Similarities Between The Wife Of Bath And The Pardoner's Tale

There are many similarities in the Wife of Bath and Pardoner Tale’s that bring them together. For example, greed, lust and issues with corruption that both tales have in them. This is important because these topics open the true meaning of the characters and unfold how the time period was at the time.

The issues of corruption plays an important role in the tale’s the reason why is because many religious role models are corrupt. The Wife of Bath Tale’s has issues in it by the wife of bath not being perfect in her ways. By this I mean how she lives her life and the power she has that she can do whatever she wants. In the pardoner’s tale it is a major role because the pardoner is corrupt in his ways of fooling people. The other thing is that the pardoner is a corrupt religious figure by him fooling people and drinking a lot.

It is a key element in the knight’s story but how he had lust for this women and he used his power to take advantage of her. In the pardoner’s tale, lust shows up when three friends sacrifice their relationship with each other over their lust for riches. Geoffrey Chaucer says in the pardoner’s tale “Divided equally of course, dear friend. Then we can ratify our lusts and full the day with dicing at our own sweet will.” This means that all the friends care about is money, which in the end they betray eachother for, so the lust caused the friends to kill one another. By Chaucer saying “This these miscreants agreed to slay the third and youngest, as you heard me say.” This is a key point in the story because what Geoffrey Chaucer is trying to say is that money is the root of all evil because it caused three friends to end each other’s lives.

The final topic is greed, it plays a role in both tales in how the characters valued their personal desires over the well beings of themselves and others. There is greed in the pardoner’s tale by the friends wanting wealth and doing anything possible to have it in their grasps. In the wife of bath’s tale, greed is the want for sex and power, and the knight acted on his greed resulting in the events that followed. The author says “truly poor are they who whine and fret; and convert what they cannot hope to get.” What this means is that the knight has greed and a selfish desire that he acted