian ends up in the garden eating pears in the tree, McCaughrean’s May wants to join him:

Again the crime is the theft of the pears, and, again, May actively slaps Damian as part of her ruse.⁶¹ The idea of oral satisfaction returns several times during McCaughrean’s tale; at the climactic moment, the lovers’ sharing of a pear shocks precisely because of the proximity of their lips (“eating the same pear”). Indeed, the boundary between the gustatory and sexual realms is noticeably thinner here.

The crossover between these two loci of pleasure finally manifests in the third and (to my knowledge) final full children’s adaptation of the Merchant’s Tale to date: Usborne Classics Retold: The Canterbury Tales by Courtauld et al.⁶² Where the first two adaptations rehabilitate May by coding her as a child, the Usborne version instead opts to appropriate the tropes of a contemporaneous children’s genre: the fairy tale. Within this framework, princess-like May’s forbidden “true love” for Damian reaches its climax in that most fairy tale of gestures, and a different type of oral satisfaction: Pluto remarks that the squire is about to “steal a kiss” from January’s young wife, and May, indeed, “sit[s] on one of the branches, kissing Damian.”⁶³ The pears are no longer the property at stake, but instead it is a kiss, a token of physical affection bestowed by the mouth, the same sensory locus highlighted in earlier adaptations of the tale.

The Usborne version arrived as feminist rewrites of myths and fairy tales were becoming mainstream, and the impulse to simultaneously embrace and reject the tropes of revocalized heroines is evident in its treatment of prominent female characters.⁶⁴ On her wedding night, May

Unlike Chaucer’s young bride, whose consent is tacit, the Usborne May has actively decided to accept January’s suit. The story becomes one of sympathetic escape rather than shrewish deception—and, following the fairy tale script, the lovers get a happy ending.

May’s enforced rehabilitation for a children’s audience takes various forms, but one final commonality remains salient across the eight decades spanned by these three adaptations: May’s numerical age. None of the summaries offers a numerical qualifier to May’s youth, but all three full adaptations do. What’s more, all three state its upper limit as sixteen. Farjeon, like Chaucer, includes this limit in January’s criteria that she be “not a whit past sixteen.”⁶⁶ In McCaughrean’s tale, May’s age is stated narratively: she is “not one day over sixteen,” and Damian “not two days over sixteen.”⁶⁷ Later, we learn that May is apparently exactly sixteen, in a deeply poignant line from Proserpine: “Old January should never have married such a young wife. How can he give her the fun she needs? This boy here would make a much fitter husband for a sixteen-year-old.”⁶⁸ Whether in direct reference or not, the Usborne authors echo McCaughrean’s initial phrasing: May is “exquisitely beautiful, poor as a mouse, and not a day over sixteen.”⁶⁹ I will argue in the remainder of this article that the question of age requires additional reflection on the adapters’ third transtemporal choice: their handling of the pear tree scene, in which the transgressive feminine obscenity of May meets the sexual and erotic obscenity of Chaucer’s sex scene.

Age, Obscenity, and the Poetics of Specificity

Chaucer and his pilgrims do not shy away from describing their characters in terms of numerical age. The clergeon in the Prioress’s Tale is seven (VII 503), while January is at least “sixty yeer” (IV 1248, 1252), presumably on his way to being “oold and hoor” (IV 1269). While many characters are described as old or young, numbers are far more likely to be used when pertaining to potentially sexually eligible, active, or desired women: the Miller’s Alisoun is eighteen, Malyne twenty, and Virginia fourteen (I 3223, I 3970, VI 30); the Wife of Bath claims she was twelve at the time of her first marriage (III 4), the same age as Walter and Griselda’s daughter at the time of her faux nuptials (IV 736). Reflecting on her transgressive “daliance” with the young clerk during her fourth marriage, the Wife discloses that Jankyn, then approximately twenty, found her sexually attractive at forty (III 600–601).⁷⁰ Yet Chaucer never provides a precise age for May, that allegedly sexually incorrigible shrew. Readers infer it only through January’s own preconditions for his marriage: the majority of manuscripts indicate that he seeks a wife whose age “shal nat passe twenty yeer, certayn” (IV 1417), and must not under any circumstance be higher than “thritty” (IV 1421), to satisfy both his wish for an heir (IV 1272) and his sexual preferences: “Oold fish and yong flessh wolde I have fayn” (IV 1418). Later the narrator suggests that January’s chosen bride meets these criteria: “Suffiseth hym hir yowthe and hir beautee” (IV 1626).⁷¹ Twelve manuscripts, however, give alternative upper limits. Oxford, Christ Church MS 152 reads lx (nineteen); eleven others give xvi or some version of sixtene.⁷² At least two of these also change the age limit implied in January’s second statement, from thirty to twenty.⁷³

To medieval readers, would the difference between sixteen and twenty have made much difference? Canon law set the minimum age for marriage in the fourteenth century at twelve for women, and fourteen for men, though typical marriage ages were considerably higher (twenties, for women).⁷⁴ The Riverside Chaucer notes that “twenty is still young,” though the younger age limit “may add to the humor.”⁷⁵ Certainly January’s hypocritical ageism, already redolent with misogyny as he insults women of “thritty,” reads as even more absurd when a woman of twenty is considered “bene-straw and greet forage” (IV 1422), as in Oxford, New College MS 314 and London, British Library MS Harley 7334. The Usborne adapters take this to the extreme in their version of January’s criteria, splitting the difference between manuscript variants as they do so:

On the one hand, May’s age, like her name, functions within Chaucer’s text to differentiate her from her much older husband. She manifests spring, fertility, growth, pleasure, and play; he is winter, barrenness, decrepitude, and potential impotence, his “pleyyng [nat] worth a bene” (IV 1854).⁷⁷ On the other hand, the idea of sixteen as a watershed age for sexuality and transgression does recall another significant text with which medieval and later readers would have been familiar. In Book 2 of Augustine’s Confessions, the sixteen-year-old future saint begins to experience the temptations of the flesh in gustatory terms: he “wallow[s] in [Babylon’s] filth as if it were scented spice. . . . How easy I was to tempt!”⁷⁸ Shortly thereafter, he and a group of other youths steal the fruit of a pear tree, not because it is delicious but for the sheer pleasure of transgression: “it was sin,” he writes decades later, “that sweetened it.”⁷⁹ The age of sixteen launches his descent into sexual and moral depravity, marked by the twinned sins of rampant sensual desires and enacted theft of pears. It is possible—though we can only speculate—that Chaucer’s engagement with this episode may have played some part in the variant xvi/sixtene found in the eleven manuscripts mentioned above. One of these manuscripts, it is worth pointing out, is Harley 7334, in the late nineteenth century considered “notorious” for its “oddities,” but also believed by some to represent a version of the Canterbury Tales revised by Chaucer himself.⁸⁰ Another possibility derives from a potential source for the discussion between January and his friends, Eustache Deschamps’s Miroir de Mariage (ca. 1389). In that text, the potential wife’s age should be “De xv, xvi ou a vint ans”—again a range rather than a precise number, but, crucially, one with fifteen/sixteen at the lower rather than the upper end.⁸¹

Transposing the tale to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—and to a readership much closer in age to the protagonist in question—complicates this issue. The relationship between age and childhood is, of course, complex and historically dynamic. Historians such as Nicholas Orme have done much to push back against the idea, famously proposed by Philippe Ariès, that in the European Middle Ages “the idea of childhood did not exist.”⁸² Where Ariès remains correct is in his diagnosis of childhood as a conceptual life stage imbricated in specific cultures and time periods, as all life stages are. The same numerical age, therefore, can take on different meanings in different historical contexts. We see this in the adapters’ variable juvenilization of May, which give quite different impressions of what being “sixteen” might mean: Farjeon’s May wishes for a “playmate,” while the Usborne May scribbles love notes and has already “agreed to marry” a much older man.

Why does the age of sixteen so dominate children’s editions? One answer concerns the editorial history of the variants. Farjeon’s preface indicates that she worked from a specific edition, The Globe Chaucer (presumably of 1898).⁸³ The Globe gives twenty in the main text, though editor Alfred Pollard indicates the textual variations of Harley 7334 in footnotes (sixteen and twenty, respectively).⁸⁴ We can conclude that Farjeon was not simply following Pollard, but made a calculated choice to lower May’s (maximum) age in the main text of her version. Why? If the regulation of obscenity in the anglophone world has operated in part as a state-endorsed disciplinary project, as Deana Heath has shown, those wishing to avoid obscenity are at least partially motivated by anxieties about legality and perception.⁸⁵ It is no coincidence that in the UK, where Farjeon wrote, the age of sexual consent was sixteen, as it had remained (and remains) since the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act.⁸⁶ Though Farjeon’s May merely eats a pear rather than engaging in sexual intercourse, the dual audience of children’s literature may here again play a role: May remains a character potentially infamous (or obscene) to the adult and/or “knowing” audience vetting children’s adaptation. Therefore, placing her at the legal age of sexual consent functions to assuage those adults’ potential concerns—or those of child readers themselves, once they encounter Chaucer’s text in later years. At sixteen, she would still be legally a minor in the early twentieth century and able to occupy the childlike persona Farjeon constructs for her.

Both McCaughrean and the Usborne adapters are working within the same legal paradigm, but they turn to different cultural loci to anchor their treatments of May. In the 1980s, following the postwar rise of the cultural category of the teenager, McCaughrean emphasizes May’s youthful disobedience. The age of the Merchant’s own wife (one of McCaughrean’s inventions) becomes a repulsive gag about the Merchant’s profession: “I always buy for value, so naturally I chose a sixteen-year-old—to give maximum wear, you understand. Worst investment I ever made.”⁸⁷ The Usborne adapters, as discussed, deploy the tropes of fairy tale, in whose popular twentieth-century context the age of sixteen also has strong resonances. It is on her sixteenth birthday, for instance, that Disney’s Aurora pricks her finger and becomes the Sleeping Beauty. (Indeed, the most common age for an “official Disney princess” is sixteen years old.⁸⁸) To be sure, the stated or perceived ages of fairy tale characters change in accordance with the social mores of a given time and place, and the age of these princesses predictably aligns with contemporaneous legal provisions around marriage and its assumed attendant sexual behaviors.⁸⁹ Yet the age of sixteen as understood within the popularized fairy tale genre as a boundary marker for transformation certainly has its appeals to a children’s adapter seeking to pacify the dual audience: to assure child readers that the character’s viewpoint is familiar to them, and to assure gate-keeping adults of the propriety of the character’s behavior (ironically, even when it has been changed). The age of sixteen thus occupies an advantageously liminal temporal space.

This discussion of age assumes, after all, that May is not younger than sixteen—a possibility left open by the eleven manuscripts cited above, as well as by the technical phrasing of two of the three adaptations discussed above. Why not simply leave May’s age vague? Indeed, why not follow Chaucer, who never pins down her age as he does for so many other young and sexually potent female characters?

In answering these questions, it is helpful to differentiate between the various “sanitization” options available to children’s adapters faced with “coarse” material. There is a range of modifications that can vary greatly in terms of the specificity that they offer. In her preface to Tales from Chaucer, Farjeon writes that she was forced to decide “between the complete omission of certain tales . . . and the suppression, or alteration of the incidents” to suit children’s sensibilities.⁹⁰ While superficially similar, “suppression” and “alteration” propose radically different ways of relating to a source-text. Suppression merely opacifies the events of the source-text, thereby acknowledging their authority or “truth.” Sturt and Oakden’s summary, for example, suppresses the Merchant’s Tale by stating certain facts while leaving out most other detail: “Then the Merchant told a tale of a wife who was the exact opposite of Griselda.”⁹¹ Alteration, instead, rewrites the source-text, retaining certain elements (say, a symbol of transgressive coupling), but modifying them (“throng” becoming the eating of a pear or the sharing of a kiss).

It is unsurprising that, when faced with the Merchant’s Tale, the vast majority of children’s Chaucers take the first and easiest choice from Farjeon’s list of strategies, that is, omitting the tale entirely. What is notable, given the choices available, is that all three full adaptations generally opt for “alteration” rather than “suppression” when it comes to May’s age and the pear tree scene. Rather than leaving May’s age ambiguous, they specify it to an extreme degree. She is “not one whit,” or “just one day,” or “not one day” older than sixteen—all phrases that in colloquial parlance translate to “exactly sixteen” while echoing January’s criterion in Chaucer’s text. Similarly, rather than suppressing the implied genital contact in the pear tree scene, all three adaptations replace it with a form of oral satisfaction and physical contact that matches the manipulated life stages of the young characters: either the consumption of a delicious fruit coupled with the physical action of a slap, or the sharing of a kiss. By contrast, in other tales adapted for children, the two strategies of suppression and alteration generally receive equal play. To use the Wife of Bath’s Tale for comparison, roughly half of children’s adaptations suppress the knight’s crime of rape as something along the lines of “a very bad thing,” while the other half alter it to some other form of (nonsexual) violence or (as in the Usborne Merchant’s Tale) a kiss.⁹²

By “downgrading” physical contact from the genital to the oral, these adaptations are actually increasing the level of specificity offered by the narrative when it comes to the precise movements of named body parts in space. We could go so far as to say that children’s adaptations are, in some ways, more graphic than Chaucer’s text, in that they provide a more granular, clear image in the mind of the reader.⁹³ Not a single children’s version of the Merchant’s Tale opts for euphemism along the lines of the tongue-in-cheek scholarly descriptions cited above. We never hear of a children’s May or Damian “canoodling” or “knocking boots” or “making whoopee” in the pear tree. If anything, the movement in children’s versions from the shocking lacuna of “throng” to the chaste specificity of pear-eating or kissing highlights the irony at the heart of erotic obscenity: like May’s lifted smock, it must reveal enough to shock and transgress, yet leave enough covered to tantalize. As Roland Barthes points out in The Pleasure of the Text, “Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?”⁹⁴ In the case of the Merchant’s Tale, children’s adapters remove the issue of both the diegetic and rhetorical garment: whether “eating pears” or “kissing,” their Mays and Damians remain fully clothed and fully described.

The impulse to give more concrete detail to the pear tree scene is not unique to children’s versions or indeed to adaptations. The logistical lacunae in the narration of pear tree sex were evident to the fifteenth-century scribes who served as Chaucer’s first critics.⁹⁵ Four extant manuscripts of the Merchant’s Tale contain scribal additions in which Damyan’s “throng[ing]” is followed by several lines detailing the size, shape, and vigor of Damyan’s penis (“A grete tente, a thrifty, and a long”) as well as May’s self-proclaimed pleasure as they fornicate.⁹⁶ Such additions function not only obscenely but also logistically: they provide further specificity as to the precise movement of body parts in the tree, in an attempt to “rationalize [the episode’s] the physical and temporal impossibilities.”⁹⁷ Rosalind Field and Carissa Harris disagree as to whether the resulting portrayal of May is an even more stereotypical shrew or a liberated sexual speaker, but they both highlight the readerly (and scribal) drive towards detail and further specificity. The retention of figurative terms for those body parts (“tente”) makes plain, in turn, one of the enduring appeals of the tale: that, like the blind January, our insight into what actually happened is shrouded, in our case by the very language used to describe it. Besides demonstrating, as Harris puts it, “sexual obscenity’s unique generative power to spawn further obscenities,” these additional lines remind us that the tale’s obscenity and ensuing infamy rest in large part on its lack of specificity when it comes to narrative sexual mimesis, as well as its age-related pley.⁹⁸

Before closing, I want to offer three observations about adaptations for children and the poetics of specificity. The first regards pley and the pleasures of obscenity. In Chaucer’s text, obscenity inheres in “throng” but also lurks in the delicious—or disturbing—uncertainties about May’s inner life and her age. Children’s adaptations certainly seek to remove that opacity, and, in doing so, the same specificity that so shocks in the added lines becomes an unexpected tool of transformation and de-eroticization. If, as Gust has claimed, the “provocative moment of fleshly penetration . . . signals new pornographic potential for Chaucer’s writing,” children’s adaptations of that moment must dutifully remove fleshiness, penetration, and provocation.⁹⁹ They do so boldly. The sexual obscenity of penetration is replaced with oral contact; the erotic obscenity of ambiguous fleshiness becomes primly specified, but nonetheless provokes a pleasurable vicarious response to taste or, in the folkloric connotations of the kiss, to generic consummation. Meanwhile, the social obscenity of May—once anathema to children’s Chaucer itself—is reengineered to garner reader sympathy.

That sympathy is also couched in the specificities of youth. Adaptations of (and scribal additions to) the Merchant’s Tale often encounter another iteration of obscenity’s generative tendency: in their historically anchored responses to Chaucer’s obscenity or perceived obscenity, they find it difficult to avoid creating new forms of historically anchored obscenity themselves. In children’s adaptation, this problem goes beyond the generative principle Harris outlines, though eagle-eyed readers will have noted that the same two manuscripts to contain all fourteen interpolated lines—New College 314 and Harley 1758—are also two of the same manuscripts that lower May’s maximum age to sixteen.¹⁰⁰ A younger May does not necessarily invalidate the notion that she is empowered, as Harris claims, but it surely signals that her sexual transgressions and vocality are intimately tied to a youth that is sexually charged. How much bawdier for a female character under sixteen to praise her lover’s penis for its girth and length and, moreover, to claim it is “the meriest fit / That ever in her lif she was at yet?”¹⁰¹ For David, these lines of “wretched but enthusiastic doggerel” inject “a sense of pleasure” otherwise missing from Chaucer’s tale, which provokes “horror at the act of love.”¹⁰² Given the question of age, to what extent does that remain true for modern readers? Even if the characters themselves experience little pleasure, who does? What kind and on what assumptions does it rest? When we joke about young women’s sexual experiences, who is laughing?

In this vein, children’s adaptations of the last century shine a harsh light on the elements of Chaucer’s text that culturally resonate well enough to be repackaged as Chaucerian capital. For all their alterations, no adaptation removes what modern readers might see as its central dissonance and potential modern source of social obscenity: the marriage itself, framed as comically disgusting by Chaucer’s text and made more culturally (if not legally) fraught by adapters’ choices regarding May’s age. If adapters are willing to change the sexual act between May and Damian, why not the relationship between May and January as well? Which alteration is less “true” to Chaucer’s text? At least for the later two adaptations, there is precedent in children’s Chaucers for changing a relationship entirely: Pinchpenny John, Lee Lorenz’s 1981 retelling of the Miller’s Tale, recasts Alisoun as the eponymous carpenter’s granddaughter, “an orphan since she was a baby.”¹⁰³ However, just as the early summarizers made May’s status as a wife their focal point, all three full adapters of the Merchant’s Tale read the intergenerational marriage as more central to the tale’s Chaucerian capital than the sex act for which the tale is most infamous. Moreover, where each adaptation more or less aligns with a progressive depiction of May as sympathetic rather than shrewish, all three still effectively rely on Chaucer’s “cultural alterity” to excuse the archaism of the marriage.¹⁰⁴

Third and finally, in all three adaptations, it is May whose perspective we are invited to share. In some ways, this is the most significant deviation from the Merchant’s framing, in which May’s desires and inner life remain largely opaque: “God woot what that May thoughte in hir herte” (IV 1851). May’s appetite, which for the Merchant functions as a humorous indictment of women’s twinned sexual and gustatory desires, becomes one aspect of readerly identification: the pears are so delicious. Farjeon and McCaughrean’s adaptations exemplify the transformation of May from a medieval shrew to the lovable trickster figure who has become accessible to girlhood in the past century—think of Pippi Longstocking or Lyra Belacqua. These female tricksters, Maria Tatar reminds us, are marked by their hunger, as most tricksters are.¹⁰⁵ But these tricksters are not women; they are girls. When May is allowed full agency as an adult in the Usborne version, it is a heartfelt and pure love that drives her rather than the carnality of hunger. I draw attention to the age-based bifurcation of May’s character because it betrays one final cultural norm that we have yet to shake: the idea that an adolescent woman can be obscene as well as potentially victimized, that obscenity might be a part of her liberation, and that we as readers, adult or child, can derive pleasure from that transgression. It is telling, I think, that it is Kim Zarins’s Sometimes We Tell the Truth—a young adult reimagining of the Canterbury Tales—that comes closest to offering this type of unapologetically self-serving May, while also offering one of the most logistically specific versions of the sex scene: “She braces a foot against a branch to get a firm hold, and with her legs spanning two branches, Damian thrusts himself inside her.”¹⁰⁶ May’s age? Precisely twenty-three.

The Merchant’s Tale is many things: comic, disturbing, logistically confounding, boorish, pornographic, variably opaque or exposed. In looking closely at its reception in children’s adaptation, I have hoped to show that its obscenity, at least, proves both challenging and creatively stimulating, as well as potentially impossible to fully erase. The challenge is made even more complex by the tale’s ambivalent relationship to age and its reputation for sexual obscenity. Children’s adapters’ default impulse to provide childlike viewpoints may prove simultaneously comical and disturbing to the “knowing” reader—one whose identity as an “adult” or as sexually “aware” is itself up for further debate. Even as children’s adaptations creatively sanitize the Merchant’s Tale by relying on the symbolic pleasures of the fairy tale, they also carefully deprive the reader of Barthes’s jouissance: the particular pleasure(s) arising from partial understanding of a text, of filling in the gaps ourselves.¹⁰⁷ In this sense, “The Kissing Tree” is in some ways a fitting children’s version of the tale, in spirit if not in substance. In both tale and rhyme, the poetics of avoidance do not entirely disguise the conflicted pleasures of voyeurism. There is something transgressive and delicious to readers of all ages when we have to spell out—but not quite say—what might be happening “in a tree.”

NOTES