Analytical Essay

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Canterbury Tales

(c. 12th century)

What do I need to read?

“The Canterbury Tales General Prologue”

“The Miller’s Prologue and Tale”

“The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale”

“The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale”

Who is the author?

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 1400). Called the Father of the English Language as well

as the Morning Star of Song, Geoffrey Chaucer, after six centuries, has retained

his status as one of the three or four greatest English poets. He was first to

commit to lines of universal and enduring appeal a vivid interest in nature, books,

and people.

As many-sided as Shakespeare, he did for English narrative what Shakespeare did

for drama. If he lacks the profundity of Shakespeare, he excels in playfulness of

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mood and simplicity of expression. Though his language often seems quaint, he was

essentially modern. Familiarity with the language and with the literature of his

contemporaries persuades the most skeptical that he is nearer to the present than

many writers born long after he died.

---Courtesy of Compton’s Learning Company

Background Lecture

Chaucer’s father, an influential wine merchant, was able to secure Geoffrey a

position as a page in a household connected to King Edward III. Chaucer’s duties as

a page were humble, but they allowed him the opportunity to view the ruling

aristocracy, thus broadening his knowledge of the various classes of society. While

serving in the English army, Chaucer was captured and held prisoner in France.

After his release, he held a number of government positions.

While in his twenties, Chaucer began writing poetry, and he continued to write

throughout his life. Over the years, his writing showed increasing sophistication

and depth, and it is recognized as presenting penetrating insights into human

character. In The Canterbury Tales, critics say that the author shows an absolute

mastery of the art of storytelling.

The Canterbury Tales are also said to present “a cavalcade of fourteenth-century

English life” because on this pilgrimage to Canterbury the reader gets to meet a

cross-section of the people from Chaucer’s time.

Canterbury, located about fifty miles southeast of London, was a favorite

destination for pilgrims. In fact, Chaucer himself made a pilgrimage there. While

he did not set out on the pilgrimage looking for material to use in his writing, he

was so impressed by the mix of company that he had met at the Tabard Inn that

he was inspired to write what was to become his masterpiece.

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Selected Canterbury Tales Terms and Definitions

Allegory - a story that represents abstract ideas or moral qualities. As such, an

allegory has both a literal level and a symbolic level of meaning. Example: Gulliver’s

Travels.

Allusion - a reference to a person, place, poem, book, or movie outside of the story

that the author expects the reader will recognize.

Fable - a story that presents a moral or practical lesson. Generally, there are

talking animals in fables. Example: Aesop’s Fables.

Hyperbole - exaggeration for emphasis; overstatement. Example: I’ve told you a

million times to…

Irony - a subtle, sometimes humorous perception of inconsistency in which the

significance of a statement or event is changed by its content. For example: the

firehouse burned down.

Litotes – a conscious understatement that achieves the opposite effect of the

statement itself. Example: I like money a little.

Satire – using humor to ridicule. Example: Animal Farm

Structure of The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is a “frame story”; it includes within it other stories. The

frame in this case is the story of a pilgrimage to Canterbury made by twenty-nine

pilgrims. Within the frame are twenty-four individual stories told by the pilgrims.

The stories told by the pilgrims are familiar tales, but here they are retold in a

brilliant fashion by most impressive storytellers.

The pilgrims themselves are described in the Prologue to the tales. In the

Prologue, we see that the personality of each pilgrim is unique but that the

character traits they exhibit are universal. People from three main segments of

medieval society are brought together through the vehicle of the pilgrimage:

church people, nobility, and common people and/or tradesmen.

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The General Prologue

Setting: The story opens at the Tabard Inn in Southwark is a town fourteen miles

from London where pilgrims meet to begin the journey to Canterbury. It has been a

long winter, but spring has arrived so it is time to make a religious pilgrimage.

While the trip has a religious shrine as its destination, the pilgrimage will not be

without its social aspects.

Note: Keep in mind that in Medieval times the Catholic Church, which was for all

practical purposes the only religion in Europe prior to the Reformation, played an

important part in everyone’s life. Daily life could be terribly hard, and sometimes

all that would make it bearable was the thought of a pleasant afterlife with God in

heaven. Consequently, after the king and the nobility, the church was the third

most powerful institution in this society.

As we will see in The Prologue, within the church there is a social hierarchy of

roles and positions. Thus, for example, we will see that the monk obviously comes

from a higher social class than the Pardoner.

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The Miller’s Prologue and Tale

Allusions to the Bible

The Noah referred to in the tale is from the Biblical story of Noah and the Ark in

which Noah, informed by God of the coming of a great flood, builds an ark and

thereby saves his family while everyone else perishes.

Concepts Familiar to Chaucer’s Readers

May/December Weddings. This is the marriage of an older, often rich but foolish

man to a very young and pretty wife. In stories, the older man usually winds up a

cuckold and it is thought by readers that he gets what he deserves for being so

foolish as to get married to someone much younger than he.

Cuckold: This word is used both as a noun and a verb. In stories the husband is

cuckolded or is made the cuckold when someone else has a sexual relationship with

his wife.

The cuckolded husband is the target of much comic ridicule in the stories from the

Middle Ages and centuries afterwards. During this time it was the belief that

older people should marry older, not younger people; thus the May/December

Wedding violates the natural order of things.

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The setting for The Miller’s Tale is Oxford, England, at the time the story is being

told.

Genre: A fabliau (pl., "fabliaux"), a French invention that depicts bourgeois

characters in satirical or openly comic plots involving unlikely and complex

deceptions, usually concerning sex and/or money. There are considerably more

fabliaux in French than in English, and Chaucer’s are by far the most sophisticated

in Middle English because they often combine elements of several fabliaux into one

tightly structured plot. Critics are divided on the issue of whether the fabliaux

were intended for noble audiences because the tales made the bourgeois look so

bad, or were intended for the bourgeois, themselves, indicating that they had a

strong appetite for seeing themselves satirized in literature. The middle ground

seems to be that they could work for a mixed audience which might include worldly

nobles (excluding those given to extreme religious devotion, of course!) as well as

broad-minded and self-confident men and women of the city.

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Characters:

• Nicholas, a clerk or student at Oxford who has spent more on his "sound

system" and on parties than he has on his studies—we know the type.

• John, the "townie" carpenter, whose trade has made him wealthy enough to

own a house big enough that he might rent rooms to the clerk, as well as

dressing his young wife in the most outrageously expensive clothing she

could desire.

• Alison, the carpenter’s "townie" wife, overflowing with energy and taking

life’s challenges as comedy whereas John, older by far, is ready to see

tragedy.

• Absolon, a clerk, possibly also an Oxford graduate, who now serves the

priest in the cathedral but who, like Nicholas, is far more interested in

dressing well and pursuing the ladies of the town.

• Gervase, the smith, a somewhat enigmatic figure who supplies a key tool for

Absolon's revenge--he works at his hot forge in the cool of the night and,

apart from lovers, is apparently the only one awake until the cries of "Out

harrow!" summon the townsfolk in an informal posse.

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The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

Sources: This tale is a satire in the form of a fairy tale. It is a twist on an old folk

tale which shows up in one of the Arthurian romances about Sir Gawain. The tale is

a parody of an “exemplum”, a moral tale that was used by preachers to show people

how they should act.

The Battle of the Sexes To understand Dame Alice, you have to understand, as

the pilgrims did, the place of women in Medieval society. At this period of time,

women were little more than their husband’s property, and they had few legal

rights of their own. To cope in this situation, the only weapon a wife had was the

granting or withholding of sexual favors.

Even here, however, the Church’s teaching on sex, which was that sex was only for

procreation and everything else was lust, could diminish a woman’s chances of

successfully fighting back. In this context, the Battle of the Sexes may not be a

fight to see who will dominate in a marriage so much as the fight of a women to

establish herself as a person with equal rights. As you listen to Dame Alice of Bath

in the prologue and in the tale she tells, keep in mind this socio-historical context.

You will also note that sex and bodily functions were talked about in mixed company

quite openly in this period.

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Audio File: Click on the link to listen to the Wife of Bath’s General Prologue read to

you in Middle English.

Genre: The prologue might be called a fictional autobiography, a confession, a

mock sermon or an apologia (L., defense). Persuasive as Chaucer’s Wife’s voice may

be, however, do not mistake it for true autobiography. Chaucer’s immediate source

for many of the opinions and strategies described in the prologue are two

characters from the Roman de la Rose (by Guillaume de Lorris, 1237, and Jean de

Meun, 1275): La Vieille (the Old Woman) and Le Jealoux (the Jealous One). He also

draws upon the vast literature of anti-feminist theologians to characterize the

views of her husbands, especially Jankyn.

Characters: a rapist knight (unnamed), Arthur’s queen (unnamed), and the "loathly

lady" (unnamed) he meets on his quest.

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The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale

The Pardoner will offer a sermon as a performance, part of a process-analysis

under the rubric "present company excepted" in which he takes the pilgrims into

his confidence. He claims that although his theme is always "Radix malorum est

Cupiditas" (greed is the root of evils), he nevertheless, ironically, is obsessed with

appropriating money (like the Wife's obsession with authority and the book), and

doesn't care about the remission of sins. He explains how he uses his position to

manipulate "lewed peple". Without his usual audience, the soliloquy is self-

destructive, and maybe self-hypnotic.

Aware of his isolation, the Pardoner's attempts to rejoin society are misguided,

partly due to his insensitivity. He attempts to join here by proving his superiority.

He has to be intellectual to survive, but this may have turned into egomania. He

scorns his usual low-class audience and thinks this more educated group will share

his opinion. So it's a demonstration of his typical con -- how he manages to survive

and manipulate audiences, but it involves his moving back and forth between

apparent audiences.

The Pardoner’s purpose is to save souls; however, he does everything he can to earn

money. The irony is that the Pardoner is very guilty of the sin of avarice himself.

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He uses ways of getting people to repent from avarice as a means for acquiring

more money for the church.

The archetype behind the Pardoner is Faus Semblant (False-Seeming) "a

professional hypocrite who pretends to holiness that he possesses not at all.

Chaucer's Pardoner sermonizes in a confessional of self-destruction. He's

dreadful, vital, and fascinating. For us, he's his own worst enemy.

Genre: The prologue may be a "literary confession" or "Vice's confession," like the

"Wife of Bath's Prologue" in some interpretations but with absolutely no ambiguity

about the speaker's viciousness, despite his cheerful demeanor. The tale, itself, is

a "novelle" or short story of a type often used in sermon exempla. The old man who

directs the young men to their doom is variously interpreted as everything from

Jesus, the Devil, God's mercy, and the Wandering Jew.

Characters: The Pardoner and his victims, in his Prologue's delirious self-

dramatization of his ruthless frauds; three riotous young men, their deceased

buddy, a young "knave" who knows how to tell a story, an old man who cannot die,

and "a privee theef men clepeth Deeth / That in this contree al the peple sleeth"

(VI.675-6).

Tale:

The tale is an exemplum on avarice. (Exempla are stories that illustrate a theme in

preaching, usually found in collections.) The setting is dramatic this time, taking

place in a tavern to set the innate hypocrisy here. Although avarice is the focus,

the Pardoner includes drunkenness, gluttony, swearing, gambling, and maybe other

sins; his choices probably depend on which sins can be made to sound most exciting.

The Pardoner has a detailed knowledge of low life. He does not euphemize sin: it's

truly nasty here. He seems to have control over the sequencing of the other sins

he incorporates too. But is he talking about gluttony? Or something else?

O wombe! O bely! O stynkyng cod,

Fulfilled of dong and of corrupcioun!

At either ende of thee foul is the soun.

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How greet labour and cost is thee to fynde!

Thise cookes, how they stampe, and streyne, and grynde,

And turnen substaunce into accident

To fulfille al thy likerous talent!

Out of the harde bones knokke they

The mary, for they caste noght awey

That may go thurgh the golet softe and swoote.

Of spicerie of leef, and bark, and roote

Shal been his sauce ymaked by delit,

To make hym yet a newer appetit.

(The Pardoner’s Tale – from www.librarius.com, lines 534-546)

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Epilogue:

There's no formal separation from the tale here, since the Pardoner goes right

into further self-parody? or more of the con? Is he still addressing his usual

church audience? The abrupt shift is disorienting.

The fake relics function as an extension of the Pardoner himself. Is he selling

relics as a misguided way to include himself? Is he drunk? Was this all a game and

he misjudged that the audience was laughing with him all along? Does he despise

this audience too?

Whom is the joke against? Against the Host to ingratiate himself to the others?

Whatever his reasons -- avarice, good-fellowship, humor -- he concludes his sermon

with an offer to sell his pardon to the pilgrims even after all he has told about his

own fraudulence. Ironically he picks the worst possible victim, that rough, manly

man who might be supposed to have a natural antipathy for the unmasculine

Pardoner.

The Host misreacts. It's a disaster and a bad call on the Pardoner's part when the

Host is pulled in against his will. The Host offers an angry reaction, not at all joking

now, metaphorically cutting off the Pardoner's tongue. The Pardoner never reacts

and is effectively shut up; we won't hear from him again. The pilgrims laugh --

nervously? They're reacting to what? The Knight levels out the social surface and

the tensions are diffused with a kiss of friendship.

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What do I need to know? 1. Explain how The Canterbury Tales is a profile of fourteenth century life.

Use specific examples from the text.

2. Characterize Chaucer’s treatment of women in The Canterbury Tales. Use

specific examples from the text.

3. Choose any two characters from any tales we read and tell how they are

alike/different.

4. How do the tales reflect life in the 1300s?

5. Explain the importance of the character of Harry Bailly.

6. Describe the portrait of the clergy as painted by Chaucer in The Canterbury

Tales. Was it an accurate picture?