Chaucer's The Merchant's Tale and the Sense of Having

Critical accounts of The Merchant's Tale often take one of two points of view. On the one hand, many readings of the tale focus on its representation of sensory perception and the metaphor of Januarie's "blind love." On the other, critics often focus on the relationship between the Merchant's profession and the tale's interest in economics, markets, and exchange. This essay argues that Marx's account of private property and the estrangement of the human senses can help to bridge these two approaches and bring into focus how Januarie's sensory experiences might be conditioned by his and the Merchant's views of property, markets, and exchange. Marx argues that the human subject's relationship to private property has the effect of estranging the subject from the human senses. So thoroughly estranged from its senses is the human subject by this relation to private property that the "sense" of having" supplants all other senses. Thus, the subject's proprietary relation to the object results in its perception of the object merely as property. The Merchant's Tale is attuned to the intimate relationship between sensory perception and economic ideology, and we find in the tale a curious and instructive resonance with Marx's account of this so-called "sense of having" and its effects on the senses.