Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Wednesday
Among that many things that Donald Trump is attacking Kamala Harris for is her joy. “You can tell a lot by a laugh,” says the man who never laughs, “I call her Laughing Kamala. You ever watch her laugh?… She’s crazy. She’s nuts.”
This from a man who never laughs. As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson observes,
Think about it: We’ve heard Trump snarl and mock, we’ve seen him smile, but can anyone remember him laughing out loud? I can’t. Kind of weird, no?
A quotation from Margaret Atwood has been making the rounds in response to Republican discomfort with Harris’s laughter. “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them,” the Canadian author has noted. “Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
Or as far as Trump is concerned, women are afraid he will assault them, as we have learned from the 18 who have reported incidents.
But set aside that darkness for the moment and focus on laughter. With Harris’s ascension, Democrats are countering MAGA with MALA, or “Make America Laugh Again.” Harris’s big-laugh personality brings to mind one of my favorite characters in literature, Chaucer’s Alisoun, the Wife of Bath. By contrast, in Trump I see Chaucer’s Pardoner.
[Side note: I’m kicking myself that I didn’t write a post about the Pardoner when Trump was pardoning all his law-breaking friends, including Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, and Roger Stone.]
Alisoun is in a position not unlike Harris’s, a woman in a man’s domain. She is one of only two women in a group of 31 pilgrims, and unlike the Prioress, who goes out of her way to appear ladylike and dainty, Alisoun lives life with gusto and puts herself forth unapologetically. While the church of the time condemns her for having had five husbands and for not being a tradwife (i.e., docile and submissive), she figures the best defense is an offense and describes how she held the whip hand in her marriages:
I will persevere; I am not fussy.
In wifehood I will use my instrument
As freely as my Maker has it sent.
If I be niggardly, God give me sorrow!
My husband shall have it both evenings and mornings,
When it pleases him to come forth and pay his debt.
A husband I will have — I will not desist
Who shall be both my debtor and my slave,
And have his suffering also
Upon his flesh, while I am his wife.
I have the power during all my life
Over his own body, and not he.
Now, Harris would not get away with such language in her own campaign, and there are scholars who have argued that Chaucer is tapping into a misogynist stereotype, satirizing her as a sexually crazed woman who devours men. My own view, however, is that Chaucer loves best those pilgrims who are full of life and that Alisoun is his favorite. She is passionate and authentic, which cannot be said of her detractors.
One of these detractors is the Pardoner, who attempts to put her down with a smarmy comment:
“Now, madam,” he said, “by God and by Saint John!
You are a noble preacher in this case.
I was about to wed a wife; alas!
Why should I pay for it so dearly on my flesh?
Yet would I rather wed no wife this year!”
Not one to back down, Alisoun goes back at him even harder with her version of, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet”:
“Wait!” she said, “my tale is not begun.
Nay, thou shalt drink from another barrel,
Before I go, which shall taste worse than ale.
And when I have told thee forth my tale
Of suffering in marriage,
Of which I am expert in all my life —
This is to say, myself have been the whip —
Than may thou choose whether thou will sip
Of that same barrel that I shall open.”
But for all her outrageous forwardness, Alisoun is looking for one thing above all, something that her society refuses to accord her and which neither Trump nor Vance appear capable of granting to women: R-E-S-P-E-C-T. In the fairy story she tells, what makes for a happy marriage is a husband who listens to his wife and gives her decision-making power, which in turn results in her giving him what he wants.
What she most desires, in other words, is a man who does not define his masculinity by female subordination. It was an unheard-of stance in the 14th century—Chaucer is Shakespearean in his ability to turn her into a three-dimensional character—and his depiction remains fairly radical in certain sections of America’s male population today.
Unlike Alisoun, the Pardoner is creepy and—to use the characterization Democrats are now lobbing at the Trump-Vance ticket—weird. I’ll explore that comparison in tomorrow’s post.
Further note: New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz, who can laugh, wrote the following imaginary scenario about the GOP ticket:
JD Vance is “completely baffled” as to why a sad, childless woman is so often seen laughing, the Republican VP nominee said on Monday.
“This woman has no children, and science tells us that, if that is the case, she has no reason to laugh,” Vance told supporters at a campaign rally in Michigan.
“It’s almost as if no one told her that stepchildren aren’t real children,” he said.
The Ohio senator said that he and his running mate plan to make the woman’s laughter “the number one issue of this election,” adding, “As long as one woman in America can still laugh, Donald Trump’s work is not finished.”
