Extimacy in the Miller's Tale

Abstract

Extimacy in the Miller’s Tale Gila Aloni In the Miller's Tale, a story of a man whose cuckolding by his tenant is exposed to his community, the category of privacy appears frequently: the words pryvetee, privy, and prively appear thirteen times in the course of the tale. But the way in which privacy is fictionalized in the tale requires that it be discussed not as a separate category connected with the concept of intimacy and opposed to the category of the public, but rather as part of a structure in which inside and outside always turn into one another. What I am referring to here is the structure of extimacy or extimité, that is, the presence of what is Other at the place thought to be most intimate.1 The expression extimité, coined by Jacques Lacan, "is necessary in order to escape the common ravings about a psychism supposedly located in a biopartition between interior and exterior."2 As Jacques-Alain Miller explains, "it is not enough to say that this biopartition is unsatisfactory. We must also elaborate a relation instead." This relation is coined in the term extimacy: "Extimacy is not the contrary of intimacy. Extimacy says that the intimate is Other—like a foreign body, a parasite."3 Dylan Evans defines extimacy as the problematization of the opposition between inside and outside, between container and contained.4 Such problematization of oppositions entails a desire for and deferral of the limit between inside and outside, between private and public. In other words, the polarity between what is socially accessible and what is intimate, between public and private worlds, is in fact not a polarity at all, but a distinction that collapses before it is even formulated. The Miller's Tale questions and repositions the notion of privacy not as opposed to what is public, but in terms of extimacy. Privacy, as Chaucer fictionalizes it in the Miller's Tale, is not the privatus related to a master's control of his property.5 It is privacy with extimacy built in.6 It is both proximity to and distance from an object. Understanding Chaucer's deconstruction of the intimate and the exogamous is key to understanding the apparent contradictions in the Miller's Tale. Space in this tale forms the arena in which various relationships—male/female, husband/wife, landlord/tenant—are negotiated. This essay examines physical, architectonic [End Page 163] spaces, such as a house that is supposed to keep the Other outside yet actually contains that Other. I also will be also looking at relationships within the private space of the house: that between tenant and landlord, and especially that between husband and wife. Lodging, or herbergage, demonstrates the presence of the foreign within architectonic spaces considered private, but which do not safeguard their inhabitants or offer them privacy. Moreover, while the discussion of extimacy in the Miller's Tale is the focus of this article, I will also devote some attention to extimacy in the other tales of Fragment I, especially as it illuminates marital relationships. A study of extimacy in this sequence of tales (Knight-Miller-Reeve-Cook) reveals that what most critics have identified as a degenerative mode—a progressive transition from order in the first tale to chaos in the last tale—is not sufficient to describe what happens in the fragment. Central to Fragment I is an increasing exposure of the structure of extimacy and man's inability to control woman. The connection between space, gender, and power relies on the basic understanding that, to use Michel Foucault's terms, the physical space provides a male/female "space of emplacement."7 Scholarly research on the conjunction of space and gender in relation to the control of women in the Middle Ages is vast. There are two major trends. Earlier research can be identified with Georges Duby's model of the separate spheres: male/public, female/private.8 Traditionally, power has been equated with public authority. "In this model," as Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski explain, "the public sphere, the domain of men, encompasses the worlds of politics, legal rights and obligations, and the market[;] . . . the private or domestic sphere, to...

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