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Horatian Satire In The Canterbury Tales Essay

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The Problem with the Institution of Marriage
According to the Bible, marriage began with God. As creator of marriage, God said, “Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge” (Hebrews 13:4). This quote explains that husband and wife should be faithful to one another as well as to honor each other in marriage. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer uses the horatian satire to depict the institution of marriage. Satire is something that is very common in novels and poems today. It is used to make light of serious situations, as well as point out problems with people or society. Chaucer uses this satire to not only make the reading more intriguing, but also to point out the problems with everyday life during the Middle Ages. The Knight in the Wife of Bath, and the Miller, are some of the characters Chaucer uses to enforce the idea of marriage while using horatian satire. In the poem of the Wife of Bath Tales, Chaucer tells about the knight. In …show more content…

Like the Wife of Bath, the Miller also agrees with the Wife of Bath 's belief of the wife being able to marry more than once. The Miller 's tale includes a lustful clerk, a conceited clerk, and an old man entangled in a web of deceit and adultery construed by a married women. Chaucer uses juxtaposition in the Miller 's Tale. The juxtaposition definition is to place two concepts, characters, ideas, or places near or next to each other so that the reader will compare and contrast them. This technique also may imply a link that is not necessarily real or to be trusted. The Millers Tale shows Alison 's blatant disrespect for her marriage to "Old John" and her planned deceit. Chaucer shows how one in marriage can be faithful in a realationship, but the other only in for deceit. Stories like the Millers tale are still popular in todays society, those which claim that jealousy and infidelity arise from marriages between old men and beautiful young

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Chaucer’s Portrayal of the Wife of Bath The Wife of Bath presents the reader with a woman who compiles to the stereotypes corresponding with the negative misogyny of women during the medieval times. Wife of Bath is viewed the same as this stereotypical woman. Some can agree with Chaucer’s choice of these negative traits of The Wife of Bath, but the same conclusion is always met. Chaucer chooses to display the Wife of Bath as a misogynistic symbol of negative traits in order to use her as an object of mockery.

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In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, various characters tell stories that reveal Chaucer’s opinion against the church, masculinity, greed, and corruption. Among these stories, “The Miller’s Tale” is an example of how the use of masculinity reveals Chaucer’s voice. The men in the stories revolve around one woman, Alison, to assert their masculinity in some manner. Alison’s husband, the carpenter John, tries to protect Alison because of his age. He fears that Alison’s beauty and his old age would make someone cuckold him.

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After reviewing the two tales “ The Pardoner's Tale” and “ The Wife of Bath's Tale” told by Chaucer, one tale effects me the most. Out of the two tales, I believe “The Pardoner's Tale” has better moral values and is more entertaining than, “The Wife of Bath”. The first reason that makes”The Pardoner's Tale” effective is the

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Formalism and Satire in the Canterbury Tales In the beginning Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a number of characters are introduced, each one having joined in the pilgrimage to Canterbury. Chaucer, serving as the narrator, provides the reader with a description of each individual, including their profession, their history, their behavior, and much more information to paint a picture of the kind of person that character is. While Chaucer thinks highly of some characters, Chaucer indirectly criticizes others, mostly people of religious backgrounds, through satire in his writing, which can be seen using the formalist critique.

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Geoffrey Chaucer has greatly influenced English literature with many of his works. He comprised more than twenty tales in his most famous collections The Canterbury Tales. There are several of his many tales that expresses love, marriage, and romanticism to display an important message. The Merchants Tale in particular refers marriage and love between the characters. First, the story introduces the narrator Chaucer, whom tells the story of a knight.

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He also utilized fabliaux to fill his stories with multiple sexual accounts that poke fun at the rules of courtly love. Chaucer’s humor had three main components – mockery, irony, and sadism. John, an older carpenter, with a young wife, is at the center of “The Miller’s Tale.” Chaucer mocks John for marrying a younger woman and the fact that their relationship does not follow the rules of courtly love. Courtly love suggests that jealousy strengthens relationships and equates to love.

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The character the wife of bath, is used as a tool for satire. Chaucer uses the irony of how she freely speaks of sex, the description of her character to be gap-toothed, and her personality being honest, witty, and funny, to challenge the church’s corruption. Before The Wife of Bath tells her story, she goes through stating her prologue. Within her prologue she describes each of her husbands, how she viewed them, and how they treated her.

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In “The Miller’s Tale” Chaucer explains how the Miller was a drunk and pale man that did not have a wife or children, but even before telling his story, it wasn’t his turn by interrupting the Monk before him and begins to explain his story. The miller start to explain about a young girl called Alison and her husband called the Carpenter, Alison was an only 18 years old when she married her husband and he was an old man. They lived in Oxford the Carpenter would admire the beauty of his wife and how the town man would be envious of him for his wife. It also involved two other man Nicholas and Absolon these men were also young, Nicholas was a clerk that would happen to be a secret love affairs, but also very clever and discreet and Absolon was a foppish clerk and a handsome man that every woman desired to have.

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“The Miller’s Tale” and “The Reeve’s Tale,” two of the many stories in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, portray many similarities on the views of love, marriage, and immorality. Both “The Miller’s Tale” and “The Reeve’s Tale” portray what love truly means to the Miller and the Reeve. Chaucer’s two tales also exemplify the unfaithfulness of the wives to their vows of marriage. Additionally, the stories share corresponding similarities in the many instances of dishonesty and immoral features of the male characters.

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The Canterbury Tales is a compilation of 24 stories penned by an Englishman by the name of Geoffrey Chaucer between the years 1387 and 1400. Chaucer wrote these tales with the purpose of pointing out the flaws in feudal society in a satiric manner. There are many different lessons that the author attempts to convey to the reader in these stories. In “The Reeve’s Tale”, Chaucer is telling the readers about how being dishonest could blow up in your face, as it did for the miller in the story. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” teaches us that men should always have respect for women, no matter how young or old.

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The Miller's tale however lacks this and provides no legitimate moral lesson. They both begin with deeply flawed characters, the Wife of Bath's protagonist begins with a rape that promptly sentences him to death, and the lot of the Miller's tale is all adulterous liars. Absalom loves the married Alison but she cheats on her husband John with Nicholas who lies to John merely for comedic purposes By the end of the Wife of Bath’s tale, the knight has learned a lesson and received fair retribution for his action, while no such thing happens in the Miller’s tale. In terms of comedy and humor, the majority of that which is found in the Miller’s tale is grotesque and unpleasant, whereas, in The Wife of Bath, it is quick, witty, and clever.

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Chaucer also uses satire in a more comical way to illustrate how women can’t keep a secret. The Wife of Bath reveals this trait when she says “by heaven, we women can’t conceal a thing” (Chaucer 341), mocking the suggestion that women have an inability to keep a secret. Chaucer also makes fun of the knight’s condition using the irony of women being incapable of keeping a secret as the only thing that can save him. Mocking women and their incapability to not share private information only further reveals Chaucer’s satire.

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The Wife of Bath: An Analysis of Her Life and Her Tale The Wife of Bath’s Prologue stays consistent with the facts that experience is better than the societal norms, specifically those instilled by the church leadership. Chaucer uses the Wife of Bath to display the insanity of the church, but through switching and amplifying their view of men and chastity onto the opposite gender. The church doctrine at the time held celibacy in an idolized manner, forgetting the inability for humans to ever reach perfection, or live up to this standard. They also did not hold women in a high regard at all, again this is where Chaucer flips the role, as the Wife of Bath describes her five marriages in her prologue, essentially describing each as a conquest, where the result is her having all control.

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In Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” he uses symbolism as a literary element to create an underlying Christian theme that portrays the characters in the story as biblical figures. Each character of the story represents a different figure from the bible such as, Nicholas and Alisoun representing Adam and Eve, John the carpenter representing a Great Divine and Absolon representing The Devil. Throughout the story, there are many different aspects that highlight the Christian theme and allow the readers to truly see this interpretation. Throughout the story readers may recognize the alignment between Nicholas and Alisoun and Adam and Eve.

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In the story, “The Wife of Bath,” Chaucer handles satire to critique class and nobility. Alike today, class and nobility still haunt us. Being that, we still see it in high school, it obviously hasn 't gone away. Chaucer brings forth the issue by sending the Knight on a journey of a lifetime. When he arrives back, he still doesn 't have the answer that he was sent to find.

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