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The Merchant reflects the social shifts of Chaucer’s time, where the rising merchant and trade class began to accumulate wealth and therefore mobility, upending the three estates of clergy, nobility, and peasantry. From the Narrator’s description, the Merchant likely trades in Flemish furs and textiles, and accordingly has an elaborate wardrobe himself. To protect his business, he keeps abreast of matters of foreign policy. However, the Merchant’s apparent success is portrayed as quite shallow, suggesting skepticism toward this rising class. Although the Narrator says the Merchant often shares his opinions, those opinions appear to be on financial matters, implying that he lacks the kind of culture or education the nobility and clergy have. The Narrator further discloses that the Merchant is apparently in debt despite his outward success, meaning that all his talk of business is just show. The Narrator finishes his description of the Merchant with the admission that he never learned the Merchant’s name. We can read this as a jab against the merchant class, suggesting that despite the Merchant’s appearance of wealth, the Narrator considers him beneath him.
Beyond these social commentaries, the Merchant is a bitter, angry man whose hatred of his wife is so potent that he cannot bear to hear the Clerk’s Tale of a patient and faithful wife. The mere suggestion that a wife could be so virtuous sends the Merchant into an angry tirade, comparing marriage to a trap. The Merchant uses his Tale to rebut the Clerk’s ideal wife with his bawdy story of May and her husband January. His lack of regard for the feelings of May, forced into marriage with January, a much older man, may reflect on his own lack of awareness of his wife’s subjectivity and feelings in his own marriage. Interestingly, the Merchant tells his story in a high style as opposed to the plain speech of a fabliau. The contrast between the style and content could reflect the in-between position of the rising merchant and trade class in Chaucer’s day. Although they could never achieve the status of the nobility, merchants and tradesmen now had financial mobility that made them more difficult to slot into the hierarchical social structure.
